Candy Land

In The Realm
Of The Cleanses

Candy Land
USA 2022
Directed by John Swab
Roxwell Films
FrightFest Screening 27/8/22

Warning: Okay, this one will have slight spoilers
because I want to talk about certain things.

Candy Land is a new film I saw at FrightFest this year and, as you’ll probably see people writing in their various reviews, it’s got a kind of grindhouse movie vibe to it. It’s not actually a horror film as such, more of a throwback (in the absolute best way) to the kind of raw edged thrillers being churned out in the 1970s except... that grindhouse tag also does it a bit of a disservice because it’s actually a very well put together, slick piece of movie making for sure. I had a couple of problems with it, which I’ll come to (and it’s the same issue my friend who saw it with me had) but, overall it’s a very gutsy and technically well made piece of art.

Okay, so the film is about a group of truck stop girls (and a guy) played by Eden Brolin, Sam Quartin, Virginia Rand and Owen Campbell, plus their ‘employer’ played by Guinevere Turner. They all live in a few motel rooms and service the various truckers and other customers either in their rooms or out in ‘the pit’ where the truckers park up, taking sex directly into their trucks. Another character, who turns a blind eye but constantly procures the male sex worker for his own gay thrills is the local sheriff (who is very bad at his job, it has to be said) played by William Baldwin.

Now, they are constantly bothered by some kind of ‘deeply Christian’ cult talking about repenting and cleansing their souls living nearby and, one day, rejected from that clan of people, a character called Remy turns up, played by Olivia Luccardi. Now she is the naive girl who, because of their protective nature, gets taken in by the friendly bunch sex workers and she soon becomes one of the girls working tricks. Then a client turns up dead in the bathroom, his eye stabbed out. Things get more violent and it’s not long before one character starts attacking the customers in gory ways.

The film pulls no punches in certain areas of the dark territory it explores... via nudity and editing (yeah, I’ll get to it) but also has a truly poignant atmosphere and a sense of joy, love and camaraderie between the main characters. Which of course, makes the murders and sense of peril for these people all the more engaging.

Okay, so the editing. At lots of points in the film, especially early on, a bunch of close ups are used with the director cutting to details of what would normally have been a wider shot, often edited together every two or three seconds without any real sense of establishing shot, often used almost as a montage to bring you straight in, up close and personal, to the way the truck stop characters live their lives. So, that way of shooting things against the ingrained, expectations of wider master and establishing shots quite often, tends to leave you with a sense of being less than comfortable with the way the film is shot and, of course, this all serves to make the audience more vulnerable to the onslaught of both violent imagery but, also, really helps generate the amount of suspense and tension you are feeling. Especially coupled with the charming performances of the actors here. It really is skillfully put together and so I can forgive it any other problems I had with the film.

Bit I’ll highlight those two problems here anyway because, heck, it’s what I do, I guess.

Number one problem for me is you will clock onto who the killer is right before any of the murders take place. So when the first murder happens and it’s not made clear by that point who the culprit is (it will be soon), you pretty much know anyway what’s happened. Then there’s a red herring of a scene where one of the truckers attacks Owen Campbell’s character but, to be honest, that really doesn’t detract from who the real killer is and, yeah, I was disappointed to latch onto who it was that soon in the film. Although, having said that, maybe the writer/director wanted us to know that anyway from early on, to build the sense of tension so... yeah... it didn’t spoil things overall.

What did detract just a little (but not enough to not celebrate this marvellous film in the way it needs to be championed) is that both my friend and I were expecting the film to be a lot more violent than it is. Don’t get me wrong here... it’s a total bloodbath of a movie but, I think because they were going for practical effects instead of CGI (which is always going to be a better choice, I think, no matter what), I did get a sense of ‘feeling’ the kills rather than seeing them. Things were cutting away just before a body hit for the most part or taken from a concealing angle and, although there was plenty of gore on offer, it felt like the illusion of violence was in the foreground, rather than seeing a knife or blunt object actually penetrate a targeted part of someone’s anatomy in close up on camera. But, again, it’s only a minor grumble and, like I said, because of the visual language the director, DP and editor have boiled it all down to, it feels a lot rougher than it looks, if that makes sense.

