I'll buy that for a dollar: The Deadly Cure (United States, 1996)

The bar for contemporary anti-cinema has been lowered considerably over the last few years, yet The Deadly Cure manages to limbo under it like a lanky hybrid of Belafonte and Plastic Man. Or perhaps I should say “vanti-cinema”--as in “Vanity/anti”, since a prerequisite for descending below cinema’s lowest threshold seems to be a desire to elevate oneself to a level leagues beyond one’s means or abilities.

In the case of The Deadly Cure, the suspect self-promoter is one Dr. Zee Lo, a Los Angeles based “real life doctor”, martial arts expert and teacher who, through his Z Entertainment Productions, has produced and starred in a series of shot-on-video martial arts adventures that seem mostly designed to show off what a badass he is. These bear such titles as Dr. Z, Martial Arts Medicine Man, The Bloods of Angel and Demons, and Combat Mortal—this last being my favorite, as it seems to suggest the one instance of a film being based on a pirated video game. To his credit, Dr. Z comes across as entirely earnest and sincere, intending his films in part as homage to his “grand master” Bruce Lee. He is also quite obviously a skilled fighter; I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of any of the blows he deals out in this movie (or of much of his dialogue, for that matter. Zing!)

As a vanti-auteur, Zee deserves a place alongside the greats, but for some fatal competencies that stand in his way. While The Deadly Cure’s many under-lit scenes, often inaudible dialog and shots that could conceivably have been composed by someone who had never seen a movie before easily place it at the technical level of James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror, it also exhibits an understanding of genre, plot, English syntax and basic human behavior that prevents it from limning The Room’s degree of incoherence and risibility. Of course, there are greater insults that one can hurl at a filmmaker than that he is no Tommy Wiseau.

 The Deadly Cure sang to me from the dollar bin for a number of reasons, all of them having to do with its packaging. For one, there are its obvious cut-and-paste, color Xerox origins and the enthusiastic pull quotes whose attributions are conveniently smudged beyond legibility. But what really inflamed my curiosity beyond the point of resistance was the fact that, while those pull quotes variously tout the film’s “authentic action” and “superb choreography”, the packaging elsewhere—and somewhat incongruously, to my mind—categorizes the film as “animation”.

 

Having now watched The Deadly Cure, it is impossible for me to stress just how much it is in not an animated film. It's images, however, do evidence a super-saturated quality that, by a violent stretch of the imagination, could be said to sort of resemble the Rotoscope technique used by Richard Linklater in films like A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life, while in no way disguising its origins as a live action video. If this effect was intentional, it was perhaps intended to cover up for some other technical flaw. If not, the attempt to pass it off as a cartoon is another brand of face-saving altogether. In any case, this gambit represents another signal event in the long history of producers banking on their audience’s inability to distinguish live action from animation, going all the way back to when Superargo and the Faceless Giants was marketed as “Not a Cartoon”.

In summarizing The Deadly Cure, I am going to use the descriptions of its actors CVs featured on the DVD case, because, despite the fact that I was unable to verify some of them on IMDB, I want to honor the possibility that they might be accurate. Zee, of course, plays our hero, Dr. Billy Lee, who has developed an herbal remedy for a deadly infection that has been sweeping the mean streets of West Los Angeles via a potent strain of synthetic heroin. In keeping with the tenets of Vanti cinema, Lee, a nice enough looking guy, is portrayed as being irresistible to women, and so is pursued arduously by his blonde intern, Susan. Susan is played by Deborah Keller (“Baywatch”), who spends much of the film lounging around hilariously in Lee’s apartment wearing nothing but a Dodgers jersey and holding an enormous cordless phone.

Meanwhile, Zee’s bitter rival, Alex (“BILL CABLE, Basic Instinct”), steals his remedy and turns it over to drug kingpin Wu Fang (the actually familiar looking “LEO LEE, Kindergarden Cop”), who immediately launches a series of attempts to alternately rub Lee out and kidnap Susan. In these efforts he employs a towering African American wearing a knit sweater with black power fists front and back. Eventually, Lee goes to visit an old Buddhist monk who turns out to be a veritable Old Faithful of exposition, informing Lee that it was Wu Fang who murdered his parents and thus inspiring him to set aside his peaceful ways and head out on the vengeance trail. Much training follows, very authentically filmed in what is probably Lee’s actual gym with his actual trainer, after which he stages a one man siege upon Wu Fang’s lair—this occurring just as the drug lord is entertaining a host of potential buyers for Lee’s remedy, each from a different country and each skilled in his own indigenous martial art.

