Mesa of Lost Women (1953)

 

Director: Herbert Tevos and Ron Ormond

Screenplay: Herbert Tevos

Cast: Jackie Coogan as Doctor Aranya; Richard Travis as Dan Mulcahey; Allan Nixon as "Doc" Tucker; Mary Hill as Doreen; Robert Knapp as Grant Phillips; Chris Pin Martin as Pepe; Harmon Stevens as Masterson; Nico Lek as Van Croft; Samuel Wu as Wu; John Martin as Frank; Tandra Quinn as Tarantella

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Of course, I was not a fan of this sort of film when I was younger - cheesy b-movies back in the day would be something I would view from merely their surface in terms of their "badness". As a result, returning to Mesa of Lost Women, the flamenco guitar over the beginning, I was more at home to appreciate it, especially when the opening overblown narration, mocking humanity's constant struggle against insects, was already enough to hook me.

An oil surveyor encounters a distressed man and woman in the Muerto Desert, the book end for this couple to tell a tale about giant spiders and an evil doctor, specifically one named Doctor Aranya (Jackie Coogan) who is experimenting on the pituitary gland and hormones in humans, exchanging them with hexapoda and vice versa with a specific tarantula breed. The problem with Mesa of Lost Women, with any film like this, is entirely that they fail to deliver even for unintentional pleasures; their bizarre expedition in genre plotting are not undermined by the wooden performances or lower budgets but, as this comes to sadly, a string of bland dialogue scenes. The premise is strange enough to not need these, as Aranya's experiments have lead to human spiders - only the males are all cast with dwarf actors, as to reflect the size of the male spiders to the female, and the spider women are cast with beautiful models. One doctor's psychically controlled harem (with one actual giant spider) is contrasted by the obvious metaphoric fear of women from men that is impossible to not ignore, the paradoxical idea of women who films like this want men to fantasise about, but see as a threat in themselves for the same virtues they are fantasised about. It comes obvious as the film was sold on Tandra Quinn as Tarantella, a model and starlet whose career was sadly very short with this her most prominent production, a shame as, one of the virtues in a dialogueless role, the film for its many flaws is distinct for the likes of her character, its personification of a femme fatale. The real set piece of the production is her "spider dance" in the middle, a performance meant to be erotic but show something if off with her figure, as the spider women are dangerous and are immense to even gunshot wounds. You can view it as sexist (even misogynistic) alongside other genre films about inhuman tribes of women, but alongside the tameness of the film, its quirks undercut this instead making tropes like this fascinating to encounter in realms of pulp storytelling, reoccurring trends of men's own libidos as much their undoing as the female figures themselves, a neurosis patterned onscreen unintentionally for how many times it was raised in these genre films.

It is an absolute shame Mesa of Lost Women is sluggish eventually, its real crime as eventually every main character brought into this is stuck in a woodland to pad out the hour plus running time. Say what you want of a Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), even if a bad film to many, but before even the Tim Burton film on Ed Wood, we could see how idiosyncratic that film was, never feeling padded and always memorable, being one of its monologues or a wobbling tombstone. It is a shame as, for pure cheese, you have so much to run with in the premise of Mesa of the Lost Women. There is enough to salve the flaws, though he cannot heal them entirely, in Harmon Stevens playing Mr. Masterson, the scientist Aranya tries to convince to help him, stealing the film as he got the idea to be the Renfield of the scenario. The man tuned insane by immortal spider women, his line reactions alone alongside the dialogue itself, with disassociated detachment and innocence despite being gun crazy, won me over as the best part of the film, what the film should have been entirely in tone even if others may mock his performance as being comically broad by accident. You have possible melodrama to work with too, a younger woman on her wedding night with a vain (and unreliable) older man who falls for the male pilot, who is also more adapt to surviving their plight when Masterson hijacks the wedding plan and forces it to land near Aranya's mountain. Even Wu (Samuel Wu, his only role), a stereotype of the man servant who is docile and quotes philosophical platitudes, the dogsbody who eventually betrays everyone, is memorable as one of the only other people you could envision surviving in the jungle in this scenario, showing his bravery enough for a crazed man to even hand him his firearm out of respect.

Mesa of the Lost Women is not Plan 9, nor Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966), lacking that spice of being truly unique in this realm of weirdo public domain films, even if they all have Mystery Science Theater 3000 runs written all over them. It is a shame that this is not as memorable as it is, and among the cheap DVD I saw it on originally, alongside a William Beaudine film The Ape Man (1943), a poverty row Bela Lugosi film, I am not surprised I was not a fan back in the day as it is eventually a sluggish production. Far more interesting nowadays too, whilst I had fun with this, is in one of its creators Ron Osmond. Osmond proliferated in low budget westerns in the forties, and exploitation cinema from the fifties, until an airplane accident in the late sixties devastated him and brought him to Christianity. This did not stop his film career, merely brought him to working with Mississippi evangelist Estus Pirkle on an infamous trilogy of religious films. Preserved by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn through his NWR label, those films - The Believer's Heaven (1977), The Burning Hell (1974), and especially If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971), the latter Pirkle's anti-communist tale where lawnmower death threatens Americans if the Soviets invaded - make Mesa of Lost Women quaint in comparison. The older film is still fun, not too long to draw itself out, but clearly was a title that could have been better even as a cheesy production, Ron Osmond by himself far more wonderfully psychotronic than the film itself.

Ghoulies & Ghoulies II (1984 & 1987)

Director(s): Luca Bercovici (Ghoulies)

Screenplays: Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy (Ghoulies) / Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli (Ghoulies II)

Cast:

Ghoulies: Peter Liapis as Jonathan Graves, Lisa Pelikan as Rebecca, Scott Thomson as Mike, Ralph Seymour as Mark "Toad Boy", Mariska Hargitay as Donna, Keith Joe Dick as Dick, David Dayan as Eddie, Victoria Catlin as Anastasia, Charene Cathleen as Robin, Tamara De Treaux as Greedigut, Peter Risch as Grizzel, Michael Des Barres as Malcolm Graves, Jack Nance as Wolfgang

Ghoulies II: Damon Martin as Larry, Royal Dano as Uncle Ned, Phil Fondacaro as Sir Nigel Penneyweight, J. Downing as P. Hardin, Kerry Remsen as Nicole, Dale Wyatt as Dixie, Jon Pennell as Bobby, Sasha Jenson as Teddy, Starr Andreeff as Alice, William Butler as Merle, Donnie Jeffcoat as Eddie, Christopher Burton as Leo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I'm a magician you sons of bitches. You can't kill me!

