Nothing But the Night (1973)

I love finding horror movies that surprises me and that somehow stayed out of my life after all these years. Nothing But the Night is a smart and original horror-thriller produced by Christopher Lee's own company and directed by one of the best, Peter Sasdy. Why I love Sasdy's work so much is because his will to over and over again visit the really dark subjects about humanity, and Nothing But the Night is no different from that path. It was a big flop, I heard, when it was released and not be honest, I don't understand why. Maybe it just took the twisted ending to far in combination with a very grey, typical British beginning on the verge on social realism - but hey, that's what's so unique with this movie and makes it even more surprising.

Christopher Lee is Colonel Bingham, a good old chap who investigates a couple of very odd suicides and accidents. This leads him to a girl, Mary Valley (Gwyneth Strong) who have strange violent dreams - and who lives at an orphanage connected to the people who died. Her real mother, played intense by Diana Dors, is a disturbing ex-prostitute with a taste for black magic and who wants her back. So after committing a crime at the hospital where her daughter stayed after an accident, she now goes after her to the secluded orphanage to bring her home. Bingham brings his friend, Sir Mark Ashley (Peter Cushing), with him in the investigation and... well, let me say there will be some surprises along the way!

I watched the movie for the first time today and before now I had NO clue what it was about. I never read about it, didn't check the reviews (except facts about quality), and didn't ask around for options from friends. This probably helped me love this movie even more, but it's hard not to love a movie with such a clever build-up anyway. I mean, this movie is almost to normal until the last half hour. It has some murders, some social commentary about the media, very good acting, very grey and realistic - but then shit hits the fan and everything turns around - and it's one of the finer twists I've seen. Maybe it's been done before, but here it's just so well-done. It even made the hair on my arms stand up because I like these kinda surprising twists that completely takes another dramatic turn than I expected from the beginning.

Like always, the relationship between Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing is the highlight of the movie. They where friends, and together their connection as actor comes close to perfection. It might not be as fantastic as Horror Express, but this is a very different story with a even more different atmosphere. The whole thing is built around a slightly boring case of a mad mother wanting her daughter back, but this was obviously the plan - and if you have no problem with a slow start you will be treated with some fine shocks towards the end. I'm not the first or last that will compare this movie to The Wicker Man, but this is a movie that stands on it's own legs and delivers the quality we wants from a seventies UK production.

The whole movie is filled with good British quality actors, but Diana Dors has always been a favourite of mine and here she's both scary and excellent as Anna Harb - mother, whore and fortune teller. If you think about it afterwards, she's a quite smart character - maybe someone who really can "read" other people. Diana was also quite an original character herself, and to really experience this weirdness, watch Who Got Diana Dors' Millions from 2003, a documentary trying to solve her last riddle...

Another nice part of the movie is the soundtrack by Malcolm Williamson, compositions that almost imitates the work of Basil Kirchin. The same almost dreamy jazz-influenced pieces that Basil did for the Dr Phibes movies and 1974's The Mutations. Good stuff.

I'm sure most of you would appreciate this thriller, so buy it now!

Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf (2009)

I first heard of Kurando Mitsutake's indie-production Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf a couple of years ago. I remember I saw a teaser trailer and some artwork, but then I kinda lost track of it and didn't think about it until I found a massive luxury BD/DVD release at the Weekend of Horrors in Bottrop. So I bought it and a couple of weeks later I finally got time to sit down and watch it. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect because I never got a chance follow the production and the purchase was just because of pure luck. It's a good way to watch a movie, and in this case I would say the absence of hype just was perfect.

Before Blind Wolf (Kurando Mitsutake) became Blind Wolf he was a normal, nerdy, Japanese man who witnessed his whole family get slaughtered - or at least he heard it, because the bad guys gave him a choice: poke out your eyes and we're not gonna kill your wife and daughter. Guess what happens? Anyway, Blind Wolf sets out for revenge and as a Japanese man with no name he takes his sword and goes after the sleazy baddie, Nathan Flesher (a brilliant Domiziano Arcangeli) who's responsible for it all. But Flesher knows he's being hunted and sends out seven assassins to stop Blind Wolf. During his trip, Blind Wolf meets The Drifter (Jeffrey James Lippold), another man out for revenge...

There's a danger with making modern Grindhouse films. A danger of making fun of classic cinema and somehow claiming that the movies they are inspired by are bad movies, tacky and corny productions. It's a very fine line between just being silly and making a serious tribute to the films of yesterday. Samurai Avenger manages to stay on the right side of filmmaking with a serious approach both to the story itself and the references to numerous samurai and western movies. Like with a good parody the fun comes from respecting the original productions. Mel Brooks once made brilliant parodies of movies and genres that he loved, but once he started to make fun of Star Wars and Robin Hood - productions he never cared for - his productions became cold and stiff.

