The Gore-Gore Girls (1972)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Alan J. Dachman

Cast: Frank Kress as Abraham Gentry; Amy Farrell as Nancy Weston; Hedda Lubin as Marlene; Henny Youngman as Marzdone Mobilie; Russ Badger as Lt. Anderson; Ray Sager as Grout; Nora Alexis as Lola Prize

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Lt. Anderson, one of my friends seems to have run into a bit of trouble... and lost her face.

Thinking he was ending on this film in terms of his film directing career, Herschell Gordon Lewis felt he wanted to go out with a bang, with more production value and shock as he was closing the door on his exploitation film career. Starting with the image of a woman, Suzie Cream Puff, "being creamed" by having her face hit through a mirror, he wanted to deliver on that premise. Here I will say, as one of the first Lewis films I had seen, I hated this film once. Hated it to the point it was actually held as one of the worst films I had ever seen. What changed in all the time that passed?

The immediate thing is this film embraces its sense of humour. Introducing our detective lead, Abraham Gentry (Frank Kress), stroking a pet cat in his lounge only to insert it into a cupboard when someone knocks outside, he is lured by a female reporter Nancy Weston (Amy Farrell) to investigate a series of gristly go-go dancer murders. The Gore-Gore Girls is a scuzzy and nasty little production, clearly influenced by the Italian giallo from the period as the unseen killer is even wearing black gloves for the job, but it is also a film so proudly with its tongue in its cheek it has pierced through the flesh. Gentry, as played by Kress, is immediately a stand-out even in terms of characters and acting performances in a Lewis film, playing a sarcastic dick but delightfully so, apt for the tone of the production with his many quips to people who irritate him during his work. He eventually even comes to like Nancy, despite their stand-off nature at first and questionable decisions nowadays; though he does nothing and makes sure she gets safely home, getting her drunk off her face on zombie cocktails repeatedly is not something we would consider heroic nowadays even if the joke back in the early seventies.

The film is a procedural where he investigates who the killer could be. Is it Grout (Ray Sager), the man at the Go-Go club bar who draws faces on vegetables and fruits, crushing them in a mania started on corpses in his Vietnam war service, or the leader of a feminist group, whose group storms a Go-Go club halfway through? Lewis even touching upon the Italian giallo genre by accident is a curious nod to this era Lewis would bow out OF, as horror cinema changed in the seventies and diversified further. This is including the fact he might have not been able to match the gore and splatter becoming more acceptable even in mainstream cinema from the period, such as The Omen (1976) having a full decapitation by way of pane of glass shown at multiple angles. Some of this film has aged and is of the era, as Gentry has no time for any woman, even when he is condescending to everyone, and eventually going to bond and have a romance with Nancy. Coming off as a chauvinist, there are many moments, before that romance too, Gentry feels like he is clearly not interested in women at all and could be read as gay.

Thankfully, a bit has aged well. Even with the feminists involved, the film never takes pot-shots with them even when their leader is a possible suspect, their huge storming scene more of a scuffle between actors then anything that comes off as offensive. It feels like Lewis, and his screenwriter Alan J. Dachman, who has a brief scene as a young male bystander asked where a suspect is, just took notice of the world around them and put in a touch for more interest. Gentry is also inclined to screwing with the male police lieutenant, hiding info and telling him the killer is a religious fanatic stealing the victims' Bibles, which is a legitimately funny running joke especially when the cast playing the fellow officers, who Gentry likes more, play it with their senior looking like an idiot.

One of the other aspects of the film was also one of the huge reasons I hated it originally, because I was offended by it, were the gore scenes, not used to the type of films Lewis made and the splatter genre. That they all involve female victims is going to be an issue for many, though Lewis was happy to have violence against men and women; the issue is entirely that, with the plot choice, some will find this uncomfortable whilst for Lewis, wishing to leave his career at this point as the inventor of the splatter genre, he decided to leave as gruesomely as possible. This is as extreme as Lewis could get, even next to Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat (2002), with openly absurd shock value and violent about it, where one person dies to a wooden meat tenderizer to the buttocks followed by salt and pepper being added the wounds. A lot of handling organ meat is involved, and the one scene that is the most infamous was also the one which really shocked me back in the day, still out-there in Lewis' filmography when a female victim has her nipples cut off, one producing milk and the other producing chocolate milk, among the other things that already happened. These scenes, even if played for the bleakest of humour, are going to shock and make people uncomfortable, especially because the targets are all women, which was the aspect which caught me off-guard when I first saw the film back in the day and also could not see the intentional absurdity in its grossness. Details of the film do feel of their time, like this or Gentry getting Nancy drunk continually, but what is also felt is that Lewis is not taking anything serious and being mischievous at the same time. Particularly with the look of the film, shot in Chicago, The Gore-Gore Girls was a shock for me back in the day for feeling rancid let alone looking it, and that I did not appreciate this type of cinema at all, especially when it came to its very twisted sense of humour.

