BECAUSE OF THE CATS (1973)
aka Brutalization
Article 5001 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-27-2015
Directed by Fons Rademakers
Featuring Bryan Marshall, Alexandra Stewart, Edward Judd
Country: Netherlands / Belgium
What it is: Crime drama

A police detective from Amsterdam investigates a gang that has been taking part in a series of burglaries, acts of vandalism and rapes.

The John Stanley guide from which I culled this title speaks of a series of murders cause by a devil cult. The blurbs on the DVD package for the movie make it sound like an exercise in brutal rape/revenge drama along the lines of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. Both descriptions are stunningly inaccurate. Though a cult of sorts is indeed involved, to call it a “devil cult” is to imply details that simply aren’t there; it’s more of Nietzschean “power of will” cult. And though the story does involve a gang rape, and there is an ample amount of exploitation elements to the story, to call it a rape/revenge drama is to imply a story arc that is simply not there. What we have here is a crime drama, in which a police inspector tries to crack the mystery of why a gang of young men (and another gang of young women) are doing what they’re doing. Yes, there’s a political subtext, and it must be pretty obvious if even I can see it. Anybody drawn to this movie by the two previously cited descriptions will be disappointed; on its own terms, it’s a passable but slightly dull drama for the most part, though the best parts come near the end of the movie. It has its uses, but it falls very short of the sensationalism the descriptions promise. And as such, I don’t think it really qualifies as a genre movie.

BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH (1984)
Article 4996 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-22-2015
Directed by Ray Cameron
Featuring Kenny Everett, Vincent Price, Pamela Stephenson
Country: UK
What it is: Horror parody

Eight scientists of the paranormal visit a house where 18 people were killed in one night years ago.

All I really knew about this movie going in was that it was one of the latter movie appearances of Vincent Price in a horror movie. Those drawn to it by that fact may well be disappointed; despite high billing, he has what amounts to a featured role, and he doesn’t quite attack the scenes with his usual aplomb. In fact, his voice doesn’t even quite sound like his own; if I had closed my eyes during his scenes, I’m not sure I would have known it was him. The movie itself was a vehicle for a surreal British TV comedian named Kenny Everett. Apparently, his TV work was hit and miss, and this movie is the same; occasional moments work, but most of it misses the mark. Several horror and genre movies are directly parodied; I see references to CARRIE, THE ENTITY, E.T., ALIEN, TEN LITTLE INDIANS, and possibly even one to THE TINGLER. My favorite moment in the movie is a musical one, in which an attempt to reconcile the count of the people killed in the previous encounter turns into a parody version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. I will give the movie credit for doing one thing right; unlike some horror movie parodies, this one does at least have some success in getting the mood right.

BRAIN 17 (1982)
Article 4970 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-27-2015
Directed by Michael Part
Featuring Masahiro Kamiya, Tadao Nakamaru, Akihiko Hirata
Country: USA / Japan
What it is: TV-Movie edited from Japanese kiddie action series

A supercomputer called Brain goes rogue and creates robots to take over the world. However, one of the robots takes the side of good, and with the help of a child, takes on Brain.

Within ten seconds of this movie starting, I pegged the movie as one of those TV-Movies culled from episodes of a hyperactive Japanese kiddie action series about giant dueling robots. The special effects are bottom of the barrel for this sort of thing, you could do better dubbing in your own home, the dialogue is beyond goofy (“I’ve got a plan, and it’s a humdinger of a doozy!”), and the robots (a giant steamroller robot, a fire-breathing robot dragon, a hurricane robot that looks like a giant pinwheel, and a big jack-hammer robot) are ridiculous. It’s basically a variation on “Ultraman”. Yes, it’s awful, but it hits me in my soft spot; I can’t help but grin, shake my head, and just get lost in the nonsense. I love this sort of thing, but if you don’t, you’re liable to end up with a headache. It’s easily the funniest thing I’ve seen in a couple of weeks. Incidentally, the TV series from which it was culled is DAITETSUJIN WAN-SEBUN.

A BAY OF BLOOD (1971)
aka Reazione a catena, Carnage, Twitch of the Death Nerve
Article 4941 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-28-2015
Directed by Mario Bava
Featuring Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Camaso
Country: Italy
What it is: The birth of the slasher film

When a count and a countess are murdered, a bloody struggle develops between potential heirs to the estate.

