Street Trash

I've been trying to watch this movie for a while.

Street Trash has been on my radar for a while now based solely on the supremely-cool box art which is at the top of this review. A man, mid-melt, flushing himself down the toilet; an act which then separates him from three of his limbs. And yes, this scene is in the movie. Fantastic.

Of course Street Trash can't be all homeless-person-body meltdowns. As entertaining as that may be, there has to be context for the body melting (I think). This context comes in the form of a Junkyard/toxic waste dump that acts as a town of sorts to the unnamed city's homeless population. This town is lorded over by a super-strong, psychotic ex-green beret who cares a knife made out of a human femur and appears to have superhuman strength. Whatever.



The story, whatever of it there is, entail the denizens of this homeless village coming in contact with a mysterious new booze called "Viper." The origins of this beverage are never explained: at the beginning of the movie, the local shop-owner finds a dusty old case of booze in his basement and decides to just sell it to the homeless for a buck. Why not?

Here I'd probably tell you about the story, but there really isn't one to speak of: in between scenes of the characters interacting in various ways that barely matter to the flow of the film, other characters buy and drink Viper leading to a meltdown sequence. I'm not even sure of any thematic reasoning for the meltdown scenes: no commentary on society's treatment of the homeless, just people to be melted for our viewing pleasure.



It's is to the movie's benefit that the meltdown scenes are pretty well-done. The cover scene of the man who flushes himself is a joy to behold, gross plastic pustules erupt green-, blue-, and yellow-tinged technicolor gore, the effect ending with what looks like a lumpy trash bag writhing in the toilet bowl. Another man explodes against a wall and a woman tears her breasts off mid-melt as they ooze and burst between her fingers and bra. Good and gross and very colorful.



Of course, the movie really lost me with the supposed "comedy" bits. As far as comedy is concerned much is borrowed from the Troma (Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke 'Em High) catalog of movies. In an admission that may lose me B-movie cred, I have to admit I hate Troma movies; just not my cup of tea. A scene indicative of this involves the aforementioned green beret chopping off one man's cock as he urinates and proceeding to play a lively game of "keep-away" with it as the victim stumbles around. The meltings were funnier than that. Street Trash should stick to what it knows and leave the castrations to Jennifer Hill.

In true B-movie fashion, the only reason to watch Street Trash is for the inventive, colorful, absolutely whacked out gore and the copious amounts of female nudity: from an opening scene chase out of a burning building to the second-act homeless orgy that happens. Or gang-rape. Either way she ends up dead, but it's not a particularly sad thing in this movie. Like all bad horror movies, since the audience knows nothing about any of the characters it's impossible to feel bad when they get naked or generally melt, which is the fate of just about every character.

To sum up, Street Trash's greatest boon is it's greatest flaw. The gore is awesome, but ultimately pointless. Pointlessness is not a bad thing, but Street Trash's Troma-esque humor sequences drag on endlessly and honestly, bu the end the body meltdowns start to wear out their welcome. I know. I must be getting old or something.



** out of ****

I Spit on Your Grave

Exploitation film can be a real nasty, dirty, fucked-up thing. Usually exploitation is lumped in with B-movie: some silly slasher romp through bubble-headed bimbo territory complete with too-absurd-to-be-believed blood-letting. While exploitation cinema is usually B-movie cinema, the opposite is not always the case. Earth Girls Are Easy is a B-movie; Ice Pirates is a B-movie. Neither is exploitation.



A movie like Evil Dead 2, campy as it is, is exploitation of a sort: a lighter, kid-friendly fare. I'll argue (I have and might again on this blog) That real exploitation is a mode: not a genre itself, but a collection of genres (horror, crime, science fiction, drama) that were borne out of specific temporal and cultural consciousnesses (Vietnam War era America) and is hard-pressed to be duplicated outside of this consciousness. Exploitation captures the consciousness of conflict; a cynical, realistic attitude that conflict is the natural state of the world and civilization is the abnormality.



