EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.
Once, this movie was called No Sleep, then Don’t Sleep, then it became an Amityville movie because that’s what you do sometimes if you want your movie to get out there, I guess. Hey — director and co-writer Calvin Morie McCarthy is out there doing it, I guess.
So anyways, as you can guess, this has nothing to do with Amityville, yet when has that stopped us in the past?
Jim is a poor college student who gets a House of the Devil job housesitting for a strange woman named Eunice, even after he’s been warned that the house itself is evil. Right away, he can’t sleep what with all the nightmares and the supernatural stuff that happens when he’s awake may be even worse.
Of course, most of this movie takes place in a room with people just talking to one another. It gets boring and yet never gets into murderdrone territory where it feels like the kind of mind numbing drugs that my brain demands, instead being merely like drinking an O’Doul’s and wondering why you’re not drunk.
I realize that they’re going to keep making Amityville movies and I’m going to keep watching them. Here are a few of my free titles to improve the streaming schlock that hopefully has at least something small to do with 112 Ocean Avenue:
Amityville Alien
50 Shades of Amityville
Once Upon a Time…In Amityville
Amityville Giallo
Amityville Christmas
Amityville Ouija Party
Amityville Police Academy
Don’t Go in the Basement of the Amityville Death House
House of 1000 Amityville Horrors
Amityville Avengers
I literally have thousands of these and I await any streaming production company that wants more.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.
“The Belle Witches have to revisit their magical talents to deter the evil Dominique Marcom from trying to raise the demon Botis into the world.”
You may read the sell line from this and wonder — a movie with an alternate title of Witches of Amityville Academy — “Is this an Amityville movie?” And i”m wondering, “Are all movies Amityville movies?” Because at this point, I feel like I’m in a non-Faustian bargain. I feel compelled to watch all of these movies and really get no reward.
After receiving an acceptance letter from Dominique’s (Amanda Jade-Tyler, who is in Amityville Scarecrow 2) prestigious Amityville Academy for witches, Jessica (Sarah T. Cohen, who was in Hellkat and Medusa) soon learns that only the Belle Witches can save her from a demon. A demon named Bortis who is also known as Otis — I am not making that up — and is discussed in the Lesser Key of Solomon as a President and an Earl who initially appears as a viper before changing into a sword-toting, fanged and horned human who likes to talk about the past, present and future. He also rules 60 legions of demons.
The good witches of this movie all definitely shop at Ann Taylor Loft and Pottery Barn because they look late 40s attractive upper class — I’d say South Hills but yinz aren’t all from Pittsburgh — and they just like to chill and sip on tea and gossip. Sam (Kira Reed Lorsch, Chained Heat 2001: Slave Lovers and on Playboy’s Sexcetera before being an early internet adult adopter and creating Married Couple Live with her husband in the early 2000s), Ellena (Brittan Taylor, Space Girls in Beverly Hills) and Lucy (Donna Spangler, who was The Coal Miner’s Daughter in the wrestling group POWW and also played Hugs Higgins in the Andy Sidaris movie Guns, Mee-Shell in Dinosaur Valley Girls and Katanna in Space Girls in BeverlyHills) are those Belle Witches and they’re fabulous.
Director Rebecca Matthews (The Candy Witch, Pet Graveyard) and writer Tom Jolliffe (Jurassic Island) have done the impossible: they’ve made a non-Amityville Amityville movie that didn’t make me question why I do this. I’m all for a web series of the Belle Witches where they bemoan the closing of Chicco’s in their mall or battle a series of zombie Karens or just sit around and drink tea and talk about their husbands.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.
I love the guys at Wild Eye. After reading our Letterboxd list of Amityville movies*, I got an email from them that said, “Have you seen Amityville Island yet?”
