Science Crazed (1991)

 

Director: Ron Switzer

Screenplay: Ron Switzer

Cast: Cameron Scholes; Tony Della Ventura as The 'Fiend'; Robin Hartsell

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)  /An Abstract Film Candidate

 

I Suggest nerve gas tests in the following countries...[Long pause] France...[Even longer pause]...Canada...

 

Where did this Canadian SOV film come from? Chronologically even Science Crazed's date of birth is confusion. Some say 1991, others 1989 thus making it a film from the year of my birth, and I have belief it was at least shot in 1987 or around that period, due to a Toronto telephone directory book and how, with all the horror posters on the walls, some like Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Creepshow 2 (1987) time stamp the period. What cannot be denied that, between this and Things (1989), Canada in its dips into micro-budget cinema could get weird, Science Crazed one of those true oddities from this world with the added strangeness of disembodied voices, strange pacing and random tangents.

The notoriety of this film is immediately established when you notice how everything is s-l-o-w. Not Leonardo DiCaprio reduced to a bag of meat crawling to his car due to out-of-date Quaaludes as in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), nor even slow minimalist cinema, but a perplexing one-off form of minimalism. Half suspecting, with a shot of a book on Hegel on the left and a horror book on the right of the table, this was made on purpose like this at times, and at other times clearly by accident and by an unknown psychological influence. The opening is full of pregnant pauses, as a doctor researching a serum that causes quick pregnancies is told by the board funding him to stop the research, represented by one man. Both have dubbed over post-synch voices. The doctor, rocking sunglasses, still continues the experiment with a willing female subject where, in exactly three hours, she will become pregnant, and in twenty one hours, give birth. The unfortunate issue of a bloody aftermath transpires where the woman dies, and the male and female assistants have to cover up the incident whilst keeping the baby. Said baby gestates, rapidly, into a full grown man with a bloody bandaged head, elf ears, a bloodied white shirt and jeans, and a taste for strangling random people to death including the doctor himself, unhappy about his existence.

Science Crazed takes a very simple premise and runs it into a form of ultra minimalism. Said son, looking like Marlon Brandon in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) after a horrifying shaving accident, making insanely deep breathing noises (especially in how they are mixed on the soundtrack among the disembodied and repeated synth) and drags himself along with a lame leg. Anyone, anyone, he encounters he chokes, sometimes with one hand, and kills in his random path in a building complex which is a stand in for a lab and a variety of environments. Science Crazed for those who know it is notorious for its strange narcoleptic tone, the set up a traditional one for any horror, only to drift off between the VHS hiss silence between music strings. It is a film set in its own world of logic due to budgetary restrictions - when the cocky detective is called at a Video Shed rental store, looking at a Rambo VHS tape, and takes the call as if at a police station whilst the clerk makes funny faces during the conversation. And of course, the film places its gonads on the table by how extreme this gets through a ten minute exercise sequence. It is what this sentence suggests - two woman, one in a pink tutu whilst the other in a form fitting piece, exercising in-between shots of the monster limping along in a corridor for what does last ten minutes of running time. Maybe because I was prepared for this notorious sequence, it did not beat me down, and was amusing instead, but it is literally the scene that makes or breaks a viewer's experience because it early on in the production. It warns you how more random, and how prolonged and dragged out, the film will get.

It is abstract? Science Crazed does eventually ware you down into a daze, as in terms of a plot, it is barely one baring the detective and the doctor's assistances tracking the Fiend down. The production feels improvised but in a peculiar way as a result. You can struggle in padding out a film, as has been found in micro-budget genre cinema, but how does one explain the scene where a woman, behind a desk, says extremely slowly with length pauses names of countries to start nerve gas tests in, which is never explained or elaborated upon, baring that it is the definition of random improvisation? Or the prolonged scene that does make sense in context, but lingers, of a woman approaching the Fiend calmly in a room with silhouettes drawn on the white wall, caressing the heavily breathing monster for a prolonged moment, avant garde film levels in pace, all for a backbreaking bear hug as a receipt? Or the other woman with a very Canadian accent, as the camera spins around her in the dark, speaking to herself (without sound) in prayer despite looking like an eighties day glow punkette? The accidental minimalism of this monster film is its own strange experience.