Given its action movie aspirations, the first hour of The Deadly Cure is surprisingly dialogue dependent, as it apparently tries to ratchet up the tension until the final straw transforms the soft spoken Lee into an exciting man of violence. Fortunately, there are a number of things that make this first hour go by more smoothly than it otherwise might. For one, the performances are, for the most part, by bad actors who are acting badly, which—as I think I’ve mentioned before—is much more entertaining than non-actors not acting. There is also the sheer inappropriateness of having your one black actor dressed in what looks like the Black Panthers’ version of a Christmas sweater. Oh, and on a personal note, there were all the establishing shots of random buildings in Westwood, which, having lived there, provided a lot of unwelcome fodder for reminiscence on my part (I’m pretty sure that the hospital at which Lee worked was a Sports Chalet).

The Deadly Cure also has a director's cameo. This is problematic, as few people not involved with the film are likely to recognize its director, Michael Connor. There is, however, a work-around for this:

Dr. Z’s attack on Wu Fang’s lair, when it comes, consists of him going from room to room and facing a single combatant in each, each of whom uses a different fighting style and each of whom ends up leaving an impression of his unconscious face in the floor. This gives the sequence more the feel of a tournament or demonstration than a vengeance driven free-for-all and, as such, one that has a lot less drama than it ideally should. Furthermore, not much effort is made to film these fights in any kind of dynamic fashion. Despite Z’s aforementioned skills, this all has the ironic effect of making the point at which The Deadly Cure finally kicks into action also the point at which it starts to get a little boring.

I think a lot of the above can be attributed to Zee Lo’s dedication to authenticity. In an extra featured on the DVD (yes, this is a dollar DVD with extras), he speaks to a group of his students, decrying the exploitation of Bruce Lee’s name. By contrast, he says, in reference to his own practice, “we don’t commercialize the art.” Unfortunately, while martial arts may be an art, martial arts cinema is, above all else, cinema, and must rely on some artifice and embellishment in order to communicate, not just an action, but also the inherent drama and narrative context of that action. Thus even a martial arts purist like Liu Chia-Liang had to master cinematic techniques in order to properly represent the form.

Happily, one thing that, by its very nature, does not need artifice or embellishment is incompetence, of which The Deadly Cure is rife. It must be said, however, that much of this incompetence comes in the form of overreach, and hence deserves a little respect. Hey, it takes balls to attempt the speed up/slow down effects of a Luc Besson film with 1996 video technology, as it does to employ a freeze frame as liberally as Connor and Lo do here. Dr. Z is clearly a man with the courage of his convictions, and I would be loath to say that the world—or at least that part of it that can be had for a dollar—is not a better place for it.

I'll buy that for a dollar: Cassandra Cat (Czechoslovakia, 1963)

It’s come time again for the least recurring of 4DK’s recurring features, I’ll Buy That For a Dollar -- the reason for the delay being that I haven’t found myself doing much dollar DVD diving of late. That state of affairs, given the current state of our economy, is, of course, susceptible to sudden and drastic change, as dollar DVDs containing fuzzy transfers of forsaken public domain films might soon be all that we’re able to afford.

Thankfully, my long experience of dollar bin foraging has taught me that the above scenario is not as dire as it may sound. A life of being limited to dollar discs does not necessarily consign you to a cinematic diet of Taiwanese kung fu films starring Carter Wong and the dregs of Fred Williamson’s oeuvre exclusively. For example, look what I found just recently: a disc featuring a dubbed print of a film from the Czechoslovakian New Wave by director Vojtech Jasny! Granted, I had to rifle through a lot of Carter Wong and Fred Williamson titles to find it, but I prefer not to dwell on that.