If exploitation is about the real, the nasty, and the fucked-up: I Spit On Your Grave is one of the nastiest and most fucked up of exploitation films.



I Spit On Your Grave is about a writer, Jennifer Hill: a liberated, successful novelist from Manhattan who retreats to a cabin in the woods to write her second novel. She's beset by four locals who proceed to attack and rape her repeatedly. The attack is roughly one-third of the entire movie, with the last third dedicated to Jennifer's healing, planning, and eventual revenge. Castration is the order of the day.



The film's plot is an old one for exploitation films (Last House on the Left, Fight For Your Life, et al.), but the way in which Spit engages its audience is what makes it an exploitation masterpiece. The film punishes its audience for even wanting to see the depravity it puts on display. As I mentioned, the rape is a large portion of the actual film, even just knowing a 30-minute rape scene exists is not one aspect any sane audience would even seek out to view. The director, Mier Zarchi, makes it worse but stripping as much of the artifice as he can out of the scene. The camera is set and left alone; for long takes this poor woman, Jennifer, is subjected to pain and horror as these four men take turns raping her.



The audience feels no respite as the voyeur aspect of exploitation cinema is dragged out and laid bare. Exploitation audiences seek out depravity, revel in the voyeur aspect of sexuality and nudity, with I Spit On Your Grave, it's rammed down their throats. The only escape is to turn the movie off and completely sever the relationship. The actress playing Jennifer Hill (Camilla Keaton) may have gone through hell for her performance (and what a performance it is; Keaton is a fabulous actress who takes the thinly written character and creates a complex show of emotion that puts a real face on the horror that is so prevalent in these films), but the true hell is reserved for the audience, their voyeurism is taken, perverted, and turned against them.



Like all good exploitation, Zarchi takes an important social function, gender relations, and re-interprets it as an apocalyptic conflict. From a feminist standpoint, oppression fills the frame in every scene and even Jennifer's stated freedoms as a successful writer and speaker cannot make her the equal to the men in the movie. The ideological fight for equality becomes physical conflict as the logical conclusion: violence is the only way men and women can relate.



I never have, and never will, overtly recommend this film to anyone. It is completely depraved, which as an exploitation film is completely what it should be. Social instance, social issues re-interpreted as conflict; active use of the gaze, voyeurism turned back on the audience, this is what exploitation cinema has always been about, if not as horrifically done as it is in I Spit On Your Grave.



**** out of ****

Ice Pirates

I loved this movie as a kid. It was shown frequently on a local channel, WXPN 57, that no longer exists. Every Sunday afternoon there would be a series of movies under the heading of "Adventure Cinema" or something like that. There must have been a volume discount on Ice Pirates because I swear this flick was shown at least once per month. I loved this fucking movie.

Emphasis on the word "loved."

Of course I loved Ice Pirates when I was six; what's not cool when you're six? Twenty years later, I honestly had a hard time even watching the movie. Ice Pirates falls under that popular sub-sub-genre of B-movie cinema: the rip-off. For every Conan the Barbarian or The Road Warrior or Jaws, there are about 75 movies (mostly out of the Italian film industry) that fail to understand what made the source material so enthralling or exciting and instead copy the plot line, lower the budget, ramp up the gore, throw in about 5 times the amount of naked women and call it a day.

This is not a bad thing entirely: without these schlock treasures, there would be no B-movie scene at all. Zombie is considered one of the greatest gut-munching exploitation films and it is such a rip-off of the classic Dawn of the Dead that in European countries, the former is considered a sequel to the latter. Being a rip-off does not a bad exploitation film make. Being boring; that makes for a bad viewing experience no matter the genre.



What does all of this have to do with the film in question? Ice Pirates is a late rip-off of the Star Wars films as well as any number of barbarian fantasy films. Stuff like Beastmaster. That's bad. Well, the film isn't all bad. It mashes the pirate, fantasy, and science-fiction genres together, which is impressive; the movie attempts to be a grand adventure. Only attempts though, never succeeds.

