Celebrate Halloween the 4DK way!

Halloween movie lists have become a staple of the season. But one has to admit that there's a numbing amount of overlap between them. I mean, does one really need to cram that much Vincent Price into their cinematic diet all in one go? In response, I have called shenanigans, emerged from my sharecropper's cabin, stumbled down the hill and perched myself in front of the community center's battered old Mac to do something that I should have done long ago. Below is a list of movies that, if you can find them, will guarantee you a Halloween like no other. (Please note that, where I have provided links, they are, in most cases, to unsubtitled versions of the films).

Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay, aka Cat Beast (Pakistan, 1997)

One owes it to oneself to, at least once in their life, watch a Pashto language horror film... before, of course, solemnly swearing to never watch one again. Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay has all of the hallmarks: fat ladies twerking in wet spandex; sound effects that are as incongruous as they are deafeningly loud, men with echoplexed voices pointing and shouting at each other. The works.
READ MY REVIEW

Plenilunio (Uruguay, 1993)

Uruguay comes through with that rarest of cinematic unicorns: a shot-on-video horror film that is not only well directed, well written and well acted, but that also provides some genuine scares... even if its creature effects are as ridiculous as they come. READ MY REVIEW

Sumpah Orang Minyak (Singapore, 1958)

The Oily Man rises from the swamp of Southeast Asian folklore to provide, not only an exotic addition to the usual cast of Halloween creatures, but also a simple and easy costume idea. All you need is a body stocking and a can of STP. READ MY REVIEW

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

The Savage Hunt of King Stakh (USSR, 1979)

Highly recommended by a well-meaning idiot who wrote: "The Savage Hunt of King Stakh luxuriates in gothic atmosphere, putting it in good company with the Italian thrillers of Margheritti et al, the AIP Poe films, and Hammer’s horror friendly take on The Hound of the Baskervilles. In contrast to those, however, it also boasts elements of stark modernism." READ MY REVIEW

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

Nyi Blorong, aka Snake Queen (Indonesia, 1982)

What would a 4DK Halloween be without Suzzanna, the queen of Indonesian horror?--here seen in one of her most iconic roles. As an added bonus for the ladies, we also get a shirtless Barry Prima. READ MY REVIEW

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

Ghost of Guts Eater (Thailand, 1973)

What? You say your seasonal gallery of ghouls does not include an entrails-trailing flying severed head? You are obviously a racist. READ MY REVIEW

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

Haram Alek, aka Ismail Yassin meets Frankenstein (Egypt, 1954)

That oldies-loving friend of yours insisting on yet another Halloween viewing of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein? Why not shake things up and switch it out with this charming Egyptian remake. READ MY REVIEW

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE (WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES!)

And finally...

Pyasa Shaitan (India, 1995)

...if watching all of the above in short order does not completely blow your mind,  here you go. The film that will spontaneously give you the ability to spout "WHAT THE FUCK, JOGINDER?" in flawless Tamil, not to mention every other language spoken by sane, decent minded human beings. READ MY REVIEW

WATCH IT ON YOUTUBE

666 (Beware the End is at Hand) (Nigeria, 2007)

As someone who’s recently been forced to confront his own mortality, I’ve had to face some uncomfortable questions. “What will the end look like”, is one of those that both all and none of us want answered. Then again, I suppose, it depends on who’s doing the answering; as a devoutly secular person, I wondered what succor the Christian church might offer me on the topic. Of course, I turned to a Nigerian evangelical Christian exploitation movie to find out. And the answer – that we’re all uproariously fucked – did, I have to admit, offer a little bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo, the producer of 666 (Beware the End is at Hand), clearly intended it as a sincere work of evangelicism, yet still knew which side his bread was buttered on. Thus he takes us straight to Hell before subjecting us to the interminable shot-on-video sermonizing that will take up so much of 666’s running time. The battle for man’s soul, according to Okonkwo, will take place in the suburbs of Lagos, and there, for the most part, in a church basement. That, at least, appears to be where Hell is located in the film, which means you religious folks should take it very seriously when your preacher or wizard of whatever talks about what’s down below. It’s right down there! They can totally hear you!

