Devil Story - 1986

 I have so many movies left to watch.  The fact that this exists and I have never heard of it...is confounding.

The immediate comparison I made in my head was to Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies.  It has been years since I saw that but in my head it's this slow hazy nonsense movie with vague zombies and basically no plot, and if that doesn't describe that movie well it certainly does describe this movie.

Some French production originally called "Once Upon a Time...the Devil", this the last movie by director Bernard Launois.  It consists of what I will guarantee you are more sounds than words and more specifically noises made by a horse instead of dialogue.

A ship crashes into a hill, a horse bucks around whinnying like mad, a mummy walks around, a undead zombie creature goes around killing people, and all these things are maybe linked, but definitely not clearly linked as our main heroine runs or hollers or fails to react at all.  Like I said, there's not even much dialogue in the movie and a lot of scenes play out with nothing said, explained, understood or communicated whatsoever.

Devil Story I guess has a cult following, in that hallowed hall of movies claimed to be the worst.  In the end, another inexplicable scene happens and it doesn't even make you blink.  This movie like no other trains you to just sorta take it in stride, blink, say uh huh, and just sorta detune yourself one more step and step outside of reality a little more.

There is value in this, its hard to define, but I do like it, and I give it about 4 stars.

Winterbeast - 1992

 There's many levels of cult film, some of which I am still discovering.

Winterbeast is some amateur as fuck, completely non-narrative Z grade bamboozle fest fucking weirdo movie that is basically not a movie at all, but rather a collection of things which are honestly not related, but pretend as if they are.

Directed by Christopher Theis, this slab of nonsense is some sorta who knows what of nondescript nothingness paired with insane wtf which will have you instantly wondering "is this a movie"?  The short and real answer is no.  I would challenge anyone who says it is.

Play the first few minutes for someone and introduce them to weirdness.  The problem is that you would not want that first 2 minutes to continue for about 75 minutes.  It would get boring, nonsensical and repetitive.  Of course, they don't exactly repeat it.  There's claymation in this movie, original music, bizarre actor moments, and even some local small town almost sightseeing nonsense?  

Basically this looks like someone was shooting their vacation footage and decided to add a horror plot.  I have rarely seen a movie where it was more obvious that within the same sequence or scene they cut away from the actor to a different actor, completely somewhere else, responding as if they were in the same scene.

 They had some ingenuity, claymation for example.  I have no idea what this is, but I will say I kinda liked it.  I give it 3 stars.

The Stranger - 1987

 One puts on the blandly named movie The Stranger with hopes - after all it is basically described as a slasher adjacent mystery movie - and then one gets bogged down in irrelevant dialogue.

Also side note the ENTIRE move I was saying to myself "that's Bonnie Bedelia" and then I would convince myself it isn't.  It IS Bonnie!  Bedelia stars in this shit.

This is possibly also one of the critical few movies where the plot revolves around a song someone remembers?  I mean really, there's a few of these and they are mostly bad - this one doesn't buck the trend.  Bonnie has these phantom memories revolving around an ad jingle from the sound of it and she has vague memories about a murder and I dunno what the fuck else happens in this movie.

The detective character is good and I liked him.  The rest of this....I mean...  One star is generous.

Tokyo Joe - 1949

 I have been on a mostly unreviewed Bogart fest.  I watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and rewatched The African Queen as well.  Good movies!

Tokyo Joe I put on without a second thought, feeling kinda sick and high on edibles while I recovered from tonsil surgery.  Humphrey Bogart stars in this film noir sorta drama, and I had no idea what to expect.

What I could never have predicted was how unintentionally hlarious moments of this were, as well as how bizarrely influential to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!  Seriously, what a strange duo of things for this movie to pull out of it's ass, but I mean seriously!  

First we meet Bogart's daughter he didn't know existed.  The uber-wooden, awfully scripted, overacted part is pure comic gold.  The little girl never blinks and delivers hyper adult, unrealistic dialogue as she doesn't move and inch and bores a hole directly into Bogey's face.  Tried to find a quote of hers from the IMDb page but nothing doing, take my goddamn word for it brah.

Then we have the place sequence where first off all I notice Bogey is dressed like Indiana Jones and then the sequence in the plane, while not being from an action movie, really reminded me of the sequence in Loa Che's airplane at the beginning of Temple.

I scoured IMDb and Wikipedia, no word on those about the connection to Indiana Jones.  What a bizarre thing though!  I mean it's not a 1:1 but watch those movies and tell me they're not loosely connected.

This is a weird one and one that sticks out.  Sometimes that's all it takes!  I give it 4 stars.

Sleepstalker - 1989

 The first movie about the fairy tale character of the Sandman came out in 1933, the most recent in 2017.  Obviously a character of some status, this little known horror movie also is sorta about the character.  Sorta.

