Zombiesaurus

D’ya think...?

Zombiesaurus
aka The Jurassic Dead 
aka Z-Rex - The Jurassic Dead
Directed by Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick
USA 2017
101 Films DVD Region 2

Wow. This is terrible.

In fact, the only thing I could think of that would be almost as bad as wasting my time sitting through this film is having to waste my time writing a review of it. 

And it’s going to be a short review, for sure (my apologies). 

Now I know a lot of people spend a lot of time and hard work making a movie but, sometimes something is so bad that you have to warn other people about it. I saw this a few years ago, going cheap in a nice, slipcased DVD (seriously, why did they bother?) and I knew it would be entertaining to some degree. I mean, with a name like Zombiesaurus... right?

How wrong I was. 

And how do you screw up a movie with a concept that includes a reanimated, dead dinosaur? Well, like this I guess. This isn’t, sad to say, some ironic ‘so bad it’s good’ concoction of a movie... this one is just generally bad and cheap looking and confusing (in terms of what the hell is going on with the script) and... yeah... it’s just all kinds of bad. 

The story... from what I could make out of it... involves a group of five commandos who infiltrate a terrorist’s top secret bunker because he has made a serum that brings dead things back to life. We know this because in one of the pre-credits scenes he tries it out on a stray dinosaur (yeah... obviously easy to find a dead dinosaur in real life, right?) and it reanimates. After he also reanimates a dead cat one year later, he is killed by a car but... he’s not really dead and, knowing some meteors will be hitting the earth soon, he decides to release his serum into the atmosphere sometime after this. So that’s why the five commandos are there. Um... okay.

And there are also four university students whose car breaks down in the middle of the desert due to an EMF pulse caused by the meteor. So they happen to accidentally stumble on the bunker at pretty much the same time and, then, it’s a race against time to stop the release of the serum into the atmosphere and... um... I think that’s more or less it. But believe me when I say that, not matter how good any of that may or may not sound... the story is a pretty confused mess which feels like it’s being re-written every ten minutes or so. 

And the execution of story... doesn’t include too much footage of the titular zombie dinosaur and everything looks so fake and cheap (including the man in a costume dinosaur... or perhaps it’s just a big puppet) with fake CGI blood (but really fake) and fake explosions superimposed over everything (like a 1980s video arcade game) and, the worst sin of all, totally unlikeable characters. None of whom seem to have any kind of redeeming quality. I mean, if you’re going to start killing these people off... at least attempt to have someone an audience cares about in jeopardy. I couldn’t wait for each next person to die because I thought, the fewer there are in this, the nearer I am to the end (and it’s not a long film to begin with). 

The only slight positive was that one of the characters, played by someone called Andy Haman, looks exactly like the video game character Duke Nukem and his name is Duque (pronounced Duke). This likeness is discussed in the movie and, really, it’s the only moment where it even scratches close to being entertaining. Even some of the acting feels pretty forced and fake. Not to mention the terrible score and... well... terrible everything else.

So that’s me done with Zombiesaurus... possibly one of the worst films I’ve ever had to suffer through. I mean, at one point I thought that maybe it was so bad because the writers were attempting to be ironic but, if that is the case (and I really don’t think it is) then it all fell flat anyway so... no. Just no. I wouldn’t come close to recommending this one to anybody at all. Watch something else, would be my advice. 

Captain Nemo And The Underwater City

Nemonomicon

Captain Nemo And 
The Underwater City
UK 1969 
Directed by James Hill
MGM Blu Ray Zone B (German)

Warning: Some spoilers just below the surface.

There’s a place I know where we can go, it’s such a lot to see,
It’s the fun food, the fun food factory.
Theme song from The Fun Food Factory

Okay... I assume I saw Captain Nemo And The Underwater City on television when I was a kid but there’s not much I remember about it, apart from the music. I wanted to give this one a watch while I was catching up and revisiting stories adapted and inspired by Jules Verne and, in the case of this one, ‘inspired by’ is a polite way of calling this one out in terms of having anything to do with the original source. 

I mean, you’ve got a white actor playing Captain Nemo, Hollywood veteran Robert Ryan and, he has a big submarine called Nautilus. And that’s about it in terms of this film having anything to do with Jules Verne, it’s sad to say. Although it would have been an entertaining, fun romp back in the day and, if you can divorce yourself from the perception of how a modern sci-fi action film should play, you may still have a good time with it now.

While, indeed, Nemo saves a bunch of people from drowning when their ship sinks at the start... unlike the original, he did not cause that sinking himself, he just comes to their dubious rescue and there’s no mention of the original character’s intent on destroying ocean vessels in this. Instead, although those rescued are still his prisoners, he takes them to his big undersea city where they can live a good life, if they so desire. The various rescued even have a small child and his kitten with them so, yeah, we’re definitely in a very different world than that created by Verne.

The main survivors are played by Chuck Connors, Bill Fraser (of Bootsie and Snudge fame), Kenneth Connor (who you’ve probably seen in the odd Carry On film from time to time), Allan Cuthbertson (who is set up as the human villain of the piece but dies already, half way through the movie) and also... Nanette Newman. Now I’ve not seen her in much stuff, it has to be said but I remember her as the host of a really annoying children’s TV programme in the mid 1970s called The Fun Food Factory. It’s a TV show that the IMDB barely registers the existence of, dating it as 1976 but listing it as having zero episodes and... perhaps it’s best this show and its annoying title song has officially vanished from the those seeking the stats.. although at least one episode can be found on YouTube (watch it at your peril is what I say). But I used to tune into it on occasion because I liked Nanette Newman and so it’s nice seeing her in a movie such as this. She has a good presence as the mother of the aforementioned sprog and it’s strongly hinted she will be Nemo’s romantic interest after the story of this one, such as it is, has played out. Alas, although she has good presence in the film, she doesn’t really have much to do and could have done with a better written part, to be honest. 

The other big female role in this, playing one of the community living under the sea and also acting as a love interest for Chuck Connors’ character, is the lovely Luciana Paluzzi... who was, of course, the sultry, sexy SPECTRE assassin who tried to kill James Bond before later taking a shot in the back she intended for him in Thunderball (reviewed here). She has a bit more to do here but... yeah, the film is not really big on building decent characters, I would say. 

Now this was made on a shoestring budget but, even so, the scope of the sets and the design of the production is mostly rather good (there’s even some beautiful Bavaesque lighting at one point). However, the fact that everything is made out of gold in the film is a bit of a problem because, although everything is painted with some kind of gold paint to make it seem expensive, the effect is to just make everything look a bit like it’s made out of cheap plastic. Which is a shame because the shot compositions and colours are pretty good. 

Apart from Captain Nemo’s diving suit, that is. 

This is black with big, glittery patterns on it and looks nothing less like a 1930s - 50s American western, decorative cowboy outfit. In the scenes where Ryan wears this stuff, he does look quite ridiculous, it’s sad to say. And, as it happens, the underwater farm sequence where Nemo is showing his ‘guests’ around the parts of the ocean which provide them all with food, looks more than competent but, honestly, slows the film down in pace and is a bit dull. 

One very good thing, though, is the score by Walter Stott (who later became Angela Morley and is billed like that on the FSM CD release from a few decades ago). That being said... an I’m not suggesting anything underhanded here... but the main theme sounds quite like the love theme that Jerry Goldsmith wrote for the 1984 movie Supergirl and the resemblance is so striking that I wonder if parts of this score turned up on the temp track for that movie, when Jerry was given the job (I guess I’ll never know, now). 

Other things of note is that Paluzzi plays something which is both similar and not at all like a theremin in one scene and, another note, a couple of people who ‘leave’ the city at the end of the picture should surely have decompression sickness when they reach the ocean’s surface. They come up way too quick. And the last note I have on this from when I was watching the movie is that Chuck Connors’ hair here is one of the most scary things you’ll see in this tale. I’m assuming it was a wig but, whatever it is, you certainly wouldn’t miss him and his aggressive locks walking down the street. 

