The Exterminator (1980)

One of the better exploitation films from my youth was The Exterminator. I still remember his catchphrase of “If you’re lying, I’ll be back”, so when the remastered directors cut surfaced, I had to see it. Fast forward to December 2011 and here it is, in all it’s bloody gory glory. The story is a simple vigilante story: When John Eastland’s best friend, Michael Jefferson, is mugged and left permanently crippled, he decides to do something about it. Jefferson had saved Eastland’s life in Vietnam and now it’s time for Eastland to get revenge for his friend. Using his old Army gear he sets out on a crusade to clean up the streets of New York using the name “The Exterminator.” [IMDb]

The movie starts out with our two main characters escaping a Vietnamese attack. Yep, you guessed it, they’re Vietnam vets. I should stress here that it’s rather well done for a cheap film. There’s some big, and I mean BIG, explosions, plenty of fire and a fair bit of gore, ie: a decapitation, when the Vietnamese are demanding information. I haven’t seen this film in years and wasn’t expecting the decap, so when it happened it totally unexpected and, for the time, very well done, FX-wise I mean.

Now THAT's a gaping wound!

Our main character (played by Robert Ginty) is down and saved by his sidekick. Once air lifted to safety we see them working at a meat market. Mr. Ginty walks in on a robbery and is, again, saved by his cohort. Unfortunately for his cohort he’s later attacked by the robbers and is left crippled. It’s here that our man has been (as the cover says) ‘pushed too far’.

Immediate +1 for having a flame thrower!

After hunting down the guys who crippled his war buddy, our man goes after various other scumbags who cross him in various ways. Needless to say, most of them end up worst off.

Why yes, it is a man (in chains) dangling above a giant meat grinder.

I remembered it fondly as a fine exploitation film of the vigilante era and was hesitant to watch it in case I spoiled some fond memories, but even now, 30yrs later it’s still a cracking good film.

The beheading is an excellent effect, others are your bog standard blood splats and what-have-you. The acting is good, but there’s absolutely no funny parts to this movie. Not a jot. On the bright side though, there are some nekkid b00bs.

We're offering a BOGOF today, Sir. Look at some fine female boobs and you get to see some man boobs absolutely free!

I highly recommend this fine vigilante film if you’re in the mood to see scumbags getting their comeuppance, and it has a good ending. Now… should I watch The Exterminator 2 next, or the original Death Wish? Hmm…

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Sint (2010) aka: Saint

Well, it’s that time again. You know, it’s the one where us Christian heathens become believers just to get some shitty presents. Yep, it’s Christmas. And we all need a good festive movie to get us into the spirit of things.

To hell with the inevitable James Bond, and Dorothy can stick her Wizard of Oz. Sint is where it’s at!

Hailing from the Netherlands, and called Saint for us English folks, it’s based around their legend of St. Niklas a rogue bishop who pillages villages in the 1400′s with a list of demands. But, the peasants are revolting and old Nik is about to get some payback. Flambé style! The plebs torch Nik by fire bombing his ship (yes, he has a cool pirate style ship) and on each full moon of December the 5th, Nik returns to seek revenge!

Hey, look, it's Santa Clau... uh-oh...

Sint is part action, part horror and even part comedy, but it’s all done really well. Sure there are some shoddy CGI effects, but, c’mon, this isn’t a 50 bajillion dollar Hollywood number. The kills are good (with Niklas using his staff to decapitate an armed cop) with some nice jump scares too, just for good measure. Lots of nice touches with things like the boy drawing a smiley face in the condensation of his bedroom window which, when the camera is outside looking in, lines up with his smiling face. It’s a simple, silly little thing, but it’s a nice touch which distracts you from the incoming scare.

I'm not sure if this is comedy, or bad subtitles. But I like it!

Anyway… where was I? Oh yes. One kid goes to check on some pigs in a barn to find his family massacred by St. Niklas and his goons (‘Black Pete’s. I’m not sure that’s politically correct these days. Is it? Oh no, wait, I don’t care.) That kid grows up to be a cop who warns of the impending massacre at midnight on this December 05th (with full moon of course).

So, we’re now following some school teens one of whom is going out this December night dressed as St. Nik. Not good. Well, things happen, like friends being bumped off and our poor lame St. Nik gets framed. Many more murders start popping up and, of course, it’s now that the Chief of cops starts to reread the report given by his once loony copper.

See, that's what happens when you shoot St. Niklaus's horse in the neck...

Next thing, we’ve got the kid and the mad copper trying to take down old Nik. I’m not going to give away the ending, so fear not.

I don't think he's gonna give you any nice presents...

