The Cat Creature (1973)

Here's an interesting TV-movie, originally aired december 11 on ABC, 1973. The Cat Creature was made mostly because producer Douglas S. Cramer wanted to make an old-fashioned, occult-themed thriller in the same vein as The Cat People and similar stuff from the forties and seventies. He hired Robert Bloch as a writer and Curtis Harrington as director and a very competent cast with Meredith Baxter, Stuart Whitman and David Hedison in the bigger parts and with a lot of great supporting actors - but more on them later.

After a real estate appraiser is found clawed to death in the villa of a rich collector, super-cop Stuart Whitman is on the case. He contacts Egyptologist David Hedison, because the dead dude was specializing in Egyptian artefacts and soon they're noticing how people is starting to die around them, and everything seems connected to a golden amulet stolen from the estate. ...and the presence of a black, nasty, angry cat near every victim doesn't bode well...

The Cat Creature is a by-the-numbers TV-movie, but it's also extremely cosy, perfect for a lazy morning. The wonderful cast is inspired - especially Gale Sondergaard, the talented and colourful actress who became a victim for the McCarthy-fascism, who also got a little comeback here and worked up to her death in the middle of the eighties. She had a successful Hollywood-career, but after getting fucked by the American paranoia she and her director-husband Herbert J. Biberman moved to more liberal New York and started to worth in theatre instead of the shallow film industry. John Carradine shows up in a cameo and Peter Lorre Jr. in an even smaller part. And he's an oddity in the cast.

Lorre Jr. wasn't really Peter Lorre's son, but he looked a bit like him and when he wanted to break into acting he changed his name to Peter Lorie Jr, which both Lorre and his people objected to. But lucky for Eugene Weingand (his real name), Peter Lorre died months after and he quickly changed his name to Lorre Jr. and claimed he was the son - and therefore got a few parts here and there. What a guy!

Curtis Harrington is even more interesting. Considered one of the founders of Queer Cinema (he worked with Kenneth Anger, among others) and very interested in the occult, he became some kind of specialist on cheap, colourful genre movies, some of them made for TV. He also made a trio of name-themed movies, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, What's the Matter with Helen? and How Awful About Allan. He did some jobs for Roger Corman also but later turned mostly to TV. I prefer to remember him for the insanely cheesy but awesome Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell!

Anyway. It's not a perfect movie by any means, mostly because it had some troubles during production. Shortly before shooting was going to begin, Harrington told Bloch the script is twelve pages too long. Bloch carefully shorted it to fit the TV-format, but after shooting was done Harrington discovered that the movie needed twelve pages more! Now Bloch had to write new scenes, who would fit in with the now already filmed shorter script, and that resulted in a less coherent story and a bit more episodic feeling.

It's still a good production and worth seeking up for you fans of old TV-movies. 

A Taste of Evil (1971)

So, I'm back again with another "Movie of the week", first aired May 13th, 1972 - according to once source, on ABC (IMDB claims October 12th, 1971...). A Taste of Evil is a special case, because it's actually a remake of another movie Jimmy Sangster wrote, the brilliant Taste of Fear. According to Sangster himself he just changed the names and a few details and voila, a new script was born for the American TV-market. I've seen the original and I've read some unfair comparisons between them and I think people are way to hard against this remake. They're both classy, but A Taste of Evil twists the plot a little bit more and - oddly enough, because it's a made for TV movie - makes the story a bit darker and controversial.

Susan (Barbara Parkins) has been at a clinic for ten years, after a very traumatic incident as a child. When she comes home again her mother (Barbara Stanwyck) has married an old family friend, Harold, and everything seems back to normal... or? Susan starts to see her dead father everywhere and soon her family think she's going insane, or is someone just trying to make her insane? All is not well in this beautiful house...

Here we have a very fine thriller, set in a house and a garden - and that's it. Sangster's script and John Llewellyn Moxey's (the king of good TV-movies by the way) directing is excellent and never wastes one second on something that's not needed (can someone please tell that to the majority of the Swedish filmmakers today?). What's even cooler is that Barbara Stanwyck plays one of the leads and she's brilliant, she completely rules every scenes she's in - without taking over and stealing from the others (for example the always reliable Roddy McDowall and Barbara Parkins).

This is one of those thrillers that depends a lot on twists and it's a pity I can't discuss them more open, but here there's a couple of details that makes this one work a lot better than the original - for example the reason for why Susan has been away to a clinic for ten years and connected to that another twist which makes everything in this production even more disturbing. It's a brave move, and a brave choice of actors to do this story with all it's darkness. Interesting enough it's produced by Aaron Spelling, long before he became a producer of shallow crappy entertainment for shallow crappy teens. Oh, I know. This is also mainstream, made to earn a lot of money from advertising - but it still dares to be something more than just safe and boring.

There's not much more to write. It's a good TV-movie, edgy and keeps up the tension all the way through. Recommended.

Revenge (1971)

The 70's was for sure a golden decade for movies, both those made for cinema and then have the more unknown classics made for TV. It seemed to be a new thriller/horror/action/disaster/adventure flick out every week and there's tons and tons of them, more than I ever will be able to see. Unfortunately many of these have never seen the light of day since then (except from Warner Archive, who have released a fine bunch of wonderful TV-movies during the last couple of years) and only survived on obscure video releases or if someone recorded it of the TV during a re-run years after. Because I'm such a nice guy I recently, as gift, got four productions on bootleg-DVDs. No, I don't feel guilty - because I know that if they get official DVDs I will upgrade them directly. One of these was Revenge, from 1971, starring Shelly Winters, Bradford Dillman and Stuart Whitman! What a cast! And it's written by Joseph "Psycho" Stefano!

Bradford Dillman is a businessman, Frank, who one day gets the wrong briefcase back to the office. A woman has his briefcase and she disappears fast in a taxi. He can just wait and see if she will call when she discovers that she's got the wrong one. Later that evening she calls and Dillman goes to get his stuff and meets a strange woman, Amanda Hilton (Shelley Winters), who lures him into his house and beats him unconscious. Hours later he wakes up in a iron cage down in the basement and is accused of something terrible, something he's innocent of doing. When he's been gone the whole night his wife gets worried and hires a psychic, Mark Hembric (Stuart Whitman), who reluctantly starts to help her... but will they find Frank in time, and is really Mark a real psychic?

How about that? Yeah, it's a very simple - but yet soooo effective story, one of those ideas I'm terribly jealous of not coming up with myself (I enjoy writing, and have written a couple of feature length scripts) and if it wasn't because of me being a very nice and honest guy I would steal the story and claim I never seen this film before. It's actually quite similar in tone to Psycho, but with Shelly Winters as a mad mother instead of a mad son, but Stefano also makes it quite different and gives it a few very original and interesting touches of darkness and... yeah, one of those lovely ambiguous endings. It's not clear anyway, but if you've been watching the film and got into the story you will notice something is wrong, terribly wrong.