And that’s me done here... Captain Nemo And The Underwater City is a pleasant film with not too much going for it to make it stand out in its own right and certainly nothing to do with the source material. If you like Nemo and The Nautilus then you might give it a look but, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to anyone. Incidentally, I had to pick this one up on a German Blu Ray disc because the film is not available in the UK or US, alas. It’s completely English friendly and has the original UK language track on it but, if you are hard of hearing, know that it doesn’t have a subtitle track on it. 

20,000 Leagues Under Sea (1916)

Little Slumber 
In Nemo Land

20,000 Leagues Under Sea
Directed by Stuart Paton
USA 1916
Imprint Blu Ray A/B/C

Warning: Some slight spoilers here. 

I’ve been wanting to see this silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea for some time now, since I loved the original novel by one of my favourite authors, Jules Verne. I didn’t get the UK release of this because it was bundled in with a bunch of movies I wasn’t that interested in but, I’m glad I waited now because this Australian edition is part of their Tales Of Adventure Collection 8, with some other Verne movies and some slightly adjacent tales in its make-up.

Now, I was both impressed and disappointed in this in equal parts so, I’m not quite sure how to organise this review... 

Okay, the first thing I was impressed with was that, unlike 99.5% of the Captain Nemo films I’ve seen in film versions, they actually get the character’s ethnicity correct to the book.. so an Indian, turban wearing guy (I think they actually got it right in the movie version of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen too but, that movie was also an incredibly poor adaptation of its source material). That being said, the caveat here is that he’s portrayed by a white dude, Allen Holubar, in brown face. Swings and roundabouts I guess, people. 

Another impressive thing is the Williamson brothers and their invention. Highlighted in footage before the film gets properly underway, along with a photo of Jules Verne, the Williamsons went with the director on location (the same locations used for the Disney version a few decades later) because they'd invented cameras for underwater photography. So there are lots of shots of divers and fish and coral etc in the movie. I can’t imagine what this might have looked like to the inhabitants of the world at the time, many of whom would never had been able to see what this stuff properly looks like before this motion picture was released. So it’s a landmark film for inventing and demonstrating the world’s first underwater photography, if for nothing else.

However, there are some problems I had with the film. 

Asides from lots of almost superfluous women in the movie… Verne didn’t really do much in the way of meaningful female characters, certainly in his most famous books… the story is an absolute mess and Jules would have been scientifically rotating in his grave at such shenanigans (and don’t get me started on the 50s serial of Mysterious Island, with its alien queen hell bent on world conquest, either). What we have here is very little to do with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea after about the first 10 mins… it’s also taking portions from The Mysterious Island (probably my favourite Jules Verne novel) and then grafted onto it another story featuring a.. ‘child of nature’ as she is credited in the cast list (a euphemism for someone who’s ‘gone native’)… who, most viewers will twig, long before the end of the picture and the big reveal, turns out to be Captain Nemo’s long lost daughter. 

About her... one of the crew of the balloon that lands on the island finds her and, she’s played by a lady called Jane Gail, again in brown face make up. And all I will say about her is… she’s an absolute comic genius. The scene where the poor white guy is trying to show her how to put on a shirt and trousers... and she’s waggling her toes at him… had me in stitches. I need to see more things with this lady in because she tickled my funny bone somewhat. She was the truly bright spot of this film for me, for sure (she died on her 74th birthday, I’m informed). 

Things all come around and she is reunited with her father who dies, is buried at sea and then we also see the Nautilus submarine (which appears to be quite different in long shot as opposed to when it surfaces, it seems to me) sink beneath the waves one final time. Leaving us with a romantic entailment involving one of the crew of the original balloon and Jane Gail’s character. Which also leaves me with the question… was this the first time an interracial romance had been depicted on screen or were there earlier films?

And that’s me done with this iteration of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, I think. It was a pleasure to watch this version, despite the enormous liberties taken with the original source materials… I’d certainly recommend this one to lovers of silent movies and will probably watch this one again at some point (if only for the comical shenanigans of Jane Gail). I’m pleased I finally got to see this one. 

She Dies Tomorrow

Some Time To Die

She Dies Tomorrow
USA 2020
Directed by Amy Seimetz
Blue Finch Films

Warning: This film has been called spoiler proof by angry reviewers, it seems to me but, I think it’s fair to say this review has light spoilers.

Okay, I’ll say up front that I have mixed feelings about She Dies Tomorrow. I sought it out on a recommendation from someone and so it does have its fans but, it seems there’s a heck of a lot of negative criticism for this film too and I can kinda see why. That being said there’s very little in the film not to like, except for the lack of clarity on the central premise... but it’s a great hook.

We start off with a character called Amy (played by Kate Lyn Sheil from the great Brigsby Bear, reviewed here). Clearly something is wrong with her and then we flash to someone who we later find out was in a relationship with her... he is in a room and starts going mad thinking he’s going to die tomorrow. Then Amy wakes up from a nightmare and returns to her empty house. She rings a friend because she’s anxious... she keeps stopping and starting as a realisation hits her every now and again. At some point the title of the movie is suddenly flashed on the screen for two seconds, blaring music like a jump scare... and then we continue to watch Amy slowly becoming disjointed from reality. Is a sequence showing blood cells interacting, a hint that she has a virus? She starts exploring textures with her sense of touch and looking at things... caressing flat surfaces as something which sounded a bit like Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (it’s probably not but that’s what it reminded me of) plays over and over on her vinyl record turntable. 

Her friend Jane (played by Jane Adams) comes and Amy tells her the thing which has been bothering her. She knows for a fact that she is going to die tomorrow... or at least she believes she will. Jane thinks she is having an alcoholic relapse (which technically she also is because, she’s drinking like there’s no tomorrow... because she believes that’s the case) and goes off. However, when we follow Jane home, she also gets the same idea that she, herself, is going to die tomorrow.

While Amy checks out the best cremation urns on the internet and decides she wants to be turned into a leather jacket after she dies, we follow the ‘also coming unhinged’ as she crashes her brother’s wife’s small birthday party... and tells them she’s going to die. Not long after she leaves them, the four people there also believe they will die the next day. 

And so it goes as we follow, primarily, Amy and Jane (and a few others but to a lesser degree) as they go about the evening contemplating their existence and getting into encounters with people they also infect with.... I dunno... an idea. 

At some point, the flashbacks from Amy’s very recent past, which eventually dovetails back into the start of the movie, show us how she came to be ‘infected’ but doesn’t show how the chain starts and, I’m sad to say, doesn’t clue us in to what’s happening. Now, that might have been okay... like a good zombie movie, the cause of the effect is rarely discussed but, in this case, there’s no actual pay off either and I think that’s why people may be having a problem with it (at least, some of the appalling reviews I’ve read). I also normally don’t mind when a movie doesn’t have a traditional closure moment but, frankly, with a mystery concept and leaving us with no idea if any of the people in this do, actually, die tomorrow... it feels a little off.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the fact that this film is basically taking an idea... if you think about it, it’s very much an M. R. James pass the curse story variation on Casting The Runes, found in such as movies like Ringu, Drag Me To Hell and It Follows (except there’s no getting rid of it so it’s a little more like a virus in some ways)... and then exploring the responses and reactions of the people who have been hit by this growing pandemic of certainty that they are going to meet their own demise the next day. And, yeah, I do appreciate the emotional areas into which this film strays and the way in which it explores humanity’s reaction to the prospect of its near demise... but the hook could have had just a little more back up to it, I felt. 

