Tag Archives: Euro-horror

Break a leg.

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STAGEFRIGHT

3 Stars  1987/18/86m

“The theater of death.”

A.k.a. Aquarius; Bloody Bird; Sound Stage Massacre

Director: Michele Soavi / Writer: Lew Cooper / Cast: Barbara Cupisti, David Brandon, Mary Sellers, Robert Gligorov, Jo Anne Smith, John Morghen, Martin Philips, Piero Vida, Ulrike Schwerk, Lori Parrel, Clain Parker, James E.R. Sampson.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: (cowering victim to chainsaw swinging killer) “I’ll do you a deal… you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone, OK?”

I really need to seek out StageFright again someday. It’s probably worth more than three stars.

Anyway, based on what I do remember many moons after I saw it in the age of big box ex-rental VHS tapes, young stage actress Alicia (Cupisti), injures her ankle, she’s taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital to get it checked by a doctor. High-profile psycho loon Irving Wallace breaks out of his cell at the same time and hides in the back of her car, getting a ride back to the theatre where she’s just been fired from an all-night rehearsal for a play about Jack the Ripper.

When the costume designer gets a pick-axe in the mouth outside, egotistical director Peter decides to change the play to be about Wallace (under the illusion the killer fled the scene) and re-hires Alicia out of sympathy. And locks them all in.

It soon becomes clear that Wallace is stuck inside with the cast and crew and begins offing them with knives, axes, power-drills, and a handy chainsaw – all under the disguise of a pretty creepy bird mask. This gory flick supposedly influenced Argento’s Opera and features some good, intense sequences and downright brutal demises for a majority of the cast.

Alicia’s brushes with the killer as she struggles to find an escape route peak in a scene where she tries to retrieve the key to her escape from beneath his feet. Of course, at the end they engage in one on one combat and she prevails, but the added scene lends a most surreal slant when Alicia returns to retrieve her lost watch and the caretaker repeats the same line over and over for no apparent reason…

The only flaw is the re-recorded dubbing, which disables much of the effect of the original dialogue and, like so many European movies, cannot recapture the ‘in the moment’ performance, drawing laughter sometimes when there should be terror.

Blurbs-of-interest: Director Soavi played the role of a victim in Absurd and was also in A Blade in the Dark; Mary Sellers was also in the super-creepy Ghosthouse.

Absurdsworth

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AbsurdVHS-2ABSURD

3 Stars  1981/X/90m

A.k.a. Anthropophagous II; The Grim Reaper 2; Horrible; Monster Hunter

Director: Joe D’Amato [as Peter Newton] / Writer: George Eastman [as John Cart] / Cast: George Eastman, Katya Berger, Annie Belle, Charles Borromel, Edmund Purdom, Hanja Kochansky, Ian Danby, Kasimir Berger.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “I’m no doctor, but that doesn’t look good.”

An as-yet un-re-submitted (!) resident of the infamous Video Nasties List of the early 80s, this sort-of sequel to the crappy Grim Reaper takes a lot of cues from Halloween, stirs in lashings of gore, and is therefore about 642% better than its predecessor.

Eastman is the beardy-loon on the run from Purdom’s priest Pleasence-clone when he is injured atop a spiked gate at the home of the “all-American” Bennett family: mom, dad, aggressively punchable brat-of-a-son Willy, and paralysed teenage sister Katya, who is confined to a cot-contraption upstairs until she can summon the strength to walk again. You can guess what’s coming later.

Beardy-loon is rushed to hospital where the doctors working on him comment that it’s “absurd” how his body repairs itself against the laws of science. He later wakes up and thanks the staff by driving a drill through the temple of a nurse and then feeding some other poor idiot’s bald head into a saw.

Naturally, he gravitates back to the Bennett house and does away with the stand-in babysitter before going after poor Katya and the replacement babysitter. All the while, Willy stands around like a tool and whines about things as everybody watching hopes that the reason this film found its way on to the Video Nasties List is because it did away with the insufferable little prick with extreme prejudice.