Vojtech was at one time a booster of Checkoslovakia’s communist regime, but had begun to sour upon it by the time of making Cassandra Cat in 1963. By the time of the Soviet invasion in 1968, he had become outspoken in his dissent, as expressed through one of his most acclaimed films, All My Good Countrymen, which was banned soon after the takeover. Vojtech would leave the country not long afterward, and would eventually, with help from fellow Czech New Waver Milos Forman, land a teaching position in Columbia University’s film department.

With Cassandra Cat, Vojtech uses a deceptively simple, fairytale like narrative in which to couch his antiauthoritarian allegory, and the result, as is often the case when such a strategy is employed, is an uneasy mix of cynicism and whimsy, sort of like a bedtime story read by a bitter, alcoholic dad. The story, set in a small town, is narrated by Oliva, the town’s old custodian, who begins the film by looking down upon his fellow townsfolk from his perch atop the clock tower, bemusedly enumerating their various foibles and peculiarities for us as he casually breaks the fourth wall. Whether Oliva strikes you as a wry observer in the mold of Our Town’s Stage Manager or simply a judgmental windbag depends, I suppose, on what you bring to the table.

Oliva is just one facet of a dual role performed in the film by Jan Werich, who was not only a well respected Czech actor, but also a politically engaged author and playwright. Despite all of those accomplishments, Werich may be best known among English speaking film fans for a performance that never even made it to the screen: that of Blofeld in the Bond film You Only Live Twice, whom Werich portrayed briefly, only to be unseated by Donald Pleasance once the producers deemed him too grandfatherly for the part. (A picture of Werich on YOLT’s volcano lair set, holding a cat much more iconic than the one in the film currently under discussion, can be seen here.)

During the film’s opening moments, Werich’s Oliva regales a room full of school children with a tale of his allegedly true encounter with a magical, bespectacled cat. Once this cat’s cheaters were removed, he tells them, all humans within its gaze were rendered in colors that revealed their true natures: the cowards yellow, the lovers red, the liars gray, etc. And in telling this story, it seems that Oliva has brought it to life, as no sooner has he finished than a traveling magician (also played by Werich) and his troupe arrive in town, among their number a four-eyed tabby just like the one in the story. The magician and his crew then treat the townsfolk to a performance that mostly consists of thinly veiled satirical jibes at them and their various hypocrisies.

For a rousing show closer, the Magician’s ever leotard-clad assistant Diana (Emilia Vasaryova) takes off the kitty’s tiny specs and gives him a good long gander at the berg’s assembled citizenry. As promised, the assembled are instantly cast in a wide variety of unflattering hues, exposing them for the assortment of craven crumbums that they are. That is, except for the lovers, who, in a surreal and balletic sequence, waltz joyously with one another as the rest freak out in pantomime around them. In the ensuing fracas, the cat escapes into the countryside, setting off a race between some of the town’s more unsavory adult elements, who wish to hunt it down and kill it, and the more virtuous inhabitants -- the children especially -- who wish to hold it and pet it and call it George. Or something.

Leading those aforementioned unsavory adults is the Schoolmaster, played by Jiri Slovak, who we last saw as the sympathetic male lead in Vaclav Vorlicek’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie? With this character, Vojtech demonstrates the efficiency of his fairytale approach as a means of ruthlessly cutting to the satirical bone, painting, with minimal strokes, a chilling portrait of malignant banality. A hunting and taxidermy enthusiast, the Schoolmaster is seen near the beginning of the film shooting down a stork which we’ve just seen flying over the town, much to the horror of some of the more principled onlookers. In his defense, he guilelessly protests about what a fine specimen the bird will make once stuffed. Later, once that process has been accomplished, he has his assistant run around his office with the stuffed and mounted animal in a mimicry of flight, clapping with childish delight all the while.

In telling his tale, Vojtech utilizes a visual vocabulary that blurs the line between high surrealism and the playfully indulgent theatricality of children’s fantasy films. Because of that, the one aspect of its dollar DVD presentation that least serves Cassandra Cat is easily its washed out color scheme, which leaves just enough of a glimmer of the original’s hues to let us know just what a very colorful affair it once was. This is frustrating for a number of reasons. While its charms are more than few, it’s unlikely that many of today’s viewers need an allegory like Cassandra Cat to illuminate the queasy relationship between tyranny and the truth. As such, I think it’s primary appeal lies in its status as a visual feast.