Look, when a movie has the tagline “For God’s sake, get out of the water!” you know I’m probably going to have to watch it. Throw in the fact that it was directed by Mark Polonia (along with Paul Alan Steele) and I knew I was going to be spinning this, probably while my wife was asleep so that she didn’t cast a gaze at me that said, “You really will watch anything if Amityville is in the title.”
Several girls are brought to a small island where they are subjected to genetic experiments that involve both humans and animals. Right away, we have a women in prison, a science gone wild story and a government conspiracy flick all at the same time, but to complete this buffet, we learn that one of the girls killed people inside the house on 112 Ocean Avenue.
Perhaps the finest movie to ever be made for $30,000 in Wellsboro, PA, Amityville Shark succeeds just because it exists. It’s packed with a CGI shark, CGI blood, stock footage, a possessed woman blasting a dude through his PC and lines like, “She’s from Amityville, what are you gonna do?” and “High quality dirtbags are getting harder and harder to find.”
Oh yeah — there’s also a zombie that shows up before the end of this movie.
Of course there is.
You know, if we put low budget filmmakers in charge of solving COVID-19, I bet their ingenuity and ability to work with no money would solve it in no time. Or maybe we’d have female prisoners fighting in basements while random dudes in officers yell into their landlines. Either way, this time, we can all win.
I hope Mark Polonia reads this and hears my request: Please make a movie where the apes from Empire of the Apes ride sharks.
Here are the short films that I watched at this year’s Fantastic Fest.
A Fermenting Woman (2024): Visionary chef and master fermenter Marielle Lau (Sook-Yin Lee) is about to be let go from the restaurant that she has given her life to. However, she has an idea to save things, as she begins to ferment a new dish that has an ingredient that truly feels like part of her. Directed by Priscilla Galvez and written by Maisie Jacobson, this puts you directly into the kitchen and all the time and energy that this dish takes. And perhaps it’s a pun to say that it has her blood and sweat in it, because Marielle uses her menstrual blood in her garden, so she decides that it should be the main ingredient in this fermented food. Marielle has taken a piece of her, perhaps the egg that she will never get to fertilize, and gives it to people who don’t pay attention to a bite of their meal, instead ignoring it as simple sustenance when she has given everything to make it into their mouths. The truest horror is that we create — whether its foods or the words you’re reading now — just so that they can be consumed and forgotten.
ATOM & VOID (2024): Gonçalo Almeida has magic here, a mixture of effects and real spider, as it watches the end of all things and perhaps the birth of a new adventure. The score, sound design and look of this film all work together to create perfection, just a true joy of watching and listening. In fact, I went back several times and saw it again, one of the few advantages of seeing this online and not in a theater. If you get the opportunity to watch it, take it. This is a short that I will think of far beyond most full length movies I see this year.
Be Right Back (2023): Ah, the worst words to say in a horror movie. In this short, Maria is left home alone while her mother goes to buy dinner. However, her mother takes way longer than she should and as the night grows dark, Maria is startled when she hears a knock on the door. Is it her mother? Or is it something else? Have you ever gone shopping when you were young and gotten lost, then looked for your parents only to find someone who you thought were them and were instead strangers? That’s the feeling that this creates and it is not one I ever thought that I would live through ever again.
A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers (2024): As if I couldn’t love this short enough, just check out this paragraph from its creator, Birdy Wei-Ting Hung: “My first encounter with Yang Chia-Yun’s Fēng Kuáng Nǚ Shā Xīng / The Lady Avenger (1982) was an uncanny experience. I was researching Italian giallo film when a vintage newspaper movie poster grabbed my attention. The advert depicted a sensational female vigilante that visually recalled Edwige Fenech in Tutti i colori del buio / All the Colors of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972), only this time it was an Asian woman’s face. Her alluring body was barely covered by a white sheet, and her lustrous black hair rested on her collarbones. Standing in a martial art squat stance, the way she holds a katana (Japanese sword) is reminiscent of Meiko Kaji in Shurayuki-hime / Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973) and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill(Quentin Tarantino, 2003). I had found our lady avenger Wan-Ching, who was played by Hsiao-Feng Lu—the Taiwanese “sexy goddess” of the 1980s, and Taiwanese pulp films.”
