"Demoni 2" (1986) d/ Lamberto Bava

Remember how much fun you had the first time you saw Lamberto Bava's schizophrenic cult classic, Demons(1985)? Well, Team Dario wasted little time in banging out a sequel, hoping to cash in on the international success of their original effort, and that's almost never a good sign, right out of the gate. Sure, there's contagion-spreading demoniac mayhem at every juncture, as crafted by the maestro Stivaletti, and fan favorite Bobby Rhodes returns in an almost identical capacity, and Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni lends her inimitably adorable pouty persona as teenaged catalyst to the on-screen madness, but the results fall well short of the first film's vigor in the end. Still, you could do a lot worse...


"Fix this earring for me, I'm gonna do the Molly Ringwald all goddamned night!"
Sally(Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) ducks out of her Sweet 16 birthday party only to get caught up watching a documentary on television about that big outbreak of demons a few years back, you remember that, don't you? A group of amateur thrill-seekers scales the high security wall of 'the forbidden zone', where the contagion had been contained, but, after stumbling upon a frozen demon corpse while inside, the investigators unwittingly reanimate the homely fellow, who takes it upon himself to kill the lot of them and dramatically break out of the television screen, infecting Sally, who's too startled to resist, in the process. Naturally, she spreads the evil to her party guests through her fingernails, letting them know that the 'floppily dancing  around her high rise apartment to The Smiths and Peter Murphy' segment of her get together has officially ended.


"She watched that documentary on television in a highrise apartment building, GET IT?!!?" barks Tony th-errr, I mean, Hank the Personal Trainer (Bobby Rhodes).
The newly-transformed demons spill out of the young girl's apartment, rushing to infect the entire populace of the building after a collective bleed burns through the floor Alien(1979)-style and knocks out the power, leaving salvation this time around to George (David Knight) and his pregnant spouse, Hannah ( Nancy Brilli), as they join with Bobby the Pimp's identical twin, Hank (Bobby Rhodes), who's been pumping iron in the building's gym and also quite adept at battling back the belligerent baddies.Little boys turn into bloodthirsty demons, hell, even family dogs transform into demons here. An embarrassing winged imp puppet with visible strings  terrorizes the expectant mother-to-be. A little girl (Asia Argento, in her debut) watches helplessly as her father is swarmed by demons as the struggle moves to the parking garage. George and Hannah decide to make their way to the roof, finally infiltrating the mysterious self-sufficient television station that started the epidemic, but demonic Sally does her best to stop the couple from escaping. She fails and eats half-blinded impalement death. Hannah gives birth. The baby isn't a demon. Is it finally all over? Of course not.


They grow up right before your eyes, don't they?
Lino Salemme ( the unforgettable coke-snorting 'Ripper' from the original ) makes a nice cameo here, playing a security guard this time around, and Virginia Bryant is on board as a classy call girl. The soundtrack is handled by Simon Boswell, with a few memorable cuts, but for me, the Simonetti metal score of the original wins out, hands down. Michele Soavi's La Chiesa (1989), originally intended as a second Demons sequel, would follow, and Bava would helm the made-for-tv The Ogre in 1988, which would be known as Demons III: The Ogre stateside, and even Umberto Lenzi's Black Demons(1991) was released as Demons III in several countries. This entry earns itself two wops, a flawed but enjoyable effort.


"Don't post that one to FB, you missed our collective sideways peace signs and duckfaces!"

"Super Fly"(1972)d/Gordon Parks, Jr.