I did not expect the Ghoulies franchise begins with a Satanic cult about to sacrifice a baby in the scene, but like so many horror franchises, they either deviate from their original premises in the later sequels, or in this case develop their selling point after time, What would become the titular centre point for these films took their jumping point from a script by co-writer/director Luca Bercovici, who would work on the first film, and afterwards leave with his work continued on with the other three films. It is not a surprise though that this is a Charles Band production, distributed by his Empire Pictures, from a man who has set forth many a franchise about tiny homicidal puppets.

The baby is thankfully saved, even if his mother takes his place, growing up to be Jonathan Graves (Peter Liapis), inheriting the family home where this tale originates from with Wolfgang, a cult member who helped rescue him, as his sole family and an excuse to get David Lynch alumni Jack Nance in a nicely appreciated cameo with some plot importance. Cue a party with slasher film archetypes, goofballs obsessed with strip poker in a home full of occult literature, making the bad decision to perform an occult ritual whilst drunk. Even sober, this is a dumb idea, as Jonathan becomes obsessed, possessed even, to develop him magic skills and becomes overcome with them. That and summoning the titular Ghoulies, starting with a hairy weasel goblin that stands up to one's knees, which are going to be there to terrorise people.

It is strange that I come into this series always presumed to have a more comedic edge, and I only admit only seeing Ghoulies IV (1994) growing up with a less than stellar reaction, so that was not a good perspective for all this time to ever have had. The first film undeniably is trying to be more serious, which just happened to involved involve homicidal critters played with puppets, who feel like an afterthought here and whose comedic aspects would be ran with further in later films. If you accept they are razor toothed and have a thing for eating faces, they are cuter than menacing, even if it's my sick view of cuteness inspired by having Monsters in My Pocket toys as a kid, and sadly maligned. They are, for a film made when Joe Dante's Gremlins (1984) exists, an arbitrary aspect to a plot more focused about a man being possessed by his satanic father from the grave, making this as a work that is indebted to the era's tropes in the Ghoulies' inclusion, to the point Gremlins' producers Warner Brothers sued this film for the similarities to Gremlins but lost¹. Despite this luck, the Ghoulies are never taken advantage of this selling point, and there was a sense for me, going through these films for the review, this was the least interesting of the ones so far. I will concede that this film had issues I have sympathy for, such as the fact the production ran out of budget midway through and required the filmmakers to find funding², and there are many aspects to how this film could have turned out which were rejected. One I admit might have made the film more my thing, that being Jeffrey Combs being in the cast, but this was also once meant to be a children's film, and was meant to be in 3D, so Ghoulies had a chaotic coarse to even get made I have to take into consideration¹.

There is certainly a whimsical charm to this, Charles Band produced films having a sense of love within themselves for their playfulness, film pulp for its own sake like lifting the clown puppet from Poltergeist (1982), or two dwarf actors playing mystic servants summoned by Jonathan, looking like cast members from a high fantasy film or from Knightmare, the 1980s British TV series which experimented with early green screen to send its contestants into said worlds. I will also say that Richard Band, Charles Band's brother, and Shirley Walker, a pioneer for being one of the first female film composers in Hollywood, also compose between them a score which feels like it is from a larger budget production and is great. Richard Band is an unsung hero for these genre films for his work, whilst Walker, with her work for DC Comic animated adaptations, like Batman: The Animated Series, to her work on the Final Destination series, would sadly pass in 2006.  Thankfully, in 2014 The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) created the Shirley Walker Award in 2014 to honour the diversity of film and television music, to emphasis her importance in the industry.

Brutally however, this is just not a film for me. I will not say it is bad, which defeats the purpose of a review by saying films are just not for me, but it is true here. I like the attitude behind this film, but it does drift off into a plot I had no interest in. One legitimate criticism I have, regardless of my awareness of the production issues, is those titular ghouls who do immediately stand out - the green demon baby ones to the weasel goblin, when not eating its way out the chicken on the dining table, being a pervert hiding under your bed during an attempted occult sex ritual - are not really a part of the material. This film clearly realised this mistake as these creatures eventually became the central focus in later films, whilst this particular film is an acquired taste for me personally. An early film in his career, his first directorial production, Luca Bercovici would continue on to the likes of Rockula (1990), which seems more appealing for me for being about a vampire wanting to have a career in rock music with Susan Tyrrell and musician Bo Diddley among the cast.

Ghoulies II is a considerably more focused and interesting film for me, opening with Anthony Dawson, of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954), in a cameo as a priest running away from Satanists with Ghoulies in a cloth sack. His attempt to dispose of them for the sake of humanity in a barrel of waste, conveniently marked as "Extremely Toxic" and left open to mist in a garage, ends up with him in said barrel and melting into a skeleton. The Ghoulies escape, five of them, and hitch a ride with travellers for a carnival who stopped at the garage, one of which is Royal Dano, already having been Abraham Lincoln's voice at the Hall of Presidents attraction at Disney's Magic Kingdom beforehand in his career alongside cinema, playing an alcoholic ex-magician who runs a haunted house named Satan's Den.

There are many improvements for what is a silly tale, the first being that needed focus on the Ghoulies themselves, legitimately evil critters who enjoy causing pain and mischief, one even knowing how to use a switchblade, which becomes more threatening. They are stuck in Satan's Den, and from here, this is significantly more interesting as a sequel for me, with the added caveat that I have a bias for carnival set films anyway, making this more tantalising. Dano is running the attraction, with the help of his nephew Larry (Damon Martin), which is one of the rides in danger of being closed by an evil eighties yuppie, an accountant who has plants to axe the attractions going in the red, Satan's Den likely to be replaced by ladies' mud wrestling by the end of the week only for the Ghoulies to accidentally bring more customers into the attraction that night. A worthy mention too, as he is a great inclusion, is Phil Fondacaro; whilst some of the lines in regards to him being an actor with dwarfism have not aged well, his character is awesome, a former Shakespearian actor and friend to Larry named Sir Nigel, a carnival employee who gets into the thick of the plot too.

