When the daughter of an elite family falls in love with a poor samurai named Iemon (Tomisaburo Wakayama), he gets rid of his wife Oiwa by dumping her into a swamp. She comes back on the night of his marriage as a monstrous ghost. Yes, it’s the Ghost Story of Yotsuya remade.
Directed and written by Tai Katô, this adaptation of the kabuki play Tokkaido Yotsuyakaidan isn’t as elegant as others. That’s not a slight by any means; it’s just brutal in how the characters must pay for the horrible things they have done to Oiwa. Those who have done her wrong get the majority of the story, but her deadly intentions weigh heavily on every frame. It’s made with craft and explores every way that film can change the way that we see an expected and known story.
The Radiance Films release of this film has an interview with Mari Asato, a visual essay on tormented female ghosts by Lindsay Nelson, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Tom Mes and an archival review of the film. You can order this from MVD.
Iwaki (Koichi Iwaki) is a motorbike mechanic who wants to be a racer. He’s tempted by the Red Rose Gang, who are speed junkies destroying everything in their path, as well as the charms of one of their members, Mayumi (Junko Matsudaira), who doesn’t believe in monogamy, despite being the girlfriend of the gang’s leader, Mitsuda (Yusuke Natsu).
Iwaki is more interested in the more virginal Michiko (Tomoko Ai). That is, he would be, if her overprotective brother Tsugami (Sonny Chiba) weren’t in the way. And oh yeah, Mitsuda doesn’t seem like she’s letting anyone else love Iwaki.
This is the first of four movies in the BAKUHATSU! series. The others are Detonation: Violent Games, Season of Violence (both of which are also directed by Iwaki), and Detonation: 750cc Zoku, which was produced by Yutaka Kohira. It takes its name from the bosozoku motorcycle gangs, who were inspired to ride by kaminari-zoku (thunder gang), who were disaffected war vets who lived in the streets and emulated American early biker culture, like James Dean movies. I also learned — thanks to Takuma on the Kung Fu Fandom message board — that there was a female Toei biker movie, Hell’s Angels: Crimson Roar.
This film just wants to entertain you, whether that’s with rampant nudity, motorcycle racing, or just the authentic, lived-in look that it establishes.
The 88 Films Blu-ray of this movie has an audio commentary by Ashley Darrow and Jonathan Greenaway of the Horror Vanguardpodcast, a video essay by Nathan Stuart, stills and a trailer, plus original and new artwork by Ilan Sheady. You can get this movie from MVD.
Aug 4-10 Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefer anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!
For a fifty-mile stretch of the highways surrounding Spurbury, Vermont, Captain John O’Hagen (Brian Cox), Lieutenant Arcot Ramathorn (Jay Chandrasekhar), “Rabbit” Roto (Erik Stolhanske), “Mac” Womack (Steve Lemme), Rodney “Rod” Farva (Kevin Heffernan) and Carl Foster (Paul Soter) are the law. Mainly, their power is used for pranks and shenanigans (“Hey Farva, what’s the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy stuff on the wall and the mozzarella sticks?”) until a Winnebago with a dead body and tons of drugs is found. The local cops get there first and won’t share the investigation. Maybe now is a good time for the troopers to actually be police officers.
Made by the comedy team Broken Lizard, Super Troopers was inspired by road trips to weddings by Steve Lemme and Jay Chandrasekhar, who were frequently high. They were also frequently getting pulled over by cops, who could have screwed with them had they only known how out of their minds the two were.
This brings back the hijinks ensue form. All you need to know is the basic outline, and you can come in at any moment for this quotable film. You either love it or you think it’s immature, but who cares? For example, I say lines from this scene all the time:
Dimpus Burger Guy: Double baco cheeseburger. It’s for a cop.
Farva: What the hell’s that all about? You gonna spit in it now?
Dimpus Burger Guy: No, I just told him that so he makes it good. Don’t spit in that cop’s burger.
Or this scene…
Captain O’Hagan: There was a time when we’d take a guy like you in the back and beat you with a hose. Now you’ve got your God-damned unions.
Farva: Cap’n… you know I’m not a pro-union guy.
Or this…
Farva: Gimme a litre o’ cola.
Dimpus Burger Guy: What?