Emeka Ani, who plays Satan in the film, takes a very Harinam Singh approach to expressing his malevolent authority, in that he simply parks himself on a throne for the entire movie and declaims at the camera with wild eyes while referring to himself in the third person a lot. His studio audience is a congregation of female minions who laugh in unison at his shtick in a manner that suggests the laughter bag being very quickly opened and closed again. Between heavily accented proclamations of the End TImes, he sends his emissaries to Earth to “win souls” for him. This mostly consists of lots of fully clothed gay sex, but also consists of one devotee forcing a hooker to lick an open lesion on his ankle, which results in her arriving in Hell and being thrown into a chicken wire covered fire pit.

But, wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I give you the impression that any of these interesting things happened in any kind of close succession – creating, as it were, a sense of some kind of propulsive narrative drive -- I must point out that they in fact served as intermittent interruptions to the aforementioned sermonizing by Okonkwo’s Pastor Chucks, who walks the coffee stands, beer halls and marketplaces of the city, preaching the gospel to the seemingly deaf ears of the populace, who quite manifestly just want to enjoy their various beverages. Granted, there is some buoyant Afro pop that plays during these scenes, but, as it is always the same exact cue, it quickly comes to contribute to, more than alleviate, the monotony.

Thankfully, relief comes in the form of a horned demon child who is born to an Earthly woman, at which point 666 (Beware the End is at Hand) (I swore I was only going to write that full title once) really kicks into its own somnolent version of high gear. There’s actually a flash forward to eight years later! At this point, it is clear that this is a very bad kid, as evidenced by a long, unbroken shot of him playing somewhat normally, if a bit brattily, with a bunch of kids in an alley. At his worst, he sprouts a single, chalky horn and throws glowing energy orbs at people, but even in repose he must shock the gentry by openly drinking and smoking at public cafes. The only problem is that the kid who plays him, with his perfectly round head and little pot belly, is kind of adorable – and the fact that he employs that same barking laughter bag laugh while trying to sound like a menacing adult doesn’t help matters.

This is all of little consequence, however, as a holy man quickly comes along and destroys the little bastard.

Until 666 (Beware the End is at Hand) 2, that is.

 

Wait, did I not mention that 666 was, at least, a 2 parter -- its roughly hour long increments likely determined by that of the average VHS tape? Well, it is, and part 2 begins exactly where 1 left off, with the resurrected Devil Boy discovered crying by the roadside by the kindly Pastor Chucks, who takes him home. Devil Boy makes quick work of possessing the Pastor’s niece and hoodoos her into strangling him. From there he goes back to his usual devilry. In fact, of the two films, part 2 is the one that delivers most generously on the exploitation thrills, will all manner of low rent video effects being put to the task of realizing the Dark One’s fiendish magic. In the end, a confusing montage depicts the beginning of Satan’s reign on Earth with much wicked but strangely abrupt laughter drowning out the lamentations of the populace.

Yet, as the credits rolled over Kenneth Okonkwo’s smiling face, I had to wonder, was this really the end? IS THAT ALL YOU GOT, PASTOR OKONKWO? And perhaps that is the message of 666: (Beware the End is at Hand) (dammit, there I go again) – that, in life, there is not always going to be a 666 (Beware the End is at Hand) 3 to come along and set things right; that THE END is not always just sequel bait, but sometimes just that -- and, as such, a call to get straight with ourselves and our God.

Which is not to say that I’m not trolling the internet for the next installment, as horrible as it might be. And in this, too, is a metaphor for life.

Plenilunio (Uruguay, 1993)

Uruguayan shot-on-video horror maestro Ricardo Islas embarked upon his career as a director at the tender age of sixteen, when he convinced the program director at his small local TV station to produce a short film he had scripted titled Posesión. Eight years and five feature-length SOV productions later, Islas had worked his way up to a budget just scraping the underside of one thousand dollars for Plenilunio (translation: Full Moon), a distinctive, DIY take on the werewolf genre.

