Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Godfrey Ho is best known for his cut-and-paste style movies, taking pre-existing footage and adding new scenes (usually ninja-related) and releasing them as a new feature, so it's probably a little weird that most of what I've seen from him so far hasn't been in that style. Ninja Terminator very much is in that vein, but The Dragon, The Hero, Princess Madam and this have been entirely his babies, although how well the plots have hung together has varied. He's also been known for being a not very good director, but all the ones I've seen so far have been pretty enjoyable, offering a steady stream of enjoyable action in between the more questionable narrative elements. This one probably holds together the sturdiest, but also has the most... questionable plot of all of them. It's also the least fast paced, lacking the breakneck speed of the other Hong Kong produced movies and perhaps having more in common with North American DTV features.

That's an area that I haven't delved too deeply into, although there are similarities with Tiger Claws, which I just watched a couple of days ago. The most obvious are the presence of Cynthia Rothrock as well as the serial killer plots, although the one here is a lot sleazier. Here, the killer is motivated by rage at his mother for abandoning him, which he channels into abusing his wife, who then leaves him so then starts torturing and murdering random women who resemble her. In Tiger Claws you get a couple of reasonably atmospheric murder scenes but nothing too upsetting (which is helpful because we have to buy the villain undergoing a moral reckoning in the superior Mortal Kombat inspired sequel, which would be harder to accept if the movie went overboard in this department). Here, we get a scene where we cut between the killer raping his wife and him fighting in the ring (although I suppose the movie is right to equate sexual assault to violence), and a series of sexualized torture sequences where the killer chains women in a warehouse. The pungency of these scenes definitely disrupts whatever lighthearted enjoyment you were hoping to get out of a DTV martial arts movie, although I must note that the rape scene is followed by the killer eating a steak, and it also turns out that he doesn't actually lock the door to the warehouse.

So that stuff is maybe hard to take, but action-wise, there's stuff to enjoy here. Cynthia Rothrock plays a waitress who earns some extra money by participating in an underground fighting ring, who gets involved in finding the killer after he murders her sister. She's part of gang who wears matching leather jackets, and the preludes to the fight scenes have a real Sharks vs Jets energy. One of her opponents shows up with football shoulder pads, which seems like cheating, and also brings along his wife, who is wearing a bizarrely out of place floral dress. Rothrock also has a scene where she's jogging in a denim vest with a ribbon in her hair, which is a weird outfit for a grown adult to wear, but serves as one of the movie's sartorial highlights. Yes, I know I was gonna talk about the action but this is very important.

Action-wise, this probably moves at 60% of the speed of Ho's Hong Kong movies that I've seen, but by American standards, the fights are still pretty good. You do get decent injections of visual flair once the heroes start facing off with the killer. This is best known for the gruesome conclusion to the final fight (I'd seen the clip years ago on YouTube, where one of the commenters described the villain as an evil Michael Scott or something to that effect), and I think the movie nicely cranks up the pace of the combat so that the gore pays off the escalating intensity. But lest you think this movie is just sleazy and grim, the very last scene ends on a more cheerful note, with Rothrock and her friends giving up gang life and getting enrolled in college. Always nice to get a positive message at the end of your move.

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I'm trying to make Doris Wishman my most watched director of 2022, so after picking up one of the box sets put out by AGFA / Something Weird / Vinegar Syndrome a couple of weeks ago put holding off exploring due to spooky season priorities, I decided to crack it open and indulge in a triple feature. The first of the three films I watched was The Sex Perils of Paulette, which I understand was Wishman's first movie in her meaner, roughie period, following her more lighthearted nudie cuties. The best known of her films from that period is Bad Girls Go to Hell, with which this has a fair bit in common, featuring a heroine going through the ringer in a sexually charged manner. Here, the heroine is an aspiring actress who comes to New York for her big break, only to be pushed into a life of prostitution by her roommate and the sleazy movie industry bigwigs.

