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.

Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine (2000)

aka. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine in Daehakroh

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Screenplay: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: So-yun Lee (as the Teenage Hooker), Dae-tong Kim (as The Teacher)

An Abstract Candidate

 

When I first approached Teenager Hooker..., there was no wonder I hated this, as I had a zero taste for micro budget films which went against the norms of genre cinema just in terms of budgetary limitations, let alone their unconventionality. Now I love these films, and Teenager Hooker... is an idiosyncratic production for those who share that similar taste. It has a premise you would expect from Japanese films made with an eye for the West as from Sushi Typhoon in the mid-2000s - a schoolgirl prostitute (So-yun Lee) is caught having sex with a client against the wall of a older woman's apartment, the son the schoolgirl's teacher (Dae-tong Kim) who gets his three brothers to dispose of her gruesomely as punishment...only for a secret organisation to bring her back as a biomechanical assassin. The twist is that this is a South Korean production just in the cusp of their great cultural wave in terms of Korean cinema getting huge recognition in the West. Director/screenwriter/cinematographer Gee-woong Nam's filmography sadly stops into the mid-2010s, but it delights me that he managed to get a long run from his debut here, include a TV movie, which I will bring up later.

Suffice to say, I was not prepared for what is on the surface a premise I found in a lot of films from this DVD era I got to by the late 2000s and hovered old DVDs from the early half of the decade even a few decades after; this was a time not just of the "Tartan Asian Extreme" era, in reference to the side label the late British film distributor Tartan managed to ride a hugely successful wave on at this time, but the time of the likes of groups like Arts Magic who brought lower budget films, including early V-Cinema era Takashi Miike to our sources, who is a good comparison in terms of the abrupt curveballs this has. Even then, his films were ones I liked back at a time when I hated this one, which turned out to be an eccentric mood piece. The immediate thing to bring up beyond how distinct its soundtrack cuts are, between Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes (a Chemical Brothers remix) to Mozart, is that this is a standard definition digital camera film which looks even more unreal nowadays as the images have become more blurry. Taking a while even to start as a sixty minute film, languidly letting our female lead wander dingy dark streets, you have the harsh lighting of the format that film was shot on, where blue parts of the streets mix with the orange yellow of artificial street lighting that immediately started to win me over rather than put me off as my younger self may have react to.

Visually as a result, this absolutely would have disappointed someone expecting a film Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl (2008) from Japan; while it belongs tentatively in the same camp as this area of eccentric genre films on lower budgets coming from the East Asian countries at the time imported into the West, this is a far and away more confounding one to sit through. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an eye-catching title but the results, only sixty minutes long, are a lot more unexpected than anyone could expect, especially as that led to why I once hated this film to the point I held it up as one of the worst films I ever saw, all because the title catch my attention in a DVD review magazine, and I went out of my way to see it. Instead of the obviously weird, I ended up witnessing something much more using its idiosyncratic plot and moments of lurid content in very obtuse ways.

The result feels like an attempt to cross mutate an avant-garde film with lurid genre cinema, especially in how director Gee-woong Nam emphasises and lengthens minor parts over major plotting. Having such a small space of time at hand should force one to be economic but this film takes a different attitude completely to this notion, deciding to have six minutes or so taken up by just the opening credits as mentioned, the titular schoolgirl stood still in the middle of a Korean urban street as music plays. Immediately drastic tonal shifts are found where, after the serious presentation of the opening credits, the film starts with the female protagonist asking a potential client if he wants to pay for "voluntary date-rape", leading to him "chasing" her with a Cronenbergian phallic gift, and then (dry) humping against a wall where she's bored and texting on her phone mid-coitus. The film goes even further with going to an older female widow losing her mind hearing them having sex against her building wall, clearly meant to be humorous but quite disturbing in how she rants immediately into a phone in the middle of the night with a deranged tone to her voice. The production design here also emphasises Gee-woong Nam was deliberately taking advantage of the eerie nature of his standard definition camera as much as it was a practical choice, as he shots the widow's scene in a darkened room with painstakingly lit candles, multiple candles to the point of having been a nightmare to collect together, as the main source of lighting for the scene. This introduces the viewer to the main antagonist, the putty faced and giant chin welding school teacher, which to this day I cannot decide is a prosthetic or his actual magnificently rubber face, catching the schoolgirl working at his home and waking his grandmother up. This leads to her demise but not before you get a prolonged few minutes of the two, when she asks for forgiveness by offering free sexual services, of them recreating a mating ritual animals do by swaying on the spot to non-diegetic music.

The film goes along from here with a mix of styles with avant-garde leanings even if by accident, a lo-fi visual I can justify comparing to video art installation work, specifically from an older review I did a long time ago to Bill Viola's Hatsu-Yume (1982) in terms of lighting and style if shot in digital. Back then, this was a credible comparison as Viola, an established American video artist, with that project was shooting on eighties video cameras around places Japan and thus (even from my own faded memories) emphasised the artificial urban lighting in certain locations chosen, something you find here as Gee-woong Nam is working around a lot of real locations and the liminal spaces in-between, especially as night where artificial lighting would be needed, between public bathrooms to obscure diners. This is set around a very low budget movie tone that includes the slow pace, emphasis on dialogue and minor actions, and interspersed splat sticks prosthetic effects driven content. The result is unpredictable and leaves a viewer thrown between tones wildly. You can go from a heartfelt and serious monologue, post-coitus and done directly to the camera, from the schoolgirl about her life and how she wants her newly conceived baby to grow up into a opera singer, set to a piece from Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, to a bizarre gore scene in a bathroom where a foetus still attached by the umbilical cord is floating in the air after she gets blasted through the stomach by the teacher with a gun.