Winters, Dillman and Whitman all personify their different trademark-characters they're experts on: Winters as the nutcase, Dillman as the square bureaucrat and Whitman doing his tough guy-routine, but with a twist - he's a psychic - or is he? The multiple layers of each characters is something very unique, and only Stefano could have made a quite basic thriller like this something really special by introducing so many shades of grey into the lives of our antagonists and protagonists. Dillman, probably among my ten absolutely favourite actors EVER, hasn't that much to do in this film actually. He's mostly locked inside a cage, in the darkness, looking frustrated. But he's still a great presence. Which reminds me of this excellent interview with him, where he also talks about the fact the he rarely said no to any movie offer and therefore did a lot of trash:

"Did I realize a lot of the material I did was schlock? Of course I did! I was constantly endeavouring to find appropriate choices that might cause me to disappear – become a hole in the screen. To take you through some of what I refer to as my ‘atrocities’ – The Swarm was populated by a swarm of stars prostituting themselves. But how could I point a finger at any of them when I was the busiest hooker in the game?"

Shelley Winters of course, as usual, owns the scenes she's in and Whitman, another fine actor, is cool and tough, but interestingly enough he's giving us some weaknesses, somewhere a frail personality just trying to make a buck - yeah, I would say he's, somewhere underneath that cool face, a self-loathing character who's sometimes ashamed of his job as a psychic.

Revenge is a damn fine TV-thriller and you who have seen it, what do you think (SPOILERS): is Bradford Dillman really guilty of what he's accused for?

I hope one day this will come out on a nice, restored DVD. It's worth it!

Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005)

I still remember the surprise when the Swedish state television actually aired this in 2005, probably one of the first showings ever - not counting the Italian TV of course, both because we horror geeks in Sweden could feel a bit unique for the first time ever but also because it was an Argento on Swedish fucking television! Do You Like Hitchcock? is a TV-movie, meant to the first of eight thrillers in the same vein as the work of Alfred Hitchcock. I doubt those other movies ever was produced, or do anyone know something about that? Anyway, Argento got the honour of starting this series and I would say the result turned out pretty interesting.

We start with young Giulio (who later grows up and is played by Elio Germano) discovering two witches performing a animal sacrifice in a deserted cottage deep in the forest. They discover him and they go after him, screaming and waving with a knife. Many years later Giulio is a film student, but his love for voyeurism is still there and he can't stop himself from studying the people in the opposite house, including a young attractive woman who lives with her aggressive mother. One dark night the mother is killed and Giulio puts one and one together and believes that the daughter and an unknown woman has made a deal, just like in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, to switch murders with each other. Soon someone is after Giulio, but he can't stop watching. He must watch...

Those who expects a gory, violent, sexy and typical giallo will be disappointed. This in many, many ways a quite complex tribute to Hitchcock, with several storylines mixed to a new one - and I must say it works quite good. Argento still has the giallo-vibe going with a killer wearing gloves, breathing weirdly and a lot of red herrings. It's a bit dry, a bit low-key, compared to most other films by Argento, but it is a TV-movie and that's probably to blame for the non-spectacular style of the story.

But I must say it works very good. It's a fine little thriller, with cheesy dubbing and a lot of good details. The main - and only - murder is in good Argento-style: violent, bloody and sadistic with a few interesting macro-shots of the door lock. What doesn't work is how the final is written. It has a twist, and even if it could have been interesting the script just moves along in a calm, boring way and the twist gets lost, like they didn't have time to stage the revelation properly - and in the end it's almost as there's no twist. First time I saw it I didn't even notice the twist, but the twist is an anti-twist which could have been very cool if they did it right.

The acting is also very uneven, even if I think the main characters do a good job.

The main theme with Do You Like Hitchcock? is voyeurism, deeply connected with Rear Window of course. Argento seem more interested in the idea of watching, investigating, than the mystery itself. The prologue might seem very detached from the rest of the story, but if you read it as a film about watching you will find that it's very important to why our main character do what he does. When he was a boy he found excitement in discovering something forbidden and this is so rooted in his persona that he can't stop doing it as a grown man. The final moments of the movie has a brilliant montage of him watching, and it kinda puts the signature on what kind of person he his - and always will be.

What's even more interesting is a small detail that Argento added for us who likes to watch, who keeps our eyes open wide. Giulio watched a naked woman in the end. She reads a book, but it's not just a book, it's this book:

La Finestra Sulla Notte, original title The Window at the White Cat (1910), by Mary Roberts Rinehart, one of her first detective stories! What the woman holds is also the 1937 release (or an identical reprint) from the Mondadori publishing house, published in their highly successful series "Il Giallo Mondadori" from 1929 and forward.

Yes, this is the origin of the gialli, the sole reason why Argento ("The Italian Hitchcock) became THE Argento,  the reason why Bava did Blood and Black Lace, why Fulci abandoned comedies and musicals. The reason for so much of the things we love.

This is a tribute and a test. A tribute to what started it all and test to see if we, the viewers, really are voyeurs of Italian genre cinema.

Les Documents Interdits (1989-1991)

Here you have something very interesting and the cause of some controversy even today. Les Documents Interdits (The Forbidden Files) is 12 (and later 13) pieces of film and video collected by filmmaker Jean-Teddy Filippe between 1986 and 1989, all dealing with the unexplained and the paranormal. My partner G saw some of these on Polish TV during the end of the eighties and was really scared and if you search the internet for the address 1036 Sun Ave you will still find discussions about the mystery behind the footage.

The thing is, of course, that everything is fake. A complete hoax conducted by Filippe to show what a powerful medium television is and how easy it is to plant "fact" into the viewers. This was officially declared when the 13th episode was released in 2010, if I've gotten the facts correct. So what the hell is this? This is something you should experience, preferably after the night has entered, maybe alone or with someone dear to you.

It starts with 12 episodes, both found footage and documentaries. We witness a man rise from the water and kidnap a diver, we see a man living without food on a life boat waiting for something, filming his life trying to survive. We see a man visiting a friend and going out in the desert where something makes contact. A wonderful documentary tells the story about Tibor Nagy, who with the help of a UFO, travelled the moon with his car. Cyborgs in Russia, a ghost hunt who goes wrong, live on TV. Episodes telling us about the unexplainable.

Les Documents Interdits is so well made. We're travelling all over the world, in several languages, sometimes the stories seem connected - sometimes not. The water, people who disappears into nothing and SCAR (an organization) comes back from time to time, like an outerworldly conspiracy. Sometimes it's funny and absurd, like the Russian cyborg who get stuck with his hand in a window - or touching like with the aged Tibor Nagy and his trip to the moon. The older episodes is eerie and strange, almost too intimate to look at. Personal tragedies that can't be explained.

