Very Heavy Number

 A book that keeps on keeping on.

Part of my collection for some years, this fine tale of a jailbait slut and the boys who do her bidding, sports a stunning cover that is typical of Thomas's other books. These include the excellent Reds and Turn Me On.

  

I picked this book up soon after publication and read it while also consuming Guy N. Smith's Night of the Crabs at the same time. Ironically, Smith's sex scenes were more explicit, but Thomas's sleaze quotient was higher and the crime aspects were very solid.

I love that the book opens with Shannon, the "heroine", getting high, and informs us that she started "blasting" at fourteen (!) God bless that gal.

 

You don't hear much about Thomas these days, which is a crying shame, because he was a true original.

How To Sell A Laboratory of the Devil

 

This Laboratory of the Devil sales brochure, used to sell the film to potential distributors at global film markets, is using sizzle to sell a sausage that never tasted as good as its parent. Still, it was worth the trip from an exploitation perspective.

 

  

It's the sequel to TF Mous' one-of-a-kind Man Behind the Sun, an authentic atrocity exhibition that used Japan's 731 camp as its launching place and managed to be both a fascinating historical document and a balls-to-the-wall piece of exploitation. 

 

Elekton Ebooks (elektron-ebooks.com) is selling the electronic version of Stephen Barber's Sadists of the Rising Son, an in-depth look at the camp and its gloomy history.

Mous, director of the original, did not return for this or the third entry.

The film is also known as Maruta 2: Laboratory of the Devil, and the third film is known as Maruta 3: Destroy All Evidence and A Narrow Escape. Neither title can extinguish its stench. 

 

Essential Killing

I'm a big fan of Joseph Losey's Figures in a Landscape, a film about  two men pursued across a nasty wilderness by an evil looking helicopter. Losey doesn't provide much background to the men and makes the helicopter a singularly threatening presence.

In Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing, Vincent Gallo plays a Taliban fighter pursued across a snowy landscape by an evil looking helicopter that sounds threatening and looks like hovering death. His pursuers are Americans. After he blows several of them up with a bazooka, he is captured and transported to some imagined hellhole in a Russian-speaking region. But before he gets there, pigs intervene, and the truck he's riding in crashes. He escapes, kills more Americans, and hoofs it out of there into the snowy wilds.

The film is an extended pursuit directed with poetic precision and room for reflection. It feels, smells, and tastes like Figures in a Landscape, so I'm sure it was an influence, but it evolves into its own beast.  Of course, it matters not that it burps up Figures for me because Figures remains in my mind an essential experience, an example of pure cinema, a relic of a bygone era in which everything was not explained, redemption wasn't obligatory, and villains were not black or white.

Filmed in Northern Norway, the snowy vistas are extraordinary and eerie, being both a refuge and a hell for our hero. So, is Gallo the film's hero? Is he heroic? Yes. Or should he be considered the villain and his American pursuers the heroes? Of course not. Gallo is the film's hero. The film is fresh because Gallo, a Taliban, IS the protagonist. It's his story. Clearly, he has his reasons for his actions (a deceased loved one is one of these, as is a war on his home soil), and the Americans have theirs. These days, the Taliban point of view is not one that's indulged often by filmmakers, so it's novel to see a character like this depicted as a flesh and blood man whose game is simple survival.  Although the political context is thick by implication, Skolimowski doesn't fatten the film's narrative with politics. Instead, he constructs a contemplative action film, or action drama, with a pinpoint focus on Gallo's inventive attempts to stay alive in an icy wilderness. And Gallo, by the way, is superb in a physically difficult, non-verbal role.

 

There are plenty of modest joys to be be had here. In one scene, the hungry, emaciated Gallo comes across a nursing mother. Without hesitation, he drops to his knees and drinks milk from her nipple. Like the killing he's forced to do (the guy isn't some screaming sadist), his time at the woman's nipple is an essential act, a shot at extended sustenance. In another scene, he takes a fisherman's catch while the fisherman looks perplexed. If a bloke looking like Gallo staggered out of the wilderness to eat your breakfast, this is exactly how you'd react. Towards the film's conclusion, he takes refuge with a woman who risks her life to help him. The way in which their encounter is resolved affirms the essential humanity of them both while acknowledging the obvious risks.

I've read a few criticisms of the film's ending. What's to criticize? The ending is totally consistent with the rest of the film. It's lean. It makes its point, it moves on.

Recommended.  

 

The (British)  Artificial Eye Blu-Ray of Essential Killing boasts a breathtaking transfer and a great interview with director Skolimowski.

