Tag: independent film

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Visual White Noise Theater: Merry (Late) Christmas, lets play “Fantastic Games” (1998) to ring in the New Year!!!

I wanted to get this one up by Christmas, but alas, the holiday season side swept me right into the Christmas guard rail. Too much rich food and too much booze had my stomach screaming in agony, sluggish and carb sick I didn’t really want to do anything, much less write a blog post but I really wanted to introduce “Fantastic Games” to people who were not in the know, so I bucked up and gonna dive right into this thing.

So “Fantastic Games” was a movie I found on a external hard drive my buddy gave me. I actually watched this three months ago and to my surprise I found out this was a kid’s Christmas film, but not like any I’d ever seen. Watching the credits and doing research I found out this was an Italian made movie directed by Al Passeri who also directed the equally bat shit insane “Creatures from the Abyss” (1994). The whole Christmas motif is pretty much a wreath around the main body of the story which is some weird Never Ending Story/Power Rangers hybrid.

 

So during Christmas Eve, a family is stranded in a cabin while a snow storm rages outside, Mary the daughter is deathly ill covered in cloths, there is mom, grandpa and her brother Kevin, their awaiting the return of the father who is a doctor but he is stranded in the snow, their dog is also missing. Then there is the family “friend” who looks like a villain from Central Casting circa 1910, he wears a long black trench coat, derby hat and big black mustache. He goes to see if he can find the father out in the snow, but he has ulterior motives. Since its Christmas Eve the family gets to open presents, Kevin opens one for Mary that contains what looks like a cave girl on a surf board and a book. Kevin starts reading from the book and we are off to a rip roarin’ start.

In “Fantastic Games”, a gnome castle floating in space is threatened by a third rate Darth Vader type with a mask made of various mirrors who controls another floating castle called the Planet of the Black Fortress, the Lord of the Black Fortress, Makeb, wants all the wealth in the gnome castle, so the gnomes call on Jade, Queen of Hope who wants to be paid with a grain of golden wheat, they agree and Jade, along with her surf board and midget dog  go to take on the Black Fortress full of weird technology that the gnomes seem not to have.

She enters a weird contest that mimics a video game to defeat Makeb and save the gnomes from destruction, and as all this is happening, Mary is ever closer to death and the blizzard outside gets worse and worse. Black hat “friend” keeps showing up saying he is trying to find the father but twitches his evil mustache. Some of the actions in the story correspond with what happens in real life. On the other hand Makeb keeps zapping his assistants from a stone dragon above his bone laden throne when they screw up, one in his death throes puts bugs in the system making Makeb’s job harder. In the game Jade/Mary battles evil eye balls, jazz playing skeletons, giant stop motion sand worms, fire demons and other things to get a higher score then Makeb who will get destroyed if Jade wins.

“Fantastic Games” is a strange movie in the best way, made in 1998 it looks like it could’ve been made in 1988 instead, in fact I wondered if this was made earlier but released later. As in any Italian production the acting is bad, the dubbed voices atrocious and a plot a mix of 1980 Flash Gordon and the Never Ending Story. For a holiday kid’s film this is just nutso all over the place and that is a good thing. The Italians don’t mess around when they make genre films, its everything out the window, including the kitchen sink.

 

So you want to play “Fantastic Games”? Well look no further: https://www.bitchute.com/video/8MNMfTWFr0ja/

 

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Short (S)hit List: Here Comes “That Little Monster” (1994)

Short films shot in black and white were a dime a dozen in the 1990’s, most low budget directors used the monochrome method to impart artiness, seriousness and mask whatever defects a low budget production spawned, most were pretentious shit from hipster assholes who had their heads wedged firmly in their asses. While the current entry “That Little Monster” was shot in black and white, tried to be arty, and tried to mask its defects with monochrome, serious it wasn’t and it is glorious to behold.

Baby from Hell!!!!

So the plot of “That Little Monster” isn’t really that complicated, it takes place in a retro future imagined by 1950’s sci fi writers, it takes place on a different planet, in a house with furniture, a TV set and Hi Fi record player that wouldn’t look too far out of place in a 1950’s swinging bachelor pad with a few tweaks here and there to make it look unearthly, add strange ornaments, sculptures and plants to make it look even more unearthly. Forrest J. Ackerman, founder of the first zine and movie monster magazine, “Monsters of Filmland” does the intro to the movie.  In comes female earthling Jamie (Melissa Baum) looking for a baby sitting job to make a little more money on this different planet, another human Twelvetrees (played by Reggie Bannister of “Phantasm” fame) interviews her for the baby sitting job, first by trying to pitch her a alien soda in what looks like retro commercial. She gets hired, she is to watch the infant spawn of the Willock couple who are going to a costume party dressed like humans, the male Willock breaks into a weird folk song out of nowhere, they allude to their being other human baby sitters that didn’t work out. She is given instructions on when to feed the baby and that she can have as much microwave popcorn as she wants, the aliens on this planet think microwave popcorn is the best invention they were given by us humans. Twelvetrees warns her to be careful around the alien infant, of course she ignores his advice and the alien baby starts running wild and things and people get hurt and Bob Hope (yes that one) makes a surprise cameo.

