VAMPIRE BAT, THE (1933)
Dir: Frank Strayer
A successful attempt at capturing the look and feel of Universal's popular horrors like DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, but made cheaply by Majestic Pictures. Universal's sets from FRANKENSTEIN and THE OLD DARK HOUSE are re-used, the actor (Lionel Belmore) who played the burgermeister in FRANKENSTEIN is on hand as another burgermeister, and poor Dwight Frye is made to play another wide-eyed Renfield caricature. They got the classic Universal flavor down pat but you can't help feeling that if Universal had really made this, the story would have been more coherent. The village of Kleinschloss is terrorized by a series of murders in which victims are found with their jugulars punctured and their bodies drained of blood. Superstitious locals think it's the work of a vampire, especially since a large number of bats have recently taken up residence in town. The real culprit is Dr. Von Neimann (Lionel Atwill), who has created a creature that's basically a football-sized sponge in a fish tank. The briefly seen and singularly unimpressive monster needs human blood, so Atwill uses a strange combination of mental telepathy and hypnosis to send a henchman out to commit killings and bring home the blood, framing intense village idiot Herman (Dwight Frye), who has conveniently expressed his fondness for bats in public. Atwill's plan, which never makes any sense to begin with, falls apart after the villagers kill Herman and drive a stake through his heart and find that the attacks continue. The story feels incomplete and full of loose ends and unexplained plot points. Most movie mad scientists seem to have something in mind, whether it's to cure some disease, replace damaged brains, create an army of obedient slaves, or something. We never get the slightest idea of what Atwill is up to or why. There's no discussion of what processes he used to cultivate what he refers to as a new life form, nor any rationale for him to keep killing innocent folks to keep it alive. It doesn't seem to be able to do anything at all on its own. It just sits there in the fish tank like one more decoration in his laboratory. Was he planning to present it to the world as an alternative to the pet goldfish? Was he on the verge of inventing of the original pet rock? Von Neimann's superhuman ability to mentally transmit orders to his servant, commanding him to kill people in other parts of town while sitting at home in the safety of his study speaking his commands aloud, is quite amazing but we're never told how he pulls it off. You'd think a man with psychic powers that impressive would already be rich and famous and wouldn't need to create a blood-drinking glob in order to make a name for himself as a scientist. The script also fails to provide any idea of how the servant commits the murders or how he gets the blood out of the victims' bodies so cleanly and always escapes the crime scenes undetected. There isn't even an explanation for why the town became infested with large bats at the same time of the aquatic creature's birth, so apparently that was just a coincidence. Fay Wray is Atwill's innocent employee who overhears him alone in his study telling his goon to kill people. She ends up bound and gagged in his lab about to become sponge food, but skeptical police detective Melvin Douglas comes to her rescue. There aren't any actual vampire bats in THE VAMPIRE BAT, but Lionel Atwill is so good as the mad doc that the movie makes decent viewing if you love the Universal horror films of the day but you've already seen them all too many times and would like to check out something similar. Just don't expect anything brilliant in the plot department. Hmmm... I wonder: Was Boris Karloff's mad Dr. Neimann from HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1944) a relative of this movie's mad doctor? He could have simply dropped the "Von" from his name.
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VAMPIRE, THE (1957)
Dir: Fernando Mendez
THE BRAINIAC himself, Abel Salazar, gets to play the likable, witty doctor hero in this solid gothic chiller from Mexico. Historically the first movie ever to show a vampire's fangs onscreen, THE VAMPIRE (or EL VAMPIRO) also began the noteworthy horror career of vampire actor German Robles, here cast as the evil Count Lavud, who sleeps in a coffin with an automatic lid and wears a suit that looks like he borrowed it from Bela Lugosi's Dracula. The story is efficiently told and features many of the classic elements of the best gothic fiction, such as the innocent heroine who returns to her childhood home (here a hacienda) to find it a sad, neglected ruin, the mysterious aunt who's clearly up to something, the vaguely threatening stranger with an eye on the family property, and the ghostly black-robed figure of unknown loyalty. The atmospherically lit, dust-and-cobweb-covered sets and stylishly shadowy night scenes make this a visual treat, and the mood of impending danger from beyond the grave is well sustained. Lavud spells his name backward to become "Duval", a trick he must have gotten from watching Lon Chaney introduce himself as "Alucard" in SON OF DRACULA. He plans to turn the heroine into a soulless undead slave and to resurrect a second master bloodsucker, a relative who was destroyed by the townspeople a century before. Despite all the bits cribbed from Universal's old vampire films, this one still has enough flair and good moments to stand on its own merits. Its greatest flaw could well be its special effects, which accomplish man-into-bat transformations with simple "stop and start the camera" tricks in the manner later used regularly on TV comedies like BEWITCHED and I DREAM OF JEANNIE. The technique was already looking pretty outdated by 1957 standards. But THE VAMPIRE does a lot of things right, and it's impossible to dislike a movie that trowels on the atmosphere the way this one does. It's also the only vampire film I've ever seen in which an undead creature of the night is defeated simply by getting strangled with someone's bare hands, as well as the only one I can recall in which the Dracula type character goes right on talking even after he's turned into a huge furry bat! The actors all all good, especially Salazar and Robles, and the music is appropriately bombastic. Check it out! 
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VAMPIRE'S COFFIN, THE (1957)
Dir: Fernando Mendez
German Robles is back as the aristocratic bloodsucker Count Lavud in a pretty good immediate sequel to the same year's THE VAMPIRE. All the same main characters are back, including Abel Salazar's very funny doctor hero. A grave robber removes the stake from Lavud's heart, and soon the fiend is on the loose again, making a second bid to vampirize the same girl he was after in the previous installment. His coffin is hidden in the cellar of a shabby wax museum full of figures that look like cheap department store window dummies. They stand around in unlikely poses in big sparsely decorated rooms, never looking much like anything from a real wax museum. The attraction also houses some torture implements including a real iron maiden which is used to dispatch one nosey character. Lavud makes too much noise when he turns into a bat, and it's a little surprising how evenly matched he seems to be with human adversaries (he gets punched and clobbered so much that it begins to seriously undercut his dignity), but the icy Robles is excellent in the role and the nice crisp lighting and good camerawork keep things entertaining just like in the first film. There's less gothic atmosphere and more action than before (and also a truly terrible song and dance number). It's still a better than average vampire thriller and easily worth watching for fans of vampires and Mexican horror in general.