It has a clear witty, very dark humoured tone, which helps the film so much in the modern day, but in hindsight this film should probably be a later work for a newcomer to watch from Lewis, just in case the content leaves a bad taste in the mouth without seeing Lewis' sense of humour in context. Nonetheless I have changed my tune considerably to the film, and if this had been his last film, it would have been a good one to have closed the curtains of his career on, with all his quirks, all his divisive content, and a fitting final image. One breaking the forth wall, the screen being closed by a character as a literal curtain closer, feeling closer to a touch from a forties screwball comedy than a splatter film conclusion. That was not the end, as he would return to cinema in the 2000s after a very successful career in advertising, but for the original era, this was an apt closure.

When it comes into asking why he even decided to end his career at this point as he did, some of it is the fact he was struggling to make these films and felt he could have less stress in his life, especially as his advertising career for decades after made him a very well off man. Interviewed on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, a 1988-9 Channel 4 series by Jonathan Ross where he tackled "psychotronic" or B movie figures, the episode entirely devoted to Lewis had him absolute at bliss, happy to look back on his career with mirth but also, playing tennis and well off, a man who did well as a lucrative writer and speaker on the subject of advertising, his film career a well kept secret. He came back to cinema, which was a happy thing, but there was in itself a happy end there just as well. Lewis, in spite of his notorious gore films, has something sweet to his life in that he managed to have happy conclusions to his life and career in cinema twice. It is an odd thing to consider, as his career was devoted to make the audience throw up and throwing entrails around, but he would have found that hilarious.

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.

Debbie Does Damnation (1999)

Director: Slain Wayne

Screenplay: Slain Wayne

Cast: Ernest Brummer, Jeanin Lake, Tony Nittoli, Lisa Pete, Charles Pinion, William Smith, Michael Sonye and Slain Wayne

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Now I’ve got your horn motherfucker.

We are in for something out of the ordinary, and not for the widest of audiences, when in stark black and white a cannibalistic demon is munching through corpses in a room with a nude woman tied up on her stomach on a nearby table, ready to be his next meal. A stop motion skull spider with a British accent named Tregor comes to the rescue, on condition to kill the cannibal and go on a quest on his behalf for the Devil’s horns. Unfortunately she gets eaten by a stop motion Hell Dragon and Tregor is forced to find another woman for the quest, one named Debbie who has fallen into Hell recently, despite her guardian angel attempting to save her, and will be centre to multiple sides taking note of her.

A labor of love that looks like it took years to even complete, there will be many stop motion monstrosities onscreen, as there will be a lot of full frontal nudity, as initially Debbie finds herself is Hell without clothes, and a lot of content which will be off-putting for many. There will be content which has not aged well, content that will be random and abrupt, or just perverse, and there will be moments I still have to admire the fact the forty plus minute production even got made. Debbie finds herself in a war over the Devil’s horns, Satan himself reduced to a hornless head who wishes her to get them back, betrayed by two men who have the horns and are now about to start warning with each other in the film to get both for themselves. One of these two men, introduced briefly with two mouse traps on his cheeks, is the MVP for all the profane dialogue with eloquent choices of wording he has as a torture loving figure in the midst of a lo-fi medieval fantasy war with the other betrayer with soldiers and stop motion figures.

Debbie Does Damnation is only corpse paint away from a black metal video at times, scored to ambient music with guitar noodling, full of evil deviants from the Morph plasticine family tree and built from sets varying from Forbidden Zone (1980) to a bizarre avant-garde theatre production primarily using cardboard. Within such sets is stuff that is definitely not-PC nowadays, moments where this is a very unconventional fetish video, and stuff that is unintentionally ridiculous as other moments are pure bravado in getting them onto the screen with clear hard work and visible duck tape. It is unconventional to say the least, all which has to be ingested as really rough material, yet made with love by a porn director with a taste for kink. It was made before he fully went into the video porn director’s chair with titles which do not hide their content, some sounding a tad extreme for comfort, and others involving Kung Fu Girls 3 (2003) which do however ask interesting questions of what they are about even as porn films from the straight-to-DVD era. More so as I learnt of this film from Annie Choi of Bleeding Skull, this is a bizarre experience to get to, strange but undoubtedly a labor of love, hard earned in getting finished and crafted in a way I have to admire even if its own stream-of-consciousness will throw a lot of people off.

As Debbie finds herself with clothes, a sword and a quest between a civil war, as female warriors fight male ones, we see a film shot on Super 8, the director’s last bang (according to the making of including with this) before his full porn career began. In context, it makes sense how its attitude is with zero fucks given in wanting to do whatever it wants. Said to exist with the “R Rated version” I saw and an x-rated version, director Slain Wayne literally built the sets to what feels like being in someone’s skull for a near hour. Made from the gut of what was cool or sexy or deliberately edgy, I openly think aspects of this production are juvenile, some of it is tasteless and an issue, like a monster dubbed “a fucking spud monkey” said to be possibly on crack, but also has moments I have to admire. Even if you have to get into the gruel, weird improvised dialogue in the post-synched dialogue, or the fetishistic moments, like the random scene of Debbie being spanked by a warrior, or a scene of women being threatened with torture that show its hand for wanting to be kinky too, there are others where you did not need to take the time to have all the extensive homemade stop motion monsters which would have been painstaking to animate on any budget, but this nonetheless decided to have. Its extensive use of Barbie dolls in cutaway scenes or mannequin body parts to depict decapitations, sword stabbings and being eaten by plasticine hell hounds makes this considerably a higher bar in terms of a film trying to make a memorable micro budget film, even if it is a very nihilistic take on Hell where no one survives or is safe, even a flying skull finding itself forced into being a flesh light against its will. Its aspects of kink and very rough dialogue will put people off, and I will not defend it whatsoever; the virtues of the film come from the moments away from these which are ridiculous in tone and in actually being realized.

