2001 Maniacs (2005) / 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010)

 

Director: Tim Sullivan

Screenplay: Tim Sullivan and Chris Kobin [and Christopher Tuffin for 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams]

Cast:

2001 Maniacs:

Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Giuseppe Andrews as Harper Alexander, Jay Gillespie as Anderson Lee, Matthew Carey as Cory Jones, Peter Stormare as Professor Ackerman, Marla Malcolm as Joey, Gina Marie Heekin as Kat, Brian Gross as Ricky, Mushond Lee as Malcolm

2001 Maniacs - Field of Screams:

Bill Moseley as Mayor George W. Buckman, Trevor Wright as Falcon, Lin Shaye as Granny Boone, Christa Campbell as Milk Maiden, Ahmed Best as Crow, Adam Robitel as Lester, Nivek Ogre as Harper Alexander, Andrea Leon as Val Turner

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You’re boning your cousin, and I’m a pig?

Full Spoilers Ahead

I want to return to a lot of films I once hated with a more positive outlook on them, but the 2000s remakes of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) sadly belongs to that category of those where I had my initial issues with grow, cultivating into a clear and understood view of why I cannot vibe with them. More so as this time I saw the 2010 sequel, which also establishes that these films belonging to an era of cinema I grew up with which is now old, not inherently a criticism in itself, but with these unfortunately belonging to the side I glad is less common nowadays. The edgy opening of the original, splicing real Civil War photos with creepy music and slashes in the soundtrack, alongside immediately raising the concerns of how the remake series tackles the Civil War, fully shows the mid-2000s aesthetic of horror is now old after I grew up with it. The first film was produced by Raw Nerve, Eli Roth's company with Scott Spiegel, and Boaz Yakin which produced his two Hostel films, marking this particular aesthetical era, even in a more overtly comedic case here, of a grungy and more explicit type of American horror. There are also, unfortunately, obnoxious frat boys as the leads, who after being very bad in their Civil War classes thus end up ironically in the past whilst trying to get to a party Florida. They end up, as in Lewis’ version, in Pleasant Valley, a Southern Confederate throwback which openly wants to get revenge on the North for the Civil War by luring and killing Northern Yankees.

The obnoxiousness is there, as no one is likable even if you are eventually meant to sympathize with them, to the point I cared more for Eli Roth in a cameo as a guy who throws dead armadillos at passing cars, claims they ran over his pet, and guilts them into free car rides with his dog Dr. Mambo. The sequel has the same issue, even if parodying the Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reality TV show, The Simple Life, which lasted from 2003 to 2007 with its obnoxious reality TV blonde stand ins and its small crew. Only the two films having male characters who are gay or embrace it is a nickel of empathy, and this tellingly comes from Tim Sullivan, as a LGBTQ horror filmmaker, whose entry for the anthology film Chillarama (2011) having the evocatively named I was a Teenage Werebear which plays to the slang version of “bear”, not just the mythological idea of bear men. I wish this was the direction we went more with, alongside the streaks of camp as these are horror comedies, as all my problems with both films begin and end with them attempting to play to taboos with these Southern hick stereotypes, with racism and various taboos, which comes off as a terrible strain of ironically nudging to these for discomfort humour whilst still having the stereotypes and racism.

The Pleasant Valley locals are evil, indiscriminating killing and eating Northerners, but they are mean to be anti-heroes which you whoop for despite the fact the first film plays to their more overt racism unlike the original film, especially as Robert Englund as Mayor George W. Buckman, the head of the community, is a really good casting choice as a lead. Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original film never addressed the uncomfortable issues of how the Southern Confederacy, whilst only lasting from 1861 to 1865, fought the Civil War for an idealized view of the South based on plantations and slavery, yet he managed to find the right balance and even melancholia for the film made after Blood Feast (1963), where he invented the splatter genre, that had a great high concept premise. It had a playful goofiness which undercut the premise's moral implications, but fully took advantage of the themes as it was set hundred years after the Civil War with the literal ghosts of the South against the North. Whilst out of context the song he wrote is a problematic earworm, and becomes more so in the grungy metalish version in the remake films, The South's Gonna Rise Again, in context it is a perfect opening song for the tone in context and fully informed the themes of his lurid little drive-in production with the right sick humored tone. That being a Southern town in the past, random bystanders in the war, who were destroyed and had become the hate driven killers against a cast, including Blood Feast’s William Kerwin, who are actual adults and actually sympathetic. Whilst never dealing with the truly problematic nature of the Confederate, even for a wacky sixties gore film which is deeply silly and made by a filmmaker who even laughed at the notion of artist pretense of artistry in cinema, the film managed somehow to get the idea that these Southerners, once tragic side casualties in a war which killed both sides, became these gleeful limb lopping psychopathic ghosts but with the Northern Yankees figures you want to see survive. You can challenge that sentence, and the film, for glossing over the South's history of plantations and slavery, and you are absolutely right too dear reader, but there is no sense of the film being pro-Confederate either, or worse smudging the tone, just an exploitation film perfectly tapping into a history moment like an old wound in a good example of bad taste.

Here, playing these Southern stereotypes’ more overt racism in the 2005 film, with an African American character with his Asian girlfriend the stick of this, the ironic humour around tackling this becomes as problematic for me for that attempted irony, which gets worse in the sequel and is attempting a detachment which cannot past muster when it falls into an un-PC attitude we challenge nowadays. This is not just even morally but, with respect for Tim Sullivan and the co-screenwriters for both films, that for me, trying to be edgy deliberately in ways like this comes off as the wet fart of humour. There is a scene of Englund, part of a group of cannibalistic ghosts, with a pair of chopsticks talking about having Chinese food which, as a British lad with awareness of his culture, evokes the worse of the lame British comedies of the seventies and so. Forgetting just the political correctness, this type of un-PC humour, for deliberately provocation nowadays against the "woke" or here in irony, is a deuce chill culturally evoking a lame uncle ruining the mood with an off-colour joke, or a bad comedian in an old English pub. This especially amplifies for the sequel, but it is found in the prequel to, which is juggling this with gory set pieces undercut by the humour.