All in all, then, a nicely put together movie full of nudity, gory aftermath, fantastic acting, a somewhat off-kilter editing style and some rough, dark subject matter. I won’t say anymore than that because I don’t want to spoil the experience for people but, yeah, Candy Land is definitely one to watch. Also, Colin Salmon was at hand to introduce a clip from his new exorcism movie Prey For The Devil, which is released in UK cinemas at Halloween this year and... yeah, he’s an interesting person to have speaking about your new movie, that's for sure.

Bitch Slap

Now, Voyeur!

Bitch Slap
2009 USA
Directed by Rick Jacobson
Momentum Pictures DVD Region 2

Blimey. This is everything it looked like it was going to be from a trailer I saw a few years ago and, because of that, it’s just not what I was expecting... if that makes any sense.

I bought this DVD because, a) it was going for about £4 and b) it looked vaguely like it was trying to parody another movie I hadn’t at that time seen, namely Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (reviewed here). The trailer I’d seen had made it look like a substantially dumb movie (nothing wrong with that) which celebrated the female form in a bizarrely blatant manner... which can be fun as long as the female community and characters are in on the joke... slipping in a knowing wink, or a cheek piercing tongue on the sly, to penetrate the unblinking male gaze.

Unfortunately, although the film does have three strong female leads... that’s where the similarity to Russ Meyer’s kitsch classic ends and, even more tragically, the movie is entirely put together from the point of view of the male perspective with not much thought to anything else thrown into the mix... or at least that’s how it seemed to me.

What I’m saying is, the movie completely serves to voyeuristically feed the ‘male gaze’ theory of objectification without even attempting to simultaneously burst that bubble with anything that helps you respect any of the characters (male or female, for that matter) as being anything other than there for the sexual or aesthetic pleasure based on attraction. Now I have a small problem with this because a) it’s a rare beast that doesn’t at least try to address this problem with some kind of have your cake and eat it mentality at some point over the course of a movie and b) I had quite a good time with the movie in spite of knowing all this and my awareness that the movie was deliberately playing up to the male impulse in this manner did nothing to stop me enjoying it, and that bothered me for a little while.

Then I decided not to feel guilty (I don’t really “do guilt” anyway, to be honest) and enjoy it on the level it was intended at but... that doesn’t mean to say I can’t be critical of it at that level. And so I will be.

The film, about three sexy action heroines, has lots of good stuff in it too, to act as a kind of unbalanced counterweight to its negative aspects. One is the elliptical way in which the timeline keeps flashing back all the way through the movie and using that to keep the pacing going and occasionally reveal new things about the characters. Unfortunately, one of those is a major twist moment which doesn’t work right from the outset because, as soon as a certain “mystery character” is set up, you know your list of suspects is going to be a pretty small list and, though the director tries to defuse that near the end, in an almost clever rug pulling moment, the fact is that the script has written itself into a corner so... of course that person is going to turn out to be one of those three (this is my attempt to avoid spoilers people).

And, another plus, is that there is at least a smattering of creative thought running through the movie. Not so much in the various forms of parody on show but in the occasional (very occasional) little detail, such as one of the bad guys having a ring tone on his mobile which is a recording of his voice saying “Ring, Funny Ring”. Stuff like that.

The general broad strokes of grindhouse style cinema are also observed with the usual parody and, like many modern films made as an homage to this genre of movie making, it plays up the sex and violence and turns it up to 11. However, when it comes to the deliberate and wilful stakes of objectification, of which there is always a little room for - male or female - as long as it’s handled with a certain amount of respect and inclusion, then this film goes way past 11 and pushes the boat out and then sinks that damn boat before it gets a chance to return to harbour.