Even its sense of perversity at times has to be admired for its complete disregard for the expected, as you have a sex scene with a Mistress of Darkness involving a man bobbing for tentacles between her thighs, and if that is off-putting to hear, obviously Debbie Does Damnation is not recommended. But with that scene actually a highlight for intentional bad taste and funny lines, there is someone to admire of a film which is completely gunning to be memorable, and never is a lazy ironic way either. It is one which truly lives up to the notion of putting your heart and soul into a project, even if said project is as profane as this. 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque

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

Touch of Death (1988)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

A Night of a Thousand Horror Movies / An Abstract Candidate

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

The set-up to Touch of Death would win anyone over as long as they had a strong stomach, or cause him or her to turn the film off if they did not. An older man is shown, when not killing women, cooking pieces of her flesh for TV dinner, then disposing the corpse gorily with a chainsaw. This sounds like the worst nightmare for a moral campaigner, but my first introduction to Touch of Death was weirder, that it is one of the films of Lucio Fulci's own, with those of others, re-contextualised in A Cat in the Brain (1990), his deeply weird meta-commentary on his own work where he was the central character. The chainsaw and subsequent meat grinder dismemberment definitely raises the bar in feeling ill with Fulci gore, even if you know its fake. In itself it already sets off that we are if getting into the absurdity, reminding me in particular of when British band Carcass got to their album Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious (1991), which stills plays to the grotesque morbidness of the type of music they helped contribute to, but by that point even in imagining someone turning a victim into glue to huff, you are seeing them parodying the idea of gruesome horror imagery to offend and traumatise audiences. Touch of Death itself, starting from that initial scene, sets itself quickly as a sick hearted comedy with a deeply unconventional trajectory, in which older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) constantly has to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, having found a novel way of acquiring the funds needed by skimming the lonely hearts pages for wealthy women. Where things get weird is that, seemingly, Lester has a copycat killer reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report. Considering his radio is talking back to him in his own voice, it is not really a spoiler to know he is not a conventional state of mind, but the film takes it in an odder direction.

In general, there are strange entries at this point in Fulci's filmography by the mid eighties even for a director who invested into the nightmarish and dreamlike with his horror films – Conquest (1983) is a border line, the least conventional fantasy film you could ever watch, and Aenigma (1987) springs to mind too – whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain. Made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness, and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, Touch of Death itself is a strange movie to my surprise in its own way. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on, this does stick out among the films before and after. The premise has a dark reality, in that you have the likes of the Honeymoon Killers, couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who targeted real women for money and killed them, but here as played by Brett Halsey, Lester is a foil who, despite getting away with a few murders, also gets a speeding ticket at one point when disposing of a corpse. Halsey is among many actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood and of fifties television productions who, as he got older, started appearing in Italian productions such as their spaghetti westerns, finding himself in his later career in a string of late eighties Fulci films at this time. Even in mind that Italian productions are post-dubbed, his character just in presence here. Whilst looking creepily like a real serial killer would in his conventional dress sense, he also has an absurd aura of a man constantly under strain, far from control. His cat Reginald, even if using human corpses, has better luck just from least having good meals.

The character being a putz really adds something here, the tonal shifts themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims, and in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, it is played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a nether realm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, is where we find ourselves, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but in a world which makes him look ridiculous. The illegal horse gambling organisation, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man assisting him, who exist in their own world wary of the police, seem like a budget restriction expected from a micro budget horror film, in that they have no fixed office; in context however it adds a weird edge that, having to keep an ear for police helicopters, their lack of fixed location is ridiculous on purpose. Lester's female victims are exaggerations, and even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova is given pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. It is not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but slowly finding that he is even having to run over homeless men trying to blackmail him. Considering he is a man unable to keep hold of money, because he is actually terrible at gambling, it is clear he is about to slip off the deep end.

The realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio is a clear sign early on not all is what is expected, very early in the film and already showing its hand. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further, becoming more unconventional with how this plays out with a streak of melancholia from this. It is clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is actually involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. Horse racing commentary constantly in the soundtrack is one of those many unique touches to this film I have not seen many "weird films" do, but it works, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

That it is played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car, due to rigor mortis, stand out when one has seen him direct some of the most gothic and notorious films from the eighties Italian cycle of cinema. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually switch which glass belongs to who, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, which adds a punch to this. The gore’s over-the-top actually fits in a sick way for this type of film too, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, as even when Fulci has someone hit in the head with a stick, an eye has to pop out. It becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction. 