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VARROW MISSION, THE (1978)
Dir: Peter Semelka
A high school puts on a contest to see which group of teens can put on the best spook house for Halloween in this no-budget amateur feature. (How come I didn't get to attend a high school like that?!) The kids, some of whom won their roles in the film through a radio station's "be in a movie" contest, are terrible actors and the script gives them all the blandest dialogue imaginable and establishes no personalites for any of them beyond being either Nice Kids or Mean Kids. A fat guy called Tiny is teased as though he were an utter moron, but all the other students seem at least as dim as he is. One guy shows up to help build the spook house (days before it's scheduled to open to the public) wearing a complete suit of real metal armor, and leaves it on! A friendly old man who drives a Rolls Royce lets the nice kids use his supposedly haunted old mill (a great creepy location) for their haunt. The mean kids are so stupid that they devote their time to trying to frighten the nice kids away from the mill instead of focusing on the construction of their own haunt. Inside the mill, the SCOOBY-DOO-like gang finds some mannequins and a cramped tunnel that leads to a secret room being used by alien "Varrows" who plan to invade the earth. I've seen a lof of movies about alien invaders, but I'm pretty sure this is the only one in which an evil spaceman announces his plan to wipe out the entire human race "one by one". Apparently the Varrows have a lot of time on their hands. There's nothing scary or funny about any of the parts that are supposed to be scary or funny, and the pacing is deadeningly slow. At the climax, the alien is revealed as a nifty looking blue creature with big red bug eyes who has a special machine that allows him to turn into a perfect replica of a human being. The sequence in which he uses the device is creatively staged and assembled, even though it mostly involves nothing more than blinking light bulbs. The most interesting aspect of the film is that the blue-and-red alien mask by the Alinco Co. was actually sold commercially as "Varo" in the late 1970s, although very few people knew it had any connection to any movie. I actually had one when I was a kid, and I wish I still had one today! As for the movie, it's pretty poor, with terrible sound and picture quality, and so unscary as to be suitable for children. It will probably only be enjoyed on any level by viewers of the right age to yearn for "the good old days" of haunted houses, when groups of friends could get together and put on Halloween events like this just for fun without being nickel-and-dimed to death by unreasonable zoning laws, insanely complex fire codes and all sorts of strangling government regulations. Its alternate title was TEENALIEN. 
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VENOM (2005)
Dir: Jim Gillespie
A better-than-average dead teenager movie that combines the stalk-&-slash suspense of the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies with some of the old-fashioned voodoo mythology of PUMPKINHEAD and THE SKELETON KEY. In a small Louisiana community, a reclusive tow truck driver dies trying to save the life of a local witch woman and is resurrected as a killer zombie. That might not sound like much on paper, but director Jim Gillespie knows how to work up suspense and a tight script manages to give distinct and believable personalites to the tormented characters. This widely ignored feature is a lot more tense and gripping than the vast majority of teenkill pics. A few of the characters may have "victim" written all over them in slasher film tradition, but some of the deaths and other events are unexpected and shocking, leaving you unable to predict exactly who is going to live or die. The photography is good too, with nice misty nighttime shots and the threatening undead murderer filmed in dramatic backlighting for a ghostly effect. The story is simple but it actually holds up and was clearly thought out by people who cared enough to craft a plot that makes sense, working the supernatural elements in cleverly. The closing shot is an eye-roller of a cliche', but on the whole VENOM is a superior example of mid-budget horror that offers decent acting from a cast of professionals and some authentic scares. Check this one out.
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VIDEODROME (1982)
Dir: David Cronenberg
James Woods is excellent as the sleazy owner of an independent cable TV station that appeals to viewers' basest instincts by specializing in violent trashy programs. Always in serach of the next ugly trend, he encounters a fuzzy broadcast of Videodrome, a mysterious, plotless show that consists of nothing but footage of people being tortured and murdered on a barren set. His ill-advised attempts to track down the source of the show and buy the rights for his station lead him into a web of intrigue and, eventually, horror. The show broadcasts a hidden signal that causes a tumorlike organ to grow inside the brains of those who watch it. This causes bizarre hallucinations in which flesh and machinery blend and reality and nightmare become indistinguishable. It's all a conspiracy to cleanse America of its riffraff by destroying the minds of the kind of people who would eagerly tune in each week to watch such senseless brutality, turning viewers into helpless, easily programmed mental slaves. Deborah Harry (of Blondie fame) is perfectly cast as a pop psychology radio show host who ironically is so jaded and desperate for new sensations that she likes being pierced with needles and burning herself with cigarettes. Despite the harsh nature of the subject matter, the movie is remarkably restrained in terms of realistic ugliness and very little of the Videodrome broadcasts is ever shown. Most of its disturbing power comes more from its overall tone, intensified by an ingeniously creepy Howard Shore soundtrack, than from any of the imagery. The gruesome violent parts are sometimes bloody but they're freaky and dreamlike rather than realistically painful. VIDEODROME may have seemed like far-fetched sci-fi fantasy back in 1982, but it's troubling when you consider how much worse things have gotten since then in the TV business. The movie not only plays better on TV than it did in theaters (the warnings about TV causing permanent harm to its viewers feels more personal), but it seems much more relevant in an era which has seen the cultural nadir that is the "reality TV" fad, and a real-life society of couch potatoes who form their opinions of the world based overwhelmingly on poorly researched, politically biased, corporate-approved, government sanctioned TV news broadcasts. Just as the movie foresaw, TV did indeed increase its power over U.S. audiences in the years that followed, gradually blurring the line between what's real and what isn't while few people noticed or cared. This neglected and eerily prescient movie is loaded with clever visual touches, amusing dialogue, superb Rick Baker makeup effects, and all sorts of brilliant surreal visuals. Unfortunately, it never does get around to telling a coherent story, presenting everything as it does from Woods' character's increasingly deranged point of view. After a while it becomes difficult to be sure of exactly what is really happening and how much of ithe confusing weirdness is simply the product of Woods' poisoned and controlled imagination. VIDEODROME was, predictably, poorly received by 1982 audiences, largely because its grim tone and complex politics were vastly different from the majority of the simple, lighthearted, viewer-friendly genre movies filling theaters at the time. The bizarre visuals still pack some power today, unlike the flood of cheapjack dimestore surrealism that MTV and computer graphics would encourage in later years. Plenty of food for thought is offered up but it is to Cronenberg's credit that the movie never becomes overtly preachy, choosing instead to let audiences draw their own conclusions and make their own moral judgements. It may not be completely linear or easy to follow, but this unique production deserves more serious attention now than it did when it was new.
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VIRGIN TERROR (1978)
Dir: Alberto Negrini
You'll find neither sense nor suspense in this drab, inferior giallo that copies the same writer's better-known WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and stars the same actor (Fabio Testi) as another laughable tough-guy detective stomping his way through a gruesome murder case. He wears a raincoat with the collar turned up even while other characters wander around in swimsuits. A teenage girl has been sexually assaulted and murdered, and the nonsensical clues point to someone connected with the nearby girls' boarding school. Are the teen girls being sold into prostitution for a secret rich businessmens' club? Since this is an Italian film from the '70s, it's highly probable. Our alleged hero's preferred method of detection is to go around kicking people's doors in and asking them who the culprit is. None of the action flows in a smooth or believable way. At one point, the detective breaks into a suspect's shabby little home by picking the doorknob lock with a large pocketknife. He then fries an egg and settles down to take a nap. Then someone comes along and sets the place on fire. To escape, the hero crashes through a window that's about two feet from an open door. The suspect, meanwhile, is hit by a truck. Fortunately for Fabio, a creepy little girl hangs around feeding him clues. There are several red herrings, characters who behave strangely for no reason (like the detective's neglected shoplifter wife) and an unsatisfying ending that will leave you wondering about a lot of things, like how you might have better spent the last hour and a half of your time. This was made as ENIGMA ROSSO and has also made the rounds as RED RINGS OF FEAR and TRAUMA.