That said, it shouldn’t be forgotten the power that Cassandra Cat likely held in its original place and time, especially in light of the Soviets’ violent suppression of the Prague Spring a few years later. After all, I suppose the measure of any cat, once it’s out of the bag, is the amount of force brought to bear upon putting it back in again. Verdict: Well worth the dollar!

I'll buy that for a dollar: Yongary, Monster From The Deep (South Korea, 1967)

Now that the reputations of Eiji Tsuburaya and Ishiro Honda have been rehabilitated, films like Yongary, Monster From The Deep are more important than ever. Those men are now rightly considered geniuses worthy of our reverence, rather than as purveyors of movies in which men in silly monster suits stomp on toys. But what if you don't feel like respectfully marveling at the level of finely crafted detail in Tsubaraya's miniatures, or the deep layers of allegory in Gojira? What if you just want to laugh at men in silly monster suits stomping on toys?

Well, that's why we have on hand those few competing kaiju efforts that Tsuburaya's and Honda's Toho output consigned to the margins. I'm talking about stuff like Shochiku's The X From Outer Space, Nikkatsu's Gappa, The Triphibian Monster, and, of course, Yongary.

Yongary is South Korea's most widely known entry in the Kaiju boom of the mid 60s, thanks largely to it being purchased by AIP and dubbed for American television. It is not, however, the country's only such film. In the 60s alone, it was followed by Space Monster, Wangmagwi in 1967, and preceded by a few years by 1962's Pulgasari. While both of those titles inhabit a circle of obscurity even deeper than that of Yongary, it is Pulgasari that holds the honor of precipitating one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of Korean cinema, if not also in the history of relations between the country's North and South. I speak, of course, of Kim Jong-Il's kidnapping of noted South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife for the purpose of remaking Pulgasari to North Korean specifications in the 1980s.

For its part, Yongary was directed -- not under duress, as far as I know -- by Kim Ki-Duk. Though I don't think we're talking about the same Kim Ki-Duk who's responsible for recent disturbing psychosexual art films like The Isle and Samaritan Girl. I could be wrong, however. Anyway, whoever directed it, Yongary is marked by a charming crudity. At the same time, I have to say that its special effects are no worse than those of many Japanese Tokusatsu television series of its era, those produced by Tsuburaya included. It's just that Yongary obviously aspires to be so much more, and hence its inherent adorableness.

The film starts with some business about a space capsule, and then we're told about some kind of traveling earthquake that's heading straight toward South Korea. I'm not really clear on whether those two things were meant to be related, or whether it's the fault of me or the filmmakers that I missed the connection. To tell the truth, when I pay a dollar for a film, I'm really just looking for something that I can throw on while I have a drink, check my email, and do whatever, so I'm not really going to be subjecting its various narrative details to close scrutiny. In other words, those of you who were hoping for a detailed synopsis are just going to have to suck it.

By the way, while a traveling earthquake might sound terrifying to many of you, I think it would be awesome, because the advance warning would for once allow me to make sure that I had my pants and shoes within easy reach when it struck. That's, of course, assuming that it struck in the wee hours, as the last major quake I was in, L.A.'s Northridge quake, did. On that occasion, however, I received a handy instruction in how you can actually manage to entirely dress yourself before even waking up. Seriously, within a fraction of a second of that quake striking, I awoke to find that I'd somehow managed to leap out of bed, find and put on all of my clothing, and get my ass under a doorway before even consciously registering any of what was going on. A good thing, really, because when I looked back at the bed where I had been slumbering, there was a bookcase lying across it. San Francisco's Loma Prieta quake didn't pose any such problems (yes, I've been fortunate enough to be at whichever end of California was suffering one of the state's worst earthquakes of the last twenty years when it was occurring), as it was considerate enough to take place during work hours, when most people already have their pants and shoes on. Unless they're whores, of course. Or Tarzan.