Baby’s Killer Toys!!!

For a low budget short film, the effects are pretty darn good, the alien baby gave me a chuckle and made me happy every time it popped up on the screen, I imagine this the way the baby in David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” would’ve looked like if it had lived a couple of more months, the gore effects and baby toys were well done, they made the baby toys look slightly familiar but otherworldly. This one really isn’t scary, its ridiculous, but ridiculous in a non pretentious and fun way, and to boot it is short, “That Little Monster” is one I will go back to and it makes it easy that its fifty minutes long and interesting, if it would’ve went on for an hour and half I would’ve been looking at my room wondering what I had to organize. “That Little Monster” came out of a time that was experiencing a “retro revival” every hipster was digging through thrift stores in the 1990’s looking for 1950’s-1960’s lounge lizard threads and digging through heaps of vinyl in used record stores trying to find the lost 45 or 78 of some obscure Swing Band. I can tell the director of this short, Paul Bunnell was one of those types of people.

The Parents

Paul shot “That Little Monster” over three years, it was originally supposed to be a segment in the awesome “Monsters” TV show, the connection to “Monsters”, according to Paul, “died” so he decided to develop it himself into a artsy kind of film to get his work seen. In the interview I saw, Paul looks like your typical 1990’s retro hipster, he wears black frame Buddy Holly glasses, his hair is slicked back with Brylcreem, he wears a plaid suit jack and wide collar shirt whose collar flaps come over the suit jacket collar, he also drives a 1960 Thunderbird with Bob Hope spelled out on his license plate and he does Don Knotts impersonations, this is the kind of guy who would direct a movie like this. Paul said it took thirty thousand dollars to make and some help from some producers. Paul says he is more of a visual stylist and tells his story more through visuals than the actual story.  This short is packed with eye popping visuals, Paul directed the segment “The Visitant” in the “Strange Tales” (https://www.noisepuncher.net/2021/09/20/want-to-watch-some-strange-tales-1986/)anthology I reviewed here awhile ago.

So are you confused? By my review or where to watch it? Or both? Well I can solve the “where to watch it” part, you can go right here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/QKhxh5RggDEC/

If you want to actually get “That Little Monster”, and I mean really get it go here: https://www.amazon.com/That-Little-Monster-Forrest-Ackerman/dp/B00006BSLW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WFR4BH0CXWB5&keywords=That+Little+Monster+Paul+Bunnell&qid=1655488192&s=movies-tv&sprefix=that+little+monster+paul+bunnell%2Cmovies-tv%2C135&sr=1-1

Time to feed “That Little Monster”!

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Visual White Noise Theater: Let me taste “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” (2013)

French husband and wife team Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet seem to like the giallo genre because the next movie they did after “Amer” (check out my review here: https://www.noisepuncher.net/2021/10/30/revel-in-amer-2009/) a giallo was “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears”, a giallo. Of course they also did the strange modern Western/Poliziotteschi movie “Let the Corpses Tan”(come on over and get your corpse tanned here: https://www.noisepuncher.net/2021/02/12/go-ahead-let-the-corpses-tan-2017/).

Dan (played by Klaus Tange) returns home from a business trip to find that his wife Edwige (played by Ursula Bedena) is missing without any evidence of her leaving or a break in, he starts looking for her in different rooms of the building, the first lady is behind a veil and tells the story of how her own husband went missing after he was hearing voices and sounds behind the wall where he gets stabbed. Soon Dan turns to the police, at first the inspector (played by Jean-Michel Vovk) is dismissive and of no help at all, Dan has a dream of going to the roof top and encountering a nude woman who jumps. The inspector himself has a missing wife and as the movie goes on it does play with giallo genre tropes but goes into Lynchesque, abstract, noir territory with shifting perspectives of reality.

“The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” uses a lot of symbolism and metaphors, sometimes you can’t tell if what Dan is seeing is real or what he perceives to be real, and without giving too much away there is another world within the walls of the building and Dan becomes a voyeur spying on the weird going ons of his neighbors. While to some extent, “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” is less linear then its predecessor “Amer”, this one, in my opinion, is more rich and mysterious. Its true you get the masked killer with razor and brightly lit color scheme of Argento and Bava, you get a lot more of a stylized and noir like atmosphere. I liked “The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears” more and it is one I want to revisit. The directors claim you need to watch it more than once to get more of the details and more of the stories. This movie will try a lot of people’s patience, even the ones who are into the weird and absurd, that is a warning. This is a love or hate it proposition, if the above description of the movie interests you by all means dive in, if it doesn’t well if you dive in your diving into an empty pool and you will get hurt.