That being said, the director has an eye for interesting visuals. So some nice shot compositions where, for instance, Amy is framed by an upright rectangle formed by an alcove-like space into another room. And she certainly demonstrates that she’s into textures as much as her namesake protagonist, sometimes using big, vertical solid blocks to split the frame. And there’s also a lot of bright, flashing colour in certain sequences too... during episodes when the ‘victims’ lives are invaded by sudden spurts of enveloping lighting like they just strayed into a David Lynch nightmare and then are suddenly hit by distorted, indecipherable voices in the background (we know from one character that she’s hearing the voices of people long dead in her life)... so, yeah, visually the film is an absolute treat.

And so is the acting. Everyone is great in this and it feels like one of those films where certain things might have been left unscripted and worked on with the actors to build up their characters and scenes. Possibly not but, if this was strictly following the script then that would be a surprise to me, for sure. I suspect there was a lot of improvisation on the film.

So... I got a lot out of the film for sure but Tomorrow She Dies is not something I would recommend to many people (if any) because it sets up and executes such an intriguing prospect... I even thought we were heading into Philip K. Dick ‘reality is not what it seems’ territory at one point... but fails to deliver any hint or clue as to what is really going on. Like the ground zero moment for this ‘infection’ and I get the feeling that this concept must have been explored by the writer but then maybe just deliberately pared back for the audience and it just didn’t quite make it for me. It felt just a little bit thrown away and so, while I appreciated the way the concept was explored and the ideas it threw up as a consequence, I don’t think this is one I’d watch again.

The Mandalorian And Grogu

Crest Of The Razor

The Mandalorian And Grogu
aka Star Wars: The Mandalorian 
And Grogu
Directed by Jon Favreau
USA 2026
Lucasfilm
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: This will probably have some very minor spoilers in it.

So the new attempt by Disney to pull some box office back from a franchise they’ve already run into the ground, namely the Star Wars franchise, is actually not a terrible movie... but it does have its problems. Titled The Mandalorian And Grogu, the film follows on from the TV show The Mandalorian and continues the exploits of Din Djarin (The Mandalorian, played by Pedro Pascale and a few others when he wears the mask) and Grogu (played mostly by CGI).

And, though the story is a completely stand alone adventure from the regular series... well therein lies the problem. 

Now, regular readers will know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of The Mandalorian but, in terms of that property, this is a pretty well put together movie, at least for the first half of the film (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get there) and is much more enjoyable than the episodes of the TV show. That being said, although it’s a half good movie... is it a half good Star Wars movie? Well no, it still doesn’t quite feel like it belongs in the Star Wars universe, I would have to say. Although, to be fair, it does try its best... but it also tries to be a lot of things... some of which are really cool but, are equally not necessarily giving off Star Wars vibes. I mean, I don’t think George Lucas would ever had conceived of this as a story in quite this way and... depending on what generation of Star Wars viewer you are... that may well impede your reception to the movie, for sure.

Now the other thing about the film is that, although it ultimately tells one story, it does seem more episodic than I was expecting. Not episodic in the way the original movies were as they tried to emulate the old Flash Gordon serials (reviewed by me here, here and here) but more like the whole thing is a game of two halves... the first half being a James Bond style opening sequence followed by a rescue mission that goes wrong, nicely setting up some new characters and ending after a gladiatorial combat scene. And up to that point... apart from some issues like the old serial title crawl which featured in the original movies being absent, not to mention some large passages of synthesiser music replacing the traditional orchestral leitmotif one expects form a Star Wars film... it’s actually a pretty enjoyable movie. 

However, the second half, starting from where the main lead is taken prisoner as payback for his actions in the first half of the film, well it’s no less action packed but I found it mostly very dull (until Sigourney Weaver brings in the X-Wings at the end). I was looking at my watch in this part of the film because, yeah, it got gruellingly boring for me, I have to admit. 

Overall, though, the first half won me over somewhat and you do need to see this one on a big screen to fully capture the spectacle. Director Martin Scorcese turns up at one point (though you might not recognise him at first) and there’s a nice, if somewhat blatant, lifesize reconstruction of the Star Wars chess game from the original movie. Look at the floor of the arena and a better look at the aliens fighting there and you’ll see what I mean. But, there are also some blatant references (I think one building even says Nexus 7) to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed here) on one planet, which look good and are also vaguely reminiscent of stuff they’ve borrowed in other films in the franchise, such as Attack Of The Clones (reviewed here) but, nice as these sequences were (and they are pretty good at this stage of the movie), they didn’t quite add up to Star Wars for me. 

However, Ludwig Göransson’s score, which I’m complaining about a little above, is also pretty good and uses the themes he’s developed in the show pretty well (I might try and get a CD from somewhere if they bother to release it in this essential format). And I also thought the effects work, which some people seem to be complaining about, actually worked pretty well in this movie. Especially the one for the character of the son of Jabba The Hutt, which looks a bit clunky but certainly convinces you that a creature like this could do the things it does without crumpling to the floor every five seconds.

And that’s me done with The Mandalorian And Grogu... I hated the second half of the movie but I mostly had a good time with the rest of it and I’m glad I caught it at my local cinema, who seemed to have absolutely no clue as how to frame it on their screens but, yeah, lack of competency of the staff at Cineworld seems to be a thing which really hasn’t gotten better over the decades. Oh well.  

Café Flesh

 

Sexentuate The Positive

Café Flesh
Directed by 
Stephen Sayadian & Mark S. Esposito
USA 1982 
Caribbean Films Distribution/88 Films
Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Well this is a fairly strange movie. 

I first heard of Café Flesh when I met my friend Teresa in the late 1980s. She always used to mention wanting to see it as it semi-regularly played at venues such as the Scala Cinema and the Everyman at Hampstead (back in the days when the Everyman at Hampstead actually programmed good films and was worth going to). It’s something neither of us got around to.

Now, however, it’s out on a shiny new restoration from Mondo Macabro and, I have to say, it was not quite the film I was expecting it to be. 

The premise is that it takes place in a cabaret/cafe after the world has suffered a Third World War. This bizarre apocalypse has had the effect of leaving 90/95% of the population unable to indulge in any sexual activity whatsoever, because as soon as they try they become violently ill. These people, the majority of the surviving population, are known as negatives (or sex negatives). There is a small percentage of the population though, the positives, who have survived with their libidos in tact and are able to indulge in all manner of sexual activity. And, by law, they are legally required to perform in venues such as Café Flesh, to give the negatives something to gawp at... even though the effect on many of the audience members is actually pretty depressing. 

So the film is a series of these cabaret vignettes, involving hard core pornographic scenes, punctuated by scenes of the positives discussing their fate and, also, the heavy and irritating banter of the MC, who is a positive but who has lost his manly equipment in the Third World War. 

And it’s not what I was expecting, for sure. I mean, it has hardcore sex scenes including penetration and erect genitalia splashing the actors seed on various actresses but... I dunno. If anything, this is actually an anti-porn movie. The hard sex scenes, cut into five or six set pieces in the picture, probably total less than 15-20 minutes of the running time. And those scenes are pretty jumpy in and of themselves... cut in a shrewd way, much like the opening fight scene in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here). So it’s more highlights of sex than the full but, often dull, lick, pump and grind you’d expect from a porn movie. 

Not only that, but these sex scenes in particular are dressed up in thematic, burlesque style choreographies and sets which can, at best, be described as highly surreal (often invoking memories for the negatives of their past lives before the apocalypse). So, the first ‘domestic’ number has three adult babies shaking their rattles in their high chairs in time to the music while a ‘housewife’ is sexed up by a man dressed as a giant rat (much is made of his throbbing tale, naturally). Other sequences include an office bound sex scene where a man dressed as a giant pencil penetrates a lady office worker, while her secretary looks on and repeatedly asks “Do you want me to type a memo?” in rhythm to the music...