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VIRGIN WITCH (1971)
Dir: Ray Austin
A pair of teen runaway sisters (played by real life siblings Anne and Vicky Michelle) fall into the clutches of the world's most boring witchcraft cult in this weak-kneed sexploitation cheapie from England. The older sister (Anne) is an aspiring fashion model who finds work with a predatory, movie-style lesbian agent. The lecherous, treacherous woman occupies her evenings as High Priestess of the coven. We learn at the beginning that the would-be model has vague psychic abilities, but her powers, like the movie itself, are far from maturity. It comes as no surprise when she decides to join the cult of robed losers and usurp the agent's position as their leader. Her younger sister (Vicky, who went on to star in the dismal TV sitcom 'ALLO, 'ALLO) is much more innocent and falls for a guy who picks them up on the road and tries to help. The witches hold their evil ceremonies (every night, it would seem) in their own little evil chapel decorated with a mask that looks exactly like the one in ONIBABA (1964). They don't seem to have much of an agenda, preferring prancing around naked to actually doing anything. The only good scene (and the only one that approaches anything remotely like creativity) is when a photograph of a victim is burned via magic and the facial expression in the picture changes from a smile to a look of pain-racked fright. The "story" could have been told in about five minutes, so most of the movie is footage of various naked women posing, bathing and lounging around. Of course it's all blatantly exploitative, embarrassingly cheesy and completely mindless. Director Ray Austin can't think of anything to do with his collection of shapely actresses aside from getting them out of their clothes and then leering at them. Watching this slow-moving dud makes one appreciate how much better Jean Rollin and even Jesus Franco handled this type of sex-and-supernatural crossover material. A reissue was given the title LESBIAN TWINS for added exploitation value, even though the sisters are quite clearly neither lesbians nor twins.
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VLAD (2004)
Dir: Michael D. Sellers
A promising concept that makes a supernatural villain of real-life historical tyrant Vlad Tepes, leaving the tenuous connection between him and Bram Stoker's character of Count Dracula intentionally blurred, VLAD ultimately disappoints due to dull plotting and pompous, now-familiar post-BUFFY teen heroics. Four movie-glamorous college students are sent to Roumania to research Vlad's evil legacy. One of them possesses a magic amulet that can keep Vlad trapped in his tomb, but a conspiracy of misguided Vlad-fanatics wants to get their hands on the artifact for various reasons. As things move slowly along, the amulet proves capable of sending people backward or forward in time, and a girl from Wallachia of the 14th century is propelled into the present (she has very 2004-look eyebrows and hair). The evil one himself lurks about from time to time and finally threatens the lives of the cast at the climactic showdown, and he's actually a pretty well-realized and impressive villain to be showing up in such a forgettable production. Location shooting in Roumania provides wonderfully authentic scenery and the cast do their best, but the frequent cutaways to sleep-inducing sepia-tinted, slow-motion flashbacks that have no real power make for frustrating viewing. The direction and photography are strangely uneven, with most of the movie being beautifully, artfully shot but for the clumsy action scenes, which are staged and edited in a manner that keeps making it hard to see exactly what's supposed to be happening. And like many other vampire movies made since the popularity of Anne Rice reshaped the genre, this one makes the mistake of trying too hard to win the murderous brute audience sympathy by stressing his troubled, tragic early life. VLAD offers so much tragedy in its title menace's past that it seems positively intent on excusing his history of selfish inhuman cruelty. In less pretentious hands this might have been fascinating stuff but most of the time VLAD is just a mammoth bore. With Billy Zane and Brad Dourif.
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VOODOO BLACK EXORCIST (1973)
Dir: Manuel Caino
A wooden sarcophagus containing an African prince who was executed 1,000 years ago for having an affair with another tribesman's woman is brought to Port-Au-Prince as part of an archaeological project. In a story that seems to have been partially inspired by both DRACULA and THE MUMMY, he comes to life in the cargo hold of the Caribbean cruise ship that's been hired to transport him and goes on a rampage, killing a gambler and using his magic ring to turn another guy into a hypnotized slave in the Renfield tradition. Once they reach the mainland, he kills more people who remind him of those present at his execution. He assumes the identity of a paleontologist who he has run over with a steamroller. The professor who arranged the trip finds out who he is and goes along with his charade in the hopes of getting a good story. The mummy-man looks like the Arnold Vosloo mummy character in the bloated American MUMMY adventure movies (and the plot has a lot in common with them too). Occasionally he experiences headaches and turns back into his ancient rotting undead form, which looks like a semi-professional attempt to re-create the Kharis makeup worn by Tom Tyler in THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940). Fernando Sancho, enjoyable as always, plays yet another wisecracking police inspector. He acts just like he did in the equally insane SWAMP OF THE RAVENS by the same director. It's possible it's supposed to be the same character. VOODOO BLACK EXORCIST, a Spanish production that was filmed in Jamaica, Haiti and Miami, is incompetently shot and directed and horribly dubbed into English to boot. The voiceover work is about as bad as it gets. The special effects, including some laughably fake severed heads, are no better. The movie has developed a minor cult reputation, mostly because it contains one of the worst, most obvious mistakes ever left in any motion picture: When the mad mummy beats up a fire-eating belly dancer, the cameraman (complete with his camera) is plainly visible in a mirror behind them! Even Jesus Franco would've noticed. There are continuity errors too. When the heroine (who is of course the mummy's reincarnated long-lost love) is kidnapped and taken to his spooky cave hideout, she had just climbed out of a bathtub and was carried off unconscious with only a towel wrapped around her. When her abductor arrives with her at the cave she's fully dressed. Sancho and the cops arrive to save the day, and in the incredible finale they destroy the mummy-man with flame throwers. The incredible part is that they don't hesitate to burn up the screaming innocent girl too! As if the terrible direction, camerawork and effects weren't enough, you also have to put up with the Voodoo Black Exorcist Love Theme, which kicks in way too often for my tastes. Newspaper ads warned, "This Dude Means Business!" I think we can safely conclude that he didn't mean boxoffice business.