So where do you swim in “The Colour of Your Body’s Tears”? Well you can go here but you’ll have to get a Shudder subscription from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.0ca9f78e-0f49-68fd-350a-1e79e209a76f/ref=dv_auth_ret?autoplay=1&

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Visual White Noise Theater: LOL! Fucking “Skins” (2017)

At first I wasn’t gonna even review this movie, sure it is weird and different but “Skins” falls into the “pretentious horseshit” category for me, the artist so full up his/her ass that they can’t see the sunlight. However, sometimes pretentious horseshit can be entertaining and unintentionally hilarious, to me that was “Skins”.

In some ways I wonder if the director, was trying to play this straight or if this was actually a troll, cinema style. If it was a troll it was the best troll pulled on the Netflix/art house crowd who think their “tolerant” and “sophisticated”. Again this is a Spanish movie and maybe the sub titles were mistranslated but even the action on the screen is utterly ridiculous. When I was meant to feel empathy for a twisted, fuck pedophile who wants to sleep with an eleven year old girl who has no eyes, not blind, no eyes, and gives her pink diamonds for eyes while his wife is giving birth I was fucking disgusted, typical of Netflix who would put out a movie like “Cuties”. The scene and the way it was executed made me snicker, then laugh, a fat old madam who runs a cat house of deformed people telling the peder creep that he can’t help who is and its OK to screw kids and then the scene between the eyeless girl and the old man (they don’t show anything) made me bust a gut.

Then there is the guy who has a fetish for deformed women, his deformed girlfriend is fucking a burn victim behind his back, a girl who has a butt hole where her mouth is supposed to be and a mouth where her butt hole is supposed to be is raped by two gay looking guys rape in both, then there is a pregnant dwarf who plays a pink animorphic teddy bear on a kids show she wants to quit and her creepy manager is trying to talk her into having an abortion, then there is a kid who is the son of the pederast who thinks his legs aren’t part of him because he believes that he is a mermaid and his legs should be fins, its one pretentious cluster fuck of deformed, sad sap people who are all looking for sick, twisted love, normally I would dig something like this but all I could do was laugh. If it was trying to say “Love knows no boundaries”, that flew over my head. The kid with legs lays out in traffic and lets the girl with butt hole for a mouth run over his legs while she is speeding away in her car from the two gay looking dudes who are trying to rape her, the guys chasing her look like they would only want to rape other dudes. Now this might sound interesting, it is kind of, but its more funny than anything. Especially at the end, (I don’t care if I spoil it either I wasted my time watching this) where the guy who has a fetish for deformities keeps butt hole mouth girl from jumping off a bridge after getting raped by the two closet gay guys, the fetish guy kisses her and the dude tongues her hairy butt hole/mouth, I roared with laughter and the kid who wants to be a mermaind in the afterlife becomes a glittery, prancing mermaid with fish falling out of the sky. Now if this wasn’t fun and I didn’t get some enjoyment out of it I wouldn’t have even wasted space on it, in some ways I am wasting space and time on this movie. This is pretentious horseshit but it was funny and made me laugh but I won’t watch “Skins” again. If what I wrote above appeals to you have at it, go on Netflix or if your like me and your one of those “FUCK NETFLIX” guys go to a friend’s and watch it if you don’t want to give these cheerleader pederasts any of your money. Over all, fuck this film and if this isn’t a troll fuck the douchey, art hipster who made this bullshit, you made me laugh at least.

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Visual White Noise Theater: Will “Jesus Show You the Way to the Highway”(2019)?

I never thought I’d see a movie shot in Ethiopia by a Spanish director, set somewhere in mid 21st century in a virtual world, the only thing is this movie was meant to look like it was shot in the mid 1980’s and is a prediction of what 2035 is gonna look like, so there is retro virtual reality machines and goggles, dial rotary phones, 1970’s furniture etc. In a word this movie is a mind fuck, you’ll want a cigarette after you watch this movie.

Where to start with a movie this insane? Well two CIA agents DT Gagano, played by a dwarf Ethiopian actor Daniel Tadesse and Palmer Eldritch played by Spanish actor Augustin Mateo, both contrast to each other in looks and personality, they are working in “Beta Ethiopia” which is the Ethiopia of the 2030’s as imagined by a sci fi film maker in the 1980’s. The Cold War is still on and the Soviet Union is trying to put a virus in the computer system called, what else? “Soviet Russia”. In this bizarre virtual reality everything is in stop motion and everybody wears the masks of famous actors, comedians and politicians. DT’s wife is a hot BBW blonde named Malin played by Gerda-Annette Allikas and she looks forward to him retiring as a secret agent so she can open a Kick Boxing studio. Your reading this saying WTF?! I did when I start watching this.