This short is a video essay that mixes “two specific female characters in Taiwan Pulp films and Taiwanese New Wave…the female protagonists in Yang’s The Lady Avenger, and in Edward Yang’s Gǔ Lǐng Jiē Shǎo Nián Shā Rén Shì Jiàn / A Brighter Summer Day.”
I love that this film puts these movies against one another, just as a young woman spends a day in the theater savoring a watermelon drink while watching several films beyond the two mentioned, as Deep Red is one of them. A sexual awakening as well as an exploration of what film tells its viewers about the path that being a woman can take, this is one of the most gorgeous shorts I’ve seen in years. I want people to just give Birdy Wei-Ting Hung as much money as she needs to create movies that will inspire us in the same way that films have motivated her.
Bunnyhood (2024): “Mum would never lie to me, would she?” In this short by director Mansi Maheshwari, writers James Davis and Anna Moore, as well as several talented animators, Bobby (Maheshwari) learns the answer as he is rushed to the hospital. The frenetic style of the animation creates the worries of childhood, replicating the fears that aren’t always rooted in the rational or the real. The hospital and surgery come across as horrific places where nothing good can happen and at times, our parents will lie to us to keep us from worrying about the truth. Is that the right way to be a parent? Who can say!
CHECK PLEASE (2024): I am a veteran of the wars of fighting for the check. The director, Shane Chung, is too. He said, “As a kid, I witnessed firsthand the quickness with which friends can turn on each other whenever my parents took me to dinner with their pals. It was all smiles until it came time to pay for the bill – then the fangs came out. “I got it!” “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s my treat!” “You can get me next time!” It got so serious for no reason. Arguing, subterfuge… it was killing with kindness taken to another level. I wondered how far someone could take fighting to pay for the bill. Inspired by my love of goofy slapstick action comedies like Drunken Master and Everything Everywhere All At Once, I thought: what if they literally fought each other? I challenged myself to write a ten-minute long action scene where two Korean-Americans fought each other with chopsticks, grill coverings, and credit cards… and CHECK PLEASE was born.”
Starring Richard Yan and Sukwon Jeong, this is a simple story but is so perfect. It gets across what it means to be a man — paying the bill — as well as the director’s attempts at getting across the feeling of assimilating to a new culture. It’s also filled with great action. I laughed really hard throughout and found joy here.
Compost (2024): Directed by Augusto and Matías Sinay, this film presents an intriguing way at looking at grief. Anastasia (Natalia di Cienzo) has just lost the love of her life, Lisandro (Maximiliano Gallo), after an accident as he builds the greenhouse where she plans on spending most of her time. How can a dream place be as such when it is filled with so much pain? And can she carry through with his last wish, which is to become compost for their plants? Can we become part of the cycle of death and rebirth when emotions are part of our equation, unlike the plants that we help bring to birth each year, only to have to watch them die in the fall?
Considering Cats (2024): A short experimental documentary shot at the Long Island Pet Expo in 2023 by director Matt Newby, this short asks us to “Take a moment to consider the cat.” Seeing as how I live with two, I do this every day. This does a good job of showing the joy that people find in the small creatures that become part of our lives, if only for a short time, in an interesting lo-fi style.
Do Bangladroids Dream of Electric Tagore? (2024): Allem Hossain’s short is described as “desi-futuristic sci-fi.” Interesting. The director says that this genre is “a body of sci-fi work that dares to imagine speculative futures through a South Asian lens.”
In this, a documentarian goes into the New Jersey Exclusion Zone to meet the droids that live there and learn why they are obsessed with a subversive Bengali Renaissance poet. Featuring the poem “Freedom” by Rabindranath Tagore, which is read by Bernard White, this is AI generated but its director asks us to think of “how AI and other technology will impact us but I think we should also be thinking about our moral and ethical responsibilities towards what we create.”