This is without a doubt a project that's well before it's time. Sure, you had Cannibal Holocaust, Zelig and Spinal Tap - but this is very far away from these very cinematic experiences. This is the first time we see something that The Blair Witch Project later tried to do, with maybe the exception of the UK TV-movie Alternative 3. Jean-Teddy Filippe also succeeds with doing this because he never fails to let his ego win. There's not credits, not "Look what a fucking brilliant filmmaker I am!"-bullshit. This is hardcore found footage the way it should be.

I'm not saying everyone's gonna like this. It's a bit arty and very weird, especially the first episodes, very "French" if you know what I mean? The second batch of episodes seem to have a higher budget, they seems more planned and with a clear idea behind. This is both good and bad. There's masterpieces like The Madman at the Crossroads and The Ferguson Case, and less focused stuff like The Extraterrestrial. From the first episodes I would say The Witch and Ghosts stands out like stunning pieces in the found footage genre.

The 13th episode, The Examination, is out on Arte's homepage, but I haven't seen it yet. They say it's the beginning of a new season after all these years. So I'm saving it for that perfect lonely night when I need to get really fucked up before sleep.

Maybe tomorrow? Maybe next year. I don't know people, I don't know...

Gold of the Amazon Women (1979)

With a title like Gold of the Amazon Women and produced by Alfred Leone, starring Bo Svenson, Donald Pleasence and Anita Ekberg it would be easy to believe that this is one of those sleazy, violent, Italian jungle-adventures - but hey, believe it or not: this is actually an American TV-movie directed by Mark L. Lester of all people! But don't let that scare you away, because even if it lacks the violence and nudity of the Italian movies it's basically in the same style, just a lot more light-hearted and family-friendly. It even starts like a lot of Italian genre movies from this time: Zombie Flesh-Eaters, Contamination, Zombie Holocaust etc - in New York, something weird happens and our heroes need to travel to South America to solve the mystery!

Bo Svenson plays an adventurer who together with a New York-friend who hates the jungle decides to try to find the "Seven Cities of Gold". But he's not alone in this. Evil drug lord Donald Pleasence and his female bodyguards is also out to get the gold and start a drug emporium like never seen before. Everything is well until Bo and his friend is caught by an angry tribe of Amazons, dressed very lightly, lead by über-queen Anita Ekberg! They kidnap men and use them for breeding! I guess that's both bad AND good for our brave heroes?

Gold of the Amazon Women is an easy-to-watch adventure tale for... almost everyone. People die and the women have very little clothes, but it never becomes nasty or "too sexy". This is actually very typical TV-movie, even if the budget seems a bit higher than usual. The locations, I guess it's shot down in South America somewhere, looks fantastic and it's a big cast and has a couple of nice temple sets. Imagine a good-budgeted Italian adventure flick and you know what you get. Mark L. Lester knows how to get good shots and even if the budget isn't high enough to make any big action scenes it's at least gorgeous to look at.

Regarding the actors. I never been a big fan of Bo Svenson. It's not enough for me that he's Swedish. He's quite flat here, sometimes he looks drunk, and it's more posing than acting. Donald Pleasence, as the veteran he is, makes good use of his flat dialogue and have fun with his part. He's hardly convincing as a dangerous drug lord, and that might also be the point with his character. He's an odd character fitting the comedy of the movie well. Anita Ekberg, my favorite, hasn't much to do - but she's awesome as usual. I guess it has more about her charisma than looks, even she actually looks stunning compared with the boring female army she has around her.

Gold of the Amazon Women was one of those movies that always glanced at me from the shelves at the video store as a kid. I never really glanced back because I wasn't clearly the target audience for a movie about half-naked Amazon women wanting men for breeding, at least that was how the cover texts described it. Now Studio S in Sweden has released it on DVD and it's fantastic that I finally got a chance to see it after so many years. The print is interesting - fullscreen like most TV-movie from that time, but it also seem to pieced together from two prints.  A couple of scenes has a different, lower, quality. That's okey for, because I want the most complete version and this obviously is that.

After a movie like this I need some Fassbinder to re-animate my brain cells, but it was worth the time!

Metal Tornado (2011)

Cheap and generic isn't just my life in three words, it's also a part of exploitation movies since the dawn of movie history. It's nothing wrong with being generic, it's part of the game - and the best game for generic scripts is the disaster genre. I think we all can agree that not one single disaster movie is an original movie - and don't defend the 70's masterpieces in the genre, they stole everything from melodrama-king Douglas Sirk and older disaster movies like San Francisco, Deluge and When Worlds Collide. It's also my favourite genre and I never grow tired of seeing either miniatures or CG models getting torn aparts by natural disasters. It's all the same to me.

SyFy Channel has been a saviour of disaster porn for a number of years, spurting out cheap flicks over and over again. After other storm-themed movies like Ba'al: The Storm God and Ice Twister, NYC: Tornado Terror and Space Twister comes Metal Tornado - a movie I don't think is a SyFy original to be honest, but belongs to that specific genre and got released on the channel last years. What makes it interesting for me, as a trash aficionado, is that it's a Canadian production and produced by my favourite exploitation man: Pierre David! Yeah? You know him I hope? He produced Dolly Dearest and Scanner Cop - and yeah, a bunch of David Cronenberg's films. Good, I knew that you knew who he is...

Lou Diamond Philips is Michael Edwards, some blahablaha-scientist, living alone with a troubled teenage son. He's dating his co-worker Rebecca (Nicole de Boer) and that causes some friction between him and his son. Anyway! He's working on a new energy source: taking power from sun flares, sucking it down with some weird space machines into gigantic battery packs down on earth. Something like that. Of course something goes wrong and the energy creates a magnetic tornado who starts to eat every metal thing it can find and of course it's going towards Philadelphia! How can Michael and his team stop it? Will he make peace with his son? Will everyone hug each other in the end? Watch the movie and you'll see...

Seriously, for me - as a very forgiving fan of cheap TV movies - this was quite OK. There's absolutely NOTHING original with it. The story goes from one metal tornado-incident to another - just like a creature feature from SyFy, and Lou Diamond Philips is a good hero running around looking worried, sitting behind computers looking worried, hugging survivors looking worried. I like Lou, no doubt about it. He's good and even if this was an easy paycheck he delivers some acting - which is rare in these movies.

The effects are mostly very cheap (surprise!), but effective. The tornado itself looks silly like hell, but I can buy it just because the story never drags. This is a movie for people who wants to sleep when watching it, just to wake up when some disaster happens. I mean, I can't even pretend any of you will like it - but I like it and that's the most important thing with the movies here at Ninja Dixon!

I have an avid reader who always comments on my blog, and he/she wanted to read about a SyFy movie and here's one for you! Hope you enjoy it!

