The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974)

 

Director: José Mojica Marins

Screenplay: José Mojica Marins, Adriano Stuart and Rubens Francisco Luchetti

Cast: José Mojica Marins as himself/Coffin Joe, Alcione Mazzeo as Luciana, Ariane Arantes as Wilma, Geórgia Gomide as Lúcia, Joffre Soares as Júlio, Marcelo Picchi as Carlos, Marisol Marins as Betinha, Walter Stuart as Álvaro, Wanda Kosmo as Malvina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

José Mojica Marins and his creation Coffin Joe, who came to be in cinema with At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964), has been appreciated and preserved, both when Marins was still with us and after his 2020 passing. We are still missing one or two films however in his filmography, and one of the most prominent absentees is The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe, which you would naturally presume would be a part of the Coffin Joe catalogue with all the others as, even if appearing in the end only, that character is central to its biggest selling point. If you are a fan of this character, then the set up for this is a tantalising one of Marins and Coffin Joe crossing paths. Marins as himself is first shown directing on a film set a home invasion going amiss for the robbers when they did not expect the young couple their targeted to become elderly ghouls, and calmly taking an interview in a nice green jumper and with even his trademark long fingers nails on display. This is his other film metatextuality poking at his legendary creation, if a pulpier crossover between creator and creation, less dealing with the character in the real world but imagining himself being terrorised by his own creation.

The first film which tackled this, Awakening of the Beast (1970), was a really metatextual production because Marins was tackling the growing notoriety around the Coffin Joe character in terms of backlash. That film is arguably more difficult to appreciate if you have not seen another film of his, as it is a commentary on the controversy over his morbid character and the success he was having in popular culture in Brazil. However, especially when it turns into a full colour wig-out with buttock faced creatures in Hell, it became more readily available outside his homeland and paradoxically a more sellable film for how bizarre it is even with context. Bloody Exorcism does get to the risqué content by the time of the Satanist cult torturing people in Hell in the final act, but this is a straightforward genre film. A lashing of haunted house/witch's curse premise is fleshed into this, all in setting up the meeting between Marins as himself and Coffin Joe as the ultimate antagonist against his own creation. There is moments where he gets to portray himself as a very intelligent man, who gets to comment with other characters about his beliefs on how horror works and is liked as it is, but he himself is not going to dissect his evil creation as a construction as Awakening of the Beast did, but have Coffin Joe scaring him instead.

José Mojica Marins is the director-creator going to an island where a friend lives with his family, all with the intention to plan his next script only to become embroiled with an evil aura terrorising the family. To his credit, the opening has an appropriately sombre opening of him travelling to the location by boat, set to haunting chanting in the score. This is also set at Christmas, with adds an amusing touch as things will start to turn amiss as soon as he gets there. First it seems merely mischievous, like a chair moving by its own will, then starts to become more an issue when the grandfather becomes the first person to get possessed, and it is established everything is (literally) going to Hell. It is cool to see Marins, whose films have been as much sold for their transgressive and blasphemous content over the years play with more traditional horror tropes. As much of the reason that he became as controversial as he was as a horror creator was that Coffin Joe the character is an atheist who thumbed his nose at religion and morality, and believed in finding the perfect women to breed the perfect offspring by any means necessary, even murder. This has Coffin Joe as a literal evil near the end that our protagonist, and has the director/co-writer take a shot for the first half of Bloody Exorcism at the classic horror tropes of haunted houses and curses, where even a toy piano being played by itself is ominous as is Marins himself being assaulted by flying books. Not even the Christmas tree is safe from snakes briefly materialising from it.

Though that side will appear later on, it may disappoint some expecting him to have the extremes that made him a controversial figure at this time do not really appear as prominently here, where there is the cute moppet daughter and Marins' film is entirely on the side on the good nuclear family, but it is interesting to see him go through this plot thread. Connected to an angry witch terrorising the family who he has wandered into the drama of, all because the wife requested her help to be able to conceive a daughter on condition the witch choose who she would marry as an adult, each member of the family becomes possessed, and sadly even the family dog is not safe, all whilst Jose is trying to rationalise the scenario. I wonder if The Exorcist (1973) came to influence this or not, or even got to Brazil at that specific time to even be able to do so, its slower pace and gleefully eerie tone suggesting this as initially a "safer" if still fun Marins film. The score certainly helps, and eventually the tone shifts into more extreme content.

By that point, there is nude possession with inappropriate self use of a poker and Marins in a lovely pink suit being a bystander to the horrors he the director would shot throughout his career. As he finds himself in Hell with demonic worships and Coffin Joe leading them, it leads to his trope as a filmmaker of hiring extras of both genders, in general state of undress, with ghoulish carnival haunted house gore effects like a man having his tongue cut out taking place. In what could be best described as theatrical performance hellscape scenes, if you have seen other films of his, like Awakening of the Beast, and how he let these moments stretch out for their ghoulishness for minutes, this is the same thing here to escalate the film closer to his other work from the time. The crossover between character and creators is not as complex as Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), where Wes Craven revisited Freddy Krueger as an entity terrorising the people who made his films, but here you at least have Marins forced to confront his creation. Bemused as a terrified bystander who only intervenes when a child is threatened, this is an example a good few decades earlier, involves the creator in actual debate with the figure he said he created directly. It also emphasises the idiosyncratic, even schism-like, knife-edge too in his work, between revealing in the anti-religious horror but also making sure it always win, which is prevalent even in mind to a politically tumultuous time in Brazil when these films were being made. Like Jose's friend being a Catholic who yet is studying parapsychology without any more issues, his cinema is curious in terms of faith and anti-faith, where he can make Coffin Joe almost a true anti-hero, even if he had to always lose, but also made a film like The End of Man (1970), a film which has Joe's total opposite, a virtuous man of miraculous gifts, even if with satirical edges mocking the world socially and politically around this character. José Mojica Marins certainly hated organised complacency in general, and if there is a sense this films seems a more safer film, it is and is probably one of the reasons it could be seen as a weaker film from the director, as it feels like a pure horror story without an edge to it even with the nastier content coming into it by the end.  He can prod at organised religion in the earlier films, and be more gruesome in Embodiment of Evil (2008) when he would be allowed to get away with it, but still create the kind of film here which have a happy ending to keep the audience happy or a twisted morality play for others, censorship or not. Certainly, as this review started with, it is strange this film is seemingly lost among those available beyond his homeland, especially as it is still a fun production among them.