Don’t Talk to Strangers (2023): Imanol Ortiz López has created a short that looks like vintage Kodachrome and is set within a toy store that only looks bright and friendly. Even the IMDB description of this movie is somewhat scary: “Mom always told me not to talk to strangers, but Agustín is not a stranger, because whenever we go to his store he offers me treats.” A young girl is saying that and in this, she’s played by Inés Fernández, who explains how she was abducted by Agustín (Julio Hidalgo). It sounds simple and expected, but in no way does what is revealed end up that way. A really interesting short.
Down Is the New Up (2018): Directed and written by Camille Cabbabe, this is the story of how an ambitious filmmaker and his crew attempt to tell the story of the last hours of a man who plans on killing himself at dawn. To be honest, I found it kind of indulgent and wish that I had spent a bit more time watching it. Maybe it was the language barrier or honestly how many shorts I watched in a few days, but there wasn’t anything here that jumped and grabbed me. I feel I owe the filmmaker an apology and am certainly willing to try and see what was here one more time.
DUCK (2024): The sell copy for this promises that this is “a classic spy thriller turned on its head.” What it is is a deep fake generated film starring almost every actor to blame James Bond and Marilyn Monroe, all voiced by director and writer Rachel Maclean.
As someone who uses AI for my real job and to create music, I have no hate for it. I do, however, dislike this movie. It should be something I love, one that gets into aliens and conspiracies while using pop culture characters. Instead, it feels like robbing the graves of the cemetery at the lowest part of Uncanny Valley. It goes on and on, reminding you of the much better work of the actors who it is raising from the dead to serve as stiff actors for a plot that can be worked out in seconds. I believe AI and deep fake can create the kind of cinema that we want to see, movies that create joy. This just engendered ennui.
Empty Jars (2024): After the last two shorts I watched, this brought back the love I have for film. Director Guillermo Ribbeck Sepúlveda has crafted a fantasy world where a woman (Ana Burgos) deals with the loud guests at her hostel by freeing a ghost from a jar, a spirit that, well, fills her with something else, giving her an experience that she hopes to replicate again and again. Yet, as this movie shares with us, the dead are even less trustworthy than the living. What a gorgeous looking and feeling short. I can’t wait to see what else Sepúlveda can do!
Faces (2024): Look out for Blake Simon. In this film by the director and writer, he starts with Judy (Cailyn Rice) being invited to a fraternity party by Brad (Ethan Daniel Corbett). However, in the ether all around this is a character called The Entity, a creature that has been abducting women the same age as our heroine, such as Bridget Henson. Now, as the frat party hits its height, the struggle for identity and who or what people are plays out. Faces feels like an entire film in its short running time and could easily become a full length feature. Whatever The Entity is, whatever it is looking for and why it does what it does are all unimportant. What is is that Simon seems ready to become a valued new talent in horror and this announces him so well.
Godfart (2023): Directed and written by Michael Langan, this is “The very true story of how the universe was created.” God (Russell Hodgkinson) is looking for breakfast. This short explains it all. This is part of something called the Doxology Universe. As someone who loves breakfast, I want to know more.
How My Grandmother Became A Chair (2020): Director and writer Nicolas Fattouh has created the perfect way of showing what it’s like to slowly lose an aging family member, something that I have gone through several times of the past years. His grandmother is losing her senses, one by one, until she — as the title lets you know early — becomes immobile furniture. There are times when it takes animation and the surreal to make life — which never makes all that much sense — something more easily explainable. This looks so wonderful and moves so perfectly that even though I knew where it was going, it still ended up as an emotional experience.
Huntsville, July 1981 (2024): In Sol Friedman’s short, four characters must deal with the ferocious attacks of a creature that is hiding in the woods. I loved the look of this, which seems like the wildest sketches the weirdest kid in school made and here they are, coming to life.