It is perverse to think Satan's Den is not doing well but is far more elaborate than most real haunted houses I have been to, one I wish to go to, as this is a heightened movie version of the carnival with the production team (and real ride operators) deserving praise for this exaggerated setting. The film was fun to just watch for its production design in context of a goofy late eighties horror movie, in terms that everything is like the place of one's dreams, Satan's Den itself a vast building with elaborate practical attractions, like pop-up mummies, that emphasis the joy of the real ones you walk past in ordinary life if they had the production values of a small genre film, to the art design through the carnival like for the entrance of the "Arabian" exotic dancers. The score by Fuzzbee Morse, the awesomely named composer whose credits for musicians he has worked on is actually too long to pick from but least includes Frank Zappa to actor Harry Dean Stanton, is awesome to and adds to this with pure horror synth, and as much of the enjoyment comes from showing so many clichés of the era but in an enjoyable way. The ladies' mud wrestling reference is one of these, and it is to the point a child randomly has a shuriken throwing star on him, in the era of the ninja craze, to throw at rat creatures who puke green goo on them, because naturally kids have shuriken stars on them. They even went as far, for the metal head character who has to take his "tunes" with a boom box into the haunted house, the production got then notorious band W.A.S.P. to record a song exclusively for the production; before lead singer Blackie Lawless moved to more serious lyrics in the late eighties to early nineties albums, and then returned to his Christian faith, they were controversial for Tipper Gore angering songs like Animal (Fuck like a Beast) and him having a buzz saw codpiece, a perfect band for this era of heavy metal interlinking with heavy metal before the more serious and critically acclaimed albums took over for W.A.S.P. onwards.

Eventually bringing in a bigger-than-human size costume for the final, it has no pretence, already playing to humour further than the prequel even if with a sick streak, as the chaos in the carnival that ends this film evoking the influence of Gremlins, varying between overt slapstick pratfalls to a critter causing a ride cart to fly off and kill at least two people glibly. Also there is a fixation on toilets, the series trope from the prequel that followed from this, as the Ghoulie in a toilet moment from before is escalated in a painful way. Its director Albert Band, father of Charles Band, was clearly a safe pair of hands for this production, late into a career mostly as a producer but making films like I Bury the Living (1958) in the fifties, so the sense the film was able to be as entertaining and fun as it was comes with the sense of someone, as a producer for most of his career at this point, who thankfully knew what to shot to win the punters over. The next film, which took four years to appear, took this series further into comedy to the point it may put people off, whilst here, the balance between the humour and playful horror tone is perfect. After the sense that the first Ghoulies did not stand out for me at all, this was a nice change of pace. If you are a fan of the first film, I will not take away from your enjoyment of it, merely that I thankfully got the film I enjoyed within the second.

 

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1) 10 Crazy Things You Didn't Know About Ghoulies, written by Jake Dee and published for Screen Rant on October 31st 2019.

2) Interview with Luca Bercovici (Ghoulies), written and published for Love-it-Loud on June 28th 2018. Retrieved August 24th 2018 on the Web Archive.

Fungicide (2002)

 

Director: Dave Wascavage

Screenplay: Dave Wascavage and Mary Wascavage

Cast: Wes Miller as Major Wang; David Weldon as Silas Purcell; Mary Wascavage as Jade Moon; Loretta Wascavage as Mother Purcell; Edward Wascavage as Father Purcell; Dave Bonavita as  "Titus" Ignitus; Antoinette Cancelliere as Lenny; Dave Wascavage as Jackson P. Jackson

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Fungicide is a ridiculous film, my introduction to the micro-budget world of Dave Wascavage, a Pennsylvania based figure who has been chugging away with his own independently made genre films since Fungicide itself, founding his own company Troubled Moon Films, and with this production the cinematographer and editor as much as the director and co-writer. Fungicide, about homicidal giant fungus, came as a surprise for how woozy and unapologetically its own weird thing, where the opening is intense, all harsh noise and a man in his family, in almost a trance, experimenting on a chemical composition which will have unfortunate consequences he will be happy about when it brings forth the nightmares of the title.

It is scored like a Playstation One game, atmospheric drum and bass, which knowing this is about killer sentient mushrooms, with the limited special effects at hand and CGI valley shots like a late nineties game, makes this almost befitting like you have wandered into an obscure American role playing game as a result, one set at a mountain hideaway, a resort to rest at which is doomed to fungus related terror. Ran by a nice hippy woman who however has a bad tendency to use the wrong choice of words, and turns into a Sarah Connor Terminator killer when enough is enough, it also sets up very early on in the film the eccentricities on display here. Fungicide is really peculiar, an automatic writing of a genre film at times, which is not going to be for everyone. You get this with the characters placed into the scenario: our female lead even in the face of regular grocery store mushrooms attaching themselves to people like leeches reacting to them with a blissful tranquillity, a real estate agent who is there to try to get her to sell the house, and eventually just becomes a third wheel, the scientist who starts speaking like he is actually an alien, and a random army man who appears, having wandered off a reality TV show he was a contestant of, named Major Wang. Then there is the professional wrestler, who is written like a stereotype of one and needs to unwind from his temper at the hideaway. He also has to take pills prescribed to him by a medically cleared doctor to prevent spontaneous combustion, which is now a sentence I can write and does become a major plot point eventually.

Simply tripping up a wooden step unleashes a serum capable of inhuman biological growth, and between the scientist speaking like the aforementioned alien, the music choices and stock scream effects, and the homemade psychedelic visuals, and this film became far weirder in tone than I had presumed of it even before the homemade mushroom puppets with giant teeth appear. In-between the leads just hanging out in the house in the woods, for prolonged periods which would-be frowned upon in most horror films for padding, this becomes a cavalcade of peculiar sights, where briefly a puppet literally plays a mushroom victim and is so obvious it becomes surreal. Obvious computer effects are layered onto the film in place of what Dave Wascavage could not practically pull off, be it the breaking of a glass door, to the panning shots of the valley, or the larger mushrooms, who drift around using spores to grow more, seen spawning out the graveyard at one point. The regular ones, not either the baby mushrooms as played by real store bought ones, are the puppets, which are cool and quite cute, and the actors in white sheets with a homemade toothy mouth and mushroom cap, armed with silly string projectile with acidic properties, using regular silly string, and able to grow arms.