Beasts (1976)

 

Directors: Don Taylor, Richard Bramall, Don Leaver, Donald McWhinnie and John Nelson-Burton

Screenplay: Nigel Kneale

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Nigel Kneale is famous for the character of Bernard Quatermass, created for the sadly lost BBC TV production The Quatermass Experiment (1953), which only has the first episode still in existence. Thankfully, the two other TV productions have survived intact, as do the three Hammer adaptations of all three stories for cinema, and the 1979 Quatermass, a TV series closing off the character. Kneale worked on other projects too, and this one was originally for Associated Television (ATV), part of the Independent Television (ITV) network before ITV became the British channel it is in the current day. To avoid confusion, as I am too young to have grown up in this era when Beasts was first broadcast, ITV was for decades since its creation in 1955, the first commercial TV station in Britain, actually a network of separate television companies who shared programming as well as created television for different regions. Nowadays, barring Scotland and Northern Ireland having their own distinct regional differences, and programming like the news being focused on different regions, ITV has mostly conglomerated all its networks in itself and is divided by having additional numbered channels. Whilst ATV, who provided a service to the Midlands all week from 1968 to 1982, is no longer with us, Beasts lingered and developed a high reputation as a British horror television series, enticing the likes of myself to witness its six macabre tales as a one-off.

The programming of the episodes varies per version, but going from the DVD version that was used for this review, Baby opens the series, about an expecting young woman moving to a country cottage. Alarm bells should be heard when the cat is mewing like mad and runs away from the premises, not the last time an animal is not stupid enough to stay where danger is. The husband, who hated being a vet in the city, is headstrong and patronises her, the idea of her pregnancy affecting her emotions a gendered bias that she suffers through here, as he is impassioned by working with cattle now and in the countryside. When, in one of the walls they demolished, they find a strange desecrated corpse of an animal in a jar which is unlike anything either has seen, he thinks it is a fascinating item to show to his senior college than a warning of such a creepy entity even being in that wall in the first place. Kneale is known for nodding to folklore, such as how the most famous Quatermass story in either TV or Hammer film adaptation, Quatermass and the Pit, links old superstitions to aliens found under a London subway construction. In Baby, the female lead hears from the locals that the fields around her new home were notorious for something which caused cows to abort and chased people off using the area, with the suggestion the strange sheep-monkey creature in the jar as a supernatural tool for hexing people. All six episodes are TV production chamber pieces, having to work around not having elaborate special effects, and here, it is a psychological tale where the emphasis is on implicit fears barring the final practical effect. The lead being patronised as a pregnant woman is explicit as a theme, leading her to be isolated when an overtly supernatural end that explains the jar creature is fully formed.

Buddy-Boy for episode two is the more idiosyncratic tale, a weird tale that takes full advantage of the lack of practical effects and carefully chosen locations this story had used. This is about dolphins in the past tense, specifically the titular one of an old attraction long gone and now with the building being considered being bought by the new owners, who are running a club cinema to show porn. This reveals a surprise in its own as, whilst this series is not that violent and little cursing, this episode jars from the rest for how adult it is to the other five, in terms of the presentation of its story, but also scenes in an adult cinema with the decor not censored and even brief female nudity. It is not a detraction to bring this up, but instead as much part of the episode's distinct makeup, Buddy-Boy the most esoteric of the series but also the one dealing with some pretty heavy themes alongside these brief moments of edginess which do not feel tacked on. Dave (Martin Shaw), the one potential buyer who wants to keep a respectable business even with erotica, whilst his partner is even supposedly weighing the breasts of women he wants to get into porn films, is suspicious of how the owner of the building Hubbard (Wolfe Morris) is driven to drink and triggered by talk of Buddy-Boy. Buddy Boy was the rare American dolphin Hubbard acquired who started to rebel followed by the others starting to die when he did, not from disease or malnutrition but as if following him in rebellion.

When Dave encounters a woman strangely obsessed with Buddy-Boy and squatting secretly in the building, it is clear in his interactions with her and Hubbard to Dave that Hubbard "punished" Buddy-Boy and is haunted by him, wanting to get rid of the place ASAP. With a growing interest in the woman for her child-like love for Buddy-Boy, it is revealed he is using her to get Hubbard to sell the building to him cheaply, but Dave is becoming obsessed with what exactly happened to Buddy-Boy, initially for any dodgy dealings in Hubbard's past but finding himself dragged into this strange psychodrama. Most of the story is entirely a drama, barring the touch that in the building where Buddy-Boy died, disembodied dolphin sounds are heard and they are not inside just the woman's head as Dave hears them too. Including its bleak ending, where her mind is entirely for Buddy-Boy even when Dave tries to love her as a romantic figure, Buddy-Boy is the oddest episode and the one which is going to divide viewers. For me, it is one of the better episodes because of this.

A great episode immediately arriving afterwards, The Dummy is set on a horror film production, a period chillier about a giant bog-pig monster. A follow up to a series of Dummy films that has not had a sequel in a long while, a female film journalist writing of the production arrives when the actor in the suit, Clyde (Bernard Horsfall) is struggling emotionally - his wife has run off with the actor in a smaller role, and taken their daughter too, during Clyde's out-of-work period. The director was unaware of their bad blood, and the production is falling off the rails as this is revealed, forcing the producer, Clive Swift, to be called in. A stalemate transpires - the other actor refuses to leave his small role, but the costume was designed for only Clyde - and it is when the journalist gives the producer the idea, when talking of Clyde imbuing the Dummy costume with his personality like a ritualistic mask, to get Clyde drunk and riff on this idea. It proves too effective, and Clyde as the Dummy beast murders an extra in a scene and goes mad, continuing on with an episode that is really good.

In general, the series after its first episode, which is just a nice start, is consistently strong as with episode four, Special Offer, in which we follow a meek female employee of a supermarket, hassled by her male superior. Unfortunately compared to the other young female employee, who he is clearly having a relationship with, this is Carrie-adjacent though explicitly linked to the concept of poltergeists tapping into the emotional energy of people, as this meek younger woman dismissed as ugly and dumb by her colleagues, Noreen (Pauline Quirke), is effecting the strange circumstances happening the store, like cans of food rolling by their own will, or eventually actually destruction of the produce. What she calls after the mascot of the store's own brand, and possibly seen as a rat infestation at first, becomes far more unnatural as this progresses, with her bullying lead wanting to initially fire her, stoking the flames. When her emotional state is told to him by his senior, who has to accept the unnatural as part of the issues as a regular crisis in a store as matter-of-fact, to be effected by her crush on him, this puts him and his wandering eye against the mill stone.