Anyway, as you might have guessed, the traveling earthquake turns out all along to have been Yongary, the fabled Monster From The Deep, and once he makes his appearance on the surface, it's time for some concerted smashing of tiny buildings and tanks. One of the things I like about Yongary is how it keeps its narrative very basic. There are no subplots about gangsters and stolen diamonds, or corrupt businessmen, or space princesses; just people wanting to kill Yongary and Yongary stepping on them. Granted, those sequences that involve the film's human stars do seem to have a strange, somnambulant quality -- sort of as if everyone were trying to act while submerged underwater -- but that may be as much due to the affectless English dub that AIP saddled the film with as it does with the original performers. The kid who voiced the film's "Kenny" surrogate, in particular, recites his lines as if he's being forced to read his own ransom note.

Yongary also includes that famous moment where Yongary breaks the fourth wall by suddenly starting to go-go dance to the twangy guitar music that's playing on the soundtrack. And then at the end, when Korea finally kills him, he appears to be bleeding out of his ass. After that, people seem to spend an awful lot of time standing around congratulating themselves, but, when you look at the finished product, who would begrudge S. Korea their moment of pride. They set out to make a kaiju film that aspired to the grandeur of Godzilla, but with a tenth of the budget and -- judging from what stands in for crowd scenes here -- about a thousandth of the extras. And they, of course, failed. But in the process they made a film that allowed me to once again laugh idiotically at the spectacle of a grown man in a rubber suit kicking around toy tanks without having to worry about someone chiding me about how the person who made it was actually quite a genius. Thank you, Yongary.

I'll buy that for a dollar: Feeders & Among Us - Part II

As they say, “Let the fungus be among us”.

So, anyway, at the end of our last very lengthy installment, I said that I was interested in seeing Among Us so that I could gauge the progress made by SOV horror filmmakers the Polonia brothers between the time of making the frankly laughable Feeders in 1996 and Among Us’ production date of 2004. Well, it turns out that the most noticeable special ingredient that the brothers have added to the mix this time around is a sense of ironic self awareness and a willingness to parody themselves. Of course, these are far from unique attributes for a horror film to have in this snarky, post modern age, given that such postures are an ideal refuge for the lazy or simply incompetent filmmaker, of which there are sadly quite many. (Hey, don’t you get it? It was meant to be bad, dude.)

Interestingly (there’s that word again), given these qualities, Among Us’ pairing with Feeders on the same disc has the (interesting) effect of making the later film seem like an apology for the earlier one. It’s an apology that renders itself moot, however. For Among Us spends so much of its time trying to preemptively deflect criticism that it forgets to be a movie, and. as a result, has the paradoxical effect of leaving us pining for the earnest dopeyness of Feeders.

And to be honest, I feel kind of bad about this. Don’t get me wrong, though. Feeders is a movie that is absolutely impossible not to make fun of. And, furthermore, I think that to make fun of it is the appropriate reaction -- certainly more in the spirit of things than to solemnly condemn it for its shortcomings. But the thing is, Among Us gives me the impression that, somewhere along the line, all of the mockery and criticism somehow got to John and Mark Polonia, leading them to adopt the chitinous shell of irony that we see here. Fortunately, they muck that up a bit, too, which allows for a few faint glimmers of the fun that could be gleaned from the earlier film.

Among Us begins with a series of laughably executed scare sequences in which a fellow in a clumsy Bigfoot costume attacks various campers. This instantly ceases to be laughable once it is revealed that what we are seeing are meant to be clips from the works of B Horror film director Billy D’Amato (Bob Dennis). You see, they’re supposed to be bad. Among Us repeats this same fake out over and over throughout its first hour, to the extent that every one of its potential horror movie moments is ultimately revealed to be ersatz. As a result, audience goodwill is totally exhausted by the time, during the movie’s final third, when D’Amato and his film crew travel into the woods and encounter Bigfoot for reals. The Polonias don’t help matters much by including among their party a fey crypto-zoologist played for broad comedy by co-director Jon McBride. Combined with all of the shaky POV camera work employed during this section, McBride’s performance has the odd effect of forcing you to contemplate what Blair Witch might have been like had its cast included an over-the-top comic relief character of the type found in a Mexican wrestling movie.