DT wants to start a pizza restaurant by the ocean but these dreams get derailed when he gets stuck in the virtual world and he needs to find a way to get out. In this stew you get a satire of 1960’s spy movies, including the incidental music, 1970’s and 1980’s action and kung fu films and B level sci fi. This movie is like a cross between  1980’s James Bond flicks and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s art movies not to mention the audio is badly synced to the lips on purpose. Seriously, this god damn movie is so insane it can’t be classified.

“Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway” is also philosophical, it doesn’t look like it on the surface but there is so many layers in this movie you’ll question whats reality, whats a dream, whats a fabricated reality etc. This movie is hilarious, some of the over the top absurd stuff will have you laughing until you are out of breath especially when one of the characters is watching TV and on it there is a man dressed like 1960’s Adam West Batman licking the feet of a man in a swimsuit, somebody yells at him “Stop watching that communist propaganda and get your ass over here!” Not only that, the president of Beta Ethiopia is dressed as 1960’s Batman and he wants to kick all drug dealers out of Beta Ethiopia. And believe it or not it gets crazier.

Most of the old computer technology that is seen in the movie was borrowed from the Estonian Computer Museum. “Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway” is a movie that hit me in the sweet spot, I literally stumbled across this movie by accident while searching for the movie “Highway to Hell” which I am gonna review next, I saw the poster and it looked like a grind house movie I’d never seen, and at first seeing the date it was made I was very skeptical, I dove headfirst into this roiling and boiling sea and I got the shit thrashed out of me. This is one newer movie I will repeat view and I am sure there is stuff I missed. There is so many Easter Eggs and little tid bits, the name alone should draw you in. I am sure a lot of religious folks searching for some religious movie about Jesus were confused when they watched this movie for the first time like I was, except in a different way, they’ll wonder what a fully clothed black midget is doing in a shower with a naked, statuesque, BBW blonde goddess and what any of this has to do with Jesus. The movie was partly funded by people on Kickstarter which is cool, Llanso’s first movie was the awesome post apocalyptic film “Crumbs” also starring the diminutive Daniel Tadesse, another one I will review later and you should watch and that one was made on a show string budget in Ethiopia and its just as weird.  “Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway” is one highway you don’t want to drive by.

To get the silver pizza pie Arrow has done a bang up job: https://arrowfilms.com/product-detail/jesus-shows-you-the-way-to-the-highway-blu-ray/FCD2009

To get on the highway digitally go here: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Shows-You-Way-Highway/dp/B0893NT9V9

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Visual White Noise Theater: Whats “Under the Silver Lake” (2018)?

“Under the Silver Lake” is like one of those Russian nesting dolls, you pull off one shell of a doll and there is another smaller doll underneath but this movie isn’t like your typical nesting doll, you don’t come down to one small doll within larger ones, you can keep pulling shells off and seem to never come to the end. This pisses a lot of people off, it doesn’t piss me off and I love movies like this that have me thinking days after I watched it, especially if its a newer film. Directed by David Robert Mitchell, who directed the awesome, multi layered symbolic horror film “It Follows” this was Mitchell’s fray into “Neo Noir”, a genre post 1960’s that lifts the main themes of “Noir” and transplants them into the current time period. More modern examples are most of the films of David Lynch, “Drive”, “Brick”, “Big Lebowski” etc. that mix various genres in with “Noir” genres like comedy, sci fi (think “Blade Runner), the supernatural and occult etc. Mitchell takes the “Neo Noir” genre and turns it on its head snapping its neck in the process.

Put out by A24 who has actually been putting out good newer movies, “Under the Silver Lake” on the surface is your typical “noir” plot. Loser and down on his luck Sam, played by Andrew Garfield, is about to get evicted from his apartment. He seems to have no job and is a creepy voyeur type who spies on his female neighbors, one of which is an old hippie chick who feeds her numerous birds on the balcony topless, he also has sex with an older and aspiring actress who drops by his apartment once in a while, as their having sex on the news they see that Jefferson Sevence, a billionaire stunt man/mogul has disappeared without a trace. However, he falls for a girl in a bikini who was a small white dog as a pet who is his neighbor, which is funny because there is a dog killer loose in the Silver Lake area who is killing pooches. He hooks up with Sarah, played by Lisa Marie’s daughter and Elvis Presley’s grand daughter, Riley Keough. They go in her apartment to watch a Marilyn Monroe movie called “How to Catch a Millionaire” and she has three dolls on her dresser of actresses in the movie, name labels beneath the dolls and beneath the names strange code. Soon other people come into the apartment before he can get it on with her and she tells him he has to leave but he should come back the next day. He does and finds the apartment empty, he breaks in the window and hears somebody coming, a girl dressed like a prostitute comes and gets a shoe box full of Sarah’s stuff with dolls and other pictures in it. He asks his pissed off landlord where she is and the landlord brushes him and tells him he has to pay rent or he is gonna get evicted. So Sam goes to find out what happened to her and where she is at.