The film knows its absurdity and guns for silly, as Wascavage filmed a scene of a mushroom attempting to eat a garden gnome, or as they learn human abilities as they eat people, one being able to drive a car and pick up a female sex worker to eat her. There is an entire dream sequence, as the scientist is delighted by the possibilities of being King of Mushroom Men, where he images himself playing video games and Go Fish with one of the puppets, which is hilarious. Mantango (1963) by Ishirō Honda this is not and you have to accept the logic is its own, alongside the padding that leads to an extended cast versus mushroom fight scene involving extensive obvious CGI and no one with clear combat technique. It does not detract from its charms, if you have basked in this region of micro-budget cinema, a film where balsamic vinegar is the solution, and is apparently more volatile and explosive than nitro-glycerine. You need to come with expectations that Wascavage's work, created visibly with his own times and resources, as his first attempt in his career is a film you could see having to be shot on weekend where the cast could get together, with members of the cast including the female lead (and co-writer) related to him. It is its own work to befuddle, admire and get a few belly laughs from, and as of yet, the threat of a sequel involving killer apples as the film ends on has yet to happen.

Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell (2014)

 

Director: Spencer Snygg and Zachary Snygg

Screenplay: Spencer Snygg and Zachary Snygg

Cast: Peter Sullivan as Doug, Marisol Custodio as Brenda, Jon Arthur as Hector; Tom Cikoski as Jake; John Paul Fedele as Mayor Farnsworth; Jon Lunger as Roger Falk

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Why don’t you buy a gun and hug a tree?

To most this would be a silly low budget film about a 50-foot killer Easter bunny, from the shot on digital streaming era of cinema. I am coming to a film like this as a film from its director John Bacchus, one of the various pseudonyms for Zachary Snygg, a figure who has been around in the ultra low budget genre industry since the late eighties, creating curiously named films like The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude (1989). Figures like this are fascinating for me to find out about, be it Snygg or a Joe Castro, figures who are prolific but have not had writing on them, figures who just worked and made films which changed per the times they were in. Snygg in particular is a curious one, as he went to softcore film parodies like The Erotic Witch Project (2000) that managed to get onto British DVD rental shop shelves, to a series of horror films with predominantly black casts like Zombiez (2005). Honestly, whilst these films tend to exist under the radar in the straight-to-video territory, I have found that someone like Zachary Snygg fascinates in terms of seeing how genre cinema at a certain level changes over time. Well known cult figures like producer Roger Corman adapted to the times, as a figure like Fred Olen Ray goes from Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988) to Christmas in Palm Springs (2014), so it is fascinating to look at the more obscure figures or ones in the micro-budget genres who continued and soldiered ahead.

Here as well, Zachary Snygg has his trademarks, teaming with his sibling Spencer Snygg, particularly in that he has a very wacky sense of humour, something where, expecting prurient softcore with a film like Mistress Frankenstein (2000), you find yourself with a scattershot sense of oddball humor and obsessions like a man in a fake gorilla suit in-between the first two Erotic Witch Project films as a continuing joke. You could argue it is ironic, playing to the low budgets involved for arch humour, but it comes off weirder, coming to the fore here again with this absurd tale of a monstrous Easter rabbit, whose origins is only asked about for the final punch line with no answer, and the disgruntled dog catcher and the female artist stuck in the job having to deal with it. Opening with the son of a newly married father, disgruntled and unloading on his married to a considerably younger woman, getting his hand sliced off as the wedding cake does, Beaster Day is a film you will not be able to gage with if it is too ridiculous, too low budget, too wacky or does things which are indulgent and immature. A prolonged topless shot of an actress running about from a special effect monster is a good example of that which may be too indulgent for example of this, alongside its openly broad tone. It is a film, meant to sell as a monster movie, which however ends up feeling like its creator indulging in whatever they thought was funny and could sell for themselves.

With everything having the naturalism if artificiality as you see with 2010s shot on digital cinema, it is played with humour, which is with enthusiasm if indulgent, the absurdity found in characters such as the older guy, the father of the female lead, who cannot have fried food but asks for it to be cooked to smell (and for his sexual kinks with his wife and cook). There are moments that are inspired especially when it would have taken for more effort to be able to depict it, such as a first person from a spade, not even for a gore scene but just a trick shot for a single shot. In contrast, you have such an odd gag like the central dog catching/animal control firm being “Dog Catcher in the Rye”, which is strange knowing the Snygg brothers, who wrote the script, choose a J.D. Salinger reference which has no other context.

It is contrasted by the bunny itself, which is obviously superimposed on screen, with the gore scenes usually not directly onscreen, but the special computer effect of hiding parts of the cast to show missing limbs or as a severed head. They are usually separate cast members including female members from Zachary Snygg' softcore films like A.J. Khan and Darian Caine, a few of which happy to have the quota of nudity for the production, something which becomes less in this modern era like a selling point but more a stylistic choice even if will cause some to roll their eyes for how blatant (and pointless) it is. Said rabbit, at least a practical effect, is likely an actual puppet, a marionette with the strings digitally hidden and flopping forwards to move, who looks like a cross between a Sumerian rat monkey and the titular creature of Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973). It looks ridiculous, but with an example like the titular Godmonster, lovably too shabby to be able to survive as a living creature, worse (i.e. blander) has graced cinema.

It is technically an ironic film, embracing how cheesy it is, but it never feels like it is bad for the sake of doing it on purpose, but throwing anything against the wall in terms of humour on its own whims, not because it wants to be sardonic about the presentation. Our lead male is a dog catcher too obsessed with his job, interesting as a funny character actor Peter Sullivan manages to make him less a detestable or annoying figure, but likable ridiculous, contrasted by a failing artist in Marisol Custodio's lead having to share a work place. Whilst other characters will be too broad for some – such as a former hippy major so bad he steals candy from children – even that character has moments which work, even when the jokes fail. The mayor's clear bias against the Amish is an example of where it feels less intentionally wacky by their creators' idiosyncratic sense of humour, at least Zachary Snygg's career from the couple I have seen, as it may seem a deliberately absurd touch to include and never show, "Amish" inherently viewed as funny despite being a minority group, but is stretched out into something which feels more peculiar than deliberately out-of-place. Even in the one off dogs that feels wacky in how out of place they are, there are at gets one or two good moments. The leads thankfully are game for the material, which can be broad but least hits with moments, such as Sullivan's Doug having police codes for dog catching and PSTD flashbacks about Shih Tzu dogs.