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VULTURE'S EYE, THE (2004)
Dir: Frank Sciurba
Aggressively bad editing (think amateurishness, repetition and pretensiousness in equal parts) makes this indie feature all but unendurable. The title is meaningless, as this is really an amateur retelling of DRACULA with no suspense and no talent. It's set in the present day (to keep the budget down, maybe?) and features characters with names taken from Stoker's novel, including Lucy Westenra, Quincy Morris, Arthur Holmwood, and even Professor Van Helsing, who is presented here as a shabby old man with a Louisiana accent, a beer belly and a very inappropriate looking sports car. Even though all the other character names are lifted directly from DRACULA, the Count himself has been inexplicably (and unwisely) re-imagined as an ugly, dumpy old German pervert named Klaus Vogel (haven't I heard that name in some Jess Franco movies? Or is he the same "Klaus Vogel" who is a/k/a Beryl Vertue, who wrote the boring 1971 exploitation film THE VIRGIN WITCH?). Count Vogel has patches of big red wartlike bumps on his temples and red makeup smeared under his eyes onto his cheeks but nobody ever mentions this strange disfigurement. He sleeps in a coffin and vomits huge amounts of blood into women's faces. Any romantic subtexts found in earlier, legitimate versions of the tale are removed here, as if with pruning shears, by the decision to make the vampire an elderly fat creep with severe acne. To try to make things more grotesque, there's a lot of talk about how Vogel has forced various victims into acts of sexual depravitiy and cannibalism in Africa (?), which opens the door for some laughable slow-motion footage of bare breasts with stage blood smeared on them. I can live with amateurish acting and weak characterization in independent films, but this shot-on-video shipwreck is so uninvolving and lifeless that watching it has a sort of narcotic effect. Somebody must have thought it wasn't boring enough, so all the action scenes are shown in slow-motion, making them appear even longer and less urgent. All the female characters who are intended as sympathetic are dead by the anticlimactic ending, which stops on a clumsy note with the death of one more supporting player. If you're a Dracula fan, you should add this one to the list (along with DIE HARD DRACULA and DRACULA 3000) of movies to avoid like the black plague. And if you are Dracula, you should avoid this travesty like you would direct sunlight.
WALLED IN (2009)
Dir: Gilles Pacquet-Brenner
Mischa Barton of THE O.C. is excellent as a newcomer to her family's field of building demolition. Her first assignment sends her to a strange, lonely apartment building created by an insane architect who incorporated ancient principles of immortality into his designs and who may have been cemented into a wall of the structure itself along with numerous other victims of a mad killer. Unfortunately for our heroine, the architect's plans were left one corpse short of completion, and someone-- perhaps one of the oddball tenants who haven't vacated the premises yet-- may still be lurking in the gloomy halls, trying to complete his demented (and cemented) project. Fascinating subject matter reminiscent of the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Dario Argento is given an efficient if unimaginative treatment here, as the cinematography is only adequate when a more stylish approach might have made for a more memorable viewing experience. Several of the most wearying cliches of 2009 horror cinema are present, including a heroine with a masculine name (in this case "Sam"), blood that's too dark to pass for real human blood, a scene in which somebody vomits, and an obvious dream sequence that ends right on schedule with the dreamer popping up in bed sweating. Misgivings aside, WALLED IN offers good performances, more than one unpredictable plot twist, a likeable enough lead character and an overall presentation that is at least entertaining, if not quite overwhelming. And it's nice to see a horror film from around this time with a story that actually makes sense and has a proper ending, definite assets in an era so replete with dull shockers marked by shaky logic and uniformly glum, unsuccessful "surprise" twists in their closing shots. Fans of supernatural tales may be disappointed by the final, somewhat mundane explanation for the seemingly indestructible old building's horrible history, but the claustrophobic final reel offers a powerful aura of fear of suffocation that will keep you watching and all of the mentally unbalanced characters come off as real people who could inhabit the real world. It's based on a novel by Serge Brussolo.
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WARNING FROM SPACE (1956)
Dir: Koji Shima
As the title implies, this Japanese import draws its main inspiration from the classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, though it gradually evolves into a variation on WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE as well. Aliens from planet Paira (pronounced PIE-ruh) arrive on Earth in standard, panic-inducing flying saucers. The Pairans look like actors in large canvas sacks shaped like five-pointed stars, each with a single eyeball (a blue lightbulb) in its stomach. A single, easy-to-miss line of dialogue in the English dub apologizes for their ridiculous appearance by claiming they're wearing protective suits, but I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be organic in the original script. Citizens who see the creatures (they're friendly but still make their presence known by creeping around at night peeking in windows) scream and flee in terror, but if you were to go waddling down the street in one of these costumes in real life, most 8-year-old kids would probably laugh and throw rocks at you. They finally decide to use a weird machine to turn their chief female scientist into a replica of a human, using a voluptuous nightclub singer (first seen in a very un-Japanese production number that looks like Ricky Ricardo belongs in it) as a pattern. She isn't able to keep her identity a secret very long due to her habit of walking through solid walls and jumping 10 feet into the air during tennis matches. She warns an eminent scientist against the use of his new superexplosive but later regrets it when a runaway planet called Planet 'R' (for "runaway" maybe?) is found to be on a collision course with Earth. When it slams into Japan, the resulting cataclysm will wipe out most life on both Earth and Paira, with which Earth shares its orbital path. The high-powered new explosive seems to be the only means to destroy Planet 'R' and save both worlds, but after all the time that's been wasted on tennis matches and such, its inventor has disappeared. It's impossible to assess this movie on its own merits for two reasons: the horrendously poor English language dubbing, worse than in any Godzilla sequel, and the lamentable condition of the faded, scratchy prints circulating in the U.S. I'm not sure how the original story played out, but the English dialogue tells us that the scientist, who is kidnapped by nameless gangsters who want his formula to sell to the highest bidder, is left tied to a chair for an entire month. The crooks who nabbed him simply vanish from the plot after the approach of Planet 'R' starts to cause deadly climate changes, leading one to wonder why they didn't think to turn the poor guy loose once it became evident that the whole planet would be wiped out without his help. Creepy footage shows plants and animals dying and devastating tidal waves (a recurring theme in Japenese sci-fi) wreaking havoc. Some of the disaster footage is alarming and there are some ambitious effects but the crazy script makes hash of the plot. Tokyo is evacuated except for a classroom of little kids who are inexplicably shuffled off to the scientist's underground shelter. Eventually the girl from Paira calmly announces that she'd given the missing scientist a ring with an electronic homing device to allow her to locate him easily. I wondered why she didn't remember that sooner. There's no scene showing her giving him any such ring, so it feels like pretty desperate writing. You'd suspect that a man who'd sat bound and gagged for a whole month might have some trouble with blood circulation, stiff limbs, or, oh, I don't know, maybe starvation, but when they untie him he's just fine and ready to race back to the lab. The alien-to-human transformation sequence is impressive and the shots of the fiery planet of death hurtling through space are nicely ominous, but the wildly implausible character behavior and goofy creature design makes the whole thing very difficult to take seriously. A couple of residents of Paira were apparently voted onto the High Council of The Emerald Planet seen in the STARMAN superhero series. Alternate titles for this, the first Japanese science fiction movie shot in color, include UNKNOWN SATELLITE OVER TOKYO and SPACEMEN IN TOKYO.