That is the surface story, sounds like a start to a neo noir film and I am not giving anymore away but suffice to say from there it gets more crazy and insane. Then you start to wonder whats paranoia/fantasy or reality. This movie reminds me a lot of Lynch’s “Southern California Trilogy” of movies which are “Lost Highway”, “Muholland Drive” and “Inland Empire”. Its a mix of Lynch, Hitchcock and Chandler, even the in between, incidental music is something Bernard Hermann would’ve put in one of Hitchcock’s films which was done by the ultra talented “Disasterpiece” who did a synth soundtrack for Mitchell’s first movie, “It Follows”. Sam is obsessed with retro pop culture, in his apartment he has got posters for noir and old monster movies all over his walls, a VHS tape player, a Nintendo, Nintendo Power magazines, even the magazines he beats off to are old copies of Sears Catalogs, Playboys and Hustlers. As his search for Sarah intensifies so does his paranoia that all of pop culture and what we listen to, beat off to, watch, eat etc. is orchestrated by small group of men who hide in the dark.

Some of the characters in the movie don’t even have names, which I think is done on purpose, the aspiring actress girl whom is a “friend with benefits” type is listed in the credits as “Actress” who is played by Riki Lindhome, then there is the paranoid “Comic Fan” played by character actor Patrick Fischler who has been in two David Lynch projects, the aforementioned “Muholland Drive” and “Twin Peaks the Return” TV series, the Comic Fan puts out a zine drawn in Daniel Clowes fashion about the history and urban legends behind Silver Lake which was where the movie industry started, chief among them being the Dog Killer of the 1920’s who might be inspiring the killer of the modern day and the Owl’s Kiss woman who has sex with prominent men and murders them, all these sequences are done in animated, 2D.

“Comic Fan” also believes all the answers can be found on a map he finds in the back of cereal box, he also has plaster masks of Johnny Depp, Grace Kelly etc. all over his walls when Sam goes to ask him questions about the zine he created and Sarah, he says it all leads back to what is on that cereal box and if he isn’t careful the Owl’s Kiss will kill him. At first Sam thinks he is crazy but then realizes that ever since he was a kid he was trying to find patterns in everything. The Comic Fan gives him a guide on how to spot hobo symbols, one of the symbols, two diamonds joined together, look like the same symbols from the “Twin Peaks” original TV series, in the movie they mean to “remain silent”.

In “Under the Silver Lake” there is a lot of symbols, a lot of patterns and a lot of interpretations of what those symbols mean. It also examines pop culture and paranoia burn out in our technological age. It also skewers modern Hollywood and the media, almost every actress in this movie is a part time prostitute, and I don’t think there is any misogyny in that presentation, its actually a comment on how power hungry producers see females in the industry. Its a critique but the movie goes a lot deeper. There is a multitude of theories about this movie, that Sam as actually a schizoid, kleptomaniac who is imagining most, if not, all the movie in his head, there is scenes in the movie that are picture perfect renditions of the cover of an old 1960’s Playboy he jerks off at, a Marilyn Monoe film and other homages to retro pop culture or that he is actually dead and in limbo in a type of purgatory etc. There is numerous videos on the different theories and symbols in this movie. In fact the film’s cryptography advisor was a computer scientist named Kevin Knight who helped create a computer program to break the Copiale Cipher, so the symbols and numbers in this movie aren’t meaningless.

“Under the Silver Lake” premiered at the 2018 Cannes Festival. A24 were pretty shitty with this movie, they kept pushing it back and back on the release date and barely promoted it. That wasn’t fair to this movie, of course it has developed a cult following but it should be more widely known as a good addition to the “Neo Noir” cannon of movies. High recommendation from me, not a lot of modern movies stroke my sensibilities, especially lame stream movies. So go ahead jump into “Under the Silver Lake”.

So it is streaming on some platforms, if you have prime on Amazon or other subscriptions you should be able to watch it no problem. I say pay these people.

But if you don’t want to support art, you cheap fucking bastards, find a pirate ship if you know what I mean.

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Visual White Noise Theater: Want to be “Censor”(2021)-ed?

Awwww, the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s, a time where behind every nook, cranny and corner of the world there was black robed Devil worshipers who would rape, impregnate you and than kill your baby for Old Scratch in front of you. On both sides of the pond this was a new witch hunt hysteria, but the US at least had a bit of a shield in the first amendment. While certain stores and rental places here in the US got raided, they were normally raided in rural areas and Bible Belt type cities, there was no national censors (though Tipper and her gals tried) to edit out sex and violence in movies on a nation wide level. In jolly ole’ Britain it was another story, in England, first amendment rights were and are very flimsy, this led in the early 1980’s to the “Video Nasty” crack down where films like “Cannibal Holocaust” and “Evil Dead” were censored or outright banned. People who had uncut videos or banned videos had their businesses and lives destroyed, over a fucking video. This the period that “Censor” takes place in and follows a school librarian marm type, Enid (played by Niahm Algar) as she puts the hammer down on gore, violence and sex in the movies to keep Britain safe from moral rot, however she has a dark past herself.

Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond off her short film, “Censor” blurs the line between reality and dark fantasy, a lot like “Bavarian Sound Machine” and  “Saint Maude”. Enid is playing with her sister, Nina and the sister disappears, she doesn’t remember what happened and her parents seem to blame her for her sister’s disappearance, while watching a movie “Don’t Go in the Church” by director Fredrick North she sees a woman who looks like a grown version of her sister, she goes to find out more about the director and the actress. Things get worse when Enid feels guilty for letting slip a movie where a man eats the face of his victim and in real life a man murders his family and eats the face of his wife, the media and public blame Enid which sends her further into a mental downward spiral. The movie is a bit slow as it builds but soon you realize that Enid’s reality is falling apart, this movie will confuse a lot of people and there is a lot of people out there who hated the ambiguous plot and ending, but those people don’t get it and I am not gonna spoil it for you.

Suffice it to say, while “Censor” on the surface deals with censorship and the free speech issues and all that it entails, it also goes deeper in how we censor our own memories and feelings to survive in reality. The human mind is very suspect when we remember things and memory is very faulty, we “edit” or “cut out” stuff distressing, traumatic or bad in our pasts. This movie deals with that and how when it is taken to an extreme degree it can be dangerous to the individual and the people who surround them.

There is parts where the violence and other situations are over the top and where you start to wonder where fantasy is bleeding over into reality, this is pretty much a character study of Enid. A woman who “censors” and puts in “new scenes” in her own memories. Sometimes it seems this movie agrees with the censorship, some of the scenes where the violence happens seem to be taken from the very “Video Nasties” Enid is censoring and they seem to be influencing her perception of reality, something the moral guardians here in America and Britain of the right and left were claiming about sexually explicit and violent content. Of course it was probably dark satire and parody of that point of view.

It also goes into “Videodrome” territory, something the director admits influenced her. If your one of these people who hates movies that make you think and don’t like clear cut endings than avoid this movie. You won’t have good time watching it, if you don’t mind putting on your thinking cap and experiencing something this movie is for you. I enjoyed it and I will never ever get sick of the 1980’s flash back movies, I read laments, bitches and criticisms of this trend, while some fuck it up badly some do good with it spectacularly, “Censor” is one of those movies.

Some of the color schemes in the movie, especially near the end are Bavaesque and show the wavering of reality in Enid’s damaged mind. I am not giving anything away but it will leave you wondering, did Enid kill her sister and mercifully forget? Did she see her sister die and mercifully forget? Did she tell her sister to “Don’t Go in the Church” and her sister did and something bad happened that she mercifully blanked out? Are her parents protecting her? Covering for her? Well watch it and make up your own mind, the clues are there and giving you my opinion would spoil it. So go watch it on Vudu, youtube, amazon prime etc. at a price, or you could find some pirates in the bay, just don’t tell them I sent you. 

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White Noise Theater: You dim wit! You and your wife are so stupid you have “Shrunken Heads” (1994)

So what to say about this piece of visual white noise? Its a horror movie…about killer “Shrunken Heads”. Who would make such a movie you ask? Richard Elfman (director), Danny’s brother and Charles Band (producer) of Full Moon infamy of course. You think any major studio would touch a movie called “Shrunken Heads” about killer shrunken heads? Well they make shit like “Avatar” and “Captain Marvel” so its possible they would make something like this but it wouldn’t be executed the same way this was, that is weird and creepy. A gang of 30 year olds harass 12 year old boys and the gang leader’s girl looks like she is 12…uh yeah this movie is off to a rip roarin’ start.

The three boys are Tommy (Aeryk Egan), Freddy (Darris Love who has been in a whole bunch of stuff like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Billy (Bo Sharon) who sit around, read comic books and in Tommy’s case, work in his dad’s grocery store. The creepy adult gang called “the Vipers” picks on them and is led by Vinnie (A.J. Damato) whose 12 year old girlfriend Sally (Rebecca Herbst who you’ve seen in every 1990’s sitcom when one of the major characters needed a love interest for that episode) has a crush on Tommy, somebody actually her own age. The boys are also friends with a Haitian Voodoo priest who runs a comic book stand in their neighborhood, Mr. Sumatra (played by the late great Julius Harris who you’ve seen in everything). Tommy intent on getting revenge on Vinnie, kisses Sally and films his gang ripping off a car, he hands the tape over to the cops and the gang gets arrested. Vinnie gets away and goes to the local mob boss Moe (played by Meg Foster in male drag, love this actress, she is in so many low budget, B movies it isn’t even funny) to tell her and get money to bail out his buds. Moe also wants Vinnie to kidnap the boys, after getting out of prison the Vipers do just that but the boys get loose and steal bags of gambling slips to hand over to the cops, Moe orders Vinnie to kill them.

