'Tis the season to be jolly.... and to
spend money you don't have. But how to earn the money? Give blood? Pass bad
checks? Getting a "real" job is definitely out of the question — so:
How about signing onto a medical experiment? Our hapless hero (Adam Conger) does the latter — and learns: never trust the
government. They weren't testing Axe Deodorant — see: The Lynx Affect — that's
for sure. Instead of suddenly being followed by bevies of babes, any person — or
cat or dog, for that matter — that crosses his path goes projectile-puking
berserk and is out for blood. Looking for a safe place to lay low, he heads off to
a friend's place...
The X-mas short has won a bevy of awards,
and it's easy to see why. Funny and bloody, it is better written, acted, and
made than many a bigger-budgeted production.
As for the writer / director / producer Bill Palmer,
Fangoriaknows more:"Bill Palmer
lives out an unending, mildly amusing horror film in LA as a camera operator on
sleazy reality shows. When his pockets get fat, he burns the money producing
short film scripts he scribbles in notebooks while waiting for D-listers to
shamble out of their trailers. His last three shorts screened at bunches of
festivals and won some awards and stuff. He recently served as 2nd Unit
Director on Henry Saine's upcoming post-apocalyptic actioner, Bounty Killer (2013 / trailer),
featuring rapper Eve, actress Beverly D'Angelo, and philanthropist Gary Busey.
He hopes to direct a feature of his own by the next lunar eclipse."
Enjoy Bill Palmer's The Living Want Me Dead, our season-appropriate Short Film of the Month for December 2015.
(Spoilers.) One might assume that we came to this movie by way of everyone's favorite child molester, the cult legend Klaus Kinski, but that is not exactly 100% correct. The actor that initially drew us to this sub-standard, obviously low-budget spaghetti western is the forgotten Norwegian actor Fred Robsahm, who died this year on March 26, 2015, at the age of 71.
Robsahm, after what initially seemed to be a promising start of a pan-European film career with his lead in the once much-lauded but now mostly forgotten movie Flashback [1969 / scene], was ancient and forgotten history by the time Even G. Benestad got around, in 2007, to doing his documentary, Natural Born Star [trailer]), on the washed-up and HIV-positive actor. It was a photo of the young, handsome Robsahm that brought us to Black Killer, and Kinski, of course, was an added attraction, but what really made us look for the film was the presence of the beautiful Marina Malfatti — of, among others, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971 / Italian trailer), The Lady in Red Kills Seven Times (1972 / trailer), Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972 / trailer), All the Colors of the Dark (1972 / trailer) and Red Stained Lawn (1973 / Italian trailer) — at her prime (she was 32 when the film came out). And while she — as Sarah, the attractive Indian squaw with a plastic surgeon's nose, perfect aim, and way too much brown pancake make-up — is indeed one of the more enjoyably ridiculous aspects of a movie full of ridiculous aspects, neither her presence nor even her naked ass help save Black Killer from, well, being what it is: a mess.
One knows not where to begin with listing what is wrong with this movie because, well, just about everything is: Black Killer is so badly acted and badly shot and incoherently edited and poorly paced that the cheap-looking sets and even cheaper-looking costumes almost manage to slip by unnoticed. What doesn't slip by unnoticed, however, is that the movie drags once too often, and occasionally even verges on being boring — and that despite a plethora of laughs that it instigates (never intentionally).
One of only two movies the Italian actor Carlo Croccolo (born 9 April 1927) ever directed — credited as "Lucky Moore" he made the undoubtedly equally inept spaghetti western One Gun, A Hundred Graves (trailer) that very same year, with some of the same actors and, possibly, with the same threadbare sets — Black Killer displays a notable lack of directorial talent, if not laziness and disinterest. In regards to style, despite the genre, Croccolo seems to be channeling the work of Jess Franco and not, say, Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci. The result is bizarre, to say the least, and perhaps because he seems more to mimic the look and feel of Franco on a truly bad day than Franco on a good day, the odd cuts and pans, bad blocking, excessive and pointless use of zooms, and total lack of visual competency do have an oddly entertaining appeal, if only because the final culminating result is so funny. But funny or not, Croccolo's filmic "style" also makes the movie hard to follow on occasion, despite the fact that the plot is relatively linear, if full of meandering tangents.