The stereotyping of the Southerners is an issue too, as there is a precise difference in criticizing the Confederacy, with the Confederate flags on display in these films more uncomfortable for me as time passes, as a viewer not even from the United States, to falling to a stereotype as bad as the racist lines played for ironic humour. There is a sheep shagging joke that continues into the sequel, where they probably could not afford an actual sheep, and it felt like the obvious joke to have whilst we have these stereotypes. The ones in the original sixties film were stereotypes, but not as heavy handed, and they were even felt to have more period accurate costumes; whilst the sequel has a shift in budget, to the point they decide to move and have a touring Pleasant Valley, rather than using a set, the costumes especially on the women of the town, who tempt the men folk from the North, feels like sexy Southern belle costumes from a party shop. This is neither a criticism as I do not punch down on budgets and production design, especially for the sequel, but it unfortunately emphasizes the sarcasm and broadness for the first film, with a larger budget, to exaggerate in questionable ways, that this is a horror comedy in how broad and eye rolling it is on the premise, than with Lewis' entire career even with his more nastier films where the premise is taken seriously, but the one liners and pity sense of dialogue made them funny.

The aesthetic has aged in funny ways – there is music from what sounds like Smash Mouth and I wish was, and there is a 2000s horniness which, whilst with copious nudity and that interesting subplot with a gay male character, never really gets sexy in the truest sense. There is all that nudity, a lot of gore, and acid moonshine that burns through a bed used, alongside a guy getting a poker through the arse, but what is meant with a sick humour as the original film becomes broader than Herschell Gordon Lewis’ original, which is said loving his films as a viewer but admitting they were never subtle. That ironic detachment, alongside the ending where the melancholic epilogue of the original is rushed and the survivors die, letting the Southerners win, really was what I was not a fan of this film originally, and stuck out now as a much older guy. The same set up happens in the second film, with the villains winning and even less an attempt at sympathetic leads as a pretense, and magnifies the issues of the previous film more greatly.

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams opens with a comic book prologue, but raises the issue that this is more overt in tackling the maniacs’ origins even as a horror comedy, the details that Herschell Gordon Lewis avoided where, yes, the Civil War likely led to innocents on both sides dying, but the Confederates becoming a problematic lynchpin that ignores slavery as a concept. Even if you ignore this, I have with Field of Screams a film that even with brief moments, and someone like Bill Moseley replacing Englund as Major Buckman doing his hardest to raise my spirits, a charismatic actor even in the most dire of viewing experiences, where I found myself miserable viewing the film. This is considerably rare nowadays as my concept of taste and pleasure with cinema is sometimes likely to baffle others.

There is a definite shift in the tone just in terms of the cameras used. We have gone from the 2000s to the straight to video late 2000s/early 2010s, a huge shift in horror cinema where, as mentioned, the Maniacs have completed disregarded being ghosts tied to one locations and go on tour, by bus, to a new location to get to more Northerners. A huge shift is felt too in how, whilst both of them are horror comedies, the prequel has a foot in the time of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and other extremer horror films, whilst the sequel even with its own gore, with a buzz saw going through a woman in a deliberately ghoulish way, is at a time when the post-Grindhouse (2007) and more pastiche nature of gore movies came to be. Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008) is notable to name check from this period, as Moseley came from that film, as did Nivek Ogre, member of the industrial band Skinny Puppy. This is parodying the then-finished reality TV show as two stereotypes of blonde airheads filming a reality show only to end up at the new travelling Pleasant Valley, one of them in the one weird joke that vaguely worked for me having a pet dog named Biscuit who already died and is kept taxidermied, talked to by the owner as if still alive. By this point, this is not even trying to have serious moments, with the leads all deliberately obnoxious, the sheep one of the maniacs is having a relationship fake, and shenanigans with Mayor George W. Buckman more of a horny old dog than a threat.

And yet there is also a Jewish stereotype, and whilst the maniacs have a more diverse cast, with a Chinese woman and African American proudly among their cannibalistic peers, it leads to the former, China Rose, speaking with a stereotypical voice, and an ongoing joke about a returning maniac, Granny Boone (Lin Shaye), having a relationship with the latter, alongside a fantasy sequence of Buckman's with a black female Northerner, which play off uncomfortable themes of plantation sexual relationships with an obvious end credits punch line that has aged like a fine murder. The post-ironic humour had aged badly from the 2000s onwards, and arguably it is worse as this is trying to be sarcastic and edgy on these types of stereotypes, but slipped into a pretense to even have. This even starts to slip into being wacky in a way that does not work, like an abrupt Southern aerobics joke, and at that point I realize that I find ways to appreciate most films but I have my limited. Even those with wavering acting performances, lack of budget or production quality, tangents away from plots or lack of plots, and all the half marks seen as "bad" cinema are things I now do not care for, and can love films for, but I still find both questionable jokes and forced wackiness like this are a toxic combination for me.

I can now enjoy silly, messy horror films many would dismiss as terrible or even the worst films, but Field of Screams, even with some fun and Bill Moseley on top of his game, was pointless and painful in the way I used to hate films of the past. There is no hate nowadays, only numbness, and it is not the curse of wokeness, but feeling like this type of humour is the equivalent of smearing your own feces on yourself as a protest, next to the fact that next to the original film, there is none of the camp fun, only this sense of sarcasm which I cannot vibe with well. Even as lurid horror comedies, the first has a generic plot pace for me as a viewer, and the latter is neither a plot with a point nor a weird tangent fest like horror cinema at its weirdest, so I find myself a fan of neither for countless reasons.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (1995)

Art by Graham Humphreys

Director: Shinichi Fukazawa

Screenplay: Shinichi Fukazawa

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

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A guy needs muscles after all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015)

 

Directors: Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, Tomm Jacobsen and Joey Scoma

Screenplay: Alec Owen

Cast: Alec Owen as Brent / Brock; Jon Salmon as Nedry; Paul Prado as Turbeaux; Greg Sestero as Derek; Jimmy Wong as Sizzler; Ben Gigli as Samzy; Joey Scoma as Todd; Kelsey Gunn as Samantha; Olivia Taylor Dudley as Motherface

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

 

I'm an immortal fuck machine!

