Victory

Victory (1995) Most people have heard of this Joseph Conrad novel but few have seen this very good movie based on that novel, set in the Dutch East Indies of 1914. Since it is an English /French /German co-production it apparently didn’t get shipped to these shores in great quantity or for a long time period as most people I talked to had not heard of it. Starring Willem DeFoe, Sam Neill, Rufus Sewell and Irene Jacob, it is the story of a hermit living on a small island who befriends and saves a female violin player in a white slaver orchestra. (Got your interest now?) Neill plays the opium addicted evil poof who snakes into the apparent Eden of DeFoe and Jacob. Sewell is his cohort in nastiness and the ever popular Hu Yi (who?) plays the all wise Chinese manservant. Throw in a malevolent overweight South American slob and a tribe of hostile natives and you have a perfect setting for an enjoyable movie. Beautifully shot in Indonesia, it is a tad slow moving for those under 40 and tries to delve into the inner workings of many of the characters, difficult to do in film. Most of the characters have a bit of baggage hanging on to them so you are not quite sure if everyone is playing on the up and up or if Sam Neill’s character is playing with a full deck. The flick also takes a slightly jaundiced view of what passes for human nature. Overall, an excellent pick for a weekend rental and you can even tell your intellektual friends you watched this movie. The movie is rated R for: DeFoe buns, Jacob buns and orbs, knife in hand, sleazy Victorian people, small trains, and large Germans.

Blood Moon

Blood Moon (2001): Well, here is another hard to define movie. I was expecting a run of the mill no cast werewolf movie but instead found real actors like Tim Curry, Victoria Sanchez, Grace Jones, and Leslie Ann Warren. Trying to categorize this movie is a little like explaining quantum physics to four year olds, it ain’t easy. It’s sort of a horror, psychological, freak show, tragic love story musical. Curry plays the owner of a traveling freak show in what I believe is supposed be the US in a recent time period. However the show has eastern European looking trucks and horse drawn gypsy wagons which haven’t been seen in these parts for longer than Elvis has gone missing. The automobile(s) have a 60’s look to them but sure do look like late Soviet Empire models. And in the closing credits there are just too many people named Vlad for this to have been shot anywhere else but in jolly old Romania. The star of the freak show is a wolf girl who is very hairy and is somewhat unhappy with her hirsute life. She finds a sympathetic loner from town whose mom works in cosmetic research (can you figure out where we’re going with this?) and gives her a serum designed to improve hair loss. Well, things don’t go exactly as planned and disaster for all results. There are some surprisingly good musical numbers including Tim Curry’s “The Plucking Song” and an interesting set by Grace Jones embedded in the movie. This movie is loaded with lots of strange people from the freak show and even has a vertically challenged orchestra and dance troupe. The lead characters are quite sympathetic and the movie is somewhat character driven, rare for this type of film. Yes, it has its clichéd characters but on the whole is a surprising and enjoyable little flick. Rent it for a fun weekend afternoon. The movie is rated R for: excessive use of freaks, full male, female and other gender nudity, gender bending, snotty teens, nerdly teens, dead teens, hairy teens, horny toad teens, and particularly for that guy with the reversing knees (Yuck).

Sleepaway Camp (trilogy)

Sleepaway Camp (1983), Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988), Sleepaway Camp III – Teenage Wasteland (1988) Yee Gods…it’s a complete trilogy and comes boxed like a first aid kit! Movie companies are sending out collections of Stanly Kubrick and other great directors, Alien collections, Star Trek and Star Wars collections, and what does your loyal B movie reviewer wind up with in his in box but a B movie collection! I guess it’s appropriate. These three (dare I say it) classics were all shot near Bremen, GA. back in the eighties and can be found firmly wedged in the ‘dead teenager’ category of movies. That is, the point of all three flicks is to have a plethora of dead teenagers piled up by the end of the movie. The real camp is long gone, probably a shopping mall by now but they were all shot in the fall after the camp was closed to keep expenses to a minimum. The original flick was more of a who dun-nit type of slasher fare. There is plenty of may-hem but you don’t know who the murderer is until the end. The two sequels are more of a when or how dun-nit type as you know who the wacko slasher is (same as the first movie) and are just following the plot along to keep up with the schedule of innovative killings. The two sequels also have the unusual fact of having Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela in the lead. It appears she left the acting business after starring in these two non-award winning efforts. What do you think? Was that a wise move? The third movie also has Michael J. Pollard in a small part as a horny toad dirty old man victim. He started with great promise way back in Bonnie & Clyde and now does this type of movie. Melanie Griffith’s sister (Tracy) also stars in III.