Sint is a good Christmas themed movie. Has some nice effects, good kills, and Nik himself looks like a cross between Santa and Freddy. Which is nice. I’m giving it less than 4 out of 5 as it starts off pretty awesome then slows down a bit where they need to introduce us to the fodder teens.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

The Human Centipede II - Full Sequence (2011)

In case you’ve been living on Mars lately The Human Centipede 2 has landed! Can it out do it’s prequel (Human Centipede – First Sequence)? Let’s have a look and see…

The storyline is as thus: Martin is a mentally disturbed loner who lives with his mother in a bleak housing project. He works the night shift as a security guard in an equally grim and foreboding underground parking complex. To escape his dreary existence, Martin loses himself in the fantasy world of the cult horror film The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009), fetishizing the meticulous surgical skills of the gifted Dr. Heiter, whose knowledge of the human gastrointestinal system inspires Martin to attempt the unthinkable.

That’s right folks, Martin is so obsessed by creepy German doctor Heiter that he’s going to attempt to create a 12 person centipede! Go creepy Martin!

Creepy Martin is creepy...

And when I say creepy, I mean CREEPY! Martin, played by new comer Laurence Harvey is very disturbing. He also never says a single word throughout the entire film, and it works.

The film begins with Martin on the job (night shift security guard) watching The Human Centipede on his laptop. After he’s dispatched his first two victims it’s all down hill from there. His mother is constantly moaning at him, his neighbour upstairs is constantly blasting out shitty music (and picking on Martin) all this culminates in Martin snapping and deciding to follow his hero. Nay. Out do his hero!

Having  gathered together his twelve victims he begins to splice them together. Unfortunately due to a few mishaps here and there (happens to the best of surgeons) a couple of folks were, uh, ‘lost’, shall we say. But, due to the magic of gaffa tape and a staple gun, Martin shines through in the end with a ten person centipede. Hoorah!

What would we do without gaffa tape eh?

But, all does not go as planned for ‘Dr.’ Martin (I shant spoil it all) and things break down.

Let me just explain this screenshot. Top right is a naked pregnant chick and bottom left is Martin raping the centipede. Now there's something you don't see every day...

The film, which was apparently shot in colour, is (in the final cut) almost entirely in black and white. I say entirely as there is a spattering of colour. That’s an in joke. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean.

Did Mr. Six out do himself in Centipede 2? I think so. He managed to get the film completely banned here in the UK due to its insanity. With over 2mins of cuts they’ve given him an 18 certificate (highest you can get apart from a porn film) and I can see why. There’s everything from centipede rape to squished foetuses. Seriously!

Is there a plot? Kinda. Do I give a rats ass? No. Although I’d love to see the full colour version which I hope we see as a directors cut.

Roll on Centipede 3!

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Trailer:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okZZca4EfAQ

Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010)

Another exploitation documentary, but this time with a twist. This one explores the movies from, and made in, the Philipine’s. Many with the help of the infamous Ferdinand Marcos (he of the wife with many shoes).

Covering everything from the women in prison/cage genre through to Weng Weng (the midget James Bond), but with Roger Corman being the link between each film.

The documentary is pretty much all interviews, and begins with directors, and producers, explaining how it was far cheaper to film the entire thing in the Philippines’s as they could hire everything there. The Philippines’s had a thriving movie industry and had everything at hand, and when they say everything, they mean everything, including the army! Actors, stunt men, demolition experts, you name it it was all there, and cheap, so it made sense for Corman and his directors to film there.

It began with a couple of cheap horror films then boomed into the women in prison genre.

Mentioned 'women in prison', need to show boobs...

Corman got tired of them and thought, ” hey, let’s put black people up front” and lo, the blaxploitation genre began. Next thing you know you have one armed executioners. No, I’m not kidding, there really is a film about a one armed executioner (from 1981)!

Drawing to a close the documentary spends several minutes talking about Apocalypse Now which was shot entirely in the Philippine’s (under Marcos), using the Philippino army and ended up looking nothing like Vietnam!

It’s a great documentary with many funny stories from the actors and actresses who sometimes had a terrible time in the Philippines, but still smile when telling the stories.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Witch Bitch

Unlike in Aerobicide there are not a lot of padding scenes in Death Spa of people working out, but there are a couple of dance numbers with crap music. Not as crap as in Aerobicide, but also not as memorable. Except for the closing song of Death Spa, in which they sing about the movie itself. This is one of the many things I miss about the 80s.

The story here is that Michael (William Bumiller) owns a gym, or spa as they called them back then, and the daily operations are completely dependent on his crazy former brother in law David (gay cult icon Merritt Butrick) and the complicated computer system the BIL has set up. Oh, computers.

Now that his wife is dead, gym employee Laura (Brenda Bakke), who danced her way through the opening credits, is the new lady in his life. We see her finish her workout  and get into the sauna nude, her hand starts moving south…and then the system goes nuts and starts steaming her alive. Fortunately she breaks the window and somersaults through.