Alas, it doesn’t come to be. But Absurd is full of gratuitous violence all the same: the first two kills are the most splatterific, and things DO get tense towards the end as Katya – as we suspected – finds that inner strength to hobble around and takes on the maniac with a compass of all things and a game of hide and seek ensues.

Of all the Halloween Xeroxes out there, it’s certainly one of the most obvious, full of “I’ll go look, you stay here” dialogue, but it does pack some interesting moments, including a funny final shot, rendering it a fair retread through familiar surroundings and a mini Holy Grail for gorehounds and masochists who like to endure the presence of bad child actors who won’t fucking die.

Look out for Stagefright director Michele Soavi as the young biker victim.

Blurbs-of-interest: Purdom was also in Pieces and Don’t Open Til Christmas (which he also directed some of); Soavi also acted in A Blade in the Dark.

The Blind and the Bloodthirsty

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JULIA’S EYES

4 Stars  2010/15/113m

Director: Guillem Morales / Writers: Morales & Oriol Paulo / Cast: Belen Reuda, Lluis Homar, Pablo Derqui, Francesc Orella, Julia Gutierrez Coba, Boris Ruiz, Andrea Hermosa, Daniel Grao.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “My father is lonely and you’re hot.”

Guillermo Del Toro’s name on anything seems to sell it internationally at present. But if he’s not careful he might fall victim to The Wes Craven Syndrome, whereby any old shite that passed over his desk somehow gains endorsement as ‘executive producer’ credence. I wonder if Wes has even set eyes of Don’t Look Down.

Fortunately for Del Toro, Julia’s Eyes is a great little foray into the world of the blind. It’s not entirely original, mind, echoes of Blink with Madeline Stowe (whatever happened to her?), The Eye, and some tawdry made-for-TV thriller with Victoria Principal (Blind Witness?) abound.

A sightless woman goes to hang herself, only to have the job done for her when a stranger kicks the stool from beneath her legs when she has second thoughts. Her twin sister Julia (Reuda, previously seen chasing ghosts in The Orphanage) and her husband, Isaac, are the ones to find her. Julia is almost instantly dismissive of the suicide explanation but, suffering from the same degenerative sight disorder, Julia wants answers before her vision fails the same way as Sara’s.

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Julia becomes convinced Sara had a boyfriend who, at the very least, ‘assisted’ the hanging but nobody seems to remember him. An old hotel custodian describes him as ‘invisible’ to the world around him before being electrocuted in the tub as Mr Invisible appears to be able to cover his tracks before Julia can find out who he is.

The stress of the situation followed by Isaac’s apparent suicide accelerate Julia’s loss of sight and her doctor forges ahead with a transplant operation and Julia faces two weeks beneath a blindfold before she will find out if she can see again. Her care worker Ivan becomes her rock and Julia eventually develops feelings towards him that are thwarted by the apparent return of Sara’s killer, who can seemingly be anywhere at anytime…

The resolution isn’t entirely unpredictable, after all Ivan’s face is kept off-camera for the most part, despite the fact we saw him earlier on with another patient. But does that make him a killer?

Julia’s Eyes takes a bit of a commitment as it passes the 90 minute mark with a lot of stuff still left to cover. Even though it eventually conforms nicely to some cut n’ dried slasher movie shenanigans, it could easily lose 15 minutes or so as the gripping nature of the first half dissipates into a sort of “how will she get out of this one?” scenario that is repeated several times over towards the finale.

The film would be redundant if at least some of these cliches went unchecked: Julia’s doctor advises she recovers at the hospital but she insists on going it alone in her late-sister’s unfamiliar house, yet she’s the only one who truly believes there’s a killer running about. It’s forgivable as otherwise the final third would just be a retread of the Halloween II hospital slasher opus.

That said, there’s little slashing: two people are hanged, another zapped in the bath but there’s a decent knife-in-the-gob and a cringeworthy needle into the eyeball, shown in all its clear yukkiness.

Some scenes work just perfectly: Julia’s visit to a resource centre for blind people is creepy for varying reasons as she unwittingly finds herself in the middle of a conversation between a group of blind women who don’t sense she’s there for a couple of minutes, then there’s a chase through the drippy back tunnels of the building when one of the blind women declares that “there’s someone else with you – he’s right behind you.”