Cyclops (2008)

This blog needs more reviews of SyFy Originals, ain't that true? So why don't kickstart this year with yet another classic from the masters of TV-movies! Cyclops is one of the better productions to come from this controversial channel, and it's mostly because it's produced by Roger and Julie Corman, written by his long-time collaborator Frances Doel and made with using left-over sets from a cancelled TV-series about ancient Rome. A classic Corman-idea, use something old to make something new. Cheap and dirty, and very effective.

Kevin Stapleton is Marcus, a soldier for the Roman Empire. He's given the mission by emperor Tiberius Caesar (Eric Roberts) to catch the violent and man-eating Cyclops who just eaten one merchant to much in the forests surrounding Rome. He do so, but when he's back he quickly falls into disfavour from the emperor and is sentence to be... a GLADIATOR! Hooray, because we all love gladiators! (Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?). Anyway, of course the Cyclops is involved in the fun and happy gladiator games and this is also the chance for Marcus to make revolt against the tyrannical Tiberius Caesar and his hordes of sleazy henchmen!

To be fair, it's not much of a story, but Doel certainly fills the story with action and violence and a few corny dialogues here and there. Not bad and it works, because you never get a chance to be bored. The direction by Declan O'Brien is slick and professional, which is surprising because I was very disappointed by his other works in the same genre, Savage Planet and Monster Ark. Cyclops seem to have a slightly, but very slightly, bigger budget - but that could also seem so because they had the chance to use the sets of another production (with a lot bigger budget). Like every other movie shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, this also features the local talents of Velizar Binev and Raicho Vasilev. Good actors and nice familiar exploitation faces.

I also love good actors slumming in low-budget movies, and Eric Roberts is no exception. He look a bit tired and yes, even bored, but do his classic bad guy routine and gives the cast some extra weight. A fun detail is that the Bulgarian cast mostly is dubbed with voices of some heavy English accents, which is nice because of tradition a lot of English actors has acted in big historical epics, often has Romans.

Cyclops is also one of the gorier movies to first be released on the SyFy Channel. We're not talking advanced stuff, but quite well-made and blood spurting decapitations, ripped of legs, chopped of heads + some violent bites from the Cyclops himself (who by the way looks ridiculous,  in a very uneven CG animated version). But it has enough of the red stuff to make me happy.

For fans of TV-movies, Corman-productions and Eric Roberts sleeping through his paycheck. Don't we all love stuff like that? 

Closed Circuit (1978)

Sometimes you see a movie that you never have heard of before and have no expectations about, and many of these movies turns out to be a lot better than I ever could imagine. Why? Maybe because no one have hyped - or hated - them and they stayed fresh because of the lack of interest from the cult movie community. Closed Circuit is a TV-movie from 1978, and even if some people call it giallo I'm not so sure I would consider it one. Sure, a giallo in Italy is a thriller/mystery with none, one or several murders. Even if Closed Circuit actually has three deaths and at a first glance is a thriller, it's more of an absurd black comedy with a healthy dose of Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury.

It's time for cinema! A spaghetti western matinée with Giuliano Gemma and William Berger in the leads, I Giorno Dell'Ira (not to be confused with the 1967 classic with Van Cleef and Gemma). The audience is gathering. We have the young couple, the dirty old man spending more time on the toilet than watching the movie, a man and a woman having a secret affair in the darkness, a hysterical man who don't want to be disturbed by anything, two gangsters waiting for a "business companion" etc. Everyone from every part of society. During the last act, the dramatic duel, a man in the audience gets shot exactly when Gemma shoots first. He dies and within seconds panic strikes. The police seals the cinema very fast and keeps the whole audience locked up, while they're trying to figure out who's the killer is and where the weapon is hidden... but soon a second murder, identical to the first, happens right under their nose and the police gets more and more perplexed...

Closed Circuit is first of all a celebration to cinema and how the movies can work as a second reality that can affect us in the same way as real life. The movie is filled with movie posters, which is natural because it's set at a cinema, but it's only genre posters. A huge billboard of Paul Leder's  insane A.P.E (under it's Italian title Super Kong) adorns the outside wall, the lobby has a gorgeous posters of Tentacoli and in the room where the police interrogates everyone Mimsy Farmer looks down from a very nice poster of The Perfume of the Lady in Black. The movie on the screen is a fictional western made to look like the real deal (but I suspect that some of the footage comes from California, a western with Gemma and Berger from 1977). The mystery becomes even more a mystery towards the end, but is not the most important thing in the movie. What's strong about Closed Circuit is it's fantastic gallery of characters, all with their own secrets and agendas and how some of them starts to enjoy being prisoners in the cinema, demanding food, cigarettes, 12 different TV's (one for each channel). The most fascinating character is the first victim, a character we know very little about, but somehow creates the situation with his almost absurd interest in the moving pictures.

Don't expect blood and nudity in Closed Circuit, it's still an Italian TV-movie quite far away from the budget and spectacle of the cinema thrillers from the same time. But it's also a damn fine and intelligent movie, original and almost spooky. It has one sequence that gave me goosebumps because it was so intense, so magical and so macabre with very small means. It's not out on any official DVD what I know, but a TV-rip is able to download and is also used at the bootleg I have, from ZDD Visual Media.

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Between 2-9 of November American Film Market had it's annual convention where a lot of movie deals are done. I would love to go there someday, just for window shopping and getting free candy and pens from the booths belonging to every hopeful distributor on the planet. Anyway, I heard somewhere - and I don't know if it's true or not - that around 250 zombie movies was for sale this year! Seems like the market is a bit over-saturated with the living dead. I'm not saying it's 250 BAD zombie movies, but I'm sure the majority of these are utter trash. Therefore I decided to check out what TV had to offer, and I felt SyFy's Zombie Apocalypse was the way to go. Produced by controversial company The Asylum, a gang of people who proudly make professional low budget versions of big budget blockbusters. Zombie Apocalypse was probably, somewhere along the road, inspired by the success of The Walking Dead, but that's about it. This is it's own universe, and believe me or not, but it works quite good.

A couple of months after the zombie epidemic wiped out 90 percent of the earths population, and the governments - trying to stop the spreading of the virus - bombed us all to hell with electromagnetic pulse bombs, we're completely fucked. We join a couple of old friends, wandering aimlessly outside on the countryside. After one of them bites the dust by the hands of zombies, another gang of more professional zombie-hunters saves them and together they continue a city where a boat will meet them and take the to the Catalina Island. But the road there is dangerous and the zombies are slowly getting smarter and more vicious. There's several kind of zombies to look out for, both running and walking - and then we have the animals... Will they make it?! I won't tell you of course, but come on, this is a SyFy movie!

