Friday's best pop song ever

Drive-In Mob tonight!: Village of the Giants and Attack of the Puppet People

Sartre was right: Hell is other people. And  -- as drive-in movie dynamo Bert I. Gordon has shown us again and again -- that applies no matter what size they are, be they a cyclopean Ron Howard or a travel kit ready John Agar. The Drive-In Mob invites you to join us then as we tonight enter the hell that is Gordon’s Village of the Giants, starting at 8pm EST, followed at roughly 9:30pm EST by the grueling torment that is Attack of the Puppet People. The IMDB describes the latter as the tale of a “lonely, deranged puppet-master”, and what more appropriate place for loneliness and derangement than Twitter? We guaranty you plenty of both if you will only agree to diminish yourself by following and tweeting along with us using the Twitter hashtag #DriveInMob. You have nothing to lose but your normal human proportions. Both films can be streamed from Netflix Instant. More details can be found at the official Drive-In Mob site.

Verdens Undergang, aka The End of the World (Denmark, 1916)

Back in the teen years of the last century, when others were taking more tentative steps into the world of feature film making, Denmark’s Nordisk Film Company repeatedly demonstrated a fearlessness in tackling grandiose subject matter. We’ve already seen this with 1918’s Himmelskibet, which depicted the first manned space flight to Mars, and here with director August Blom’s 1916 Verdens Undergang, which, true to its title, depicts fiery apocalypse at the instigation of an overly friendly comet. It had only been six years since Halley’s Comet had done its last drive-by, an event that occasioned not inconsiderable panic due to concerns that the gasses within its tail might suffocate every living thing on the planet. Verdens Undergang certainly reflects those anxieties, but, like Himmelskibet, seems to have at its heart more a despair over the ongoing world war and the apparent inability of mankind to just get along.

Despite the enormity of his subject, Blom wisely strives to keep his narrative small scale, telling his story from the perspective of one family in a small mining town, while still managing to span the wide class divide that fuels the movie’s conflicts. Said family is that of West (Carl Lauritzen), a manager at the mine who has two adult daughters, Dina (Ebba Thomsen) and Edith (Johanne Fritz-Petersen). During a swing through town to oversee operations, the mine’s wealthy owner, Stoll (Olaf Fonss), falls for Dina and does his best to sweep her off her feet. After some requisite hand wringing, Dina eventually decides to run off with Stoll to the big city, seeing in him the opportunity to escape from both her small town existence and the dominion of her stern father -- who, in an earlier scene, is seen accusing her of being a “harlot” for the crime of returning home from a local dance unattended. Meanwhile, the less restless Edith throws her romantic lot in with Reymers (Himmelskibet’s Alf Blutecher), a dependable young sailor with deep roots in the town.

Cut to a few years later, and Stoll -- who, in his towering top hat, couldn’t be a more efficient symbol of capital if he was the Monopoly guy -- has struck it rich on the stock market, enabling him to shower Dina, now a bored trophy wife held prisoner in their lavish mansion, with glitzy baubles. Unfortunately, it is right around this time that Stoll’s cousin, Wiseman, a renowned astronomer, discovers a new comet that is destined to travel very close to the Earth, the news of which triggers a market panic and corresponding dip in stock prices. Stoll then decides to use his inside line to the astronomy world to manipulate the market, but when the news from his cousin isn’t good –- it turns out that the comet probably really is going to destroy the world -- he lies to his newspaper publisher friend and has him publish a much more sunny projection of the outcome. As a result, the value of his portfolio is restored.

