April 6: Viva Mexico — Pick a movie from Mexico and escribir acerca de por qué es tan increíble.
Released in theaters as El asesino del zodiaco (The Zodiac Killer), it was put out on video as Un instante para morir (An Instant to Die). It’s all about a police commander, a forensic scientist and a reporter all on the hunt for a killer who uses the zodiac to plan his murders. You know. A zodiac killer.
It’s directed by Christian González (Thanatos, Comando terrorista) and written by Marcelo Del Rio, who would go on to work in the art department for movies like the remake of Vantage Point and Limitless and Ricardo Del Río, who was a production coordinator on Kill Bill Volume 2 and was also a line producer on several big films made in Mexico.
It’s also a Mexico giallo and looks great, which is probably due to Rodrigo Prieto being the cinematographer. Since these somewhat humble beginnings — he also El jugador and Ratas nocturnas in this same time period — he went on to do the cinematography or direct the photography for some major movies such as 21 Grams, Brokeback Mountain, The Wolf of Wall Street and videos for Taylor Swift, Lana Del Ray and Travis Scott. He’s the director of photography on the upcoming Barbie as well.
I like how there are chapters for each segment using the zodiac signs and it looks and feels way better than a low budget Mexican genre picture — not that that’s a bad thing, because I love those too.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
In Mumbai, Tatya Vinchu (Dilip Prabhavalkar) and his henchman Kubdya Khavis (Bipin Varti) enter the cave of Baba Chamatkar (Raghavendra Kadkol), a wizard who knows the Mrutyunjay Mantra, a mantra that can place someone’s soul into another body or object. They’re being tailed by Inspector Mahesh Jadhav (Mahesh Kothare), who has been obsessed with catching Tatya Vinchu. He tracks him down to his warehouse headquarters and they get into a shootout, at which point Mahesh fatally wounds Tatya Vinchu. Before he passes on, the criminal uses the Mrutyunjay Mantra to transfer his soul into the closest thing nearby: a doll.
Yes, that’s right. This Indian Marathi-language film, directed by Kothare, is Child’s Play.
Mahesh’s boss Superintendent Jairam Ghatge (Jairam Kulkarni) has a daughter who has just Gauri (Kishori Ambiye) who just came back from the U.S. And she has another relative — seriously, this gets a little confusing keeping track of who is family with who — called Lakshya (Laxmikant Berde) who is a ventriloquist. He’s in love with Aavadi (Pooja Pawar), whose father Constable Tukaram (Ravindra Berde) has already arranged her marriage to another cop, Constable Sakharam (Vijay Chavan). As you can imagine, the doll with the spirit of Tatya Vinchu ends up being owned by Lakshya.
He starts his reign of terror by killing Lakshya’s evil landlord Dhanajirao Dhanavate, a crime that lands our protagonist in jail. He’s cleared of all charges, but Tatya Vinchu leaves for Mumbai, where he discovers that the only way out of the body of the doll is to possess the first person he revealed himself to, who would by Lakshya, who has now been sent to a mental institution as he can’t stop screaming about the possessed doll. Mahesh and Gauri also learn from the wizard that the only way to stop the killer is to shoot the doll directly between the eyes.
Mahesh Kothare wrote the movie in a few days — I mean, he pretty much just remade Child’s Play, so while this is impressive, is it? And he named Tatya Vinchu as an amalgamation of his make-up man’s name Tatya and the translated name for a movie he loved, Red Scorpion. Seeing as how the Dolph Lundgren Red Scorpion was only five years old when this was made, I assume that it was not the movie he was referring to.
In 2013, there was a 3D sequel made called Zapatlela 2. It was also remade as Ammo Bomma, which is kind of funny because it’s a remake of a ripoff. I mean, Dolly Dearest and M3GAN did the same thing and no one really was all that upset, right?
April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.
At one point, in the midst of the comic book boom of the early 90s, Malibu Comics — owned by Dave Olbrich and Tom Mason with the private financing of Scott Mitchell Rosenberg — was big enough to encompass Eternity Comics, Aircel, Adventure and from 1992 to 1993, Image Comics.