Yep kids get iced in this movie, this early in the movie you get an underage girl dating a 30 year old grease ball, a transgender mob leader and kids getting killed for gambling slips. Wooo. Damn but things are about to get hotter because Mr. Sumatra knows what really happened and he slips into the funeral home to get the murdered kid’s heads, he shrinks them and revives them with a voodoo ritual to get revenge. Each one has a different power, Tommy can shock people, Freddy can get people with a switch blade he carries in his mouth and Billy has vampire teeth that sucks people dry. Mr. Sumatra teaches them how to use their powers and did I mention these Shrunken Heads can fly? He then sends them out to get revenge.

They first practice on other criminals before moving up to the Viper gang and Moe. Sally still has the hots for Tommy and has a picture of him by her bed which later leads to some uh hum uncomfortable and laughable scenes. Whoever wrote this was a fucking genius…the person probably did too much coke and drank too much cheap vodka. Out this popped and the only person they could get to direct something this insane was Richard Elfman, who directed the awesome disasterpiece “Forbidden Zone”, then he gets his brother, Danny Elfman, who did music for Tim Burton’s “Batman” and was the lead singer of Oingo Boingo to do the music for his movie, and not only that the Oingo Boingo song “No One Lives Forever” in the movie. They only spent a million (and it shows) on this thing, practicing nepotism, Richard puts his son Bodhi in as the Viper gang member, Booger and this was Full Moon’s first theatrical release since most of all of Band and company’s releases were straight to video or cable. I couldn’t find the box office take on this thing, I imagine it wasn’t that big of take.

I don’t want to spoil too much but the people who get killed by the “Shrunken Heads” become zombies who don’t kill and eat people, they pick up litter, clean graffiti off walls and help old ladies across the street. Yep this visual white noise is insane, some are gonna see this as a mess, this is damn beautiful mess son and I enjoyed every damn minute of it. I wasn’t bored like I was at Marvel’s “Endgame”, I kept looking down at my phone wondering when this bloated, overripe, CGI enhanced piece of shit was gonna end so I could go to the taco shop outside the mall. Flying, killer, “Shrunken Heads”, what more can you ask for?

Meg Foster as Moe above.

Meg Foster from “They Live”. Heh. Heh. Heh.

Anyways if you want to watch the Shrunken Heads of murdered children attack and kill gangsters go here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Iblt2X3JUkW3/

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Visual White Noise Theater: Rated “PG: Psycho Goreman”.

Kids, I am really fucking sick of CGI over saturation, if you comb through my posts one thing that disqualifies a movie in my mind forbeing awesome visual white noise is over reliance on CGI when it should be a tool. That is why I don’t like a majority of super hero movies, it becomes too much and I can tell its fake. Now I know I sound like that crazy old man that lives down the street, yells at you for throwing your baseball by accident in my yard and curses at the clouds. I don’t care, yeah I am old and will continue to have mostly old man tastes. I am damn sick of movies that have no punch and have stupid fucking ridiculous CGI monster battles at the end. I will pick a SOV (Shot on Video) movie like “Black Devil Doll from Hell” anytime over CGI saturated Marvel shit like “End Game”. So whenever I hear that somebody is doing a movie with mainly practical effects I get rock hard and jizz in my jeans. “PG: Psycho Goreman” made me sticky down stairs.

Every kid’s dream is to be able to command a killer alien, which is pretty much the basis of the movie. Psycho Goreman is exiled to earth by a council of aliens because he destroys whole populations and planets. Two kids find PG’s gem which makes kids the master of him, when the council finds out he is awake they want him dead. Pretty cut and dried, and all those aliens are made by hands not on a fucking computer. Latex, rubber, red corn syrup, animal entrails. Burn baby burn.

“PG: Psycho Goreman” has kid actors in it, of course that will turn off a lot of my followers since most kid actors can be fucking annoying and ruin a movie. In my opinion these kids don’t, the girl who plays Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) is “freakin” hilarious (watch the movie you’ll get the “freakin” part). How I found out about this movie was I was a huge fan of the film collective “Astron 6” their special effects expert on their short and feature length films was a man by the name of Steve Kostanski, whose previous special effects work was on the  the great “Manborg” (director also), “Father’s Day”(director also), “The Editor”, the awesome, Lovecraftian “Void” (director also) and “Leprechaun Returns”(director also), granted all of his movies have a smattering of CGI but in almost all of his movies its mainly practical effects and in “PG: Psycho Goreman’s” case, as well as “Manborg’s”, stop motion. Anybody who uses stop motion these days goes in the gold book.