IMDB lists over forty alternate titles for this, the most notorious of Mario Bava’s films. I’d first heard about it as TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (my favorite of the titles), it entered my list under the rather generic but descriptive title CARNAGE, and the print I saw was titled A BAY OF BLOOD. It’s often heralded as the first true slasher film, but I also like to think of it as the missing link between the slasher film and the “old dark house” film where heirs to an estate are knocked off one by one. Granted, there’s no real “old dark house” here, but the basic plot structure makes it feel like one, while the appearance of a group of teenagers to add to the body count certainly puts it in slasher territory. I also like to think of it as Mario Bava’s PSYCHO in that to some extent, the movie is conceived as a bit of a joke; certainly, the ending of this one can be seen as a punch line. It has more of a plot than your average slasher movie, though it does get a little confusing at times and you might be tempted to keep a score card. According to the trivia section of IMDB, this was Bava’s own favorite of his movies, and though it wouldn’t be my personal choice, it is probably his most influential.

THE BROOD (1979)
Article 4939 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-26-2015
Directed by David Cronenberg
Featuring Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle
Country: Canada
What it is: Cronenberg horror movie

A man’s wife is being held in therapeutic isolation by a doctor who practices a technique known as psychoplasmics, in which patients manifest their anger as growths on their bodies. When the husband begins to fear for the safety of his child, relatives of the couple begin dying at the hands of murderous deformed dwarfs.

I saw this one many years ago on one of those commercial cable channels, which is rather ridiculous in retrospect; Cronenberg’s imagery is both so grotesque and so essential to the essence of the story that to watch a censored version of one of his movies is pointless. I haven’t seen all of Cronenberg’s genre works yet, but with the exception of THE DEAD ZONE, this is the best of the ones I’ve seen so far. The story is certainly more focused than the ones I found in RABID or SCANNERS. It’s intense, well-acted, and on top of the Cronenberg’s usual theme of the ways our bodies can turn on us, it deals with divorce, rage and the cycles of abuse that pass from generation to generation. It’s disturbing, powerful and sad as well, and is definitely not for children. This is one I recommend, but I usually do so with Cronenberg.

BORN IN FLAMES (1983)
Article 4937 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-24-2015
Directed by Lizzie Borden
Featuring Honey, Adele Bertei, Jean Satterfield
Country: USA
What it is: Independent feminist tract

In the future, ten years after a peaceful socialist revolution in the United States, a group of women form an underground organization to battle the injustices of the political system. They try to work peacefully, but when one of their number is arrested and dies in prison, they decide to change their peaceful strategy.

This is one of those independently made art films which, to these eyes, functions primarily as a call to arms for radical feminists. On the surface, it appears to be a science fiction movie, but there’s nothing that appears remotely futuristic in the movie, and I don’t see any ways in which this society works that is inherently different from how it worked at the time. Granted, the movie’s fractured, jagged presentation (though the movie is not presented as a documentary, it’s filmed in the style of one) makes it often difficult to tell what’s going on, and since most of the movie focuses on the members of the underground, we don’t get much in the way of detail of this future world. I suspect the science fiction aspect of the movie only exists so the movie can make the point that a “peaceful” revolution will solve nothing. Some of the music in the movie is not bad, but unfortunately, the title song (which plays at least four times during the movie) is rather screechy and unpleasant. Most of the movie seems to consist of revolutionary rhetoric, and this gets old if you’re not a revolutionary. I suspect the movie would best be appreciated by radical feminists; the rest of us might be hard pressed to find something to like about it.

BODY DOUBLE (1984)
Article 4936 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-23-2015
Directed by Brian De Palma
Featuring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry
Country: USA
What it is: Hitchcockian thriller

A claustrophobic actor becomes a peeping tom when he takes over house-sitting an avant-garde home. He begins the suspect that the woman he is watching is being followed by an ugly Indian with ill intentions.

Yesterday, I watched an extremely low-budget director try to do a copy of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Somehow it’s fitting that today I deal with a big-budget director who almost made a career of trying to emulate Hitchcock. This movie is Brian De Palma’s attempt to redo VERTIGO with touches of REAR WINDOW and with lots of nudity and sex thrown into the mix. Generally, I prefer De Palma when he’s not wearing his love for Hitchcock so blatantly on his sleeve; if you’re familiar with VERTIGO, you’ve got a handle on about ninety percent of the plot of this one. The thing is that De Palma didn’t really need to imitate Hitchcock this much; he could be very memorable in his own way when staging some of his scenes, and at least three sequences in this movie stuck with me for years from the first time I saw the movie. Still, my original viewing did leave something of a negative impression on me; I never cared much for the characters, I found the plot pretty far-fetched, and I found its descent into the porn industry during the final third to be rather unpleasant. I’m a bit more forgiving of much of this on this, my second viewing, but I noticed another problem; there is a lot of dead space in between the big, memorable scenes, and I do think that at least twenty minutes could be pruned from the running time if the movie just picked up the pace. Genre-wise, this is mostly a mystery thriller, but horror pops up in the story in two ways; the opening and closing scenes involve the filming of a horror movie, and the murder that is the centerpiece of the movie is truly horrific. All in all, I liked the movie a little better on this second viewing, but I do think it’s far from De Palma’s best work.