Contextualised as an almost lost film, Dude Bro Party Massacre III was by all accounts demanded by President Ronald Reagan to be destroyed, likely for the plot twist in a dream sequence where he is secretly killing bros as a female serial killer. His censorship of the film, destroying it, was however thwarted by the fact one teen in Minnesota and his VHS player managed to record a late night public television screening of the film, the only copy we are able to see. Just in recounting the first two films, never existing outside this scenario, the amount of gore combined with female nudity, ridiculous deaths and a man getting his face pulped as an orange does in an electronic juicer is enough to catch one off guard. The story is recounted by Brock, twin brother of Brent (Alec Owen), who is murdered immediately after this exposition. This continues the curse of the "Motherface", originally a dorm mother burnt in a panty raid gone wrong, eventually leading to a daughter/copycat "borrowing" her face, with someone else now at it again in a film which is less a slasher parody, but does get in the joke about sequels managing to stretch out the premise over and over.

The real context of the film is that it is the creation of 5-Second Films, a group founded by Brian Firenzi in the spring of 2005, originally starting with films that are simple:  2 seconds of beginning titles, 5 seconds of film, 1 second of end titles¹. Naturally, 5-Second Films evolved to the point of making this theatrical film and creating this ironic parody, structured as being shot on VHS, a type of film going through this neo-grindhouse and meta-genre era of cinema in the late 2000s and early 2010s which I found at the time very uninteresting. Alongside the possibility I have softened to these films through this particular example Dude Bro is also aiming for something stranger in tone, something to use a Spinal Tap reference deciding to go up to eleven than merely just for the lowest hanging fruit. Considering someone gets a harpoon in the crotch, not even that is safe, and yet this is going to cram as many bizarre turns as it can in an era when YouTube was becoming a concept, and looking at the parody films of yore, in taking this absurdist tone to an extreme.

That is not including all the meta jokes and the adverts in-between, like the Pizza Goblins, which are seconds long and more there to knock you for a loop than for parodying advertising, as the film when it is staying on point with a plot is going to turn it on its neck in bizarre ways. The premise is a slasher, where after two previous Motherface spree attacks, the bro dorm for the third year welcome into their midst Brent, the twin brother of their fallen bro, welcome in among a vegetarian named Sizzler (Jimmy Wong) who will not get into the dorm unless he gets some "beef" and because of his dietary choice, a wheelchair bro who lost his legs to wolves, one whose trauma of his French handyman father leads to the subtitles being from someone sneaking in distress messages, and also among them one traumatised from the previous times. There is also a girlfriend of one of the bros who wants to join the fraternity despite being an all men's one, and whose boyfriend is stalked by the fear of her wanting to take his virginity and have kids.

The film befits the era it was made; now the 2010s became an old decade than lived in, where this type of humour is not within context of many "surreal" films from this period like this. Time has also softened this type of humour, and made the references more noticable, where suddenly you are taken aback by a cameo by adult film star and pro sex advocate Nina Hartley as a school principal, only to be bombarded by the fact this also has Larry King and Andrew W.K. among the cameos, a mad pot pourri of figures to have had. This is a film proud to write the most ridiculous dialogue, to have the silliest plot twists and play loose to its own plot, even point out its absurdities, which were once things I hated in these types of genre films. I have changed, but also Dude Bro is willing to push the joke to its extreme, taking the slasher and taking it the most surreal route of all. The plot is your traditional slasher in a body count, but you also have to factor in, where you also have to factor in the police being led by comedian Patton Oswalt, a Satanist who is rooting for the Motherface killer as the Bros have the power to summon the ultimate bro, one who needs to be stopped even if it involves sacrificing his virginal male police officer, a noble spirit even if his noble desire to "bang" kids with the power of literature is badly phrased. This would all be jokes I once hated, but now, something delights me in the lunacy of how the plot lines are interconnected in jokes that seem random but lead to extended pay offs, such as how this cop (guided by the female officer meant to lead him to his sacrifice) is told he needs to bop the bros on the nose, because they are actually sentient oranges behind a huge vitamin c decrease in the state, a bizarre joke that has a tragic and perverse pay off with the film ending with oranges raining from the sky.

The production - helmed by Jon Salmon, Michael Rousselet, Tomm Jacobsen and Joey Scoma, with collaborations by numerous people for the script by lead actor Alec Owen - does have a frenzied lunacy to it of clear improvisation. It exhibits the type of layered nudging humour of YouTube but in a case where, as an ultimate spoof, any joke which fails is matched by ten more afterwards, which is a huge advantage to the film tenfold. There are moments you will wonder if you have actually seen certain moments in this movie, such as the spirit guidance from a deceased foetus, and yet this has for the obvious gag of side characters, there to just pad the cast out for a body count, them making reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two Hamlet characters who only have one significant moment in that monumental play and, as referenced in this moment too, got a Tom Stoppard play around them which is just as well regarded and absurdist, a smart joke to pull among all the lewder jokes which also land perfectly.  

Back in the day, this type of irony undercut the absurdist and surrealist touches to these parodies, but with a film like this, even jokes which would have caused me to roll my eyes once, like an abrupt robot duplicate, now land especially as this takes the jokes to their extreme, especially as this is still also a super gory splatstick comedy where a man will slap himself with his own ripped out tongue against his will. There is also the willingness, for a joke about the bros having of killing many people for yearly pranks, to extend it to a long (frankly sombre and beautiful) extended gag with model shots and underwater imagery just to add to the punch line. Especially as the fourth wall gags are a factor too - in the adverts being mild aneurisms in their randomness, or the search for a lost bro to become a joke one expects from a Leslie Nielsen parody film - and I became to admire Dude Bro Party Massacre III as a gleefully bizarre spectacle.

Abstract Spectrum: Lurid/Wacky/Weird

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

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1) 5-Second Films' About Us page, preserved on Web Archive in its October 3rd 2012 version.

Bad Taste (1987)

 

Director: Peter Jackson

Screenplay: Peter Jackson, Tony Hiles and Ken Hammon

Cast: Terry Potter as Ozzy / 3rd Class Alien; Pete O'Herne as Barry / 3rd Class Alien; Peter Jackson as Derek / Robert; Mike Minett as Frank / 3rd Class Alien; Craig Smith as Giles Copeland/ 3rd Class Alien; Ken Hammon as 3rd Class Alien; Costa Botes as 3rd Class Alien; Doug Wren as Lord Crumb; Dean Lawrie as Lord Crumb SPFX double / 3rd Class Alien; Peter Vere-Jones as Lord Crumb's voice

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I'll have his head Reg. I want to suck his brains out.