Kurando Mitsutake, like the true indie-director he is, stars as the main character Blind Wolf, directs and writes the movie - and amazingly enough he carries the story and seem to take his acting as serious as the directing. Even if Samurai Avenger has an episodic feeling, which often happens with movies that could be considered road movies, this is far from a bunch of weird scenes put together to make a cult movie. Storytelling is no. 1 and everything hangs together. Our hero is meeting seven assassins, but something that could have been repetitive becomes interesting and have it's place in the story. Even more absurd stuff like the Zombie Mistress and her three zombies fits so well into the surrealistic atmosphere. This movie could be set in another dimension, an alternative reality, where the prison is a small shack out in the wilderness and people are bleeding liter after liter of ultra-red blood. There's not one second of realism in the story, but a lot of depth within the characters.

There's a lot of gags referring to the Grindhouse-aspect of Samurai Avenger. Blind Wolf is dubbed by a much manlier voice, there's a few sequences that looks to been taken from a more worn out print and from time to time a narrator tells us about details in the story, mostly related to samurai traditions. This could have been forced and stilted, but works very fine.

Like all good samurai movies the blood flows in huge amounts. Most of the gore and effects is well-done and echoes both the Japanese cinema from the seventies, but never becomes to realistic either. This is a fun movie and the gore is mostly there to entertain than to disgust someone.
Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf was a nice surprise and I hope that Kurando Mitsutake and his team will bring us more stories in the future. I, for one, welcomes more of this kind.

To quit or not to quit?

I have no idea. To quit or not to quit? To stop blogging about movies or continue? Everytime I watch a movie it feels more and more meaningless to write about it. Everyone has written everything about every movie. And the rest just don't care.

Blood Tracks (1985)

"From the makers of A Nightmare on Elm Street" said the advertising material belong to Blood Tracks when it was sold in Cannes in the middle of the eighties! This came from the fact that it was distributed by New Line Cinema, who also distributed Mats Helges earlier hit movie The Ninja Mission and with the money from that one produced the first movie with legendary horror icon Freddy Krueger. But Blood Tracks is very far from the glitter and glam of Hollywood. Shot in the south of Sweden and a few scenes in Funäsdalen, this is a small but interesting piece of trash from the annals of Swedish trash cinema.

Easy Action arrives to a small village up in the mountains. They're gonna shoot a new music video there, as publicity for their new upcoming hit album! The director quickly finds an abandoned factory and the team decides to do some location scouting there. But an avalanche stops them from going back to civilisation and soon they're hunted by a murderous inbred tribe of crazies, the left-over's from a family that fled up there after a murder and never looked back! Now they want to protect what's theirs and they're very, very bloodthirsty!

Blood Tracks is basically a Swedish version of The Hills Have Eyes, but with more snow and more gore. I've seen this many times on tape and I never seen it as bloody and graphic as this version. Legendary for being hard to find in a complete version, this DVD from CMV Laservision could be the longest ever. It's far from perfect, but the full frame presentation is decent, but has a few cropping issues that blocks out nudity (not all, just one scene - I think the rest is complete). The Japanese version has always been considered the longest and a few alternative scenes, just based on the cropping, is included on this DVD and sourced from the Japanese tape. But the rest, yeah dammit, this could the best most uncut version so far.

The added gore really boosts the entertainment value of the movie. Mats Helge uses buckets of blood for a graphic impaling, stabbings, a burning, a ripped out eye and other nasty surprises. We're not talking Tom Savini quality here, but still - it's not bad at all. The most infamous scene, mostly because it's been cut everywhere, is when a woman is ripped apart (just like in Ruggero Deodato's Cut and Run and Fulci's Conquest). In every version I've seen you just see blood on her face and then cut to another character watching, but here you actually see her get ripped apart. The effect is primitive, but it's there and it's bloody. Other effects is also more visible, for example the cut of arm and another shot of a woman laying on the ground with a pipe through her chest.

Blood Tracks is very cheesy, cheap and silly, but finally it lives up to it's promise as a real, bloody and nasty slasher. I'm not saying it's a masterpiece, because it's not - Mats Helge was most of his career a very incompetent storyteller - but this ranks as his best together with The Ninja Mission.

The German (or Austrian?) DVD is released under the name Shocking Heavy Metal and it's a must for collectors of Swedish cult and gory slashers!

And because I'm so nice I'm sharing the uncut body ripping-scene (in German language, by mistake) with you, enjoy! I see now that she's not getting ripped apart, she's cut in two pieces by the rope!

The Killer Elephants in stock again!

After reading yet another fine review, this time at Mondo Digital, I hope you all feel inspired to go to Diabolik DVD (the only solution for you who don't live in Scandinavia) and buy a copy of Attackafant Entertainment's release of The Killer Elephants! Here's the direct link!