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here does not off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening in his work adds to this, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. It is kind of twist you would want from Italian genre cinema, and absolutely distinct from Lucio Fulci's filmography as its own quirky surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird/Grotesque/Quirky

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

Ebola Syndrome (1996)

 

Director: Herman Yau

Screenplay: Ting Chau

Cast: Anthony Wong as Kai San; Wan Yeung-ming as Yeung; Wong Tsui-ling (Angel Wong) as Lily; Miu-Ying Chan as Har; Meng Lo as Kei

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

There are some infamous Category III films from Hong Kong, where they used a rating that limited viewers to adults but fed a boom in exploitation, erotic and horror movies, and among them, Ebola Syndrome is one which lives up to the infamy, so much so it is worth having caution in terms of actually watching it. Contextually, when the Category I, II and III ratings were first devised for Hong Kong cinemas in 1988, it was dealing with content, not just gore but films were criminals were shown as heroic, which could have been controversial. The ultra-notorious Men Behind the Sun (1988), an exploitation film dealing with Unit 731, the overt research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that performed lethal human experiments during the Second Sino-Japanese War, was the first film to get the Category III rating, and when this rating came in, the films which earned them were not necessarily cheap productions, but films with named stars. Even Wong-Kar Wai has had a Category III film in his career, as unfortunately, depictions of same-sex relations were qualifiable for the rating, leading to Happy Together (1997) being among them, a subject for a more complex dissection of what that says in terms of LGBTQ politics at the time.  

The Category III film however has an infamy for the notorious and bloodier entry among them, alongside the erotic works like Sex and Zen (1991), and Ebola Syndrome near the end of their peak in interest can be labeled with justification as the last blow out, for good and bad in offensive ways.  I would have to call myself out a hypocrite for labeling some of the content in this offensive and distasteful, as someone who has been intrigued by this film over a decade and went out of his way to see it, so moral high ground is a ridiculous notion to get into. Just be aware that, whilst it actually calms down in tone, this is pretty extreme as a film can get, starting off with an explicit sex scene introducing “Chicken” Kai San (Anthony Wong), a completely irredeemable villain who we follow as for a large portion of the film, which leads to him being caught with a mob boss’ wife. Threatened with castration, and urinated on beforehand, he kills everyone, including the wife, and nearly torches her young daughter, dowsing her with gasoline, only to have to leg it before the act is done. Already this film before it becomes truly extreme has already set up the tone of taking no prisoners in good taste and gruesomeness, with a streak of deliberately crass dark humour intermingled within it too whether appropriate or not.

It is feasibly big budget film shot in two countries, as Chicken hides after this in Johannesburg in South Africa, which is a disarming thing as usually a production value like this in a horror film would not get into some of the content here. Even if you can stomach when it gets into taboos like rape and cannibalism, it is extremely nihilistic about global connections, even without the moment, to be frank about it, the story properly begins when Chicken sexually assaults a female carrier of Ebola and starts to spread it over two countries. No one until the last half, where it somewhat tones down and the heroic Hong Kong police have to try to stop Ebola being spread by Chicken, is defendable expect as transgressive, sick humored or just purposely nasty to make the viewer squirm. The owners of the Chinese restaurant Chicken has been working in at Johannesburg are unlikable, a bickering husband and wife; the husband himself, among others with the Taiwanese and Chinese figures living there, is racist to the white and black Africans, exploiting cheaper meat from the local Zulu tribe of black Africans, who are suffering through the Ebola outbreak; and the white Africans can be racist to the Asian immigrants in a country where one cannot help but look at through the view of Apartheid ending only in 1994. No one in this half of the film is likable, and it is here where some of the most uncomfortable and transgressive details come in.

There is the obvious concern, shot in real locations, that this is an exotic exploitation of South Africa, finding to way to have real decapitations of chickens brought in watching a tribal Sharman try to cure the Ebola plague in the Zula village, viewing the community as a “foreign” other in their dress and appearance to our distasteful lead from Hong Kong. There is some sense of this, alongside exploiting a couple of 1995 Ebola outbreaks in the African continent, such as in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo, as it was called at the time,  which would have been clear influences, alongside the fact that, as a virus which has tragically had a lot of outbreaks in various African countries in general, Ebola is exaggerated here beyond just being a horrifying disease which can cause internal and external bleeding to literally causing the organs to melt and eat themselves in some of the more legitimately disgusting details, such as an autopsy sequence. There is however, to contrast this, a sense of general misanthropy all round, the idea of transcontinental travel and cultural exchange being a doomed affair, and it becomes less a problematic film in the tone of what “mondo” documentaries from Italy were accused of but its own twisted and transgressive film with some uncomfortable scenes in a variety of taboos, which says a lot when Category III became stereotyped for some extreme films in both gore and sexual violence when these films were being learned of in the West. Some goofy humour, more common in Hong Kong’s cinema, does appear but it is more thankfully to emphasis a sick sense of humour to this, that this film is deliberately emphasizing the transgression whether justifiable or not, in the inventive cursing or the ill advised decision to take a pee in the underbrush only to encounter a leopard, which involved actually placing Anthony Wong, already an acclaimed actor by this point in his career, near an actual leopard.