The film in its final act, by the time the fiend has terrorised an indoor swimming pool with wooden panelling, does feel the burden of its weight if you cannot engage with its tone, as liable as it did when I first saw the film to cause the viewer to drift off into the visuals. Ultimately, between this and Things, Things is so consistently strange that you do keep alert once you understand its logic. Science Crazed in its own way is just as fascinating, but in terms of being a film that is a repetition of shots, of the fiend limping along or watching bystanders at the swimming pool, which are stretched out to an extreme. Not a lot actually happens in terms of a film, one which could have been less the sixty minutes or shorter, and as a result it is closer to a monster film distorted beyond recognition. Even for a horror fan, there is not a lot of the luridness of gore either and any practical effects, barring some fake blood, with a lot of the film following an old b-movie trope of a monster strangling a person, sometimes with one hand, which is very easy to act out but for most people is usually a sign of a terrible horror film. It is an acquired taste.

As a film openly hostile to a conventional viewing experience, this is in itself strange and unconventional, which is, ultimately, why it has developed the reputation over a decade it has. It is abstract though? There are as potentially strange concoctions done on purpose you could imagine - if Michael Snow, the Canadian avant-garde film maker, or a slow cinema director had helmed a b-movie horror film but kept in Bela Tarr length long takes. One can imagine, shot from a distance the exercise sequence, in a one take ten minute sequence, in real time before a monster killed the participants, and whilst not for everyone, that would have been memorable in the annuals of horror cinema in itself. Science Crazed itself, for all the moments clearly intentional in structure, is not intentional at other times, and thus is something else, and part of its legacy as an obscure oddity, which is the entire micro-budget genre where some due to their form and budgetary restrictions leads to perplexing distortions in audio-visual content as much as ones which fully succeed. Many, frankly, most people would not find appealing in the slightest; however for someone like me, whether shot on videotape camera or a digital one from the early 2000s, with just limited resources, they seem to exist in their own little worlds with their own rules that are compelling to witness and their own form of abstraction. That the film promised a sequel in the end credits, the "Revenge of the "Fiend"" is almost a cherry on top to this particular example. That, with its director having disappeared entirely, it is the ultimate what-if mystery of what the blue hell a sequel to Science Crazed would have turned out like if he kept making films.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic/Random/Slow

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991)

 

Directors: John Carl Buechler

Screenplay: Brent Olson

Casts: Evan MacKenzie as Skip Carter, Kevin McCarthy as Professor Ragnar, Eva LaRue as Erin Riddle, John R. Johnston as Jeremy Heilman, Patrick Labyorteaux as Mookey, Billy Morrissette as Wes, Hope Marie Carlton as Veronica

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Ragnar has no dick.

After a high for this franchise for me, the second sequel comes four years later and from Vestron Video, a home video company who became part of Lionsgate and were rechristened as their home distribution arm. Vestron also included Vestron Pictures, their production and distribution arm, and their spin-off Lightning Pictures, which Ghoulies III comes from. When Lionsgate Home Entertainment announced its revival of the Vestron Video brand as a Blu-ray and DVD reissue label in 2016, you naturally got to see the films they produced and distributed, such as Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) to Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) alongside many horror films.