What was once an off-putting aspect of the film for me, the DV photography, actually contributes a great deal to the film for me in how its muddy image appeals as an aesthetic in its own right. The imperfect can have a beauty to it even if it is in the eye of the beholder, and the lo-fi aesthetic sticks out for me on this viewing because of its murkiness and distorted colour lighting, a style as much as the richness of celluloid film or the clearness of high definition in later low budget genre films. Some very striking images start to come to be because of this, such as that incident in the bathroom which is shot in luminous green lighting, almost Vaseline smeared, with the deliberate harshness of the saturated lighting insanely stylish. The more overtly lurid moments, such as intercutting between the teacher and three brothers having their way with the lead, sawing her into pieces, or actress So-yun Lee bravely dealing with nude scenes and/or strapped to machinery built from metal beans and tubing, are contrasted by ones I would expect from video art I have watched, such as intercutting to an actual opera singer never addressed by the cast singing in the scene nearby. These later details now I see are more overtly unconventional choices on purpose.

Particularly with the shots in the open streets or an empty night road, it evokes video art from a variety of decades as mentioned by way of a video camera which distorts the lighting and the colour, in how the failing image adds to the sense of environment that crisp photography might not do well with all the time. Even the moments of scenery consuming colour lighting adds to the distorted sense of reality the film has where everything is out-of-whack to suit the messy visual look. It almost takes one back, for a moment of unintentional comedy, when I spotted a prominent KFC restaurant out of nowhere in a moody scene over turntable music in real South Korean streets. The music is surprisingly strong as already mentioned, and anyone who hates the film would still appreciate the choices immensely. The director has a good taste in classical music and remixes by the likes of Massive Attack, where even in scenes that might frustrate people, such as an opera singer inexplicably stood on a pier as mentioned, masked by the bright white light in front of the camera above them, you still have good music being played that has a grandeur to it. These tonal switches are further fudged by the brief inclusion of an assassin subplot with sci-fi trappings where the schoolgirl, now a biomechanical cyborg, has to kill a person in a restaurant. The further genre changing does pull the film fully into the lurid genre cinema of the time though closer to Takashi Miike's, in both how he abruptly undercut these premises with moments of quietness, or that when he did ramp up the absurdity, he was glad to. The crotch gun that ends this film, subverted as a phallic object inside a man's mouth from a woman in this case, is something he could have done in one of his films.

The experience of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an acquired taste, a lot of its strange tone one which would catch a lot off. It's the blurring of the artistic and the lurid that causes a lot of this, but I have come to love this as time has gone on, where you find yourself both with the pacing of a more atmospheric film, but contrasted by your antagonists being a high pitched voice man with rubber putty all over his head and three strange brothers by his side, one calling himself a girl and their method of dismemberment being a comically large saw a magician would use for a magic show, the artistic aspirations clashing continually with these creative decisions that now win me over. We can only thank an early DVD release by Third Window Pictures in Britain for licensing this - an unsung hero especially for Japanese cinema like Shinya Tsukamoto to Sogo "Gakuryū" Ishii on Blu-Ray - in fully translated English subtitles, as we never got any of the other films from Gee-woong Nam.  As a director, he would continue with these very idiosyncratic titles - Chow Yun-Fat Boy Meets Brownie Girl (2002) furthers this eye catching title with a premise about a jar the former finds that allows him to turn snails into human beings, whilst Never Belongs to Me (2006) sounds like a premise to a Shinya Tsukamoto or Miike film we sadly never got, of a man who on request of his girlfriend in an act of revenge has his penis replaced with a gun that fires on orgasm to use on those who did them wrong. Whether they were any good or not is entirely not for the place of this review, but if any of them demonstrated the style and idiosyncrasies of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine, that would make them more enticing.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

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

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam aka. Turkish Star Wars (1982)

 

Director: Çetin Inanç

Screenplay: Cüneyt Arkın

Cast: Cüneyt Arkın as Murat; Aytekin Akkaya as Ali; Necla Fide as the Queen; Hüseyin Peyda as Bilgin; Hikmet Taşdemir as Sihirbaz

 

I considered films through a black and white viewpoint when I was younger. They had to have clear narratives and be well made, something which made “Turkish Star Wars”, as I first learnt of it as, one of the worst films I had ever saw when I viewed it at sixteen or so in a bender of Google Video viewings. Now my views have changed, where films of immense quality become greater but I can appreciate something like this, which comes in the context where Turkey’s film board was not allowing Western films like Star Wars (1977) into the country¹, leading to one of the most infamous “Turkploitation” films to be produced by a director known as a “jet director” for getting films made within ten days¹. Let us not kid ourselves, even next to other Turksploitation films, this is one of the more erratic I have ever seen, its infamy deserved for its shamelessness and how, honestly, it is an utter mess even if its unpredictability is something to also admire.

After centuries of change where atomic wars have decimated most of it and pieces of the continents have drifted off into space, Earth (which suspiciously looks like squashed Death Star) is under attack by an immortal wizard. With the planet protected by a force field created from human brainwaves, the wizard needs human brains, or at least one, to destroy it and attack Earth, forcing two Turkish space pilots onto his own planet where they must face his bizarre hordes of monsters and stop his plans of galactic destruction. Turkish Star Wars is infamous, as a low budget Turksploitation film, for taking footage from Star Wars and using music from everything from that film to Flash Gordon (1980). The montage of attractions theory created by Sergei E. Eisenstein is decimated by the slapdash editing of this, where even the use of music and sound clips is as hastily put together as the visuals, and yet has a drastic effect on the viewer when viewed together in this narrative. The difference is that, while Eisenstein wanted to elicit certain emotions from the viewer, this film causes stupefied amazement instead.