So, yeah, the camera hovers over every inch of the female bodies on screen (with hardly any nudity at all, but that’s really beside the point) and then rewinds and ramps back up in slow motion and you expect some of that up front at the start because it’s kind of a signature to set up a trashy sexploitation feel. However, the film revels in this as almost its sole purpose throughout the entire duration of the movie. I think when it started to really get to me was when the film asked me to believe that three women on a limited, life threatening deadline, and with a wilful purpose to get on with what they are doing, were suddenly going to get distracted and have a water fight so they could splash water at each other and dance around in slow motion for the audience. I loved it and it was obviously knowing... but it does kinda paint the characters as being real airheads, to the point where it contradicts the already established intelligence of the characters in favour of yet another eye candy sequence.

Don’t get me wrong. As a red blooded male I can happily watch attractive, dancing, women jiggling their cleavage and getting into cat fights all day... but there seemed to be a definite lack of respect for the way in which this was achieved in this movie (as stupid as that sounds and I really don’t want to dig myself into a grave here).

So I guess what I’m saying here is, this movie has everything a person who is attracted to women as the basis of their sexuality could want in it: curvy babes, fights, lesbian kissing plus explosions, bullets and more... but the price is a little too high in terms of the way it voyeuristically pursues its goals. Like it’s got something missing.

So can I recommend it?

Well yeah. If you go in with your eyes open and watch it in a group of people with a load of beers or the alcoholic beverage of your choice, then you will probably enjoy it at some level, just like I did. However, if I were a straight woman looking at this movie then I would almost certainly be offended by it at some level (or maybe not... I’m not a woman so I don’t know for sure). I love films with a grindhouse sensibility but there’s something about the approach to the material that makes this one disrespectful to a large percentage of its potential audience and I can only condemn it on that level... which is a shame because I did have an okay time with it.

So only you, I’m afraid, will be able to know whether you can stomach the disrespect and still be able to enjoy yourself watching a movie containing babes, guns and a heavy guitar based soundtrack. If so, then good on yer and give it a watch... but don’t buy into it completely because the knowing reflexivity, if it’s there at all, is either misjudged or not worked through enough... and this did leave a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, to be honest.

Machete Kills

Machete Junction Kills

Machete Kills
2013 USA/Russia
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’s gonna be some fairly big spoilers here.

The original Machete movie was a spin-off movie of a fake trailer used in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse project (released separately as Planet Terror and Deathproof over here in the UK). Like other projects made from the fake trailers in Grindhouse, such as Hobo With A Shotgun, Machete was a modern movie masquerading as a 1970s exploitation picture but made with a dash of self-conscious nostalgia for the sub-genre.

Both Machete Kills and Machete Kills Again were put up at the end of the original Machete as two films in which the title character ... um... Machete (played by Danny Trejo), would return. And now he has, in the promised Machete Kills. This was a film I’d really been looking forward to.

The film opens with a new fake trailer, that for the third movie in the Machete trilogy which has had something of a title revision since the last movie. Now the next Machete movie after this one, if the series gets that far, is Machete Kills Again... In Space. And indeed, the trailer looks wildly silly, it has to be said. Laser beams, Buck Rogers robots, light-sabres, light-machetes and a host of other things referencing the boom to plunge a character into the sci-fi milieu left in the wake of the original Star Wars movie’s cinematic success. Although this trailer is quickly referenced again at the end of Machete Kills (amongst other pre and post-credits chunks of “Machete movie moments”), I think that this should maybe have been left completely to the end of the movie because, this opening trailer tells us some important and spoilery things... one very quickly and then a bunch of stuff when you get into the last third of the movie.

The thing it ruins straight from the start is the fact that it reminds audiences the original Machete started off with a scene where he lost his partner. As you know from the previous movie, Machete’s new partner was also his new girlfriend, as played by Jessica Alba, a role this actress reprises here. However, since she isn’t in the trailer for Machete Kills Again... In Space, it doesn’t take much to figure out her character probably won’t make it until the end of this movie. Remembering that last film’s opening sequence on top of that, it’s not hard to realise she probably won’t even make it through the pre-credits sequence of this one before coming to a nasty end and... alas.... this is indeed what happens.