J’ai le Cafard (Bint Werdan) (2020): “J’ai le cafard” means “I have the cockroach,” yet it also means “I am depressed.” Director and writer Maysaa Almumin is followed everywhere by a dying large cockroach, which is her mental anguish. She connects more with this gigantic roach than anyone else around her until she realizes the impact that it is having on her life. I loved the puppet work and enjoyed seeing how this idea came to life. Can you be friends with an insect? This movie asks that question and I think the answer is yes, but roaches can be just as infuriating as people.
Manivelle: The Last Days of the Man of Tomorrow (2017): Directed by Fadi Baki Fdz, who wrote this with Omar Khouri and Lina Mounzer, this takes a realistic look at an unrealistic story, exploring the life of Manivelle, an automaton from Lebanon whose life seems to mirror the history of the country. His glory years were in the past, when life felt free, and today he is falling to pieces, his body failing him, reaching out in vain to people whose lives he ruined. Manivelle has been an actor, a soldier and now, he’s just a lost robot that claims to run a museum and read books, but he fails at all of that. I absolutely loved how this was shot. It’s perfect.
Yummo Spot (2024): Directed and written by Ashley Brandon, this is about a couple who moves to the woods and tries to start a family. Soon they learn that the Live, Laugh, Love lifestyle may be more difficult than they thought. This had a strange vibe but you may enjoy it more than me.
Two of Hearts (2024):Director and writer Mashie Alam places a boy (Anaiah Lebreton) and a girl (Basia Wyszynski) in a battle over some decisions, like eating a piece of pizza. Are they brother and sister? Are they a couple? Where did they get all of those great clothes? What’s happening? This is one of those times when the way something is filmed outdoes the basics of the script. Does the title refer to a Stacey Q song? Where is this house where they live? Can I visit? This movie has an amazing look and I want all of the answers to these questions and so many more. It’s good to have questions. It’s good to want to know more.
Skeeter (2024): Chris McInroy gets me every time. Actually, he’s made me physically sick a few of those times, no complaints. That’s because his movies are always fun, like this one, where someone has been raised by mosquitoes. If you’ve seen his movies Guts, We Joined a Cultand We Forgot About the Zombies, you know what you’re in for here. Thank you again, Chris, for shocking me and reminding me to never eat popcorn — or any food — during your movies.
In 2044, advanced AI finally drains the last of Earth’s natural resources. Humanity escapes at the last minute, along with a Chinese clone of President Donald Trump who spends a thousand years on Mars with a slowly draining AI robot, racing around on a rover.
Now, he’s been brought into a battle between what is left of humanity and the Illuminati, who are based in Hell and have Satan, Anubis and Aleister Crowley among their troops. Along with a clone of Van Helsing, Commander Kali and Dr. Jekyll, all characters that would go on to appear in the rest of BC Fourteen’s movies.
A lot of people say this looks like a video game cutscene and yeah, it does. But I kind of love these movies for that. I miss they were an actual video game where you could take Donald — not the Donald, a Donald — into Hell and fight Satan hand to small hand.
Somehow, these movies get even weirder after this and I would advise that you watch all of them. A clown who is Hannibal Lecter that flies a spaceship? A werewolf in space? A pumpkin headed bad guy? It does all of that and more, including a reptile Anton LaVey.
Directed and written by Raul Lopez Echeverria, this is — as the title tells us — the story of Domingo (Eduardo Covarrubias), who lives in a poor neighborhood in Guadalajara. He has lost his wife to divorce and only has work in his life until he learns that his passion for announcing soccer matches can change his entire neighborhood.
While soccer may not be as popular here in America — it’s making strides and the World Cup is a big deal here no as well — you can substitute any sport for what Domingo loves. The idea that he sits on the sidelines of a barely complete pitch and is as passionate about the games as anyone commenting on the biggest matches in the world is why everyone loves him.