Turkish Star Wars, revisiting it, is a glorious mess, the plot synopsis my attempt to comprehend a film which can suddenly lunge forward, even into the middle of a fight without warning, to the next plot point, where monsters suddenly appear out of nowhere and the theme from Indiana Jones, used behind the main hero, suddenly battles with the villain’s Flash Gordon synth within the same scene. Random zombies or the fact there are nunchaku in space are the less strange aspects to this film, which is frankly a disaster in terms of the material being put together if you were to judge it severely for its technical qualities.  Even with the English subtitles over the years not being perfect, this as well in terms of the script feels an over-elaborate take, where its lead actor Cüneyt Arkın, a well regarded and prolific figure in his homeland, got to write the script too but it feels like everything he wanted to go with too ambitious for its production craft. For what is a simple tale of heroes versus a human blood drinking space wizard who just wants a human brain, not plural, to destroy the Earth he was once a person on, this lost a lot of the point with everything else Arkın wanted to include for profoundness. The result in watching it, and trying to understand it, is like becoming a paper bag in the wind which drops you off by the end confused and alarmed.

The decision to use so much pre-existing work is as much part of the confusion, as using the Star Wars footage for production value makes less sense as the film goes, a detriment to sanity as none of the re-appropriated Star Wars footage makes sense, especially if suggested (by the Death Star in another role) the Earth is destroyed at one point only to not. It is as much a collage of pre-existing science fiction and fantasy works beyond that film, in its premise and pieces, including things that were not directly included in the film but evoked for me accidentally, as the creators of the film could cram into a single movie and made into a cabinet of baffling curiosities. With our main hero (played by Cüneyt Arkın), who bounces around like Taylor Kitsch in John Carter (of Mars) (2012), and his womanising friend whose famous whistle to attract women accidentally conjures up skeletal horsemen to his annoyance, we see them fight everything from TV headed robots and cybermen from a fifties b-movie, toilet paper mummies out of genre, and to paraphrase a description my younger self used when he viewed this the first time, the bastard feral children of Elmo from Sesame Street. There are even henchmen clearly wearing budget Fu Manchu and Devil masks among the goons. My struggles with the film still are softened because of this, where the film does drag but, if you can tolerate its tone, is starling and hilarious in a positive way. Between the lengthy narrative exposition, it is effective a series of long, continuous fight scenes where anti-war philosophy and appropriated Western iconography is matched with a beast having its head karate chopped off or a severed head thrown at another so hard they explode.

The philosophy and mythology in the film adds the cherry to the top of its cake, where knowing its lead actor is writing this provides a sympathy for the film even if, from the first few minutes in with the narration trying to explain the world it is setting up, his script did not translate onscreen in a way that would be coherent for everyone. The film is a stream of consciousness of unconventional ideas, quaint ideas of hope, and erratic science fiction ideas that adds to the incomprehensible but delightfully creative mass you see (and hear and read) onscreen. That it includes religion, with an Islamic subtext, adds to the sincerity of the film that is an unexpected turn as well, even if it goes towards putting context to a sacred sword and a brain. There is also the bromance between the leads which also is admirable, one so strong your brains are psychically linked and, regardless of the running gag of one of them believing himself to be a womanizer, becomes the real romance of the production.

The flaws even in terms of this type of cinema is that it does rush through so much of itself with far more concern, for all things, for its lore about the “13^th Tribe” of Earth’s ancestors blown off the planet, literally, rather than making sure the work is a little bit more cohesive to appreciate its simple premise. When it can stay for a minute and take a breath, even some of its goofier moments also become better for this, like the training montage of punching rocks, tying them to ones legs to run and jump, or just kicking then as projectile weapons. It is a film on a purely silly level something you are glad exists, because it has someone karate chop a monster’s arms off and then impale them claw first into their torsos, and it would be improved simply if this had been a little bit more cohesive then what we got. What you get nonetheless, as an artefact from filmmaking history is nonetheless compelling if you have the patience for this.

For those people, over eighty minutes, this is the kind of janky spluttering that would be a breath of fresh air for those willing to experience it. There is more pain to be experienced with something which is technically more cohesive but has no effect, whilst here the vividness of Turkish Star Wars and its own unpredictability is worth cherishing even if we all admit that would never win any technical awards for quality. It is a film you need to see once, even if you hate it, and now that my tastes have changed and I can see its virtues, I look back at my younger self who found it unbearable and ponder how much of a naive sourpuss he was.

 

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1) The strange case of Turkish Star Wars, written for Esquire Middle East.

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

 

Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter & Larry Sulkis

Cast: Natasha Henstridge as Lieutenant Melanie Ballard; Ice Cube as James "Desolation" Williams; Jason Statham as Sergeant Jericho Butler; Clea DuVall as Officer Bashira Kincaid; Pam Grier as Commander Helena Braddock; Joanna Cassidy as Dr. Arlene Whitlock; Richard Cetrone as Big Daddy Mars; Liam Waite as Officer Michael Descanso; Duane Davis as "Uno" Williams; Lobo Sebastian as "Dos"; Rodney A. Grant as "Tres"

Canon Fodder

 

Ghosts of Mars was just okay. That really is not a good place to put oneself in a review, but for what was once a loathed film for me from John Carpenter, that pretty much is the perfect irony when returning to this. This was not even with the loaded issue for other viewers of the weight of his legacy against his later films before he retired and became fully a touring musician. It is deemed that John Carpenter’s career ended on much weaker films, and sadly that is a concept which I have heard with the legacies of a few big names. It seems absurd, and the argument that directors as they get older lose their spark misses context, when some get better and more interesting the less “popular” they are, and when you have a case like Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira was getting critical acclaim when he was making films past a hundred years old. With Ghosts of Mars, it feels less like a film of an older director losing his style; in fact, if this came from a young director in their twenties, it feels like the film that catches attention with hope that they capitalize on the style they have and add more personal voice to the later films. That is the real irony here, as Ghosts of Mars is sound in scope, with ambitious aspects, but the presentation is conventional at times to the point it lacked something, which could be found from anyone of any age.