Soon after, Stoll returns with Dina to her hometown, where he reveals a scheme that sounds like one of Ayn Rand’s most fervid masturbatory fantasies. According to this plan, they will wait out the disaster within the presumed safety of the mine, after which Stoll envisions a scenario in which only the rich and powerful have survived, emerging from the rubble to create and master a new world, free of the impediments presented by all of those pesky worker types. (Gee, I guess those dishes really will wash themselves.) To celebrate this grand vision, Stoll throws a lavish party for all of his rich cronies on the very day of the projected disaster. Unfortunately, those pesky workers, lead by Dina’s spurned former fiancé Flint (Thorlief Lund), see this as an ideal time to get back some of their own, and attempt to storm the mansion at which the fete is being thrown. A gun battle ensues, during which Dina is mortally wounded, and, with her in arms, Stoll steals off to the mine, where both he and Flint, who follows him, will die horribly.

If you come to Verdens Undergang with the expectation of seeing some kind of steam punk FX extravaganza -- as I admittedly kind of did -- you may end up being mildly disappointed. So what, you may ask, are the effects of a comet’s passing too closely to our Earth, according to Verdens Undergang? Lots and lots of sparks, apparently. At the same time, Blom’s depiction of submerged houses, along with the scene in which Johanne Fritz-Petersen kneels atop a table, frantically crying to the heavens as her own home rapidly floods with sea water, are as realistic as could be. Three years earlier, Blom had directed Atlantis, a film inspired by the Titanic disaster whose effects were so realistic that audiences suspected he had sunk an actual ocean liner in order to get them. He didn't, but judging from what I saw here, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he had.

Being a child of the 70s, I’m well accustomed to the thuggish moralism of disaster movies, wherein, given that the destruction of the many is assured, the only suspense lies in seeing on whose side that particular movie’s version of a vengeful God -- or Irwin Allen, if you prefer -- falls down upon. As an early example of that tradition, Verdens Undergang helpfully has a preacher on hand to officially label the comet “God’s punishment” -- leaving open only the question of who will be spared its wrath. Will it be the poor workers, who doff their caps in humble prayer as the comet approaches, or the rich, who party like it’s 1999? (And, truly, every time Stoll opens his title-card-assisted-yap, you can practically see the Old Guy rubbing his hands together in anticipation of smiting him.)

Well, it turns out, somewhat refreshingly, that, at the end of Verdens Undergang, pretty much everyone has been equally on the receiving end of the big cosmic dump, which I imagine reflects the cynicism about human nature that the horrors of the First World War might understandably have inspired in Blom and his ilk. Aside from the preacher -- which is something of a gimme -- the only apparent survivors are Edith and Reymers, who are together Inarguably Verdens Undergang’s least interesting characters. Both sought neither to enrich nor to liberate themselves, but simply, one assumes, to quietly procreate and die within the stifling confines of the tiny town to which they were born. In return for this prize, the two end the film by falling to their knees in reverent thanks, as well they should.

Tweet the pain away

Sompote Sands' Magic Lizard really is shit. Simply one of the most harrowingly awful things ever committed to celluloid. Of course, to certain types, a fact so unavoidably unpleasant only presents itself as a challenge. Such are Keith of Teleport City and Carol of The Cultural Gutter -- and, wouldn't you know it, those two crazy kids have gone and scheduled a joint viewing of the film, this very Sunday evening at 10pm EST, during which they will be sharing their minute-to-minute reactions on Twitter. (Can stunned silence be tweeted? Quiet sobbing? We shall see.) A number of us who have already been hardened by the experience of watching Magic Lizard will also be on hand to alternately guide, heckle and cajole them as they, for the first time, pay horrible, horrible witness to it. I suppose it's possible that there are others out there who might own a copy of Magic Lizard and, if that's you, you're welcome to join us by using the Twitter hashtag #MagicLizard. It's your life.

Evil of Dracula (Japan, 1974)

Evil of Dracula is the third and final film in Toho’s mid 70s trio of western style vampire movies now known as the "Bloodthirsty Trilogy". I think it can be said at this point that the second film in the series, 1971’s Lake of Dracula, is officially “lost” -- meaning that, when I went to watch it, I found that I had either misplaced my copy or had never owned one in the first place. Hopefully future generations -- or perhaps me, with either my wallet or a more diligent eye -- will someday rectify this unhappy situation. Until then, we’ll all just have to make do with only referring back to my review of the trilogy’s initial entry, Vampire Doll.

