"Green Room" (2015) d/ Jeremy Saulnier

Tonight, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise touches down on planet Valhalla, as we cover 2016's Green Room, a surprisingly nasty and effective independent slice of survival horror/thriller from director Jeremy Saulnier, that stars the late Anton "Chekov" Yelchin and Sir Pat Stew himself, in a one hundred-eighty degree dramatic departure from the "infinitely wise leader of humanity" roles he's been sopping up in recent years, the equivalent to Ben Kingsley's Don Logan role in Sexy Beast (2000) in a way.Despite heavy praise from seemingly most everyone who's seen it thus far, I approached with cautious interest, as the familiar subject matter has often been wincingly fumbled in Hollywood hands over the years. To add insult to injury, the vast number of uninteresting arthouse trailers that preceded the movie on the disc didn't ease my mind at all, but then like a lightning bolt (or two)...


"You here to see Lou Rawls? That's twenty-five each, no flash photography..."
After an ignominious start to their latest tour of the Pacific Northwest, punk outfit "The Ain't Rights" find themselves booked to a club off the beaten path near Portland that's frequented by a lot of skins, some of the sieg heiling, red laced variety. After throwing a ballsy cover at the mostly bald patrons (Dead Kennedy's "Nazi Punks Fuck Off", of course) to kick off the festivities, the rest of the band's heavy set wins over most of the close cropped crowd. When Sam (Alia Shawkat) forgets her phone inside the green room, Pat (Anton Yelchin) heads back in to retrieve it, only to stumble across a dead chick with a knife protruding from her domepiece on the floor, and her friend, a skinhead girl named Amber (Imogen Poots) being held in the room against her will at gunpoint, much like the punk band is about to be. With their phones confiscated, our heroes are left at the mercy of a guy named Big Justin (Eric Edelstein), while the other bouncer, Gabe (Macon Blair), consults with the club owner on what to do with all of these pesky eye-witnesses. I'm sure he's a reasonable guy and he'll chalk it up to a misunderstanding and let them all go, in the end. Or maybe not...


"There I was, swinging down the high street, yeah.", croons Amber (Imogen Poots) the skinchick.
The club owner, Darcy (Patrick Stewart), has a continuing mission to raise racial consciousness among the local bootboy population (can I get a "Hail Victory!"?), to explore the manufacturing of strange new drugs, like heroin, in the club's basement bunker, to snuff out lesser lives while issuing red laces in the process, and to boldly kill like no man has killed before. In keeping with his mantra, Darcy calls for the elimination of the pesky punks, who've overpowered Big Justin, taken his gun, and slapped an MMA-style arm bar on the big galoot, by now. When Reese's (Joe Cole) chokehold proves less effective than planned, Amber serves up a Stanley knife disemboweling for Darcy's employee. There's a struggle at the door that leaves Pat with a diced arm, hanging by the sinews in several places, and forces Darcy to call in his bigger guns, in the form of a white power dog trainer whose pit bulls throat rip at attack commands issued in German, and a small army of skinheads with shotguns and machetes who've already earned their red laces and are eager to spill more blood for their admired leader. You can bet what transpires from here on out is going to be packed with tension, deep-seated gore splattered murders, and bellicose bovver boys. My opinion may be slightly biased concerning these proceedings, but that's a recipe for success in my book. Check it out!


" This is a white bastion. No smelly Ferengi admitted.", exclaims Darcy (Patrick Stewart) and his Star Trek bootboys.
Make no mistake about it, the film's soundtrack, which includes such scene luminaries as FEAR, Poison Idea, Bad Brains, Slayer, Napalm Death, and Obituary, to name a few, is authentic and satisfying. Patrick Stewart has been a favorite of mine since his portrayal of Sejanus in BBC's I, Claudius miniseries put him on my radar decades ago, and this movie only reinforces that sentiment. Hearing Jean-Luc Picard talk about "earning red laces", "boot parties", and "nigger dope" is especially hilarious and surreal, and keeps the film from becoming bogged down by the apex levels of tension and on-screen brutality that it taps into in order to bring it's audience some genuine scares. As a long-time proponent of villainy, I confess that I may or may not have been cheering on the bad guys the whole time or most of it. I was certainly grooving heavily on the ultra-realistic violence, at the very least. On the scale, I've got to bestow the full Monte, four Wops, on this potent little indie thriller, and strongly recommend that you score a copy and see it for yourselves. See if it doesn't stick with you well after the end credits roll.


Go ahead and keep those tattooed Neanderthals at bay, mister Chekov, I'll be up here entertaining some blue and green women. Kirk out.