The setting is a tantalizing one, with this one tiny story within it even if with grander concerns. Mars is colonized, and unfortunately, an entity of its past are possessing the settlers in isolated colonies, turning them into husks to be controlled and kill those not taken over. A Martian police unit has been sent to pick up a criminal, James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube), from a jail in a mining colony. In attempting to collect Williams, the group find themselves within a colony where no one is around, until they find the headless bodies strung up and survivors turned into a horde of killers responsible for this. The tone of this, including that their only form of escape from these killers is a giant space railway train, evokes the western genre in an outer space setting. We never got a western from John Carpenter despite the fact he has always been open in his admiration for them and inspired by them. One of the most obvious examples is how the premise of Rio Bravo (1959) inspiring Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and this is important as that is an earlier Carpenter film evoked in Ghosts of Mars as the police and Williams find themselves trapped in a place of head hunters.

The one thing which has not aged well – in a film where the practical art design is juggled with working with CGI, for a film from the early 2000s with a soundtrack by Carpenter full of heavy metal riffs – is actually that parallel to old western films. Space westerns as a concept allow the idea, through a new frontier that is uncharted, to explore the issues of the western, allow us to reflect on the past. One of the most loaded of these is colonization of land, especially as the American Wild West is set in the context that land actually belonged to the many tribes of Native Americans. Ghost of Mars never explicitly refers to this, but by accident the film is riffing on the idea of this, which is not good by mistake as these titular ghosts, literal as we learn of who they are, are psychopaths who disfigure their hosts with body piercings, wearing victims’ faces and collect their severed heads on pikes. It is a dicey position to deal with themes of white colonization in horror with plot tropes like this, even when the colonialists are to also be criticized or even if all of this is unintentional. There is a reason why S. Craig Zahler, when he made an actual horror western with Bone Tomahawk (2015) went out of his way with the script to distance ideas to avoid this, with an actual Native American character on the leads’ side, as they are about to enter the hostile lands of a cannibal tribe, openly dismisses the “troglodytes” as they are called as being nothing like an indigenous American tribe but simply monstrous, and even that film still got called out by some reviewers as racist. You cannot really nod to themes of outsiders fighting the hostile forces of uncharted landscapes without bringing up uncomfortable colonial issues, or racial stereotypes, and Ghosts of Mars even when dealing with hostile Martian ghosts unfortunately falls into this.

Everything else about Ghosts of Mars beyond this is just okay, entertaining but just not at the batting average expected from John Carpenter, which becomes the curse for any creator who manages to string a series of legacy defining works, more so when just one of them would have been enough to cement a legacy, but Carpenter managed multiple in a row. That is the issue, that his highs were so big, even the less regarded ones, or under seen, like Christine (1983) appear with hindsight to be better than most. The issue here is that we are just missing that one twist in the plot, missing that one turn or shock of his style of the films before to stick out. The whit is still there, and actually this is jokier even if the nastiness of the threat is here. In the downtime, whilst some of the nods to the female cast being gay are crassly put, there is a fascinating nod I completely missed in my youth to the setting being a matriarchal colony. It is merely the backdrop, causing one to wish this film had been more a success and Carpenter could have made another film in this world, as it provokes a fascinating turn on gender politics without needing to be the central concern. At a period where Mars’ colonization has been dealt with in areas like the lack of breathable oxygen but is still early days, we have already set up that the figures in high power of women, that is never explained aside from the fact that, barring Ice Cube as the anti-hero, our lead is Natasha Henstridge, allowing her a good meaty role as a result of this. Men are still here, including a baby Jason Statham before his career grew, but the women are in charge, with Pam Grier as the head of the police group, and the script making jokes the explicitly cut down to size macho bullshit, even accidentally cutting their own thumb off whilst high at one point, in the downtime. Whilst Statham plays his character as a horn dog who tries too hard to proposition to Henstridge multiple times, his is one of the only male characters with Ice Cube’s "Desolation" Williams to be reliable, the most comedy coming from William’s supposed savors from jail, his brother and his two colleagues, who become the butt of most of these jokes. Cube himself, doing better than Busta Rhymes infamously in Halloween: Resurrection (2002) as a hip hop star in a genre film at this point, is stiff at first, too much attempt to make him edgy and cool, and thankfully he is able to get to the point of standing out when he and Henstridge just get to play a buddy cop duo role stuck in this hellish scenario.

The aesthetic also stands out. The practical effects are still visible, in the production design juggling the aesthetics of the western genre with science fiction on a lower scale genre film, working around ways to depict details like the giant tank-like train, a symbol from western iconography, which still work and have their own distinct sheen. There is a sense of cool pulp sci-fi in the Millennium, and it feels closer to this new century and decade than a film washing over in aesthetics from the nineties either. The music is also strong for me, in mind that there is now a greater emphasis on chugging metal riffs, prominently involving the thrash metal band Anthrax but also including guitarists of note like Steve Vai, Buckethead and Nine Inch Nail’s Robin Finck. It feels less nu metal, as the time frame have shown to have been prevalent, but feeling part of what was to become the “New Wave of American Heavy Metal” that fully formed in 2005 onwards if in context of a John Carpenter score. Some may find it inappropriate, but for me it befits the aesthetic of the entire film, which is strong in itself. With the isolation of the red earth of the setting, all the colonial town setting has lo-fi science fiction aesthetics, with steel grey and heavy looking vehicles, heavy looking guns, and the costumes either suggesting struggling on in life or the uniforms of officers designed more for practicality in this environment. The world does breath into life in the little details.