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WATER HORSE, THE: LEGEND OF THE DEEP (2007)
Dir: Jay Russell
An immensely likeable family film about a boy and his monster. Comparisons to E.T. and FREE WILLY are inevitable, but this is strong enough to stand on its own merits. In WWII Scotland, a lonely little boy named Angus misses his soldier father and counts down the days to when he believes the family will be reunited. On the shore of Loch Ness, he discovers a strange egg that hatches a slimy, flippered sea creature (a nicely done job of computer animated effects) to whom he quickly develops an emotional bond. He tries to keep the ever-growing beastie a secret from his mother and other adults, but this becomes almost impossible when a group of British soldiers come to occupy the manor house at which his mother works as housekeeper. Eventually the Brits get the idea to set off depth charges in the lake in case any Nazi subs are hiding there in ambush, and things come to a tense but satisfying finish. Kids should enjoy the sight of the cute-but-ugly creature (dubbed "Crusoe" by its young human chum) and its ongoing battles with a mean cook's aggressive bulldog (another species that can look cute and ugly at the same time), but there are serious themes of loss and tragedy here that some might see as a little heavy for a children's film. Of course the same can be said of BAMBI, OLD YELLER and many other movies that are considered family classics. The acting is first rate and the pacing is for the most part perfect. One strange aspect of the project is the author's decision to call his creature a water horse. It bears virtually no relation to the water horses of European folklore, which were reputed to be evil monsters capable of assuming the appearance of horses in order to lure innocent people to their deaths. Since the mythology for this creature was entirely invented for the story, I see no reason not to make up an original name for the animal too. People who take the notion of the Loch Ness Monster seriously generally believe it to be of an extinct species called a plesiosaur, but this creature has some decidedly non-plesiosaurian features and is clearly intended to be a heretofore unknown type of magical fantasy animal. The only aspect in which it ever resembles a horse in any way is when it takes its understandably alarmed friend for a ride around Loch Ness on its back (a fun, exhilarating scene). We're told that only one such creature can exist in the world at a time, so I suppose its super-fast growth is meant as a defense mechanism needed by a species that would have no parents to protect it in its youth. There's a lot to enjoy in this rather old-fashioned production, but my favorite scene was a great sight gag that wittily accounts for that classic old photograph of the Loch Ness Monster that's appeared in hundreds of books, films and TV specials over the years. The scenic Scottish locations are a nice bonus and provide a pleasing visual backdrop for a simple but tidy little story. Well produced, well photographed and well above average for a film of its type.
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WEREWOLF HUNTER (2004)
Dir: Paco Plaza
This ambitious Spanish/ British feature was made as ROMASANTA but misleadingly retitled by American distributors hoping to dupe the video-renting public into expecting an action-packed monster movie along VAN HELSING lines. As a result, American viewers rejected it for not having enough of the empty-headed Hollywood blockbuster elements the packaging seems to promise. It's no masterpiece, but it is an interesting movie in its own right. The full title on English language print is WEREWOLF HUNTER: THE LEGEND OF ROMASANTA. Various characters qualify technically as "werewolf hunters" at different points in the movie, but there is no specific person present who deserves to be identified primarily by that title. The good-looking but meandering feature is an unusual fact-based period horror piece starring Julian Sands as Manuel Romasanta, a real-life psycho who violently murdered over a dozen women in nineteenth century Spain. When brought to trial, his only legal defense was his claim that he suffered from the curse of the werewolf, making him a shape-shifting animal man unable to control his bloodthirsty urges. As played by Sands, Romasanta wears an intense, haunted stare that lets us know he's an odd character but isn't really knowable since he seems to be staring at just about everything and everybody in basically the same fashion. The film has a picturesque look and is rich in period details but never really demands attention, largely because the unwieldy script wanders all over the place before even settling on who the main character is. Character relationships are underexplained to the point of causing mild confusion, and too many scenes end abruptly without adding anything of note to the plot. Is Sands a real wolfman who actually undergoes a physical transformation, or is he just a deluded maniac? The movie plays it safe and never decides for sure, offering overwhelming evidence that the supernatural goings-on are all in the murderous character's mind, but allowing several unexplained instances of what appear to be genuine superhuman powers to remain. When Romasanta approaches a ferocious real wolf, it backs down and slinks away with its tail between its legs; and a burly, bald, tormented man seems to be under a hypnotic spell that causes him to periodically go berserk, running naked through the woods and committing murder, supposedly under Romasanta's control (it's highly unusual to see this Dracula-like mental dominance attributed to a lycanthrope). Interestingly, Romasanta fancies himself a wolf who only occasionally takes human form, instead of the other way around. The only transformation depicted is a wolf-into-man sequence that only weakens the film's impact by attaching strong visual images to what is otherwise only alluded to, and the fact that it ends with Sands punching his way through what looks like Saran Wrap doesn't help either. The most interesting scenes are those devoted to 1851-era forensics and 'police procedural' elements, although a somewhat sophisticated discussion of genetics feels very out of place for a story set in 1851. There's a lot of excellent work to be appreciated in this forgotten movie, but the script's indifference toward keeping track of its characters and its irritatingly episodic structure result in a whole that is far less than the sum of its parts. If you're looking for a true werewolf movie you'll be disappointed for sure, but devotees of historical horror re-enactments might find the project worth a look.