The other stuff you’ll realise, as you go through the movie, is that things are all pointing towards this one dovetailing straight into the next one. When Mel Gibson’s villanous Voz is shown to have a Star Wars fetish and intends to colonise the moon with his hand picked people and super-clones, much in the same way as the “off course” Bond film Moonraker did in the late seventies, you start to figure out where this is all going and, when he shows the silver mask worn in the Machete Kills Again... In Space trailer, you realise that this whole film is leading up to some kind of cliffhanger ending which takes Machete and the main villain careening into more mayhem in space... and that is also the correct conclusion.

For while Machete is clearly playing a more Bondian role in this one (he has his gadgets and knows how to use them... and is clearly a parallel here for “the many lives of John Shaft”... specifically the Shaft of Shaft In Africa) and the movie is quite blatant in its Moonraker references towards the end (with even some of the underscore sounding particularly late 70s Barryish at certain points)... it’s obvious that Machete Kills is Rodriguez saying to his Grindhouse audience... “Okay, so this is Machete’s version of The Empire Strikes Back.” And that is quite literal too... some parts of the sets are modelled on corridors and textures from Cloud City, Gibson has his own landspeeder and, after one of the regular Machete characters is blinded, Voz freezes her, encases her in carbonite and absconds with her in his spaceship.

Okay... so, this is all good and it certainly demonstrates the way films were getting high-jacked mid-production and turned into hastily changed science-fiction vehicles in the late 1970s. However, one of the things it has done, perhaps, is dilute down the already parodic Machete character into something else. It’s certainly a valid thing to do and it was very entertaining, but it was a bit more epic in scope than I wanted and a bit less punchy, I felt, than the first movie in the series.

Don’t get me wrong, it was fast paced as hell and the actors were all firmly committed to their tongue-in-cheek seventies roles, but I just didn’t have quite as much fun with it. That being said, however, there’s still a lot of laughs to go around and it brought a smile to this face on more than one occasion. It even had a follow up to the gory intestine joke of the previous film, which wasn’t quite as funny as the first but had a lot of people laughing. It’s very much a rip roaring time at the cinema and, what it lacks in the rawness of the first movie, it certainly makes up for in the sheer stupidity of its ideas... which includes flick knife smart phones, gatling gun bras, a miniature “strap-on” bazooka which shoots when you twerk, a helicopter blade ride with a difference and a 3D sex scene that will definitely leave you wanting more... especially as the print isn’t even in 3D, if you catch my drift.

Machete Kills is not quite the grimly humoured gore fest of the previous movie (although it certainly has its moments) but this shouldn’t stop the same audiences who liked the first movie from getting into this one... and with actors and actresses like Danny Trejo, Mel Gibson, Lady Gaga, Michelle Rodrigues, Amber Heard, Cuba Gooding Jr, Antonio Banderas, Charlie Sheen and even gory make-up legend Tom Savini, reprising the character he played in the first movie (but with a twist) going along for the ride... you’ll probably find something you’ll enjoy if you liked the first one. Definitely glad I saw this one and certainly looking forward to Machete Kills Again... In Space.

Nude Nuns With Big Guns

Nun’s The Wiser

Nude Nuns With Big Guns
2010 USA
Directed by Joseph Guzman
Havana Films Blu Ray Region B

Nuns? Yes.
Nude nuns? Oh yes.
With guns? Affirmative.
Big guns? As the film carries on the guns get a bit bigger so... yes, very much so.

As you can see from my blindingly scientific and rigorous critical technique above, I have perhaps come to the conclusion that Jospeh Guzman’s grindhouse homage, Nude Nuns With Big Guns, does exactly what it says on the tin.