Sleepstalker reminds me of those 3-4 middle Hellraiser movies that were barely about Pinhead and instead some stupid other story with Pinhead shoved in there in the end with 4 lines of dialogue.  It's also about the level of quality of those movies.

We begin with Griffin's family being murdered and the killer being put on death row.  We get a priest who comes to the man on death row and gives him the ability to come back as living sand, which he obviously uses and comes back to murder some more.  Along the way some cops get  involved or whatever and some mild weird "scares" happen.

This is one that took me a long time to get through.  It moves at a glacial pace and is an hour 45 minutes which is probably about 45 minutes too long for what it is trying to do and how thin the storyline is.  Character have bad dialogue, stand around, plan things, discuss things, have zero chemistry or charisma.  It's a fucking dull, dull movie.

Then we eventually get to the priest who unveils what we already know, and cablam, final confrontation.  I dunno.  This movie is not good.  I'll give it like half a star. The effects are good, the few times they happen. It might deserve higher.  But ya know.

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural - 1973

 Halloween horror fest bayyyy-by!  The theme of the movies this year is "Tubi algorithm".  I am going to watch whatever it recommends in the first screen (or so) and this will be therefore random, and will also give you an interesting insight into what Tubi thinks I like.

Also known as The Legendary Curse of Lemora, and Lemora, Lady Dracula.

Lila is a angelic virginal singer who is a member of a church after her father is accused and found guilty of murder or something like that.  She receives a communique from her dad and sets off to find him after being told to come alone.  Doesn't sound fishy at all.  On the way, she enters an area full of cursed, psychotic people and things don't get much better when she finally arrives and meets cryptic Lemora.

The movie chugs along and there are some pretty good sequences.  The beginning with the bus ride into town is really good, and though the movie telegraphs what is going on and what is going to happen, its a fun ride to take even with the outcome clear.  The usual lesbian undertones are present, there is a little nudity, and that's about the sum of it.

About 30 minutes were cut to make the version now available.  It's rated mature and nowadays except for the brief breast shot it's practically PG rated.  I wonder if the original cut had more violence and nudity.  This cut though, gets a relatively average 2.5.

Night Feeder - 1988

 I love how the IMDB for this says "the debut of Kate Alexander"  Yeah!  Because it was basically everybody's debut!  And also for a lot of them, their only film ever.

Night Feeder is a super Z grade slasher that no one has ever heard of.  Its amateur to the true definition, which we have seen a few times now on the blog, and the movie really looks, sounds, and feels like it.  As I may have said before, these can be divisive, a lot comes down to tone and atmosphere...

Night Feeder has main character reporter Jean in a city where young women's bodies are turning up with their brains sucked out of the heads.  She wants to write a piece on the news and begins to investigate, meets a charisma-less police guy Alonso, and gets sucked into the story.  

It cannot just be that, and so what it does instead is have a lot of weird nonsense shit with the town blaming stuff on a weird band that sings exclusively about suicide, and having a weird subplot about prostitutes.  I tried to find the band on YouTube but I can't so you will just have to trust me, it's great.  Also great and jarring is the strange electronic score by one of the films 3 credited directors.

Sometimes you walk the line and find something which is yes Z grade but scratches the itch in just the right way.  I give it 4 stars.

The Chamber - 1996

 So I am at the thrift store and picking around VHSs, and the usual route here is to grab something unknown and random, and I pick up 1996's The Chamber in this context.

Bought for almost $4 million for a one-page idea around the height of the legal thriller, Hollywood banged down John Grisham's door to make another smash hit like The Firm.  The Chamber is originally going to star Brad Pitt and be directed by Ron Howard, that falls apart and eventually what we have here gets made.

Chris O'Donnell and Gene Hackman star in this southern story of a bomb which kills two children, and the fallout involving the killer being put on death row.  Sam (Hackman) has been in prison for 16 years and his grandson O'Donnell is a lawyer who decides to fight for him.  Sam is definitely a racist asshole, and guilty of many things, but is he guilty of the bombing?

The Chamber is a really odd movie in that we are watching our protagonist fight for a racist, and grow close to one, and Sam is not like the lovable curmudgeonly old dude who we kinda love.  He is a murderer, a slur blaring bigot who doesn't hold back and isn't trying to be on any good behavior.  Watching as we emote some sort of sympathy towards him for almost 2 hours is...an odd choice, to say the least.

We're all expecting bland leading man Chris O'Donnell to legalese his way to a happy conclusion and he doesn't, spoiler alert, so at least it does not pull punches.  I'll give it 1.5 stars and say it does move pretty quick.

Sweet Sixteen - 1983

 Also apparently stylized as Sweet 16.

I flick this on cuz Amazon recommends it and I get midway through before I realized I'd seen it before.  That's ok, I've seen a lot before.  I watched it again.  It was Don Shanks as the Native American character Jason that clued me in, I recognized him.  Don Shanks, I did not know, also played Michael Myers in Halloween 5.