Which sounds surreal and it sure is, until you compare to the sequence where two men with telephones on thier faces go to work on a lady and a lesbian scene set to a backdrop of barbed wire and the sounds of gunfire and air raid sirens. But perhaps this is to be expected in a movie where the ultimate pinnacle of male handsome is referenced as Jack Lord (I bet he would have been pleased with that) and where a couple of characters are referred to as the ‘Dagwood and Blondie’ of the scenario.

Now, the film looks pretty good with a stylistic flair which suits the premise and, pretty much all of the actors from the world of porn... Paul McGibboney, Michelle Bauer, Marie Sharp, Tantala Ray and so on, are really great (I’m not talking about the sex content here... like most porn actors of the time, they are first and foremost actors). However, the synthesiser music by Mitchell Froomis... uh. It’s both irritating and bizarrely appropriate to the story and, even though I hated it while I was watching it, it’s also kind of haunting and I wish I could get this thing on a proper CD (instead of vinyl or digital download... so not going anywhere near it in those formats, thanks). 

And that’s me pretty much done on the very interesting Café Flesh. A film that is well thought out in concept and certainly makes the viewer think about the milieu and also what this story may well be a metaphor of (and I’m sure people have their own interpretations). My one criticism would be some of the sound design... I’m sorry but that actress wouldn’t possibly be able to make those kind of sounds with the other actor’s male member lodged firmly in her throat like that... it would surely be more muffled. Other than that though... a very interesting watch and I can see how high concept pornography like this must have been an influence on directors such as Michael Ninn, ten or so years later. 

Lady Terminator

Terminate Her

Lady Terminator
aka Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan
Indonesia 1989
Directed by H. Tjut Djalil
108 Sound Studio 
Mondo Macabro DVD 0

Warning: Spoilers I guess... it’s not that kind of movie.

I’ve been meaning to catch up to Lady Terminator for a couple of decades now. After a point, I decided to not grab the old Mondo Macabro DVD because I thought, surely a film as cool sounding as this would be getting a Blu Ray release soon? Well, apparently not. I recently listened to a Mondo Macabro podcast from a couple of years ago and, apparently, while they’d like to do a Blu Ray, there are some rights issues on that format so, that’s torpedoed for a while, it would seem. So, yeah, I eventually sourced the old DVD copy least. And, yeah, the picture is a little softer than I would have liked but it’s still quite watchable. 

Okay, so this is not quite in the realms of a ‘so bad it’s good movie’ because, some of the production values for the time aren’t too terrible (I mean, they’re also not great but, yeah, watchable). This is, it has to be said, more of a ‘so silly it’s good’ kind of movie and, anyone who knows me will known that silliness is a quality I treasure highly. And this is, indeed, an attempt to blend mythical Indonesian goddess legend The Queen Of The South Seas (in a slightly changed variant, from what I can tell, after having read about some of these stories) and transplanting it into a... ‘not even trying to hide it’, blatant riff on James Cameron’s The Terminator. Just without even the relatively low budget that first movie had and, you know, without the time travel aspect. The film even has it emblazoned on the credits... Original story from The Legend Of The South Sea Queen.

The pre-credits sequence depicts an actress called Fortunella playing The Queen Of The South Seas in days gone by. In her ‘under the sea’ but sometimes floating on the surface castle, she kills another in a long line of lovers during intercourse. Now at first I believed this was just a case of ‘vagina dentata’ when she bites the man’s cock off with her undercarriage and, that’s certainly what I’d been led to believe by the aforementioned podcast. But, no, the Goddess lady just has a big, bitey snake living up in her genitalia. Although it seems to do a lot of ‘arterial spray kind of damage’ to the men in question. Which leads her to ask the question... “Is there any man who can satisfy me?”

Well be careful what you wish for because... her 100th lover, a wizardish chap, pulls the snake from her sexy bits before it can do the damage. She promptly vanishes but not before putting a curse on him, telling him his great, great granddaughter will die from her hand. 

Roll credits and then, after they've played out, we are transplanted to modern day (1989) Indonesia, where a young anthropology student played by Barbara Anne Constable is researching the legend and, ends up sinking to her sea castle, being magically tied up to the Queen’s bed and then having a badly cartooned snake penetrating her bikini bottoms and up into her crotch. The idea being that this has turned her into a minion of the South Sea Queen to seek out and extract her revenge on the great, great granddaughter. Oh, and it also somehow turns her into a machine-like cyborg, as we see her rise naked from the sea and sex up two local men, who both are killed using exactly the same MO as the original lady... having their penises lopped off by the incisors of the snake in her undercarriage. Not a machine snake though... it’s all a bit odd, to tell the truth. The police autopsy report later says... “Cocks bitten off by eels.” so, yeah, make your mind up people!

Okay, we then cut to the great, great granddaughter, local song singer celebrity Erica, played by Claudia Angelique Rademaker (from what I can tell, the IMDB really is bad at trying to figure out who’s who on non-American movies). When Lady Terminator comes for her in a crowded bar, the bullet count is high and she’s only just rescued by hero cop Max, her new love interest played by Christopher J. Hart. It’s amazing how most of these actors and actresses only have this one film to their credit. 

The film then becomes a chase and a series of action sequences, punctuated by the occasional sex scenes and, of course, it includes some additional male member chomping action. Lady T seems obsessed with destroying men’s genitalia much of the time, it has to be said. At one point she riddles a cop with plentiful machine gun bullets until he’d deader than dead but, still takes a second to kick him in the balls before moving on. Another cop is riddled with machine gun bullets in his testicle region too. This lady is really going balls to the wall in this movie, for sure! 

But, of course, it also has to hit all those ‘similarities’ to The Terminator. So she uses the police band to track them, drives through the wall of the police station and crushes a cop against the wall in the process and even has a scene where she slices out her damaged eye with a scalpel in a mirror, before fixing said eyeball and returning it, after she heals it with her electricity eyeball powers. Oh, right, I forgot to mention those. These are the same eyeball powers which enable her to shoot lasers from her eyes in later scenes, just like the main antagonist in Mausoleum (reviewed here). The film even has one of the cops say to the granddaughter, “Come with me if you want to live.” So, yeah, like I said, the film is pretty up front about what it’s trying to rip off here for sure. 

And I loved every minute of it. This one is a comic romp that doesn’t seem to know it’s comical but, that’s okay, the silliness is infectious and I’d have to say that Lady Terminator is definitely the very definition of a ‘switch your brain off’ movie. In fact, I’d say if you did try to watch it while your brain was engaged, you might come away very confused. A solid recommendation from me though and, yeah, hoping those Blu Ray rights issues get cleared up at some point because I would love a high definition copy of this one. An absolute banger for an all nighter of a movie screening, that’s for sure. 

Tarantula

Firefox VS Spider

Tarantula
USA 1955
Directed by Jack Arnold
Universal/101 Films 
Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

Warning: Small, eight legged spoilers coming your way. 

“I’d say you were the biggest liar since Baron Munchhausen”
quote from Tarantula

Well Tarantula is a film I wasn’t that impressed with when I first saw it, although I absolutely adore 1950s, atomic age B-movies and... revisiting it now on a very good Blu Ray transfer put out by 101 Films as part of a dual edition (yeah, some companies are still putting both the Blu Ray and DVD in the same set combinations)... I’d have to say I’m still not all that swayed over by it. Jack Arnold was an absolute master of these kinds of films with things like the first two Creature From The Black Lagoon films, The Incredible Shrinking Man and, even uncredited work on the classic This Island Earth. This one falls fairly flat though, especially when you compare it to, say, the absolute masterpiece that was THEM! (reviewed by me here). It does have a couple of things going for it though...