We find out that Michael’s wife killed herself after a screwup during the birth of their (stillborn? I don’t see a kid anywhere) child left her in a wheelchair. But she didn’t just take some pills; she self-immolated. As more than one character reminds us, she was “burned to unrecognizable ashes.”

Someone is busy killing off the gym’s clientele. Is it the dead wife’s ghost (Shari Shattuck), the brother in law, the computer itself, an angry employee (Alexa Hamilton), a shady business partner, or a combination?

Standout scenes: a gay guy brushes off a horny woman by telling her, “you’re VHS; I’m Betamax.” That’s a unique approach to coming out. Blaxploitation fave Rosalind Cash shows up as one of the cops investigating the deaths. David explains to the cops what “hacking” is. A guy gets his torso ripped apart by a resistance upper body machine. A man has his throat cut by a frozen fish which comes back to life through the magic of, well, magic I guess. There is a death by blender scene. The dead wife and her brother become one, in more ways than one. There is an attempted murder by tanning bed.

My copy of Death Spa is a Japanese import region free DVD; I’m pretty sure this is OOP in the USA. You know you have been watching too many weird films when you can look at Asian subtitles and tell the languages apart, yet can’t read a word of it. Also, apparently Japanese DVDs have to blur out the bush, so no full frontal. Just pixelated frontal.

This is not what anyone would call “a good movie,” but if you’re reading this site you probably don’t need to be told that. The question we have to deal with here at Midnight Showing is, “Does it entertain?” The answer is yes, immensely, a thousand times yes. I would have given it three stars anyway because it’s everything that was great about late 80s horror (everyone looks great, nobody is likeable, everything is leading up to a death extravaganza party that can’t be cancelled), but I have to bump it up to 4 for the plentitude of topless ladies and crazy death scenes.

American Grindhouse (2010)

American Grindhouse lays out our favourite deviancy chronologically. Right from the creation of the moving picture through to some recent picks such as Planet Terror and the like.

Our journey starts with the creation of the moving picture and how it spawned exploitation in the sense of your great-grandma whipping off her drawers to ‘titilate’ viewers. Shame on you grandma!

Exploitation, as we know it, began with the movie ‘Traffic of Souls’ which tells the story of white people being bought and sold as slaves. It was a rumour of the time that spawned a movie, but it was the first movie to exploit a genre/story and lo exploitation films were born. Yay!

The documentary briefly discusses the introduction of codes of conduct, the big classics (Dracula, Frankenstein etc.), then discusses the Tod Browning classic ‘Freaks’ which ruined the poor guy. If you haven’t seen it yet, you need to.

Moving into the 30′s it talks about the early crime dramas where criminals would discuss their crime, but with the movie always ending with a message of ‘crime doesn’t pay’. The 40′s, for some reason, brought the ‘educational’ film which either explained VD or showed child birth. Very odd!

Todays question is: guess the STD!

But the 40′s also brought us Hollywood ‘film noir’, so that’s OK then. The 50′s brought us dirty magazines, biker gangs and burlesque, and the 60′s gave us the nudist flick! It’s getting better and better all the time! Oh no, wait, the 60′s also gave us beach films. That’s beach, read it again, and the ‘roughies’ where women get their ass kicked for no real reason.

Fear not, the 60′s redeem themselves when one director decides to show the previously unseen and actually shows blood! Gasp! That’s right, along came a Mr H. G. Lewis and Blood Feast. From there on in… well, I’m sure you know the rest. Or you should know the rest!

Mr Blood Feast himself, H.G. Lewis

Oh, and some other film called ‘Psycho’ (or something) also came out around the same time. I don’t think the director of this Psycho ever got anywhere…

The 70′s gave us that crackpot Charles Manson, but it also gave us things like Last House on the Left. I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good thing or not. I’ll let you decide. It also gave us the genre we know as Blaxploitation. Love it or loathe it, it’s fuckin’ awesome. Possibly on the downside we also got the women-in-prison genre. Only good for boobs. Although this film historian, Kim Morgan, says that most women like to see other women naked and it turns them on. I love Kim Morgan!

Kim Morgan for President! And here was me thinking that all film historians were old bearded men.

Although The Big Bird Cage turned it all on its head by having gay prison guards looking after the women which is kinda funny.

By now were in the mid-70′s and that means Ilsa – Shewolf of the SS and a flood of Nazisploitation films. You name it, the Nazi’s were doing it. Closing the 70′s is when it became OK to show full sex and porn arrived, also bringing with it, into the 80′s, the animals-gone-mad films. Dozens of them. Hundreds probably!

Anyway, it’s a good documentary on our favourite genre of movies. A bit slow at the start as, I think, it spends a bit too much time setting the scene. It could have started with Freaks onwards, or even just started from Blood Feast onwards. Either way, it’s a good 90min history lesson on exploitation. Grab it if you can!