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WHEN EVIL CALLS (2006)
Dir: Johannes Roberts
It's hard to believe anybody would want to copy so creatively bankrupt a series as the WISHMASTER movies, but that seems to be the case here. An evil genie who is inexplicably confined within telephone lines sends text messages to various brainless students at a British high school, offering to grant each one a wish. Of course the wishes all backfire, in a manner that's supposed to be clever but which is actually simple-minded and illogical more often than not. This dopey project started out as the world's first horror miniseries made specifically for viewing on cell phones, which might explain why the computer animated blood and fire effects look so cheap and unconvincing when blown up to the size of a TV screen. The 20 brief lame-brained episodes are linked together for DVD release with some hastily shot footage of Sean Pertwee as a mean, drunken school janitor relating the tales to a nerdy student in the supply closet. Ironically, these segments are much better acted and more entertaining than the vignettes themselves. Pertwee repeatedly makes jokes about each of the incidents and then gets flustered when he has to explain his puns to his dim captive audience, a device that somehow continues to be funny even after it's happened over and over again. If it weren't for his enthusiastic segments, this feature would have next to nothing going for it. Even this framing device is fumbled when Pertwee suddenly sprouts an animated fanged monster face for about two seconds for absolutely no reason. The text message concept is good and could have been creepy, but the filmmakers ruin it by throwing in an unnecessary mascot character who, at one point, stands there and types in his message and then hands the phone to the character directly in front of him. As you can guess, he doesn't fit into the plot situation very well. Adding insult to plaigarism is the fact that the ancient genie is represented as a clown! Yes, it's another stupid looking, pitifully unscary circus clown, this time one made up to look like Tim Curry's Pennywise from the Stephen King TV adaptation IT. The 20 bite-sized bits of horror are crudely assembled affairs, often containing reaction shots of people who should appear horrified but look either bored or mildly confused, as though they weren't sure what they were supposed to be reacting to. The average 10-year-old could think of better ways in which wishes could go spectacularly wrong than this lowbrow movie does. To cite one example: A boy wishes his flat-chested girlfriend had bigger breasts. Even if they grew ridiculously large, even so big that she couldn't stand up, it might make some kind of sense. But they simply swell up and instantly explode in a welter of poorly animated blood. The guy didn't wish her breasts would burst; he only wished she had bigger ones. In another episode, an underage girl wishes she were "older". Although the script makes it sound like she was supposed to turn into an elderly woman, they must have been unable to do a good old-age makeup, since they settled for simply superimposing a CG skull over her face. The script cheats in this way several times, failing to come up with intelligent ways to grant each victim's wish to the letter and still have them all end in disaster. Just as in the WISHMASTER films, once you realize the writers will let anything happen, whether it fits the scenario logically or not, there's little reason for involvement. Continuity is weak even when you take into account the cobbled-together nature of the project, as when the nominal heroine is grabbed and pulled into a closet by Genie The Clown in one scene and is next seen flitting around at the prom. The ending makes more sense than you'd expect of such a logic-challenged movie, but it's too pat, too easy, too predictable, too sudden, and will leave most viewers feeling ripped off. The director was also responsible for DARKHUNTERS and FOREST OF THE DAMNED. |
WISHING STAIRS, THE (2003)
Dir: Jae-yeon Yun
Interesting South Korean ghost horror that borrows images from RING --- a woman brushing her hair in front of a wall mirror, a pale bluishghost crawling through a window in the same jerky pixilated way that RING's ghost climbed out of the TV screen, etc.--- and adds a weird wish-fulfillment fantasy element and a spooky setting reminiscent of SUSPIRIA. At a Korean art academy for girls, there is an old stone staircase containing 28 steps. Legend has it that, if you climb this staircase with your eyes closed and count each step aloud, every once in a while a mysterious 29th step will appear at the top. At this time, you may ask "the fox" to grant any wish and it will come true. An overweight student wishes she was thinner, a ballet student wishes to be the one who gets to travel to an important tournament, and eventually one girl wishes a dead friend would return to her, just like in "The Monkey's Paw". I was impressed with the visuals and involved in the plot, but I'll be darned if I could sort out exactly what was going on most of the time. Not because the movie doesn't make sense (although it may not), but because the main actresses all looked so much alike to me that I couldn't be sure who was saying or doing what to whom. I spent most of the running time wondering, "Is that the girl who took the shoes? Or the girl who wore the shoes? Is the girl who owned the shoes the one making the wish? The one falling down the stairs? Uhh...let's see, Is that girl who's talking now the one who was mean to her friend? Or is that the friend? Is that girl who's being chased around the mean girl? The friend? The other girl?....Why do I suddenly have a headache?"... All the stars are young, skinny Korean girls with medium-length black hair, making it a constant chore to keep track of who's who. The only girl easily distinguished from the rest is the fat girl with red hair...But then she loses weight and dyes her hair black! AAARRRGGHH!! All I can say is, if they decide to do an American remake of this one, I hope they will do us the kindness of casting one blonde actress, one brunette, one redhead, one Asian girl, one black girl, one Hispanic girl, etc., so that maybe we American viewers will be able to sort things out without straining to find any tiny identifying distinction in the actresses' mouth shapes and eyebrow arches to help us make a guess at who is up to what. Anyone got any aspirin?
WITCHING, THE (1972/83)
Dir: Bert I. Gordon
In 1983 the folks at AEI took NECROMANCY, a confused 1972 horror flop starring Pamela Frankin and Orson Welles (yes, that Orson Welles), and decided to make it whole lot worse and release it on video. The resultant mess was christened THE WITCHING and turns a merely muddled feature into one that's nearly unwatchable. Welles plays Mr. Cato, a devil-worshipping crackpot who literally owns a small New England town with the unlikely name of Lilith. Pamela Franklin is the annoying wife of a duplicitous, cheating husband clearly copied from John Cassavettes' role in ROSEMARY'S BABY. Pam is dragged (complaning all the way) to her new home in Lilith, ostensibly so her hubby can start a career at Cato's occult toy factory (what?). The real reason she's sought by Cato and his coven of kooks (and the reason the entire community exists as a devil cult full of with strange people and stranger rules) is because Cato believes she can bring his dead son back to life. As little sense as it made in the original cut, the newer footage and narration hammered into it in '83 only succeeds in making it completely incomprehensible. The "improvements" include a loud, rockin' 80s-style synth soundtrack that cheapens the overall aesthetic, some unneeded orgy footage (basically a few shots of some topless women standing and/or lounging around in Cato's house, to whom Franklin of course never reacts since they weren't there when her scenes were shot) featuring a quick glimpse of a young Brinke Stevens, and most damagingly, some truly dreadful footage of a nagging transparent superimposed ghost who keeps popping in to deliver unending echo-voiced prattle that's hard to hear and adds nothing but a few more bewildering and senseless details to the plot. This movie is so devoid of characterization that it's impossible to care about Pamela's persecuted heroine, and the script gives her almost nothing with which to construct a knowable character. The re-edit again makes things worse, as Pam is seen determinedly constructing a voodoo doll of herself near the climax. Exactly what she had in mind and why we needed to watch her trim off a lock of her hair and glue it and a photo of her face to a doll is never explained, since in the next scene she's suddenly completely under Cato's control (I guess), inexplicably performing the occult ritual (which includes murder) to resurrect the child, even though by that time she's well aware that doing so will require her to take his place in the grave. The kid turns from a rotting skeleton to a healthy little boy and reawakens, whereupon the witches throw Pam into the grave and bury her alive, precisely as the script promised they would. And then the credits roll. You've got to wonder what Welles and Franklin (both of whom deserved better) were thinking in '72, and what the klutzes who butchered the decade-old feature were thinking when they elected to make so many drastic, distractingly obvious and unhelpful changes in a misguided effort to update it. Do the legacy and the memory of Orson Welles a favor and resist the urge to watch this boring horror hack job.