Tonight, we'll take a look at director Gordon Parks Jr.'s premier effort, a coke-encrusted cult classic of seventies' blaxploitation  known primarily by the stellar soundtrack provided by the legendary Curtis Mayfield, who also lends his visage to the film while performing live with his band, The Curtis Mayfield Experience.His lyrics to soul classics like "Freddy's Dead", "Little Child Runnin' Wild", "Pusherman", and the title track vault the otherwise pedestrian urban fare within,  to a morally uplifting socio-economic commentary for the turbulent era.Utica native and classically trained actor Ron O'Neal delivers a memorable turn as anti-hero Youngblood Priest, a heady young coke dealer looking to deliver one last big score before exiting the dangerous drug game on his own terms.Unfortunately for O'Neal, who would ironically succumb to pancreatic cancer in 2004 on the very day his signature film was released on dvd, the same performance that gained him success as an actor would provide a stifling cinematic stereotype that he would never be able to climb out from behind.Also on board here are television staple Sheila Frazier as Priest's main squeeze Georgia, Carl Lee, as his business partner Eddie(who gets to deliver all the best lines here while O'Neal provides much of the action), the venerable genre fave Julius Harris as Priest's old powder connection Scatter, and Charles McGregor as the oblivious Fat Freddie.The son of Gordon Parks, Sr., whose Shaft!(1971) helped lay the foundation for the popular subgenre, Parks, Jr. does an admirable job in providing a provocative look at the hazards of ghetto life while maintaining a controversially non-judgmental stance on the criminality of the hustler's creed, represented here by the anticipatedly gaudy fashions, luxurious apartments, caramel-colored Carmelitas, and pimped out luxury sedans one would expect to encounter in a low budgeted ethno-action flick such as this. A succinct script allows for much display of Parks' visual style through establishing shots of walking and driving through slum neighborhoods that often resemble a pre-fab post-apocalyptic set, more than places of human habitation in America in the twentieth century, for sure.Moderately powerful stuff, indeed.
 
"It ain't the same without 'Mr. Bubble', baby..."
Priest(Ron O'Neal) is a successful young powder pusher who's willing to gamble his fancy designer vines, extravagant spread, gran'daddy Caddy, half a piece of dope a day habit, and loyal young filly Georgia(Sheila Frazier) on thirty kilos of llello from his main man Scatter(Julius Harris) , which he hopes to parlay into a million in cold, hard cash in a month's time with his overbitten weasel of a business associate, Eddie(Carl Lee), in hopes of abandoning the hustle for good before he gets iced by rivals on the streets, or worse,  incarcerated by overzealous thugs with badges and a penchant for racial insensitivity, dig?At first, everything is clumsily impotent-looking judo training, photo montages of cocaine abuse, and slo-mo sudsy tub fuck sequences that go on longer than that snazzy-assed Eldorado cat be wheelin' around in, for Youngblood, with a lengthy chase-thru-the-filth that nets a junkie pickpocket a designer boot to the skull on the floor of his ghetto hovel and some tough love for lazy earner Fat Freddie, who's forced to go out and mug for Priest's missing ends or face seeing his wife get turned out as a common streetwalker, thrown in for good measure.

It's not every day you witness white-on-white crime, and if it is, why don't we hang out more often, dammit.
Freddie unwittingly gets pinched while knuckledusting an easy mark with brassies on the street in broad daylight, and after the badges rough his shit up on the white-hand side, he bloodily divulges every last bit of info he's got on Priest's set up before getting himself smooshed by a car.To further define the hustler's stress levels, a group of black militants ridicules him over his lack of participation in the coming revolution, to which he assures them, that, when it finally goes down, he'll be right down front, killin' Whitey, not constantly putting a gold cross/spoon necklace full of nose candy into his nostrils.If only that white powder wasn't so damned oppressive and symbolic of the decadent decade...A rocky rendezvous with former mentor Scatter earns the old coot an arm full of lethal drugs when the mob muscles him out in favor of the new kid with the outrageous hair, fronting him the dope supply necessary to throw his master plan into action once and for all.With the knowledge of Youngblood's hustle, naturally, the cops orchestrate a sting and arrest...nah, just kidding, they suggest he partners them in on his racket on the grounds that he never leaves the game. What the hustler decides to do in the last reel, I'll let you discover on your own when you see it for your own damned selves.
 