Spare a thought for the poor bastards who do not work with large, well established groups who deal with extraterrestrial activity like the Men in Black or those who work out of Area 51. Middle America, full of UFO sightings, may either have a police force who are not taught to deal with such cases, or a small group of amateur or professional (but unfunded) specialists but at least can have a Mulder and Scully, or similar FBI agents, at hand. In Bad Taste, marking his first work in a career which would wildly spin out into ambition and legacy, Peter Jackson shows us that all New Zealand has at hand, whilst capable, is The Astro Investigation and Defence Service, a New Zealand group, who even have to put up with a name so politically incorrect even in 1987 when written as an acronym, let alone the fact they have only four members. Dealing with malevolent aliens rampaging around their beautiful but quaint countryside, the sick humour of the name is something to take their minds off said nasties terrifying the sheep and making whole towns of people disappear, and it says a lot about Bad Taste the film, living up to that title, that the only negative aspect to that name is the aforementioned acronym, whilst everything else in this film, when Jackson was entirely outside the film industry, is tasteless but aged well.

Unfortunately, finding the entirety of the population of Kaihoro missing, The Astro Investigation and Defence Service have to deal with aliens who want to use human beings as the main food supply for an intergalactic fast food franchise. Never has the terms ‘Heavy Users’ and ‘Super Heavy Users’, from the Morgan Spurlock documentary Super Size Me (2004), been as macabre as when you link them to the activities of the aliens in Bad Taste.  This is also of a type of alien invasion story far removed from even The War of the Worlds, where even if the Tripods invaded in Surrey, H.G. Welles' original novel still had an apocalyptic nature, whilst Bad Taste's humour, one of its many virtues, is embracing New Zealand as a nation and a Commonwealth country in its more mundane aspects. Only now is it dated that Queen Elizabeth II's portrait is onscreen in one of the first shots, and there are both Dr. Who references and a liberal (and specific use) of the term "bastard" throughout. The innocuous nature of Peter Jackson’s first three films – this, Meet The Feebles (1989), and Brain Dead [Dead Alive] (1992) – is a huge factor in why they are as memorable among other factors.

It is also hilarious to see New Zealand, before it was put on the map by the Lord of the Rings adaptations Jackson helmed, as interpreted here. We can imagine a young Peter Jackson, in his yellow/red knitted scarf as Derek, not despondent about the possibility of Oakland being wiped out by the invading aliens, filming in these locations and getting an inkling that Hobbits would not look out of place there for a J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation. Usually in alien invasion films everyone looks the glamorized version of what a normal person is, the settings metropolises (New York, Los Angeles) or cleaned up versions of places, and never would it be conceived that one of the main heroes, with an uzi in hand to take out the mindless hordes, would step in a patch of cow dung and slip like in this film. Bad Taste still has a final chapter that is an extended gun battle, but because of its low budget, its setting, and its jokey and naive tone, such images are pulled up into being inherently silly as well as gripping.

That the film is as much a comedy as well as horror, keeping in the boom of ‘splatterstick’ and horror-comedies made in the 1980s, enforces this as it never takes itself seriously. Sight gags, jokes against places within New Zealand, and aliens giving the heroes the middle finger during combat all pile up together in their frivolousness to create something inanely charming. The first three films of Jackson’s, even in the perversity of Meet The Feebles, were able to take such juvenile humour and ideas, and makes them into imaginative, amusingly inane but compelling areas. Brain Dead [Dead Alive] would succeed the most, as its 1950s setting and the era’s stereotypical stiltedness already brought a sense of naivety and innocence to the characters and interactions that were invaded by the bloodiest and graphically imaginative gore scenes you could see. That they are New Zealand films, part of the British Commonwealth, does have a lot to say; connections with the British and our use of our own inanity within our most surreal and disgusting jokes is matched by the utter amusement of how Jackson runs with the connections with the British Royalty and our culture within his country, just by the amount of times the late Queen or (then) Prince Charles’ faces appear in such a gory film.

The gore is the most distinctive aspects of Bad Taste, but the virtue of it and Brain Dead is that they are more just decapitations and blood effects continually repeated, but delve into a Carnivalesque mentality where the rules of human anatomy are destroyed as much as the prosthetic effects. Case in point would be the predicament that main character Derek (Jackson in one of two roles) has when his skull is broken and he is in constant danger of his brains falling out. The anatomy of the grey matter is slightly suspect even for my lack of medical knowledge, but the complete lack of rules is what makes the gorier sequences stand out. And it is not just these scenes too as, despite the low budgeted nature of the film, shades of the camera techniques Jackson would have in his later career and the Lord of the Rings trilogy can be seen in these origins, the elaborate movements at certain moments striking considering how difficult or time consuming some might have been to pull off. The attempts to play with the form of cinema in one’s debut, made over four years¹, can be seen and are the best virtues of the film, the piecemeal nature of this production length found in how the film's editing has to coordinate around Jackson himself playing two characters, Derek clean shaven and as one of the aliens with a full beard, let alone the production having to work around how the creators were complete outsiders to their film industry originally making this. This is a work, in terms of micro-budget and no-budget genre cinema, of a high bar, just for having to work around something obvious which could have undercut the film in continuity. Jackson even has the pair fight on top of a cliff just to toy with this, whether out of practicability or to see if he and the rest of the film production team could pull it off, the mirrored doppelganger effect a memorable and applaudable attempt even if it is obvious how they set the individual shots together to make it work.

The film's premise beyond this is obvious in mind to its limitations in cast and resources - one poor sod out for donations wanders into the town now without a population but flesh eating aliens, and the leads have to rescue him and stop the attempt at human fast food business. However, whether it is that they used their limited resources to even have Jackson head butt a fake seagull in a shot, or that this film's crude premise has its satire, particularly when their leader is (for all his praises of them) treats the group as minimal wage employees who can be disposed off, the film has a lot of whit to it to admire. Some aspects are just deliciously weird, like wondering where and how they found the "Magical Mystery Car", a Converted Ford Anglia Van designed to have cardboard cut-outs of the Beatles, from their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band era, seemingly driving the vehicle, which both a) has the imagine of Paul McCartney (et all) in a cameo in a splatter scene, but is funnier now knowing Jackson directed the documentary The Beatles: Get Back (2021).