That’s right. Despite the small origins of starting with Ex-Mutants, Maliby eventually was published licensed comics for Planet of the Apes and Alien Nation, as well as being the publisher in record of books like Youngblood and Spawn, becoming 10% of the entire comic book industry and for a time, they were bigger than D.C.
Their own characters like the aforementioned Ex-Mutants and Dinosaurs for Hire got video games and the company was doing well when Image got big enough to publish its own books. This led to Malibu’s Ultraverse, which looked quite different than other comics on the racks, as Malibu premiered digital coloring and higher quality paper.
The continuity of the Ultraverse was, well, ultra tight and packed with crossovers. There was also plenty of talent on the first books. Prime has Bob Jacob, Gerard Jones, Len Strazewski, Norm Breyfogle and Bret Blevins. Hardcase was created by James D. Hudnall. And the last of the initial three books, The Strangers, was by Steve Englehart and Rick Hoberg. Other major creators would come on board like Mike W. Barr, Steve Gerber and James Robinson.
There was a thirteen-episode Ultraforce cartoon — and toyline! — and a Glen A. Larson-created Nightman series that came out of the imprint before Marvel Comics bought the company in November 1994 supposedly so they could purchase their in-house coloring studio or maybe to keep D.C. from buying them. The Ultraverse became Earth-93060 and gradually was whittled down to fewer and fewer titles until the line ended by the end of 1997.
In 2003, Steve Englehart was commissioned by Marvel to relaunch the Ultraverse, but it never happened. There’s a rumor that the way profit sharing was part of the company — or allegedly the. shady business dealings of Rosenberg — will keep these characters in limbo.
But I told you that to tell you this.
At one point — 1993 — Malibu introduced their new hero Firearm by making a 35-minute VHS that came with an issue of the comic.
Created by writer James Robinson and artists Howard Chaykin and Cully Hamner, Firearm lasted nineteen issues and told the story of private detective Alec Swan, who keeps getting pulled into ultra-human work.
Directed by Darren Doane — who also made Blink 182’s “Dammit” and oh Lord, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas — and written by Robinson, this introduces you to Alec Swan (James Jude Courtney, yes, the man who would one day by The Shape), a British SBS commando who became a member of the secretive Lodge, a group of secret agents who operate outside of the rules of governments. He’s called Firearm because, well, he can kill anyone and just about anything thanks to his gun shooting abilities. He’s also obsessed with film noir, hence relocating to Los Angeles and trying to be an old-fashioned detective.
The movie introduces his antagonist Duet (Joe Hulser) and is a basic 80s tough cop action film, but man, it has tons of squibs in it. It leads directly into issue zero of the comic, which it was packed with for $14.95.
Robinson went on to write one of the best comics of, well, ever in Starman and a comic book movie that is the inverse in quality of the comic that inspired it, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
As for this movie, well, it’s certainly interesting that it even exists.
Michael Wilcott (Simon Mosely) lost his parents in a plane crash and his brother to a murderer. Now, as he hunts down that man — instead of killing himself — he finds himself getting close to The Hidden. And yes, there’s another movie with the same title, but director Nathan Hill and writer Nick Goodman didn’t know that.
Everyone is as Australian as can be and if you are ready to work your way through the accents, you’ll also be rewarded by two shirtless men having an incredible fistfight on the side of a cliff. There’s also a cocaine addicted monster which is really a man in a bear suit, so this also has that going to for it.
I mean, this is a movie where a bear lives in the sewers and eats a man on coke, gets into coke and appears for one scene and you name it The Hidden. This is a movie that demands sheer insanity throughout and instead feels like teenagers trying to make a serious movie except that, yes let me say it again, it has a zooted-out bear in it.