Despite the focus on Kinski as the headlined star, Kinski's character, James Webb — one assumes he must be the "Black Killer" of the title, but who knows for sure — is more of a major supporting character than anything else; Fred Robsahm's Burt Collins is actually the central character around which most of the action transpires. Kinski's Webb, in any event, rides into town one day with a horse loaded with books; claiming to be a lawyer, he spends most of the time wandering around town with big books in his hands or watching from windows or explaining the law to the town's judge, Wilson (Dante Maggio). The rest of the time, he busies himself with pulling strings behind the scenes, hiding guns in his hollowed-out books, or shooting bad guys with his books. (No matter how many bad guys involved in a shootout, none ever think of shooting the guy wandering around in the background with books in his hand.) Whether or not Webb is a good guy or bad guy, or what his intentions are, is left unclear for most of the movie, and his propensity for "loaded books" is less logical than simply another (truly ridiculous) nod to the quirky affections of so many spaghetti western heroes following the release of Corbucci's Django (1966).
Burt Collins's intentions, on the other hand, are clear: initially he returns home simply to visit his brother Peter (Jerry Ross of Karzan, Master of the Jungle [1972 / trailer]), but when quick-draw Burt cheats at cards and ends up killing a few of the bad guys, he not only becomes Sheriff but more or less causes a lot of people to die before he finally kills all the manly O'Hara Brothers, all of whom have a truly atrocious fashion sense.
That, at least, is what we were able to distill from the extremely disjointed movie which transpired on our screen.
Kinski does OK as an actor, relying as so often simply on his presence and not on any display of true acting ability. Robsahm, well, there's a reason his career went nowhere; he smiles a lot and is sort of handsome despite the grime, but he is hardly convincing. Most of the other actors — particularly Dante Maggio as the judge, Calogero Caruana (of Mandinga [1976 / trailer]) as Miguel O'Hara, Enzo Pulcrano as Pedro O'Hara, and to an extent even Croccolo himself as the Deputy Sheriff — seem to think that they are acting in a silent movie, and thus arch and bulge their eyes or exhibit over-exaggerated body language more typical of an early D.W Griffith or Charlie Chaplin movie than a modern western. The female characters are all of the laughable kind, and totally superfluous. Consuelo (Tiziana Dini) seriously exists for no other reason than to be or get nude, and she is or gets nude in almost all her scenes — in fact, at one point, during an exchange with bad guy Ramon O'Hara (Antonio Cantafora, of Juan Piquer Simón's Supersonic Man [1979 / trailer]), she starts out naked, gets dressed, and then gets undressed again. (She dies with her clothes on.) The sexy Indian Sarah (Marina Malfatti) doesn't expose as much skin, but she looks more like a European in a politically incorrect costume on the way to a Halloween party than a Native American, and her presence is far more enjoyable for the laughs she gets than for being convincing. She shoots a mean arrow, though.
Some credit should be given to the music by Daniele Patucchi, which sounds so much like a soundtrack to a spaghetti western that it occasionally verges on becoming a parody of spaghetti western music. Often, hints of incidental themes from more famous movies (Once Upon a Time in the West [1968 / trailer], for example) or western songs (Ghost Riders in the Sky, for example) echo weakly in the background. Still, if the rape scene is in any way uncomfortable, it is due only to the disquieting carpet of sound that he puts behind it, so he obviously put some though into what he was composing. (Patucchi, who that same year did the music to David Friedman's The Terrible Swift Sword of Siegfried [1972 / trailer] and Mario Mancini's Frankenstein '80 [1972 / German trailer], went on to do the music to Il sesso della strega / The Sex of the Witch [1973 / scene], Umberto Lenzi's Mondo cannibale [1972 / German trailer], and two José Ramón Larraz movies, La muerte incierta [1973 / 5 minutes] and Estigma [1980 / excerpt]).
One thing for sure, when talking about the obscure and forgotten movie Black Killer, we aren't talking about some long-underappreciated masterpiece — unless, that is, you want to talk about masterpieces of crap. And even then, as laughable and as bad as Black Killer is, it has one too many dry spell and thus simply drags too much to be a truly enjoyable piece of craptastic cinema. Black Killer borders the edge of psychotronic enjoyability, often wetting its toes if not its ankles in the waters of the surreally stupid, but for all its teasing, for all the come-hither-and-enjoy-my-inability allure it exudes, Black Killer just never truly goes overboard to being truly enjoyable, fabulously fun flotsam, despite being unmitigated flotsam. Recommended with major reservations, if at all, to fans of bad movies; fans of westerns, spaghetti or otherwise, might want to avoid Black Killer.