I like that Tubi is getting these foreign movies and giving people in our country a chance to see what the rest of the world is like. I may not be a soccer fan but I can feel the passion within this movie and the joy that the characters feel.
This is my holiday tradition. Watching David DeCoteau-directed movies starring Vivica A. Fox.
There’sA Christmas Intern (with Michael Paré and Jackée, no less, and I wonder if they discuss how no one puts the accent on the e in their last names), A Christmas for Mary, Christmas Matchmakers, My Christmas Grandpa and A Christmas Cruise, A Husband for Christmas. They also made The Wrong… series together, which includes movies about an incorrect life coach, high school sweetheart, blind date, cheer captain, Valentine, Prince Charming, Mr. Right, fiancé, real estate agent, cheerleader coach, stepfather, wedding planner, house sitter, cheerleader, tutor, mommy, stepmother, boy next door, teacher, friend, cruise, man, crush, student, child and roommate.
Mariah Carey only thinks she’s the queen of Christmas. Has she been in Sworn Justice: Taken Before Christmas, A New Diva’s Christmas Carol (directed by Rusty Cundieff!), Dognapped: Hound for the Holidays (directed by Fred Olen Ray, as well as A Wedding for Christmas), Holiday Hideaway, A Cozy Christmas Inn, The Christmas Thief, 2nd Chance for Christmas (with Tara Reid and Brittany Underwood), Christmas With a View, Royal Family Christmas, A Royal Family Holiday, A Christmas Wedding, So This Is Christmas, Annie Claus Is Coming to Town, A Holiday Heist and Farewell Mr. Kringle or has she just put out an album? When it comes to basic cable holiday movies, Vivica A. Fox is the holiday diva.
Writer Jay Cipriani also wrote A Christmas for Mary, Carole’s Christmas, A Winter Wonderland, A Christmas Cruise, Sharing Christmas, Sleigh Bells Ring, A Husband for Christmas, Christmas Land, 3 Holiday Tails, A Golden Christmas and A Golden Christmas 3.
Ava (Anna Marie Dobbins) has pretty much been dumped by her boyfriend Dean (Anthony Carro) for his career. She decides that she’s going to spend the holidays in Tinsel, the most Christmas place ever, a small town that reminds her of her days as a little girl. She’s lured in by an ad that Mia (Rylie Coe) has placed in the hopes of finding a new wife for her widowed dad Mason (Marc Herrmann).
Vivica plays the next door neighbor Viv who encourages the love match in this.
Mason has no lens in his glasses but Ava does have a cute dog, which seems to work into the plan Mia has to get a dog of her own. Everything works out, as you knew it would, and we’re off to another holiday movie for DeCoteau and Fox.
Not only is this a kaiju movie, it’s also a comic book movie. Based on the Charlton Comics series Konga, which was an adaptation of the movie Konga and had 24 issues of art by Steve Ditko, this movie was made during COVID-19 lockdown by Brett Kelly, who also made Ouija Shark, Raiders of the Lost Shark, Agent Beetle (which is based on the Dan Garret Blue Beetle), Planet Blood and so many other movies. It uses stuff shot by friends and fans as well as stock footage and footage Brett shot himself.
The laws of public domain are always wild. The Konga comic book came out a year before the movie and is the first appearance of the ape. None of the Charlton Comics had renewed copyrights, placing them into the public’s hands, so this movie could be made while an adaption of the movie couldn’t.
After getting injected with a formula from an alien ship, a gorilla escapes and makes friends with Chance and Grayson. Then he grows to monstrous size and the boys have to figure out how to stop him before the government kills him. One way they try to help is by dressing Chance as a hot dog and trying to lure Konga away from the military.