Peter Jackson with Bad Taste clearly wanted to push himself with this film, and like the most well regarded genre films, the limitations cannot undermine this fact, especially when he went on to make Meet The Feebles and the masterpiece Brain Dead, and successfully raised the bar and made better films. That his legacy went further from this to Oscar awards and ambitious films are a really curious page in history, as arguably even among legendary cult directors who went into the mainstream, Jackson is a candidate for one of the most successful micro-budget genre filmmakers from that era. This sort of filmmaking leads to great reward for the makers and the viewers, and after writing that at 26 years old or so when covering this film once before in an amateur review, I can still say long afterwards that Bad Taste has probably made double the reward for itself every time I view it.

 

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1) Bad Taste, "a perspective" by Tony Hiles, published for NZ on Screen on 04/09/2013.

The German Chainsaw Massacre - The First Hour of the Reunification (1990)

 

Director: Christoph Schlingensief

Screenplay: Christoph Schlingensief

Cast: Alfred Edel as Alfred; Karina Fallenstein as Klara; Artur Albrecht as Ihr Liebhaber; Susanne Bredehöft as Ihr Mann / Margit; Brigitte Kausch as Brigitte; Volker Spengler as Henk; Dietrich Kuhlbrodt as Dietrich; Reinald Schnell as Kurti; Udo Kier as Jonny

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #266 / An Abstract Candidate

 

Kebab on the road!

That title is not a cash-in for Tobe Hooper's legendary The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). This is aware of that film, alongside the irony of West German/German laws that kept that film banned from the country, as with its sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986). Its director Christoph Schlingensief became aware of them, likely through bootlegged versions due to their lack of availability, and wrote this film in mind of them only after watching the official celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down.

It is not an insult to the late Christoph Schlingensief, as much as a reinterpretation of Tobe Hooper's films as a provocateur looking at his homeland in this time of reunification, that he was as much being a shit-stirrer who suggests that, just after the reunification of West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that unification would not lead to the country instantly becoming a better place. This is not an empty concern to make either in context, as set during and shot after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this imagines the GDR (East Germans), when they are able to leave through the opened borders, being picked off by a family of West German cannibals within a wasteland of general chaos left from the mechanics of the country having been separated into two, or even as one in the early 20th Century.

This is emphasised by real footage of the celebration of the unification, with the TV coverage of the state ceremony for the re-unification of Germany at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and a speech by the then German president, Richard von Weizsäcker. His speech of reconnection is contrasted by the awkward pauses, apt in mind to a country that, for at least the 20th Century alone, has been a nation thrown into turbulence, and Christoph Schlingensief through his career both for cinema and controversial public performances has never escaped its own problems.

In this world, an East German woman Klara (Karina Fallenstein) kills her boyfriend and flees by car across the border to West German. Said border is a phantom world, shot in rundown industrial wasteland, of unemployed custom officers who have lost their minds, and many figures in the phantom zone including the cannibalistic family, picking off stray drivers to make into sausages, a more perverse choice rather than just meat knowing sausages are a cultural stereotype (and cultural product) for Germany. At first, The German Chainsaw Massacre as an explicit horror film in tone feels unique for Schlingensief. Set around a woman, who in her really violent and unexplained decision, moves for a new life, the limbo she enters is atmospheric. The rundown industrial environments and wasteland is contrasted with a tone creepy just from the soundtrack, and it is set up that the film is going to be extremely violent, such as foreshadowing a character being alive despite having no bottom half. His satirical tone, a grotesque one, I have become acclimatised to seeing his films for the first time looks like it is going to be filtered through this different mood.

The German Chainsaw Massacre however shifts quickly to his trademark, a hyper extreme and exaggerated tone which is in bad taste and very broad, meant to be very sickly humorous but in itself really serrated and confrontational as a result. His cinema, in hindsight, was always going to have an issue to sell to outside Germany because it is so ingrained in concerns about Germany's cultural and political aspects, with so many nuisances for all his chaotic mass of screaming caricature I myself would have no idea about¹. It is cinema, for a cult audience, that you can "sell" for how extreme and weird he can be, but his cinema really requires some context to get the most from its satire. He also, in deliberately being offensive to middlebrow ideals in his homeland, as was the case in United Trash (1996), has moments which have not aged well at all here one of the cannibalistic family a predatory lesbian.

It is however also more closer to the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre than you would presume, no way near as precise and menacing, but with Tobe Hooper's film having a lot of strangely twisted humour, a lot of bizarre characters, and with Christoph Schlingensief's movie riffing on the set-up and, in an escape through a vehicle at the end, even visual motifs. Hopper's sequel, much to the bemusement of his financers Cannon Group who wanted a straight-laced horror film, is especially a clear influence here, as alongside being such an underrated film in itself, Hooper was arguably playing to this same twisted and grotesque humour in his own country's context, of  his cannibal family becoming businessmen in eighties America, and Bill Moseley being a mad Vietnam War veteran screaming about setting up "Nam Land" as a public attraction.

The German Chainsaw Massacre is a film where most of the cast, even the female lead, are not defendable. Artur the boyfriend, who somehow manages to stay alive despite looking like grounded mince eventually with his guts only kept inside by a sliver of skin, is introduced being a near rapist, whilst our cannibal family, with a tendency of putting old man masks on their victims to kill them ritually, are a strange assortment of oddballs and even products of incest. The grandfather from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre here replaced by one clearly dead, revealed to be a skeleton in a German war outfit, the male head is doing bad ventriloquism from which everyone believes whilst one of the other members explicitly wears a winged German helmet evoking the country's warring past. And then there is Udo Kier, who sadly is not as prevalent here as in other Schlingensief films, playing a strange mad younger man on the side posing as a police officer just to grope a female friend. In terms of commitment to the performance, he at one point whilst wearing a wig sets it on fire for real, which is a something different to say the least and just evokes, with the exception of his Lars von Trier and Guy Maddin roles, how little I truly got to see from him as an actor just from the more well known genre films he made.

It is a film that, like the other Christoph Schlingensief films I have seen, if much more difficult to digest as it continues, his films of the nineties period at least being openly broad. His style is fascinating and memorable - the most obvious mannequin stunt possible, when one is thrown at a car, feels on purpose - but it is also a very acquired taste especially as in terms of the genre he is working in, horror, it becomes intentionally derailed by his provocative broadness. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre never had someone's testicles ripped off, and considering what he did with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, Tobe Hooper himself realised the comedic potential of his own premise and made a film that was broad and over-the-top comedy for the sequel, matching the tone of The German Chainsaw Massacre more even if Schlingensief's film is still, even an hour long, a much more challenging film in terms of his world's exaggerated acting, broad comedy and icky shock value to provoke and annoy his country.