Ice Pirates meanders along, never really providing any excitement. Honestly, there's not much to write about the movie. A group of pirates exist in a galaxy-spanning future where water by way of giant ice blocks is extremely rare and thus heavily controlled by an oppressive regime. The aptly named ice pirates liberate said ice and a princess and find a planet with water at the end. This planet is Earth. The End.

No mention is ever made, nor technology devoted to, the fact that hydrogen and oxygen can be extracted from the atmosphere to create water. Chemically speaking I think it's impossible for water to be rare. Regardless if it's water, or even if it were gold, silver, gasoline, spice, or even ketchup that was rare in this universe, nothing can overcome the boring storyline, terrible effects, and flat humor. Excitement is the real rarity.



Actually, I lied, there is one truly exciting part. At one point our heroes are threatened with castration, turned into slaves, and made to serve the evil empire before making a daring motorcycle escape with a princess in tow. It may sound it, but this is neither exciting nor funny. While escaping, our heroes encounter a family of robots going for a walk on the promenade. A father robot in the middle, flanked on the left and right by his child and his wife.

The robots are really cheap plastic effects too. The look a like like R.O.B., a crappy old Nintendo peripheral. This stupid robot was supposed to be a friend and play games with you. R.O.B. made the lonely feel even lonelier.



But I digress. Getting right to it: our heroes, speeding their way to a daring escape, collide with and completely smash to bits the robot child. As shattered plastic rolls across the promenade, the father robot begins exclaiming: "Baby! baby!" At this point, the pursuers proceed to obliterate his wife. He yells: "Baby! mother! baby! mother!" like a mantra. What a shitty day that robot's having.

I must've watched this scene three or four times. Easily the best part of the movie and the only reason to watch.

* out of ****

American Nightmare

Low budget exploitation movies, and I'm talking those made with friends instead of actors or shot with a DV camera any schmuck can buy at Best Buy or wherever, are usually a losing bet. What can be an avenue for a maverick writer or director is more often than not an exercise in futility: sub-par everything without the usual exploitation benefits of good, gory special effects. Something to be avoided. American Nightmare is something different, and for exploitation cinema that's a rarity.

I honestly never thought I'd write these words: where Halloween popularized the slasher film and Scream sounded it's death knell, American Nightmare actually reinvents the slasher film.



Big words indeed, and how can one low budget film actually do anything for such an exploitative, artistically derisive genre? A genre that's rarely if ever, even considering how many films have been labeled as such, given the popular consciousness any story worth telling or a character worth following. I'm not going to say that American Nightmare does any of these things, but it comes close, and thematically, actually has something to say.

American Nightmare is a slasher film that is literally about dying. The kill scenes, instead of being drawn-out stalkings ending in gory death are instead shot in close-up, usually just the face of the victim, the means of death off-screen. The camera is left to linger, the ultimate voyeur experience: watching a personal act both of the killer and the victim. In this way it's both chilling and more violent than any explicit killing.



That's a rarity: American Nightmare is one of the few slasher's that's actually chilling. Not scary. I honestly don't think any slasher movie has been scary since Halloween, but chilling in the sparseness and frankness of it's scenes. Every act committed by the killer is portrayed not as a simple plot point or notch in a body count, but an outpouring of grief and madness; all born out of the near-brilliant performance of Debbie Rochon.

She's awesome. Rochon is intense to watch. I've seen her in numerous Troma films where she's never been one to turn down a decent topless scene, but this is the first time I've actually seen her act. Color me impressed. As the killer in the film, there's no mystery that she's also the protagonist. There's no final girl, no mystery as to the killer's identity, it's Rochon's show all the way. The actual reason for her killings is barely hinted at, but the audience is never left looking for a reason: it's obvious she's got a personal grudge with someone or anyone. I'm leaning towards the latter. This comes through most often in the improvised dialogue. Hardly cohesive, full of obscenities and ready to leap off the screen at any moment, What could easily have been written off as overacted comes off as legitimately dangerous.