One is that some (but not quite all) of the special effects and make up effects in this one are handled pretty well, for the most part. The other thing is that the script does nothing to make light of the ridiculous plot (although the make up in one scene may well make you laugh) and the actors are all very good at projecting a certain amount of gravitas around the story. These actors include monster movie regular John Agar as the perpetually smiley, heroic Dr. Matt Hastings, Leo G. Carrol as the resident mad scientist Prof. Gerald Deemer and the sensuous Mara Corday as the professor’s new work experience student (as we’d express it these days) and love interest for Agar, Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (who would go on to play a few supporting roles for her friend Clint Eastwood in The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact, Pink Cadillac and The Rookie but, I’m getting ahead of myself... I’ll get to Clint in a little while). 

Also in the cast, as the sherif of the small town of Desert Rock and friend to Agar’s Hastings, is Nestor Paiva. Regular readers may remember Paiva as the boat captain in both Creature From The Black Lagoon (reviewed here) and Revenge Of The Creature (reviewed here)... and also for his role in The Falcon In Mexico (reviewed here). I almost didn’t recognise him at first because, although he was born in California, I always associate him with playing roles with a strong, sometimes Mexican accent and, also, his almost bald head here is prominently displayed, rather than covered with a hat. Hearing him speak perfect American English was a bit of a shock, to be honest. 

The film opens quite starkly and effectively. A camera pans around the bleak desert landscape until it fixes on a man wandering through and then collapsing. He dies but by then we can see he has deformed features. This is because, as we later find out, the serum Professor Deemer is working on to make animals grow to giant sizes in order to solve the world’s food shortage problems, causes an unnaturally quick manifestation of the rare disease acromegaly when injected into a human. Acromegaly, is of course, the famous rare condition contracted by famous character actor Rondo Hatton, which pushes the bones and muscles around the face to give everything a warped look (something which gave him good work in various villainous roles in his short, painful life... the Rondo Awards are named after him).  

Anyway, the professor buries another of his initially willing human victims, after being attacked by him and... the laboratory is partially burned down. What he doesn’t realise is that, while he was rendered unconscious in the fight, the dying human lab rat injected him with the formula as well... not to mention the fact that the professor’s already unnaturally huge tarantula has escaped and, of course, it roams the desert killing cattle, horses and humans until everybody can put two and two together... mostly as a not bad special effect superimposition of a real tarantula interacting with miniature sets and being projected against real life actors in some sequences. I think there’s probably some puppet work here too but, in regards to the big spider’s many on screen appearances, the puppetry is kept to a minimum.

So that’s the set up and, it’s not a terrible film to be sure (fourth biggest box office hit of the year) but, I have to say, the storyline and lack of any real twists and turns leaves me a little cold when compared to other movies like this. However, some of the make up effects, such as when Leo G. Carrol first shows signs of acromegaly, are put together extremely well. Alas, on the last time you see him, just before he is injected with venom by the tarantula so it can eat him, the make up is so over the top that he appears to have one eyeball that has melted all the way down the side of his face. If this sounds silly, it is.

What also sounds silly but, really isn’t, is the way the live footage of a real tarantula is scaled up and inserted into the shots. This kind of approach rarely looks good but, in Tarantula, Jack Arnold just about gets away with it... it looks quite acceptable and decent. I say almost because, on one tell tale shot where the big guy is one again clambering over a small mountain, some of its legs disappear behind the sky so, you can definitely see where the live action and the miniature were badly lined up, in that instance. 

And, big spoiler here, the Tarantula is finally put down in the final reel by a jet fighter pilot firing rockets or napalm or some such. The close up shots of the pilots eyes (pretty much the only thing visible of his face) combined with his voice, made me sit up straight. I looked it up and this is, indeed, the second uncredited screen role in a Jack Arnold film for a young Clint Eastwood, seen here piloting a jet long before his stint in Firefox. And, of course, this film’s leading lady would, as I said earlier, play a supporting part in four of Clint’s movies too. I wonder if this film is the first time they met... or even if they did meet as, I don’t think Clint shares a screen with anyone in this film... just sits in the cockpit, talking into his radio. 

And that’s me pretty much done with the quite entertaining but, really not great, Tarantula. The score is a mix of original and old rerecorded and tracked in pieces, from the sound of it... the opening Universal logo was the tip off for me on that front, which begins with the same opening bars as Creature From The Black Lagoon. It’s all quite effective though and very much of its time. Let’s face it, though, while Tarantula may not have the thrills and spills of certain other, more thoughtful atomic age monster movies, it’s still quite watchable and, if you have a hankering for spending time with this kind of thing (and who doesn’t?), then you’ll certainly want to be adding Tarantula to your list, if you’ve not seen it before. 

Fantastic Voyage

Carry On Up 
The Artery

Fantastic Voyage
Directed by Richard Fleischer
USA 1966
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers swarming in to protect the organism.

It’s been a fair few decades now since I last revisited the film Fantastic Voyage but, I thought I’d give it another look in the Blu Ray era, to see how much better the film would look in this format. Well, it turns out it looks pretty good still, which I would expect from a film as visually rich and well designed as this one.

The film starts off very strongly with a pre-credits sequence which includes a truly great shot of a TWA jet coming in for a landing at night... and also a car crash and minor gun battle. Then there’s a wonderful title sequence where various sound effects relating to the medical machinery around a scientist being kept in a coma, acts as a backdrop to the titles and a graphic of a stop watch countdown. 

The plot to this one is very simple but also almost cyclic when you find out the reason of the mission the main characters have to go on. Basically, actor Stephen Boyd is recruited to join up with a team of scientists and a submarine pilot, played by Donald Pleasence, William Redfield, Arthur Kennedy and Raquel Welch (in her first proper staring role after two years of TV bit parts and two films away from the film which, in the same year, would catapult her to international fame and truly put her on the map, Hammer’s One Million Years BC, partially due to the publivity campaign). The top two big wigs where Boyd shows up are played by Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell (who I best remember in the Marilyn Monroe movie Bus Stop, although I haven’t seen it in well over thirty years... need to catch up with that one again too, I reckon).

Basically, the scientist who is so important has a blood clot on the brain and the only way it can be operated on is from inside the human body. Luckily, he’s taken to the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces and it’s here that a submarine, along with its occupants, will be shrunk down to a very small size and injected into the guy’s blood stream, so the crew can make their way into the brain and operate on the clot with a laser gun. Boyd’s special agent is there to help out and also act out as security because, it’s strongly believed that one of the crew is a saboteur who wants to end the scientist’s life. Why? Because the scientist has discovered the way to keep things miniaturised for longer than an hour but he was attacked by foreign foes before he had the opportunity to pass that knowledge on. The script does everything it can to point the finger at Arthur Kennedy, the surgeon, being the traitor but, any film fan will probably twig the true ‘bad guy in medical science clothing’ from the get go.

And so the crew are injected into the man’s bloodstream in a tale including a number of set pieces where things go wrong - they end up going through the heart (while the people monitoring from the outside stop the patient’s heart for no longer than sixty seconds... can the Proteus, their nuclear sub, make it through in time?), a scene where they have to go through the inner ear and somebody outside drops a pair of scissors (sending the crew inside the body flying all over the place) and the memorable moment when Raquel Welch, in her skin tight diving suit, is attacked by antibodies in the immune system and the rest of the crew have to try and pull them off her before she is suffocated to death. 

It’s a great film with some truly interesting and, at the time, cutting edge special effects with some beautiful colours. Even the scenes outside the body look stunning, with Fleischer using lots of vertical and horizontals to split up the compositions (including a big cage of criss crosses which can be artificially opened and closed in front of the camera to push the patterns in the visuals).There’s also a wonderful shot near the start where Boyd is asked to stay in his car and the floor opens up and the car descends to the underground headquarters where the ‘operation’ will be performed. It’s shot in such a way that the perspective of the angle combined with the car going down makes it look like the car is shrinking... which is, of course, a really nice bit of foreshadowing of just what is going to happen to the submarine and its occupants later in the story. 

