Train Week: Amok Train (1989)

From the director of Iced, Jeff Kwitny, comes one of the most underrated gore movies of the eighties (together with the amazing Spider Labyrinth): Amok Train, also known under the stupid title Beyond the Door III. Produced by our favourite schlockmeister Ovidio G. Assonitis, this co-production between USA, Yugoslavia and Italy delivers everything you would like from a movie: gore, nudity, miniatures and a train! I still only have the old Dragon DVD, but I guess I should buy the US DVD sooner or later - or just pray to Satan to make this be released on blu-ray! That would be awesome, yeah? Oh, the story? Well, as you can hear from the title this fits directly into Ninja Dixon's Train Week and it's probably the most absurd movie of the bunch!

A group of stupid American students goes to Yugoslavia to see some ancient old tradition out in the backwoods. Professor Andromolek (Bo Svenson) welcomes them, but we soon understand that he's not that nice! He's really after one of the girls, who happens to have the sign of the devil on her as a birth mark, and the professor wants her to fornicate with Satan himself to bring antichrist back to the world... or something. Anyway, they manages to escape and jumps aboard a train - the Amok Train! Soon they're getting killed one by one from supernatural powers, all connected with the train! Blood! Gore! Limbs! Gore again!

As you can see Hostel wasn't first with bringing stupid kids into Eastern Europe to be killed in gory fashion. This is the mother of all movies that tries to make us believe that this is the most dangerous part of Europe (it's not, believe me - try Stockholm a Saturday night instead). It's also a great movie. Not when it comes to the story or acting, but the gore! The atmosphere! The locations! Everything is perfection. Most of the movie is set on a dark dirty train and they manages to make it look repulsive and disgusting. The totally over-the-top gore sets the tone for the whole movie and prepare for a lot of latex getting ripped apart, lots of blood and brutal deaths.

I don't wanna sound like teenage gorehound here, but the gore IS fab. Or do teenage gorehounds use the word "fab"? I have no idea, but I love that they actually don't shy away from the creative deaths. They show everything in glorious details and it looks quite nice. Sure, clearly fake heads and stuff like that, but it's graphic and nasty. The scene where the train driver gets his head squeezed off under the train is fantastic, but so is every death here. Fans of miniatures has a lot to see here also. They are cheap and primitive but adds a lot of colour to the almost fairy tale quality of the locations and story. In one insane sequence the train leaves the track and crashes through a forest and into a lake - just to kill two characters! It's excessive silliness but also one of the reasons this movie works so well.

I can't say so much about the acting. Like some of you might have noticed I never been a fan of Bo Svenson. There's something contrived over his acting and he seldom seem happy with what he's doing. Not even here, which is odd because he has a chance to wear a rad goaty, a cape and worship Satan. I would have loved such a job!

The Yugoslavian setting boosts the production value a lot and this movie looks a lot more expensive than it probably was. A very underrated production and one of my favourite train movies. Give it a chance, will ya?

Operation Paratrooper (1988)

Here we have a forgotten Swedish oddity, or more exactly a co-production between Sweden, Yugoslavia and the US: Operation Paratrooper, now released by Studio S in Sweden under the title Fallskärmsjägaren. Starring none other than Andy Warhols old darling Joe Dallesandro! It's based on a story by extremely boring Swedish author Jan Guillou, but feels more like a mix of an Italian war movie mixed with an American slasher, with a dash of Swedish TV-production. This is the first time I've seen this movie in good quality, this is the best it looked in many years - but is it any good?

Joe Dallesandro is Sergeant Rayker, a tough motherfucker and an vietnam war veteran. He's deeply disturbed and treats his soldiers like animals, risking their lives with real ammunition and hand grenades. One day he goes to far and is fired and prosecuted for his stupidity. At the same time a general and his buddies are going up to a cabin to drink beer, do some illegal weapon affairs and just being macho - but Rayker is out for revenge and uses all his knowledge to kill them one by one, and the only man who can stop him is his own soldier who wants his own revenge...