That’s not always a recommendation , of course, and if you’re a somewhat seasoned film watcher like me and you come across a title of this kind of... um... calibre, you’ll know that even if the writers/directors of these kinds of things managed to live up to the title... it can still be a dull and deadly affair with the name of the tale being just about the only thing that’s interesting about it.

I’m happy to report, however, that Nude Nuns With Big Guns exceeded my expectations for it.

This film seems to be based, from what little information I can glean, on Guzman’s original short of the same title, which is actually just one scene which would then make it’s way into the final feature, with the actresses and roles slightly changed around. But it’s made, I would think, with the wave of modern grindhouse movies very much in mind and it does nothing to hide its influences, perhaps wearing them on it’s celluloidal sleeve just a little too obviously but in a way that will, I suspect, be much appreciated by fans of this kind of work. You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about here...

Grindhouse: Planet Terror, Grindhouse: Death Proof, Machete (reviewed here), Hobo With A Shotgun (reviewed here)... this film is very much trying to hold its own with these kinds of movies and, I have to say, it succeeds at this very well. Right from the outset we have a modern day take on the early 70s exploitation thriller which really makes sure that no grimy, sleazy stone is left unturned to make up the proper ingredients for a jaw dropping and mostly quite dumb hour and a half of escapist mayhem.

The villains are unpleasant and vicious, of course. They do nasty things like rape and kill... but that’s always a good way to get the audience’s back up and ensure that when the time for final retribution comes, as it does in this tale of an abused nun coming back for revenge and doing “the lords work” in her best “old testament” style of anger, wrath and fury... the audience is on her side when it comes to the films tough and “if you’re a geezah cross your legs” grizzly denouement.

But of course, since it’s trying its darndest to be a tight, little exploitation movie, you can be sure the path to revenge will take the sleaziest of routes possible as the titular Sister Sarah (played unflinchingly by Asun Ortega) and her “lesbian lover nun sidekick” spend as much time out of their habits as they do getting back in them and going into battle fully locked and loaded. The film gets all the clichéd genre thrills squeezed into its short running time and, even when the characters in the movie are being their most unpleasant, you can be sure that the filmmakers will put something humorous or “knowing” into the editing style to give you a little smile, even at the most inappropriate of times.

The film asks you to suspend your disbelief because one of the things you have to accept about the landscape and network of villages this plays out in, is that all the nunes and priests are drug dealers and are the religious equivalent of a kind of low life mafia. Against this backdrop, Sister Sarah walks as God’s right hand gun, and if the movie does tend to make you think of the lone western gunman roaming the desert and doing the Lord’s work, then I really think it’s supposed to. In terms of the twisted morality and the prevalence, no matter how grim, of an angry, vengeful justice of sorts, the tone of this movie comes across no less as a modern, but not that modern, take on the classic Italian spaghetti western idiom.

And it has a lot of help with that on the musical front too, with Dan Gross’ score being a definite cross between emphasising a kind of rerun of the heavy Planet Terror music (and it’s really close on that front) and a typical Morricone meets Nicolai mode of spaghetti western scoring in the quieter passages. So if you find yourself thinking the locations and some of the stylistic tweaks are similar to something you’ve seen in those Italian oaters... I really don’t think you were supposed to think any other way.

It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, fair warning. The villains are very well played, which also means they’re thoroughly unpleasant and commit atrocities you might have a hard time having fun with... but like I said earlier, that’s all part of the tension and release part of the game on these kinds of revenge movies and if you can handle this kind of stuff then you shouldn’t have a hard ride with this one.

The performances on this are all very good including a little bit of business with modern character actor Bill Oberst Jr that will come back to haunt you if you stay to the films, enigmatic, last minute or so of footage. If you’ve seen and loved films like Machete and are also into watching such lowly 70s fodder as They Call Me One Eye and The Blood Spattered Bride in the spirit in which they are intended, then you shouldn’t find yourself having too much of a problem and probably quite like, Nude Nuns With Big Guns. If you’re anyone else, however, I’d definitely say “stay away”.