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

THE SILENCE OF WALTER SHELTIN

Bill Oberst Jr. To Show Chops In THE SILENCE OF WALTER SHELTIN 

Horror genre actor Bill Oberst Jr. (known for leads in Fearmakers’ DISMAL, director Michael Emanuel’s upcoming SCARY OR DIE with Corbin Bleu and The Asylum’s August release A HAUNTING IN SALEM in 3-D) has been attached to detach his wife’s head from her body in a fit of postcoital bliss for writer Jeff Palmer’s THE SILENCE OF WALTER SHELTIN, a fan-driven film scheduled for production in late 2011.

Palmer makes an appeal for fan funding in a video that Oberst calls “the funniest and most original Kickstarter video I’ve ever seen.” In the video, Palmer cradles an axe and talks to fans about the film while his offscreen wife’s nagging drives him closer and closer to the brink of murder until…

httpv://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jbpalmer/the-silence-of-walter-sheltin/widget/video.html

Oberst says “THE SILENCE OF WALTER SHELTIN is a purely fan-driven project. It’s not a money-making project so there’s no way we can do it without small donations. It is really a labor of love. Jeff Palmer’s script is skin-crawlingly creepy and a little funny and whole lot of fun. It’s the kind of little film that Rod Serling and Richard Matheson might have made on a weekend off from THE TWILIGHT ZONE or NIGHT GALLERY…a devoted husband has a romantic dinner and passionate sex with his hot wife, and then chops off her head. But why? The answer is even better than the murder. It is a great classic horror script.” A casting search is currently underway for the role of Walter Sheltin’s gorgeous wife.

Fans can pledge a small contribution toward the film’s production budget at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jbpalmer/the-silence-of-walter-sheltin  Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing funding site, so no pledges are collected unless the production makes its funding goal by the August 19th deadline. Several appreciation gifts are offered for pledges, including lunch with Oberst and Palmer at a swanky Hollywood restaurant, signed posters, DVDs and an autographed life-size stand-up of Bill as Walter Sheltin clothed in his wife’s blood and a strategically-placed axe (says Oberst, “I’m lobbying for one of Walter’s smoking hot wife in the same pose!“)

“No one is making a dime on this picture,” says Oberst “it’s just a gift we want to wrap up, smear with a little blood and give to fans. I personally appreciate any help. Some films you do for money, some are just for love of horror. This is one of those. Thanks for helping us get it made and for keeping the fun of indie horror alive!“

Alienology – Tales From The Void

Well, my first book review outside of Midnight Showing. Head over to Sonar4 Landing Dock Reviews and check out my review of Alienology. It’s a pretty good book with aliens, gore and other assorted sickness.  :)

Right from the get go, we are assailed with a moving wall of text setting up why this film will never be able to be made again (which is true, this had to be made at a certain time for any chance at authenticity) and some mentions of a “code” that exists among the carny folk, among other things.  THIS is where I find FREAKS has the absolute most to offer anyone who watches it in todays morally bankrupt and culturally suicidal society.  For those that don’t know, the main arc examined through FREAKS is that of a couple (A Strongman performer type and a Trapeze broad who happens to be French if the accent was deciphered correctly by yours truly) that is plotting to get the lady in the couple to marry the roaming carnival promoter and then kill him in order to inherit the fortunes he apparently has coming to him.  Of course, our savvy band of deformed oddities and lovable monsters is a step ahead of the nefarious duo and their shady plan and, by the end of the film, kill the man (or at least we are led to believe that they killed him since we never see him again after he is stuck in the ribs with a knife and descended upon by a dozen or so blade wielding freaks crawling underneath a carriage in the middle of a terribly stormy night) and disfigure the trapeze artiste almost beyond recognition making her “one of them.”

Proud to be part of the Carnival of Blood Blogathon!

This is where I usually get to fist pumping and celebrating the no nonsense attitude these people took when dealing with folks who would seek to take advantage of them and, in the end, murder one of their own.  Nowadays, if someone marries into money, people applaud the move, or they get a reality tv show, or they are thought of as clever and smart and the most resentment you will get from the general public is jealousy instead complete and utter disgust.  The forces that control our media and institutions have engineered a climate where everyone is a potential enemy to the millions that is so rightfully yours and if ONLY you could get those sandbagging motherfuckers out of the picture, you would have less competition in your way and could realize your dream of being better than everyone else, consequences be damned.  But the FREAKS survive by travelling and working together to entertain audiences and use the curses that have been so unfairly bestowed upon them as a tool for something not unlike success.  They may be laugh at, teased, and ridiculed, but they have your attention and some of your cash, and they have done it by embracing what they and piquing your curiosity and allowing you to explore those emotions for a nominal fee.  Everyone wins and in a symbiotic and subconscious way, everyone takes care of everyone else.  What the fuck is better than that?

FREAKS Full Movie