How to explain Operation Paratrooper? For me it's one of those European genre movies that decided to me more serious and less trashy to be able to compete with the American movies of the same kind. This can of course be both good and bad. The Yugoslavian location automatically gives the movie a grey and quite boring look, closer to what we call social-realism (which is of course a lot more than locations, but I think you get my point). What takes out from the seriousness of the movie is the stupid dialogue and the over-acting from some of the talents involved. The best one is Joe Dallesandro, who here makes one of his most even and interesting performances I've seen, and its extra fun seeing him playing such a stuck-up, angry military when I've only seem him in more radikal and sexually liberal parts. Martin Hewitt, who plays Cooper, Rayker's old "student" also makes the best out of a badly written character.

Thank heavens Operation Paratrooper stick to it's exploitative roots and gives us an odd mix of First Blood, a random slasher and any war movie made during the eighties. It's is gory, but most of it is kept off screen and not show until the bloody aftermath, but director Frank De Palma keeps up the action with explosions and stunts and some nicely framed shots during the bulk of the movie. The ending feels a bit rushed and is hardly original, but works because the movie belongs to a certain degree of silliness.

Yugoslavian producer Djordje Zecevic (often credited under the name George Zecevic) also produced Mats Helge's ultra-cheesy rock-slasher Blood Tracks and I guess this means that Studio S was one of the last he made business with, because they're also releasing his Montenegro, a drama/comedy from 1981 starring Erland Josephson. I know it took for ever to close this deal, so I guess it was just a case of good luck that Mr Zecevic died in January 2012, after the deal was done after several years of communications through fax!

Operation Paratrooper/Fallskärmsjägaren is an entertaining and violent action-driven slasher-esque war thriller. And if that won't sell you this movie you probably should go back watching Arn: The Knight Templar or any other mediocre Jan Guillou adaptation!

Dark Echo (1977)

Hey, wattya say about this: an underwater-zombie film no one talks about! A co-production between Yugoslavia and Austria and starring Karin Dor! Yeah, Dark Echo might have a reason for not being talked about so much, but it’s still a quite well-paced movie with gorgeous locations and a nice monster. Another reviewer wrote that this could have been a fitting double feature together with Loreley’s Grasp, and I guess that’s true. The atmosphere is similar and the gore is cheap but effective. Not that John Carpenter’s The Fog has the most original story, but Dark Echo kinda resembles Carpenter’s classic in more than one way. Let’s take a look at the story…

100 years ago a ship sank in the big lake by the little town of Hochberg in Austria. 86 people died and now the captain of the boat comes back to take revenge on those that caused him and his passengers to die! From the dark waters of the lake, with a rotten body and a nice captain’s hat, he’s brutally kills the relatives of the guilty ones!

Yeah. That’s it I guess. Sure, there’s a hero, a heroine, a brave inspector, some teens – the usual gang of meatheads running around in this kinda flick. What I like about it is that it has a good pace. It’s not so much happening really, but time flies and you never get bored. Maybe check the updates on Facebook a bit to many times, thoughts starts to wander away, but then that darn moisty zombie turns up again and kills someone. So, is it gory? Not really, everything is quite bloodless and off screen until the last half-hour when they suddenly chops the top of the head of a character in gory, graphic fashion and then shows us the brain falling out in slow-mo! I could buy this movie only for that scene!

So the money-shot is there, how’s about the zombie himself? Yeah, he’s a nice creation with a couple of fun underwater-scenes and a lot of full-zombie make-up on screen, nothing hides in the shadows. He’s not hungry, but strangles a poor woman, drowns some people, throws another fucker of an old tower and uses the axe (as mentioned above) at one point. Can’t complain about that, but Dark Echo could have used a lot more gore.

Another very good thing with the film, except the stunning locations, is the awesome electronic score by Slobodan Markovic and Sanja Ilic. This is so good and so fitting to the beautiful locations. One thing that makes me confused is that everywhere 1977 is the production year, but during the end credits it’s copyrighted in 1986. I know it could have been re-copyrighted that year, but the fashion and the music seem much newer than 1977. Well, who knows and who cares?

If you get the chance, take it and watch Dark Echo. Far from any masterpiece, but the zombie and that head-chopping scene made it worth watching!