The score is kinda interesting too... there’s no music at all for almost the first forty minutes of the film (including no score over the credits... apparently the first American film to do that) and when the sub is injected into the blood stream for the final hour (which is more or less shot in real time because that’s when everyone will start to grow to normal size again), the music immediately comes in, courtesy of Leonard Rosenman’s 12 tone serial score, one of the first movies to employ the technique. In fact, the first film to ever use that style was by the same composer for the 1955 psychological film The Cobweb.

The novelisation duty of this one was given to acclaimed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov but he found so many flaws with the science in the movie, that he spent a lot of time rewriting it and getting it all right before he handed it in. Because of some of the difficulties in production (some of which may have been rewrites when Asimov informed the studio), he still managed to get the novelisation into shops before the release of the film. 

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Fantastic Voyage other than, many people such as James Cameron have tried, and failed, to get a remake going for any length of time... which is a shame because a modern remake would probably be a good idea for this one. As it is, though, the film is deserving of its reputation as a classic and it even inspired a sixties cartoon series sequel, which I used to watch as repeats in the early seventies. A great film and certainly worth upgrading to Blu Ray, for sure. 

Devil's Gate

Fallen Angel

Devil's Gate
Canada 2017
Directed by Clay Staub
Ace Entertainment FIlms

Warning: Some spoilers regarding the story set up over the first half an hour.

Devil’s Gate is a nice little entry into the horror genre and is the directorial debut of Clay Staub (who has been AD on a number of high profile Hollywood films, especially for Zack Snyder). This one is, like another film I saw a little while ago, one of those stories (and titles) which deliberately sets up expectations of where the plot is going... and then taking you somewhere slightly different. This movie hits one of my scare spots in terms of where it’s going so I was always going to have a fairly good time with this one.

The story involves main protagonist FBI Agent Daria Francis, played by Amanda Schull, who has been sent to the county of Devil’s Gate in order to help out with a case of two missing persons, the wife and son of a farmer in a remote farmhouse in the midst of the desert land (13 miles away from everywhere else). We’ve already seen, in the opening sequence, what grisly fate happens to someone who trespasses on this farmer’s land if they’re silly enough to ignore his ‘No Trespassing’ signs so audience tensions are set up fairly early. 

When Daria gets there, after a brief interview with the local, red neck sheriff (played in a nice cameo at the start and end of the movie by actor/director Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek The Next Generation fame), she hooks up with a young deputy called Colt (played by Shawn Ashmore) to question local people. She starts with the sister of the missing woman and it’s obvious that the main suspect here is the husband, Jackson Pritchard (played by Milo Ventimiglia), who didn’t even report them missing (it was the sister who did that). So, against the wishes of the sherif, Daria has Colt drive her to the Pritchard property to take the investigation forward. Pritchard is a profoundly religious man whose family have been living on the ranch for generations and the locals all know he wouldn’t do anything to his family.

When they get there, they find the property laden with traps and the wife’s car still in the garage. However, the power has gone from their phones and vehicle etc. After she arrests and cuffs Pritchard for suspected homicide, she investigates the house and finds... something in the basement, locked in a cage. Is it some kind of rural breeding science project that the husband has been working on? Yeah... nope.

So that’s when we get the big revelation that, according to Pritchard, the farm house has been watched over by ‘angels’ for over a century and that, when the angels took his wife and son a few nights ago, he realised they were ‘fallen angels’ or ‘demons’ and so he captured one of them to hold as ransom in his basement. At this point, it becomes clear that we’re not really dealing with a religious horror movie at all... but a sci-fi horror and, yeah, when the wife is returned, as played by Bridget Regan (who played 1940s Black Widow Dottie Underwood in Agent Carter, reviewed here) it basically becomes a siege movie as the four of them try to survive the attack of the ‘demons’ who are trying to get one of their number back. 

And it’s really not a bad slice of modestly budgeted horror with, frankly, some amazingly well done special effects (which seem to me to be a well realised blend of practical and CGI) and a lot of tension between the human characters. It’s incredibly well shot too... nothing too flashy in terms of the compositions but still very nice to look at. The opening shot, for instance, of a lone care driving through the desert towards camera with an absolutely gorgeous, cloud filled sky, indicates the sense of eye candy you will get throughout the film. There’s also an amazingly gruesome kill at one point and the special effects for this shot do not let it down... it’s something you might expect to see in a 1980s era Romero zombie movie but, yeah, it looks quite spectacular if you are into that kind of thing.

The actors are all fine too, with a special shout out to Amanda Schull, who plays the character with a ‘failure is not an option and I don’t have to be a nice person about it’ kind of chip on her shoulder, which the actor just runs with and then deliberately softens down as she realises that her assumptions about the situation are pretty much wrong at every level. She tries to instill calm in characters as Ventimiglia portray’s Pritchard as the angry, revenge seeking human. 

Now, if there aren’t enough twists for you in the main set up, there is another little twist coming later on in the movie. Now, I kind of saw it coming but I totally didn’t... which is a hard one to explain without giving it away but let’s just say, I saw a twist coming with one of the characters but it was a deliberate misdirection and two other characters were the ‘recipients’ of that specific reveal. And I’ll say no more about that.

The film ends fairly satisfyingly but, immediately after what was obviously supposed to be the closing shot of Schull riding a police car off out of camera the way the first car of the movie came into shot, there’s a curious epilogue involving two of the other characters. This, I would imagine, was originally intended to be on the film as a post credits scene but then I suspect the producers lost confidence in anyone knowing they would need to stick around for one. There’s a sequence at the end which certainly confirms that there’s more than enough for a bigger budgeted sequel at some point but, I dunno, I don’t think this film is on many people’s radar so I suspect that won’t happen. Which is a shame because, I have to say, Devil’s Gate is a pretty good movie and I’d certainly recommend it to lovers of horror and sci-fi, especially those who enjoy the siege scenario where a small location is threatened by a bunch of monsters. A nice surprise of a movie... it’s not perfect but it’s pretty close.

M3GAN 2.0

M3ganomaniac

M3GAN 2.0
aka Mthreegan Two Point Zero
Directed by Gerard Johnstone
USA/Canada/New Zealand 2025
Universal/Blumhouse

Warning: Some pretty big tonal spoilerage here. 

Like many people, I quite enjoyed the first M3GAN movie (reviewed here) but, even though it was clearly left open for a sequel, I was kinda worried it would just end up being a rehash of the first. Especially since it was green lit so quickly after the popularity of the first movie (within two weeks of release I believe). My fears seemed justified when it came to the trailers for this new installment in the franchise, M3GAN 2.0, because it looked pretty awful and like it was going to fall exactly into that same writing trap. 

Not often has a trailer been so misleading and, I suspect, it was cut like that deliberately, to keep the expectations of the audience from the first movie on board with the sequel. In fact, from what I could make out, some of the trailer was even manipulated to give it a different vibe to what the movie is, with one line of dialogue coming from a totally different version of a specific character, for example... and certain other lines not making it into the movie at all. Marvel do this kind of thing all the time these days and the trailer looks like it was clearly shaped to withhold certain information about specific scenes.

Okay, so the surviving cast of characters from the last movie are all back... with Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen Van Epps... and, of course, Amie Donald and Jenna Davis as the body and voice of M3GAN respectively. We also have a new threat... not just to those characters but, to the entire world, in the form of a kind of adult version of the titular character called Amelia, played really wonderfully by Ivanna Sakhno. And the fact that she is... not quite the villain but certainly working against M3GAN and her human companions (if you want to call them that)... certainly changes the dynamic of the picture.