There are scenes which will be uncomfortable and un-defendable for many, such as the rape scenes, especially as they all involve murder, and it is completely understandable if that is enough to caution a viewer off ever watching this film. In general, the entire passage of the film when Chicken gains Ebola is going to shock even hardened viewers nowadays if just in amazement of a higher budget Hong Kong film managing to “go” where this does. This is a film where Anthony Wong uses raw meat as a masturbatory aid and puts it back in the kitchen to later cook, so there is a deliberate shock value to the film, whether justifiable or not, which was trying to go further than other films. Herman Yau, whose career started with late eighties and kept going into the 2020s, clearly wanted to make a film with some depraved scenes on purpose, as eventually you will get into cannibalism and, in deposing and feeding a body to patrons to the restaurant, Chicken unwillingly beginning to spread the Ebola virus in Johannesburg. Eventually, fleeing to back to Hong Kong, this will continue, if with less emphasis on these more shocking scenes and, with an exception of an explicit threesome scene with two female sex workers played both with horror and goofy humour, on the threat of this virus in a metropolis. Some of the post-contagion and even autopsy scenes are going to be shocking for some viewers in their extremity too, but it starts even playing like a more “tamer” contagion film in how, with slow motion scenes to emphasis whenever Chicken can or does spread his illness, as the ultra-rare case of someone immune to it, the tone becomes less grotesque horror but a virus thriller.

Once it reaches its final, with the police in Hong Kong trying to catch Chicken when they contact an Ebola outbreak, even those who do find the film tasteless will have to concede that this does things with a lot of considerable heft to them even if they themselves understandably do not have the tolerance for the film’s tone, such as having an insane fire stunt in the final scenes with a stunt actor. There is also Anthony Wong himself, who having worked with Herman Yau on The Untold Story (1993) and Taxi Hunter (1993) was not a stranger to extremity. He has been a prolific actor who here brings what is absolutely needed to make this film vaguely defendable – a character who is impossible to connect to as he is a horrifying figure, yet is both fascinating to watch and, when he tries to have a happy ending with an old flame, actually brings in a bleaker shade to the material as you come to realize even a sociopath could have kindness in his heart, despite the chance he will kill that person he cares for even by pure accident as a Typhoid Mary figure. Considering how diverse Wong’s filmography is – John Woo films, Yau’s work, Johnnie To crime films, Ann Hui dramas – like so many Hong Kong actors, it is not a surprise he can add a gravitas even to a sleazy, depraved film like this as being able to act in a variety of genres and tones for films is more commonplace in their cinema. In fact, Wong won an actor’s award, the Hong Kong Film Award, for The Untold Story, which would be like if suddenly a figure like Daniel Day Lewis made a controversial and extreme horror film, and had such a good performance within it he still won an Oscar.

This is the same for Herman Yau too, alongside those in front of and behind the camera here, as with a string of horror films throughout his career, including the long Troublesome Nights series, he has gone from comedies dealing with housing crisis issues (A Home with a View (2019)), action films and entries in the Ip Man martial arts franchise. Yau even co-directed a re-imagination on JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls for a 2015 film set in its own Hong Kong centric context, which makes his notoriety in the West for films like Ebola Syndrome, which does live it to its infamy fully, more fascinating with hindsight. It is a strong film, even in the current day, where time has not made it “quaint” and it is to be approached with caution. Knowing its director went on in a variety of genres, and continues working, places more on respecting him as a director and with a sense that, even if a viewer may find the film utterly irredeemable, it was with hindsight made with the likely hope at least a viewer or two would react like that.

The Seventh Curse (1986)

 

Director: Lam Ngai Kai

Screenplay: Wong Jing and Yuen Gai-chi

Based on the Dr. Yuen novel series of Ni Kuang

Cast: Chow Yun-fat as Wisely; Chin Siu-ho as Dr. Yuen Chen-hsieh; Dick Wei as Black Dragon; Maggie Cheung as Tsui Hung; Sibelle Hu as Su; Chui Sau-lai as Betsy; Elvis Tsui as Sorcrer Aquala

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Picture a Maggie Cheung, Chow Yun-fat film directed by the man who made 1991 live action adaptation of Riki-Oh. That is The Seventh Curse, told in an opening bookend over wine and colourful chatter such as aliens chopping off human toes.  It shows the fascinating world of Hong Kong cinema of the time. You can be in this film and than a few years later a Wong Kar-Wai or John Woo production. All are good, and this one is as unpredictable as you can get as, for what is a horror action work, it begins as a serious action movie where our lead Dr. Yuen Chen-hsieh (Chin Siu-ho) is introduced, brought into a hostage situation to help a person in dire straits, but with Maggie Cheung's reporter Tsui Hung compromising the situation by taking the role of a nurse to get a story on Yuen.