Like Vampire Doll, Evil of Dracula is a vampire film with a contemporary setting, though it perhaps exploits even more than that first film the collision between the modern and the gothic, the urban and the rustic. Thus when our hero Shiraki (Toshio Kurosawa), with his fashionably generous sideburns, collar length hair and flared trousers, arrives in the eerily quiet northern burg where he is to start his new position as psychology professor at an exclusive girls school, he is accompanied by a swingy jazz theme courtesy of composer Riichiro Manabe. Manabe, whose music for Vampire Doll jangled in not all the right ways, actually scores high marks throughout Evil, thanks to a score that fittingly combines skittery psychedelic guitars with more traditionally “spooky” instrumentation like organs and bells.

Shiraki’s uneasiness in his new surroundings is far from alleviated upon his arrival at the gloomy manse of the school’s principal (Shin Kishida), who wastes no time in informing him that the corpse of his recently dead wife is still lying in state in the cellar. Shiraki is further surprised when the principal tells him that he has chosen him to be his successor, and then insists that he spend the night so that the two men can get to know each other a little better. Not surprisingly, things take little time to get markedly creepier from there. Shiraki “dreams” that he is attacked by a pair of ghostly women, one a girl with a bloody wound on her chest and the other an older woman whom he later identifies as the principal’s deceased wife. Later, upon meeting a trio of girls who are roommates at one of the school’s ancient dormitories, he learns of a friend of theirs who has recently gone missing, and recognizes her from a picture as the other woman in his dream.

Fortuitously, the school’s doctor, Shimimura (Kunie Tanaka), is also an amateur scholar of the occult, as well as an enthusiastic compiler of all of the town’s most macabre folklore (where would horror films -- and horror film exposition -- be without such hyphenates?) Now convinced that his was no dream, Shiraki teams with Shimimura to get to the bottom of things, and it is not long before all signs point to the principal -- as well as to a mysterious white European who happened to wash up on the shores of the town some two hundred years previous. And, while Evil of Dracula is here giving an obvious tip of its hat to its western literary source, it isn’t all as you might expect. This Dracula, you see, was a devout man driven to renounce his faith by 17th century Japan’s criminalization of Christianity, which thus set him on the path to becoming a mad, blood-drinking demon. That’s right, y’all; Japan is claiming responsibility for Dracula, which back in the 80s probably would have made a lot of white people really furious.

Unfortunately, knowledge, while perhaps being power, does not prevent Shiraki’s young female charges from one by one falling victim to the principal’s evil charms. One such victim is Kyoko (Keiko Aramaki), who takes to her bed with a mysterious illness after receiving some even more mysterious puncture wounds on her left breast. Kyoko’s two roommates insist upon staying in the dorm and looking after her while the rest of the students go on vacation break, and Shiraki and Shimimura commit to guarding over them while they do. Thus do we end up with a large, suitably gothic and largely deserted creepy old building for the film’s final confrontation with Dracula’s titular evil to take place, as well as a dubiously sustainable supply of nubile innocents to provide the snacks.

It being a Toho film, it should come as no surprise that Evil of Dracula is technically well executed, and director Michio Yamamoto and cinematographer Kazutami Hara each bring a sure hand to the task of making it rich in both atmosphere and appearance. In fact, in contrast to the contemporary western films that appear to have influenced the trilogy, Evil of Dracula comes off as downright stately. It has neither the grittiness of AIP’s Count Yorga films or the cheesecake-y sexploitation trappings that Hammer was indulging in at the time to put it over (nor, thankfully, does it stoop to the ill-advised attempts at pandering to the “hip” youth market seen in the latter’s Dracula A.D. 1972). Even its few brief moments of nudity and eroticism come off as more artful than prurient, and by comparison a genteel exercise in tasteful restraint.