I've seen more than a few zombie flicks during the last years, or related - like mutated people, people with an aggressive illness etc. I guess this one falls in-between, because the zombies (which they are called) both shows signs of being dead and having a virus of some kind. I guess they die fast and then become living deadheads! Some have been stinkers, some have been good and some a little bit of both. UK-African co-production The Dead was a disappointment and I can't recommend it at all, Serbian Apocalypse of the Dead was trashy fun, the Mattei-flicks was cheap and great, I dig the Resident Evil-franchise... and even if some people says the opposite, I would say that Nick Lyon's Zombie Apocalypse belongs with the good one's. But this is still a TV-movie, made on a fairly low budget and extremely generic. If you can handle those facts, you're in for a treat.

The script is pretty straight forward, which could have been a failure - because no one likes a boring zombie movie. But the story is built up with a good amount of tension and likable characters. You have zombie attacks every ten minute or so, but they never get repetitive. There's a point with every attack, from killing of a character to introduce the characters to a new adventure. It helps that the zombie make-up is good (I was a bit worried when I saw the behind the scenes-stills at The Asylum's homepage, but you can't compared unprocessed stills with the finished product) and the dialogue is down to a minimum. Because I HATE when people talk just for the sake of talking, and in low budget movies that means that the script isn't good enough. Here they talk when they need to, and usually say good stuff. Most importantly they made the world, or the US, look deserted and post-apocalyptic, which is very impressive considering the budget, and adds to the atmosphere.

Gore? Well, this is a movie made for the SyFy Channel, but it could be the bloodiest SyFy production I've seen. True to The Asylum's traditions the gore is digital, but it's used in such a frenzy that it works fine. A lot of heads is being chopped off, body parts and blood spurting and a high body count - and an even higher zombie count. I'm not sure if the SyFy version was edited for violence, it usually happens on that channel, but if so I hope there will be an even bloodier version on BD as soon as possible!

Flood (1976)

The beauty with Irwin Allen is how he cast his productions, always very competent character actors – even in the main roles, and always some old movie star. It’s the last thing I appreciate extra much. It’s similar to how Swedish director Arne Mattsson worked, always gave the old-timers something to do, let them be a star in something bigger. In Flood Richard Basehart and Gloria Stuart represents the classic generation of actors, and of course both of them is excellent. But Flood is mainly a man’s movie, a manly man’s movie. Robert Culp, Martin Milner and Cameron Mitchell, all three middle aged men with young hot girlfriends!

Story? Yes, it’s the same as always. A coming disaster in form of a poorly constructed dam, a small town with a mayor that refuses to believe in that something so absurd as a dam-disaster can happen and the man of warning himself, the all American hero (with his buddy, the tough helicopter pilot). And then the dam bursts and…yeah, you all know it by now!

Nothing bad with clichés, I love them, and Flood indeed delivers some of the most juicy clichés since Earthquake! Everything from the boy-in-peril to pregnant-woman-in-peril to the meeting with the officials that ends with them not believe in our hero – and everything in-between! The budget is slightly higher than Cave In and here there are actually extras, and bigger sets… and a miniature of the dam! And visual effects! And even a stunt or two! Not much of course, because the main effect scene is when the dam bursts and then we’re treated to some stock footage, a couple of scenes where water is flooding into houses and over streets. Not much visible casualties as usual in Allen’s TV-productions.

But Flood is something for us that loves and appreciate TV-movies. It’s often effectively told with out to much unnecessary scenes, and it’s always guaranteed political correct – in that special seventies way we all like. It’s a movie made by pros, and I can’t complain about anything special, except maybe that it – as always – needs more disasters to feel really spectacular! Robert Culp and Cameron Mitchell is favourites of mine, especially Mitchell who was one of the most underrated actors of his generation. Here’s a weird thing, Roddy McDowall, another fantastic man and actor, shows up in the beginning – but then he kinda disappears! Maybe I looked away the moment he died or departed from the story in some other way. Weird!

Flood is out from Warner Archive in a great-looking release, and like the other in their Irwin Allen-collection, this is a must for the serious disaster- and TV-movie fanatic.

Cave In! (1983)

Shot in 1979, but not released until 1983, Cave In! clearly feels a lot more seventies than eighties. Produced by Irwin Allen, this TV-movie with a disaster theme was one of several he produced for Warner and now, thru Warner Archive, they’re finally out on DVD. For me, as an Irwin Allen-o-holic this is fantastic, even if I read mostly negative opinions about these made for TV-disasters. But I know what I want, and I’m not disappointed…

Senator Kate Lassiter (Susan Sullivan) is on her way to visit the Five Mile Caverns, to see if they still can be open to the public. One of the guides is her ex-boyfriend, Ranger Gene Pearson (Dennis Cole) and this will be a tense situation! At the same time an escaped convict, Tom Arlen (James Olson) manages to hide in the cave after killing a police! But the worst thing is of course the marriage between ex-cop Joe Johnson (Leslie Nielsen) and his wife Liz (Julie Sommars) who are on a trip to try to piece it together again… and do I even have to mention the manipulative and controlling professor Harrison Soames (Ray Milland) who keeps his grown-up daughter in symbolic chains. When the cave suddenly caves in, our gang of wandering clichés is stuck there and must survive to get to the ground level again, and at the same time fix their problematic relationships!

Yes, this is Irwin Allen all the way, but with a small budget and a set consisting of a papier maché cave and a dramatic flashback for each character! To be honest, and we all know it, this is not original. This is a TV-movie of the week, with a script tossed together from a lot of other movies that has been done (Irwin Allen “remaked” one scene a couple of years later for When Time Ran Out…), but it also has that amazing TV-coziness that we rarely find nowadays. I can imagine how the family, but not the youngest, gathered in front of the telly to watch the latest Friday-movie with a bowl of popcorn and dad holding a beer in one hand and with his other arm around his wife’s shoulders (I also see brown or orange wallpaper, but that was only if it was released in 1979 instead of 1983).

The cave obviously is a symbol for relationship-hell. If you get thru it you’ll survive and can live happily ever after. The drama works, especially because of the very fine performance of Leslie Nielsen as the bitter ex-cop and Julie Sommars as his desperate wife. Good stuff. Ray Milland calls in his performance, but his character is also so twisted and evil that it’s hard not to be fascinated by him. When his daughter finally breaks up with him (I just don’t consider that a spoiler) I got goosebumps.

Action? Yeah, there’s some falling cave-walls, a diving-scene and a good sequence with our gang trying to get over a very weak bridge (also see the volcano-movie with Paul Newman…), which is not bad at all considering the budget.

I love old TV-movies and Cave In was a pleasure to finally see. Nothing new under the sun of course, but a couple of solid hours of entertainment. And please Warner Archive, release the longer version of When Time Ran Out… on DVD so I can buy it!

Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe (2005)

An ambitious title for a very cheap movie, Vampire Wars is actually a very fun and entertaining pilot for a TV-show that never was realized on the channel formerly known as The Sci-Fi Channel. It’s a tongue-in-cheek mix of horror and action, with some healthy but not to annoying doses of humour.

A crew of vampire-hunters is roaming the universe, killing vampires and making jokes with each other. One day a new member arrives, the young and ambitious Damian (Dominic Zamprogna) who are suppose to be the one that will be captain after tough-guy Churchill (Joe Lando). After a disastrous mission Damian is left alone in command with his skeptical group of vampire-killers under him. But one mission is left, and they’re forced to follow him…

This is a very cheap production, but wait. It’s not cheap in a bad way. First of all, we have this whole universe where every planet looks like some Canadian backwoods-forest, including old warehouses. The computer animations leading to each planet it something that was primitive even in 2003 and everything, from the sets to the clothes look homemade. What really makes this movie worth watching is the slick direction by Matthew Hastings and the nice cinematography (I guess, 35mm) and the cool vampires and random monsters showing up to enlighten the story.

Universe is based on different vampire-tribes, two of them are The Voorhees and Leatherfaces. Another one is like a parasite-worm who controls its victims and makes them hunger for human flesh. The Leatherfaces is the most primitive, with human skin on their faces and spears and stuff. The Voorhees is the typical punk-goth-hybrids with bad hygiene. Leader of them are Michael Ironside, who seem to have a lot of fun in his performance.

The gore is not bad at all, mostly blood that spurts everywhere, but a few gory impalings, limb-rippings and lots of gory aftermath too - way more than a lot of other SyFy-movies. Vampire Wars is one of those “b-movies” that knows what it is and never hides that fact that the budget was a dime or two, but still manages to delivers good entertainment, blood, a quite witty script and lots of adventure to the audience.

For us who are much into monster-movies there’s a fun surprise at the desert-planet, the monster from The Terror Within 1 and 2 makes a cameo! Yes, it shows up very unexpected and tries to kill our heroes! Not to surprising, because the producer of this movie is Andrew Stevens who starred in The Terror Within 1 and 2 (and even was the director of the last one!).

If you find it for a buck or two, this is a movie I can recommend.

Draugasaga (1987)

I’ve been a movie collector for quite a lot of years right now, and there’s always been three titles that someone seen on television and want to see again: Sekmisja, Månguden and Det Spökar i TV-huset. All three was shown on Swedish television and forever imprinted in the minds of Swedish kids. The first one is of course a famous Polish sci-fi comedy, the second one was long gone, but released on DVD in Sweden in 2010. The last one, Draugasaga, a TV-movie from Iceland by Viðar Víkingsson has been a holy grail for some people, including me. I saw it as a kid, and maybe 15 years ago I saw a shoddy bootleg-VHS at a friends place and then it was gone again. Until now.

Everything is set in the TV-house, the public service television of Iceland. A new kid is hired to be a night watchman. The old watchman is going to quit, and is very afraid of the ghost that haunts the place, a red-haired woman who is very dangerous, especially if she have a big sledgehammer in her hands… Our hero is getting more and more obsessed by the ghost-legend, and his relationship with his girlfriend – who works at the TV-house – is getting more strained. At the same time, a red-haired ghost is getting more active with her sledge hammer…




Most of them who saw the movie when it first aired on Swedish television probably only remember the more visual part, the woman with the hair in front of her face, the sledge hammer outside the elevator, the attack outside on the street. Strong visuals, eerie atmosphere and something that was new to most of us. Draugasaga is much more than so, a weird relation-drama, maybe a form of satire over television, a dream-like story about the past meeting the future. I appreciate all of this, but especially when it mixed with some excellent and creepy horror images.

It clearly has a TV-feeling, that special quality that you will recognize from BBC or Scandinavian TV from the same time. This seems to be shot on film though, and has some very nice cinematography and slow but effective editing. The pace is slow, but there is not one boring second in the movie. One bizarre thing leads to something other weird, and goes to horror and then some kitchen-sink drama. A very unique approach to a ghost-movie I would say.

Viðar Víkingsson has crafted a pearl of a movie, something that will grow on the viewer. For some of us it created nightmares for years after, it became a legend – and well deserved so. But does it still hold up? Yes, it does. Very well indeed, and if you are used to TV-productions from the seventies and eighties this is the movie for you – if you can find it of course...

Sharktopus (2010)

I was very fond of Roger Cormans earlier SyFy-production Cyclops, with Eric Roberts and some impressive left-over sets from a bigger production, so it was with joy I heard the news about Sharktopus – the best creature feature-title ever? But if that’s not enough, Sharktopus also gives us a performance by Brent Huff, the mega-star from Strike Commando 2, Born to Fight, Nine Deaths of the Ninja and a lot more classics from the eighties.

The main idea with creating such a monster like Sharktopus is that the US military will have something to use against drug smugglers! It’s controlled by a remote, but after an accident the Sharktopus looses its remote and is out to kill, kill and kill!!! Eric Roberts is the inventor of our hero, and her daughter co-inventor. Now they need to catch it before it can kill, kill, kill even more!!!

Jaja, as we say in Sweden. The story is so-so. Nothing special. The typical creature feature storyline used a billion times on the SyFy Channel and since the dawn of monster movies. Like The Asylums latest monster movies, Sharktopus has its tongue firmly placed in the cheek and has at least one Sharktopus-attack ever ten minute. Everything is computer graphics, except a few rubber-tentacles here and there, but fits good to the glossy, sunshine style of the movie. It feels like a commercial for shampoo or some ab-fitness machine, but with very silly dialogue and a huge tentacle-monster munching half-naked hunks and babes.

But the highlight of the movie is the attacks, which is many and often very entertaining. The best one is already a classic, the bungey jump-kill, but I like when the Sharktopus is attack the WORST dance troupe in movie history and eat’s them one by one. He probably did something that the dance critics probably just dreamt about doing. Another victim is a poor worker who’s screaming “No, not like this” when the monster grabs him, and that after talking with his colleague about death!

I wonder if this line echoes the famous one from Night of the Lepus? It says everything about the movie:

"Excuse me! Everyone! There's a killer shark-octopus hybrid heading this way! So please leave the marina in a timely fashion!"

Sharktopus is a great movie for fans of stupid shark-movies (I’m looking at you Jocke!) and I can’t wait to own it on DVD – or even better, blu-ray (but I guess that never will happen)!

Abominable (2006)

It’s time for Ryan Schifrin to make a sequel to Abominable, because with his talent and the quality of this creature feature it can’t go bad – and the ending is a perfect, well-used cliché which actually works. It’s a low budget movie, which can be noticed with the crappy pre-credits graphics, but the rest is so damn on-the-spot that it’s difficult to understand this was a SyFy Original Movie when it was released in 2006.