Horror Paperback Infestation

 

I was an instant fan of Beth Holmes' The Whipping Boy (Jove Publications, '78), a strange and sometimes mind-boggling tale of child abuse. If you can wrangle a copy, you won't be disappointed.

The cover art is striking but strangely underwhelming, too. I often look at it and contemplate the thinking behind it.The interior of the sleeve is the actual face of the man whose profile is seen on the cover. 

 

Pretty decent rabies novel from Walter Harris, who preferred to be known as W. Harris. Definitely a product of the success of James Herbert's The Rats, it had a similar structure and got a little too preachy about the sexually active. You know who you are!

Cover art is great, and makes it looks like a war novel. There's a war against rabies, sure, but nothing terribly military. I'd say Star Distributors were probably trying to snag readers of Martin Cruz Smith's Nightwing ('77), the 'Bats Attack' hit of the year. Guy N. Smith's Bats Out of Hell was released a year later to further capitialize on Cruz's success. It was clearly a good time for plagues, infestations, and bats.

 

Did Victor Mullen quit the book trade after writing The Toy Tree (Paperjacks, '88)? Must have. I can't find anything else by him. I did look. Oh, yes, I looked hard because I loved The Toy Tree.  The language is awkward at times (a few too many adjectives), but Mullen captured the madness of a crazy kid very nicely. He pushed the envelope, too, with plenty of nastiness directed at kids and some juvenile games that would not have been out of place in Serrador's film Who Could Kill A Child? 

 

The book's art is very special. Probably much too subtle for the random paperback buyer, it  conveys the book's nihilism with skilled strokes of the brush.

 

The Toy Tree was another interesting release from the Ontario-based Paperjacks, the same publisher of the masterpiece The Happy Man (reviewed on this blog long ago).

Vintage Ad Mat Invasion

 

I'm not sure how I did it, but I snuck into this heavily policed flicked on a school day and got momentarily groped by an old bloke reaching for his coat. The grope was more shocking than the movie. Polanksi is interviewed and shares some vague views on "snuff", but the purported snuff film in the movie is segments from Wes Craven's Last House on the Left. Ripped off!

Now, the "snuff" we imagined back in those days has been well and truly eclipsed by the reality of atrocity videos posted on the net. For sheer, sickening brutality, nothing comes close to the Mexican chainsaw beheading video currently doing the rounds, or the truly horrendous videos (there are a couple) documenting the real life murders of innocent people by the 'Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs' (thankfully tucked away in prison). 

Wiki link:  h*tp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepropetrovsk_maniacs    (replace * with 't', of course)

Back in the 70's, nothing could have prepared us for the extreme nature of  this material, or predicted the means by which it would be globally 'distributed' and propagated. 

For mine, the whole "snuff" myth never made sense, anyway, because nobody could possibly get away with marketing and distributing a movie in which "actors" were actually killed. What gets done in private is what gets done in private, but the issue of publicly exhibited "snuff movies" is an issue for idiots.

 

Melbourne had a healthy grindhouse culture in the 70's and I made sure I was part of it. Unfortunately, I wasn't even a teenager for half of the 70's, so my grindhouse ambitions (and cred) were thwarted by age and my mother's Catholic sensibilities.

And speaking of Catholic sensibilities... My mother bought a Catholic newspaper called 'The Advocate'. I had no use for this rag until I discovered their extensive film listings. A priest with cinephilic yearnings would review the good, the bad, and the ugly playing at the 'pictures'. He would then sort his past reviews into four or five categories including Highly Recommended, Recommended With Reservations, Not Recommended, and, the granddaddy of them all, ADVISED AGAINST

It became quickly apparent to me that under the Advised Against category was a cinematic stew of exploitation magic. Films I remember appearing in that section were The Night Porter, The Passage, Straw Dogs, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, A Clockwork Orange,  Cruising, The Decameron, Vampyres, and, of course, The Exorcist and Tower of Evil -- essentially, the movies that would shape my entire pulpy life and the lives of folks reading this blog.

I don't know who you were, Father Film Reviewer, but I thank you for advising me against the films I grew to love... and a bonus thank you is also in order for you because you practiced cinephilia on me, not  pedophilia.   

     

  

I feel sorry for youngsters today who'll never know the magic of exploitation triple bills at sleazy hardtops and drive-ins.

 

A bucket load of false advertising and a collage of bald-faced lies. Dave Prowse's 'Monster' turned up for the ad mat, but his Horror of Frankenstein is MIA from this program. In Aussieland,  Horror was initially paired with Scars of Dracula. 