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WITCHMAKER, THE (1969)
Dir: William O. Brown
Seriously creepy witchcraft chiller shot in the misty moonlit bayous of Louisiana. Alvy Moore (befuddled county agent Hank Kimball on GREEN ACRES) stars and served as associate producer. He's a professor of occult studies who takes a small group of students and a reporter (Anthony Eisley) to a remote cabin surrounded by swampland. Their cover story is that they're scouting film locations, but they're really out to solve a series of gruesome murders of young women in the area. The killer is a scary, deranged, laughing violent brute called Luther The Berserk, who leads a pack of devil worshippers in his hidden subterranean chamber. When Luther (a well cast John Lodge) overhears that a beautiful blonde "psychic sensitive" in the party is herself descended from witches, he sets out to dominate the girl's mind and make her the 13th member of his coven. The powers and beliefs of the witches are more authentically based in real folklore than in many witch movies, and although there's a definite fantasy element (some witches materialize out of thin air, one can turn into a cat, an old hag is transformed into a young beauty, and so forth) this cheap production never feels too hokey and ultimately succeeds in delivering chills. Luther is a frightening, intimidating enemy and the gloomy visuals and eerily quiet swampland setting work to maintain an ominous mood of lurking evil. Moore and Eisley don't inspire much confidence as heroes, and you'll want to smack them when they stupidly pass up an easy chance to kill the evil warlock, but most of the story logic is good and the various black magic rituals seem to have been well researched to give them an authentic flavor. Some of the prints used for VHS releases during the 1980s are in terrible shape, but occasionally the grainy, battered look of the film captures a certain verite' feel much better than THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT did. THE WITCHMAKER (a/k/a THE LEGEND OF WITCH HOLLOW) is honestly a better movie in every way than the overhyped BLAIR, but since it didn't have the benefit of a website to con people into thinking it was a true story, it has fallen into obscurity. There are two slightly different climaxes on different prints, one (shown in the U.S.) in which Luther has the power to throw exploding firebolts at his fleeing enemies, and one used for European prints that's more subtle, but the difference doesn't affect the grim outcome. Maybe not a classic, but this title is well worth watching and deserves more recognition.
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WOLF CREEK (2005)
Dir: Greg McLean
Excellent acting and crisp photography give this Australian production the feel of a professional feature film but the lack of a real story and its overall pointlessness mark it as just another TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE copy. The Australian outback is substituted for the American West, but apart from that everything is basically the same as in most of the U.S. entries in this unimaginative, easy-to-produce subgenre. Yet another carload of bland young victims take yet another road trip into yet another deserted countryside. Yet another car that conks out leaves them stranded with yet another sadistic psychopath who takes them to yet another ramshackle hideout where he rapes, stabs, shoots and otherwise mutilates them. Oddly, the first half of WOLF CREEK, in which nothing really happens, is more entertaining than its last-reel torture scenario. To the director's credit, he takes his time letting the viewer get to know the characters, such as they are, before letting the hardcore violence kick in. In the last third of the movie, expectations for anything clever or original are dashed as the same old gore stuff takes over. The crazy guy in this case (played by an actor who is far better than an empty project like this deserves) has no motivation whatsoever as he gleefully cuts up and mangles young girls, apparently just for lack of anything else to do. Then there's the strange bit about the meteor. For a while, it appears that a meteor which crash landed and left a huge crater nearby is going to have some relevance, but this subplot is dropped and never seems to have anything to do with the killer's evil behavior. There isn't a real ending either, just one of those cop-out "the case was never solved..." captions flashed onscreen. WOLF CREEK tries to look like a serious, respectable film by dressing itself up in pretenses of being "based on actual events" and by allegedly addressing the real-life problem of the unsolved disappearances that occur in Australia each year. But it's really just one more plotless, ordinary exploitation flick with its raison d'etre being nothing more than the depiction of innocent young women bleeding, screaming and crying as they're slowly cut up and tortured to death by a big mean thug. Stupid, depressing, generic stuff.
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WOLFMAN (1979)
Dir: Worth Keeter
Earl Owensby, a North Carolina tool salesman who wanted to be a movie star, produced and starred in a number of successful low-budget features that mostly played in southern drive-ins in the '70s and '80s. They weren't very inspired or original but they all made money and were seen by millions of moviegoers. This one is a redundant werewolf thriller in which Earl plays Colin Glasgow, a man who inherits a Georgia estate in 1910. An evil preacher (a typical cheap movie style shot against Christianity) joins Colin's scheming relatives in putting the whammy on him, turning him into a very traditional wolfman who transforms, via old-fashioned 1940s-style lap dissolve effects, during the full moon. Earl, bless his heart, was never a great performer, but he certainly isn't the worst I've seen and he did get to live his dream and make himself into a movie star of sorts. (And, heck, to be perfectly honest, I wish I'd done that.) In one scene, Earl wakes up the morning after going on a werewolf rampage. Seeing that his shirt is stained with blood, he tears it off and throws it into the fireplace. The man's back and arms are so incredibly hairy that he still looks like a werewolf when we get a look at his bare flabby torso. Most of the other acting is worse than Earl's, with the southern accented cast adding unwanted comedy by pronouncing "wolf" as "woof" and such. The sets look kind of plain and empty and the period costumes are adequate, although a few minor characters can be spotted wearing decidedly 1970s-looking wardrobe. The biggest flaws are in the plot. Colin's family deliberately puts the werewolf curse on him, even knowing that the bloodthirsty killer monster he will become will be right there under the same roof with them when he transforms. (No prizes for guessing how the evil but shortsighted relatives die.) Near the end, the sinister reverend grabs the heroine by the wrist and drags her along the countryside for what appears to be miles, and she has no choice but to run along beside him, crying and hollering, never thinking of simply going limp and falling to the ground, which might have made it considerably harder for the 65-year-old villain to abduct her. One lunkhead even sees the crazed, cackling reverend dragging the girl across town against her will but apparently doesn't think there's any problem with that. When the preacher enters the family mansion (still dragging the girl by the arm) it's daylight outside but by the time they get to the attic it's pitch dark and the full moon is out, leading one to conclude that this is one house that has a lot of stairs. The wolfman is of the hairy-faced Paul Naschy school and the makeup is actually pretty good, although it probably gets too many closeups for its own good. There have been far worse horror movies produced, but WOLFMAN is too routine, predictable and badly acted to provide much entertainment.