They're right, things do go better with Coke.
To be fair, some dialogue exchanges are handled sloppily by Parks, giving them an air of artificiality that contaminates the film's reality in places.O'Neal's silly wig and epicene mannerisms only compound that problem, and when one adds the flagrantly inept camera placement during the slo-mo fight in the finale, it's not long before they're reminded that they're watching a low budget exploitation film, after all. Flaws notwithstanding, this is still memorable viewing for any fan of the sub-genre, beyond question, and compared to later entries like Abar the Black Superman(1977) or Super Soul Brother a.k.a./Six Thousand Dollar Nigger(1979), it may as well be Citizen Kane up there on the screen.O'Neal would direct the forgettable sequel, Superfly T.N.T.(1975), himself, but it would fail to make much of a splash at the box office.The film's producer, Sig Shore, would direct the second sequel, Return of Superfly, in 1990.Parks would helm Three the Hard Way two years later, and die at 44 in a Kenyan plane crash in 1979.Harris would turn up in  Larry Cohen's two slices of blaxploitation gold, Black Caesar and Hell up in Harlem(both 1973) as Big Papa Gibbs, and even King Kong(1976), as well as Raimi's Crimewave(1985) and Darkman(1990).You'll no doubt remember Charles McGregor from Blazing Saddles(1976).Real-life pimp K.C. loaned his unforgettable mack-tastic '71 Eldo to the production in exchange for a role in the movie, dig.Still, the most noteworthy aspect of this one has to be the Mayfield soundtrack.On the scale, I'm givin' Fly the only score The Man'll let me give it, which is:
 
 Biff! Zap! Powww! And his leather stays flawless, can you dig it, baby?

"Necromancy"(1972)d/Bert I. Gordon

Here's another rarely-seen late oddity from Mr. B.I.G. himself  that turned up a decade later during the video tape era, a lethargic low budget Orson Welles occult effort reworked with added nudity and blood-letting and repackaged as 'The Witching' by the folks at Paragon, the updated trailer with repetitive takes of Orson's portly facepiece hogging the lens while clutching multiple chalices and inimitably burping corny sorcery-based dialogue remains one of my fondest memories of the time, and always pulled some laughs out of me when I saw it, regardless of how miserable I may have been, prior to.For you new boots on the block, Orson Welles ran the gamut in film, having directed and starred in R.K.O.'s Citizen Kane(1941), a movie that many consider the greatest the art form has offered to date(Not I, says I), and then, thirty years later, he's waddling around in a house-sized ceremonial robe with nude Satanites n' Satanettes flanking him(Brinke Stevens is in there, in an early cameo), toiling in a witchy B-movie for the guy responsible for drive-in gold like War of the Colossal Beast(1958), Food of the Gods(1976), and Empire of the Ants(1977).Providing petite brunette eye candy for your humble N in this one, is the waifish Pamela Franklin, an actress unafraid to break 'em out for the dark lord and master in the name of artistic integrity and plot continuity.Ahem.Also on board are Twin Peaks' Sheriff Harry S. Truman, Michael Ontkean, and fiery Lee Purcell, a redhead I'll never forget thanks to her Valley Girl(1983) cougar.Grrrrrrrr, baby, grrrrrrrrr.

This could be a snapshot from my old place back in the mid to late nineties, I tell you.
The Brandons(Pam Franklin, Michael Ontkean) look to put a painful miscarriage, caused by a group of naked Satanists ritually shanking a doll elsewhere, in the rearview mirror and take to the road, where Frank's reckless juggling of an argument and navigating a winding mountain road leaves a carload of innocents in a flaming wreck that Lori manages to snare a weird doll with fingernail clippings in its pocket from.Hmmm, if that's awful peculiar to you, then Frank's hiring in the small town of Lilith as a toymaker for the shadowy kid-denouncing Mr. Cato(Orson Welles) will seem equally right off the bat fishy to you.And with good reason, too, because her husband and the rotund employer are indeed cultmates of the old religion, with designs on harnessing Lori's yet-unknown-but-highly-groovy psychic powers of necromancy to resurrect Cato's son from the grave, after willingly becoming a witch in their sexy coven, of course.Cato mumbles...incessantly...at...great lengths... at a party...mumble...mumble.Frames repeat again and again.Meanwhile, hallucinatory premonitions warn Lori to refrain from ever using her powers or she will perish.You should probably listen to your hallucinations when they tell you you're going to die, Lor'...
 