You can see the progression in these types of movies. The original has lots of kids at camp but by the 2nd and 3rd movie, the campers appear more like horned out teens. The level of nudity also progressively increases as you go from 1 to 3 as does the potential for aardvarking. The psycho transsexual killer also goes from camper to camp counselor so you can see lots of intellectual forces were at work here. And also true to form, most (not all) but most of the kids that get it, sort of deserve it, at least from the killer’s point of view. All three movies were rated R for: bodies everywhere, death by drowning in an outhouse, death by battery acid, death by boiling….I could go on for a long time…., horny toad teens, forbidden tent exercises, breastulations, pulsating gore, horrible camp songs, and for the awful mullet in II.

XChange

XChange (2000): Watch out, it’s another Canadian government supported movie. If you read this column regularly (Is there anyone out there who does?), you know I consider these government supported movies to be mostly snoozers and losers but the Tapehead will have to eat his words on this one. While not a great movie, it is a reasonably well done SF movie about body renting. That is, in the near future, you can occupy someone’s body to save time making a trip somewhere. It is also being used as a kind of voyeur central as many people just switch bodies to have an anonymous night out on the town doing all sorts of naughty things. Poor hero Kim Coates has a business appointment and switches with someone on the other coast so he can make the meeting. As luck would have it, his switchee is a corporate terrorist who doesn’t come back with his body and the somewhat corrupt corporation running the show wants to dump his ‘essence’ into a clone. This sounds ok until he finds out the clone can only live for a couple of weeks so our hero has a major problem if his body is not recovered. Not only that, if the police do find his body, the law requires it to be impounded as evidence until a trial. This naturally irritates our hero a tad and he decides to exceed some government regulations on his own. So, you get an interesting set of conflict resolutions, exotic settings and technology, along with some traditional wooden acting by Stephen Baldwin. But this isn’t too irritating since he plays a clone and apparently, clones don’t have sparkling personalities in the near future. Couple that with the fact that almost every major female starlet’s role contains at least one episode of gratuitous nudity and you have a film that should interest a few people out there. XChange is a reasonably well done science fiction movie with a modest budget. The movie is rated R for; multiple orbulations and bumulations, excessively wooden Baldwin, sending in the clones, guided stealth bullets, multiple assassinations, and for the movies unique extrapolation of what the future holds in cruise missilery and miniaturization.

Dead and Breakfast

Dead and Breakfast (2004): How can you resist a movie with a title like this. What we have here is a modified zombie movie with attitudes similar to ‘Shaun of the Dead’. In actuality, it appears to be a starring vehicle for Ever Carradine, David’s niece. David Carradine makes a cameo appearance and is mostly shot from mid-chest up; you rarely see his bottom half. (Hey, that’s not an all bad idea, come to think of it.) The director’s commentary explained that the eccentric David would constantly use his cell phone between takes and always had it in his hand during shots so they had to shoot high. That’s dedication to your craft. In any event, he was apparently just lending his famous name to help his niece’s picture take in the rubes.

While a pretty standard zombie movie, this one has a twist in that you only become a zombie if some of your dead bits get put into this ancient Asian box. Once in, you follow the orders of the prime zombie. This sets up some pretty funny situations as these dead guys apparently have a small level of self preservation left. After charging the Bed & Breakfast where the victims are holed up, they get a little sheepish when the whole front rank is mowed down by home made shotguns. They start to get funny looks on their faces that you don’t normally see in zombie movies and you can see their tiny brains working hard as they start to have second thoughts about their marching orders. One zombie even plays the guitar and sings. And in what other movie can you see line dancing – hip hopping zombies? Oh, there are plenty of exploding zombies, lots of body parts flying, and blood gushing but it’s so over the top that it is meant to be funny. True to form, cast mortality is appalling but Ever does survive but has to be dug out of a pile of dead guys. This was pretty fun and not your normal zombie movie. Beware; it does have a low budget. The movie is rated R for; gallons and gallons of blood, flying zombie parts, single shot shotguns, singing zombies, angry zombies, fearful zombies, and especially for the street full of line dancing zombies.