Farva: A litre o’ cola.
Thorny: Just order a large, Farva.
Farva: I don’t want a large Farva. I want a goddamn litre o’ cola.
Obviously, I have seen this film too many times to be objective.
Directed and written by Jennifer Reeder, this is the tale of Jonny (Kiah McKirnan), a teenage girl living in a town where young women keep disappearing. Before she turns 18, her father sends her to live with Aunt Hilde (Alicia Silverstone) and undergo a family spell, the Forevering.
Now, Jonny thirsts for blood and is filled with power. She decides that she will be the one to find these women and to destroy whoever has been stealing them. That sounds basic, but when you see the dynamic colors by director of photography Sevdije Kastrati, you’ll realize this is something special.
This is a serial killer movie, a coming-of-age tale, a feral beast inside a young woman, a detective story, a superhero movie of sorts, and so many other things. It is many things, sometimes too many things and yet the one thing it is never safe. It’s in no way boring, either. It’s a bright burst of color, of ideas, of blood and gore, of a filmmaker going for it.
This limited edition Blu-ray has new audio commentary by writer-director Jennifer Reeder and director of photography Sevdije Kastrati, a video essay by filmmaker Jen Handorf, on-set cast interviews with Kiah McKirnan, Alicia Silverstone, Melanie Liburd and Christopher Lowell, two music videos and three short films directed by Reeder, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options by Creepy Duck Design and Duke Aber / Shudder and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Kat Hughes and Marianne Lampon. You can order the film from MVD.
Based on Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, written by Thomas De Quincey — the same person who inspired Suspiria — and has Vincent Price as Gilbert De Quincey. He’s an adventurer hired to stop the sale of Chinese brides to overseas men.
That makes this sound too ordinary, a film that feels like you’re on drugs, that has Yvonne Moray as a small courtesan, a fishing net filmed backward filled with captured women, bad girl Ruby Low (Linda Ho), a two-fisted action hero role for Vincent Price, floating skulls, rotting bodies and a narration by Price that makes this feel even more odd.
You can also find this as Souls for Sale and Evils of Chinatown. Director Albert Zugsmith also made College Confidential, Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Fanny Hill, Psychedelic Sexualis and the horrific nightmare that is Dondi. He also produced The Incredible Shrinking Man and High School Confidential. What many may not know is that he was also a lawyer. In 1947, he represented a friend from the war, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in their lawsuit against National Comics for stealing their creation, Superman. They settled out of court for $100,000, and National kept the character. Most of the money went to pay Zugsmith’s fees.
Siegel wanted Bob Kane to come on board and sue over Batman. In the years that followed, both Siegel and Shuster believed that Kane and Zugsmith had made a deal without telling them. They got nothing, Kane got his part ownership and profit deal on Batman, and Zugsmith got his pay. They lost their jobs, never getting to create new adventures for the Man from Krypton.
Writing for this movie has some class. Seton I. Miller won the Oscar for the script for Here Comes Mr. Jordan. He also wrote Scarface and A Knife for the Ladies.
Flower Child Coffin (Pam Grier) is Coffy, who saves lives as an emergency room nurse but also takes them as she gets revenge for her sister Lubelle, murdering the people who got her hooked on heroin. Once her friend Officer Carter (William Elliot) gets crippled by those very same people, she decides to up her need to kill everyone in her way.
She thinks her boyfriend, Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), is on her side, working to make the community better. But he’s just as bad as her targets, King George (Robert DoQui) and Arturo Vitroni (Alan Arbus). He even tells them that she’s just another whore, sending her to death at the hands of Omar (Sid Haig) before she pulls a weapon out of her hair and stabs him in the throat over and over again.
All that’s left is to, well, kill everyone. Yet Howard almost wins her back. He tells her how they’re going to change the community. And then a white woman asks him to come back to bed. What else can she do but blow his manhood off with a shotgun?
Jack Hill directed and wrote this, and everything he touched — Switchblade Sisters, Spider Baby — became the kind of movies that transcended their drive-in and exploitation beginnings. Coffy isn’t the kind of woman who needs to be rescued; she’s a force of sheer violence, unstoppable even when things look at their worst. By the end, she walks the beachfront alone; you half expect her to walk into the ocean like Godzilla.