If she had a cigarette dangling from her lip, this'd be the "Sexy" card.
It seems that the wide-waisted warlock has spent several years trying to bring his son back to life, and disallowed all Lilith residents from having children until he finally succeeds.Goat heads.Outta sight dancing naked chicks.Gobletsful of Paul Masson.Human sacrifices, he's tried it all, Satan knows he has.Now, Lori alone, holds the key to unlocking the gateway between life and death, the infernal rite only stoppable by Lori's revulsion to the black arts and witcher-huh, she's okay with it?Oh well, I guess that's cool, too.Lori's inducted into the circle of black magicians, she raises Cato's son from the dead, and gets herself buried alive in his place.Oh, those muted screams will soon be replaced by the laughter and merriment of father-son cultist sack races and barbeques and fishing trips.An ending that could only be interpreted as a 'downer' if you're a square that's got no love for Lucifer.

Orson just wants to be happy, and by 'happy' he means roughly the size of a Buick.
Gordon followed this one up with The Mad Bomber(1973), before putting a B-movie spin on H.G. Wells' Food of the Gods three years later, while Big Orson, who really doesn't bag enough screen time here to merit a starring credit if you ask me, would continue acting right up until his death in 1985, lending his unmistakable voice to things like Shogun(1980), Slapstick(of Another Kind)(1982), with Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn, and The Transformers:The Movie(1986). Pamela Franklin wasn't nearly finished with genre movies after this effort, appearing in Legend of Hell House(1973), telefilm Satan's School for Girls(1973), and Gordon's own Food of the Gods in '76. Lee Purcell would later turn up in Stir Crazy(1980), Airplane II:The Sequel(1982), and Homework(1982), her only genre credit since being The Unknown/Clawed:The Legend of Sasquatch in 2005.As for tonight's entry, the PG of the Necromancy cut is misleading, when you look at the amount of nudity and blood that the Witching cut brings to the table.As muddled an affair this turned out to be, it's worth a look for the curious and fans of dated cinema witchery.Two Wops.

Well that knackers the Herman's Hermits comeback tour, 'duddnit?

"Prometheus"(2012)d/Ridley Scott

Since my Mediterranean ass got dragged yesterday afternoon from a glass slider full o' berry-scented Sativage to an IMAX 3D screening of the much-anticipated prequel to Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi/horror cult classic, Alien, by my roommate, Doc, the resident sci-fi guy, I thought I'd offer a few, brief opinions on the film for you Woprophiles considering throwing down twenty-plus samoleans to bear witness to the late spring blockbuster yourselves in the near future.After donning the enormous RealD 3D goggles(Dub ain't shittin' ya, folks, these puppies wouldn't look out of place on George A. or Darryl Mac.) necessary to view the damned thing and a brief 3D re-boot delay, my official tallies for the two and a half hour long spectacle began.Just beneath the breathtakingly composed space and planet exteriors lurks a storyline holier than Saints Abreha and Atzbeha combined, a lunkheaded script full of unnecessary exposition(Having a character lifelessly explain plot points I'd understood...Hell, predicted outright, an hour earlier isn't a tribute to mine own intellect less than it is to your laziness, Hollywood.) as delivered by a cast of characters that ranges from forgettable-at-best(any number of motherfuckers decked out in Planet of the Vampires-esque gear and taking up frame space while not looking scared by any of the sleek cg horrors unfolding before their very eyes, to say the least) to instantly despisable(interstellar research jagoff seeking to tame formerly unknown species of transparent alien cobra/eel that rises out of black muck puddle by extending a friggin' hand to it?).Though the effects are admittedly pretty groove-worthy(especially if you've just ripped on some nugs), whether removing a troublesome Cthulhu-ish tentacled beastie from a birth canal by laser or watching a statuesque alien architect crumble like so much coffee cake as he plummets into cascading falls, I was overcome by the feeling that I've seen all of it before in other movies that tied it in more effectively, without having to explain it away in cliche'd dialogue to the cheap seat mannekins with the popped collared pink polos and orange-hued hair pig hussies on their arms.Regardless of Scott's obvious talents in the medium, the resources for this franchise were pretty exhausted two movies in, resulting in the mindless exercise(and to hang the promise of yet another movie on the end of this mess is pretty ballsy...what you guys gonna call that one? A pre-sequel or a fucking se-prequel?) that most of the civilized world will end up going to see, if the opening weekend receipts are any prognosticative measure.To be honest, I wasn't expecting too much, just the light IMAX fluff that I received, and the accompanying promo poster was a tits bonus that lightened the sting, certainly, but scalewise, Prometheus is a pretty pedestrian two Wops, all the way.

