Dan O'Bannon R.I.P!

This was sad news. Dan O´Bannons was one of the best screenwriters out there, and when he didn't get the full credit he at least contributed with some marvelous ideas and concepts. He was involved in many of the best screenplays I know, and some cheesy but great ones. All these are favorites of mine and I think all of them bear typical O'Bannon trademarks like good dialogue, interesting characters and truly shocking moments:

Dark Star
Alien
Dead & Buried
The Return of the Living Dead
Lifeforce
Total Recall
Screamers
Hemoglobin

I know the last two isn't the most loved movies out there, but they are two favorites of mine. Hemoglobin is a daring and provocative horror/monster movie about incest and inbreeding and Screamers is a VERY underrated sci-fi movie with great violence, actors and storyline.

The genre movie-industry just got a bit more boring...

The Mutants of Nightmare City - part 9

I'm happy when I see mutants that's not ashamed of themselves. It took a few years, but finally this mutant was prepared to step out of the closet and be proud over that he's a transvestite. Notice the strict dress and not to shabby wig. This is a mutant with style and taste.


Oh dear, some mutants just needs to do some nasty sucking. Not directly on the body, but from a good old bottle. Maybe he's scared of bacterias, or just don't want to get blood on his well-manicured hands.


This guy escaped from a Lucio Fulci-movie and managed to scare Hugo Stiglitz and the audience in at least one scene! Bravo!

The Hanging Woman (1973)

There's something special with spanish horror from the seventies. They are never stylish in the same way as the italian horror, but still brings the same feeling of dread, darkness and thick atmosphere. The Hanging Woman is a very competent horror-hybrid that mixes mystery, zombie, murder and gothic in a beautiful way. Stelvio Rosi, who have a nice seventies-brit look, plays Serge Chekov who arrives to the small depressing village in the mountains where his uncle has his house. But now the uncle is dead, and left in the house is his strange young wife and a scientist and his daughter. Just when Serge arrives to the village, he finds a hanged woman in the cementary. She was scared to death, and then hanged to make it look like a suicide. More strange things starts to happen in the village and his the house, and the gravedigger, Igor (Paul Naschy of course) seem to be involved in a lot of the occurances. And the fact that he's a necrophile don't help him when he's accused for what's happening...

I heard some bad things about this movie, but I can't agree on the negative things. This is a slow moving story, but it also have an amazing atmosphere and directing that keeps the story going without the audience getting bored. I love directors that can tell a story with the camera, and together with the editor knows the timing to makes everything work with not so much fancy editing. This is very basic craftmanship, but sometime that's just what a story need. Somehow this way of filming makes the stronger scenes even more powerful, and even if the physical decapitation in the movie is off screen, it still looks amazing when the head falls to the ground. The same thing with the zombies that appears in the end. Creepy stuff, and very intense.

But this is also a movie with quite a good script, and the twists and turns works very fine. Even I got surprised sometimes, and the mix of genres made the movie unpredictable. As you understand by now, Paul Naschy is not the lead actor, but his small character is good and Naschy knows how to make a good show even when he's not first in line in front of the camera. He looks like a brute, but he also was a skilled actor who could work without lines and effects. His charisma is enough in a part like this. Over all the acting in this movie was even and no one was bad. I don't have much experience with lead actor Stelvio Rosi, but his job here wants me to see more of his work. The ladies are good to, especially Maria Pia Conte as the weird widow of Chekovs uncle, who probably has the best written and fun female character in this movie.

Gory? Not really, but the decaptitation is lovely and there's also the typical no-budget autopsy where they use the carcass of a pig to imitate human flesh and skin. But the zombie-make up is eerie and cool and the production values are perfect for this kinda movie. Half the fun of the story is the cool location, the small dirty village with the mountains around it it. And it's raining or snowing almost all the time, so the feeling of cold dread is evident all the time.

What about the dvd? Much better than I expected. The print is made from two sources, one lesser tape-version which shows up in the beginning and in the end, and the rest is a good-looking fullscreen movie-print with nice saturated colors and good sound to. I guess the movie was shot wider, but you don't notice any direct cropping except during the pre-credits. The dvd is also loaded with extras, but I haven't had time to check them yet. But if Naschy is involved I'm sure it's good.

I'm very happy to own this movie and finally got a chance to see it, because this was a movie that I connected with directly.

Hanuman: White Monkey Warrior (2008)

My life has so far been great. It's been wonderful. I've seen so many wonderful, fun, entertaining and cool movies over the years. From all over the world. Thailand is a favorite movie-country of mine, and even though many movies are far from masterpieces they still have that naive charm, "it" you can call it. Today I lost my virginity to a mega-turd of a thai-movie: Hanuman: White Monkey Warrior. Obviously a try to cash-in on Tony Jaa/Panna Rittikrai/Prachya Pinkaew/any other talented personality from Thailand. And what a shitty movie this was.

Crap-actor Sornram Theppitak plays Yod, an ex-policeman that walks around doing nothing. He's in love with a woman who has some kind of home for... children/fat kids/retards/anyone that seem to be around in the countryside. But Yod is a troubled man. His father and family where killed by some evil foreigners and he wants revenge. He knows to much, of course, and the baddies wants to kill him... and yeah, I have no idea whats going on. They run a around a lot anyway. Fight a little bit. Bad digital explosions. More fight and the most funny scene I've seen in a long time, except it should be the opposite.

I don't know what to begin with. Director Sakchai Sribonnam clearly don't know what he's doing. I've never seen a movie with such a lack of energy as this one. Hello! Is there anybody out there? No one hears you because no one listen to each other, actors, camera crew, director, editor. Everybody made their own little shit-movie. Man, it's actually has some budget. Maybe more than the first Ong Bak! But where's the production value? The biggest location is also the best: a shoot-out on a freeway. It's okey, but I've seen better in PM Entertainment Groups movies. And they made twenty movies every year.