One can maybe read something autobiographical into the story, with Wishman trying to eke out a living in the movie business and only being able to do so in the sexploitation genre. In contrast to the warmer, more innocent depictions in the nudie cuties, here there's a queasier relationship with sex, something that the movie obviously offers up for titillation, yet squirms about as it does so at the heroine's discomfort. So the experience of sitting through this and some of Wishman's other films from this era is a bit more conflicted than if the movies peddled straight-ahead guileless sexploitation. I don't think this is quite is forceful in pushing that dynamic as Bad Girls Go to Hell or Indecent Desires, but found it held its own in this respect better than the other two movies I watched in this triple feature, A Taste of Flesh and My Brother's Wife, as it filtered the narrative more stringently through its heroine's perspective.

These B&W downbeat Wishman joints all have a similar visual style, disarmingly artful even when pushing their sleazy, salacious pleasures. But even when the camera is moving in similar ways, floating up and down at the sight of gyrating flesh, you can find nuances in the effect, like the boozy camerawork in the first party scene, where the heroine is overwhelmed by the sordidness of the affair. Like many a Wishman joint, this is set primarily in her apartment, and pads the proceedings with leisurely walks outside, and you can feel the sense of joy and discovery in those outdoor scenes, while the ones indoors have a threatening quality. As they say, there's no place like home. (This dynamic is pushed even more forcefully in A Taste of Flesh, which ends with a tense closeup of a turning doorknob, with no escape in sight. I'll give that one a recommendation too, as it mixes sexploitation and political thriller in a way only Wishman could achieve.)

But lest I make this sound like a completely grim affair, there are grace notes to be found here. Like I said, the movie looks quite stylish, and while Wishman's unique decorating sense is maybe harder to grasp in B&W, there is a scene where the heroine sits on a bed, her dress matching the pattern on the bedspread. Her roommate is played by Wishman and skin flick regular Darlene Bennett, who is not without her charms, and has a scene where she argues with the heroine while very sleepy and refusing to get out of bed. (Depending on how many more Wishman joints I end up seeing, Bennett could find herself among my most watched actors. This would not be unwelcome.) And I got a kick out of seeing Tony Lo Bianco play the heroine's boyfriend, the only positive male character in the whole movie.

This movie had been on my radar for years, well before I'd developed any real interest in Hong Kong cinema. Its reputation was based on its numerous scenes of outrageous ultraviolence, the appeal of which could be conveyed easily in gif format. Having seen the whole movie now, I can confirm those gifs did not misrepresent the film. Every few minutes, and sometimes more frequently, there's a scene of violence that seems to defy what should be physically possible. Want to see someone punch through another character's stomach? Want to somebody explode another man's skull with their bare hands? Want to see a character commit seppuku and then try to strangle their opponent with their intestines? You need only wait a few minutes for the next gruesome highlight.

Of course, this means that the violence is set up like a series of gore gags, and likely as a result of the behind the scenes requirements to pull them off, lacks the speed and physicality I associate with Hong Kong action cinema. So it is perhaps not an immediate favourite, but I think the simultaneously more deliberate and punchy delivery of these scenes helps it work on its own terms. This is an adaptation of a manga (which I have not read), and the way the movie stylizes the dramatic qualities of such scenes, having characters stand off and bark out their motivations and then exploding into violence, brings to mind a live action cartoon. The prison environment here is similarly stylized, the guards' uniforms perfectly crisp and colour-coordinated, the interiors like a cartoon rendering of a prison, without the grit a real one would have. (In that respect, the movie stands in stark contrast with another recent viewing, Escape from Alcatraz, which was shot in its namesake and benefits tremendously from the physical reality of its environment.)

That stylization extends to the casting, with a cartoonishly bulked up Fan Siu-Wong in the lead role (a startling sight after seeing him play a scrawny punk in Righting Wrongs earlier this month) and supporting roles primarily cast with grotesque-looking or downright ugly actors. (Sorry, I guess that's mean, but there are a lot of uggos in this, to the movie's benefit.) The movie finds ways to humanize a number of them, giving the proceedings a covert political charge, but the cast member who steals the show is the incorrigibly cruel Yukari Oshima. Oshima has always stood out to me in her girls with guns movies because of her off kilter, androgynous presence (which was even more noticeable when paired with the more overtly girlish Moon Lee), and this movie pushes that even further by casting her as a man, replete with weird male dubbing. Perhaps there is something objectionable here, but you want someone to give off sinister live action anime vibes, with the physicality to back it up? This is your gal.