It is just a shame that the film is missing just the last little thing to get it over, the iconic aspect that a lot of Carpenter’s most well appreciated films had. This was also the film, until Carpenter’s final theatrical work The Ward (2010), we were left with as it did not do well at the box office at all. It is, in its own context, a good as a solid genre film, even in spite of issues raised by accident with the narrative. It is just a shame that this is missing that one diversion away from an A-to-B plot, which made Carpenter’s films from his golden era stand out, something which could have made this more of a highlight within the filmography.

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

 

Director: Ciro Ippolito (and Biagio Proietti)

Screenplay: Ciro Ippolito

Cast: Belinda Mayne as Thelma Joyce; Mark Bodin as Roy; Benedetta Fantoli as Maureen; Michele Soavi as Burt; Valeria Perilli as Jill; Danilo Micheli as Bill

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It took seven years to get from Alien (1979) to Aliens (1986). Italy got there with an unofficial sequel a year later and likely with mind the Ridley Scott film would still be in cinemas around the world and people would believe this was an actual sequel, they could follow it with this without anything but pure carnival hucksterism. This is funnier as, with the actual Alien franchise, we never got Xenomorphs on Earth until Aliens vs. Predator in 2001 but this got there one year later too.

Set around astronauts on a space mission, we follow a group of cave explorers predating The Descent (2005), exploring a cave to their peril in the midst of an abrupt alien invasion. Immediately you see that the production wanted to make caving the exciting new thing, helped by the fact as the predominant set location for this lower budget film, actual caves, are impressive locations regardless of price of filming, legitimately beautiful locations and perfect for a horror film. More idiosyncratic is the obsession with bowling, which is Italian producers trying to figure out what is hip to American audiences and that they had access to a bowling alley too. Joking aside, it's a simple monster film, where Thelma (Belinda Mayne) as our lead is among this caving group, who also just happens to be psychic and has grim concerns about what is happening in general around her. That is a plot detail which is abrupt but means she is the one person with a bad feeling as, likely due to the astronauts' mission, there are festering alien blobs on the beach among the sand castles let alone in the caves.

Obviously, like Luigi Cozzi's Contamination (1980), these Italian films wanted to have the face huggers from Alien, one of its most iconic images from the pulsating eggs let alone the horrifying critters inside, but could not for copyright reasons. The iconic eggs even if their biology is weird, meant to be the selling point for both but having to figure out something new even if unconventional, here blue rocks which pulsate and become face eating entities. They do one better than the face huggers, whose children burst out of chests, by gestating and bursting directly out the face of their victims, but it is one of the touches you see where this was made to follow a major film globally. Like Contamination's, which were more biological bombs which made everyone explode, there is no logic like the Xenomorphs to how these alien "eggs" work, only the fear of unknown objects being played to in a film like this which, in content, cause gory results or leads here to mostly vague rubber entities which have red Twiglet tendrils.

This film has a style, even if it is as much an Italian production shooting in America trying to be American, even if it unfortunately leads to a dubbing of one black cast member, a bowling alley staff member, which director Eli Roth once bluntly called "Amos & Andy" dubbing, clearly an Italian man in a voice over he openly admits crosses a line into being racist¹. It is a languid film in fact, taking half an hour to get to the caves themselves, soaking in the American locations, and as a monster film pacing itself quietly with its cast, it is a distinct change of pace even from other genre films from Italy at the time even if might put some off expecting the purely over-the-top and lurid nature of others from this era. The music is one of the strongest aspects, composer Oliver Onions, alongside the memorable name, also happens to be a pseudonym for Guido De Angelis and Maurizio De Angelis, the legendary composers behind films like Street Law (1974), acclaimed in the Italian genre field and earning their pay check for a great score here.

For the moments you can pick holes in this film, I have seen it enough times now they even have a charm. It makes no sense to see future director Michele Soavi, before directing Cemetery Man (1994), writing on a typewriter in a cave using lit candles, a habit his character has despite the newly elected Pope in Italy meaning the candles have become more expensive to buy, but it is a cool (and funny) image) alongside moments which work intentionally. One, in a prolonged camera pan after a victim against complete black, exemplifying the moment their face explodes from a recent host, is actually good enough to have become an iconic moment in a more acclaimed film. In terms of whether this is actually scary or good horror, that is entirely subjective. Honestly the more interesting thing about this era of Alien rip offs, which are different to even the ones for Aliens  which took a different tone as an official sequel, is how they reflect tropes from a popular film in their own way for better and for worse, like Peter Walker's Inseminoid (1981) for one closer to this Englishman's home. They are reflections of the industry of cinema, where everyone is eyeing everyone's success and sometimes blatantly cashing in on what worked, which can be ironic for entertainment for some viewers, but still counts as entertaining. This one at least, to the film's credit, has the creepy idea of being inspired by tape worms in terms of the alien tendrils, even if I made a joke about them earlier in the review, taking inspiration from something which is real and can be found in a human being's guts, which is creepy. The egg symbology from Alien as mentioned is scrambled, a pretence to sell the film, but when this is about cavern walls with tendrils coming out of them, and the aliens themselves being vague entities we never truly see the full sight of, even if to cover the practicalities of the effects, it is still effective.