Episode five, What Big Eyes, has the added star power of Patrick Magee, a North Irish actor many will likely know for his small but iconic role in A Clockwork Orange (1971), or in a variety of other places from Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), to even a Lucio Fulci horror film partially shot in England, The Black Cat (1981). Inspector Curry (Michael Kitchen) is a new RSCPA officer, the real life group using those initials to represent the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and is eventually brought into Magee's experiments after the set up. Adamant to protect animals, Curry even ends up reading the records of an animal merchant he feels is suspicious, only to be surprised when Hungarian and Romania timber wolves are being sent to a tiny pet shop in town. He suggests to the pet shop owner herself, McGee's daughter, his suspicion someone is using their store name as a front for illegal animal smuggling but she, living absolutely devoted to her father without ever having her own life and being mocked by him, is complicit to his experiments which used the wolves. Magee is dubbed by Curry's senior officer as a crackpot scientist who believed Darwin got it wrong about evolution, and between being a specialist in lycanthropy and the title's Red Riding Hood reference, with his creation a "Grandma vaccine", it is clear what the episode is hinting at. The episode's decision to be very subjective of how this vaccine works, as Magee is using it on himself, becomes one of the best strengths of a strong episode.

Episode six, During Barty's Party, ends this series on a perfectly gruesome note, in which an older couple slowly grow paranoid in their house at night. The opening sets up that another couple, who were necking in the fields, are being attacked by some unknown form off-screen which the central female lead initially thinks is from a dream. The husband initially dismisses this as all her nerves, his pride felt when a rat is found under the floorboards of their home and refusing to be swallowed even when the situation becomes direr. However, as the radio tells them, there is supposedly a rat migration transpiring in the thousands on the march. Barty of the title is the unseen host of the radio show that plays through the story. Whilst there is one use of the word "retarded" which has not aged well, he is not dissimilar to modern hosts with their wisecracks and playfully goofy, which adds a nicely grim edge as, in-between a real pop song they licensed and the fake ads, he initially dismisses the rat migrations as more rats are heard under the central couples' floors. The additional touch, relevant to the time period but still disturbing, is a take on how species naturally adapt to resist poisons, only in this case the wife theorising the rats may have also developed a consciousness awareness of the humans who created the poisons and desired revenge. Without spoiling this episode, it is a macabre end to an insanely good anthology series. It comes with the knowledge that, just in the seventies alone when this one-off series came out, Kneale was also writing the likes of The Stone Tape (1972), so this was part of a decades' long strong career from that point between the fifties to the eighties, one where this would be a grand piece for any writers' career in television and film, but one of many that cemented his reputation.  

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005/2007)

Director: Tsutomu Mizushima

Screenplay: Tsutomu Mizushima

Based on a light novel by Masaki Okayu

(Voice) Cast: Reiko Takagi as Sakura Kusakabe; Saeko Chiba as Dokuro-chan; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Rie Kugimiya as Sabato-chan; Akeno Watanabe as Zakuro-chan; Atsushi Imaruoka as Umezawa; Ayako Kawasumi as Shizuki Minagami; Daisuke Kirii as Seargent/Zamuza; Fumitoshi Miyajima as Nishida; Reiko Takagi as Minami-san

 

"It can't be helped that the class representative has been turned into a monkey, so Dokuro-chan may sit next to Sakura-kun."

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, to use its full name, could be seen as a true stereotype of anime. A young teen male has a guiding angel, a cute girl, protecting over him, with wacky sex comedy hijinks ensuring. Even if a parody of these tropes, it might prove an eyebrow rising take on them for an outsider to the medium, so this title does come with a caveat that it is an acquired taste. However, considering immediately into the first episode she kills her charge with her giant spiked club the first moment she is introduced, caught getting changed in his room, only to resurrect him as she will do at least two more times that same episode, we are dealing with something more openly twisted in its humour than other anime parodies or sex comedies. It really works as a parody for people who have actually seen anime tropes it is parodying, but as much of my interest in this straight-to-video production, whilst slight in length is seeing it take the stereotypical love-hate romantic relationship found in many stories, not just animated, and take it seriously whilst with its macabre sense of humour, as if there could have been a version of this with a regular of romantic comedies, Jennifer Aniston, could constantly bash her love interest's brains out everywhere only to oops, resurrect and apologise for this over and over. 

The story of this production, and this theme of love even if the female lead will kill the lead, is also as much to do with its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, who I fully believe has always approached his career as an animation director with a macabre sense of humour, which is more implicit as he is the screenwriter for this two series straight-to-video production too rather than just their director, adding a greater connection potentially to the material. Mizushima has fascinated me for a while. Arguably, as much of this may be for the wrong reasons, as his stints in horror after Dokuro-Chan have been divisive to say the least. This is where the question of what is intentional or not gets confusing, but also compelling, as there is a title like Another (2010), a supernatural mystery series, which violently contrasts its serious tone with over-the-top deaths that you could call comedic, such as the first being an unfortunate encounter with an umbrella and a staircase. The Lost Village (2016) really comes in as the production which raises this concern. With its main composition by the acclaimed screenwriter Mari Okada, a huge figure in anime, let alone a significant and prolific female screenwriter in the industry, who has even directed a theatrical work named Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018), it was a very divisive television series, one which many would argue was terrible, but has been argued to have been a satire of the genre which took people by surprise. Between a character who has forever stayed with me and could have been a character here in Dokuro-Chan, Lovepon, a young woman even a tragic back story whose obsession with execution becomes delightfully absurd, and material that even for horror would be balked at, like a giant monstrous silicon breast implant, it emphasised the really unpredictable nature of the director Mizushima.

Because of how many tangents there are in his career, I have always been wary of dismissive some of these projects even if they were failures. Even for the work of his that is more wholesome, like the Girls und Panzer franchise¹, Tsutomu Mizushima has also had a streak of misanthropy found in his career, especially in the comedies from his earlier productions in the straight-to-video format. These are the points, including how gory he could get with his horror work to a hyper-exaggerated form, which raised this question of deliberateness for me as an anime fan. An obscure set of shorts less than thirty minutes long for online viewing, Plastic Neesan (2011), is an absurdist comedy about a group of model making schoolgirls which never got to model making, and was instead about characters who could be really spiteful or just weird. There was also Magical Witch Punie-chan (2006-7), which envisioned a magical girl if she was the evil despot heir of a magical kingdom, an inspired and dark premise which went as far as a comedy as having her cute animal mascot as an indentured slave constantly trying to murder her. The infamous one of this trio is Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan itself, as whilst the USA also got Magical Witch Punie-chan, Dokuro-Chan was the one which gained a wider attention when it was released in the United States by Media Blasters back in the day, a straight-to-video work which is brazen with its tone despite juxtaposing it against its fluffy presentation.