Ex-policeman and private detective Harry Clegg (Gilbert Wynne) is hired by Lord Cruickshank (Norman Claridge) after the rich man gets a threat on his life. Clegg may be the hero, but his inner dialogue includes lines like “I’m a private eye. Also a cold-blooded killer, a liar and a thief. My big problem is, I’ve been a loser since the day I was born.”
A sex worker named Suzy the Slag (Gilly Grant, School for Sex) is killing off old rich men with beartraps, guns and her sexual charms. Maybe she’s just mad that the filmmaker chose such a poor and misogynistic name for her. Sometimes she strangles men, lets them get their breath, then drowns them in her bathtub. A former adult actress, Suzy, serves as the killer for Wildman (Gary Hope), who has waited twenty years for his revenge on these rich guys.
Wildman also has five lollipop girls — Susan Killington, Laura Beaumont (who went on to write for Thomas the Train), Hannah Leek, Susan Babbage and Felicity Leach — who may be in their 20s but are dressed like teenagers or younger, all sucking on lollipops more than once in this film.
This isn’t great, but it has a gross charm to it. That’s a compliment.
The best thing that I can say about this movie is that nearly every person in it is a horrible person. There are cops that don’t do their jobs well, expectant mothers that smoke and other parents that couldn’t care less if their kids have come home yet. Even the lovely people in this movie only exist to be snuffed out. This is the blackest of comedies and also the most nihilistic of films.
Jim and Slim, a couple of workers at the Ravensback chemical plant, decide to finish work early and head to the bar, neglecting the pressure gauge warnings and allowing a cloud of yellow toxic smoke to escape.
That yellow cloud finds its way to a school bus full of innocent children who are so well behaved that they even sing a song to compliment their bus driver. Suddenly, the bus passes through the yellow cloud, and the kids get turned into zombie-like monsters with black fingernails.
The townspeople only think the kids have disappeared, so they shut the town down and try to keep out any outsiders until things clear up. Boy, this town…there’s Billy the local sheriff, who is in over his head. There’s Harry, his deputy, who only seems to want to get it on with Suzie (and who can blame him, what else is there to do in a small town?). And then there’s Molly, who runs the general store and is also the police dispatcher, because that makes sense. She’s played by Shannon Bolin, a singer who was once known as The Lady with the Dark Blue Voice in the 1940s.
Even though this was made in 1980, it’s both woke and exploitative enough to give zombie Tommy two mommies. One of them, Dr. Joyce, is among the first to be burned alive by one of The Children. Not the last — as the kids all come home, they burn their parents and most of the town alive.
I guess John is our hero, and his wife, Cathy, is pregnant (and pats her stomach and says, “Sorry…” before smoking a cigarette), so he’s obviously worried about her. That’s when this movie shifts into one that totally lives up to today’s theme. Kids get killed left and right with impunity. Roasted in closets, zombified hands chopped off, shotgunned…it’s pretty much open season on children. And when The Children die, it sounds like a cat in heat.
After all that, John falls asleep and wakes up to deliver his wife’s baby. We get a peaceful scene of the many, many dead bodies with the children all lying there looking peaceful and not dismembered. That’s when John noticed that his newborn child had black fingernails.
Director Max Kalmanowicz only has one other credit, the weirdo sex comedy Dreams Come True, where “a young couple masters the supernatural art of astral projection which allows them to travel through dreams, explore their fantasies and make a whole lot of love.” Hopefully, nobody cuts off a ten-year-old’s hand in that movie.
Chesty Anderson is a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in the U.S. Navy and the lead character in a movie that promises that you will see bare breasts. That’s 1976, I guess, and Shari Eubank is the right actress for this. A former cheerleader and homecoming queen at Farmer City High School in Illinois, she was only in one other movie and what a movie: Russ Meyer’s Supervixens. After this movie, she quit acting and moved back home, where she became a drama teacher. And she’s a way better actress than most people would be in a sexploitation film, but man, Supervixen is your drama teacher? The world is fascinating.