I remember Keith, in one of his Teleport City reviews, mentioning how one of the cardinal – and frequent – sins of these SOV movies is how they try to compensate for their glaring artificiality by having characters constantly say things like, “This isn’t a movie man. This is real!” Hey, he was right! I honestly lost count of how many times characters in Among Us said things like, “This isn’t a fucking set! This is life.” Or, “Isn’t that what they say in the movies?” On the other hand, I must say that Among Us’ script, in terms of its attention to character and attempts at believable dialog, is indeed a vast improvement over that of Feeders – even if that only results in it achieving the kind of serviceable blandness that ultimately makes it less entertaining than its lovably off-base predecessor.

In the end, Among Us is an uncomfortable watch due to the way that it so violently wrestles with its own limitations. The problem with these type of films is that, even at their most technically refined, the best they can hope for is to look like a Korean soap opera, and no amount of screaming at the audience that they are, in fact, a real movie – or, more poignantly, real effin’ life, man – will change that. What’s more, the relentlessly knowing, self-referential tone of the film comes across as an attempt by its makers to dictate what their audience’s response to it should be. And that strikes me as being something of an imbalanced exchange. The audience of a film like Among Us should be as free in responding to it as the film’s creators were in making it. Working well outside the restraints of the studio system, the Polonias presumably made exactly the movie that they wanted to make – within their limitations, of course – and hopefully with little regard for what others might think. We who choose to watch that film should in turn be free to make of it whatever we want, without having to feel the filmmakers’ over-controlling fingers all up in our brain pans.

That said, I was saddened to learn that John Polonia passed away suddenly last year, the victim of a heart aneurysm at the young age of 39. Given some of the things I’ve said above, I sincerely hope that I don’t come across as disingenuous when I say that his death represents a real loss to the world of film.

After all, if we are strangely transfixed by a movie like Feeders, it is not just because of the ineptitude of its makers, but also their audacity. The vast majority of people in the Polonia brothers’ place would, despite their enthusiasms, consider their combined lack of means and ability and – granted that they even indulged themselves in contemplating the possibility at all – turn their backs on the project of making their own films. In deciding otherwise and following their desires, the Polonias stuck their heads up out of the foxhole of conformity, effectively making themselves targets for derision and the condescending judgment of those many who took the easier path. In judging them myself, am I really going to fall down on the side of conformity? Of risk aversion? Of catering to mainstream opinion?

Naw. Flaws aside, the Polonias rock. The rest are all wimps.

I'll buy that for a dollar: Feeders & Among Us - Part I

I’ve remarked in the past upon the great extent to which my movie viewing habits are dictated by whatever dollar DVDs I’m able to find in my local junk shops. So I’ve decided to once again attempt to initiate one of my sporadically recurring features on the topic. The last time I attempted to do this was way back in May of last year, with my review of the hilariously dubbed Thai Wild-One-on-pachyderms saga Killer Elephants, so let’s hope that this time around I do a better job of keeping up with it.

Crate digging for cheapo public domain DVDs is one of my favorite forms of urban foraging, and, luckily for me, my neighborhood, San Francisco’s Mission District, is ideal grounds for the pursuit. Amidst all of the mom and pop fish markets, panaderias, greasy spoon diners and taquerias, the ten block stretch of Mission Street between 16th and 26th is dotted on either side with junk and discount stores. Needless to say I am never wanting for tee-shirts and tube socks. And I’m proud to say that, thanks to one such establishment, I have a rolling carry-on bag that, despite what its $15 price tag might lead you to expect, has served me faithfully and sturdily for over six years. But most importantly for my purposes, what many of these shops offer is myriad opportunities for finding cut-rate discs boasting horrible, murky transfers of choppy TV prints of countless forgotten and disreputable movies.

My favorite spot for this activity was a large mom and pop junk store located in the shell of an old movie theater on the block of Mission between 22nd and 23rd. It has since relocated to a more nondescript location and been replaced at the original by a chain dollar store, which itself has a decent selection of two-fer kung fu discs and unsubtitled Mexican films.