Also this commits to an appropriately nihilistic ending, taking advantage of when you can shoot at the right time, and you can depict a metropolis in carefully chosen shots completely without people, offering a gut punch that makes up for this lower budget with an obsession for bowling. Ciro Ippolito, the credited director, is an outlier as none of his other films fit the template of genre cinema at the time, more of a producer/writer for titles like the romantic film Vanilla and Chocolate (2004). This is the same for the un-credited co-director Biagio Proietti, though he has a co-writer credit on Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat (1981). A lot of the history of Italian genre cinema factors in key figures, not just directors but also screenwriters and producers, who continued even if into other genres within this now-cult sphere of genre filmmaking. This makes these two fascinating alongside the film as a one-and-done in that said history. Literally they came to take advantage of the popularity of Alien, did not get sued or have their films pulled as infamously others did, like Enzo G. Castellari for the Jaws inspired Great White (1981). Whilst Alien 2: On Earth was once an obscure title, likely because it did not have a known or infamous name in the director's chair, it was salvaged and rediscovered, allowing its mischief with a known franchise, and that it managed to get away with it, to sparkle with ghoulishness.  

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1) Taken from the featurette Franchised Terrorist: An Interview with Eli Roth, as was available on the British Blu Ray release by 88 Films.

Odd Noggins (2015)

 

Director: Joe Sherlock

Screenplay: Joe Sherlock

Cast: Melody Berg as Amanda; Juniper Bloodraven as Miss Garland; John Bowker as the Drunk Grandpa; Emily Howard as Shannon; Richard Johnson as Tom; Bryn Kristi as Liberty; Morgan Mayhem as Tammi; Rob Merickel as Uni; Roxxy Mountains as Tami; Bob Olin as John; Kirk Sardonis as Jeff; Connor Sherlock as Jeff

An Abstract Candidate

 

Half Gator

Half Man

Caught on security cam!!!

Aliens. Always the menace, abducting women and pulling out their intestines in nightmares, but in this context, Joe Sherlock's Odd Noggins comes with the knowledge that, whilst they are integral to the film, everything you would normally expect even from a micro budget film, and what to presume with one about said aliens, flies out the window. The woman we are introduced to have these nightmares, clearly believing she was abducted by aliens, is sympathetic and takes a stance. Where things abruptly turn is the moment she dissolves into yellow custard and all that remains is a skeleton...in a film watched by another woman.

I was aware, through a podcast named No-Budget Nightmares, Odd Noggins was going to be a perplexing experience even for a micro-budget film, and there is the additional context that the original version they covered was from 2000, whilst this is the 2015 remake I am covering, still a weird amalgamation of non-sequiturs, a UFO plot and going against expectations of conventional genre films. This was where I first learnt of pimento loaf, a food item I never heard of until learning of this film's existence, and this clearly shows that director-writer Joe Sherlock either has a thing for women drinking beer in the bath, or does but also enjoys doing so himself, with drinking beer in the hot tub the more decadent option to really enjoy life. For the version I saw, it is a film that, even if shot in many people's homes, has its own gleefully playful sense of logic you have to accept or you will hate this film. Expect to be befuddled on purpose, as this repeats and refers to small details in a noodle map of logic not following its plot in great elaboration. That film within a film for starters is referenced throughout, mostly following various women who end up watching the film and/or referencing it without greater context, but there is never context given for it, even if linked to the central plot, nor considered related to the aliens in that film proper.  In one scene a male bar keeper jokes about an art house film which just leads from one person than to another's path they cross with, than onwards. It is breaking the forth wall in talking of how that is the structure here, and inexplicably, I can reference a film like Max Ophüls' La Ronge (1950), a film literally about a circling narrative of interlinked romances, as a comparable example with Odd Noggins of all things. That is respect for Sherlock himself as, playing in its own logic, this toys with leading the viewer around the garden path deliberately, so any unexpected similarities to acclaimed art house cinema from French is entirely because this film itself is structured this unconventionally on purpose too.

This follows a string of characters in strange scenarios, including a "Bellygram" dance, a belly dancing strip-o-gram figure without the nudity, a sad female clown, and various women that are part of a UFO conspiracy with many drinking beer in the bathtub, even still wearing the clown makeup. I bring that up again, and I will probably get a weird look from the reader from across the internet for this, but this is a behaviour which happens a lot here to the point you have to address it, with many of these female characters doing this. And yes, the nudity as a result by the female cast is far more frequent than even some erotic films, surprisingly so. In mind to concerns about this, if one is going to have exploitative factors like this, Odd Noggins can also legitimately claim to be a standard bearer for body positivity even when it is doing this for titillation. It is amazingly positive as, something clearly through his career, Sherlock casts a diverse cast of actresses, of various ages and figures, larger women to smaller, and Odd Noggins at least bothers to have a wider view of women of all shapes and sizes being attractive. Even as a goofy free flowing piece, it is also about its female cast, frustrated workers in a variety of jobs, whilst the men are almost all weirdoes and doofuses on purpose. The exception is the man who needs special modification and dresses like a man in black. Clearly, in his case, he is connected to the aliens and really does not count, alongside the fact he also eats large jars of mayonnaise with a spoon.

All of this is part of this film's logic, to repeat little touches ad nauseum to befuddle the viewer. This feels unlike some films from this area of having improvised their plots with little, but a micro budget film with a fixation on deliberately repetition, Twin Peaks references, and finding concepts like a Renaissance fair and pimento loaf in the abstract inherently funny as concepts. Occasionally, as want of its alien premise, people melt into luminous lemon meringue filling barring the bones, the kind you get from even English cafes underneath Perspex covers. Most, if you cannot vibe with this, will hate Odd Noggins, a film which does the "it was all a dream" twist as a standard moment. [Huge Spoiler] The actual twist is that most of the female cast are working with the aliens, to take men's heads and take them up to the mother ship in cardboard boxes. [Spoilers End] How Odd Noggins plays, since we follow the female cast, means that its finale never comes off as misogynistic symbolism of female tempters that sadly comes into storytelling a lot, but more like the men are, as mentioned, patsies. Figures like "Sir Porkalot", as he is dubbed by his girlfriend, and the rest of the male cast, obsessed with these women, are always side characters that are clueless and/or horny until the film reveals its actual plot. [Another Spoiler] Always too late when their heads are ripped off by pure strength. [Spoilers End]