The climax is a little drawn out and familiar but an almost heartwarming twist is added on at the end – the biggest mystery is Julia herself: she quite literally appears and replaces her dead sister. We learn almost nothing about her life up to this point, where she lives, who her friends are… Husband aside, it’s as if she never met a soul.

Again, forgiven due to the tasty Spanish vibes on show: you only need to see this once to appreciate how good it is.

Blurb-of-interest: Daniel Grao was in Killer Book Club.

Cold Prey-garism

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BLOOD RUNS COLD

2 Stars  2011/15/74m

“Hell just froze over.”

Director: Sonny Laguna / Writers: Laguna, David Liljeblad & Tommy Wiklund / Cast: Hanna Oldenburg, Patrick Saxe, Andreas Rylander, Elin Hugoson, Ralf Beck, David Liljeblad.

Body Count: 6

Sweden: Land of Volvo, saunas, ABBA, and Roxette. Norway: Land of herring, fjords, and famously coming last in Eurovision countless times.

Sweden shouldn’t really be jealous. But then Norway got Cold Prey – hands down the best slasher, neigh – best horror – film in a long time. Sweden was all like “yeah we can do that.”

So out came Blood Runs Cold, shot on a minuscule budget of about $5,000, and boasting a plot staggering similar to Sweden’s next-door neighbour’s celluloid prize possession.

Winona, a singer of some such, drives into the snow-covered turf of her old town for a couple of months away from the stress put on her by her manager. Unfortunately for her, she gets the wrong house and beds down in a twee, but dilapidated shack of a place.

She drives into town and runs into an old boyfriend and invites him and a couple of his friends back to the house to party. This is where Blood Runs Cold trades in some of its admittedly impressive style for some dumb ass character behaviour… It seems the house has no bathroom as people keep going outside to piss and one of them sees a figure in the upstairs window but doesn’t bother telling the others about it. The other guy finds that Winona’s van has been tampered with, picks up a torn out spark plug, tosses it into the snow and doesn’t bother telling the others about it.

Before sun up, all three of the invitees have been murdered and eaten by the hooded, goggled freak living in a series of secret rooms and caves beneath the house. Winona assumes they just went home and, upon finding a large paddle of blood on the living room floor, simply cleans it up and goes about her day as if it meant nothing…

“This film is snot what I signed on for.”

When it’s just Winona and the loon – who appears to be deaf, blind and made of dust!? – all dialogue is gone and as he hangs her up to serve up some chick-meat, she escapes, he catches her, she escapes, he catches her and so on until the credits suddenly spring up out of nowhere, several minutes earlier than the box promised!

There’s some good looking photography on parade and the house geography supplies a few good hidey-holes for Winona to crawl around (could’ve provided some Kleenex for her Heather Donahue moment too, I guess) but even at 74 minutes this drags and isn’t nearly a quarter as tense as Cold Prey.

Curiously recorded in English – which also seems to inhibit the acting – with a higher wad of cash at their disposal, this could’ve been much better but seems lazily written with an almost purposely dumb cast and a stack of unanswered questions, not least of all who the dude at the beginning is?

Be careful what you fish for

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Vegan Voorhees is going to take a little step outside of the slasher movies only hoop into the dangerous world of… OTHER HORROR MOVIES! Well, killer fish movies – but only for a minute! Promise!!

Being a child fan of Jaws, I’ve always liked me some fish-what-bite-back movies. I don’t really like eating fish but they get a raw deal (‘specially if it’s sushi – ho ho ho) so sometimes it’s nice to see them get their own back on people.

So here’s a quick overview of some of the finny films I love as well as those that I didn’t so much as “love” as “stare open-mouthed at”…

The JAWS films (1975-1987)

The Top Dog of killer fish movies, the original movie has not only never been bettered but it’s rare to find anything that comes within a mile of it. That said, for years I advocated Jaws 2 as my favourite of the bunch – thanks largely in part to A). the water-skiing bit, B). Phantom-of-the-Opera shark and C). the dumb group of teens picked off by the shark. Though not nearly enough of them got chomped.