This movie is really fresh off the boat, it hasn’t even rotted yet and it doesn’t stink. As of today its a couple months old, truth be told I don’t know how to describe this movie, I’ll take a shot at it, its like a cross between 1990’s era “Power Rangers”, “E.T.”, “The Guyver” and one twisted Rob Zombie music video. This movie is just fun and while a lot of you will get really mad at the jokes and throw your cheap beer at your big screen TV, I was rolling all over the floor laughing. This movie made me happy, sometimes I want something that makes me think, be angry, be sad etc. Then there is movies like “PG: Psycho Goreman” that are just fun and stupid.

Take it from Steven in this interview with Mashable: “It’s mostly inspired by my experiences as a kid, I grew up in the video store, constantly going to rent movies with my family every weekend. There were a lot of scenarios where I would rent movies that were not suitable for kids, and so ‘PG’ is a bit of me working through some of those traumas.” Gotta love childhood trauma. So get traumatized and think me later.

To get hacked to pieces by alien god go here (and yes you have to pay for it, dammit, more visual white noise like this needs to be made): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwDGB214hM8

If you want to get physical like I prefer (and I will end up eating your soul) go here: https://www.amazon.com/Brooks-Alexis-Hancey-Nita-Josee-Hanna/dp/B08Q9VZRDV

The full mashable interview here: https://mashable.com/article/pg-psycho-goreman/

Update: “Psycho Goreman” is available in blu ray!!! Highly recommend going over to the distributor, Raven Banner, and picking up the limited edition sets of the movie, I got the one with the action figure and there is one with an O card here: https://ravenbanner.store/search?q=Psycho+Goreman

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Visual White Noise Theater: Go ahead “Let the Corpses Tan” (2017)

Wow oh wow. If this had been made in the 1960’s/1970’s and not 2017 nobody would’ve known the difference. This is what would happen if you threw Spaghetti Westerns, Euro Sleaze, up your ass art films and Poliziotteschi films in a blender, this is what would result. With a soundtrack that sounds straight Morricone, bright colored titles and sequences, this could’ve been a lost Leone film if it was made by Belgians instead of Italians. Three Criminals, one sex addict, two cops, two ladies with a child, a failed novelist, a grifting lawyer all shoot at and plot against each other over stolen gold, all of this taking place in a old mission type church where the sex addict MILF who seems to own it runs an artist commune. One of the criminals looks like a French Charles Bronson minus the mustache, and another is a craggy, rough looking guy, Bernie Bonvoisin, that in real life fronts a French heavy metal band that sounds like AC/DC called “Trust” which has been around forever. There is nudity, blood gushing, liquid gold thrown on people, insane edit cuts, leather gloves and leather jackets.

The movie is based on a novel “Laissez Bronzer Les Cadavres” by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Jean Pierre Bastid, Manchette is credited with reviving the crime novel in France in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Sometimes this movie can drag, especially with the arty sequences, sometimes it can be confusing. Some events take place in the past with one of the characters remembering things from when he was young and his youthful indiscretions with what I assume is the sex addict MILF art commune leader. It also shows the same events from the different points of view of the different characters which I thought was pretty cool. Some people might go “What the fuck is going on?” And I wouldn’t blame them one bit either.

The twin subjects of lust and greed come up often, and seem to be the main points of the movie. All of this happens over gold. Gold is evil. Which to me is kind of a simplistic point to make in a movie, but it tries to go deeper than that but it doesn’t try enough. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t preachy, if it was I wouldn’t waste my time or yours writing a review on this movie. Again this blog is about things I find interesting or cool I want to share with everybody else, I’ll never waste your time with boring, puerile noise. “Let the Corpses Tan” is not completely boring and it isn’t puerile. Its fascinating how they took the old Poliziotteschi formula and breathed new life into it. This movie doesn’t tell you what time period this takes place in because it could take place any time but it seems the absence of cell phones in the movie dates this back to the 1970’s or early 1980’s, as I have said its got the whole spaghetti western vibe to it.

Wikipedia lists this movie in the “Weird Western Crime Film” genre, it is a crime film and there is elements of a western and it is weird but the actual definition of a “Weird Western” is a western that has supernatural, sci fi and/or occult elements, none of these are in the film as far as I could see. Yeah there is weird segments that to me seem more metaphorical and not in anyway supernatural. Maybe you will see it differently.

There is a lot of people that are saying they are sick of all the retro call backs in movies. I never get sick of these types of movies, in fact I go out of my way to find them. The best ones are the ones that combine the past with the present to create something new, of course nothing is new under the sun, everything has been done before, however its in how you mix those elements together to create something different and fresh. Kind of like ingredients in recipe, all in existence being mixed together to create a new dish, “Let the Corpses Tan” is visual white noise that does that.

Bernie in the middle.

To get tanned go to: https://www.amazon.com/Let-Corpses-Tan-Elina-L%C3%B6wensohn/dp/B07K8XQ8GF

There is gold in dem hills!!!