Aside from the typical low-budget traps of terrible lighting and sub-par camera work, American Nightmare is an A-level slasher. For the first time in 20+ years it does something new with the genre. I'm flabbergasted to be honest. And there goes the last of my integrity. I know, this has been a serious kind of review, but any fan of horror movies in general or interesting independent affairs should definitely see American Nightmare. To make up for the lack of exploitation in this review, I'll provide the ultimate spoiler: like any good scream queen, Rochon does provide us with an ample view of her physical attributes. It's kinda awesome. Viva la B-movie!



*** out of ****

Return to House on Haunted Hill

Why would anyone want to return to the house on haunted hill? In the first film, various good-looking actors and actresses were killed by glossy ghosts who moved through an increasingly-annoying spastic frame rate manipulation that resembled stop-motion. Gruesome deaths too. One woman was put through an autopsy. Again, why would anyone return? The annoying frame rate returned, sadly.

The simple sleep-in-the-house-one-night-and-you-get-paid plot line of the original has been done away with in favor of some needlessly complicated affair involving an archaeology student hunting for a mystic urn (aren't they all mystic) before she's killed by a classmate mercenary also hunting for the urn and the quest is taken up by her successful magazine-editor sister and teacher and blah blah blah.

The biggest flaw in the beginning of Return to House on Haunted Hill (aside from that obtuse name) is it takes too long to get into the house. Since the audience is privy to the character's lives before they make the trip to the house on the hill, and the decisions and circumstances that bring them, we don't gain better insight into the characters to make them more sympathetic, just how stupid they are to even consider going to the goddamn house for so cliche and unnecessary a MacGuffin.

Once everyone is situated in the house, things move briskly (one hour to kill approximately 12 characters) and any established characterization is abandoned for copious amounts of gore. Since Return is a direct-to-video B-movie, all we're really asking for is gory kills and shamefully voyeuristic shots of boobies. This movie delivers. Well, at least at first.

The first major kill involves a ghost who was given a riff on "The Cask of Amontillado" and reaches through his makeshift mausoleum wall and gruesomely into someone's stomach, gripping their muscle and flesh like a handle, slamming them against the wall repeatedly. Nasty and brutal. The practical effects were quite good as well, which I'm always happy to see.



The second kill though; the second kill basically makes the damn movie and is almost solely responsible for the rating at the end of the review. I'm not going to spoil, but rest assured it includes great monster make-up, two naked women, forbidden lesbian trysts, and a great face-slashing effect. It's nasty, guilty, extremely voyeuristic, and everything a good exploitation flick should be.

It's a shame when the movie goes downhill afterward. As exploitative as Return can be, the later kills devolve into quick, clean affairs devoid of any scares or suspense and too reliant on poor CGI effects to resemble anything other than a video game. At this point, interest in the story could make the movie still watchable, but stupid adults acting as teenagers and chasing a mystical urn with ties to ancient evil is boring in the very best of circumstances.



Return to House on Haunted Hill limps its way to a lackluster conclusion and I was struggling for a reason to care. Being only 80 minutes long is pretty much the sole reason to finish. Gotta love short runtimes on boring exploitation films. Aside from the two kills in the middle of the movie, there'd be almost no reason to watch in the first place. The aforementioned 80 minutes goes a long way to recommend it for party or abbreviated viewing. Give it a shot.

** out of ****

Prom Night

I hate this fucking movie.



To hell with being objective or whatever one is supposed to be when reviewing movies: 1) it's an exploitation movie site, the rules can be a little lax; 2) Prom Night is a terrible fucking movie.

Remake in name only, Prom Night is the story of a group of friends and a last hurrah at senior prom before going their separate ways after high school. Of course, the kink is that one of the girls witnessed her family being murdered years ago by her teacher because he's psychotically obsessed with her. What are the odds he's broken out of the mental institution?

The entirety of Prom Night is made possible because every single character from the dimmest of high school bimbos to the most hardened of seasoned detectives is an absolute moron, even by standards of the typical slasher movie. The first two-thirds of the plot is coming up with increasingly mind-boggling reasons, ranging from quickie sex (no nudity, of course) to washing one's hands (really, there's no bathroom anywhere else), for each teen to go up to their post-prom suite one by one to get murdered by the oh-so-handsome psychopath.