Trust me, sister, I was yawning, too.

"The Party Animal"(1984)d/David Beaird

Is it fucking June again already?Tonight's movie first turned up for me as a VHS new release on the shelves at D's Video back in '85, the choice of the evening for one of the more iniquitous neighborhood guys who'll remain nameless here, for reasons well known to all in attendance that summer afternoon, all who unanimously thumbs downed the inauspicious sex comedy amidst cries of "biased opinion" from the film's chooser-cum-champion, and as far as I had thought for twenty years afterwards, probably the only one in existence.I recently stumbled across the MGM dvd on a three dollar shelf at Big Lots(along with the Dimension Mother of Tears(2006) disc that had been eluding me for a minute, and a couple of others, really a Howard Carter/King Tut buried-in-his-jammies kind of excavation, reminiscent of my glorious far reaching VHS hunts of yesteryear) and knew instantly that too many years had passed since I last screened it, and my evaluation at the time was borderline unfair due to aforementioned circumstances.One thing you'll learn about Libras, we demand a balance of justice in everything we get our mitts around, or it'll pick at us like a pair of woolen unter-knicks until the state has exhaustively been achieved.Once ample haze had been vigorously puffed up, and the film had run it's brisk seventy-seven minutes, I found my recent suspicions about it to have been well-founded, indeed, with several snicker-worthy segments, a killer alt. soundtrack with mint Buzzcocks, Chelsea, and R.E.M. tracks and a memorable live performance by righteous L.A. mod outfit of the day, The Untouchables, and I haven't even mentioned all the eighties-licious headband babes and their respective bra-buddies that are broken out along the way, all in the name of lunkheadedly libidinous teen larfs.Onward.

Pondo(Matt Causey) wants to park his yap in some three-finger gap.
The ridiculously-named Pondo Sinatra(Matt Causey) is a twenty-six year old backwards Confederate Flag-wearing bumpkin who's arrived at college in the back of a turnip truck and whose abrasive Southern drawl and neanderthal approach to women seemingly leaves him jinxed from ever scoring a slice of hair pie, to this dismay of his collegiate chum with equally ridiculous name, Studly(Tim Carhart), a guy who never has any problem nailing any number of compliant feather-coiffed campus-dwelling quims, who give angry, documentary-style testimonials to the camera concerning Pondo's lovemaking ineptitudes.We see him get head-scissored between the thighs of an unwilling fully clothed cunnilingus recipient on a lover's lane car date and sends a whorehouse full of hookers off screaming in terror.Studly sends his friend to Elbow(Jerry Jones), his own personal sifu in the ways of women, a jive-talking black cat who urges Pondo to be a "houuuuun dawg" that's "gonna eat dat pussay!", but he only manages to crash a black party decked out in seventies pimp gear, slinging ethno-jive and offending everyone until a gaggle of statuesque homeboys converge on him and set his honky ass straight.A wrongful makeover leaves Pondo a hunchbacked 'n chained up mohawk punk with spikes through his cheeks that's chased by a lynch mob through town before he cries out, familiarly, in agony:"...I...am...not...an animal!" "Bullshit! That's an animal!", one of the posse replies.

"...Hounnn dawg gon' eat dat pussay!"
Pondo, desperate to see his dreams of being cool enough to sing the title track in a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses on stage become reality, crashes a party with comically oversized amounts of illicit drugs, rolling himself a Led Zeppelin of a jibber, eating sloppy mounds of reefer with fistfuls of prescription drugs and a whole sheet of acid before dumping a sack of cocaine on the table, cutting elephantine lines with a meat cleaver and burying his face in the mess before being led out by the disbelieving police.Several half-baked attempts at developing a new aphrodisiac leave the local females bald and disfigured.Faced with expulsion from college, Pondo stumbles upon the formula for irresistibility in some sludge he's dumping out in the lab workshop, transforming himself into the titular 'party animal' whose mere presence sends any nearby woman into a sexual frenzy, but soon finds out being desirable to the opposite sex can be a frustrating, exhausting predicament, as well, when several overweight women at the laudromat are suddenly struck horny, sending the hayseed to a premature grave.Studs notices a rabbit in the backyard that bears the same stars -n- bars patch in his back fur as his deceased friend used to wear, and calls out to the animal, knowing that his goofy pal has managed to get reincarnated in the perfect guise...