Here’s the thing... this film is not just a rehash of the first movie on steroids. I mean, sure, M3GAN does have a totally killer dance sequence and she even gets to sing a song (this time it’s a cover version of the truly beautiful Kate Bush song This Woman’s Work) to hit some of the right tonal notes with fans of the first. But this is very different, for sure. The first movie was a sci-fi tinged horror film and, while there is still the tension of the ‘will she, wont she turn against us all again’ variety, when it comes to the title character...this movie goes full on into a sci-fi tinged action adventure yarn. And by that I mean it leans full on into the action which reminded me of nothing less than the Mission Impossible franchise in a lot of sequences (it even has a planned heist sequence at one point). That being said, the violence gets pretty gory in this movie, with impalements and arm ripping just for starters.

Now, the one bad thing about the movie is... when it comes to the identity of the real villain of the piece, well... I’m sure most audiences, like me, would have figured it out in the first 20 minutes of the movie, with the expected twist reveal itself held until the third act, so to speak. However, lack of surprises aside, it’s still all executed pretty well and I have to forgive it that blatant telegraphing.

There are some wonderful quirky bits to this too. For example, when the conciousness of M3GAN hops into a really nice car, the soundtrack goes into the theme from the old David Hasselhoff TV show Knight Rider. And one of the murders committed by the assassin Amelia is a clever, modern, cyberpunk twist on the serial killer murders in Michael Powell’s 1960s career killing movie Peeping Tom.

But yeah, this one goes full on with the action sequences and, contrary to the atmosphere in the first movie, you will probably find yourself rooting for M3GAN by the end of the tale, I would think. An ending which, of course, sets things up for the possibility of another sequel.

So I think that’s me done with M3GAN 2.0 and, I have to say I really liked it... more so even than the first one. And I especially liked the ‘Allison Williams unconscious in an exo-skeleton’ fight scene, which reminded me more than just a little of the fight sequences at the end of the excellent Malignant from 2021 (reviewed here) but, I can’t tell you why. That’s one spoiler too far, I think. But, yeah, this one feels like a M3GAN meets Charlie’s Angels mash up and, I was certainly here for it. Roll on part 3.0 is what I say.

Psycho Sex Dolls

Doll Reaver

Psycho Sex Dolls
Written & Directed by David Wilde
UK 2025
Wilde Entertainment
Blu Ray Region 0

I jumped on board the kickstarter for this new movie by David Wilde fairly late in the game and I’d be lying if I said it was anything other than the bevy of gorgeous ladies on the posters combined with a very marketable title that attracted me to click on the pledge button. That being said, now I’ve seen the end product I’m rather glad I did. 

The basic plot set up to Psycho Sex Dolls, in a nutshell, is that an obnoxious porn photographer/video maker, Damien Self (played so brilliantly by Simon Weir), is losing money for his even less likeable boss James Steel (played by Kieran Chalker) and is given a week to come up with something fresh and innovative to bring new life into Steel’s failing porn empire. In addition to this, his top model Mia, played by a very interesting actress called Stella Paris, has walked out on him because, in the horrible digital age in which we live, most models can shoot, produce and upload their own content. 

After a week of drug fuelled attempts to get some script ideas together and get back some of his old models with no results… “I got giant tits done for you and they exploded!”… Damien resorts to an invite he got given to be a beta tester for a new, powerful and fully lifelike, AI enhanced series of customisable sex dolls... and he orders three. One is a deliberate copy of Mia and the other two are Chloe (played by Jamie L. Jones) and Sophie (played by Emma Cole). And it very quickly becomes clear that these uninhibited robots are the answer to his prayers when it comes to shooting new movies but also, it later turns out, writing and editing the porn content they are churning out. But the leader of the three sex dolls, Mia, is a slightly more advanced model than the others and she’s learning and making various judgements by herself, which could lead to trouble for some... at the end of a knife or a bullet, perhaps.

And it’s actually a fine film. Not quite what I’d expected but certainly a refreshing movie. It is, of course, as I mentioned in my recent review of Black Eyed Susan (you can read that one here) one of a number of movies made in the recent trend of adult sex doll tales but, it’s still a relatively small subgenre at present and this one explores its story in some style and is, again, a little different to some of the others.

Now, since I started this blog and had requests from young, independent UK directors eager to show their work (this one wasn’t a request by the way… I gravitated towards the product myself, not the other way around), I’ve seen my fair share of barely clinging together movies, sometimes of dubious quality. They come in three basic shapes… badly told with bad quality production values, pretty good with equally bad production values and, this kind... well crafted with some pretty good production values. So this one does look a whole lot more professional than some (not all) of the modern, microbudget UK indies I’ve seen over the course of the last 15 years or so.

Now, fair warning and as the title suggests… the film is pretty sleazy. But, for me, it felt like the kind of British sleazy I would associate with late 1980s/eary 1990s British sex shop era porn but, actually there to help fuel a story which happens to be set in that kind of industry as it is now. So there was almost a nostalgia rush involved for me, in a way. And there’s also some real character development here…

I mean, I was astonished to find that, even though he’s technically a poor excuse for a human being in some ways, I found myself mellowing and quite liking Damien after a while, actually rooting for him by the end. I hope he returns in the sequel. Similarly, by the end of the film, Mia’s basic internal chemistry has undergone a transformation and she’s evolved into something... perhaps someone... not totally evil or out for herself but an almost fair minded, if still bloodthirsty individual. She even has a moment towards the end which indicates she is perhaps developing her own emotional responses. Which I was totally there for.

The film starts off with a lot of frantic hand held camerawork and I was worried for a while that this and the mish mash look of different film stock styles were being edited in to cover up a possible lack of coverage in a few areas but, it’s not the case and the cinematography becomes more steady and fluid when required. It soon became apparent that these jolting collisions of styles were deliberate choices and were, one might say, even Godardian in their motive. I've not seen anything else directed by this guy as yet so it might well be a signature flourish, perhaps. And there are some nice ideas worked into the sleazy coating of the story which make this more than what you might at first be expecting (although there’s plenty of that stuff too). Such as the male lead conversing with is inner demons via a mirror.

And the film is quite funny in places too, with a very anti-woke nature. I mean, it’s not going to be for everyone (I work in an office with a very young team and they would be in an uproar about some of this dialogue) but, again, it’s refreshing to be able to watch something like this without wading through all that ‘triggering sensitivity’ tightrope walking. I’m sure the writer/director makes no apologies for lines like “Busty Big Brother. That sounds a bit tranny.” And it’s all quite entertaining it has to be said, especially in some of the porn movie parody parts such as the production of Spring Ball Breakers and the iconic Kubrickian flourishes lavished on A Cockwork Orgy. 

So, yeah, I have to say I was surprised at many things in this movie. The main male and female leads really inhabit their characters in a three dimensional way and it’s an entertaining yarn which will lead straight into a sequel as part of a planned franchise. So as soon as I finished watching this one, I rushed over to kickstarter to help fund the sequel, The Dolls, at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidwilde66/the-dolls-0 and, if you want to catch up with this first movie, then you can watch it in various ways and places with some details on the film’s home page here.

So summing up, Psycho Sex Dolls is not a film I’d recommend to everybody but, I certainly think about half of my friends would enjoy it and I had a pretty good time with it myself. Roll on the next one, I can't wait!

Shining Sex

Sex Shooter

Shining Sex
Italy/France/Belgium/Switzerland 
1976 Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Kind of spoilers... I guess. It’s basically just sex.

Okay then... this is probably going to end up being a really short review. Shining Sex is a movie by Jess Franco I’d not heard of before. I do like the director a lot but find his films hit and miss... usually they hover between absolute masterpiece classics such as Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here) and Female Vampire (reviewed here) to... almost unwatchable stuff like Nightmares Come At Night (reviewed here) or his not so great Fu Manchu films (reviewed here and here). Now, the only reason I bought this beautiful Severin restoration of Shining Sex is because there is also a CD in here presenting the first part of a compilation of cuts from Jess Franco soundtracks (many of which I don’t have on other CD compilations) so, yeah, even if I never watched the film it was still a good buy for me. 