Schlingensief's film is fascinating, rewarding if you appreciate Christoph Schlingensief as a provocateur. It is a film in hindsight I would wonder how a regular horror viewer would react to it, as Schlingensief's films really do have their own idiosyncratic tone which, honestly, is more difficult to chew on in that he has political ideas visually upfront. It is, in truth too, not necessarily provocative in a profound way only what he did, but a really nihilistic equivalent of chewing with your mouth open with his work as much for me as an outsider, the dirty laundry of Germany's complicated historical past and present in his career being scrutinised not through the cold eye of a figure like Austria's Michael Haneke. As a Haneke looked at Europe's failings in his chilling cerebral nature, Christoph Schlingensief instead has a gregarious and deliberately offensive tone, "gregarious" apt as, even if you may never find this film funny at all, and the location choices are actively chosen to be grimy, he plays all of this with a broad farcical tone than takes the horror tropes seriously, something comparable to when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 transgressed the first film's seriousness by being ridiculous upfront.

More so now having seen the film, I wished to have seen this on a cinema screen with an audience presuming it was a horror film with just political content than what you get with a Christoph Schlingensief film. I know this film was screened at the Showroom in Sheffield², an independent cinema in England which has been in the past the closest for me to see, in a blue moon, non-mainstream Hollywood films on a cinema screen. Baring one I have seen onscreen there, Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers (2009), which is for another review for another day, it would have been fascinating to see how people would have reacted to a film like The German Chainsaw Massacre, especially a British audience not having grown up in a country that went through unification, like this. Knowing in 2021, renamed Blackest Heart, a terrible title, this has ended up on Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom, is fittingly hilarious with my own sick sense of humour. The one film from Christoph Schlingensief not made available on MUBI, their streaming platform allowing me to see his cinema and in a context, this in itself is a perverse yet perfect way to sell this film as many baffle people, expecting a generic horror film like others on that site, will find Christoph Schlingensief's offensive production mocking the change of a united Germany there facing them. Even when it is taken off, as always happens with streaming sites with interesting films, it may appear in another unexpected place, waving with its twisted series of gore scenes and broad acting performances, to baffle more people, and I pray that continues so forth.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

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

 

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1) This one article, by Dr Sarah Pogoda, a Senior Lecturer in German Studies and German Literature for various organisations such as the University of Sheffield, has helped me considerably gain more from The German Chainsaw Massacre and admire the film greatly.

2) Screened in 2014, as is documented here, I saw this on the marquee outside and now more than ever wished I could have gone to the screening.

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)

 

Director: Stewart Raffill

Screenplay: Stewart Raffill and Gary Brockette

Cast: Denise Richards as Tammy; Theo Forsett as Byron Black; George Pilgrim as Billy; Paul Walker as Michael Brock; Ellen Dubin as Helga; Terry Kiser as Dr. Gunther Wachenstein; Buck Flower as Norville; Ken Carpenter as Neville; Sean Whalen as Weasel; J. Jay Saunders as Sheriff Black; John Edmondson as Karl; John Franklin as Bobby

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

 

There is something naturally, perfectly, fitting that this film, from the director of Mac and Me (1988) and Standing Ovation (2010), originates when a man approached director Stewart Raffill with the fact that he had a large scale animatronic T-Rex and wished to make a film with it¹. Knowing as well the fuller context, including Raffill having to write the script in a week and improvising whatever he felt could get a reaction, suddenly I find myself with the British born filmmaker, infamous for a E.T. rip-off by McDonalds, more sympathetic for a man who went from working as an animal trainer for films to a strange career of movies hesitantly put together and in this case, gunning for the weirdness for the sake of weirdness genre but not making something contrived.

What you get was a film lost in time which is strange. As in, already this comes from the baking pot of hastily putting together a film post-Jurassic Park (1993) where Paul Walker, long before his career in the Fast and the Furious films, is romancing a young Denise Richards only to accidentally get the wrong side of her domineering ex. Said ex dumps Walker's Michael in the middle of a big cat park at night, where he is mauled by a lion, and becomes an experiment for Dr. Gunther Wachenstein (Terry Kiser), who transplants his brain into a robot full sized T-Rex. Admittedly, this is not the first strange idea of putting a brain into something else - Boris Karloff was obsessed with transplanting brains between man and dog in House of Frankenstein (1944), and likewise Tammy... was made as a comedy. The narrative gets weirder, in real life as much as the movie's own, when the original film was meant as an R-rated movie. And when I write R-rated, that means that it was originally released cut of its content for a more family friendly form by in its premiere, and that when it was resurrected in the later 2010s by Joe Rubin, co founder of the distributor Vinegar Syndrome, with its fully uncut form, it was revelled to have a jaw dropping level of gore to go along with its bizarre tone.

Yes, Tammy... is a silly film but it does catch one off-guard with ease. It is made in the nineties, yet we open with Denise Richards in the middle of an aerobics scene with other women set to a glam metal score about walking around like a dinosaur. In complete honesty, the film with its cheese and winking tone, alongside some of its adult humour really being tactless, would have in any other context had put me off. I realise that, with a lot of cult eighties horror films especially, their cheesy tones really do not work for me. Here however you have a film where, when it comes to Paul Walker having his brain transplanted into a robot dinosaur, you have in the fully uncut version a full blown splatter moment Herschell Gordon Lewis would have been proud of, with the brain being exposed and eventually being removed. Gore is not something nowadays I take with interest as well, but there is something incredibly jarring and striking in this film, with its early nineties colours and comedic tone, where a tyrannosaurus rex foot crushes a man and it has blood split, or heads being bit off. Whilst it is not a definition of greatness in a film, there is something striking when genre and tone catch one off guard.