WOLFMAN NEVER SLEEPS (1972)
Dir: Jose Maria Zabalza
Maybe he doesn't, but you might while you sit through this scrappy feature that takes several interesting concepts and turns them into a chintzy tossed salad of old school monster movie ingredients spiced up with added blood and laughable sex. Waldemar Daninsky, who first became a wolfman in MARK OF THE WOLFMAN, survives an attack in Tibet by a creature that may have been either a werewolf or a yeti (a later film in the series, THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI, would return to this situation, presumably inspired by 1935's WEREWOLF OF LONDON). Returning home to Spain, he finds his life is a teensy bit complicated. His cheating wife and her lover are plotting to kill him (in one of the cheapest and most poorly staged car crashes ever committed to film), a female mad scientist is in love with him but also resents him for spurning her earlier romantic advances, and a mysterious guy in a white rubber mask is sneaking around in the shadows looking like a prototype Michael Myers at the mysterious castle where the sinister "Dr. Wolfstein" carried out his experiments in the first film. The luckless lycanthrope slaughters his unfaithful spouse while in werewolf form, immediately after which he manages to electrocute himself by grabbing some power lines during a storm. He is resurrected in a laboratory by the jealous woman scientist, who keeps a dungeon full of former patients she has caused to mutate into second-rate circus freaks, along with some who are supposedly half-human and half-plant (huh?), and others who are just plain nuts. Waldemar, who, like the audience, never really knows what's going on in this story, spends much of his time either chained to a wall or trying to help a pretty med student (who also has a crush on him) find a way out of the castle. (Both he and the heroine somehow forget about the large stained glass window through which Nacshy had easily crashed to make an escape a short while before.) That is, of course, during the periods when he isn't actually dead. Throughout the film, the mysterious scar on Naschy's chest is stubbornly called a pentagram, when in fact it's a pentagon. The most memorable scene is one in which the lady scientist savagely beats the chained-up wolfman with a leather whip, which apparently gets the hairy beast sexually aroused, then removes her clothes and embraces him (at this point the monster is clearly more in the mood for love than in the mood to tear her throat out, which is how he greets most folks). Eventually Waldemar's wife is brought back to life and turned into a combination zombie and werewolf. When she is killed a second time, she instantly assumes her rightful stage of decomposition. The lurking killer in the pseudo-Myers mask turns out to be exactly who you expect, and the sanity-challenging ending sees the survivors calmly exit a room full of bloody mangled corpses and cheerfully comment on what a lovely day it is outside. The fourth film in Paul Naschy's (real name Jacinto Molina) world-famous werewolf series is an incomprehensible mishmash. Much of the trouble is reportedly the fault of the director, who not only failed to control his alcoholism during the shoot but also allowed his 14-year-old nephew to rewrite parts of Naschy's original script and even to "help" with the editing. The finished film, unsurprisingly, plays like something assembled by a drunk and a teenager. The most distracting flaw is the poorly edited-in footage of werewolf attacks from MARK OF THE WOLFMAN, which was made eight years earlier. Not only is the wolfman wearing a noticeably different shirt in those scenes, but his behavior is drastically different too: in the older film he was a ferocious, fast-moving, arm-flailing, hyperactive wild animal, but in the new footage the werewolf (under the influence of mild hypnotic control achieved via something called "chemotrodes", which presumably are like electrodes only chemical rather than electrical in nature) moves like a sleepwalker most of the time, clomping along at a steady gait with his hands held out in front of him. The editing is enough of a disaster on its own, but its incompetence is worsened by one of the worst English language dubbing jobs you'll ever hear. It's too bad Naschy didn't end up directing this installment himself. You can bet the results would have been a lot more impressive. A common print with some of the violence and all of the nudity cut is titled FURY OF THE WOLFMAN.
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WOODS, THE (2005)
Dir: Lucky McKee
Slow-moving tale of a haunted girls' school that's like watching an Italian horror film without any of the bold Argento style that could have infused the underdeveloped story with some much-needed dramatic power. It opens just like 1957's BLOOD OF DRACULA, with an emotionally messed-up teen being dumped at a spooky private school by her uncaring parents. The dad is played by EVIL DEAD star Bruce Campbell, who seems to have brought elements of those films along with him including sentient vines and tree roots that attack people and some of those nifty low-to-the-ground, high-speed Steadicam chase shots. Credibility is strained by the fact that all the staff members at the remote, shadowy academy (which is run more like a prison or a concentration camp than a school) are so obviously crazy and/or evil on first glance that it's hard to believe nobody would notice. The sullen heroine is left surrounded by the most horrible women imaginable and, although THE WOODS doesn't really feel like a direct imitation of any particular film, it suffers from a sort of over-familiarity that breeds, well, boredom. The dialogue is often frustrating in that people usually only seem to say about half of what should have been said to make their verbal exchanges feel believable. Thus most of the conversations sound choppy and incomplete. The deaths and disappearances that commence are caused by the spirits of three demonic witches who took over the institution some hundred years earlier. Naturally today's outwardly nutty faculty are all witches too. The title refers to the thick forest surrounding the place, which periodically eats girls' souls (or something like that) and kills interlopers by using its vines to strangle them or make their cars crash. The lighting and cinematograpy are efficient and although the heroine seldom changes facial expressions, her cold one-note performance fits her character perfectly and is entirely appropriate to the script. Unfortunately the whole thing isn't very involving, devoting most of its length to mundane unpleasant incidents involving the new girl and her constant abuse by an inexplicably hostile bullying rich girl and an assortment of unsympathetic teachers. It tends to go on and on in this fashion for what seems like a very long time before the supernatural elements are finally brought into play. The movie has its good points, but one can't deny that Amicus could have told this slight story more effectively as a twelve-minute segment of one of their horror anthologies back in the '70s.
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WORST HORROR MOVIE EVER MADE, THE (2006)
Dir: "Bill Zebub"
A rank amateur mess that doesn't even live up to its title. THE LEAST FUNNY COMEDY EVER MADE would have been a more apt name for this inept load of uninspired nothingness. There's a lot of fun to be had in poking fun at the conventions and cliches of the horror genre, but nobody who showed up to help with this worthless project seems to have tried to find anything very witty or original to say. Any couple of teenaged buddies could do as well with a camcorder, a couple of blank tapes, a couple of spare afternoons and a couple of sixpacks. Instead of coming up with anything funny, clever or insightful, "Mr. Zebub" simply falls back on presenting the poorest possible imitations of ideas and characters he's seen in real horror movies. Once every few minutes something resembling a Joke occurs, probably having escaped the director's attention. A couple of the actual jokes are relatively funny but most of the time the movie lazily settles for total carelessness which is conveniently written off as "comedy" on the grounds that it isn't supposed to be good. There isn't any plot, as it's all a collection of bits in which some youthful idiots try to escape from various horror situations. Unable to come up with anything genuinely witty, the project relies on countless toilet references and other gross-outs (that any 10-year-old could have thought up) in a minor effort to generate some easy laughs among dumber viewers. There's a group of violent army guys, a poop monster, a girl who briefly grows to giant size, a mummy, and an undead maniac who thinks he's the reincarnation of Jesus. None of this is presented with any style or enthusiasm and the special effects are as bad as can be, although I suppose the filmmakers would claim that their effects were intentionally terrible to qualify the various scenes as parody. I'm not a big fan of the Wayans Brothers' over-hyped SCARY MOVIE franchise, but at least those films found quite a few clever ways to spoof the genre instead of simply imitating it in the lamest way imaginable and trying to pass the results off as satire. The end credits include the excuse that the "movie" was made over a long period on a dare, but it's unimpressive even on those terms and there's no reason anyone who wasn't actually in it should ever want to sit through it.
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