This is all before we get to an abrupt martial arts fight - it will be that unpredictable - where the combatant against Yuen is just a messenger telling him the blood curse he has had for a year since his trip to Thailand is about to burst. This is, in respect to the film despite its laissez faire attitude to some things, very bad as even making love can set it off, with blood vessels swelling and bursting, the seventh at Yuen's heart and fatal. It forces him to take the advice of Chow Yung Fat's Dr. Wisely, an occult specialise, and go back to Thailand to deal with an evil wizard who is so bad he sets a big headed demon creature onto people, called a "Ghost Child", with chest busting crimson showers ensuring. The source for all this is the work of Ni Kuang, a prolific figure who here is having his series of Dr. Yuen novels adapted, but is also a work which crosses over multiple characters of his as, whilst a side figure here, Yung Fat's Dr. Wisely is the protagonist of a series of novels by Kuang started in the sixties and reaching the millennium.  If there is any sense this has been exaggerated from the source, I look to director Lam Ngai Kai who has his own clear obsessions and delirious attitudes. He is however someone who can be incredible faithful to the source - the Riki Oh adaptation is insanely faithful to by Masahiko Takajo and Tetsuya Saruwatari's source work, but it barely covers a work even weirder and unable to be adapted on a sensible budget - so I would not be surprised a bit of this is the source texts transposed as much as possible. Considering this has the back-story, in the blood curse, of Yuen saving a female sacrifice to an old ancestor - a skeleton corpse prop who still gets a fight scene, glowing blue eyes and to ripe a man's head off - we are in a moment of Hong Kong cinema sadly no longer with us but magnificent in how you can never expected the obvious to transpire. The term "this goes up to eleven' is appropriate here.

Like The Boxer's Omen (1983), an infamous Shaw Brothers supernatural tale, this has its own logic with the arcane, like worms who reproduce so fast that, on contact, you rip your own stomach open to death as they pour out, or the blood curse induced by being forced fed bullets from slain people, or the antidote (least for a year) being a magic pellet cut from a maiden's bared breast. All is over the top - even the melodrama - as a rope trap splits a man in two like a wishbone rather than just throws them to their death, and in vast contrast, you have Maggie Cheung playing her perky reporter like a comedy protagonist in an entirely different film, which is awesome to see as, in the logic of this film, she can just acquire enough armaments from her dad's gold credit card to mow people down, or has extensive knowledge of traps from Vietnam War research to avoid that scene's pitfalls and take photos of all the newly acquired corpses. You can see how this is a film, with its eighties gel coloured lighting and absolute enforcement of using practical effects, that in any other context like today will blow people's minds, but it is surprising to know this would be a one-off in Hong Kong cinema at the time, just a vein of creativity and delirium that creators and collaborators, in the midst of the vast connective web of its film industry, worked within.

And it is crafted with care even with the monster costumes, in how a random piece of the arcane, the grotesque Ghost Child, is an elaborate puppet prop here even if in context it is more gruesome;  that it is created from the blood of a hundred crushed children, which is not shied away from in the slightest. Melding action cinema, with enough extras relying on wires when hit with shotgun blasts, and martial arts cinema, and horror, it is a maddening eighty plus minutes to experience for a very simplistic story, and it was crafted to make all the scenes stand out.  And it manages to never peter out either, which makes this even more compelling. When Cheung is possessed, it is not enough to have her cured by regular means, but by being stuck into a bath of seven types of black animal blood, whilst the finale includes a Ghost Child vs. Old Ancestor battle which is as gory as it is ridiculous seeing to puppetry effects thrown at each other. The cast never feels like they are coasting through this either, as whilst Cheung is full of chirpy imagery, Chow Yun-fat as Mr. Wisely gets to be a badass just by knowing how to break cursed like a living textbook, and occasionally having a rocket launcher without context when that does not work.

Ni Kuang himself is an insanely prolific writer, prolific in also wuxia and science fiction storytelling, his work adapted to multiple formats over the decades. The Wisely series itself, prolific in number and not even the main novel series here being sourced from, was adapted into the director's last film The Cat (1992), and between comics, radio dramas, television and films, this series captured an audience back in the day which won many over. When there are over 145 in the series from the early sixties, this alone with Ni Kuang is someone whose mark is likely left on more titles, and thus makes The Seventh Curse even in its madness more compelling to consider in context as a result.

Two Thousand Maniacs (1964)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cast: Connie Mason as Terry Adams; William Kerwin as Tom White; Jeffrey Allen as Mayor Buckman; Shelby Livingston as Bea Miller; Ben Moore as Lester MacDonald; Jerome Eden as John Miller; Gary Bakeman as Rufus 'Rufe' Tate; Stanley Dyrector as Harper Alexander

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Following on from Blood Feast (1963), the most telling thing about his follow-up in the eventual gore trilogy is that Two Thousand Maniacs is how much of a step up in production this turned out to be. Set up as a group of six Northerners welcomed into a Southern town called Pleasant Valley, four in one car and a hitchhiker played by Blood Feast star William Kerwin with a female driver in another, you can tell from the get-go the budget and production of the film, even if still lower budget, was improved, taking the splatter film template Lewis created a year before and placing it within a full narrative.