One of Russ Meyer's ladies is lending her face to the ad, too, but there's not a Russ movie in sight.  

I saw none of the triple bills above at the time, but I did get a schoolboy kick out of the title Spermula. Unfortunately, I also got a kick from my father when I walked around the house yelling "Spermula is cumming!" over and over again to my siblings and mother.

 

I saw this double at Melbourne's wonderful Silver Screen Art Cinema, the notorious home of Killer Fish's notorious three month long run.

 

First in line for this one. Hot for Barbara Bach, too. What young lad wasn't? 

A couple of years later, the Dendy Collins Street went porno.

 

Rode my bike to the Burwood Drive-in to see the first film on this program, The Decameron. Couldn't stay for the other two because my bedtime was around 10 pm. Damn parents and their damn school night rules!

 

I was on a first name basis with the manager of Detroit's Northgate theater. The place smelt of butter spilled decades ago and the carpets were stickier than a bukkake set. 

 

Fairly obscure poster for the brutal and nihilistic Death Wish 2. 

The Graphic Sting of Couleur Sang (Bloody Heavens)

 

Recently stumbled on this lusty '81 publication from Collection Secrete, and I certainly can't say it pulls its punches.

A work of elegant sadomasochism, it uses graphic pictures and text (in French and English) to tell the fanciful story of an unfortunate young woman who is humiliated and degraded in a country house from hell. 

The traditional S/M iconography is here, as is a thoroughly nihilistic, unrelenting odor of perversion. 

The accompanying text is close to the length of a standard porno novel, and there are almost thirty pages of brutal illustrations. 

 

Images such as the one above remind me of Danish pornography in the 70's from the Color Climax stable. There is a whiff of Eric Stanton and DeMullotto, too.

Other books by Joseph Farrel include Painful Flavours and Humiliations. 

Ad Mat Attack

 

Sunnyside ('79) represented Joey Travolta's fifteen minutes of fame. The film, an average Warriors wannabe, flopped at the box office, robbing Travolta of further leading man opportunities.

In all honesty, I was more interested in the film's two supporting features, and enjoyed both immensely. Director Charles B. Pierce, who captained both of these, had a seven year period between '72 and '79 where he turned out neat little docu-drama horror flicks with excellent titles. In addition to these, his The Legend of Boggy Creek, a very creepy little thriller, enjoyed some success.   

 

After The House By The Lake (aka Death Weekend), I expected big things from director William Fruet. Unfortunately, he never did anything to better that film.  

Search and Destroy, seen by me at the Abbey Theater (in Madison Heights, MI) was a terse revenge drama along the lines of Rolling Thunder and The Exterminator, but without the balls of those two.

Don Stroud, who was dynamite in House, did his best with the limited material.

I remember the throbbing electronic score punching up proceedings.

 

 

Interesting how the Aussie distributor added the virginity angle to the ad mat. 

The girls in this movie were 15, but there was nothing risque about any of it. In fact, despite the marketing angle, the film is quite a sensitive portrait of awkward teenage relationships and the clashing expectations of the sexes.

McNichol was terrific, O'Neal (coming off Paper Moon) was adequate.

A porn version of the film was released, but the ages of the characters, not surprisingly, were upped.

Hollywood Action Scorecard

 

It's clunky and all over the place narratively, but I enjoyed Contraband.  The set-up is as cliched as hell (a young punk fucks up and his brother-in-law has to square it with a local sleazeball) and director Baltasar Kormakur rips off Michael Mann's Heat wholesale, but the pulpy plotting got to me and I succumbed to the double-crossing carnage.

Walberg plays the kind brother-in-law and gets to shoot and maim and bulldoze his way through Panama City as he attempts to import a load of fake dollars into the US. It just keeps piling on the jeopardy and bloodshed until there's very little left, and for this reason, I'd recommend it.

 

Stephen Soderberg's Haywire feels more like an expensive cinematic experiment than a fully fledged action movie, but that's not a bad thing.

The most interesting material involves shrewd sound mixing and the use of David Holmes' music in a number of suspense scenarios.

The action sequences are fresh because they are shot and cut very cleanly, and we get to appreciate star Gina Carano's stellar fighting prowess.

The film did not stick with me after I'd seen it, but I appreciated its virtues and creative smarts.

When Joe Carnahan's The Grey begins, it feels like a remake of Frank Marshall's Alive, a terrific movie by the way.  When the doomed plane crashes with Liam Neeson on board, the survivors don't eat each other --  wolves eat them instead.