This, including its source material, a light novel series, is clearly a parody of a couple of works. Ah My Goddess, originally started as a 1988-2014 manga by Kōsuke Fujishima, was about a young man who accidentally summons a titular goddess to his world as a new roommate; famously, as nodded to in a joke here, is Rumiko Takahashi‘s Urusei Yatsura, a legendary manga (including its animated adaptations) where a young teen male finds himself with a female alien named Lum living with him on Earth. Dokuro-Chan herself is an angel from the future with a halo and a giant spiked kanabō club called Excalibolg,  which she can use to both resurrect the dead unscathed as well as splatter a torso into chunks with one swing. The tone of the straight-to-video series, and why it may raise an eyebrow from anime fans as much as non-anime viewers, is that the initial set-up is legitimately twisted despite most of the story in these episodic episodes being more a sex comedy in the traditional sense from anime. In context to the fan base, even some of the lewder jokes are normal, but the cutesy tone occasionally gives way to jokes which with hindsight are quite transgressive, softened yet paradoxically heightened by the tone.

Dokuro-Chan was originally assigned to the past to bump off the male lead, the young teenager Sakura Kusakabe, as he was foretold to accidentally defy God by giving people immortality despite being the typical horny male lead, one whose hormones make it impossible to get past a girl he takes interest in without embarrassment. Where the joke might be more shocking nowadays, casually used as part of the humour, is that for the price of immortality, it meant finding immortality by accident by permanently stunting women from growing biologically from twelve years old. With very casual jokes of people calling Sakura a paedophile much to his horror, it never gets any further in terms of transgression, but is causally brought up to torment him quite a few times and emphasises that, whilst portrayed as a light hearted comedy, this is for the first "season", not conventional in episode number or length, it taps occasionally on bleaker humour whether it has all aged well or not multiple times. This is the kind of joke that occasionally appears within this, which means I would not recommend this series for most. It also falls back into a type of sex comedy which is common in Japanese animation, including a potential issue for anyone outside anime fandom that many sex comedies involve teen leads in general, as here, that will also not be for everyone either. A lot of this in this case, as per the genre's tropes, is usually the gag of embarrassment and the male lead being tormented for a mistaken comment or being in the wrong place of mind (or actual location) at the wrong time, and ending up being called a pervert, which is not for everyone even for anime fans. That idea of male sexual neurosis, whether intentional or not, is found in a lot of anime, and befits this story with hindsight. The difference here is that this has an outlier tone which affects this too, that a lot of it is very light and fluffy sex comedy, with the bright colours and tone of early 2000s anime, but contrasted by the twists of dark humour. The most prominent is that, even if played for light hearted chuckles in tone, we will be seeing a lot of Sakura’s intestines and guts being split over and over, lovingly animated in his repeated dismemberment by Dokuro.

The tone is perfectly set up in the opening credits song, redone with newer lyrics for the second set of episodes released in 2007, a charming ditty from Dokuro's perspective where even if she will maim, disembowel and mutilate her crush, it is out of pure love, infectious and completely setting up the cutesy misanthropic tone. Dokuro-Chan does not play safe with its humour when it wants to, its eight fifteen minute episodes for the first series placing itself in regular slapstick with added gory violence, and deeply weird one-off gags which are strange with clear knowledge that is the intended result. Dokuro decides, rather than kill him as assigned, that she will try to change Sakura whilst becoming smitten with him, but that this pretext is more that he is stuck with an impulsive id of an angel who likes him but also indulges her pure obsessions whether beneficial for him or not. Sakura will die a lot at her hands and the Excalibolg despite the initial promise to protect and change him, usually because of her reactions to his lewdness (or accidentally seeing her undressed), or even trying to get a mosquito off him at one point with the club. It is to the point permanent psychological trauma is likely from the many deaths and resurrections he has had.  The lack of consequence, or anyone else reacting badly to this even among his classmates, who at times do witness this carnage, is part of the joke, even if eventually there is the current that he is crushing on her despite being attracted more to other classmates.

The resulting work for the first "series", eight fifteen minute episodes compiled into four full ones, is to be honest one you would not show a person if they are new to anime unless you knew their sense of humour or taste in the perverse was strong. A lot of it inherently would baffle or even make someone uncomfortable, particularly many of the sex gag are about near nudity or perceived sexual innuendo with its teen cast, despite never showing anything actually explicit unlike some sex comedies have. It is the kind of work, out of context, which supports all the clichés that give anime a bad name, and one has to remember that Reiko Takagi, who voices Sakura, is actually an adult voice actress who however manages to make Sakura sound like he is actually voiced by a young teen boy, one who will be battered and smashed into chunks of meat repeatedly by Dokuro. Within context however, the really misanthropic humour actually softens the discomfort and a lot of it feels like it is playing up to clichés only to twist the knife into them. Dokuro is the lovable heroine if you can get into her headspace. Alongside the cliché of the female lead beating up the male lead for a perceived (even accidental) slight of perverseness being taken to an extreme, she is very much an anti-heroine, someone who can destroy for the sake of it, as much as lovable in her earnestness for Sakura and her growing crush for him.

It is, however, a relationship has its difficulties, whenever she will eventually even say very random and illogically things, and is suggested to have tortured a teacher to start a club entirely devoted to the sport of watching woodwork glue dry. In the wrong frame of mind, these characters including Sakura may put you off, but the clichés they are as characters meant to be add to the dark humour. Such as the fact, when his class is informed he will eventually cause the entire female gender to be stuck at the age of twelve, they do not defend him in the slightest, and were already going to beat him up or ostracise him beforehand. The sole exception is Shizuki, whose crush on him is countered by his to her, undercut by Dokuro blundering through, and their own chemistry as the leads who clearly have fondness for each other, playing to the cliché of a love triangle with actual seriousness. This does emphasis, at the end of the day, this was always going to play in the source as a conventional teen romantic comedy, but that the set-up is deeply surreal. Then there is another angel (with horns) called Sabato, who with an electric cattle prod powerful enough to kill a sperm whale is there to murder Sakura but you feel sorry for, as the joke is how to torment her over and over, forced to live in the streets, and under a bridge cold and miserable, to the point the end credits song is from her perspective as she is miserable and cold.