The tone has also drastically changed on from the previous films, as when not biting a face off, not only have these Ghoulies are going to get degrees, they have now learnt to talk. It is set up in a period twenty one years prior to this episode in the franchise, so there is going to have to be a continuity loophole that, as established in Part II with a giant Ghoul being summoned, various species of demons per film exist that are related. More noticeable is that there is more overt slapstick than even before in its broader tone, more goofier gags and even actual nudity for titillation, a horror comedy that is more comedy in terms of its college setting. Set during a prank week between male fraternities for a Prank Crown, lead Skip Carter (Evan MacKenzie) is gunning for it whilst twenty one years earlier, these Ghoulies were captured using a comic book, an underground publication using real demon summoning spells, which is found by one of Skip's frat brothers sat on the John when he knocks a wall tile off and reveals it. The comic is with the incantations to summon them from their sacred jar, i.e. sacred toilet bowl, as they are not even hiding the franchise's obsession with them, with someone being flushed to death in one. That links with the sense of childish humour that would pass were it not for the female nudity, the more overt horror later on or the main villain, a hateable blond jock, being continually called a Hitler Youth.

That comic is confiscated by a hated teacher, Professor Ragnar (Kevin McCarthy), who becomes power hungry and summons the Ghoulies to do his bidding. One major aspect of Ghoulies III which may put viewers off is that this is less a plot from here on but more a setting for a goofy slapstick film, less homicidal Ghoulies but vandalising Ghoulies, who are late to the Freddy Krueger 'one liners' which became popular in the late eighties into the early nineties for horror cinema, which alongside the more broad tone may find extremely annoying. The most prominent film in director John Carl Buechler's career, outside of his special effects work, is being the director of Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988), the film which had Jason Voorhees fight a telekinetic girl, which would be remiss to not bring up, and here he came to this with a film that was clearly more a humorous and a pastiche of horror than meant to be scary, with a script by Brent Olson, who is listed as having never done anything else.

Another is the more explicit sense of horniness, with actual nudity and one character, Veronica (Hope Marie Carlton), who when she is not trying to seduce multiple male characters including Skip is the kind of person who dances in her underwear less in her own world in her bedroom, but wanting to give ghosts an eyeful. Considering she is an Andy Sidaris alumnus, through multiple films including Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987), that is not an insult to her existence either in the film, but this does cross a line at times. There is horniness which can be acceptable including explicit titillation, but this includes the film ogling the women without giving them characters, where even the comedy security guard is a pervert trying to score panties, and has creepy Ghoulies ogling women in the shower, there only for the sight of women in showers for a sex comedy. The only consolation in that later scene is that, as anyone who has seen Phantom of the Paradise (1974), strangely this was not the first time a Psycho parody with a plunger involved transpired.

There is still horror here, the Ghoulies still killing people, even if here it involves the aforementioned death by toilet, and the finale does even get more over the top in a cool way, with someone melting and a giant prosthetic body suit costume with a stomach face. However we are fully falling into parody of the franchise itself here, with a literal cartoon bomb at one point and slapstick with the security guard and his beloved (and named) golf cart. You can feel this as our lead Skip is a pure archetype, and that his love interest Erin (Eva LaRue) is precariously generic, expecting Skip to give up his pranking and become respectable, but is a stereotypical plot that will change her mind on this, and that it encourages (in both male and female versions) this idea of stripping away one's personality, or a contrived self reflection to stay as you are. Ghoulies III is still fun, but I feel this has jumped the proverbial toilet itself, even if in a distinct way, and would have lost people who liked the balance of before between the two other films.  Certainly as time passes there is a sense the film has already felt out of time in the moment it was realised, feeling like a late eighties movie washed up on the shore of the nineties, and as much as there was cultural blurring into the later decade, this is one of those cases where, for its fun moments, it feels aged and lacked multiple virtues of the previous sequel.

Games of the Abstract: Captain Commando (1991)

Developer: Capcom

Publisher: Capcom

One to Four Players

Originally for: Arcade

 

Revisiting the beat-em-up genre, Captain Commando from Capcom, starring their literal namesake, is pretty well regarded. Even if it is because the company, whose name actually comes from "Capsule Computers", clearly they and the fans became fond of him to include the titular character in the likes of the Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games to the RPG crossover Namco × Capcom (2005). This is all despite him never getting a sequel game, a shame as this is a distinct entry into the beat-em-up genre.