All of the above gives Evil of Dracula an enjoyably old fashioned quality that overrides somewhat its timely aspirations. It straight-facedly favors melodrama over action, concealing any proclivities toward intentional camp that might or might not have lurked behind the camera. And, despite a couple of gory moments, it studiously avoids cheap shocks, perhaps out of fear of upsetting the mannered atmosphere that it has so fussily strived to create. In place of that, we get more than a few strikingly poetic -- and very Japanese -- visual moments: the blood red rose in the foreground of one scene to suggest the principal’s malevolent omnipresence, the conspicuously aestheticized arrangement of the body of a young woman who has plunged to her death from one of the dormitories’ upper landings, and more.

If this formalism sounds like it might prevent Evil of Dracula from being fun, then I am simply describing it wrong. The film is a joyously seamless piece of genre entertainment, largely free of the tonal hiccups that made Vampire Doll less so. Yamamoto -- along with Manabe and co-writer Ei Ogawa -- clearly learned from his experience as the series went on, and his resulting confidence and familiarity with the territory all ends up on the screen to our benefit. Of course, the same might possibly be said for Lake of Dracula, if I could only track the damn thing down.

Friday's best pop song ever

Drive-In Mob tonight: Django Django Django!

Although I rarely write about them, I’m a big fan of Euro Westerns, which is why I’m especially excited about tonight’s Drive-In Mob. First up, at 8pm EST, is Sergio Corbucci’s classic Django, starring Franco Nero. Then, at around 9:30pm EST, it’s Viva Django, starring Trinity himself, Terrence Hill. Now, I’ve never seen Viva Django, but it is rare among the many unofficial Django sequels for its good reputation, so I’m very much looking forward to it. Both films are available for streaming via YouTube, and you can both follow and tweet along with us by using the Twitter hashtag #DriveInMob. As always, please check out the official Drive-In Mob site for the full skinny.

Loor Da Bala (Pakistan, 1999)

I keep telling myself that I’ll eventually reach some kind of tipping point where these Pashto language horror films won’t seem so strange to me anymore, but Loor Da Bala most definitely isn’t it. In fact, Loor Da Bala brings the strange on a couple of different levels. It’s guaranteed to be just about the most violent, grotesque and sleazy thing that you’ve ever seen, which would make you think that it at least wouldn’t be boring, yet it somehow manages to be that as well. Thankfully, those who are easily offended can occupy themselves during the slow bits by making angry phone calls to the VCD’s distributor, Sangar, whose phone number is helpfully plastered on screen for most of the film’s running time. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

To give you some sense of what we’re dealing with here, Loor Da Bala makes something of a theme out of people being sexed while supine. A woman is raped while unconscious, then turns into a monster and tears her attacker’s intestines out. A male protagonist is subjected to similar treatment by a “comic relief” gay character while he lies in a drugged stupor. A trio of globular college girls innocently knead at one another’s breasts while sleeping (as you’ll do). And finally, in a sequence that really puts Loor Da Bala on the world cinema map, a voluptuous female sasquatch-like creature lies chained to a table, moaning and writhing in a combination of fear and ecstasy as a pair of bears (i.e. men in matted looking bear costumes) nuzzle at all of her areas, until she finally breaks free to kung fu kick both of them into the middle of next week. This last was literally the weirdest thing I’ve seen yet this year -- and, yes, I know it’s only February.

The film features a duo of male protagonists played by Shahin Khan and, of course, Badar Munir. I say “of course” because Munir’s career as a star of Pashto cinema goes all the way back to 1970’s Yousuf Khan Sher Bano, the first feature ever produced in the Pashto language. In the ensuing years he came to fulfill the same role in Pashto cinema that Sultan Rahi did within Punjabi films, that of being the beefy, angry, yelling guy who stars in every movie, with a body of work that ultimately came to total over 400 films. Munir also worked in Urdu and Punjabi movies, and reportedly starred alongside Rahi on a number of occasions -- in films that immediately pushed their way to the top of my “must see” list the moment I learned of them.