The actors are unbelievable bad. No, sorry. Two of the actors are unbelievable bad, and I'm afraid it's the hero and the main fighter-villian. Sornram Theppitak thinks he's in a thai daytime-soap and has watery eyes and half-open mouth in every scene without fighting. When it comes to the fights he can't fight at all and all the scenes where you see it's him he just runs around trying not to be kicked, and fuck yeah.. I could do it better! The rest is done with a mediocre stuntman, or at least with a mediocre choreographer. The bad guy has a tattoo and look that makes you want to hide your face of shame. I don't want to talk about it. Forget everything.

In he last twenty minutes we have some okey stuff, but it don't save the movie at all. There's a fight in some kind of illegal fighting club which has some nice moves and some good stunts. But not much at all. The final fight, in and outside a factory, is pure shit - but has two tasteless gore-scenes which don't fit into the rest of the movie. The most disturbing one is when our brave hero impales a bad guy with a iron rod through his ass and out from throat!

I will never see it again, but I will always remember once scene, more fun than the rest: twenty children (+ the "happy retard" and the "funny fat" kid) has died in a fire, Yod discovers this and try to wake these barbecued bodies with shaking them and screaming their names! One after another... and then there's an extra flashback together with each body that shows something funny/cute that the dead person did earlier in the movie. Yes, it's very, very, very funny. The burned bodies, not the flashbacks.

I'm not gonna say that you should avoid this movie, because that's just silly. Try it if you want to, but write a note before you kill yourself and let your family know that you did it on your on free will and that I can't be blamed for your death.

The Mutants of Nightmare City - part 8

Wow, this guy drank way to much before he became a mutant! Or was it the "mutantism" that made him an old wino? Actually, during christmas he always wear those silly reindeer-horns on his head to show that has some sense of humor and can joke about it.


A legend in his own time! Professor Hagenbeck is the source of every mutant (I guess, because he was the expert and therefor he must mutate first). It's a pity that he just makes this appearance and then just leaves us alone for the rest of the movie...


The priest-mutant has always been a mystery because it's obvious that our heroes see his deformations first, because the nice part of the face is in our direction. But that's just a small detail. Even if I'm a devoted atheist, I admire that he's still praying even when he's a mutant. Probably one of those god damn liberal priests!

Finally Iron King

I've been thinking for a long while to buy Iron King - The Complete Series, but it wasn't until last week when Jocke mention to me how cheap the collection was at Amazon (from private sellers of course), and quickly decided to buy it. I chose the wrong shipping and was expecting it in like eight weeks, but it arrived today.

I'm pretty sure I will love it. Ultraman is the best thing to watch a boring day, Message From Space: Galactic Battle is FANTASTIC and as soon as Mill Creek re-releases Super Robot Red Baron I will get that one to. 

The japanese sure could produce fun sci-fi shows for the whole family, even a swedish nerd like me.

Spirited Killer 2: Awakened Zombie Battles (199?)

Okey, first of all, Spirited Killer 2: Awakened Zombie Battles is not the correct title. It's just the titles that Mill Creek has given this unknown thai-movie. It has nothing to do with Spirited Killer (who actually was part 4 in that series) and dosen't feature Tony Jaa. But for me it's of great interested, because this is another of Panna Rittikrais early movies.

For you who don't know about Rittikrai, he's the man behind Tony Jaa and I consider him to be one of the best movie-fighters EVER. In his early movies he had bigger parts in these ultra-lowbudget countryside-actionflicks, but later focused more on choreography and smaller parts, often as a bad guy. Not everything is good of course, and movies like this could probably only have been made in the north of Thailand for a penny or two. This is also one of the huge amount of Rittikrai-movies which have the following story: some people have some business in the jungle and discover that they have a zombie after them, a martial arts-zombie! In this movie it's more complicated: our heroes is out in the forest to do some magic ritual for their dead grandfather. Nothing special with that, but at the same time, not far away, is a bunch of gangster trying to move the spirit from their dead leader to a new leader... and not far away from from them is a couple treasure hunters who finds a chinese dead guy with a treasure under him.

So of course the worst happens. All magic rituals in the area is waking up the dead gangster AND the dead chinese guy and they start hunting down everybody that happens to be in the forest! After a while Panna Rittikrai shows up and uses black magic to take the power from the zombies to transform himself to a super-fighter!

This is wonderful Thai-trash. The story is zero and everything is filled with cheesy fighting (some of it is quite good, but nothing unique), a splash of silly gore and a lot of slapstick! We have fart-jokes, we have speeding-up-footage-jokes and "crazy" voices on some of the characters. I like the rituals and the visual effects is primitive. During one fight an instrumental version of Europe's The Final Countdown starts, but the rest of the soundtrack is stolen from John Carpenters Prince of Darkness!

I guess it's not many people who actually can stand these movies, but I do. It's not a good movie by any means, but it's okey entertainment for idiots like me. The Mill Creek-release is not bad at all. You can find the movie in the Spirited Killer Trilogy and the quality is better than I ever thought they would be. Miles better than any crappy thai vcd's, and the aspect ratio is correct - but you have to maybe squeeze the TV-screen a bit, change from 16:9 to letterbox or something like that. Try it and you will get it right sooner or later.

After BCI went down the drain Mill Creek took over some titles. and it's great that they released this trio of movies. Spirited Killer is also out on single release from BCI, but it's a crappy movie anyway, so get this box if you're interested in getting it cheap.