It is not a film for everyone due to this deliberately lacksidasical tone, but it is at least a film which tries even if in the school of throwing everything at the wall. Too many films do not sustain themselves in content, even if a lot of my appreciation of these types of movies comes from a love for even the no-to-micro budget films which are sluggish and have charm in their great faults. Using the Jaws template as so many, with the Easter Day celebration under threat, considering the films which have existed, the ridiculousness here has to be expected, and the issue becomes whether you expect something this low budget and proudly embracing how indulgent it is. Certainly, and this is a technically positive, this is one where you cannot dismiss it as trying, as Beaster Day least keeps bringing something new in each scene, a gag or a joke or man half dazed forced to wear a cheap carrot costume to attract the beast, whilst other horror films of any budget feel they are going through motions. Even the lurid moments, mostly all the female nudity, feels out-of-time in the current day, making it more the director-writer’s impulses for better and for worse. A film like this I would have hated back a long time ago, but now able to appreciate the freewheeling nature of these sorts of films, this one does feel unashamedly its own film for good, for bad, for cheesy moments and a few good one-liners.

Monster A-Go Go (1965)

 

Director: Bill Rebane (with Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Screenplay: Bill Rebane, Jeff Smith and Dok Stanford

Cast: Philip Morton as Col. Steve Connors; June Travis as Ruth Logan; George Perry as Dr. Brent; Lois Brooks as Nora Kramer; Rork Stevens as Tom Logan; Peter M. Thompson as Dr. Chris Manning; Robert Simons as Henry Schwartz; Barry Hopkins as Frank Logan; Henry Hite as Frank Douglas / the Monster; Herschell Gordon Lewis as the Radio Announcer Voice; Bill Rebane a  theBoyfriend at Dance / the Narrator

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

 

What you are about to see may not even be possible, within the narrow limits of human understanding.

 

A surf guitar song set over the still shot of the cosmos is probably befitting Monster A-Go Go. Christened one of the worst films ever made, including a stint on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, its infamy in genre cinema is well known. The story of why this film ends up as peculiar as it can be is simple, yet asks so much of how precarious filmmaking actually is on any level. Bill Rebane, a figure who would go on in Wisconsin making genre films, shot the film in sections as he kept running out of money¹. The film was eventually unfinished, and it was Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man who I admire but was always a businessman as much as a favour for splatter flicks, who bought the unfinished material wishing to have a secondary film to play with one of his own. Lewis finished the original with all the issues, such as not being able to hire the original actors, which could come about as a result of this.

A fallen space spaceship and the astronaut named Frank meant to be within it are found crashed in a field. The astronaut is nowhere to be seen, but there is a dead helicopter pilot, which immediately raises concerns. Also be aware, as a viewer, the voice over narrator, to pad over of the loose ends, such as a still conversation to the wife of the astronaut, is going to be the MVP here whether you wish to bequeath the title to him or not. Played by original director Bill Rebane himself, that deserves applause because never was there pontification in a sci-fi narration with such heady tones, Criswell only beating him as no one could match Criswell in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

As someone more sympathetic to these films, punching down on Monster A-Go-Go was not something I did throughout viewing this film. Someone else would punch down on little Jimmy, nephew of the astronaut Frank, who is the kind of kid put in front to act who hesitates on camera, who also looks like a stereotype of a fifties Americana young boy, who asks whether Jimmy was as common a name in North America as it inexplicitly has always felt like for myself. Others would punch down on long scenes of actors talking in fields. Far more an issue, whilst a compelling oddity, is that this film is incredibly dry and languid, with the monster normally not seen and just talked of. It can cut to go-go dancing in the most abrupt of inclusions, but unintentionally this is like if James Benning or an avant-garde artist decided to make a parody of a sixties sci-fi b-flick and deliberately wished to antagonise the conventional viewer of such films.

The use of the narrator to explain content, and the minimalist score alone, feels like we have accidentally made an avant-garde film at times, especially as for a low budget film mocked as terrible, when seen in a restored form, this is a monochrome independent production that, honestly, looks a higher budget than many modern no-budget films shot on digital. That is entirely because celluloid and even 16 millimetre film has a distinct touch to it, a layer of aesthetic which is striking, especially as for a Chicago shot film, this has moments which are atmospheric even if most of it is still scenes of a lot of exposition. When the monster is actually revealed, it is then you realise these experiments in obfuscation are really just a film that needed to be patched together, with the stranger caveat that the monster is not an alien, or a rug acquired because the original costume was lost, nor an Incredible Melting Man designed by Rick Baker, but Henry Hite, who is a distinct looking man, which cannot be denied, but you feel sympathy for in how awkwardly he is used. Born Henry Marion Mullens, Hite was promoted as "the world's tallest man" at 8 ft 2 in, even if his actual height was 7 ft 6¾ in², part of a Vaudeville act called the “Lowe, Hite and Stanley” show³. Monster A-Go Go was his only film, most of his career for various food promotions like Wilson Certified Meats³. Hite here, sadly, does not have a lot of time onscreen, unable to emphasis his height over everyone else and thus, usually in a shot separate, instead looking like a balding man in a mucky silver jump suit and burn makeup. With the added aspect that it is a film with almost all the monster attacks worked around off-screen, even if using his height for monstrousness can be argued to be distasteful, he is a distinct figure to include in any film which is not appreciated enough by the film itself.

It truly does feel like a minimalist take on a sci-fi monster film, including all the aspects not intended, as with a Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) which would cause the likes of Mystery Science Theatre to urinate on it. It is, even for a film over just an hour, a film so languid that my younger self, not used to these extremes, would have despised it. Now, adapting to these types of films, there is something delightfully perverse in a lengthy scene of a man, wandering a film holding a burnt stick, set to clearly audible sound of the film reel in the preserved Arrow Film restoration, and bird calls. Lengthy scenes of exposition, around a narrative where the monster is abruptly kept at one point by a scientist only to escape again, have a theatre-like pace with sets, even a tangent that leads to no build up or anyone being quickly killed. It involves a trucking "Lancelot" helping a woman with a broken down car, with a kiss as a reward. Those characters do not return, no monster appears, and whilst I liked it, other viewers would be dumbfounded. This is not even taking in the casting of June Travis, in a tradition of hiring older actors based on their history, Travis an actress from the Hollywood studio system who whose career was mostly in thirties films with Monster A-Go Go her last. Her role, barring a possible romance with one of the men trying to find Frank, despite already being with Frank, is barely here as well and just adds to the strange jumble of pieces that made the film.