Hey Untouchables, how many mods does it take to screw in a lightbulb*?
Causey would also turn up in the Beaird vehicle, My Chauffeur(1986), while the director would continue to helm successful comedies and theatrical productions after debuting with this minor cult hit.Carhart would land roles in things like Witness, Desperately Seeking Susan(both 1985), and even Pink Cadillac(1989).Jerry Jones had previously appeared in several Rudy Ray Moore flicks, like Disco Godfather(1979), The Human Tornado(1976), and '75's Dolemite.This is probably the most even-handed performance I've ever seen him give.Robin Harlan would appear in Hollywood Vice Squad(as 'Hooker #4', of course) the following year, before moving on to a successful career behind the scenes as a foley artist on over two hundred movies.Despite it's occasionally strained approach in delivering the comedic goods, Animal turned out to be a pretty nostalgic trip back to the outset of the eighties for this guy, and mostly unworthy of all the negativity I'd been chucking in it's direction for the past two decades.Two big ones on the scale.Check it out for yourselves, if you feel compelled to do so.

Xenophobia Rabbit sez, "Git offa mah lan', g'wan git!!"



*Fourteen, by my estimates.One to change the lightbulb, one to book the Northern Soul n' Rocksteady bands for the scooter rally afterwards, and twelve to run down that dirty grease merchant rocker and kick 'is fahkin' 'ead in, roit?!!

"Des Morts"(1979)d/Jean-Paul Ferbus, Dominique Garny, Thierry Zeno

My earliest memory of tonight's movie dates back to the early eighties, where a trip to Gallery of Sound left me holding the fifty dollar Media VHS of Basket Case(1982) in my left hand and the pricey eighty dollar plastic Gorgon clamshell VHS of this in my right.Not yet the eager young real death/real gore-hund I'd blossom into a few years later, I passed on the impressively packaged/ridiculously priced Belgian deathumentary in favour of Henenlotter's legendary siamese brothers, and wouldn't come across it again until one of my regular mom and pop video store 'going out of business' sales haunts in the middle of nowhere years later, for a couple of bucks in a bin by the register.After a successful evening of carousing cooze and getting wasted like a Viking does, I blew through early morning red lights to get home for a chance to finally screen the critically acclaimed thing without passing the fuck out like a chump, the way I ended up doing afterall.Paced somewhere between a funeral procession and the time that'd have to elapse for your entire cadaver to rot down to fertilizer, the filmmakers, who comprise the avant-garde team that brought us the aptly-named Vase de Noces(1974), translated as 'The Wedding Trough', but globally notorious as 'The Pig-Fucking Movie'(uhh, yeah...we'll be skipping that one here, folks.), mix ethnographic art and exploitation in serving up  the poetry, spirituality, and absurdity of death, in graphic detail, for the camera.

Still a two liter of Mt Dew Voltage, a bag of sensi, and some Sabbath away from qualifying as a "ripper".
You groove on dead bodies, man?You're about to get more than a couple here, believe you me.Corpses in various states of decomposition all pass the lens, matter-of-factly, as they're graphically dissected like so many fetal pigs in a high school laboratory(porn for morticians, really), incinerated into charcoal(more or less), and entered into the ground for that lengthy, unpleasant dirt nap that nobody likes to think about while they're surrounding themselves with material wealth and acquisitions or partying their balls off constantly like some guys think they're entitled to do.Ahem.You should be able to execute an autopsy or effectively prep a cadaver for a funeral by the time you've sat through all the procedures depicted in lurid detail for the cameras here.Burial rites your bag?Nepalese, Thai, Belgian, South Korean, and even Yank rituals are examined at exhaustive mandible-numbing length here and segued by exploitative shock cuts.All these funerals and still no stiffie joke?With much respect to Terry Jones of the Pythons, I'll take the high road here and pay my respects to the bereaved within with a moment of silent dedication that won't translate worth a good goddamn to anybody following at home.We see a guy who makes a living dumping people's ash remains over the Golden Gate Bridge via airplane, with discount group rates.Oh, but that's not all...