Plenilunio’s action centers around a group of kids who all hang out together at the local TV station (Channel 3 TV in Colonia del Sacramento, at least in name the same station that backed Isla’s debut). Seeing over them is the station’s news cameraman, Roberto, a soft-spoken and gentle soul (played by Islas himself) who does his best to fill a sort of big brother role for the brood. When a food stall operator is brutally killed in the woods outside of town, and the victim’s family refuses to accept the police’s explanation that a wild dog was the culprit, the gang –- whose imaginations, as we are shown, are fueled by South American horror comics and Spanish translations of Marvel’s Man-Wolf –- become convinced that a werewolf is to blame.

It turns out that the victim’s three children have also come to the same conclusion, as a couple of the kids from the TV station find out when they go into the woods searching for clues. Here they come across the grieving children laying out tainted meat in the hope of poisoning the perhaps not-so-mythical predator. However, they are thwarted in this attempt when they are attacked and chased off by a mysterious albino man. It is later learned that this man has recently purchased a small bungalow in the area where the initial murder occurred. After more killings and a piling up of evidence supporting their suspicions, Roberto and one of the older boys decide to pay the man a visit, on the supposition that he may, in fact, be the werewolf without being aware of it.

On the contrary, upon finding the stranger’s bungalow vacant and making their way inside, they find a series of meticulously dated VHS tapes documenting each of the man’s transformations. It turns out that this fellow is far from the hapless Larry Talbot type, and is instead a deliberate killer who not only revels in the vicious exploits of his lupine alter ego, but is also nearly as savage and deadly in his human form. This is proven when the stranger comes home and discovers the two, setting upon them with such ferocity that they barely escape with their lives.

Roberto and the kids take shelter in the offices of the TV station, which is deserted for the holidays, only to find that the albino stranger has followed them. After cutting off their communications, he stands vigil outside the building, killing anyone who attempts to leave or enter, all the while awaiting the arrival of the night and the full moon, when he will make his transformation and easily break through the feeble barriers that the kids have set up. Throughout this grueling standoff, Roberto –- fully stepping into his role as protector, and drawing upon presumably heretofore unknown reserves of courage to do so –- repeatedly tries to reason with the killer, pleading with him to let the children go. But this isn’t going to happen, for, as the wolf at the door explains, it simply isn’t in his nature to do so. And besides, he’s “hungry”.

Doing for The Three Little Pigs what Matthew Bright’s Freeway would later do for Little Red Riding Hood, Plenilunio is a film that shouldn’t work, but somehow kinda does. This is largely due to the fact that Islas, unlike so many other SOV horror filmmakers, keeps his ambitions firmly reigned within the scope of his means, and sticks with a story and characters that are both suitably ground-level. Furthermore, the naturalness of his young actors and the easy chemistry between them gives their scenes together a casual everyday-ness that both sits comfortably within the homeliness of the format and provides contrast to the surprisingly violent and gory kill scenes. It also has to be said that Plenilunio’s script is simply very well written, to the extent that the ideas themselves are unsettling enough to keep you invested regardless of how explicitly or seamlessly they’re rendered.

And to that point, Islas also makes the wise choice of never showing us too much… at least, not until the end of the film. I have to tell you that my urge to show you a screen cap of Plenilunio’s monster -- which Islas’ own site self mockingly boasts was “hand-made out of sponge and cotton” -- is almost too overwhelming to resist. But, since the director himself chose not to reveal it until the film’s final minutes, I feel to do so would be in defiance of the whole spirit of the endeavor. More importantly, I think that, while we all might get a lot of cheap mileage out of mocking such a shabby creation -- this is the internet, after all, and we’re all well practiced at it -- I fear that to get caught up in doing so might come at the expense of registering the many real charms that Plenilunio has to offer. In other words, this is one that’s well worth seeing for yourself.

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…