So here we have a truly odd fish of a public-domain film. (We couldn't resist saying that.) In the simplest of terms, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is a silent two-reeler comedy, a burlesque, one of many in general as well as one of the very few that the great silent (and later talkie) film star Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (23 May 1883–12 Dec 1939) ever made. Also of note: the list of names involved aside from Fairbanks — script, Tod Browning (The Unknown [1927], Dracula [1931 / trailer], Freaks [1932 / trailer], Mark of the Vampire [1935 / trailer], The Devil Doll [1936 / trailer], and more more more); subtitles, Anita Loos (The Women [1939 / trailer]); direction, John Emerson and the fired Christy Cabanne* (The Mummy's Hand [1940 / trailer] & Scared to Death [1947 / trailer]); co-star Bessie Love (who began headlining films like The Lost World (1925 / full film) and ended as a character actress in movies like the original Children of the Damned [1964 / trailer] and José Ramón Larraz's classic Vampyres [1974 / trailer]) — is exceptional to say the least. And of note among the names of the background bit-players: the beautiful but long-forgotten Alma Rubens (19 Feb 1897 – 21 Jan 1931), whose career, ironically enough, collapsed due to her drug problems. Ironically, we say, because this pre-code comedy is all about drugs, and it's definitely not anti-drug either. And what is The Mystery of the Leaping Fish about? Let's let the Worldwide Celluloid Massacre explain the film: "A short slapstick spoof on Sherlock Holmes from 1916 made into a cult item by its heavy use of drugs. Coke Ennyday (Fairbanks) is a detective who literally sets his clock by his drugs and carries syringes with him in order to function. He also eats opium paste right out of a can and disables assailants with drugs. He investigates the mystery of a man literally rolling in money to find out his secret and befriends a fish-blower: a woman (Love) who blows air into inflatable fish for people on the beach."
The short is, of course, normally silent; we know nothing about the music added to the background of the version found on YouTube below.
*Christy Cabanne: a forgotten and unknown name now, but notable for being, along with Sam Newfield (The Monster Maker [1944]) and William Beaudine, one of the most prolific directors in the history of American films.
Remember the Rubettes? Not by name, probably, but they were an assembled British pop band that, while a one-hit wonder in the US, were more successful in Europe. Their biggest international hit is without a doubt Sugar Baby Love (1974), but perhaps more notable is that they were one of the few pop groups in the 70s who had the balls to do a "serious" song about a gay figure, Under One Roof (1976) — it was not a hit in the US. (Interestingly enough, another "serious" song of the same year, Rod Stewart's The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II), was.)
The bubblegum pop song Sugar Baby Love, in any event, has popped up in a number of advertisements and TV shows and movies, including P. J. Hogan's super-popular Muriel's Wedding (1994 / trailer), which is more entertaining than the trailer lets you surmise, and Neil Jordan's less-popular Breakfast on Pluto (2005 / trailer), which is still on our To See list.And the song is used in full in this great French, computer-animated AIDS-prevention commercial from 2006, which won a Silver Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival that same year. It tells a great story of surviving the ups and downs of life and living long enough to find the right one. It also uses some pretty nifty cinematic transitions and visual concepts that show more creativity than many a movie we've watched. And, lastly, it has a happy ending. It may be a commercial, but it is very much a cinematic experience. Enjoy.
The straight equivalent to this ad, by the way, using the The Vibrators' "punk" classic Baby Baby [1977], can be seen here. It is not as visually fun, is annoyingly Phyllis Schlafly in attitude, somewhat racist,* and oddly annoying and less enjoyable than the queer ad. It basically can be labelled FAIL. (Remember, all you vaginas out there: if you can't get a man and that house in the suburbs, your only option is to jump off a bridge. And while we're at it: face it, if you don't one day have kids, you are not a complete woman.) * Though, actually, when remembering our wild years long ago as a teen in Washington, DC, when we slept with anything that moved, the "racist" interlude — sorry, fellow white guys — is true. (We confess to having played both Cowboys & Indians and with dolls well into our post-college years.)