"Nelle pieghe della carne" (1970) d/Sergio Bergonzelli

Tonight we look at an early giallo of Italian/Spanish descent, from the man who would later direct Ajita Wilson and Lina Romay in the hardcore Apocalipsis Sexual (1982), that's heavy on the trippy psychedelia of the era and Freudian lunacy and features performers like Elenora Rossi Drago and Pier Angeli, a year before her tragic suicide. The translated, international title, In The Folds of Flesh, refers to a Freudian quote about the effect of life experience upon the brain, not the body, as some might be misled into believing, and the levels of sex and nudity within are appropriately tamer than one would expect to see in gialli of the period. Don't let that sway you, though, as Bergonzelli more than compensates with incest, rape, murder, outrageous concentration camp flashbacks, vultures, and more bloody mannequin heads than three Herschell Gordon Lewis movies, ferchrissakes. I can't help but think a pre-movie bubbler sesh ( for self-medication purposes only, of course) might act as the perfect compliment for anyone thinking about sitting down to this one, especially if they aren't able to score a ten strip of acid, readily...


"Hiyata empowers himself by lifting the phallic Beta capsule over his head, and thus becomes an Ultra Man"- Freud (not really)
Just before he's apprehended by the authorities, Pascal (Fernando Sancho) the murderer seemingly witnesses Lucille (Rossi Drago) burying a body behind her sizeable estate as a young boy looks on. Thirteen years later, Lucille has a couple of vultures in cages as pets, and is also mother to Andre (Alfredo Mayo) and Falesse (Angeli), who may or may not have been molested by her own father as a child, causing her to murder her suitors by dagger or sword when their sexual advances trigger her traumatic memories, as Andre peep-toms from a safe distance. Afterwards, Mom grants her the criminal mulligan by disposing of the corpses via acid bath(!), and slagging the bones off to visitors as "Etruscan remains". Yeah, maybe in a technical sense...More heads roll than on the set of a 1981 Ted Nugent video (Intensities in Ten Cities was a good album with a couple of great tracks on it, I don't care what you say) while Andre takes fashion to the eyesore extreme with clothes that'd make Liberace blush.You probably don't want to act on your first impressions of anyone in a giallo, as the twists soon come like Arch Hall, Jr. himself induced them, in a tux with a (wild) guitar and dirt bike down on the beach.


"Slap me another tab of acid, this Grateful Dead album still sucks, maaan!"
Pascal finally butts back in on the scene, hating on animals (a vulture eats lead and a dog gets C.T.F.O.ed), and raping the women of the household, and while the thought of forced penetration from a slathering, overweight, unkempt Hispanic criminal tortures Lucille, Falesse is strangely cool with it! None-the-less, Lucille does the unwanted house guest in with cyanide capsules in the bath while flashing back to her own black and white childhood, where she waved goodbye to the condemned as they asphyxiated in gas chambers (through improbable large glass shower windows, of course). A man claiming to be Falesse's real father appears, having faked his death, conflicting with the idea that she had beheaded him after molesting her all those years ago, as flashbacks would have you believe. Another flashback (what's one more, at this point?) reveals that it was her mother's lover who had raped her, and that she beheaded, and that the details of that night were purposely kept from her to maintain her sanity. Her sanity? What about the viewer's sanity after bearing witness to this Italo-Spanish soap opera-on-Krokodil? What about it, I ask you.


"The realism of Flesh's gore disturbed me very deeply."- Nobody
Angeli, who earned a Golden Globe for 'Most Promising Newcomer' a decade earlier, walks around in much the same haze that she would in the laughable American Z-grade monster opus, Octaman, a year later before succumbing to a sleeping pill overdose. Sancho made his name in westerns during the previous decade, and appeared in De Ossorio's 1973 Blind Dead sequel, Return of the Evil Dead. The folks over at Severin have released the English dub of tonight's review in a very acceptable, highly collectible package, should any of this strike you as vaguely appealing (...or even appalling, if that's yer bag. Nobody's judging you here, man.). On the scale, Flesh rates a respectable two biggies, a worthwhile addition to any genre collection. Look for it!


"Ohhh, help me, Will Robinson! Save meeeeee!"