All these characters exhibit the tropes of their archetypes - Sakura is the typical "potato-kun" generic male lead, a term I am using from online slag as many male protagonists have a passiveness with a sense of being stand-ins for viewers, to the point they have the danger of being blander than a raw potato, contrasted by fighting against his puberty badly as a teenager whilst trying to be a good person. Dokuro is mostly depicted as a bright, light voiced ditz who happens to have a giant spiked club. The clichés of some anime and manga, the sex comedy, is contrasted by the hyper violence or the perverseness of some of the gags, even cruder ones like the fact that, in this series' dogma, if you remove an angel's halo (as razor sharp as a sword) it causes one to have continuous and life draining diarrhoea. For all its crassness, there are moments which are deliciously peculiar. Surreal anime comedy is distinct from surreal comedy in other mediums and other animation from other countries, and a production will win me over if it manages to use its visual style, the writing and/or pure strange ideas to least get a memorable highlight or two. No series, in one episode, is just dumb when it inexplicably references Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, only with the protagonist Gregor Samsa waking up to discover, in a surreal dreamscape of a bedroom, he has grown a bug in terms of morning wood with the sexual anxiety metaphor apt for Kafka, as well as be a good joke when half of these sex comedies in anime, as alluded too, do end up being the existential nightmares of teen males when they reach and pass puberty.

There is, even for a work which clearly does not have a high budget, also moments of real experimentation too. The class rep, in the first episode when Dokuro is introduced to class as a student, is turned into a monkey, with a real stock image of a howler monkey used for his head in jerky stop motion. It is a joke paid off in further episodes on when she turns someone into a dog, or when the second series, just four more additional episodes, there is now a giraffe and a few others in their class from incidents we do not see. Little oddball flourishes, such as cutting to two wild bears looking nervously briefly watching at the carnage of Dokuro playing on Sakura in a river (with sweat drops signifiers for this), show even if the humour is crude and playing to vulgarity at times, it does so with a wink. Even those cruder jokes are helped by one of the huge advantages animation has, that you can exaggerate to an extreme, make even your female characters, no matter how cute and colourful, distort and even look corpse-like when the halos are unfortunately removed, including the strength of the voice performances from the cast.

This explains so much about its director Tsutomu Mizushima for me, even if all his productions are animation made by staffs of various collaborators. Working in comedy greatly, he likes broad and heightened extremes. When this applies to horror, even a goreless work like The Lost Village, the exaggeration is there and a dichotomy can arise in what was intentional or not with any work I will see of his in what was a success, what was not, and what was deliberately done as a joke or deliberately cutting the legs under expectations. Certainly as well, he does eventually lean further to absurd comedy through the first season, something to bear in mind even if still with the twisted logic of the original premise. The one crux for this production thought is that, for better and for worse, whilst this does have an ending in the first season, it really does not conclude the story. How you would conclude this premise I have no idea, and it would be compelling to know how the source material did so. Two years later, a sequel of four episodes (leading up to an hour's length) was created. It is, in honesty, bonus material. Set after the first series, with new characters fully introduced like Zakuro, Dokuro's nine year old sister who is yet in voice and appearance like an older sibling remotely not of that age, it is more a series of one-off scenarios with the cast even next to the first season, which was a set of one-off stories itself like Sakura being invited to the cinema by Shizuki on a date. Like the original, it is bright and cheerful in a good way in terms of appearance, but there is also clearly a sense of the series moving more to its sex comedy, lightly humoured tone than the first series, jettisoning most of the more twisted jokes entirely.

The first series had some weirder jokes, like explicitly referencing North Korea multiple times, and whilst the second series has its moments, including Dokuro trying to get Sakura is eat living chocolate versions of himself for Valentine's Day, there is a clear change in tone even if aspects, like dismembering Sakura at least once per episode, remain.  One of the things which does work in those later episodes favour is that they just emphasis some of the weird jokes from the first season, which feel weird even in context then from cultural differences, and let them be expanded upon. The entirety of the “Sensitive Salaryman” running joke grows thanks to these two series, a one off gag about a TV series (with a film spin-off) starring a man who emotionally and physically cannot live a day without his body riddled in hyper-sensation; I still do not get the joke in its full meaning, and the figure really only crops up in the background as a TV series character who got a film adaptation, but it works as a strange gag. More as it allows as well the multiple times the tie-in “Sensitive Sausage” branded food to be unfortunately in Sakura’s vicinity for ingestion for the second season, a tie-in probably requiring health warnings unless you want to be curled up in the foetal position with your body writhing in hyper-sensitivity, and hear that melancholic moaning that cues up in the score when the salaryman is evoked, which is what ultimately made the joke funny for me. And this feels deeply weird on purpose for any audience regardless of their native language and culture, and is one of the moments where the second series does have highlights to appreciate. For the most part, it feels like bonus material in the truest sense.

The original, even if the sequel still has Sakura being smashed to bits by Dokuro constantly, is in itself enough, especially if there was a sense of losing its misanthropic attitude. It feels too short as a fully fleshed out story, but the most subversive moment where the show there ends is trying for a dramatic conclusion, the cliché of the magical figure being forced to leave for her world which the show plays straight and has had enough time to have built up to. Knowing the premise is based on clichés eventually works in its favour as it is mixing the cute with the lurid and the serious. (More so, in the least expected scene, when the final episode even has a sombre and strangely ill-eased sequence of Sakura without memories of before and feeling he has lost something whilst spending time with Shizuki at a cafe). The entire running gag that this is effectively a male protagonist who is a submissive among more stronger and openly sadistic female figures, with the women in their twisted ways lovable and he the butt of the jokes, is pretty striking too from the first season, a trope that I have found finds itself in these sex comedies even if they still raise concerns for sexualising the female leads and, especially with the "harem" genre, the idea of all these female characters in a variety of romantic shapes all vying for the conventional male lead's affections. A lot of them end up, even if by accident, being about the male being entirely out of his comfort zone to confident figures, and here it is more obvious, so much so that whilst the episodes have grow stronger with hindsight, I do see the danger with the second series, if this had continued, of losing the female cast’s original tones in favour of more submissive fan service figures, which is no way near as entertaining. I see with the second series, when it spends an episode about the cast taking a bath together, that this even if you are a fan of the medium that can get past the sex comedy could have dangerously lost its initial spark if we got more from this narrative.