However, I did watch the movie and... well... it really is just a sex movie to be honest. Nice to look at but it’s almost non-stop sex going between different locations and a surprisingly small amount of dialogue. It looks nice and if you want to see as much of Franco’s girlfriend (later wife) and second muse Lina Romany as it’s possible to capture on a camera which doesn’t actually enter a person’s body, then you’re in the right place. And she is fine in this.

The entire plot, as it is, will reveal everything here. Lina plays Cynthia, who works in a nightclub doing her special (not so special) strip show entitled Shining Sex. A strange couple pick her up after the act and she takes them back to her place to do sexy business. But it’s clear there is something strange up with them. The woman, Alpha (played by Evelyne Scott) is a bit unused to sex and a bit bitey. Her partner Andros (played by Raymond Hardy) doesn’t have much to offer in terms of sparkling conversation either. They sex up Cynthia and rub a special ointment on her which causes her body ecstacy but also turns her, unwittingly, into a killing machine (much like the lips of death kiss in one of Franco’s Fu Manchu movies). Alpha is really a being from another dimension and Andros her brain washed slave (in some readings he’s her robot... although his erect member seems less mechanical to be honest... I haven’t seen the French language edition of the film but it’s possible the term robot is used in the original sense of the word as ‘slave’?).  They send Cynthia out, using telepathic control signals, to kill humans who are onto the fact that there are beings from another dimension in our reality... to sex them up and kill them with the poison her body has absorbed. 

There’s also a bizarre sub plot with Jess Franco as Dr. Seward (presumably named after the one in Dracula) as he has a psychic connection with Alpha whenever Cynthia does sexing... or something... it’s all a bit loose. We see Cynthia sex a few people to death and then her body succumbs to the ravages of the ointment/virus thingy and she dies herself. The end... nothing more to see here folks. 

It looks nice and there are many trade mark Jess Franco zooms if that’s your kind of thing... lots of zooms in and out of Romay’s hairless labia and other such fleshy visions are on offer here. And the decor in some of the interiors is pretty cool and made me think of some of his earlier films. Not too much else to say about this one though, to be honest. The last 20 minute sequence takes place in Africa (or somewhere like it) and it really doesn’t need to. I know Franco shot this with the same cast in the same ten days that he also shot a movie called Midnight Party so, perhaps that movie called for an African sequence (or, as likely, since it’s Franco we’re talking about, perhaps he was also shooting bits for this while he was making a third movie in the same period). It doesn’t add or detract fro the plot, such as it is... just gives us a refreshing change of landscape at some point. 

Despite the lovely Lina and various actresses getting naked and frisky for the director, I found this... not a hard watch exactly but I did find myself almost dozing off in a couple of places. It’s more the extras to this wonderful Severin set which are the big draw. The score CD was always going to be the thing for me but there are some nice interviews on the second disc plus, again if this is your thing, almost a quarter of an hour of outtakes which didn’t make it into the movie... comprised totally of close ups of various vaginas as they are being licked or of cocks being similarly stimulated. Maybe this would make a good back drop, projected onto the wall at a party but, yeah, it’s all a bit samey, to be honest. 

That being said, it’s not a terrible film from a technical level and I’m genuinely pleased I saw it. I will continue to seek out another Franco here and there (I still have his House Of Lost Women to watch, which I bought for the inclusion of the second volume of the CD soundtrack compilations) but I would say that, unless you are a Franco completest (and that’s probably not a bad thing to be... although challenging because of the amount of movies he made and their current availability) then I would say Shining Sex is probably something you could live without, to be honest. 

No One Will Save You

My Grey Heaven

No One Will Save You
Directed by Brian Duffield
USA 2023
Star Thrower Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers throughout.

Just a quick shout out to a movie from a couple of years ago called No One Will Save You and, also a bit of a warning because, in order to discuss this one properly, I think it’s necessary to talk about what happens at the end (most of the rest of the spoilers in here are just stuff you will figure out from the trailer). Also, I found out one of my comparisons I’m going to make, after I watched this and read the trivia section on the IMDB... well it turns out that Stephen King tweeted out the exact same connection to a specific episode of a specific TV show that had been in my mind when I was looking at this one. So glad I’m on the same page as everyone else here.

This is a movie about a young woman called Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) who lives alone in her late parents large house, slightly remotely on the edge of a forest, a short bike or car ride from her local town (which she visits as little as possible). She is despised by a good deal of the population of the town for something which has happened in her past some ten or more years earlier. Something which Brynn has to live with every day.

And then, one night, as she is trying to sleep, she hears something downstairs. It’s a home invasion but, as she sneaks around trying to see who it is... she soon realises the question is not who but what’ is it? Which, as you’ll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is an alien. And not just any alien, this is obviously based on the greys (or Zeta Reticulans) of popular, modern UFO folklore (and don’t get me started... I gave up researching these guys years ago because of too many sleepless nights). That first night becomes a fight for survival but, survive Brynn does, after accidentally managing to kill said alien.

However, when she goes into town the next day, she finds signs that she’s not the only one who has been visited in the night. Indeed, not only does she change her mind about reporting it because of the reception she gets at the police station, but she’s chased by two humans who are obviously alien/human hybrids. And the rest of the film is about the second night, when more aliens come for her (and the rest of the local population).

Now I’ll get to that spoilery ending in a minute but, the film made me think of two specific sci-fi/horror tales of yesteryear. One of them is Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, based on the way aliens take control of humans with a living seed creature vomited from their mouths (in this case) into their victims. But the other thing was (and this is the thing Stephen King clocked too), the similarity to one of my top five episodes of The Twilight Zone, specifically The Invaders, which has a wonderful score by Jerry Goldsmith. That episode has a cast of one (Agnes Moorehead) and depicts a woman who is victim to a similar home invasion from teeny, tiny creatures. I won’t give the twist of that episode away (which is a humdinger) but, in order to make that twist work, there is no dialogue in the episode at all and it’s all set in the woman’s home.

Well, No One Wil Save You is definitely cut from the same cloth. The whole thing is practically wordless (other than a source song and some alien vocal sounds, there are only five words spoken throughout the whole film) and, asides from a few forest and town scenes, the majority takes place on Brynn’s property.

And it’s a well made suspenseful film, it has to be said. You will feel for the lead as she battles, with far inferior means, to stay out of the clutches of the aliens and, despite the revelations of what she did in the past, she’ll probably have your total sympathy (and that’s kind of the point in terms of leading to the ending of the movie too). And the greys themselves can be pretty terrifying, not just a one trick pony as they come in a variety of versions of increasing scariness. So there’s a definite feeling of unease as you watch Brynn fight for her life.

And so we come to the end... don’t read further unless you want to know.

By the end of the movie I felt kinda shortchanged by the conclusion... for all of thirty seconds... until I realised that this was a pretty good ending. When the aliens probe Brynn’s mind and discover how she’s repented for her accidental crime and had to live with the unforgiving towns folk, they spare her from being a human hybrid. Instead, with the planet now populated with human/alien hybrids, Brynn gets to live with them in her home town, teaching them how to be the best part of her human race, giving her a far easier and happier existence than when the Earth was populated by her own species. It’s kinda like what might have happened if the main protagonist of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers had let himself be reborn as an alien pod person, living in harmony (of a kind) with his fellow pod people... instead of what happened at the end of that movie. Here, Brynn has found her calling, continuing to live her life collecting doll houses for her diorama (where she watches her model townsfolk in a similar way to how the aliens hover in their flying saucers and monitor their new world) and teaching her new friends how to dance.

And that’s me done with that. No One Will Save You has a perfect ending for a pretty suspenseful film. Not the happy ending you might have wanted but, certainly a happy ending that Brynn deserved. And who needs humans anyway... horrible creatures. This one is definitely worth a watch, as far as I’m concerned.