While this movie is a snooze — how can a movie named Chesty Anderson, USN be boring? — It does have a fun cast. It left Scatman Crothers ill-prepared for dealing with Kubrick, as one can only assume every scene is done in one take; I’ll bet there were fewer takes in this entire film than in one scene of The Shining. Timothy Carey is devouring scenery and being a lunatic as a mobster, while Ilsa, Dyanne Thorne, is in this as a fellow WAVE. At the same time, Joyce Mandel (Wham Bam Thank You Space Man), Uschi Digard (so many mammary-based movies), Rosanne Katon (Bachelor Party), Marcie Barkin (Fade to Black), Connie Hoffman (Naughty Stewardesses), Dorrie Thomson (Policewoman) and even Betty Thomas show up. Fred Willard, too, as Chesty’s square boyfriend.
Chesty’s sister has been killed after taking photos of Senator Dexter (George Dexter) in drag, which gets organized crime involved. And a man-eating plant is part of the story.
Yet through all this — a movie with all of these people — it’s very PG. And look, I’m not demanding sin, but in a film with this cast, even the shower scenes could be watched on regular television. It promises you vice and gives you virtue. Well, not much, but you get the point.
Director Ed Forsyth also made Superchick, Caged Men, The Ramrodder and more, while writer Paul Pumpian mostly worked in animation after this, and this is the only film for his co-writer H.F. Green.
This was initially released by Atlas Films in 1975, then rereleased by Flora Releasing and Coast Films. Thanks to Temple of Schlock for that, as well as the knowledge that this aired on TV as Anderson’s Angels. How much did they cut? It was also rereleased by 21st Century.
Aug 4-10 Stoner Comedy Week: I don’t gas reefer anymore, but I love it when people in movies do!
Writer, co-director, co-cinematographer, co-editor, songwriter, stuntman and star Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, who made his debut in this film. Ram Rahim has also released several music albums and other films, which “typically revolve around himself and his teachings. Many of these are based on social issues and the promotion of God’s worship.” At the age of 23, he was selected as the leader of the Dera Sacha Sauda sect by Shah Satnam Sing, which was a surprise.
His life is, well, complicated. Sure, he’s organized drives for blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol screenings and tree planting that have been recognized by Guinness World Records, as well as the world record for most people sanitizing their hands simultaneously. He’s worked to eradicate forced prostitution.
But as of 2017, the Indian Film & Television Directors’ Association (IFTDA) and the Cine and TV Artists Association (CINTAA) banned Ram Rahim from future work in Indian film and television for “criminality and moral turpitude.” That’s because he was convicted of a 2002 rape in 2017, which led to 200,000 of his followers going wild in the streets. In 2019, he was convicted of the murder of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati, who was trying to find answers on that same 2002 sexual assault. This comes after years of conflict with Sikh and Hindu groups, including him dressing as their deities and tearing pages from their holy books. And oh yeah, the forced castration of 400 members of his religious group so that they could be closer to God.
This may be the most separate the art from the artist review ever, as a result of reading all this after I watched the movie.
Guruji (Ram Singh) is a spiritual leader who has taken on the job of eradicating drug use and gender issues from society. It also has 1.3 million extras — good luck updating the IMDB — including a musical number that has 125,000 performers lighting thousands of candles.
Reviews were not kind: “It is not possible to be prepared for the sensory assault that is MSG: The Messenger,” “Watch it only if your survival depended on it,” “…excruciatingly awful only for non-believer,s” and “Three hours of torture so painful that you start laughing at yourself.”
Gurunji may be a superhero. Or a super villain. He never drives the same car twice. He has Superman’s flight and strength, but also mind powers, like telepathy, telekinesis and mind electricity, which is a thing. Are those enough powers? He’s like when a kid first rolls up a character in a game like Champions and keeps adding things. He also has a special elixir that can cure any disease. And a talking lion. I’m shocked he didn’t add “I have triples of the Barracuda and the Road Runner.”
He can also rap.
Perhaps his kryptonite is his lack of fashion sense, but his main enemy is a terrifying killing machine named Mike.
Yes, you read that.
Despite my disgust with the auteur’s real life, I also have to say that this guy has millions of followers — that’s how this came out in theaters in Canada — and made several more movies, and despite the fact that this is three hours, you know I’m going to watch the rest of them.
Imagine Neil Breen, if Neil Breen had the power to make men cut their dicks off.
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