Even Johnny Blaze needs a little breather sometimes.
...and just when you thought you might get through a mondo shockumentary without having to witness any senseless animal death, four oxen selflessly give their lives for the filmmakers' lens in obligatory gruesome fashion, in case you were feeling too positively about the whole dark affair thus far.Hey, at least they slumped dead on their left sides, allowing the dead Thai mom that they were sacrificed in the name of, a peaceful passage into a joyous afterlife without wreaking vengeance or sickness upon her living relatives.I'm still thinking the cows just might have gotten assfucked on this particular deal.More, you demand? There's Mexican bull-skewering and butcher shop hijinks with still-twitching severed calf heads. Interviews with handicapped individuals soon follow, resulting in some serious heavying of some already weighty eyelids on this end.A satirical look at cryogenics is taken via color still photography For those of you wondering where the hell all the executions in this damned documentary are, ponder no further, as you bear witness to a would-be Filipino guerilla-turned-informant's check getting cashed by his former comrades, his twitching corpse dumped into a shallow grave(a scene Zeno cut from later prints of the film as 'unneccessary').The camera pans a cemetery as the film comes to a close, perhaps leaving more questions for the viewer than it has ultimately answered...

"Dude, the buzzer went off, gimme those fuckin' tweezers, ya cheater!"
Though I probably woulda dug Morts had I picked it up way back when, I have to think I ultimately made the right choice in wicker basket freaks and grillsful o' scalpels.By the time I finally saw the damned thing, I was a different animal entirely, senses dulled against most real shockumentary violence and death by the mid-80s surge of Faces, Traces, Scenes deathumentary barrage me and the boys willingly endured back then, though there are still a few clips I have trouble wrapping my eyes around to this day.Morts is tame in comparison to most of those aforementioned vids, and I'd imagine any hardened gorenophile or death metaller worth his(or her) tits in grue would have the same end result that I did that first time around: riding the somnambulistic sky dragon to la-la land and chainsawing wood planks on the couch where I sit like I was named Jean-fucking-Pierre or something.On the other hand, Morts is a cerebral otherworldly journey that just might hit the spot for one of those rainy afternoons when you're piped outta yer gourd and fancy contemplating the end, which coincidentally, awaits us all, with its cold, final embrace.Worth a look, two Biggies.

Don't you wish they could stay like this forever?Oh, wait...

"Time After Time"(1979)d/Nicholas Meyer

Tonight's feature answers the second most nagging question on the collective 1979 conscience, "What if H.G. Wells unwittingly provided Jack the Ripper with an escape route throughout time via the time-travelling machine he'd only just constructed in his basement, forcing him to follow the murderer through the years, like some sort of impromptu time detective?".Number one, being: "You mind if I bang this hulking line of  fishscale Peruvian off of your ass quick?I hear "Night Fever" coming on out there, and I love that song.".These words I speak are true.Seriously, look it up.Malcolm McDowell had just premiered his controversial turn in Tinto Brass' Caligola(1979) seventeen days before tonight's release, a sharply dilineated departure from the nudity, urination and slo-mo vomiting he'd shared for Brass' lens in bringing the disturbed young Caesar to the big screen.Opposite McDowell here is genre vet David Warner as the infamous sex-selling slut-slicing surgeon he's in pursuit of, and he's sinister, as always, if not a bit underappreciated here.Mary Steenburgen plays Wells' modern love interest, Amy, and you can even spot former Andy Warhol discovery-turned-supporting-actress, Patti D'Arbanville, in here as one of Saucy Jack's vic's, and a young Corey Feldman as a boy at the museum.Revisiting it for probably the first time since the cable box days(or network telly, methinks), I found it to be an enjoyably fluffy romp, despite the lengthy running time(nearly two hours), and the film's general aversion to worthwhile action occurring within it's frames.It must be some sort of childhood nostalgia going down in me gulliver again.Forwards!