This is not a stylishly directed movie, something that works to its benefit. Through clear-eyed observation, the movie documents all the ways in which inmates are stripped of their dignity, so that the titular event takes on a certain urgency. Some of this is through deliberate, pointed acts (the warden cruelly takes away painting privileges from an inmate), but others are from the mundane details of prison life. When you think of nudity in prison movies, it's usually in a more salacious context, the requisite titillation we expect from WIP flicks. Here, presented as frankly as it is, it feels dehumanizing. (There's perhaps more to unpack with respect to the gender dynamics at play with this element, but I don't think the movie is ignorant of them.) The filmmakers managed to shoot this in the real Alcatraz, and the movie gets a lot of its effect from the deadening physical realities of living in this particular setting.

It's maybe a bit startling to learn this was directed by Don Siegel, as the compassionate streak towards inmates here feels starkly at odds with the tough-on-crime sentiment of Dirty Harry. Both films star Clint Eastwood, who plays things with his usual steely understatement, perhaps more so here, as he's given next to no backstory. This is another area where the movie excels, as it's able to flesh out its characters through intelligent casting, small bits of action and carefully observed dialogue. This is all the personality the characters are allowed to still have (one of them has a phone conversation with his wife cut short when he tries to explain the prison's rules), so it makes sense we get to know them on such terms. The character we learn the most about is a black inmate played by Paul Benjamin, who got handed an excessively punitive sentence for killing two white assailants in self defense. He bonds with Eastwood over a slowly developing mutual respect, although both characters prod their racial divide. This element might bring to mind the embarrassing dynamics in The Mule, where an octogenarian Eastwood is cool enough to hang out with Latino drug dealers a quarter of his age and sling racial shittalk around without getting stomped, but let's just say it's handled a lot more convincingly here.

When the movie shifts to the escape itself, many of these qualities still hold. There are no great moments of excitement, but instead an almost pathological procedural quality. Eastwood uses nail clippers to scrape away at a grille in his cell. He can't get a good grip on the clippers so he steals a spoon. He needs to weld them together so he procures a dime and matches. And so on and so forth. The actual escape is depicted with a similar terseness, characters crawling through the crevices of the prison, ducking out of the sightlines of the guards, their navigating of the prison's architectural rendered with a real tactility. It doesn't exactly end with a bang, but maybe that's the right choice.

Also, we have reached 100 pages.

I saw Blue Underground is releasing two of Franco's de Sade-related movies on 4K (Eugenie and Justine). I don't know why, but the idea of Franco on 4K weirds me out. Like, his films shouldn't be that clear and crisp. Maybe I'll pick up Justine. I haven't seen that one yet. I gathered it's not as good as Eugenie (which admittedly, was top-tier Franco).

I guess I should clarify, Eugenie, not Eugenie de Sade (I think Eugenie de Sade is the one I'm under the impression isn't as well regarded now that I think about it.)

While I haven’t updated yet to 4K, I was of that mentality until I saw the Night of the Living Dead blu-ray released by Criterion. It did feel like I was watching a brand new film, having only seen it in crappy public domain versions over the years.

That being said, seeing a scratchy, unrefined version certainly has its charms. The print of Zombie I watched last Friday was super faded and scratchy, but it felt like I was transported back to the grindhouse days (but without the fear of getting stabbed and whatnot). I saw a pretty tattered print of Last House on the a Left a number of years ago, gave off the same vibe.

There are a few things about this that might seem promising. First, you got a group of prostitutes standing up to the mob. And the mob boss is named Carny Ball. And the movie is attentive to how the prostitutes work together as a unit. One of them negotiates on behalf of the group, but has to get buy-in from the others. And there's one who pressures new members for sexual favours, but gets pushback from the more senior members. Meaning that this group of prostitutes has a better functioning HR department than many large organizations. And there's the fact that a number of them appear to be women of colour or immigrants, meaning that the cast is more diverse than one might expect from a sexploitation movie of this era.