"Frontiere(s)"(2007)d/Xavier Gens

It's certainly hotter than Bob Guccione's cut of Caligola(1979) out there this past couple of days.Perfect weather to plop your ass on the nearest couch and catch up on the latest horror movies in the comfort of an air conditioner.The parlour downstairs has no such air conditioner,so the suffering I'm feeling elsewhere in the house is just as apparent in the room where I screen movies.Insert the appropriate joke about "hot,sticky,and sweaty" here if you like,but you bastards oughta know the lengths I go to get new reviews up for you on a regular basis.I'm sweatin' like John Wayne Gacy in Boys Town over here.But...I won't let the humidity hold back today's horror hit for the ghoulish gourmets out there who hunger for all things homicidal.Let's get to it.
In the resurgence of horror recently,one nation that has proved a force to be reckoned with HAS to be France.Just when you thought the French were too busy lining up to see Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working to check out Lucio Fulci or Tobe Hooper back in the eighties,the Blue Blanc Rougers have churned out some top notch horror of late,proving they were indeed paying attention.For those of you who wondered what it would be like if you took Texas Chainsaw Massacre,set it in France,and made the killers a family of nazi cannibals,ponder the thought no further.Xavier Gens has already fleshed out your idea with his nasty little film.

You won't be throwing any petrol bombs with that hand again,will you,pinko?
Yasmine(Karina Testa)has a lot of problems.She's pregnant from her ex-boyfriend Alex(Aurélien Wiik),who along with his two pals Tom and Farid have been peacefully protesting in the streets since an unnamed ultra right wing candidate has been elected president.And by peacefully protesting,I mean petrol bombing,shootouts with the riot police,and generally making a nuisance of themselves.Is it any wonder that their left wing hijinks have gotten Yas' bro Sami bleeding out from a fatal bullet to the labonza?Alex and Yas try dumping Sami off at the hospital,planning to meet up with Tom and Farid on the frontier afterwards,but Sami shuffles off his mortal coil on a gurney while alerted constabulary chase Yas out the automatic doors.Meanwhile in the other car,jibbers are rolled and passed,virginity jokes are made,and before too long, the two socialist stoners find themselves at a hostel on a desolate country road.Didn't you guys ever see the OTHER movie about hostels??It seems the place is run by a couple of broads and a creepy muscular bald guy named Goetz who combine efforts to forcefeed their invalid mother(the slop pours out of a tube jutting out of her neck!).After small talk,casual sex,and the aforementioned gross-out dinner,our anti-heroes are questioned at gunpoint by Karl,who not only doesn't seem to like the left wing rioting going on in the city or "little ragheads" like Farid,but he's also a crack shot with a rifle,blowing Tom's hand to ribbons after Goetz swings for the fences on his chin and ribcage with a lead pipe.The two escape in their car with Goetz in pursuit,who runs the boys off the road and over an embankment near a mine opening.

If I had a Deutschmark for everytime this guy says,"Meine Ehre heißt Treue!",I could fund my own eugenics program.
When Alex and Yas show up at the hostel,they're driven by the girls to a sinister looking cottage,where we're introduced to the rest of the family,led by exiled SS officer Von Geisler(Jean-Pierre Jorris),who lectures his children in racial purity when he's not dining on untermenschen or feeding them to deformed,retarded offspring of young girls he's kidnapped for the very purpose of preserving the white race.Much man-munching,head-splattering,tablesaw bissecting,jugular chomping,neck axing,carcass gutting,and heiling hijinks ensue from this point.Do the nazis enforce their iron will upon the hapless fugitives?Do the petrol-chucking pukes manage to survive the Aryan onslaught,and if so,will they ever call a law enforcement official a "fascist pig" after facing horrible death at the hands of the REAL thing,complete with a pen full of pigs(insert rimshot)?I'll let you guys check it out for yourself to answer these and other nagging questions that may arise...you know,like the new dawn over a glorious new fatherland!

Yeah. To your domepiece.
For all the mind-blowing gore and French nazi-cannibal creeps abound in this shocker,director Gens very nearly blows it from atop a decidedly leftist soapbox,the size of which you'd only expect to encounter in a Hollywood movie these days.No matter how grotesque he makes his antagonists,between their pure blood theories,human feasts,and graphic murder streaks,his protagonists are still out in the street,rioting and causing destruction,pistol whipping cops,and being domestic terrorists.I wanted to kill the lot of them myself five minutes into the movie,so sympathy was something they weren't gonna get from little ole me.For me,I'm exhausted with the whole concept of inbred cannibal families by now,and I could go a few years without seeing more diabolical nazis,too.Don't forget to demonize scumbags like Stalin,Castro,and Guevara on the big screen once in awhile.Didn't they kill enough people for filmmakers' tastes or lack thereof?Luckily for Gens,there's enough brutality,tension,and red stuff from beginning to end here to keep the finished product satisfying.Politics aside,this one is thoroughly enjoyable,and merits a scale rating of:

She's trashed after bashing the fash,but in the government Yas(Karina Testa) has met her match.