Forget plot line though, even as an exploitation slasher, Prom Night is a complete failure. A bloodless, frightless, sexless affair that plays like a primetime sitcom. I've seen more chilling episodes of CSI.

What's the point of making a slasher film where every single kill happens offscreen? There's ni visceral thrill, there's not even a decent jump-scare. Stalk scenes are so drawn out that they fail to even be engaging. Honestly, I fell asleep at least three times during this thing. Prom Night even lacks the rudimentary excitement of the mystery of the killer's identity. The killer is revealed in the prologue to the film and that's about that.



A horror movie without scares, suspense, or excitement. I won't even continue. There's no reason to watch this movie unless for some reason you care about the characters and want to see who makes it out alive. I can't imagine anyone being that invested in this flick.

* out of ****

Slither

The people who made Slither must have loved the unsung 80s classic Night of the Creeps. Not only does Slither ape the latter's not-so-original-to-be-considered-stealing plot line of intergalactic slugs that invade Small-Town America and turn the unsuspecting populace into grotesque zombies, but also attempts to mimic the shameless 80s "cheesiness" that defined the latter movie. The irony of that being Night of the Creeps tried hard to mimic the naivete of 50s teen horror movies. Slither is a throwback to a throwback.

What Slither may lack in terms of original ideas, it makes up for in it's sense of fun. As far as B-movies go, it's damn good.



Contributing to the fun is genre-vet Michael Rooker giving a twisted turn as the unfortunately named Grant Grant; a controlling, jealous, yet ultimately decent man who is the first to play host to conquering brain slugs and eventually finds himself covered under mounds (literally) of grotesque make-up as an undulating mass of slug/human flesh. As the monster of the movie, Rooker does a good job of grounding the outlandish special effects that make up his final sluggy forms. He never overacts to such a degree that the audience regards his transformation as totally cartoonish. Only half-cartoonish. He is the RookerSlug.

The other actors come and go, screaming when they have to, running while not screaming and generally doing a good enough job of not making their thin characters annoying, but not a good enough job to make one really care if their characters live or die. As far as I was concerned, any character was far game as slug fodder. In fact I was rooting for the movie to throw some curve balls and kill off our leads half way through the movies just for kicks. No such luck.



Because it's rooted in other films that genre fans have probably seen, nothing in Slither is totally surprising or unseen. The movie unfolds exactly as expected, offering only minor surprises along the way. Some of the character deaths are interesting; kills are set up in a such a way to make you think they'll end in a recognizable fashion, but then there's always a small twist to it that changes the bloodletting just enough to make any B-movie hound smile.

Of course, therein lies Slither's greatest strength: the gore effects. Just to get the negatives out of the way, as with most low-budget movies, the computer effects suck, which means it's good that they're not used often. The practical effects on the other hand are gross, gory, and great. Every kill is something different; the movie never repeats itself. James Gunn is a good enough director that he keeps each kill exciting, not weighing the pace down with tedious stalks scenes or lingering too much on the ultra-violence as to make the movie an exercise in constitution. The stand-out effects are two monster set-peices: a woman who's grown to the size of a house (ew) and the aforementioned RookerSlug.



I love RookerSlug; by the end of the flick he's a slimy, tentacled mass of undulating flesh barely recognizable as a man. The various slug zombies strip down in an orgy of flesh and proceed to be absorbed via some kind of freaky sexual osmosis into RookerSlug. The end is a complete rip of another unsung horror movie from the 80s, Society. B-movies are supposed to be gross in some fashion though; if they weren't exploitative at all, why the hell would we watch them?

Slither is as a good time: fast-paced, gory, but fun. Given the current spate of "torture-porn" flicks like Hostel and Saw that sacrifice any sense of excitement for mind-numbing queasiness, a movie as unoriginal as Slither seems like a breath of fresh B-movie air. Definitely check it out.

*** out of ****