Whether you could have actually gotten this on to a further longer work, in mind to it likely needing to be censored for the television screenings for even the gore, is merely a guessing game. A title like this however presents, even in its own ballpark, the idea that you can parody the clichés of your genres but still be earnest in them. One joke far less palatable as the show aged, that Dokuro wishes to change Sakura because his older self would have lead half the world's population to being permanently twelve years old, has not helped, but most of this is a timeless joke which has aged well and allows one to still like these characters, the oddball couple who, even if one is not attracted to the other, will realise in the end he loves her as dearly even if he has yet to say "I love you" beyond friends. The reference to romantic comedies early on was a nod to this, as it is a joke as old as a screwball comedy from thirties Hollywood like Bringing Up Baby (1938), without Katharine Hepburn repeatedly bashing Cary Grant in the face with a club, but the exasperated male lead dragged along by the firecracker of a personality still found in many stories across mediums, and gender swapped, into the modern day. The idea of people who work together despite one being as much a frustration to the other is universal, and with Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan, the joke comes with a very sick sense of humour too in this case.

Abstract Spectrum: Cute/Dark Humoured/Wacky

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

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1) Girls und Panzer might seem surreal still for outsiders to anime as a franchise about an all-high school female team of World War II tank drivers, in a world where they are kept and used for non-violent public activity, and it is considered a martial arts commonly practiced by women. To an anime fan, this is just Tuesday night viewing, so the bar for surrealism in premises is different.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (1995)

Art by Graham Humphreys

Director: Shinichi Fukazawa

Screenplay: Shinichi Fukazawa

Cast: Shinichi Fukazawa as Shinji, Asako Nosaka as Mika, Masahiro Kai the Psychic

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A guy needs muscles after all!

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell from the get-go has the story of its director Shinichi Fukazawa. An outsider to the Japanese film industry, he was interested with bodybuilding, splatter films imported into Japan like the Evil Dead series started by Sam Raimi's 1981 independently made horror film¹, deciding to make what would become a film just over an hour in tribute. It belongs to a long history of Japanese lower budget films like this with homemade splatter effects and mid-nineties video production. The difference to others, like those made for the straight-to-video market, like Jôji Iida's Cyclops (1987), which were forty plus or so minute mini-features which got released soon after they were filmed for the video market, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell was left unfinished and unseen for fifteen years¹. It took, according to its star/writer/director/practical effects creator Fukazawa seven and a half years just to shoot the film, between re-scheduling, problems with the film stock he was forced to film on, and working around his and his cast's lives, and another seven and a half years for post-production¹. Fukazawa was finally able to complete the production in 2009 after beginning the editing process of all the 8mm film started on from 2005². Including having to take an additional two years for the original independent version of DVD¹, Fukazawa was finally able to complete the production which would become a work of international interest as well.

Those two obsessions of its lead/director Shinichi Fukazawa are very clearly visible in the film itself, and far from a critique to note the clear tributes to the Evil Dead films, as a tribute that came to us long after originally intended, by the time the Evil Dead became a pop culture institution, this really stands out again because of this. The plot is very simple, set up in a thirty years earlier prologue where a man accidently kills the girlfriend, he was about to leave, when she was trying to kill him with a knife. Burying the body in the house, this is the father of our lead Shinji (also played by Fukazawa), aptly leaving a curse for the son of a different woman he would marry that will haunt Shinji. Keeping the house as an heirloom, in real life a house the director's real father was going to scrap that was in a Tokyo suburb and his son took advantage of to film within¹, Shinji will only go back when convinced by an ex-girlfriend and journalist Mika (Asako Nosaka). With her fascination in haunted houses and wishing to write about examples like her old flame's, when learning of the strange goings-on in the premises, Mika takes him to the building.

He does not believe in ghosts, only in fitness and that smoking ruins one's beauty by sapping away the vitamin C in one's body, but the curse of his father before he met his mother now is in his lap. He goes with Mika and a male psychic (Masahiro Kai), and the later becomes the start of the hauntings as he has legitimate psychic abilities, allowing the ghost of the jilted girlfriend to possess him, thinking Shinji as his lookalike is his father and deserving punishment. It feels a homemade production, which begins because when wanting to use another 16mm or Betacam, Shinichi Fukazawa for the budget had to use 8mm, which caused as much as the problems which would cause this film to take as long as it did to be finished even in terms of digitizing the footage in the extended post-production¹.  Thankfully, with a complete film, it has the charm and atmosphere of a home movie of the time, played on a projector with actually sprockets, adding a distinct look. With hindsight, especially as its production history adds a layer like it was rediscovered and rebuilt, that helps in mood as, in mind to the homemade quality of the first Evil Dead, you see a one-man band show an incredible amount of moxy and quality to this, as well as provide a distinct tone to this film. There are visible lifts from The Evil Dead, as the psychic is possessed and even dismemberment will not stop a spurned lover who confuses son for father, but there is as much its own spin on the material even when Shinichi Fukazawa does get a moment to say "Groovy" like Bruce Campbell.

It has its own atmosphere, helped by the small house the production was able to spill fake blood within and furthered by the practical methods to depict this gory splatter fest, the later entirely of Shinichi Fukazawa's own craft and in itself worthy of incredible praise. Some moments have eerieness to them, such as the father returning from the dead on a TV, and others are funny, such as the punch line to a random criticism of Mika's smoking biting the leads when trying to dispose of evil sentient corpse pieces. The practical effects, even the moments where they seemingly took still images and coloured over them, are memorable especially as it is overtly humorous and deliberately repulsive in the "slapstick" tone. As a fan of films like Evil Dead or Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) when he wanted to make the film, Fukazawa got the right tone with what he loved from these films, in touches like the hand-feet meldings to the attempts at dynamic shots like the camera following flying projectiles taken from Raimi. His interest in body building does come into play, being able to hulk out of his shirt onscreen and use gym equipment as an improvised crossbow at one point, itself adding a distinct touch to the proceedings.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell even in terms of its turbulent gestation history really exemplifies what entices about micro-budget cinema for me. It is about outsiders who get to make films away from industries to their personalities, putting everything including probably actual blood into the materials to get it made. Shinichi Fukazawa has yet to make another film, but he can at least be proud he completed this one, with the warm reception received even globally as the perfect introduction to this type of cinema in attitude.

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1) An Interview with Director Shinichi Fukazawa, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, written by Ken Wynne for Attack from Planet B and published on April 28th 2017.

2) Reel Review: Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, written for Morbidly Beautiful and published October 11th 2017.