Also, apparently, the role of the elder statesman character was supposed to be Leslie Nielsen.  A small change would've made this a lot better.  Nah, I kid tho, this movie is good.

Aleisa Shirley is one of the main characters, I don't know who I should say was the real main character, but she is a nice change from the typical focus.  Sexual and a bit catty she and several other people are involved in some killings in a local town.  It is all getting blamed on the Native character Jason, and the cops arrest him while others are still being hunted.

This movie is pretty solid as a slasher.  The tropes at this point are to make the victims unlikeable, but it will get worse from here and this is not as bad as some time later on in horror movies.  The kills are pretty minimal, I think this must've been made when the MPAA was cracking down a little on blood.  There are a couple topless shots and a little full bush.  Can't go wrong there.

I like it, I'll give it 4 stars.

Lost Highway - 1997

 Who knows how I got into David Lynch.  I believe I had heard the name at some point in my early teens, and it is possible my good buddy in high school Ben introduced me to Lost Highway possibly.  We liked it cuz it was insane, had Marilyn Manson and Rammstein in it, and was very transgressive.

I have rewatching both Lynch and Cronenberg throughout the years, revisiting my old teenage favorites, and seeing what does near-middle-age me think of them?  Lost Highway is memorable for many things, one of which being the standard Lynchian weirdness, but also I think in a lot of ways it serves as an interesting bridge from what Lynch was to who he became later, I see a lot of the relaunch of Twin Peaks in this, as well as a lot of Eraserhead, in a mashup perhaps a bit like Balthazar Getty turning into Bill Pullman.

It's somewhat hard to describe the plot (no surprise) but basically Fred (Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) begin receiving scary VHS tapes on their steps.  They call in cops, who have no answers, and then a tape reveals Pullman killing his wife, which he is then pronounced guilty for.  He randomly disappears from his cell and is replaced by Balthazar Getty, a delinquent non-related guy who soon enough gets involved with a woman that creepy mob dude Nice Guy Eddie is dating, also played by Patricia Arquette, and from there a creepy underworld is exposed.

Filled with Lynch moments, there are individual sequences in this which you've never seen anything like before and really will not again.  I simply do not understand how some things have not been copied, drawn from, influenced the cinema of others.  Sure, he has some thematic copycats, but I don't really understand why people don't copy this.

Thematically, hell, I'll throw in my take about the two real questions to ask:  What happens in the movie, and then, What is the movie about?

What happens:  I think if we look at this as literally as possible, it is about a man discovering his wife is cheating on him.  Pullman sees Arquette at his jazz club, and if we accept there are not two Arquette's, she's also maybe mixed in with Nice Guy Eddie.  Pullman goes a little crazy and grows distant from her before murdering her one night, killing Eddie and a few of his men as well.  He is caught and arrested.  He embarks into a fugue state and imagines himself as someone innocent (Getty), and draws many psychotic conclusions about her life that justify him murdering her. 

Thematically, I think it is about growing distant from people, and the sort of bizarre moments we wish that someone was dead or gone or would just get lost or whatever.  This film explored the reality of how dark those thoughts are, how evil exists even in the mind of innocent people, and how we use justification in different ways to explore the dark recesses of the human mind.

This movie is worth a rewatch, y'all.  It stands up.  I would love to see a high def transfer, the full screen pan and scan DVD I watched is an awful experience.

Scream - 1981

 So Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven....just kidding.  Also known as The Outing 

Scream is a simple name for a bizarrely simple but also way too complicated movie.  Scream stars nobody and was directed by a guy mostly known for stunt work, this movie supposedly started filming without a finished script or an ending in mind, and boooooyyy does it show.  

Scream is a simple enough idea, a bunch of people are at an abandoned town in the middle of nowhere and a dead body shows up and soon enough they're being hunted by a mystery killer.  The town is too far (more on this later) from anything to go get help so they try to band together and use their wits to escape the situation.

Okay, so they say it is 30 miles from the nearest help.  You know guys, I'm a hiker.  I did 13 miles, half of it uphill with an elevation gain of 3000 feet.  I did this in about 5 hours.  The average person walks a 20 minute mile.  Just wake up and head out at 6am, you'll get there by nightfall.  It is not that hard.  I'm tired of movies saying they're too far to walk to get help.

As the strangers wait in this town, random things also start happening to them.  A pair of motorcyclists come out of nowhere and they try to use the bikes to get help.  But then later the weirder one - a black cowboy comes out of nowhere with the body of their friend, drops it off, evades all questions and leaves, and is never explained.  WHAT???

The good things about this though is that the music is great, and the bizarreness does achieve a level of atmosphere that sorta pulls you in.  This is not as amateur as it could be, and the low 2.3 rating on IMDb seems a little wrong.  I'd give it like a 2 I guess.