I warn you that this movie is made with a stuffed animal and a monkey suit. If you’re expecting the poster to be real, you should not watch this. It also has characters with names like Megan Bacon (Ellen Mildred) and Major Bummer (Trevor Payer). Speaking of Major Bummer, someone took the time to complain about how his medals are incorrect on IMDB, which is hilarious, because of all things in this movie to complain about, they took the time to navigate the difficult-to-use IMDB database to remind the filmmaker that he was so wrong and that the character “wears the four stripes of a Navy Captain, not an Army, Air Force or Marine Major’s gold leaf.” I assume the same person also wrote about how the jets were wrong in a movie where a stuffed monkey becomes a 50 foot kaiju simian.
23. VACANCY: Road weary are we? Pull over for one that’s set at a hotel or a motel. Goodnight?
A few years ago, I worked at the kind of ad agency that was too cheap to pay for creative directors to go on shoots. Well, when I got the chance to get a script developed by a food social media site for one of my clients, I couldn’t wait to get to be part of the production. And someone had to be there with the client, right? Well, I had to pay for everything out of pocket. Flight and hotel. So I stayed at the Hotel Normandie, which somehow had rooms for less than a hundred a night and was in the middle of Los Angeles’ Koreatown, the kind of place that has all night buffet dinners, so when I wanted dakgangjeong at 4:17 a.m., well…I was covered. It was also blocks from The Prince, the bar where Jake Gittes meets Evelyn in Chinatown, where Gene Wilder and Golda Radner went on a date in The Woman In Red and the bar where magicians hang out in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Other movies that filmed there include Midnight Run, Crank, Body and Soul and shows like New Girl and Mad Men also were lensed there.
So yeah, the agency was cheap but I had a great time.
I was surprised to see the Hotel Normandie show up as the setting for this movie, but when I think about how every room had the look of a hard boiled detective’s office from the 1930s, it all kind of makes sense.
Babak Naderi (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Neda (Niousha Noor), along with their daughter Shabnam (Leah Oganyan), get lost in Los Angeles and decide to stay for the night. There is only one room left and they’re told that they will be locked in for the night. Soon, both are seeing strange people who aren’t always there and are confronted by the odder front desk clerk (George Maguire). It turns out that the relationship between our protagonists is not strong at all and their secrets are what is keeping them trapped within the hotel.
Director Kourosh Ahari has a good eye for this kind of movie and it’s an interesting watch.
My stay was much better than this one. Originally built in 1925, the Hotel Normandie was selected as the official hotel for Stanford University alumni, as well as the University of Southern California and the University of California Los Angeles. It’s been fully restored and it looks gorgeous inside. I’d definitely recommend staying there if you’re ever in town.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Japan
I haven’t seen any of Kurando Mitsutake’s movies before this and, well, now I’m looking for more.
The director of Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf, Lion-Girl and Gun Woman, in Maniac Driver he’s loudly proclaiming that this is a Japanese giallo.
A taxi driver (Tomoki Kimura) is usually quite normal and even mild until gorgeous women get into his vehicle. Then he loses his mind and is driven to the kind of murderous impulses that get your movie named after animals and filled with black gloves, wearing a motorcycle helmet like the murderer in Strip Nude for Your Killer.
While there are moments of Argento in this and definite tones of Maniac — the poster tagline is “I warned you not to take a taxi tonight” and The New York Ripper — this also draws on the pinky violence genre of its native country.
With a cast of Japanese AV stars (Saryû Usui, Ayumi Kimito, Iori Kogawa, Ai Sayama), a metal soundtrack by the band Aim Higher that makes this feel like the 80s wave of giallo and neon lighting, Maniac Driver is unafraid and unashamed to go there. Is it a giallo? Well, it has the feel of the genre, even if it gives away the killer right away and his reasons — his wife was killed while he was unable to protect her — aren’t discovered by someone else or the police blundering in the dark.
It’s closer to a slasher or Taxi Hunter. That said, I could care less what bucket it has to fit into. It’s fast running time is filled with non-stop violence and sex, a movie that’s ready to be lurid and cheap. And I mean that as a good thing.
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