The first teaser for Ong Bak 3!

I consider part 2 one of the best films I saw last years, a magnificent and powerful martial arts-drama. And here's the teaser for the next part, some of it was shot at the same time as last one, and hopefully this production had a more peaceful shooting than Tony Jaa's directorial debut.

Shriek of the Mutilated (1974)

Yeah, this is utter trash. Quite fun trash, but still one of those movies that not even the most retarded IMDB-user would write "At least better than those modern movies with CGI instead of REAL effects" about. Shriek of the Mutilated is another of those billions of Bigfoot-related movies (in this movie it's a Yeti though, but it's more or less the same thing - only that I think that a Yeti belongs in the Himalayas and not in some American backyard) that came in the seventies. It looks like a porn movie and the actors are on the same level, but still... it has some demented charm after all.

A couple nobodys arrives to a big house close to the forest. It's fall, and it's gray and rainy all the time. The only fun thing is their mission to catch the aggressive Yeti, which is a guy in a really bad Yeti-suit jumping around acting like he was a gorilla. Then they walk around, have long meaningless dialogues, a lot of trees and leafs, and when you least expect it, a non-gory Yeti-attack and finally a very stupid and silly ending that just don't make sense.

If you haven't seen any of these ultra-low budget cheapo-movies from the backwoods of the US, this can be a good start. It's not the best movie, but it's like watching a accident, it's hard to look away. The script is everywhere, the horror is nowhere, but unfortunately you are still there in front of the TV watching the disaster unfold. The actors pretending their acting in a school play, but they are older and more pretentious, and the person responsible for the lightning just decided to turn the lights at that the scene to make everything as bright as possible, and that's it. Simple, effective and very unsuccessful. The cinematography is okey most of the time though, but looks cheap and is cheap. Angles and editing is right some local TV-commercial.

Gore? Yes, as I mention there's nothing to talk about and the few drops of gore is badly edited and hardly visible. It could have been more spicy with some cheesy gore, a little bit more blood - not matter how badly executed it could have been. Just to make it a bit more fun to watch.

Do I sound very negative? Yes, but I also enjoyed this piece of trash - a lot. Sure, it took me two hours to watch it, because I always found good reasons to check my Facebook all the time. And get something to drink in the kitchen. Or play with the cat, cuddle with my bf, or just do something else. But finally the end-titles was rolling, and the last scenes was quite fun to be honest - and there's a reason for the Yeti to look so crappy... so overall, a fun grindhouse-flick which is trashy enough to see together with some friends - and not alone like me (my dear G preferred watching Apocalypto on his computer instead - good for him, bad for me).

So that's it. Quality all the way. I need to see more of these movies, just to get used to them. Or should I?

Sick Nurses (2007)

Once upon a while I stumbles over a film that I never heard of, but who seems so twisted and fun that I just have to see it. Sick Nurses is a sick little movie from Thailand, but a sick movie with a lot of humour and tounge in cheek. It's part a parody/satire over the typical Asian long-haired ghosts, and also a very black comedy about how seven superficial nurses get what they deserve!

The hospitals favorite doctor is young, handsome and fucks all the nurses. He's also the leading bodysnatcher in the area, together with his nurses. He steals bodies from the hospital and sells in the black market. But with so many beautiful and egocentrical nurses around, there must be intrigue and fights - and when everyone think one of the nurses is gonna marry him, the other ones kill her and together with him they sell the body. Well, try to anyway. After having the body in his trunk for seven days, he's tired of it.... and so are the vengeful spirit of the dead nurse, who decides to take out her gruesome revenge in one bloody, dark night...

Yes, this movie is about a long-haired female ghost killing people. BUT... it's also a very clever and funny satire where the filmmakers toy with the clichés, twist them around a little bit and makes something that's more of a very black comedy than a pure horror movie. Sure, of course there's plenty of horror elements, but they are often so weird that they become more bizarre than scary. For exampel, one character gets her jaw ripped of and suffocated with a fetus! Another one kills one hundred faceless nurse-ghosts by stabbing them with a pregnancy test. Another one get's stuck in her handbag in a very special way. The ghost is painted black with slightly blonde hair and uses her power to make the characters to do outrageous stuff.

The style of the movie is also very cool. It reminds me more of John Waters, Wisit Sasanatieng and some people with less imagination would say the whole movie is a visual tribute to Mario Bava, and to a degree, even Dario Argento. There's splashes of strong colors everywhere, often red or green, the angles are stylish and there's a European feeling to some of the set-ups: static camera, and a lot of weird stuff is going on at the edge of the framing. Gore? Yes, but not THAT much. The first hour is virtually goreless, but with a lot of bizarre scenes, and then we're treated some delicious splatter-scenes with a lot of blood-spurting and some original digital and physical effects.

I think the movie is quite low budget, but the crew has done a great job making it look fantastic. The humour is fun, and sometimes very subtle with a lot of attention to details. The characters might me shallow, but that's part of the concept in the movie. Everything is about looks, fortune, power and sex. My favorite character is the nurse who tries to loose weight all the time by vomiting, and later she brushes her teeth and eating a suger-donut at the same time!

Fun, fun, fun. This is a small but almost brilliant black comedy, which will make many disappointed by distributors who tries to make it look like a grim and serious J-horror movie. Pearls before swine, to be honest.

Demons 2 (1986)

After watching the first one, I just had to take a look at the sequel Demons 2, a movie I've never been especially fond of. It's still not a great movie, but it's at least a little better than I expected it to be. Maybe I've just gotten older and realized that gore isn't everything... ha ha, who am I kidding? This is a frigging Demons-movie! It should have gore... but no.