The immediate thing to talk about is its theme song. Outside of its original context, it is a difficult song to digest, as its lyrics are from the perspective of Southerners threatening that "the South will rise again", an issue in the same way as a Confederate flag is because of how, to express Southern culture, unfortunately this has involved using the symbolism of the Confederates who practiced slavery. As an earworm, sung by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself as well as written by him, this makes this a guiltier issue to deal with, because it is a damn good song in terms of being stuck in the brain. In context though, it is perfect, as even if this is a splatter film first, the choice of its subject, and looking at both stereotypes of the South, and the uneasy relationship in culture between the Northern states and the South since the Civil War, is prominent and deliberate even as an exploitation film. Set in 1965 at the bicentennial of the end of the Civil War, the film is still meant to be a splatter film for entertainment at heart, but it is distinct touch from Herschell Gordon Lewis to tackle the conflicting emotions of the North and the South post-Civil War even within this film's playful tone, [Plot Spoilers] how the Pleasant Valley town is full of literal ghosts out for revenge for what Northern soldiers did to them when alive during the conflict [Spoilers End].

This is still a very goofy film, openly so with a sense of humour, for how many films has one such murder among its string of them being a game of hitting a tiny target to drop a giant rock onto someone? That or the sequence involving a very dangerous version of a barrel roll, played for sick humour as with Blood Feast and the director's other films? It still presents moments that, in context, are pretty nasty, as this feels like the cousin of Blood Feast with someone getting an arm axed off, but as with that film, it managed to be almost charming in spite of this. Unlike Blood Feast, the humour here is far less unintentional but deliberate, part of many tonal changes which transpire in just a year from the previous production. A considerable change of emphasis onto a plot, with dialogue scenes and more fleshed out characters, is found here even over some later films. The plot too, imaging the ghosts of the Confederate deciding to get their revenge on the Northern Yankees a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, is also tantalising even if this still, as an early Herschell film, a string of gore scenes first as priority. It is a loaded one, and how this bothers to even have an epilogue, where the ghosts leave to where they go to, is definitely something distinct from the director's filmography.

Out of a lot of Lewis' films, this is conventional and well put together, in that it is a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end which even people likely to be put off by his productions would appreciate. It also establishes many of his best virtues being how, when possible, he could pull resources when needed. It may seem odd not to immediately talk about the gore, but instead the music turns out to be the film's best virtue, where this is indeed a film where the virtues of the soundtrack are to be found. With talented musicians hired in the cast, playing members of the town who play jovial songs even over victims' remains being ritually barbecued, you do not expect a splatter film to be memorable for its traditional folk songs. Two Thousand Maniacs however has a ribald energy just from this music alone.

Arguably this tone could be unintentionally darker due to, unfortunately, a more complex question with depiction the South, entirely because the history of the American South and its idealised past. It is poignant here, in the slow burn ending, where the dead literally came back to haunt the modern day, which cannot be dampened even in the film of over-the-top performances and humour. Most of the cast have the right type of pulpy energy that one would like and, even if the film's structure means some not-surprising predictability in the pace, this is a film that became one of Herschell Gordon Lewis' most well regarded for a good reason. Hell, I think the knowledge of what this inspired says a lot of how well regarded the film is, that this not only inspired a 2005 remake but also the least likely band to take their name from them, 10,000 Maniacs an alternative rock band capable of very poetic songs on the likes of the In My Tribe album but still naming themselves proudly after the two thousand maniacs here. I like other, weirder films from later in the director-producer's filmography, but I see the virtues with Herschell's film here as clear as day even if there is fake blood over the skyline.

Nikos the Impaler (2003)

 

Director: Andreas Schnaas

Screenplay: Ted Geoghegan

Cast: Joe Zaso as Frank Heller; Felissa Rose as Sandra Kane; Andreas Schnaas as Nikos; Brenda Abbandandolo as Daisy; Joseph Michael Lagana as Pete; Joe Lattanzi as Ryan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

"Who dresses these people?"

"Probably their pets."

Romania 1002, and I am unsure whether 11th century Romanians would say "crap" but this is a splatter film, one where I will make the blasphemous comparison that, for the notorious splatter filmmaker from Germany behind the Violent Shit trilogy, there is no real different here with Nikos the Impaler and when an auteur like Wong Kar-Wai makes a film in the USA like My Blueberry Nights (2007). The difference is that Jude Law's face did not get ripped in My Blueberry Nights in the first few minutes, as the titular Impaler gets gang retribution against him for all his killing, but the differences are in genre here. I still can see this as Andreas Schnaas paying tribute to American horror cinema in his own way, also playing Nikos in costume, ripping people to shreds and rampaging across New York City

Even with his guts slipping out on the floor, Nikos claims immorality, and even eats his own guts Joe D'Amato style to emphasise this before he keels over before we cut to New York with a guitar solo song to explain where we are. The film is two separate pieces which connect together, one half in the then-modern day explaining how Nikos himself was a Northland barbarian who killed 300 people and hated Romania, even shafted by history itself as Vlad the Impaler came decades later and stole his thunder. A group of students and their teacher – two male slackers wanting extra credit, a girl named Daisy, two elder tourists and a somewhat positive depiction of a gay male couple, alongside the male teacher and his love interest Ms. Cane – go to a Romanian art show where a theft was planned at the gallery. Naturally with the exhibit having  a labyrinth full of old weapons, the botched robbery struggle gets blood on Niko's helmet, and resurrects him, wanting to repay everyone for this with a surprising amount of decapitations and, for a rare example of this, even the full severing off of someone’s face.