Matt McCoy (in a great performance, one of the few really likable heroes I’ve seen in recent years) is trapped in a wheelchair after a climbing-accident that also killed his wife. After six months the doctors think he’s read to go back to his own home, in the shadow of the mountain that killed her, together with a male nurse, Otis (Christien Tinsley, who also was the creature effects coordinator). It don’t take long until something is lurking outside the house, and soon our hero will witness how the young beautiful women in the house next door is picked off one by one…

No, it’s not Jason… It’s Bigfoot!

Actually, if you mix the Bigfoot-legend with Friday the 13^th and Rear Window you will get Abominable, and what a wonderful mix. Ryan Schifrin handles the direction as a pro and the style is old-school, calm and genuinely thrilling. He learned from the old masters, and it’s hard not to feel involved in the characters. McCoy as Preston Rogers is the best written character, and everything evolves around him. We’re seeing most of what’s happening from his point of view and not one single time are we visiting the opposite house by “ourselves”. Exactly like in Rear Window. The girls are good, but they have little to work with. Most of the supporting parts is played by excellent character actors like Jeffrey Combs, Lance Henriksen (who seem to enjoy playing just an ordinary guy!), Paul Gleason, Rex Linn and Dee Wallace.

The monster itself is fantastic. A classic man in suit, but with a very freaky face and tall as a house. He also delivers some very fun and nasty gore-scenes and the havoc he’s creating in the girls house is so cool. Some very smart editing makes everything seem more spectacular and advanced. He looks a lot like Jack Elam too, which makes it even scarier. A slightly human face which makes us connect to the creature a little bit more, and it feels more like a huge motherf**king hairy killer than a typical Bigfoot.

It’s been talk about a sequel ever since this movie became a huge success on TV and DVD, and it would have been a fantastic opportunity to spin this movie up one notch. More monsters, more gore, more cool characters – and hopefully Matt McCoy back in the wheelchair.

I’ll cross my fingers!

It's 5 x SyFy!

Most critics have the wrong approach to the production from SyFy (former Sci-Fi Channel). Even if they know what to expect, they have to whine and cry over crappy CG, silly scripts, uneven acting and absurd storylines. Why do they continue to bash these productions? I have no idea, but personally I think most of them has some good entertainment value – and some is more or less unwatchable.

Since Saturday I’ve been focusing to turn of my brain by watching five different SyFy-productions, all quite different from each other. I had a great time. I also started to watch Shark in Venice, with the Republican cover-boy Stephen Baldwin (obviously high on something), but first of all – it’s no an official SyFy-movie and second, it was crap – so I couldn’t finish it. Which is very rare in my house.

I started with House of Bones (2010), a haunted house-flick directed by Jeffery Scott Lando and with Corin Nemec in an extended cameo. This was a lot more fun that I thought it would be. The whole thing is a send up on reality ghost-hunting shows, with a wonderful and perfect pastiche on the credit sequence of a show called Sinister Sites. Hosted by Quentin French (Nemec) and his crew of ghost-hunters, this time visiting the terrible Wicker House. It won’t take long until they realize the house is a living being itself (with flesh inside the walls!) and starts killing them off one by one. Fun movie, creative and with good acting and some minor and nice gore.

After watching Corin Nemec in House of Bones I felt I finally needed to take a look at the notorious S.S. Doomtrooper (2006)! I don’t think it never been released on DVD and I didn’t find it on Nemec’s official page, which is a pity because it’s a very fun and quite violent WW2-movie with nice production values and probably one of the worst CG-creatures I’ve ever seen. A Nazi-Hulk! Expect this visual effect, this is a nice decent adventure-movie – and I think you all could be entertained by it. If I was the producer I would go back now, redo the CG-monster and release it again.

To much Nemec is not good, at least not in one day – so I decided to support Lou Diamond Phillips instead. Carny (2009) is a slightly more expensive movie than the first two. Excellent directing by Sheldon Wilson and a nice creature, both as a physical and digital effect. The Carnival-set is of course great, and so also the “freaks” there. Lou Diamond Phillips looks old, but he feels a lot more relaxed as a middle aged sheriff than the other parts I’ve seen him in recently. It also has a fun take on religious fanatism, which makes it the only SyFy-production I’ve seen with some kinda political standpoint.

Next up is Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Aztec Rex (2007)! Made on a very low budget, shot in 15 days on Hawaii… this is better than I first thought. It took some time to accept and get used to the very, very, very bad CG-dinosaur and the very, very, very, very bad wig on Ian Ziering’s (Why him? I would have chosen Dean Cain here) head, but after that it became a quite decent adventure-movie with some gore, gorgeous locations and the worlds smallest Aztec-community. But the story, with dirty, evil Spaniards coming to find some gold in Mexico works better and better and I was never bored. And yes, Ian Ziering is Cortes. Weirdest miscasting since Charlton Heston as a Mexican.

I saved the best for last, Sea Beast (2008)! Directed by my old favourite Paul Ziller and with... Corin Nemec as a grumpy old fisherman! Maybe not that old, but old enough to have a 17 year old daughter! Excellent cinematography and a bigger look make this one of the best SyFy-movies I’ve seen for a long while. The creatures are cool too, some two-legged fuckers that spits poison and then rips you to pieces. The gore is mostly after-the-fact, but it’s far from bloodless and has one great graphic gore-scene! Ziller is bothing mixing rubber-effects and CG and everything looks quite good. Nemec is convincing as the fisherman too, though I was very sceptical in the beginning.

So, five classics! :) Now I need to see something with depth and proper character development, so I can regain some brain cells!

Stonehenge Apocalypse (2010)

I think the most important ingredient to make a fun b-movie is to be fucking serious with what you do, or else it fails and it just get's boring. It's the same thing with other media, if you're gonna do a quickie exploitation-movie, do it like the big guys. No, sorry. Do it even more serious, then you will create cinematic magic. Stonehenge Apocalypse is far from a masterpiece, but the talented director Paul Ziller knows this, but still try to deliver as much as possible for very little money. The story is so far the most absurd, but fun, in the history of the SyFy Channel.

Misha Collins plays fringe scientist and general nuthead ("I never said it's aliens on the moon, I said it's a robot head"), a former boy genius but nowadays running a conspiracy themed radio show and talking to other nutheads. He notices an energy burst at the site of Stonehenge and this leads him to the craziest story ever told: Stonehenge is really an ancient mechanism who's connected to a huge underground Egyptian pyramid in Maine! His friend Leshem (Hill Harper), another more serious scientist has just discovered the pyramid and sets everything in motion with some ancient mumbo jumbo. This trigger every darn pyramids to transform themselves to volcanos and destroying everything for hundred miles around them. The only key to stop this end-of-the-world machine is the world famous The Antikythera Mechanism!!!