This is definitely the case for a film, in truth, which is goofy. In mind to its circumstances, including that the director filmed most of the film not far from his own house¹, there is a charm to the film but it cannot be denied either that it is ridiculous to consider. It is helped considerably by its cast. There is an unfortunate and bittersweet nature to Paul Walker, who tragically died too young when he developed a popular status in the Fast and the Furious franchise, a series about cars and action which moved away from its origins, of the boom in interest for street racing, into a long lasting series that gained more fans unlike other franchises after five films onwards. He is charismatic in the scenes he gets on screen, bearing in mind he is literally replaced with an animatronic dinosaur, thankfully one which does have enough as a great piece of mechanical creation that, even if they have to awkwardly animate scenes in with him afar moving, is an interesting co-star to work with as a machine. Denise Richards is the same here, a charismatic figure who thankfully went on to have a prolific career in television. Whether one film or not can be argued for why her cinema career never went as far, when there was a period in the late nineties when she would be very visible in films like Wild Things (1998), it was probably not helped by the notoriety of casting her as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones in a James Bond film, The World is Not Enough (1999), probably the biggest profile film from that time and an albatross around her neck for how her role was not highly looked upon.

A shame as, actually the figure that has to carry the film, she is sincere in this utterly silly film having to act against an animatronic dinosaur. With Theo Forsett, playing her friend Byron Black, having to play the leads in this absurd premise, there is a lot to have to work around in its adult humour and absurdities, such as an entire scene in a morgue, trying to find a new body for her boyfriend, which alongside a T-Rex outside giving thumbs up and downs in response outside in a truck, also has the consideration of whether to have a woman's body instead which some temptation from the dino to go in that direction. If anything, the film willingly going to the edge in terms of stretching itself is where Tammy... gains worth, a movie that knows how ridiculous it is to have an animatronic dinosaur have a scene using a payphone. It does stumble in its willingness to go for an unexpected - some of the jokes have not aged well, and Forsett's broad stereotype of a gay character will cause some to roll their eyes, but it is really the couple of jokes at his expense that are more an issue, whilst by accident character is given to him as the son to the town sheriff whose relationship is awkward as father and son.

Other times however this attitude proved a virtue to the film, where even the gore is a strange and unexpected exclamation which keeps the film, where a young woman's love for her boyfriend even overcomes him sudden brain transfer in a dinosaur, interesting. That it will have, for the scene of Michael being mauled, an actual stunt man or animal trainer play acting being attacked by an actual lion is something which stands out, as is the fact that for all the jokes, the gore and even attempted grave robbing just after a funeral, it is still sincere as a love story is credit for the film in terms of positives. Definitely the experience has softened me to Stewart Raffill as a figure, least who in his career as a filmmaker and then later an author is as eccentric as his output. Unlike a future film like Standing Ovation, a film always meant for kids which did get predictable, this in contrast was not surprisingly a film to screen when it was rediscovered and made available for midnight movie crowds in its original cut. It is, again, ridiculous, but I have to admire the film being weird too.

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1) Which can be read about, along the director's career, HERE.

Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: W. Boyd Ford

Cast: J.P. Delahoussaye as Fuad Ramses III; John McConnell as Detective Dave Loomis; Mark McLachlan as Detective Mike Myers; Melissa Morgan as Mrs. Lampley; Toni Wynne as Tiffani Lampley; Chris Mauer as Mr. Lampley; Christy Brown as Bambi Deere; Christina Cuenca as Misti Morning; Michelle Miller as Laci Hundees; Kristi Polit as Trixi Treater

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #211 / An Abstract Film Re-Review

 

Decades after the events of Blood Feast (1963), in which his grandfather slaughtered women to create the titular feast for the goddess Ishtar, grandson Fuad Ramses III (J.P. Delahoussaye) inherits the old catering store he owned, finding the original Ishtar statue in the back, now less a gold painted mannequin but more of a stone idol. Immediately brainwashing him, it commands him towards the desire to recreate the blood feast again for the wedding celebration of Tiffani Lampley (Toni Wynne) and Detective Mike Myers (Mark McLachlan). In real life, Herschell Gordon Lewis did not make another film after 1972 beforehand, fully committing himself to the world of advertising where he made a huge success in his work. In this time, his films started to develop success for cult movie followers. We even got the unofficial sequel, Blood Diner (1987), where two brothers inherited their uncle's goal to create a feast of blood in her name.

There is an irony to be had that Herschell Gordon Lewis, never one to stay modest, confessed his contempt (in light heartedness mind) to the idea of art minded cinema, He nonetheless left a lasting mark on cinema through Blood Feast. Even if they were made just for money, the idiosyncrasies to how he made his films and his sense of humour to making them are one of his best virtues and are part of his DNA. This is more so the case as, when the long awaited sequel to Blood Feast came about, his most well known film, he would afterwards claim that it was never really his own project despite directing it and collaborating with his old producer colleague David F. Friedman. Yet my experience with some of his odder tangents beyond his gore films, the likes of How to Make a Doll (1968), suggest his fingerprints are still here. Symbolically this is perfect, as upon returning to film making, there had been enough time alongside his cult status for this to be put together with an entirely different mentality, drawn from the subterranean fringe culture that embraced his films in the first place.

It is definitely an interesting film for him, less a sequel than a remake set in the same world, one between the psychobilly music by Southern Culture on the Skids, and its jokey (and frankly weird) tone of his later work, which becomes a cultural signpost of alt-culture of the time of psychotronic cinema, rockabilly revival and early 2000s softcore titillation. It also means Blood Feast 2 is a tangent fest, the original film's premise replayed longer and with irony, liable to be off-putting unless you relent and accept those tangents are more interesting than the plot. One however not that different from his late sixties work and, ironically, is more focused than his own original gore films of yore.

And the type of ironic dithering here that came in low budget cinema from the 2000s onwards has grown on me, and especially in this case is far less an issue. I will openly admit here, to draw the curtain back that, I saw this film the first time in 2019, than revisited it only two years later in 2021, and what a difference two years makes. When you uncover the films of Lewis' career or even people working on the film like Joe Castro, the special effects creator on the production who made low budget films in this era from the shadow of the legend's career, it sheds a new light on the production in terms of how to digest it. This film also feels considerably wackier than wanting to come off as so-bad-its-good, which is close to Lewis' own career. This is the kind of film, to keep you on your toes, where one of the police detectives, the older veteran obsessed with food, suddenly breaks out into a weather report in front of a map just for one moment. It is never brought up again and such odd turns are numerous.