Set in 2026, which is hilarious unless things are going to go downhill soon, we have the futuristic version of Metro City from the game Final Fight (1989) as our initial setting. An intergalactic villain named Scumocide (or Genocide in the original Japanese version) is head of all the scum and villainy of crime on Earth and the galaxy, with Captain Commando and his team are sick of this, wishing to stop them all. It is as simple a premise as the game mechanics themselves, where you have a basic strike and jump button, some moves depending on the directional commands and a special that drains energy for a huge attack.

We are yet to get to some of the more elaborate games of this genre, which varied the gameplay, like Konami's Bucky O'Hare tie-in, the 1992 arcade game, which is a shooter in a scrolling beat-em-up template, or two of the best of the genre which added move combos and more buttons to use, like Winkysoft's Denjin Makai II: Guardians (1995), or Capcom's own Battle Circuit (1997). However, we can proudly say that, in terms of a fever dream game logic, Captain Commando has personality in spades as so many of these games did. It begins with your closable heroes, where the least interesting of the lot is a ninja, usually the more entertaining choice for most gamers when given the options. Captain Commando himself is pretty memorable himself, including the digitized sound clip of his name, "toyrific" in form but with it clear how he would get constantly brought back into Capcom crossover games. I wish the two others, excluding the ninja who was, were brought back into Capcom crossover games, as Capcom throughout their history had a delirious nature to character designs, even Street Fighter with its iconic characters having a sense of style to them that was really distinct. You have Baby Head immediately standing out here a literal hyper-intelligent baby, with diaper and pacifier, piloting a robot suit that, yes, can pilot already in a robot suit much larger ones you knock enemies out of when they appear. Mack the Knife manages to stand out too, not just for his name explicitly referencing the Bertolt Brecht song, as a pink alien mummy with twin knives that, depending on how you defeat them, are blades which cause enemies to melt into skeletons. The later is one of a few moments of where a premise of a Saturday morning cartoon gets suddenly gruesome, like the fact some enemies, like a kabuki warrior boss of one stage, can disembowel you when you lose a life, torso off below everything from the hips downwards entirely, with some gore and a trace of guts to traumatise any kids playing this back in the arcade.

Between muscular pink haired women with electrified sais, little portly fire breathers, and men in xenomorph alien cosplay, cybernetic suits blatantly riffing as much as possible on the H.R. Giger designs without copyright infringement, make the villains just as diverse. There is something we could be in danger of losing if we are not careful with the type of games more commonly published decades later, which is unlike the triple-A games in the decades after which are carefully put together, this has an improvised dream logic which is compelling. Even for a game set in the future, it seemingly wanders off from a conventional sense of progression soon after the first level. We go from the streets of Metro City fighting knife welding hoodlums to a finale in a spaceship against Scumocide, somehow reaching there by way of an old Japanese temple full of more ninja to a circus that has a secret lab full of horrifying mutant experiments in the basement. This is matched by the gorgeous visual aesthetic, Capcom always at this point on their A-game in terms of their quality.  

Having played quite a few now, this does seem basic next to others I've written of, and an appeal to these games in general is the pleasure of just bashing the attack button at thugs over and over, taking advantage of sidestepping enemies vertically and that the throw is a godsend. There is one tangent chasing a mad scientist on hover boards in a river chase, which is as nineties as you can get, but this is, without this seemingly a cheap description, a "classic" example of this beat-em-up genre. By the later games, and those which were released directly for video game consoles or the resurgence of them in the 2000s and 2010s, we will be getting RPG options pioneered by the likes of Battle Circuit where you can power up your attacks, or multiple attack buttons with combos a greater emphasis. Captain Commando, alongside its cartoonish and vibrant tone, is a game from the old school titles before these examples, which are a pleasure enough in them especially when they have the personality this has.