I really like Todd Sheets, because he seems like someone just as willing to passionately discuss his favorite Fulci movie as he is someone ready to make something astounding like Moonchild. He may not be the biggest fan of this movie and sees a lot he could have done better — or so he says — but I had a blast watching it. It made me feel like when I was a teenager and all I cared about was reading Fangoria and driving to other towns to find mom and pop video stores with different libraries of horror movies than the ones I’d exhausted around me.
This movie is exactly what I was looking for.
The plot is simple but that’s just to get the creature into our world and killing everyone he can. A farmer named Romero once wanted his crops to do better so he tried some magic and ended up with, well, a goblin. So he dropped it in a well and years later, when a young couple buys the place, they accidentally unleash it, as you do, and things go wrong for everyone and right for you, the viewer.
So yeah, I would have been 21 when this came out and that was the perfect time for me to enjoy Fulci references, heavy metal soundtracks and people just randomly showing up and trying to speak dialogue that they are ill-prepared to deliver and they still end up sounding like every art school party I ever attended with the cheapest bottle of vodka in my hand.
Now, wondering like why a goblin needs a drill to take out someone’s eyeball is the kind of thing that people wonder about when they get too intellectual about movies like this. Other questions would be why is there so much genital mutilation and why do zombies just show up? These are dumb questions no one cares about. Stop asking questions. Stop making sense.
The goblin looks great, the music is pretty solid and the video quality is absolutely horrible. The guts look like real animal parts which is how they do it in Texas on productions big and small, but this was made in Kansas City. They have good barbecue in both places and I guess the sloppiness of the sauce on the meat translates to how grimy the guts look in horror films too. Why is this movie making me hungry instead of nauseated? Have I gone too far?
This was shot under a full moon with a video camera. That’s as perfect as life gets.
Jan Reiff went on to be a director of photography on movies like Iron Doors and Slave, but before that he made this shot on video tale of Ludwig Herrmann, who killed his wife Elizabeth — and her lover — when he caught them in bed together. Then he killed a witness who was completely innocent. And oh yeah, then they came back as zombies.
Translated as Requiem for the Devil, this feels like a German Fulci superfan made his own movie because, well, that’s exactly what it is. Those zombies put him through hell — razor blades in the spaghetti anyone? — but Ludwig isn’t going down easy.
That said, he also kills his wife in a way that will get him on one one my many Letterboxd lists: he throws a hairdryer into the bathtub while she’s in it. Then he shoots her lover and runs him over to be totally sure, then because that witness saw everything, he remembers Italy and jabs out one of his eyeballs.
I mean, this has a lot going for it, beyond the gore, like an eighty minute running time and an ending that has, well alright it’s mostly the gore because the wife gets her face ripped clean off before quite literally facefucking our protagonist with a drill and then finger banging the hole left behind because, you know, why not? I’ll bet Ludwig wished he just kept playing his Gameboy and never looked around to see if he was being cucked. I mean, there are some questions you don’t want the answers to.
You can watch this on YouTube thanks to altohippiegabber.
Also known as Femme Dangereuse (Dangerous Woman), this Jean Rollin-directed movie is all about an Asian woman known as the Car Woman. This role was specifically written for model Tiki Tsang, who is actually Australian. Rollin worked on this film until he grew too ill to complete it, then edited it years later*.
The Car Woman kills throughout the film, leaving a toy car behind as a calling card for each murder. Literally the entire film is a series of episodes with people meeting Car Woman and getting killed, whether they are women who get an army of doomed prostitutes to help them, a boyfriend and girlfriend who end up shot and stabbed with a golden fork respectively or a photographer and her model in New York City.
You have to love that Car Woman cocks her gun every time she shoots it, which isn’t needed after the first shot. It’d just waste ammo. This is what I think of when I should just be watching Jean Rollin movies and staring at all of the women, huh?
*It was shot on 16mm and originally intended for a direct-to-video release, although it did have a brief theatrical appearance in 1993. No usable print or negative of the film exists today, so what you get on video is what you get.