BLOODSUCKERS FROM OUTER SPACE (1984)
Article 4933 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-20-2015
Directed by Glen Coburn
Featuring Thom Meyers, Laura Ellis, Dennis Letts
Country: USA
What it is: Regional horror comedy

A strange force from outer space is transforming Texas farmers into bloodsucking zombies.

Given the fact that this is a regional film with no doubt a tiny budget, I should probably cut it a little slack. As a horror film, it’s not scary; it does, however, have some very low-budget gore scenes that might interest that crowd. As a comedy, it scores with one line (about incidental music), but that’s about it. Not only are the rest of the attempted laughs not funny, but there are too few of them, which is my way of saying that there’s a lot of dead space. The most interesting thing about the movie is the occasional descents into sheer weirdness; for example, the main characters’ drug of choice is nitrous oxide, the hero responds to a flat tire by destroying his entire car, and a local janitor is obsessed with the word “weird”. I know these scenes are supposed to be funny, but they work better as odd touches. Acting, direction and editing are all subpar. The only names I recognized in the casts were a couple of cameos from Pat Paulsen (as the President) and Jim Stafford (as an idiot). Still, the movie has its fans, but if what the film has to offer you leaves you cold, this may be one of the worst films you’ll ever see.

BLACK MOON (1975)
Article 4930 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-17-2015
Directed by Louis Malle
Featuring Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart
Country: France / West Germany
What it is: Fantasy allegory

In escaping a literal war of the sexes, a young woman seeks refuge in a farmhouse and finds a very strange world.

The tagline for this movie was “An Apocalyptic Alice in Wonderland”, and that’s probably as good a place as any to start with this one. We’re in avant garde/art film territory here, and if there’s any linear sense to be made of it, it’s well-hidden. However, if you think about it, “Alice in Wonderland” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either, and if there’s one thing I do get out of this movie, it’s that Louis Malle did have a sense of the magical logic of that work, and he manages to capture it here. There are certain scenes here that recall specific moments in the Alice books; for example, when our heroine picks up the elderly woman and cradles her, it reminded me of the scene where the duchess leaves Alice in charge of a baby who then turns into a pig. The heroine’s search for a unicorn is a central theme, and I suspect that one of the central lessons here is that the unicorn won’t accept her until she accepts the other aspects of the world in which the unicorn dwells. All the characters who have names share the same name with the exception of the rat with whom the old lady chats (actually a wallaby). Snakes pop up as a recurring visual motif, as well as does a score of naked children running with a pig. I have no idea what the title means. Nevertheless, this is one of those avant-garde films that works for me, and I’ll probably give it another viewing some time. Just don’t expect an explanation.

THE BLACK HOLE (1979)
Article 4929 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 9-16-2015
Directed by Gary Nelson
Featuring Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster
Country: USA
What it is: Science fiction epic

An exploratory spaceship has to make repairs aboard a long-missing spaceship that is near the edge of a black hole in space. There, the crew meets a brilliant scientist (the only survivor of the original crew) and an assortment of robots. The scientist plans to make a journey into the black hole… but has he been totally truthful to the visitors?

I’ve never seen this movie before, but I have heard about it, and what I heard was not good. I’ve heard that it makes no sense, but that’s only the ending; most of the movie is pretty easy to suss out, as it’s your typical “mad genius” movie (think 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA or MASTER OF THE WORLD, and you’ll be within striking range) who has an obsession that may kill everyone involved. There’s an army of robots with blasters, a super-robot with a will of its own, and a pair of cute robots. How cute are they? Well, much as I like Slim Pickens as an actor, to let him voice a robot is just too painful, and the other robot (voiced by Roddy McDowall) speaks in aphorisms; they’re not near as cute as the movie wants them to be. It mostly plays out like an action thriller, but the script is pretty clumsy, and I sometimes sense the actors don’t quite know what to do with it. The ending is largely this movie’s attempt to emulate the star gate sequence of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, but directed without Kubrick’s sense of style and with no real point or purpose; I’d say that there is less here than meets the eye, but that would imply that what meets the eye is absorbing. The special effects are impressive, but it’s one of those movies that feels more like it was made to try to cash in on a craze than because it had any point of its own. All in all, my reaction to this one was on the level of a puzzled shrug.