Bad Dreams (1988)

 

Director: Andrew Fleming

Screenplay: Andrew Fleming and Steven E. de Souza

Cast: Jennifer Rubin as Cynthia Weston; Bruce Abbott as Dr. Alex Karmen; Richard Lynch as Franklin Harris; Dean Cameron as Ralph Pesco; Harris Yulin as Dr. Berrisford; Susan Barnes as Connie; John Scott Clough as Victor; E. G. Daily as Lana; Damita Jo Freeman as Gilda; Louis Giambalvo as Ed; Susan Ruttan as Miriam

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

In the shadow of Nightmare on Elm Street becoming a huge horror franchise in the late eighties, 20th Century Fox joined among others on the supernatural horror bandwagon with Bad Dreams, in which the prologue, as you always want, introduces a cult actor like Richard Lynch in a prominent cast member, in this case as the head of a hippy cult, Franklin Harris, anointing members with what seemingly is ladles of water.

It is later revealed it was gasoline, the house exploding from the resulting fire, beginning the film with one survivor Cynthia, a young teen, having to bare the memories of what happened after the thirteen year coma she wakes from after the incident. This is a big film in context of this genre, in terms of the studio distributing it, just from the soundtrack -  I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) by The Electric Prunes, a punk cover of My Way, and more strikingly Guns 'n' Roses before they went big with Sweet Child of Mine, long before it become a radio staple even here in Britain - and there is a deliberately sense of this trying to match the success Nightmare on Elm Street had. Specifically, this was made after the third film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), which managed to figure out the tone of the series and become a favourite for fans, this explicitly riffing on its premise and re-casting Jennifer Rubin, a prominent side character in that film, as the lead Cynthia here. Prominently as well, with director Andrew Fleming starting here and continuing through the next decades in Hollywood, you have as his co-writer on the script Steven E. de Souza, a big figure in Hollywood who, also in 1988 when Bad Dreams was released, co-penned the script for Die Hard, which mid-way through a career with credits alongside other big actor films is arguably the hugest title for his entire career. Souza is someone I like, even when his directed and written attempt to adapt Street Fighter (1994) as a video game franchise to the big screen was seen as a failure, and you can spot his sense of humour and witticisms throughout this.

The Dream Warriors set up, of a group of patients being targeted one-by-one by an unnatural force, is obvious here, as with Harris the cult leader who, like Freddy Krueger with his burnt face make-up, occasionally appears burnt up to in the border beyond life and death. Like Dream Warriors, it is a series of set pieces where people are picked off with the only difference that, with the doctor running the group here, said male figure here is openly a sceptic to the scenario who is yet trying to rationalise the alarming number of freak deaths taking place one soon after another. Honestly, Bad Dreams is pure horror spectacle even in terms of being pure cheese as well as what works, with some flair but until its ending twist is going in an expected route for the set-up even in terms of the exaggerated takes on mental health by a game cast, such as the nervous wreck of a former newspaper reporter, for the equivalent of a Weekly World News where Bat Boy came from, who chain smokes like a furnace. They are picked off one-by-one in inventive deaths like Dream Warriors, the equivalent of a haunted house ride of a film, and your taste will entirely depend on whether you can appreciate this.

There are some memorable incidents, including someone seemingly deciding to play hit-and-run on their senior in the hospital car park and gleefully killing them, to the surprising level of gore such as the gruesome moment someone ends up going through the turbine in the boiler room and literally recreating the song Raining Blood from Slayer onscreen. Probably the most idiosyncratic aspect of this whole film does need major spoilers, but suffice to say, this set up with a supernatural slant becomes a more “rational” ending, which comes off more contrived than if ghosts were involved yet provides an appropriate heightened nature of a ludicrous murder twist. [Major Spoiler] I highly doubt even with the variety of side effects and causes medicines can induce in real life, any that can cause people to kill themselves as happens in this, or hallucinate about Richard Lynch would be allowed anywhere near a medical storage facility on a hospital unless you wanted a scandal. [Spoilers End] It comes off like a giallo twist, where attempting a rational route than taking a supernatural slant becomes stranger than accepting the idea of the unnatural over materialistic logic in a plot. It feels appropriate for the film, far from a criticism, and does provide a distinct touch for Bad Dreams. Even in among this too, remembering the film it was inspired by, this does thankfully play to some unnatural imagery as it subjectively pulls the rugs out from under a viewer a few times. In reference to something that is already talked of, without spoiling which scene mentioned it is, this manages to get away with the “it is all a dream” segment twist by having a moment so abrupt and jarring for a character to be involved with that it actually comes off as gleefully inspired in a sick humoured way.

Of course as well, it provides a fascinating tangent into the careers for those involved as Steven E. de Souza is a big name from this era of action and Hollywood blockbusters, making a rare jump into horror cinema, and Andrew Fleming, despite mostly staying out of the genre, if more well known for The Craft (1996), a film I will admit I always found disappointment in for how its ending seemingly conforms against the promise it has about all female tale about witchcraft, but had a legacy for people who caught it at the right age. This is a cool piece in their careers, not the best of these Elm Street inspired films but certainly a memorable one.

Burial Ground - The Nights of Terror (1981)

 

Director: Andrea Bianchi

Screenplay: Piero Regnoli

Cast: Karin Well as Janet; Gianluigi Chirizzi as Mark; Simone Mattioli as James; Antonella Antinori as Leslie; Roberto Caporali as George; Pietro Barzocchini [Peter Bark] as Michael; Claudio Zucchet as Nicholas; Anna Valente as Kathryn; Benito Barbieri as  the Professor; Mariangela Giordano as Evelyn

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Mother, this cloth smells of death.

Ye old awesome horror synth opens Burial Ground, an infamous Andrea Bianchi zombie film the wave that came out of Italy after Zombi 2 (1979), which also opens with a man trying to say to the undead he is their friend only to get eaten. The group who come to his mansion of the damned, to meet him, are to find themselves in the midst of this undead horde, including infamously a mother played by Mariangela Giordano and her child son, played by an adult named Pietro Barzocchini under the name Peter Bark, a very miniscule height male actor with the choice of playing him as said child, making viewers squirm since this film's first release. And yes, it was always weird, as his namesake, Bark's character was named Michael, really weird when he wanders into the bedroom his mother is in during an intimate relationship with his father and becomes jealous by their act.

There is not a lot complicated to Burial Ground in general. Set to a really idiosyncratic score by Elsio Mancuso and Berto Pisano, including a lot of lounge jazz that you would never find in zombie films from the 2010s, the basic premise is that they are in the home of Professor Harry, the man already eaten by the first ten minutes, who was studying rituals to summon the dead, and they have to survive. Michael's weird relationship with his mother being with her husband notwithstanding, it is a cheesy zombie film, and honestly, in tone there is no difference to this to a forties or fifties b-movie, of screaming damsels in distress and men helpless to zombies trying to choke them, only with gore and director Bianchi infamously bringing really transgressive content to his work. It is to the point the score at times suggests a UFO will appear any minute to explain why the zombies came out the ground.