Some of this film feels like home movies from a zombie convention at the Pittsburgh Expo Mart, which used to be right across the parking lot from Monroeville Mall, home of Dawn of the Dead. It also goes into the history of the filmmakers who made Night of the Living Dead, showing commercials for Calgon, Iron City and the Magic Lantern, a device that helps you light your grill faster which is a major deal for Steel City summers.
The convention — I was there, look for a chubby long haired 21-year-old me looking hapless — also had Adam West, Kane Hodder, David Prowse and Gunnar Hansen, as well as people who actually had things to do with Romero’s zombie movies like “Chilly” Billy Cardille and his daughter Lori, who was the star of Day of the Dead.
This also feels like an informerical for things you can’t buy any longer from Russo’s Imagine Inc.There was their new magazine, Scream Queens Illustrated, trading cards and the Scream Queens Swimsuit Sensations video. There’s a near home movie scene of Brinke Stevens arriving and man, while so many actresses seem unapproacable and like androids, Brinke always seem so cute and fun and normal and melts my heart.
Overall, this is like visiting John Russo’s house and him pulling out footage to show you, like “Have you seen the trailer for The Majorettes?” and “Do you like Midnight?”
Definitely when Savini is doing the tour of the mall, well, I am there. He talked about falling on a stunt and his legs being hurt for weeks, as well as the old fountain that was once in the mall.
The quality of this is so bad that it made me wistful for the time of watching camcorder shot footage that just looks like a grainy blur. The fact that people would watch this looking for insights into film and just get footage of Romero hangers on riding the Gateway Clipper makes me deliriously happy.
Directed and written by Thomas Brown, this film has a roundtable between George A. Romero, John Russo, Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman as they discuss exactly how Night of the Living Dead was made. You also get to see Karl with Marilyn Eastman as they discuss how they went through library music to get the sound effects and soundtrack for the film under budget, which is worth the price of admission — it’s streaming for free on Tubi but you get the idea — of this documentary.
As a bonus, everyone from Tobe Hooper, Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, John Landis, Fred Olen Ray, David DeCoteau, Chris Gore, David E. Williams and Scott Spiegel speak about what the first modern horror movie means to them.
The best part of this is, as you can imagine, getting the original crew together and hearing how they thought they could make this for $600 each, how that number rapidly increased, the frustration of working for ad agencies, living at the farmhouse, painting a car that was loaned to the production and nearly ruining it, going to Washington D.C. for a quick scene away from Evans City and so much more. It’s a leisurely discussion — the Tempe Video blu ray has the original cut of this and the entire roundtable as an extra so grab it from Diabolik DVD — and everyone seems happy to be there and excited to share their stories.
Shot at Washington & Jefferson College and in Edgewood, right across the bridge from Tateh Cuda’s garden, The Dark Half found George Romero again working with a big studio and adapting a Stephen King book.
It has Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton) trying to escape the lowbrow horror books he writes under the name Goerge Stark for the highbrow world of literature, even burying Stark in a fake grave. The problem is, well, Stark is real, the soul left behind by a vestigal twin — the brain surgery scene in the beginning is astounding — making his way to Castle Rock to destroy all of the goodness in Thad’s life.
King knows all about this, as his Richard Bachman pen name came from writer Donald E. Westlake, who wrote his more violent fiction as Richard Stark.
Sherriff Alan Pangborn, played by Michael Rooker in this movie, is the same character Ed Harris played in Needful Things. As you can imagine, he has a hard time trying to understand the fact that Thad has a dark version of himself because he’s a man who believes in facts.
I wonder if the extended time Romero spent with Dario Argento led to him portraying Stark as a bandage covered, black hat and cloak wearing giallo killer, complete with a razor blade. He’s always surrounded by swams of loud birds, which is a great tension builder.
Beyond Hutton and Rooker, Romero has a great cast here, including Amy Madigan as Thad’s wife, Julie Harris as a friend who knows Thad’s secret, Chelsea Field as Alan’s wife, plus Royal Dano and Rutanya Alda.
While I like Romero’s smaller productions, I really ended up liking this way more than i thought I would and plan on going back in to watch it again.
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