Bill Rebane, the director of the likes of The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), is someone I want to get into. He would not make another film for nine years after this¹, staying in short and industrial filmmaking until Invasion from Inner Earth (1974). Truthfully, Invasion from Inner Earth managed to be even more languid, a far more difficult film to sit through if still fascinating. Monster A-Go Go is undeniably a potential struggle for anyone getting into these films, but it is such a bizarre end result of when films are left unfinished and are attempted to be finished years later that I appreciated. It is as much a film meaningful for me as a huge Herschell Gordon Lewis fan, someone who would have openly admitted, as a businessman first, he made films with little and on the seat of his pants. By himself, he could make a film as strange as Something Weird (1967), which lived up to that title and even founded the company of the same name, by the late Mike Vraney and now held by his widow Lisa Petrucci, who would release Monster A-Go Go on unsuspecting viewers in a new age. This film is no different in the slightest to the fifties sci-fi from Hollywood, all as capable of being as rewarding as they are kitschy, all with a fixation on the dangers of radiation be it nuke or from space flight, with the only difference is that this is the anti-sci-fi film in structure. It also has as big an anti-climax transpiring as I have ever seen in these films, which was a surprise to see, in hindsight hilarious if the kind that would cement this film's infamy fully.  For those prepared for a film like Monster A-Go Go, the stomach for it, it is fascinating to witness as this anti-climatic, anti-genre mishap, especially with the delight that, thankfully, Bill Rebane kept making films and a cult name for himself from the seventies onwards, and Herschell Gordon Lewis made a lot of films at this time in a variety of genres, and became a cult legend with this a weird footnote for him.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic

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

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1) This is discussed by Rebane himself on part one of the Straight Shooter interviews, included with Arrow Video's Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection

2) Taken from "Tall Man Henry Hite Dead At 63", published in The Evening Independent on May 29th 1978.

3) Taken from Strange But True: When the 'World's Tallest Man' came to Clinton, written by Terrance Ingano for Telegran & Gazette, included on the site for July 11th 2021.

Piñata: Survival Island (2002)

 

a.k.a. Demon Island

Director: David and Scott Hillenbrand

Screenplay: David and Scott Hillenbrand

Cast: Nicholas Brendon as Kyle; Jaime Pressly as Tina; Eugene Byrd as Doug; Casey Fallo as Monica; Lara Wickes as Lisa; Garrett Wang as Paul; Julia Mendoza as Carmen; Daphne Duplaix as Julie; Nate Richert as Jake; Aeryk Egan as Larry; Tressa DiFiglia as Connie; Robert Tena as Bob; Ed Gale as the Piñata

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Here, in the past, a piñata was not a friendly celebratory object to knock sweets from its fluffy insides. In the back-story setting up this film, a shaman in an ancient village struck with the plague believed it was caused by the villagers sins, and created a clay piñata to seal the curse within, even sealing within its hollow form a freshly sacrificed pig's heart to absorb all the tribe's evil. The most prominent thing for me about this film, even over certain lead cast members, is that the piñata is the creation of the Chiodo Brothers, a trio of siblings (Charles, Stephen and Edward Chiodo) who I know for Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), their directorial horror film which was a production show their craft, from claymation to practical effects, in all its bizarre and wonderful fashion. Known for working on a variety of projects, their creation here is Survival Island's best part, as this sealed object was floated down the river by the villagers, celebrating with a good luck piñata closer to the modern day equivalent was created to celebrate this act. Unfortunately, being a slasher film with a supernatural slant, we know that, in 2001, the bad piñata will be found on an island by a group of bikini and swimming trunk clad young partiers.

On said island, a female sorority and a male fraternity are going face-to-face in a scavenger hunt. Consisting of acquiring as many men's and women's underwear as they can, scattered around, the rules do admittedly make no sense as one sorority and one fraternity member are handcuffed together to collect items, despite them being face to face to get the most undergarments from each other. The prize at least, a cash sum half given to charity but the other half to the winners, is worth the game, but has to be discarded quickly when someone confuses the bad piñata, found in the open, for one of the many tiny modern ones the group have hung off trees full of hotel sized bottles of liquor like tequila. There are enough people here to effectively call them most red shirts, and thus there will be a body count.

Evil or not, you would be pissed off if a guy hit your chest open with a rock and cracked your piñata form open. And whilst piñatas are not a cultural object in Britain, though can be bought in stores like Wilko in a form, it is significant that this premise is what it is though never explored, of a Latin American cultural object of the piñata being involved, an item especially in Mexican culture of significance, and symbolic in Catholicism of a symbol of sins broken by the blindfolded person's faith. With North Americans wandering this island, this could have been even as a lurid slasher movie a work subconsciously about those from the USA's colonial history finding themselves succumbing to a very angry artefact from the landmass' past. However this is a conventional late era slasher, told straight, and I will admit here this was a slasher film where their glee in picking people off felt weird. This is a trait I have always had with slasher films and especially with a gory one like this, where the vicarious pleasure is in very one dimensional archetypes being picked off, and not even in plot. Demon Island as most know it was a frequent visitor to the IMDB Bottom 100 list¹, the worst ever films, and was why I came to this. But it says much of how my tastes are unlike the mainstream and how bad cinema can be from this specific level, in that Survival Island is on a technical level is pretty standard and not the lowest in cinema. Paradoxically it is also not of interest for me in the slightest in terms of entertainment value, always the one who has preferred slasher films for their tangents than their plot tropes, which this has none of and is streamlined of.

Barring the two leads, hand cuffed together briefly and with bad blood over their past relationship, this has little personality for me barring how of the early 2000s this is. Most may know this, if not for its negative reputation, for Nicholas Brendon and Jaime Pressly as these leads, Nicholas Brendon already known for a key role in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV franchise, Jaime Pressly in 2005 reaching prominence as a key role in My Name is Earl, another popular television series. For a film with a ridiculous villain, a piñata demon, this is a dry horror film for me which just goes through the kills and plot beats with not much else, and the CGI used for the character even back then was a terrible decision for how dated it looked already at the time. Credit must be given to this film for one plot trope it swerves on, that the seniors running the game still take it seriously a Bob had been injured, even if the girl involved is ranting of a piñata demon bashing his head, and try to get everyone safely back to camp with intentions to leave. Horror films, let alone slashers, normally do not do this, and it is sad the film was not this smart or going to embrace the silly concept. What you get is the traditions of the slasher with the creation just in the kills, such as testicular trauma or the piñata cheating by pretending to be a normal one hung off a tree.

It cannot stop however that, with not a lot happening beyond the process of death after death, and the skeletal structure of the surviving cast trying to escape the piñata, this is a film which screams for a strange and silly work to have been created for the premise, but never did. This should have been closer to the Chiodo Brothers creation itself, getting the point of their role and making a monster appropriately exaggerated and mean looking even if most of their creation is sidelined with CGI instead. If this does have to be among one of the worst horror films ever made, the sin should be how much wasted potential even with this premise there was.