Unfortunately, the movie plays out less entertainingly than you might hope. The prostitutes do stand up to the mob, but this takes almost two-thirds of the one hour runtime, which is largely padded with shots of nighttime street footage. There's a documentary quality to this footage that holds some novelty for the first few minutes, but as the movie keeps returning to it, and keeps looping that same bit of sexy, swingin' scoring to mask the lack of incident, and well before the hour's over, I guess I'm swung out. I just watched a few Doris Wishman movies recently, and for all their blatant padding, they usually have a sense of movement, at least in the camerawork, that gives the movies a certain momentum. Here, the camera setups are largely static, so the padding and the story and dialogue scenes both feel much longer than the runtime would suggest. I should note that the film is not unpleasant to look at (the fact that it's shot on film means that it's automatically better looking than the majority of modern digitally-shot releases) and there are a handful of stylish moments (a stabbing in silhouette is a highlight), but the relatively simplistic camera setups mean that the movie rarely pops visually.

And honestly, this is nowhere near as salacious as the premise requires. The street scenes are in busy, nice enough areas that they don't lend an atmosphere of tawdriness. The nudity is presented in a fairly perfunctory manner (characters discuss negotiating with the mob will sitting on the sofa topless; I did chuckle at the "beach" scene which is very obviously shot indoors), and the violence is nowhere near as sleazy as you'd hope. Even the climactic castration scene is awkwardly framed, so that you don't see nor feel anything (the heroines might as well be mending the villain's zipper, given the excitement level). A good comparison of how to do this movie right might be Joseph Mawra's Olga movies, which find ways to sleaze things up, and have a strong central presence in Audrey Campbell to hold the story together. This movie does care about the prostitutes' group dynamics, but to a fault, as none of them emerge as interesting characters in their own right.

As I've started paying more attention to my Letterboxd stats, I've noticed an embarrassing lack of women in my most watched actors. To rectify that, I've decided to piggyback off my Doris Wishman exploration and watched a bunch of movies with Darlene Bennett. This was one I watched for that reason, and I'm sorry to report that she's in exactly one scene (the aforementioned topless couch scene), although if we're all amigos here, I must say that she was not an unwelcome sight. This is also the first film I've seen from Barry Mahon, and while it seems this is considered one of his better movies by my Letterboxd circle, I don't think this convinced me that further exploration is merited. That being said, I see he directed The Beast That Killed Women, a nudie cutie horror movie which stars Darlene Bennett, Gigi Darlene AND future überMILF Juliet Anderson, which probably makes it the Three The Hard Way of sexploitation. So I suppose I will make time for that one at some point.

There's a few scenes in this where you're looking at one of the Bennett twins, and folks, I must confess that I could not tell which one I was looking at. This is important for you to hear because I must admit I could not pull off a double date with both of them at the same time. It does not matter how different their outfits might be, how quickly I run from one end of the restaurant to the other, how generously I tip the waiter to keep their yap shut, I fear I will slip. Please pray for me as I reckon with this horrifying possibility.

While I have yet to see it, I speculated based on its cast that The Beast that Killed Women would be Barry Mahon's Three the Hard Way. This one features some common performers, in that it has Gigi Darlene and Darlene Bennett, but also her sister Dawn. Which I guess makes this Barry Mahon's Mothra vs. Godzilla, with Gigi standing in for Godzilla and Dawn and Darlene as the two little Mothra larvae from the end. (Which movie is sexier depends on the viewer.) But whereas Mothra vs. Godzilla owns, this movie very much does not. I put this on because I had a long day at work and wanted to watch something that was short and I didn't have to pay too much attention to and maybe had boobies because I am a sad little man and such things bring joy to this dismal existence on Planet Earth in the Year of Our Lord 2022, and this might be the longest hour I've ever spent watching a movie. I fear my compulsion to watch Mahon's work will lead to a similar incident as when I watched eight Phil Prince movies in one week due to their short runtimes. But at least things happened in those. Depraved things only enjoyable by degenerates, but things nonetheless.