The end is a pimento loaf sandwich being made with an insane amount of sauce and slices, in close up as the plot is actually explained, used aptly to conclude how this strange film closes out. This is an acquired taste, probably like that sandwich itself, but I have to credit Joe Sherlock for making something idiosyncratic. He was also also editing and scoring this, with the score itself too a compellingly odd synth score meant to evoke Theremin, drones and an end credit piece where "Shake your booty" is repeated, playing with the mood of proto vaporwave or recorded on musty tape on purpose. Throughout the film, characters also read a magazine like Weekly World News, famous for its UFO sighting claims and the cult hero Bat Boy, and that really suggests a lot of the tone. It is a film about the eccentric and the strange on purpose, and it actually lives up to the attitude that made me want to cover such films like this as a fan, of the film seemingly of "no purpose" defying expectations over and over again.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Non-Narrative

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

Mindkiller (1987)

 

Director: Michael Krueger

Screenplay: Dave Sipos, Curtis Hannum and Michael Krueger

Cast: Joe McDonald as Warren; Wade Kelley as Larry; Shirley Ross as Sandy; Kevin Hart as Brad; Tom Henry as Vivac Chandra; Diana Calhoun as Mrs. Chandra; George Flynn as Mr. Townsend; Crystel Niedle as Connie

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The way things are going, I should try to screw a turtle!

Among the many horror films made in the eighties, Mindkiller definitely exists because of the whole issue of how, in society, the concept of falling in love and romance exist, but if you are a socially awkward person, the ways of yore to go about intimacy are far more difficult. This is unfortunately where incels came into being, the negative downward spiral in this position, which Mindkiller shows a prototypical example of in Warren (Joe McDonald). The set-up emphasises the horrific nature under its surface, a strange (i.e. perfect) atmosphere of fog machine, gel lighting over cold purplish-blue lights, jump cuts, and a mother angry about her adult son killing hamsters again. Yes, it is absurd in tone but aesthetically, before you get to the main story and Warren himself, it stands out. The son is non-human in look, but once he was a man who believing psychic ability could be honed and improved, the manuscript from his work finding itself in Warren's hands at his work as a library clerk.

Warren is the kind of guy without self-esteem, who is trying to watch The Art of Seduction starring Rex Hunter to get dating tips, without much luck with women in the same way a blind squirrel attempts to get nuts in a live mind field. Warren unfortunately has a temper, and shows the worse aspects of how people just struggle with the interaction presumed to be needed in human society, and in needing to interact and date, which even a cheesier horror film like this can depict well. This is an issue when a new employee at the library, a woman named Sandy (Shirley Ross), comes into Warren's world and he falls in love with her. Naturally, he finds in the archive this manuscript which involves mind control. A silly concept, but with the insidious nature of the seduction artist, it gets into how, in the struggle with socialising with others, the lure of controlling others for love and sex fantasies becomes the immediate downfall of Warren.

Films dealing with these types of archetypes, the male character who is weak and crawls towards violent power with horrible consequences, does become a metaphor for how many exist in horror cinema of how society makes a mistake of not designing itself to help the lonely and desperate, to prevent real life examples of Warren coming into be or preventing them from being drawn to have control in violent ways, here a research text which offers a key to greatness and mind expansion, that however ends in tears. At first, Warren is actually nice, as it has nothing to do with mind control, but to expand the mind, improving in his work and confidence, cook awesome food, and psychically cause vending machines to spit out candy bars at a whim. When he gets to women as a possession to have, including Sandy, is when absolute power corrupts, fixation and rage corrupting him. More so here if you attempt to brainwash the woman, Sandy, you have a crush on, and if something is going wrong with your newly acquired powers.

Mindkillers is a more silly genre film despite the more serious themes I can reach for in its plot, personality to be found in the film, a goofy streak of humour despite aspects of its content being far more uncomfortable in the future after due to how these themes of men reaching for more extreme ways to be with women have become a subject of greater concern, such as the incel concept itself. It follows the expected plot life of many films like this, as his experiments in mind expansion lead to Warren becoming colder and meaner, mind controlling a paper cutter blade in his friend's hand to go onto his other fingers the first signs he will lash out. The film returns to the tone its prologue has, when molecular manipulation by a machine is the final stage of the manuscript, which has unforeseen body horror consequences. A film like this does not really reinvent the wheel, but without any context for this, Mindkiller was very entertaining, a goofy tone which does not stop these more serious ideas to come into play. Even when it escalates with this plot turn, usually a film plot like this suggests one should not tamper with powers beyond what we should access; instead, truthfully, it is more the morality which fascinates me with this theme from even before cinema came into being for the horror genre. If mental expansion was possible, would we have Warrens brainwashing women to love them and hurting people, which is unfortunately the likely scenario. There are also the unforeseen health risks, such as deformation of the head with the brain trying to adapt to the ability to hear all thoughts.

The turn into body horror and the unnatural helps a slow burn and silly film, where his friend's use of the manuscript just causes him to start baying at imaginary moons between his growing confidence, like he is a pretending to be a werewolf, a film with personality which does bring some practical effects and mind bending content into the finale to escalate the tone. It gets into phantastical layers, as people are terrorized in their dreams, even monster tooth phones being brought in, and Warren's transformation fully embraces the spectacle of this era. By the end, someone looks like a Dick Tracy villain named Big Head, or people can be possessed by giant heart blobs that transfer the original person's mind. It is sad that director/co-writer Michael Krueger did not do a lot more than two films in the directorial role, and a few scripts, but sadly, the reason was that he passed in 1990¹, not long into the beginning of his career in genre cinema. This is an obscure film I tracked down in itself, one which I came to appreciate due to an absolute lack of expectations.