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1) As of August 17th 2022, Survival Island is no longer on the list. Its existence on there can be evidenced however in a review like the following, for Misan[trope]y, written on October 20th 2014 in a series of reviews about IMDB Bottom 100 denizens.

The Guyver (1991)

 

Director(s): Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George

Screenplay: Jon Purdy

Based on the manga by Yoshiki Takaya

Cast: Jack Armstrong as Sean Barker/The Guyver; Vivian Wu as Mizky Segawa; Mark Hamill as Max Reed; David Gale as Fulton Balcus; Michael Berryman as Lisker; Jimmie Walker as Striker

Ephemeral Waves/A 1000 Anime Tie-In

 

Note: The version of The Guyver (1991) watched is the director's cut, which involved a flashy editing technique added to cut between scenes, but also visibly removing shots of violence which is brought up in the review.

This review will also be re-posted at my other blog 1000 Anime for a little cross-promotion between them. Please take a look at a wide selection of reviews I do there as well.

 

Yoshiki Takaya's manga The Guyver was at one point one of the first Japanese manga and anime franchises to transition over to the West, and one of my earliest memories as a child to the idea of "manga" or "anime" involved the 1991 film itself, a small news article about The Guyver with the exceptionally deceiving poster of co-star Mark Hamill's face against one-half of the iconic Guyver helmet. In Japan itself, Yoshiki Takaya's manga started in 1985 and is still going thirty plus years on through multiple magazines, with two anime adaptations for straight-to-video, 1986 and 1989, and one I grew up with getting into anime, a television series between 2005 to 2006 which was an attempt rejuvenate the franchise. The OVAs, specifically the 1989 multi-episode one, gained an infamy when released in the West for its violence, whilst the TV series was undermined by not having ultra-violence that made the anime notorious, despite the late anime distributor ADV Films selling the series off this infamy, and that it does not have an actual ending. In the West, two live action films were made, one produced by Brian Yuzna with Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George making their directorial debuts, the sequel three years later with Steve Wang on his own in the director's chair and taking a drastically different direction in tone. Together they are curiosities.

Made as a Japanese co-production, Yuzna himself is a man I admire. Connected to Stuart Gordon, the director famous for Re-Animator (1985), Yuzna himself as a filmmaker has a fascinating series of strange and imaginative horror films, some involving Screaming Mad George, birth name Joji Tani, a practical effects designer from Japan whose reputation when he moved to the United States and worked in cinema have had a lasting legacy. Steve Wang, a Taiwanese makeup artist and creature designer who emigrated to the USA as a child, would comes into the directorial chair in his small filmography here as a co-director, and especially with a film called Drive (1997), gained himself cult recognition.

The Guyver, as the 1991 film, is however a strange mess. The plot is from the source - an evil corporation called Chronos are after an alien bio-armour, the titular Guyver. Set in the United States, a young man named Sean Barker (Jack Armstrong) finds the Guyver and is infected by it, creating living armour which grows from his body when he needs it. The Guyver is a tokusatsu influenced production, like an ultra-violent Power Rangers in the image most have of it, as Chronos has its members and test victims used in experiments where they turn into horrifying monsters. This is contrasted by the weapons the Guyver has, with its arm blades to a chest laser beam, designed to slice them the pieces.

Yuzna's Japan-US co-production decided not to follow his wheelhouse of gore and elaborate special effects in films like Society (1989) or Bride of Re-Animator (1990), but only have the special effects...at least at times. The director's cut, the more readily available version, has scenes of gore cut, but even the film without these missing fragments is incredibly goofy at times, creating a contradiction of a film you could not give to a child without causing potential nightmares, at least its most lasting moments, but other times has incredibly silly humour. The first Guyver film, the more easy to find, is a peculiar thing with its tendrils connected to Stuart Gordon and Yuzna, with the evil Chronos Corporation headed by leader Fulton Balcus, played by David Gale who is famous for Re-Animator. Balcus wants the Guyver bio-armour and sends "Zoanoids", humans who can turn into humanoid monsters, after Sean Barker.

The one success, the only success, in terms of consistency is the practical effects. Screaming Mad George is legendary and notorious for his work, from the human cockroach sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) to the "Shunting" scene from Society, visceral body horror which even if you can see the seams is so nightmarish and gooey that it borders surrealism. Moments show this in The Guyver, seeing him and everyone in the practical effect department having a field day with the premise. Whether it is horror film veteran Michael Berryman and various actors turning into various humanoid beasts or the spectacular Guyver armour itself, a warrior with cyberpunk and insect-like traits, they are all applaudable. It is, however, a film struggling with a premise, possible in anime and manga, which has an apocalyptic tone on a large scale, and also requires martial arts to pull off even fights between men in rubber suits. Guyver: Dark Hero will try to overcome this, to greater success, but this prequel struggles.

It is a really strange film, not in surrealism, but how it ended up as it did. Mark Hamill, the legendary Star Wars actor a year before he took on the voice of The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, creating for him a career flourish as iconic as Luke Skywalker, does stand out, playing a cop on the edge trying to get the scope on the Chronos Corporation, with a sense of grandeur to his appearance. The late David Gale steals scenes with his bizarre intonations and wall chewing, even enraged by burning toast as he is by the incompetence of his minion. Vivian Wu, as the female love interest, is visibly struggling with her dialogue and not helped in the slightest by a wet, one dimensional female character she has. Alongside the fact she is cast as a Japanese character, which is dubious for her as it is as casting, she is a really strange inclusion as between Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), a huge film in his later career which was her onscreen debut, and Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996), Wu, a Chinese actress whose career is mostly in dramas in the West and China, found herself in this film sandwiched between a Bernardo Bertolucci film and Greenaway which is a curious tangent. Even her appearance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993) at least makes sense as a second sequel to a franchise which was huge at the time and whose first feature film was a box office success.

Jack Armstrong as the hero sadly struggles out of the whole cast, in a role that, to be brutally honest, was made an a absolute charisma vacuum even by the standards of a pulp story that emphasises practical effects first, which does not help him out at all. These stories, and this is something I think of in terms of the Guyver television anime, is structured around protagonists, male leads, who are usually bland, especially in many ultra-violent anime too where the worlds and context around them are more meaningful. More so as he is put against Hamill, the advertising cynically suggesting a key Star Wars figure as the lead in some posters, as well as against Michael Berryman as the main henchmen, one of the most visually striking figure in cult cinema. Even Spice Williams, a prominent stunt actress who stands out physically here with Berryman as a physically imposing female henchwoman, gets to play out a more memorable and playful romance with Berryman in one of the few jokes of the film which do work.