A ultra low-budget splatter film, with static early 2000s aesthetic but definitely shot in New York City, what this turns out to be with hindsight is what Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) was supposed to be but this outdoes. Jason Takes Manhattan was the last film of the original Friday the 13^th franchise, before New Line Cinema acquired the rights and made Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), which notoriously promised to have Jason in the Big Apple. Only has a couple of scenes were shot on real locations and is mostly set on a boat. I like the film, but a large portion of Nikos the Impaler is in the gallery, but once it gets to the second half, this is clearly shot in the city and Long Island. Set to eighties speed metal throwbacks, and obvious but effective practical gore effects, this starts as a traditional gorier slasher but becomes a more elaborate take on Jason Take Manhattan with far less restrictions with what it could do, both in stealing shots across the city to the ridiculous number or the number of gory head trauma deaths.

It is also a tribute to cult American cinema and a really good snapshot of what indie American genre films were like in the time period – clearly set in 2003 with posters of Crossroads (2002), the Britney Spears star vehicle, a video rental shop selling Jason X (2001), the Friday the 13^th film set in outer space, alongside The Sum of All Fears (2002), and a reference to “that wizard Larry Potter kid”. Like the wave of German splatter films from the eighties on, you see figures, recognisable or for viewers of niche fringes of low budget genre cinema, appear in this. B-movie actress/filmmaker Tina Krause makes a cameo as Eva Braun, which will be explained later in this review, and there is an extended scene, playing themselves, of a group of figures in the video store connected to Troma Films, from an actress from their films Debbie Rochon to Troma figurehead Lloyd Kaufman himself, naturally selling his own films, wearing a dapper bow tie before he is killed and truly being the Stan Lee of cult cinema. One very obscure figure, but a great nod to this era of straight-to-video cinema from this cinema, is also the cameo of Darian Caine, a regular of softcore erotic films from this era, like The Erotic Witch Project (2000), even if it is just for a gratuitous shower scene.

Even if using a gym and a cinema among places, Andreas Schnaas was filming on real locations here, a production where people onscreen worked behind the camera, and clearly made for the love of filmmaking. A set pieces running into an all-women's gay bar searching for a man uses an actual bar for the location, and the end even recreates the iconic shot from Zombi 2 (1979) with Nikos on the Brooklyn Bridge. They even managed to acquire an aerial metropolis shot, if brief, which shows a lot of care and effort into the film which is a grab bag of splatter and humour. Even when there were clear limitations as a low budget film, I admire the achievements; there are also times you need to realise with films like this, once you come to this type of cinema, that their pleasures comes from admitting their practical limitations. Case in point, when a sword able to shot lightning briefly appears, obviously you have to use CGI as here because you cannot explode a car in the middle of New York even in guerrilla filmmaking.

It is an indulgent film, where Andreas Schnaas can mock his own production Zombie '90: Extreme Pestilence (1991) but can have it screening in a cinema in one of his films, yet I can respect this because there is a level of unpredictability here without padding. Random ninjas can be seen, you can suddenly have German rap metal in the score, and whilst Adolf Hitler abruptly makes an appearance, summoned alongside figures from the director’s own films from DVDs in a rental store, the German filmmaker just makes this a way to mock the dictator, Hitler complaining he is not in charge and promptly getting exploded for talking back. For those with the taste for these films, it is one of the most ambitious in how, in a foreign country for him, Schnaas still made a film that was not comnpromised and packs a lot into itself. A level of commitment too that is visible here is enough to be admired, and this even shows levels of commitment few films have as, whilst starring in their own film is one thing, most filmmakers have never sung on the power metal song about Nikos as Schnaas does here, which is a new level of dedication especially as he does a credible power metal vocal. Neither for its gore either does it feel repugnant either but actually fun for all its gruel, like Herschell Gordon Lewis films, which is the most rewarding thing. Nikos the Impaler is the kind of film you would point blank dismiss for being nasty for the sake of it, and being a series of tangents into gore scenes, but somehow knowing there is a dedication to Fanni the cat in the end credits, one of the last ones, does emphasis the makers of this were ordinary people who just got together to make a spectacle like this. With mind of how no and ultra-low budget films are being re-evaluated and preserved, Nikos is a good one to have a second life from if for the fact that, to try to sell this for an imaginary Blu-Ray restoration, this takes what we wanted from Jason Takes Manhattan, actually achieves it and adds far more gore, more personal creativity, more playful humour, and a comical amount of head based trauma into the proceedings.