This shop’s main area of business seemed to be the wholesale supply of cheap souvenirs to Chinatown gift shops, and in order to get at the stacks of cardboard boxes that housed its DVD selection, one often had to push aside piles of fake jade statuettes of the laughing Buddha and Chinese Opera VCDs. Once done, these boxes would often yield such treasures as horrific entries from Fred Williamson’s European years, of-dubious-provenance discs containing suspiciously well-mastered versions of Italian gialli, lesser but nonetheless satisfying American film noirs like Kansas City Confidential, and Spaghetti Westerns both classic, like Death Rides a Horse, and less so, as with the Ed “Cookie” Byrnes fronted Any Gun Can Play. All for a dollar!

By the way, while there are currently no functioning movie theaters on Mission Street, the facades of seemingly all of those that have come and gone over the years remain, repurposed as retail spaces, parking lots, etc. Ironically, it is only the one theater that I actually had a chance to attend during its years of operation, the cavernous New Mission, that remains shuttered. I have a vivid memory of my ill-fated attempt to watch The Company of Wolves there on Family Night, a monthly event that had more the air of a neighborhood block party than a night at the movies. One weekend morning a couple months back I saw a truckload of mattresses being loaded into it, so perhaps it’s now being used as a warehouse.

Anyway, aside from the thrill of the hunt, what I most like about dollar disc diving is how the combination of utterly random selection and negligible financial risk leads to me watching films that I wouldn’t have under other circumstances. Such is the case with the disc that I am reviewing in this installment, a double feature number containing the obscure horror/sci fi titles Feeders and Among Us.

I suspect that Feeders benefits from my relative lack of previous exposure to shot-on-video backyard horror films. I know that other writers on the internet have taken a more proactive approach to this subgenre, and have come away from it with an aversion bordering on toxic reaction. For myself, what encounters I have had with these type of films have been, as I suspect they are for most people, purely accidental. I can vaguely remember feelings of frustration and disappointment that I would have upon bringing a movie home from the video store back in the 80s, seduced by box art that promised classic B movie thrills, only to find something that, to my surprise, looked like someone’s home video of a visit to a charity haunted house – something that, to my mind, wasn’t a movie at all.

Of course, back then I had yet to develop the fine appreciation for outsider cinema that I have now, and I imagine that, had I attempted to watch Feeders then, it would have ended up, like those other mistakenly procured SOV films, being promptly ejected from the VCR and returned. However, given that I now come to it with a more, er, sophisticated sensibility, I was able to watch it not only in its entirety, but in one sitting no less. And I even enjoyed it. Sort of.

Both Feeders and Among Us are products of the Polonia brothers, a pair of movie mad twins from Wellsboro, PA who, starting in the late eighties, churned out a truly impressive number of homegrown genre efforts. Feeders, made in 1996, falls somewhat toward the earlier end of their oeuvre, and comes complete with all of the shortcomings you might expect in a novice effort of its type. For starters, the acting on the part of the amateur cast comes in every shade of bad, from hysterically overemphatic to disturbingly dead-eyed and listless. An awkwardly expletive-laden script (at one point, a forest ranger, seeing a flying saucer pass overhead, exclaims, “I hope it doesn’t burn the fucking forest down!”) does nothing to help matters, nor do the heavy regional accents of many involved, which had me constantly anticipating someone calling someone else a “jagoff”, even though, sadly, that never happened.

On the technical end we have the Feeders themselves, a race of marauding space aliens who are realized via immobile paper mache puppets that appear to have been built up over either half-inflated party balloons or crumpled up paper bags. These make their journey Earthward inside flying saucers that are rendered via the crudest, Colecovision style computer graphics imaginable. To be fair to the brothers, they do prove relatively competent in the areas of camera pointing and editing, and attempt to compensate for these aforementioned shortfalls with a generous amount of splatter.

The film centers upon two road tripping buddies, Bennett, a nerdy comic foil in a fetching shorts-and-tube-socks ensemble played by John Polonia himself, and Derek, played by co-director and fellow SOV auteur (see Woodchipper Massacre) Jon McBride. Unfortunately, the two men’s arrival in the picturesque town of Mansfield, PA coincides with that of a vanguard force of alien invaders, who have for some reason chosen the sleepy tourist spot as their first point of conquest. The reason for the invasion becomes clear once the aliens start in on the “feeding” referred to in the title, which involves a lot of sloppy chowing down on the various nonplussed looking actors, one of whom proves himself incapable of even playing a severed head convincingly.