So this mixes everything from Stonehenge to pyramides, ancient technology and the mythology of 2012. It's a lot of fun and though the budget was low, there's not one boring second. The dialogue is witty and is performed by a bunch of talented actors who seem to have a lot of fun here. Misha Collins is really good as the hero, and I hope he will show up in more SyFy movies in the future. Most of the effects are cheap CG, but it works better than you would think - probably because of the absurd storyline - and it looks kinda cool when the pyramids transform themselves to violent volcanos. It's a pity more money wasn't spent on the actually disasters, because I would have loved to see some more mayhem.

Stonehenge Apocalypse seems like something that was made up during lunch. A couple of fun ideas tossed together to one story and even if the science is gone with the wind, it's an engaging story. A lot of the script is people sitting behind computer and watching earth grids, TV-footage of disaster areas and some inside quarreling about nuking Stonehenge or not. But we're also getting a crazy sect, some bloody squibs, some action, volano eruptions and Papier-maché Stonehenge zapping tourists to death with death-lasers!

Good, old-fashioned, cheap fun. I love you Paul Ziller. Never stop making movies.

Månguden (1988)

In 1988 Jonas Cornells Månguden was shown on Swedish public television and left scars in many young views or many, many years. The movie itself was only shown twice that year, and until now it's been surrounded my legends and rumours. But finally, it's out on DVD. Personally I've been searching for it during many years. In 2005 I was very close to get a copy from composer Jan Tolf, but he died during our mail conversation and I just felt that it was pointless to search anymore. But now it's out and it was interesting to see if it was as scary as I remember it...

Tomas Laustiola is John Vinge, a Swedish-Finnish cop that's responsible to catch a brutal serial killer. This unknown maniac slaughters innocent families out camping, with a HUGE machete. He or she is also dressed in a black robe and a creepy African mask, the mask of the Moon God. To really mess up the minds of the police the killer films his evil deeds and let the police have it as a gift.

Vinge, an alcoholic and a victim of an abusive father - also an ex-cop, is tired of being a nobody. He continues the investigation together with Erland Salander (Per Myrberg), a profiler who has retired because of a nervous breakdown. Together they find that more and more clues leads to the Ethnographic Museum where two mysterious researchers work, a woman that attracts Vinge's attention and the creepy Andreas Gregor (the always f**king brilliant Heinz Hopf). But more life's are at stake, and the killer is getting more and more brutal...



... and no, it's not nearly as scary as I remember it! But this is still a really great little thriller which has no connections at all with the typical slasher, It has more nods to the Italian giallo and American thriller actually. The pace is quite slow, but filled with tension and mostly good and great acting. The dialogue can, as usual with Swedish productions, be a bit stiff - but the actors do their best and they all feel convincing. It also looks great and has some creative visual touches that very few other Swedish TV-productions have. Jonas Cornell did a very fine job here.

As a movie made for Swedish television this is unique in many ways. First of all, it dares to be commercial with some brilliant set pieces and spectacular backstories. The red herrings are shameless and honest, and the concept with lost and found footage works extremely well. It's not only the footage that the killer leaves (which is really eerie), there's also another surprise later on in the movie with reminds me of Cannibal Holocaust of all movies! Yeah, it’s a long shot – but I’m sure you know what I mean when you see it. As a Swedish production from this time is also quite violent, but compared to what we see today - or earlier in other countries cinema - it's weak. It has one graphic murder though, and some brutal shots of the killer dragging people out from their tents and whacking them with a machete.






It starts of as a normal Scandinavian cop-movie, but evolves into something more colourful and odd. It has hidden documents, silent movies, murders, old artifacts, a childhood-trauma worthy of Dario Argento, a masked killer with black gloves and even a supernatural touch which I love. It's been hyped over the years for being scary, but it's just more than scary: It's a damn fine little TV-movie which holds your interest from the beginning to the end.

I was surprised to see how good it was after all these year, and to be honest - I prefer this one before all these trillion fucking boring Beck, Wallander and Van Veeteren-movies that being produced every day. Here's a movie that borrows heavily from the European genre cinema and feels proud of that. For once there’s a Swedish movie that could be called international and actually wants to do something with a tired genre.

After all these years, Månguden still delivers.

MegaFault (2009)

I've been collecting the movies from Asylum for a while now and getting more and more surprised. There's still not much originality, but I never been in the movie-collecting business for unique experiences - even if I love those when I get a chance to see one. People who praises Asian and European rip-offs from the eighties and at the same time think it's disgusting to see The Asylum make a buck or two by doing the exact same thing are just hypocrites. This is what exploitation-movies are. I'm not saying Asylums movies are masterpieces, but I don't think the old classics in the genre are masterpieces either, and some of them are very bad - like Alien vs Hunter. Today I've seen MegaFault, an "original", story. But obviously inspired by 2012 (which makes it the third 2012-inspired movie from Asylum so far) and a lot of other older and new disaster movies. 

Brittany Murphy stars as Dr. Amy Lane, a geologist (or seismologist... or whatever) that together with her boss, Dr. Mark Rhodes (Bruce Davison) discovers that the world is about to end. After saving an explosives expert, Boomer (Eriq La Salle), from an early death, they together tries to stop the disaster: a hug crack in the world, threatening to go all around our dear globe (which echoes Andrew Martonäs lovely A Crack in the World from 1965) and killing us all! At the same time Dr Amy's family is in danger and of course she wants to save them to!

Not much of a story, but this is a competent made SyFy Channel-movie with a trio of good actors that don't sleep through their performances. Eriq La Salle could be the new black Arnold Vosloo (they have an uncanny resemblance in this movie) and Bruce Davison is a more than competent character-actor who gives some credibility to the movie. If I was heterosexual I would marry Brittany Murphy the way she was and looked ten years ago, but here she's not looking well at all. Thin and pale, and sometime it seems like she's shaking. But she still makes a good job, thought it probably was a paycheck-job. A sad thing she left us so early. 

But a disaster movie is all about the disasters of course. MegaFault is The Asylums most expensive movie so far, and it looks big and slick. But compared to 2012 it's a cheap, cheap movie. But we're treated to a lot of disasters, mostly earthquakes where the effects goes from primitive to really impressive. What makes them work even better is that the camera is moving all the time, either on the ground or during arial shots - so that fools us to believe it's more real than it is. A static shot in low budget movies like this are often less convincing, and director David Michael Latt knows his homework. The best stuff is the huge arial footage where cities and landscapes a crumbling underneath us, and some of the avalanche-stuff looks great too. There's also a volcano, but we see very little of this and the lava and heat-effects is quite boring. 

Not a bad b-movie at all, and now I'm waiting for 2012: Doomsday directly from my favorite Thai shop, so hopefully I'll be enjoying that movie in a week or so. But I'm sure there will be more The Asylum-movies until then, whether you like it or not!