This is a bunch of nude modelling footage, overlaid with narration on what a great gig the titular business offers, and how Gigi Darlene is truly living the American dream, and how phonies get in the business to feel up the models, and I bunch of other stuff that I probably tuned out. Perhaps Nudes Inc. offers Casual Fridays, in which the models can wear jeans during their topless photoshoots instead of dress pants. What I'm getting it is that there is a lot of telling but little showing, except the endless, endless nude modelling footage, which is presented with as little style as possible. (Yes, yes, the girls are attractive, but this makes me appreciate Nude on the Moon, which I was initially lukewarm on, all the more. That movie has a story and atmosphere and something of a deliberate visual style.) For all its faults, Prostitutes Protective Society at least tried to demonstrate how the titular organization worked. This makes no such attempt. (It is interesting how both movies foreground immigrant characters and sexual harassment, although neither is explored for more than a few minutes.) This does distinguish itself from the other movie by featuring colour, which is further enhanced by the woefully degraded transfer I watched, wherein the colours in the frame evolve in real time. Would this have played better under the influence? I have no idea, I watched it sober.

I chased Nudes Inc. with Naked Fury, and I'm thinking this is the ideal form to appreciate the work of Barry Mahon. It's ten minutes long instead of eight hours or whatever. It has slightly different music (jaunty piano) instead of the maddeningly repetitive rock'n'roll that features in his other movies. It has an attractive visual style, with its stark blue background and occasional shaky close-ups for excitement. And it has actual conflict, presenting a playful wrestling match between the Bennett sisters. I think I could tell which one was which this time, so there is hope for my double date scheme yet.

Alongside Nudes Inc. and Naked Fury, I also watched Instant Orgy, which features a group of women deciding how to spend the money they raised for charity. I would think they would have decided on a cause before raising the money, but I guess it's like that storyline in Arrested Development when they held a fundraiser for "TBA". And it's for a good cause, although as a big government liberal, I would prefer tax dollars and government programs be directed at these causes instead of the charity of private citizens. Anyway, somebody spikes their punchbowl and they all end up taking their clothes off and grooving to some surf rock. I am not sure how much of an "orgy" this really is, but the vibes are good, and this is only seven minutes long. I am not convinced that Barry Mahon is a great director, but he is easier to appreciate in such small doses.

Not to be confused with Nudes LLP.

Speaking of Gamera, what’s the word on that reboot they were floating around?
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Oh, I don't know, I just wanted to post a picture of the weather here this week.

Gamera no like that weather.

I think Rock is pictured there. Only question is whether he's the one on the left or right.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

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Btw, that's Steven Seagal's daughter. Can you imagine what dinner with the in-laws are like for Gamera?

Like a lot of these somewhat less celebrated kung fu movies, I had to watch this in an English dub, and like a lot of these somewhat less celebrated kung fu movies, all the voices except those of the heroes were in a constant state of shrieking or cackling. Obviously the main villain should do his share of cackling. But the children shriek. The good looking lady who presents a possible love interest shrieks. A bald guy who plays a minor baddie has a more guttural cackle. He and his goons decide to antagonize some poor bastard and you hear all of them shriek and cackle at the same time and the kid charges in and starts shrieking and one begins to wonder if this scene would have played more tolerably in its original audio.

That being said, this is not a purely unpleasant auditory experience, thanks to some deftly applied "borrowed" music. During a recent viewing of Cirio H. Santiago's Firecracker, I noticed how the liberal use of the Shogun Assassin score significantly upped the energy level. (The heroine in that one was played by Jillian Kesner, who I understand once played the girlfriend of the Fonz and was the real-life wife of Gary Graver, and let's just say she wasn't hired for her martial arts prowess.) Here, we open with Ennio Morricone's theme for The Big Gundown, and let's just say that it makes this relatively small scale movie feel a lot more epic. (The Korean forest locations also help greatly in this respect, and it was nice to see this in a pretty decent transfer on Tubi, as a lot of these movies are only available in much worse condition.) And it definitely adds to the excitement when that same theme is deployed during a training sequence when one of the heroes learns how to fight by kicking. But lest you assume that's the only music that's well used, I must note that the arrival of the main villain is announced by the James Bond theme.