Jaws III and The Revenge were comparably naff but I still like. I can clearly remember cereal boxes with 3D glasses and little Jaws comic strips on the back; Jaws 2 crisps (pickled onion) and attempting to read and understand the complex plottings of the Jaws: The Revenge novel, aged eight.

But enough about these films – we’ve all seen them, we know they started well and ended up with a fish able to strategize an intricate revenge scheme, but what of the hoards of pretenders?

Tentacles (1977)

A giant octopus eats people at a small Californian beach resort. It sounds awesome and begins fittingly awesomely with the ‘pus snatching a child from a pushchair by the water! Harsh. Some spooky scenes ensue but before long, protracted scenes of scuba diving only serve as a reminder that nothing is more boring than protracted scenes of scuba diving.

The ‘pus eventually attacks a sailing regatta, eats another child and Shelley Winters wears a giant sombrero. At the end, a widowed guy sets two killer whales on the poor creature. Tentacles should’ve been so much more. It should’ve lived up to that AWESOME artwork. Someone remake it.

piranha1978-aPiranha (1978)

Joe Dante directed this playful spoof on Jaws and it swims with ease into second best killer fish film. Despite being a total satire-fest, Piranha is actually quite sad in points: the nice summer camp counsellor (Dante regular Belinda Balaski) falling victim to the ever-trilling fishies is a borderline upsetting moment rare in horror, letalone low-rent killer fish horror.

The film was followed by a bizarre sequel in 1981, directed by James Cameron of all people, in which the fish had developed freakin’ WINGS and could hide out inside corpses long enough to flutter out at close by nurses.

Roger Corman produced a real cheap looking TV remake in 1995, which featured a chick from Baywatch and Soleil Moon Frye and much of the same footage from the original. Fair to say it sucked.

The Last Shark (1980)

Universal successfully sued the producers of The Last Shark (a.k.a. Great White, L’ultimo Squalo) for plagiarism and the film was shut down after only a couple of weeks in theaters in 1980, which is a bit of a shame as, despite its shameless pilfering, it’s not the worst killer shark film around.

A rampaging Great White eats windsurfers, boaters and endless people who try and kill it. Borrowed scenes include midnight skinny dipping, the shark crashing another regatta, eating a helicopter, tearing a jetty away and characters which are virtually third-generation Xeroxes of Quint and Brody. The shark resembles a thirtieth-generation copy of a polystyrene junior school art project that more floats than swims.

The Beast (1995)

Proving he was a versatile writer, Peter Benchley penned the novel in which a giant squid terrorises a small coastal community, which was made into a mini-series a few years later. Sounds like Jaws? It virtually is. Shot in Australia with a load of cast members from Neighbours or Home and Away, I can’t remember much of it now, which is possibly a merciful state of mind to be in.

Cruel Jaws (1995)

Love that tagline: “This time it’s even more personal than the last time.”

I encourage you ALL to find a copy of this hilarious patchwork effort that unapologetically steals footage from the Jaws movies and The Last Shark. Another hungry fish – this time trained (!?) by the navy – comes to town to eat folk, the mafia are involved, the marine biologist tells everyone: “Only one species of shark is capable of this…the TIGER SHARK!”

But all the footage is of Great Whites.

There’s a sensational scene when a girl confined to a wheelchair begins rolling down a pier and plunges into the water and we clearly see her legs begin to kick. A girl squeals “I wanna dance!” when she’s already dancing. The main guy looks like Hulk Hogan and the shark is somehow destroyed three times at the end. It’s amazing.

Literally ALL scenes with the shark are lifted from other movies and it had the nerve to try and pass itself off as Jaws 5!!! It’s at least more fun to watch than Jaws: The Revenge though.

Deep Blue Sea (1999)deepbluesea2

Saffron Burrows is a scientist. Ha ha ha! She and Stellan Skarsgaard have been experimenting on Mako sharks to reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s. Ha ha ha! The side effect is that the sharks’ brains swell and they get smarter. Ha h- what?