Attackafant Entertainment is a small company, very small. Every sold DVD means that we can get closer to release even more DVDs in the future. The next will already arrive in January, the fantastic monster movie Thunder of Gigantic Serpent. Our focus is at movies that's hard to get and even of many of them are lost we try to dig up the best possible version - in these cases we used digibetas directly from the rights holder in Hong Kong.

If you live in Sweden you can buy The Killer Elephants at, for example, Discshop, Ginza, Webhallen, Megastore and many other places. If your store don't have it, ask them to order it!

The Supernaturals (1986)

My relationship with director Armand Mastroianni is odd. I'm trying to find every horror/thriller movie he made and every time I find one I realize that it's not really that good. Sometimes even boring, or just lacking "it". But why the hell do I continue to seek up his work? There must be something in what he does that attracts me. Maybe he has good ideas that never reach their full potential? I have no idea. The Supernaturals is a zombie movie made when horror movies started to fade out from mainstream culture, which means it's low on gore and terror, but has a childish approach to it's themes that's more connected to movies like The Gooniss and The Monster Squad, but still not suitable for kids.

Nichelle Nicolas, the female afro-american version of Cameron Mitchell (just look at those eyebrows!) leads a troup of soldiers for an exercise out in the deep southern forests (I have no idea if it's the south, but it sounded good!). What they don't know - as usual with these horror romps - is that the area is cursed and underneath the ground awaits a small army of civil war zombies to kill them and take revenge on their deaths!

That's it. And it takes some time to get going. My reaction to the first half was that it was flat and uninspired. Like Mastroianni just didn't care for either the flashbacks or the normal life of the soldiers. I can agree, because that's the least interesting in the whole movie - and it never works as a good set-up either. But when the night finally falls and the zombies awake and becomes more active I would say that this becomes a good little zombie movie. I love how the zombies has tunnels underground and sets out traps for the soldiers, which also generates a couple of the very few bloody scenes in the whole movie. I'm not sure if it was edited for violence, but it could have used some more to really make up for the boring first part.

Maybe it would have worked better with more defined characters. Right now I can't remember any of them, except Nichelle Nichols - but that's because she's famous from Star Trek and it's fun that she of all people plays the officer in charge. The characters seem to melt together, and in the end it's the nice zombies who takes the lead. Yeah, almost forgot, Maxwell Caulfield plays one of the main characters and he's good. Weird that he didn't became a more popular mainstream hunk, instead of slumming in DTV movies and soap operas after this.

I can understand all the negative stuff I've heard about The Supernaturals, but it a few fun scenes here and there and the zombies and night-time locations was nice enough for me. Watch it on your own risk!

X-Ray (1982)

I'm sure the distributors never knew what hit them. It was suppose to be an ordinary slasher, and it turned out to be the almost surreal cheese-fest X-Ray. No, I'm not negative at all, this is prime cheese with a storyline so simple even Andreas Schnaas couldn't have failed with telling the story. Directed by legendary Boaz Davidson under the protective shield of Cannon's even more legendary Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. In front of the camera they trusted Barbi Benton, the former Playboy model and ex-wife of Hugh Hefner (and also a productive recording artist) and the result is the silliest slasher ever made.

Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) goes to the hospital for a routine check, but something is not right and soon they're are keeping her there much longer than needed. At the same time a man, dressed in a surgeons outfit, starts killing the staff of the hospital one by one! Could it be the crazy boy that killed Susan's best friend by impaling him on a coat-hanger 16 years earlier? How the hell should Susan know that? She's still waiting for the doctor, not realizing that someone is fucking with her files to make her stay longer at the hospital...

This must be the first and only time a story is built around long waiting times at the hospital! I can imagine how the screenwriter experienced something similar, short visit that ended up four hours later and with less answers than before. It's basically Halloween 2 mixed with My Bloody Valentine with a couple of splashes of very soft porn and a slasher parody like Wacko or Student Bodies - but unintentional. It's like the filmmakers didn't even try to make it scary, they just had a big hospital set and a couple of actors walking around without any real purpose and decided to toss together the next slasher hit.

I guess it didn't became a hit and the silly plot and absurd twist probably helped. But I'm not saying this is a bad movie. It's flawed and silly and stupid and retarded and more stupid, but it's also entertaining and has a nice body count and Barbi Benton being quite effective in the lead. And she show's her tits in one long and gratuitous sequence, for those who like that. Barbi looks like a TV-actress, and the visual style of the movie echoes any soap opera set in a hospital, but that's a neat combination - especially with bloody (not gory) murders happening around every corner.

X-Ray is out on DVD in Germany. I have no idea if it's a bootleg or not, but it looks OK in it's fullscreen presentation, probably taken from a Betacam SP master (just a guess, because I think the terrible quality a VHS would offer) and seem to be uncut.

A nice addition to the slasher-collection!