There is a plot here, about a pretty tepid rivalry that is not easy to invest in, and let's just say that when you notice both leads are sympathetic and a more overtly villainous character arrives (with the aforementioned Bond theme queue), you won't win any prizes for guessing how this turns out. Most of this is pretty episodic, with an early incident involving an ******* foreign fighter who looks like a burlier William Redfield, a scene where one of the heroes tells the other to get outta town with real "Leave town, please, I'll be your friend" energy. Also Yuen Biao is briefly in this as a goon who fights one of the heroes at around the middle of the movie. I actually watched this for his involvement, because I'm trying to game my Letterboxd stats and get him to my most watched actor this year.

As far as Ng See-Yuen's directorial efforts go, this lacks the kookiness and some of the verve of Game of Death II and Invincible Armour, but knows mostly how to capture the fights in engaging ways, even if the style isn't terribly sophisticated and he sometimes cuts when he shouldn't. There is a bit of sharply used handheld near the end, which feels participatory without losing coherence, and the final fight has a cutaway that anticipates a much funnier use of the same flourish in Invincible Armour. I will note that in casting John Liu, Don Wong Tao and Hwang Jang-Lee, you have three extremely talented martial artists that are great fun to watch fight other people and especially each other. The latter two are saddled with an awful bowl cut and shitty blonde wig, respectively (one wonders how many of these martial arts stars resented Bruce Lee for popularizing a hairdo that only he could pull off). Liu however comes off as one cocky sonofabitch, and apparently had quite the ego offscreen, but when you see him kicking Tao in the face like his legs were windshield wipers, or swooping low kicks at Hwang like he's breakdancing, maybe some of that cockiness was justified.

Doris Wishman essentially remade Too Much Too Often! in 2001 as Satan Was a Lady (not to be confused with the 1975 Satan Was a Lady, a hardcore film she did with Annie Sprinkle that has little do with either of these), and probably the most drastic difference aside from the wide gulf in quality (cannot stress how much more entertaining this one is) is that the gender of the protagonist differs between the versions. In Satan Was a Lady, the evil scheming dominatrix who sets out to blackmail a client and seduce the client's son for easy money is female. In Too Much Too Often!, the evil scheming dom...inator? (that sounds like a killer robot; looks like it's just dom) who sets out to blackmail a client and seduce the client's daughter for easy money is male.

From having seen my share of sexploitation movies, this character type feels so distinctly female that having their gender flipped colours the proceedings interestingly. These movies were made for primarily straight male audiences, so it's no surprise that the female dominatrix types, even when presented as the protagonist, were an object of desire as much as a point of audience identification. Switching the character to male, the audience identification is still there (the somewhat aspirational story arc kind of forces this on the material), but surprisingly so is the sense of desire. I wouldn't call this a particularly homoerotic movie (the one gay sex scene, a whipping session between the main character and his client, is presented in frantic and shadowy contrast to the more sensual straight scenes), but the character is one defined by his charisma and sexual potency. Wishman seems to be in love with this character, even if the things he does (blackmailing his client, beating his pregnant ex-girlfriend) should make us hate him. It helps that the actor playing him, Buck Starr, is pretty magnetic even when he's being dubbed over.

Other than that, this is pretty classic Wishman, with the visual style maybe a bit more forceful and adventurous than usual. (The Something Weird / AGFA Blu-ray for some reason has this on an S-VHS transfer. It actually doesn't look that bad, but I wish this had gotten a proper restoration. Wonder if there's an elements issue.) There's one sex scene between the protagonist and his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend that has a nice playful energy, especially when the camera gets up nice and close and starts tilting on its axis and moving along their bodies. And you get late appearances from Wishman regulars Sam Stewart and the great Darlene Bennett. The latter is seemingly dubbed by someone several years her senior (possibly Wishman herself), and is introduced her nipple perfectly framed in a hand mirror, which is just great cinema. Now, things maybe don't turn out too well for either of them, but that just drives home what a POS the protagonist is.