The zombies themselves emphasis this film's legacy, how they can be both creepy but ridiculous, the morbidness of their decay in representing death contrasted by their potato sack cloth clothes, or how that, sanely, you could outrun these shambling undead with ease and get off the premises quickly. Instead, the cast are doomed by fear of the uncanny, moving decay or inexplicably start gurning transfixed and trying to fire at one until some figures out later headshots only work. Admittedly, getting a foot caught in an animal trap as at one point is something that could credibly get you eaten, but there is also both a humour and virtue even to this infamous film how the zombies make up in sluggishness with being clever and being able to use tools. Here, you may be decaying but your knife throwing reflexes are as strong as when you were alive.

Burial Ground is a film which, even next to the other zombie films from Italy, looks like it is chasing the others in trend, your mileage drastically changing depending on your taste in camp and feeling icky, something clear as it tries to top the splinter to the eye scene from Zombi 2 with a head through a broken window. There is still a style to all this to appreciate - I like the music as talked of, and this is still a production from a time where you could film at a real mansion with its aesthetic decor helping so much in the production value - but this is as schlocky as you can get. I love this film, but you have to work around this, to be able to appreciate its absurdity as much some cool ideas for the genre, zombies who figure out teamwork and battering rams. This is also with the film finding itself contrasted by its luridness, which became the more infamous aspect for decades, the more explicitly incestuous slant that comes between Michael and his mother becoming more graphic, in a way a) explains the casting of an adult, and b) is really screwed up. The tone is cemented when the film ends on a quote from the "Profecy of the Black Spider", which does not exist, and yes, is not properly spelt as typed there, adding the cherry to this gory guilty pleasure.

Babysitter Massacre (2013)

Director: Henrique Couto

Screenplay: Henrique Couto

Cast: Erin R. Ryan as Angela; Marylee Osborne as Bianca; Joni Durian as Lucky; Tara Clark as Arlene; Odette Despairr as Linda; Serendipity Lynch as Sandy; Geoff Burkman as Mr. Walker; Stephanie Coffey as Allison; Chandra McCracken as Tina

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Into the modern day, and slashers have soldiered on with the trends around then, Henrique Couto's Babysitter Massacre showing how the genre can be influenced by the trends around it. In this case, however, this is also a case for me of two different tones, like oil and water, which do not mix well for me. It is a film which is trying to juggle two different horror films, where one poster offers something grim and unremorseful, but contrasts it by what is playful and unapologetic right off the gate, brazen female nudity with a babysitter bathing with the exploitation from the get-go. The jarringly switch of tone but also horror subgenre that comes immediately afterwards fed into my reticence.

It is meant to be a slasher, but do not expect chase scenes, instead riding the capsizing wave of the time of "torture porn", that questionable genre term for when, in the 2000s, horror films emphasised the fear of prolonged agonising pain on victims unable to help themselves. Despite films like Eli Roth's Hostel (2005) cementing the term, what kept it alive arguably was the Saw franchise becoming a permanent part of horror canon from that decade onwards, revelling in edgy, mean spirited but serious scenes of gruel. This has the uncomfortable introduction of this, of the titillation leading to this actress, entirely nude, playing out being tortured, which is thankfully subdued due to the fact the scenes and effects are very minimalistic, in this case pulled finger nails and a simple neck cutting effect. Some will still even find that distasteful, but alongside the fact that I am not going to take a moral stance, as that would come off as a hypocrite for even watching the film, it emphasises the inherent issue in schism this film cannot escape from for me.

The premise, in which former babysitters and friends still haunted by the lost of a friend in their teen years, is contrasted by the seriousness of that premise, in which the killer with a white mask without facial features returns, and one of the characters, a loner, is both overcoming survivor's guilt and is ostracised unfairly by almost everyone of her friends for that person being taken, something is admirable in the attempt. This is however also a film which is both presenting this, set at Halloween too, with what is tonally closer to The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) in tone with significantly more lurid titillation. It is here where I wish Henrique Couto, who has mostly worked in more lighter hearted far, even westerns and a Christmas film named A Bulldog for Christmas (2013), had made two different films. Whilst there are moments in the script where the term "bitch" and jokes are made where you hear a male voice attempt to write women, you actually get some likable interactions in the characters too, both when being serious, the main female lead bonding with her mother, or goofy, like arguing with a former boyfriend who is still a pizza delivery guy since the age of seventeen.

It is gleefully lurid, including the most contrived way to get the leads into lingerie, to feed a female friend's fantasy, and referencing Sorority House Massacre II (1990), that clearly knew how dumb the contrivance was. There is a ridiculous amount of nudity for the sake of it, but there is paradoxically a virtue to this in how, even if it is salacious, this is a cast of actresses for those scenes who are women you would encounter in a bar or on the street, a body positivity with likable characters where, rather than eighties teased hair and casting people for specific looks, the only thing that feels manufactured is how fashion has changed since the early 2010s and now looks of a time period. The best example of this is the most ridiculous and memorable scene, of a nude woman seductively pours Halloween candy onto her body on her bed to tempt the killer, where the actress is a larger figured woman who a sexist would criticise for her appearance, but here in a scene more appropriate for a Slumber Party Massacre parody stands out for this, where she is beautiful in the scene and appropriately game, sexy and brave for it even if, as the cliché goes, the killer has to kill.

The unfortunate thing is that this film wants to lean on a serious plot, the clichés of slashers for once for me something I wish had actually been here. As mentioned, "torture porn" is a distasteful word I am not fond of as a horror subgenre term, and it feels so out of place when mixed with these scenes, like a po-faced Herschell Gordon Lewis film without his sense of fun. If this was a serious film without the jokes, even if uncomfortable, the film would make sense with its structure, with its ending a bleak one, [Spoiler] the killer the father who killed his own daughter, and everyone including the female lead he is fixated on barring one character dying [Spoilers End]. Instead, with its finale, the swipes into comedy, and the abrupt use of an Ouija board that actually works, become more jarring. In Eastern horror cinema, there is more ability to switch between tones like this because it clearly comes from countries like Japan and South Korea where this is more flexible and commonplace in their cinema, and you find films in the West that can pull this off, becoming incredible works as a result; the tonal shifts here, regardless of the nationality of the film, really undercut this, neither fish nor fowl as a result despite things to admire for me.