The plot is simplistic enough that this can get away with these weird moments of humour, closer to the camp mentality an overt parody from this period like Psycho Beach Party (2000) had, all whilst still between playing the plot straight as possible in spite of this tone. It helps the broad characters, one note, are at least fleshed out in terms of joke characters, and arguably in some cases a lot better in performances than Lewis' original films. Our food obsessed cop, sceptic about Ramses III being the culprit, and his younger partner, obsessed to bag Ramses III for the sudden string of murders taking place, are kept alive by these actors making them stand out as is the joke when they switch sides. That this older cop is quite good at his job, except eating over the corpses, adds to the humour in a positive way, or that their female secretary in the office turns out to be the smartest and most confident person in the room between them. The bride's mother, who is an overt stereotype for mother-in-law jokes, or even legendary film maker John Waters in a cameo as a Catholic priest, a life's goal as a fan of Lewis' work, playing as tasteless a joke in the role he would have been game for and visibly relishes.

And then there is J.P. Delahoussaye as Ramses III, who at first is actually given a great performance in context, at least a better performance over Mal Arnold as the original Ramses from the first Blood Feast, a "special" performance in itself in how arch it was. Normally I do not like including obscurer pop culture references without explaining them, so I apologise in having to draw from this one, but the exact comparison to what Delahoussaye's performance style becomes soon into the film, grandiose and almost nearing an accent, is when in the mid 2010s a veteran of American professional wrestling named Matt Hardy created an idiosyncratic persona from his previous one. An ageless mad entity obsessed with riding lawnmowers and shooting fireworks at his own brother, all to do something fresh, a "broken" character for a company called Impact Wrestling with a Cruella De Vil white streak in his grown out hair, and among the many other deliberately weird things using a manner of speech that can be described as Shakespearian wall chewing, gravitas of the hammiest sort Delahoussaye a decade earlier uses in Blood Feast 2 for humorous bombast.

All of this fits the film, one which saddles itself between this intentional humour and splatter, the raison d'être of Lewis' film. The original Blood Feast, despite its quirky kitsch, is important because it created the splatter genre of horror, back when on a limited budget Lewis had to use a cow's tongue and fake blood for the initial gore sequence. Decades later, and on the cusp of the new century, splatter and gooey special effects became more over the top and available in lowest budgeted productions. This is seen metaphorically here in how the main practical effects designer is Joe Castro, the director of the low budget series of Terror Toons films which started the same year as Blood Feast II, the third one of the last works Lewis did before his death playing himself as the narrator of gristly reinterpretations of fairy tales. The gore in Lewis' older films, even as sleazy as in a later work like The Gore Gore Girls (1972), was crude and deliberately silly even if utterly revolting, especially as he eventually started lingering on real animal offal as it was, for a lack of a better word, being fingered, to relish the exclamation point.

The same is the case here where, despite how gruesome it is, there are overtly farcical details like Ramses III using kitchen implements, even using oven gloves to hide his fingerprints, or the infamous scene of someone's face being peeled off, the skull underneath still looking around like a perverse animatronic. The gore is most accomplished here, keeping the sense of ickiness to it even when Delahoussaye is chewing the walls too. Even in mind Castro, to the detriment of some of his own films, can be too grim in some of how realistic his content looks, he was the right person to have when, despite Blood Feast's reputation, most of Lewis' films from the late sixties on became more deliberately grottier whilst being ridiculous

The softcore nature of the film is a distinction from before too as, even whilst Lewis made nudie cuties before he made gore films, and at least one porn film he denied making, Blood Feast II at times feels like it was a 2000s softcore film meshed in DNA with a splatter film which is distinct. Lewis' films do have the issue, which cannot be ignored, that he usually had female victims most of the time, one of the few exceptions Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), but the softcore nudity is a caveat in itself and comes off instead as more ridiculous. There is an absurdity at points too when you have lead Tiffani and her friends have a lingerie shower party, of putting on and taking off negligee, which comes off as absurd.

The specific type of softcore here is I can pin point to the early 2000s straight-to-DVD film, like Jim Wynorski's Busty Cops (2004), which became common on the lower shelves of even British DVD rental stores and those I admit freely I have seen a few of, like the aforementioned one above¹. Films which are on the verge of porn and are very statically shot even before they get to the nudity; films, from the few I have seen, that the likes of Misty Mundae (real name Erin Brown) starred in, which were low budget and in many cases strange. It is the same here, where nude scenes are paraded in their own separate space, where a woman wanders a house very naked to Devil's Stompin' Ground by Southern Culture..., or when the lingerie party happens and, for two of the people participating, the film is nearly looking to turn into a softcore sex sequence until Ramses III stumbles in.  

Eventually the film's strangeness becomes compelling. One of the strangest running gags compels this opinion from me - in which a minor character dies, the mother-in-law's husband, and his body inexplicably starts popping up in future scenes, even at the wedding reception at the end of the film. There is a sense of the film being self aware of itself and trying to top what it did previously in how genuinely eccentric it can be, even having a character correct the mistake from the original film that Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess, not an Egyptian one. Even one of those nude scenes, for the police secretary, is played as a bizarre dream for a police officer where her breasts become two iced deserts and for her, when he wakes, to chastise him. What in any other case would be a sloppy early 2000s production, a predecessor to Neo-Grindhouse in being too ironic and not taking itself seriously, instead in this case is camper than a boy scout conventional and genuine in its weirdness. My growing admiration for ultra low budget films too, this one with a lot more production value too, helps considerably as is the fact Lewis made a lot of low budget, weird films. Knowing he himself worked on the likes of Something Weird (1967), living up to that title among other grab bags of eccentricity, really argues that this film is more closely linked to the others, in lurid content for the sake of luridness,and weird characters. Characters in his old work, as here, would have not batted an eye either at the catering Ramses does even when having visible human fingers in rolls to snack on.

An outlier in the career of Herschell Gordon Lewis's filmography it may seem, it does not feel that much of one despite the claims of this. Tragically as well, probably for this reason, this film has be made obscurer and even lost when, in context, it was insanely entertaining whilst in very bad taste and ridiculous. One that, due to one of its songs having been played on the trailer for Arrow Video's promo reel in their early days, has grown on me considerably with fondness. Blood Feast II does feel like a feast, a vast contrast to the quick and sudden shocks of luridness of the director's first film of the two, but a long and peculiar thing for me to delight in.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Camp/Eccentric/Grotesque/Psychotronic/Weird

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

 

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1) And that particularly example, still irredeemable, did show how bizarre these films could get, with random nude egg breaking in a group shower and a talking lama as a police chief. Those scenes still linger with me despite being a long time ago.