As far as plot, the movie seems to have a couple of parallel narratives going on which I can’t say for sure, without the aid of subtitles, really interweave or relate to each other in any way. It could just be that, despite its horror trappings, Loor Da Bala couldn’t escape the requirement that it include, like most Pashto films, a storyline involving wounded masculine honor and corresponding bloody vengeance. Thus is provided a gang of scurrilous thugs who, in the course of terrorizing Khan and Munir’s village, kill off some of their woman folk, as a result setting the stage for much gunplay and scenes of men piercing, puncturing and perforating each other with various swords and daggers amid aggrieved throaty screaming.

But, of course, those are all things that you can see in any Pashto film. What you can’t see in any Pashto film is a pair of hirsute, mother and daughter (I think) hellbeasts who transform into dog, bird or human form by way of a variety of deeply bizarre psychedelic optical effects. Said hellbeasts then feast on the entrails of their victims -- that is, until Badar Munir slices off the head and hands of the younger one, who nonetheless fights on for a good few minutes despite being reduced to little more than a collection of blood squirting stumps. This affront puts the snaggletoothed mom-beast on a personal mission of vengeance against our heroes, one that can only be stopped by liberal applications of equal parts portly man martial arts and forceful readings of Islamic scripture.

In those moments when none of the admittedly exciting events described above are taking place, Loor Da Bala puts an earnest effort into becoming tedious through the application of a truly mindboggling number of not at all interestingly staged musical numbers featuring the usual assortment of rump-heavy women. And where that fails, the film courts inertia through sheer repetition. One or two crazed fight scenes might be plenty entertaining, but when all are pitched at the level of an apocalyptic final confrontation, it becomes a bit dismaying when they are followed by a dozen more. The same can even be said of the monster attack scenes, as wonderful as each is in itself. During the last hour, I on numerous occasions thought that the beast had been vanquished, only to have it come around again five minutes later like a bus on rush hour schedule.

Yet, as sleepy as things may get,  Loor Da Bala can always be relied upon to snap us to attention with one of its frequent moments of truly stunning seediness. Such is the scene in which the beast, having taken fetching womanly form, fellates the barrel of Shahid Khan’s pistol, sucking the bullets from the chamber as he sweatily derps out watching her. Also promoting wakefulness are the movie’s many aforementioned reminders of all the unsavory fiddling that might befall us should we nod off. The end result is a type of enforced sleep deprivation that might just make Loor Da Bala the rare film that violates international torture conventions. You have been warned.

 Again, that number is…

Friday's best pop song ever

Drive-In Mob tonight!: Kingdom of the Spiders and Empire of the Ants

Science teaches us that arachnids are staunch monarchists, while ants are proponents of territorial expansion. Neither of these geopolitical bents works out all that well for us humans, as is demonstrated in both of the features in tonight’s Drive-In Mob. First up, at 8pm EST, is Kingdom of the Spiders, followed, at around 9:30pm EST, by Empire of the Ants. Both films are available for streaming from lord internet, in the case of Kingdom of the Spiders, from YouTube, and in the case of Empire of the Ants, from Netflix Instant. All you need to do to either follow or tweet along is use the #DriveInMob hashtag on Twitter… and of course check out the official Drive In Mob site for more explicit details.

Gundala, Son of Lightning (Indonesia, 1981)

When it comes to source material for its pop cinema, Indonesia has a pulp and comic book culture to draw upon that’s almost as rich as its already well mined folklore. We have, for instance, already checked in with the fright-masked comic book crusader Panji Tengkorak, as well as the dime novel warrior hero Wiro Sablang. Gundala, a contemporary costumed hero of the type perhaps more recognizable to Western audiences, was created by comic artist Hasmi (aka Harya Suraminata) in 1969, and by the dawn of the 80s had achieved enough popularity to merit a big screen adaptation of his own -- in this case under the guidance of director Liliek Sudjio, who had traveled similar territory with 1980’s Darna Ajaib.