"Oi, that weren't me cunny, guv'nor...."
John Leslie Stevenson(David Warner) arrives late for his mate, H.G. Wells'(Malcolm McDowell) unveiling of his latest invention, a working time machine, due to an as-yet-undiscovered propensity to leave Whitechapel whores slumped dead in back alleys with their innards whistling in the wind.By the time Scotland Yard has policed the blood trail to Wells' flat, Saucy Jack has already deftly skirted past the commotion to the basement, somehow managing to transport himself forward through time into 1979.Wells, realizing his contraption has sprung Jack the Ripper on an unsuspecting future socialist Utopian society(Ha!), packs up the available folding money and shiny trinkets to trade with the natives(!) on a journey through the tapestry of time to catch a cold-blooded killer.Once in 1979, Wells finds himself hopelessly out of place, even in ordering fast food, while Stevenson has adapted to the future quite seamlessly, trading his antiquated garb for groovy denim action vests and polyester disco boogie suits.Wells traces the Ripper to his hotel room by monitoring his guinea exchange at a local  bank, where the surgeon/slasher illustrates the current society's violent-prone mindset with a television remote, leading to a mostly unthrilling chase on foot through the crowded streets of San Francisco.Losing his target, who's wrongly believed to be killed in a traffic accident, Wells is forced to retreat to the friendly face of a teller named Amy(Mary Steenburgen) who removes the sting of his wounds by showing him around the city and giving up the first date mogambo while she's at it.

"I don't see the promotional 'Caligula' soft drink glasses display anywhere, and I should very much like a word with your superior, young lady."
A newspaper headline declaring the discovery of another Ripper victim abruptly snaps Herbert from his recent liason, and forces him to reveal the whole unbelievably mad truth to her when offering tips to the police under the alias of 'Sherlock Holmes' proves rather fruitless, indeed.Wells sneaks Amy into his time machine, taking her forward a couple of days to prove his story, only to have her discover via future headline that she is to die at the hands of the ripper herself.The duo plot Stevenson's next moves using the future newspaper, but Herbert gets himself locked up hours beforehand, only to be released when the authorities mistake the mutilated body of Carol, one of Amy's friends for her, just in time to find Saucy Jack making off with his girl in tow, at knifepoint.Herbert tearfully pleads with Stevenson at the museum for Amy to be delivered over unharmed, but Stevenson is not satisfied by merely proving Wells wrong about man's instincts, and plans to take Amy with him in Wells' machine.In the melee, she manages to escape his clutches before Herbert can remove the 'vaporizing equalizer' from the side of the time craft, effectively sending Jack the Ripper screaming through the ages without the machine.Amy's emotional pleas influence Wells to take her with him back to his own age, vowing to change her name to Susan B. Anthony as part of the bargain.The credits that follow tell us the couple later married.

Jack the Ripper(David Warner) would rather spill your entrails on the concrete than shake his groove thang.
The real Amy Robbins was one of Wells' young real-life students that he fell in love with while already married to his own cousin,and married a year later in 1895.Free love, indeed, Herbert, free love, indeed.Steenburgen and McDowell tied the knot themselves the following year, and divorced in 1990.He's one of my favorite actors of all-time, whereas she's mostly appeared in the kind of movies I'd never watch unless there be pussy to be gained afterwards, and even then, prolly not, folks.Meyer, who also helmed the cult classic, Invasion of the Bee Girls(1975), is probably best known today for directing several of the Star Trek films, most notably 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.Insert your best over-dramatic William Shatner scream here.Warner, another long-time favorite of mine, can be seen in such diverse fare as 1970's Straw Dogs, From Beyond the Grave(1974), The Omen(1976), The Island(1980), The Man With Two Brains(1982), and even Titanic(1997).On the scale, Time stands the test of time for the most part, earning a respectable two Big ones.Worth a look...

Whore-ripping, time-space continuum-spitting, tron-gasm finales: One.