Despite Steve Wang's later work such as with the Guyver sequel and Drive (1997), with fight choreography from the tokusatsu school, and of an incredibly high quality in terms of fighting and stunt work, the fights here look stilted and suffocated by the presentation, lacking what the sequel did. In sacrificing some of the practical effects in terms of beast designs in favour of men in rubber monster suits, likely injuring themselves in painful stunts but bringing an exhilarating air of chaos to the proceedings, that sequel as we get to found a kineticism which works. The result beforehand in the prequel is as stiff. More surprising is the lack of scale even by the standards of a small budget genre film, feeling like only a couple of rooms and some exterior shots were used, the script as swift in getting to its end without any sense of dramatic conflict being found.

The final issue, ultimately the creative decision which maims the film fatally at many times throughout itself, is deciding to play most of the film as a comedy, coming clearer to me now as a result of having to work around the limitations. Even if it worked on other Brian Yuzna productions like Re-Animator, the humour in those cases was incredibly grim even if there was slapstick. This has more broad, goofier with characters being buffoons, and one of the more contentious running gags being the character of Striker. Jimmie Walker, playing him, is a prolific comedian and actor especially in television, all the way back into the seventies with shows like Good Times (1974–1979), a spin-off of a series called Maude which is significant in terms of an American sitcom from that time period about an African-American family. I can see Walker's completely natural charisma here, though when he suddenly indulgences in some early nineties cheesy rap, you realise with The Guyver how tonally this is not an adaptation of Yoshiki Takaya's manga. His fish-monster character is a memorable costume, and he has one good gag of accidentally wandering on a cheap horror film scene with a Linnea Quigley cameo, but his character in general has mostly cringe inducing humour from Striker as a gag character, more an issue as his character in general and especially how his monster version looks has uncomfortable stereotyping that cannot be ignored.

This version of the concept does not really work with its material at all, and it is telling that, with a Director's Cut cutting out violence, there is a misinterpretation of the source material that undercuts it. There are moments you could not show children, and yet they are actually some of the most striking moments. Taken from the source, and recreated in the TV- series, is that the giant orb in the centre of the Guyver's head is its weakness, leading to the death of the lead and an absolutely memorable sequence of body-horror resurrection. Even if it is played for goofiness, with a knock-off Jaws theme riff, that sequence has a morbid grace, and has some humour which actually works beforehand, mainly the fact that Yuzna alumni Jeffrey Combs, of Re-Animator, makes a cameo chewing the scenery and is involved as a weird goat creature by that point. Famously [Spoiler Warning] this is the film where Luke Skywalker gets painfully turned, with Hamill submerged in practical effects latex, into a cockroach-locust hybrid, a moment that if it had been in another production would haveve been up there in Yuzna and Screaming Mad George's filmographies as being iconic. Here, the film around it does not live up to what, in between both films, is the best sequence of these American adaptations, a scene which is actually horrifying, actually tragic and adult, and is one of Screaming Mad George and the prosthetic team's best moments on this film. It is a scene which has clearly stayed with George as, alongside the woman turning into a cockroach in an Elm Street sequel, he is referring to this idea with Paranoiascape (1998), an experimental pinball game he worked on exclusively for the Japanese Playstation One market that explicitly references this as much as Society in some of the grotesque sights within it. [Spoilers End]

The Guyver is a film so painfully bad in its humour at times that it both makes little sense tonally but loses its power in context. It feels like a cheesy American action film from this era, not in terms of when they are fun, but just the clichés, whether it is the moment with a multi-ethnic gang of clumsy hoodlums, or the humour being at the expense of Michael Berryman, rather than embracing his comic timing and imposing nature more, or that no one is taken seriously even as comic characters. Jimmie Walker is even paired up with an actor named Peter Spellos as bumbling henchmen, with Spellos having a vague Eastern European accent, in scenes that undercut the actors themselves. Peter Spellos, who can go from Jim Wynorski films like Sorority House Massacre II (1990), sometimes playing the same character of Orville Ketchum, to a career in anime voice acting for work like Naruto to Cowboy Bebop (1998), is someone with clearly a lot of charisma to try to make this material work, but The Guyver is a case of a cast of fascinating individuals, from a variety of idiosyncratic areas of pop culture, not being helped by the script and tone. From anime voice acting to Star Wars to Peter Greenaway art films to prolific American sitcoms, everyone in and behind the film camera is a fascinating figure who could bring a lot to the table, but the work onscreen from the production really does not connect together.

Ultimately, it is the emphasis on the humour especially, against the paltry production, which makes The Guyver insufferable at times even when it can be charming at other times. A Jeffrey Combs goat demon, or Vivian Wu and Mark Hamill running away from what apparently is a flea monster, like characters in a one-reel silent film comedy, are charming to see, but in mind that this is The Guyver, a tokusatsu work at heart, whether you kept the gore or not, this feels like a project which grabbed at the wrong point. This is stranger considering Brian Yuzna, even if he might have not had a taste for martial arts, had a taste for horror films which got the tone for humour and the monstrous perfectly, or his fellow producer Aki Komine, who produced a series of films with Yuzna or by himself which did attempt manga adaptations with heavier leanings on action, by it Christoph Gans' Crying Freeman adaptation from 1995, or the Fist of the North Star film from 1995 which, whether good as an adaptation or not, was an attempt to get the original violent post-apocalyptic narrative to the screen¹. Komine, with Steve Wang, would also work on Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight (2008-9), Wang's attempt to bring the legendary Kamen Rider series from Japan to American children's television, so there was a sense of Komine being interesting in the type of storytelling The Guyver did not turn into inexplicably. With these curious names involved within its production, it feels instead a sense that, together, The Guyver whilst fascinating just did not gel at all in terms of creativity.

In contrast, Guyver: Dark Hero even with its own flaws managed to be more successful, but that is a review for another day....

To Be Continued...

 

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1) That and this Fist of the North Star adaptation has the curious mix of action star Gary Daniels, Malcolm McDowell, professional wrestler Leon "Vader" White,  Costas Mandylor, Downtown Julie Brown, Chris Penn, and African-American cinema pioneer Melvin Van Peebles involved, which is a strange cast to ever get in an adaptation of a Japanese manga.