The origin of Gundala, as portrayed in the film version of his exploits, Gundala Putra Petir, is an equal mix of kiddie sci-fi and old fashioned mysticism. The young scientist Sancaka (Queen of Black Magic’s Teddy Purba) is hard at work on a serum that he hopes will render people immune to the effects of lightning strikes. This appears to be a common threat in Jakarta, for, no sooner has Sancaka injected himself with his latest test batch than he finds himself on the business end of a lightning bolt while out strolling. This somehow transports him to the realm of Kronz, the King of Lightning, who looks like something out of The Mighty Boosh. Kronz bestows upon Sancaka the powers of Gundala, which include, of course, lightning speed, as well as the ability to channel electricity, shoot lightning from his hands, and use his finger as a welding torch. He also bestows upon him the Gundala costume -- and, no, those wings on his head don’t flap, but they certainly look capable of it.

Once back in our mortal realm, Sancaka acquires that habit so common to newly minted superheroes of stumbling upon crimes in progress wherever he goes, which of course gives him ample opportunity to test his new powers on an assortment of disposable thugs and crumbums. He also begins work with his colleagues on something called an “Anti-Morphine Serum”. This last brings him the unwanted attentions of a narcotics ring run by the evil mastermind Ghazul, who is played by reliable Indonesian cinema bad guy W.D. Mochtar (Special Silencers). Ghazul and his gang eventually succeed in capturing and imprisoning Sancaka, which puts our hero, who is perfectly capable of escaping his bonds in his guise as Gundala, in a tricky situation as far as carrying out his superheroic duties while keeping his identity secret.

Gundala Putra Petir is a bit undernourished as far as superhero spectacles go, but perhaps no worse than some of the cheaper Italian costumed hero efforts of its day and prior. The sets, for the most part, look cramped and bare, and the acrobatics in the fight scenes are more often than not accomplished by jumpy trick photography. In addition, Teddy Putra, while filling out his street clothes nicely, tends to look a bit slight and scrawny in his form fitting Gundala costume. On the other hand, the film contains a number of other gaudy elements that are enough to keep its comic book heart beating despite its shortcomings.

For one, W.D. Mochtar’s Ghazul is a classic, Bollywood-style, OTT villain, complete with an intimidating pompadour, gold metallic gauntlets to cover his deformed, claw-like hands, and an array of brightly primary colored military style jackets -- not to mention his zebra patterned, fur lined throne. In establishing Ghazul’s villainy, Gundala Putra Petir follows the time-tested Bollywood matrix by which a character’s evil is measured by the number of liquor bottles he has in his lair. In Ghazul’s case, that lair looks like one big liquor cabinet, with an odd preponderance of J&B -- which leads me to think that they don’t have Vat 69 in Indonesia.

Another asset to the film is its music, in particular the funky Gundala theme song that starts pumping on the soundtrack whenever our hero springs into action. Elsewhere, the musical vibe is of the 70s cop show variety, which is wholly suitable to the scale of the action, while thankfully not as infectious as the song. I had that stuck in my head for hours afterward, which prompted me to reflect that superhero theme songs are an especially cruel type of earworm, as there is so little -- if anything -- in daily life that merits their accompaniment. To launch into a lusty chorus of “GUNDALAAAA” while preparing to brush one’s teeth or microwave a burrito is simply to mock one’s own life.

Gundala also, to its credit, manages to dig deep and deliver the rousing climax that so many cut rate superhero movies before it have lead us to expect. Poverty notwithstanding, you can rest assured that you will see sparking control panels, a damsel in distress suspended above a snake pit on a cross, and coverall clad minions being blithely tossed from elevated walkways as they vainly fire off their machineguns in a kind of automated death rattle. Gundala, you see, cares about being an enjoyable superhero movie, even though it's working against some pretty profound material limitations. That alone is enough for me to meet it halfway.