Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies (2001)

Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies is a documentary about, as its title suggests, the history of American movies, but not your Hollywood blockbusters, oh no, this is about the history of American exploitation movies.

The documentary begins with the end of World War II, the baby boom, televisions and quite probably the first ‘scream queen’, Vampira, who introduced the viewers to low budget movies on TV. The mid 50′s brought many headaches to Hollywood, not just people watching TV rather than going to the movies, but a law came in to force breaking up the monopoly that the studios had. The ‘theatre divorcement’ as it was nicknamed.

Around this time AIP started up producing low budget movies that put teens in the limelight with rebellion at the forefront. Then Roger Corman appears…

Vampira - the black and white version of Elvira

Corman could turn out films within days on a low budget yet still make a profit, something that AIP quite liked, and so a partnership was formed. Next thing you know we’re getting colour, Corman and Vincent Price. All in one film!

The 30min mark is where it heats up and moves in to sinema. It’s here that exploitation movies came in to their own. Hollywood movies were forbidden to show certain things in movies, but low-budget studios didn’t have the same constraints as Hollywood so they churned out the nudist, nudie-cuties, and then you have Russ Meyer.

Boredom set in and now in the early 60′s the exploiteers were looking for a new niche. Enter, Blood Feast.

The infamous 'Blood Feast'.

Prior to Blood Feast (as one man puts it) ‘no one had ever filmed blood before, or saw anyone die with their eyes open.’ After that came the ‘roughies’ which were the ‘torture-porn’ of their day with men beating women black and blue (in black and white). But when the restrictions on Hollywood are lifted, there’s no niches left for the cunning exploiteers and low-budget independent movies effectively died.

Schlock! is really interesting documentary, there’s plenty of good titbits of info and trivia in here and it’s amazing to see how much of Hollywood is built upon the shoulders of Corman. His films may suck at times, but without him there’d be no Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, James Cameron… the list goes on. They all worked with Corman, many getting their big break (or starring role) thanks to Corman.

It’s kinda like watching a documentary on the Titanic, you know the sad end is coming, but at least with exploitation films you know it’s not THE end… as one interviewee commented ‘exploitation films are still alive, everything out of Hollywood now is exploitation.’

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Feast III - The Happy Finish

And now we reach the end of the Feast trilogy (assuming they do end it here that is) with Feast III – The Happy Finish..

The first five minutes of Feast III consists of flashbacks to Feast and Feast II. Feast III continues on right from the end of Feast II showing what happens to Honey Pie (shant spoil it) and the rest of the gang.

As we’ve come to expect from the previous two movies, Feast III has the usual amount of schoolboy humour and over the top gore/comedy.

Having survived Fast II, the group meet up with a Duke Nukem/cowboy who has a plan for survival, which comes to a rather unfortunate end, leaving the group at a loss for leadership. This is soon remedied by a mysterious ‘prophet’ who seems to have some sort of control over the beasts (whom we still know little, to nothing, about).

But before the meeting is surely one of Feast III’s funniest moments. Ass rape. Yes, that’s right, I’ve managed to write a review with a humorous scene of ass rape. Our ex-car dealer has his back to the wall, while trapped in a storage container. Unfortunately, said wall has a hole in it which one of the randy beasts decides to make good use of. The rest you can find out while watching it.

Ass rape - in this case, it's funny.

As the beasts run from the mysterious ‘prophet’ the gang take his advice and head for the place where the trilogies humour comes from: the sewers. Here they meet a Macguyver/Bruce Lee wannabe.

Beast balls! Gratuitous alien sack shot

Another humorous thing in Feast III is the pole-in-head guy from Feast II. With a pole through your head, I’m sure it’d be quite difficult to talk and you’d be even harder to understand. Subtitles to the rescue! Yes, every time pole-in-the-head guy talks, we get subtitles showing, approximately, what he’s mumbling.

Pole-in-the-head guy goes delirious and thinks one of the midgets is his son.

The survivors leave the sewers and head for street level where the trilogies ending begins.

I’m not going to spoil it, but I enjoyed the ending. Some may not like it, but it’s suitable for the Feast movies. In fact, I’ve enjoyed all three Feast films. They’ve been funny, gory, chock full of boobage and schoolboy humour.

Long may it last. More Feast and more schoolboy humour please!*

* and, of course, boobs

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Feast II - Sloppy Seconds

If you’ve seen the first Feast movie (or read my Feast review here on Midnight Showing) then you’ll know what the movie is about. For the rest of you, it’s about monsters invading a small town and running riot. Yep, that’s pretty much it. But it’s a comedy so when kills aren’t taking place, something funny is.

A couple of characters have made it from the first Feast in to this second outing. Sloppy Seconds starts exactly where the first movie left off, in fact it shows you the end of Feast then has the black screen with the shrinking circle, exactly like you’d see when you finish a level in Super Mario World (Super Nintendo/Famicom, best console ever created in the history of the Universe).

We’re introduced to Biker Queen then reintroduced to the Bartender (who still isn’t dead). We’re then treated to the meeting of Bartender and Honey Pie (deserter in Feast) which results in one of the best male to female beatings ever. Even just thinking about the sound of her head smashing off that toilet pan makes me snigger like a school boy.

The main problem with Sloppy Seconds is that it takes nearly half the film to introduce all the characters (which I think there are too many) and give a decent laugh. Even then, for me the first laugh was the monster fart scene. Call me immature if you like, but you can’t beat fart jokes. Then comes one of about three scenes that made me laugh: the monster bukkake scene.

That's monster wang and monster jizz!

One of the characters decides that to defeat the enemy, he must know the enemy – inside and out, so he decides to do an autopsy on one of the creatures. This involves him using a blow torch to cut open a monster and poke it’s various organs with a stick. One organ must obviously be the prostate which makes the monster shoot jizz over almost all the cast (including the old Bartender guy! Ewwww!).

The monsters REALLY love our earth cats...

Another scene has Honey Pie locked in a store, in a daze she dreams of love and sex (with what looks like some fat dude) but awakens to see one of the creatures humping something. Turns out, the monsters really love our earth cats…

There are a couple of other scenes which made me laugh out loud, but they were few and far between, especially since the movie does run for a touch over 90mins. The effects are quite well done (for a straight to DVD release that is) and there’s certainly enough gore in it to keep the average gore-hound grinning.

Gratuitous boobage.

Unfortunately they kept the best scenes to near the end of the movie, which is where the punk/goth chicks finally get their boobs out. This should certainly have happened sooner and would have gotten more of a (boioioioing!) reaction with them running about topless. But sadly not to be. Shame you Mr Director!

So, in summing up: it gets a couple of points for the topless chicks, and a couple of points for the funny scenes (watch out for the baby scene), that still only makes it average.

But, never fear… there’s always next time. Yep, there’s a Feast III cumming.

NOTE TO DIRECTOR: more boobage early on please…

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1104835/]