The bloody narrative builds towards Neeson having a face-off with the mother of all manhunters. As expected, those who survived the plane crash have less luck surviving in the chilly wilderness and are torn limb from limb by gnashing teeth and ripping claws. Wisely, Carnahan turns his flick into something more than just a contemporary version of William Girdler's Day of the Animals. The film takes a crack at being an existential thriller and pretty much succeeds, the result being it is richer and more layered than expected.

Neeson, Hollywood's latest action hero,  plays a flawed fella who isn't afraid to admit that he's scared. Naturally, he's the last man standing, so it's up to him to risk it all to save his frozen skin.

The Grey's final minute provides no cathartic pleasure, but it will incite debate.

The Utterly Splendid World of Suehiro Maruo

 

Miminashi Hohichi in the Dark (1999, 2011; Seirin Kogeisha)  is another extraordinary excursion into the world of Suehiro Maruo, the prolific artist behind Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show (filmed as Midori) and Ultra Gash Inferno.

Although there have been several English language editions of his books, many have never been translated from the Japanese, and probably never will.

 

Maruo often insinuates iconic figures into his work, so the appearance of Frankenstein's 'Monster' in one story here provides disturbing and fascinating pulp fodder. After encountering a mother and daughter, he proceeds to engage in intercourse with one while the other becomes an equally unwilling participant.

There have been slightly sexualized versions of the Monster's story, but few feature the ferocious carnality of this gem.    

 

 

Georges Bataille's Histoire De L'oeil (Story of the Eye; 1928) surely had a muscular influence on Maruo and many of his contemporaries. Variations of and tableaux inspired by the book's deliciously grotesque eroticism permeate the artist's work.

 

Imo-Mushi (Beam Comix; 2009) is Maruo's take on Edogawa Rampo's Caterpillar story (filmed twice as: Caterpillar, and as one of four stories in the uneven Rampo anthology Rampo Noir). 

 

 

With surprisingly little fanfare, Koji Wakamatsu's Caterpillar (reviewed on this blog several months ago) has finally been released in the US by Kino Video.  

Although I had some reservations about its very plain digital appearance, it is still a very worthwhile and respectful take on the story.

 

As these images indicate, Maruo's version is a more deeply erotic interpretation, eschewing some of the source's political content. Still, the artist amply conveys the horrors of war hero worship and delivers a frightening, brutal yarn.

  An upcoming Maruo translation to English is The Strange Tale of Panorama Island. Although the book has been delayed for a while now, I hope it's release is still imminent. 

Personally, I'd prefer a translated volume of Maruo's insanely brutal and beautiful Lunatic Lovers (2007; Seirin Kogeisha). The images below barely capture the corrupt, vile, transgressive essence of this work.

 

 

 

An exceptionally good source for Maruo's work is  akatako.net

Pulpy Porn Is Erect Again

In John McNaughton's superb Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the titular anti-hero works part time as an exterminator. In one scene, he meets with his boss, an oily individual, and is told that work has dropped off due to the sluggish economy. When Henry makes a gesture to return his trusty spray can and pump, the boss tells him to keep it, not too concerned.

The cover of the lewdly titled 'Sharon's Slavery Sessions' (above) depicts Henry's oily boss (far right in sunglasses) in a sexually appropriate situation (approproate for him!) far removed from the bug spraying business.  He appears to be having a good time and seems unconcerned by his flagging fortunes.

Take another look at the film if you doubt my observation. It's Mr. Oily for sure.  Perhaps he took his eye off the bug business when slave training caught his interest.   Can you blame him?

As a card-carrying island lover, I'm quite partial to this scenario from the infamous 'Captive Women' series. The fella in the flannelette shirt appears to be the patient type and is quite alright about waiting for his turn. 

If someone can send the co-ordinates of Lust Island, I'd be mighty appreciative. A Google Earth link would be fine, too. 

 

Not only is the lady a 'tormented teaser', but she's an 'All American Tormented Teaser'. I'm not sure what difference it makes, but American culture has a strange obsession with placing the word 'American' before everything from pimps (American Pimp) to psychos (American Psycho) to werewolves (An American Werewolf in London).

Mr. Red Jacket (previously known as 'Peter Perfect') is one eager beaver, and he's combed his hair just right. The bloke in the middle is a little overdressed for the occasion, although he'll certainly keep warm once the Winter winds start beating the walls of the cabin. The punter on the right must have drawn the short straw because he's copped shibari duty.