This is more or less a blueprint of the first one, with some of the same actors, and just one a different location. Here the demon-plague starts when the sequel to the first productions movie-within-in-the-movie is showing on television. But this time the characters is trapped inside a high-rise residential apartment building instead. A birthday-party becomes a massacre when lovely Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni first watches the movie and gets attacked by a demon crawling out from the TV-set, and then we follow a gang of gym-monkeys (lead by an extremely overacting Bobby Rhodes), a pregnant woman and her husband, a little boy home alone and a couple of other meatheads.

The worst thing with Demons 2 is the lack of gore. Sure, there's some slimy-transformations and some creatures getting wacked, but still... this is a more or less gore-less movie with very little blood. This is really a pity, because the energy is high, the attacks are fun and creative - but seem less powerful because of this detail. The attack at the gym and the garage could have been a fantastic gore-fest, but instead it's just a bunch of half-naked muscles-cows screaming like little girls and nothing more. But on the other hand, the movie looks great and the demons are as cool as ever. The most freaky character is when the little boy becomes a demon! He's so bizarre, so damn creepy and strange. It's the best sequence in the whole movie, and the stuff after when a Gremlins-like monster is attacking the pregnant women is fun too.

Lamberto Bava seem to have more control over the direction here too, and it's a lot more coherent and thought through than the first movie. The lighting is a bit colder, less over-the-top and with more footage concentrating on tension rather than monster-mayhem. But I miss the gore, I miss the awesome decapitations and skin bursting like balloons...

Well, you can't have it all. But the lesson I learned today is that some movies actually gets a little bit better after a few years. It's not a better or more entertaining movie than Demons, but it's not a bad little monster-puppy after all.

Thanks everyone!

No, I'm not gonna close the blog ;)

But I just want to say thanks with all my heart to you who actually reads this blog! I started to write in english last summer because I wanted to do something else than my old blog, try to focus more or less only on movies and the alternative genre cinema, DTV-movies and stuff that I like.

I know my texts are very uneven, but I'm one of those that has to write something everyday - even if I can't get the grammar correct or the spelling perfect. But I do my best and I learn every day (for example, the difference between "to" and "too"). It's an obssession to write about this stuff, and I guess that I will do this until the day I die, in one way or another.

One thing that's important for me is that people read what I write (and have opinions about it too), which I think is the point with a blog and the "art" of writing. To be honest, if I didn't have the amount of visitors I have now, I'm not sure I would write.

So thanks you everone that reads this, that follows me, links to me, comments on my posts or just lurks around somewhere there in the background :)

/Fred

Remembering Zelda Rubinstein - Chock, Episode "Kött" (1997)

Few people know that recently departed Zelda Rubinstein once starred in one episode of the failed Swedish TV-series Chock. Every episode is filled with famous Swedish actors, the host is the greatest of them all - Ernst-Hugo Järegård - an the production itself is so terrible bad. It looks good, at a first glance, but after a while you realize it just looks like a school production. The direction, this time by Anders Lennberg, is generic and has no personality at all - just boring - and the dialogue is stiff and ridiculous. My dead uncle could have done it better.

The story itself is not that bad in this production, but it's a shame they couldn't have done it better. There's no tension at all, just half of the storyline is interesting - and that part of the story is what this post is about: Zelda Rubinstein. It's a weird feeling seeing Zelda playing a horrible, controlling little person, acting against Jan Myrberg (the other actor that do a good work) and watching Swedish TV-classic Hylands Hörna. She never utters a word, communicating only with gruntings and facial expression - and Zelda rules here. She's the best, the most bizarre, the most real, the only scary thing in the whole episode.

I can't recommend Chock to anyone, but if you find it - buy it only for Zelda Rubinstein's sake.

Zelda, have fun were ever you are...

Demons (1985)

There's not much to say about Lamberto Bavas Demons, except it's extremely stupid - and extremely entertaining. The idea is just to get a bunch piece of meat inside a big cinema and unleash the demons on them. Nothing more. There's not side stories (if you don't count the ugly gang of punks that enters the cinema a little bit later), and the characters are flat and shallow. It took four screenwriters to come up with this story, and they didn't focus on characters or story.

The gore is plenty, colorful, graphic and slimy. It's also a very cryptic story, with no explanations to what's happening - which is okey for me - but it would be fun to get some clue who started it all, and why it's all connected to the movie within the movie (a movie that are even more retarded than the main feature!). Michele Soavi shows up in the beginning, in the movie they're watching - and in the end, dying a terrible death. He's obviously connected to everything (and so seem that freaky woman that works in the cinema), but nothing more is said about their connection.

But it's all about action and gore anyway, so why care about story. I've heard Lamberto Bava said many times that he don't like gore, but that's not visible in Demons. Every time I watch it I forget how gory it is, with throat-rippings, decapitations, limb-chopping, slime-spurting, stabbings, stranglings and everything else under the pale moonlight. It's a bit plastic, but still made with energy and a lot of blood. There's a couple of shots during the end when one of the characters are driving around on a motorcross and shopping demons to pieces with his sword that somehow echoes more modern Japanese splatter-cinema.

I think the final twist underlines the whole movies stupidity, when they are stuck in the cinema with no way to get out... and suddenly a helicopter crashes down the ceiling and they can climb up through the hole. No warning, from nowhere. A helicopter. I guess the screenwriters gave up there and just used the first idea that they could come up with.

No, don't misunderstand me now. I love Demons, it's fantastic gory fun splatter-flick from the eighties. It's creative, visual, gory and never boring. Bava directs with flair and style, the sets and lightning are superb - and you sit there with a big smile all over you face, hopefully with a beer in your hand and with good company.