Various confrontations and tense close calls follow, all played out in the non-descript front rooms and garages of those friends and family members of the Polonias who were at this point still tolerant enough of their movie-bug shenanigans to allow the use of their homes. Highlights include a very Shatner-esque moment for John Polonia in which he does battle with an alien duplicate of himself, and a 1970s style “downer” ending that sees McBride fall to his knees and tear at his hair histrionically as the beginning of Earth’s final days plays out before him.

At just over an hour, Feeders can at least be credited with not adding the sin of overstaying its welcome – that is, provided it had one in the first place – to its already considerable list of flaws. In fact, the film moves along at a nice clip, buoyed, no doubt, by the enthusiasm of its makers. The brothers are always throwing something at you, and if you decide to be a good sport and not let yourself get too up in arms over just how crappy that something invariably is, you might just have an okay time.

I noticed that Among Us, which was made in 2004, was singled out by a couple of IMDB commenters as being the best that brothers John and Mark Polonia had to offer, though each used heavily qualified language in setting that notion forth. I was interested in seeing what progress would be evident in the brothers’ style and technical ability eight years on from Feeders, which in itself is something of a compliment to Feeders – that, in its aftermath, I could look forward to watching another product of the same crew with anything other than dread, much less anything that could even be remotely described as “interest”.

To be continued…

I'll buy that for a dollar: Killer Elephants (Thailand, 1976)

I think that it's time I come clean and admit to all of you that my taste in movies -- and, hence, what I choose to write about -- is pretty much dictated by what I can find at the dollar store. That is not as limiting as it might sound, however, since my neighborhood has about a gajillion of those stores. So, not only can I take home most of the combined cinematic output of Sonny Chiba, Bolo Yeung and Fred Williamson for less than the price of a Denny's breakfast, but I can also, on occasion, make some fairly interesting finds.

Killer Elephants, IMHO, is just such a find, as it's a rare example of a 1970s Thai action film that was actually dubbed into English for American release. Now whether that release was originally a straight to VHS deal or if Killer Elephants had a run on the grindhouse circuit or on U.S. television I have no idea. But, regardless, it's easy to see what an American distributor of that period might have seen in the film, because it's possessed of some fairly unique and potentially exploitable charms.

Killer Elephants is a uniquely Thai take on the biker film, as the gang that Sombat Methanee leads ride elephants rather than motorcycles. Now you might be chuckling to yourself over the absurdity of such a notion, but picture in your mind Marlon Brando on a motorcycle going up against Sombat Methanee on an elephant and you might just be a bit more respectful. As such the film features lots of scenes of rampaging elephants overturning cars, toppling over flimsy grass huts and... well, that's pretty much it, but they do an awful lot of both of those things. The film's American handlers obviously cut it down to little more than its action scenes, which means that Killer Elephants is very fast paced and makes absolutely no sense. And if that doesn't qualify it for a review on 4DK (notice the Bollywood style abbreviation there?), I might as well just hang up my blogging, er, shoes right now.

The dubbing of the male voices in the film sounds like it was all done by one guy, who uniquely combines the authoritative Harvard clip of the Kennedys, the folksy, homespun inflections of Walter Brennan and the random burst delivery of William Shatner into one heady vocalese. As more male characters are introduced, you can hear this guy getting more and more desperate to mix it up, and eventually he reaches into Cookie Monster territory for his voicing of one of the bad guys. The female voices also all sound like one person, except that she says "bastard" a lot and manages to say it in a different, completely strange way every time, at one point saying something that sounds more like "Boss Turd". I thought I was past the point of being entertained by bad dubbing, but, oh, how wrong I was.

Unfortunately, Killer Elephants failed to kick off the wave of Eleph-sploitation movies that it rightly should have. It's a shame, because Sombat really does manage to cut a pretty badass figure perched atop his "ride". Anyway, I would highly recommend this one if you can find it. Did I mention that it cost a dollar?