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1) The British Film Institute's page on Michael Krueger.

I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. (1982)

 

Director: Marius Penczner

Screenplay: Marius Penczner and John Gillick

Cast: Larry Raspberry as Ace Evans; John Gillick as Bart Brazzo; James Raspberry as Rex Armstrong

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Note: The following is based on the 2005 re-edit version of this film. This does not reflect a review of the original version, which is referrenced in the below entry.

 

One slip up, and we air condition her skull.

A fifties sci-fi parody, I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. is somehow a film I had never heard of but has a compelling enough back story, alongside its onscreen content, that left me surprised it never crossed my path. Director and co-writer Marius Penczner made this film with a budget of $27,000, with money won from an Emmy winning short film of his, and the help of Memphis-area film students¹, as a Tennessee regional production, which (in the cut I am talking of) is a huge addition to what they succeeded with. Likely the reason this film never came up in my readings is how scarce its original screenings were, only shown in 1985 on the "Night Flight" cable program, a cable program originally on cable TV network USA Network which showed full length and short films alongside music videos. Varying between cult films, short films by the likes of the Quay Brothers, music videos, experimental cinema, and collaborations and specials with the likes of KISS to a video profile of Aretha Franklin’s career, Night Flight was with hindsight admirable in its goals, continuing into the nineties and being revived into the 2010s.

The fact this film was only screened back in 1985 means it was not easy to see unless you were watching Night Flight as a regular viewer, with the only close thing to an actual release coming in 2005 with a DVD release¹, one notably (and with this review based on this version) some revisions that were made to the material by the director. Shot in monochrome, this begins with two prisoners, brothers, being taken to their punishment on an airplane only for a UFO to knock the plane they are in out of the air. In mind to multiple cuts – this 2005 version with a new score and cut down from its original running time - it is cool as a no-nonsense take on the b-movie, with a tongue in its cheek about the tribute but taking itself seriously with a zip from the get-go. There is a sense of humour to this as this is around a conspiracy involving rival cola drink plants, when a health cola plant nearby the crash site is where the survivors of the plane crash, the prisoners, and the aliens behind their escape are hatching a shady plan involving taking over another plant for Uni-Cola. This heist with hostages by the brothers is used as a cover to begin a brainwashing plan on humanity. It is not an accurate attempt at a fifties b-movie - no back screen projection, no Criswell monologues or wobbly tombstones - nor an attempt at campiness, only that it has what costumes, vehicles and sets the production are carefully chosen in an ambitious way to get the right tone for this tribute.

Many of the sets themselves, like the jail the brothers end up in, are real locations which have to be commended in being able to secure them for the production, and unlike some films of the past this nods to, least for 2005 cut, there is a lack of pointless padding. Mesa of Lost Women (1953) this is not, with endless dialogue with no engagement to it, and that was shorter next to I Was... is considerably. Following its tale of secret cola formulas and aliens hiding among us, armed with deadly white sci-fi billiard balls of pain and memory erasure, with only a pair of G-Men and one female journalist to stop them, this has no fat on its form which feels pointless in having. There is a Body Snatchers vibe and brain stealing cola, zombification the result with this strangely not the only film from the eighties obsessed with cola stealing one's mind. Surf II (1984), with Eddie Deezen creating Buzz Cola to turn surfers into zombies, inexplicably shares a bonding moment as two films parodying older decades of cinema, that one inspired by early sixties beach films, and the dangers of sugary soda.

A sense of personality here - such as an argument whether people keep whiskey in their car glove compartment or not - really helps, even throwing in a stop motion monster for good measure as a cherry on top, with the funny knowledge this same creature returned, as Marius Penczner directed the music video for ZZ Top’s TV Dinners, where the beast made a cameo¹. Controversially, with no context for the original version, the re-edit does not jar badly at all with this film, which could have botched this badly and felt like trying to bolt on an entire aesthetic, of 2000s technological for film making, onto a production a time long after the materials were filmed with its own technological aesthetics. The music suits perfectly, there is not a moment within the film without feeling threadbare, and the inter-titles placing chapters on this tale, clearly to help explain context, are to be appreciated or can just be ignored without being too much a distraction.

As micro budget films go, this one can raise its head high in the knowledge that it is an accomplished one in the circumstances of this area of cinema. It also has the least expected recommendation that Bob Dylan of all people saw the film and wished he had starred in it¹. This quote is said to come from an article interviewing in Spin Magazine Volume One, number 8 from December 1985¹. Called Don't Ask Me Nothin' About Nothin' I Might Just Tell You The Truth: Bob Dylan Revisited, the article, which is split in two in the magazine², does not talk about this fabled list of films he wished he was in. It does however come from Interview magazine, a magazine first published in 1969, and comes from a February 1986 interview with writer Scott Cohen, where this film is mentioned alongside The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), the original 1959 Ben-Hur, and Raintree County (1957), a romantic western set during the American Civil War starring Montgomery Clift and among others Elizabeth Taylor. For weird details like this, especially when confirmed, I am surprise I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. never crossed my path. It is a niche production, one which might not be as action packed or outright cheesy for some people's tastes. In huge admiration of its achievements, this does deserve a reappraisal.

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1) The film's streamable version on NightFlight Plus.com, which includes info on the production.

2) Spin Magazine Volume One, number 8 from December 1985, which has the Don't Ask Me Nothin' About Nothin' I Might Just Tell You The Truth article, preserved on Archive.org.

3) New Again: Bob Dylan, Interview Magazine's re-visit on this original February 1986 review, using Scott Cohen's original writing.