Said clever fishies rebel against the scientists, crash a rescue helicopter and start to sink the out-at-sea platform, pitting the group of survivors against them as they try to reach the surface.

LL Cool J is a religious chef. Thomas Jane swaggers around, throwing himself all over the show as the macho hero and Burrows plays it all low-rent Ripley, her character so detested by focus groups that they re-shot the end to have her chomped by one of the sharks.

Shark Attack 3: Megaladon (2002)

The first Shark Attack movie in ’99 could send a can of Red Bull to sleep. The second one had roaring Great Whites and a couple of decent laughs but Shark Attack 3 is where it’s at: a giant million-foot prehistoric Megaladon shark comes out of a deep sea trench and eats things. There’s a school of regular GW’s around too, ready and waiting at the bottom of waterslides, eating parasailers and stuff…

As if this were not wacky enough, John Barrowman camps it up as a scientist who turns to his female companion (who played a different role in the first film, evidently hoping nobody saw it or fell asleep and didn’t notice) seconds after she mourns the loss of a friend and says; “What do you say I take you home and you let me eat your pussy?”

Allegedly he was trying to make the actress laugh but it got cut into the film anyhow. See it!

Behold the convincing effects of Shark Attack 3

The Reef (2010)

A subtle Australian export reportedly based on true events. Five people head out on a yacht. The yacht capsizes. Four of them opt to try and swim to land. A shark eventually catches up and begins attacking them.

Open Water has a lot to answer for (not least of all its horrible sequel, Adrift), but The Reef is actually pretty good. Though you could only watch it the once really. Some decent tension mounts in one of those what-would-you-do situation horrors Australia is good at.

Piranha 3D (2010)

Alexandre Aja helmed this in-name-only remake (which would’ve been better off as a sequel), which trades story and character for gore and tits. Lots of tits. So many in fact that I wondered if the film had been part-funded by a Naturist Society.

Dame Elisabeth of Shue tries her hardest to fit things together as the local sheriff who sees Spring Break literally savaged by a massive school of prehistoric piranha freed by an underwater earthquake.

It’s a disappointingly shallow affair but good for squishy demises and 13-year-old boys who want to ogle silicone boobs but the whole thing carries a disturbing undercurrent of misogyny in places, which sees countless pretty girls chewed into chunks only after they’ve ripped their tops off.

Shark Night 3D (2011)

The more family friendly alternative to Piranha, college kids take a vacation at their rich friend’s lakehouse and soon discover it’s teeming with various species of dangerous sharks put there by a group of money-hungry rednecks who want to sell footage of real life shark attacks to the Discovery Channel. Seriously.

No reason is given for the fishes aggression and I was more sad that the teens captured and killed a cute Hammerhead than when any of them died. It’s funny how the lead guy is supposed to be the ultimate nerd but is seen comfortably shirtless with the body of a Jersey Shore extra. The dog is the only character who matters and is the one to save the day when it counts.

Other ponds to paddle in:

  • Devilfish (a.k.a. Devouring Waves) was another scientists versus their own creation-fest, just really boring
  • Red Water had a Bull shark eating various people – and Coolio – in a river
  • Frankenfish set Bayou-dwellers against a giant leaping mutant thing that eats Muse Watson among others
  • Spring Break Shark Attack was a made-for-cable flick that predated the Piranha remake but was otherwise the same, memorable only by the fact that I watched it in China and some schmuck kite-surfing right into a Tiger shark’s gob.
  • Malibu Shark Attack is just that: lifeguards at the beach are attacked by Goblin sharks that float in on a tsunami.
  • It’s Daryl Hannah versus contaminated and angry fish in Shark Swarm, an epic three-hour affair with a body count to rival Jason’s.
  • Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus and Sharktopus are no-budget Asylum affairs with mucho hype and little thrill, crappy effects work, ridiculous plots and washed-up 80s singers like Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. The first is infamous for a scene in which the giant shark randomly leaps 35,000 feet into the air to eat a Boeing 747 and the second features a shark with tentacles and an attitude.
  • And coming in 2012, this:

Can I burst into tears now or do I have to actually see it first?

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