For fans of psychotronic cinema there are few things more enticing than forbidden content and establishment outrage, and Jake West and Mark Morris’s 72-minute documentary on the often-oversimplified era of the “Video Nasties” brings both in the bucketful. Information, education, and entertainment abound in this vivid and engaging oral history.
I’m going to keep this review short and to the point, mostly as the director/writer Jon Jacobs didn’t with the film. It was based on a late 50s Fritz Langer short story, and somewhere in it is the basis of a pretty decent entry into the mid-90s supernatural goth-horror canon. Unfortunately, that gets crowded out due to either a lack of narrative focus or a need to hit the promised run time.
Before being corrupted by Hollywood, and forever tainted by the evil of production budgets, Peter Jackson had a highly respectable career in New Zealand cinema as the foremost auteur of splatter comedy. Bad Taste, with it’s exploding sheep was his breakthrough moment, and Braindead arguably the highlights of his filmography and unarguably the bloodiest film ever at that time. But it’s his adventure into the world of puppetry that is “Meet The Feebles” that got run through the Trash or Treasure grinder this time, because what we really need right now is a meanspirited laugh and a hippo with a machine gun.
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Once upon a time, mostly before they could get a steady supply of really good blood effects that would wash off of diaphanous nighties, Hammer Films did a lot of business with its Sci-Fi horrors including the renowned Quatermass series and the mostly forgotten X The Unknown and Spaceways. Unfortunately, they didn’t make Village of the Damned, so they released These Are The Damned as frightening children were in at the time. Directed by Joseph Losey, in exile from the USA for being a card-carrying communist, and reasonably based a book by H.L. Lawrence, it was applauded by The Times upon its release and has been recognised as a highpoint of British Sci-Fi cinema.
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Rock and Roll and horror movies have always been connected at the swaggering hip. From the ’50s onward they have shared an undying bond of heightened emotions, juvenile daydreaming, cheap production values, the mystique of delinquency, and high tempo drama. So, getting Guitar Wolf, arguably the finest garage rock bands to have come out of the 80’s Tokyo punk scene, and putting them in a zombie movie is a bit of a no-brainer. That the movie is this fast, chaotic, and unwilling to slow down for anyone just makes it even more perfect. That Takeuchi Tetsuro, a prominent music video director, directed this 1999 psychotronic rock-&-roll fable is just the cherry on top of the Molo
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Because Todd Philips is in the news (and in my spare time I’m a screaming muso and punk aficionado) we’re looking at a documentary that is his earliest work. Shot in 1993, Hated follows around notorious shock-rocker/dangerous lunatic GG Allin as he lives out his rock-and-roll nightmare. Whilst GG had some reputation on the US punk scene, this 53 minute film sent him to notoriety and onto many “most degenerate person in music history” listicles. As for Todd Philips, it might show a lifelong appreciation of performance dickheads and happens to be the highest grossing student film of all time.
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Back in the distant past of the mid 90s, there were exactly two film posters that ruled the walls amongst the heady intellectualists of A-level and first year university students. One was the classic Uma Thurman-fronted pastiche of Pulp Fiction, displayed to signify that you were sophisticated, with a touch of the retro-chic charm and danger of a 70s heroin overdose about you, and imply the student could more than likely quote all the movies that Quentin Tarantino errantly used the word “inspired” about. The other poster, normally positioned with far less lighting, was any of the myriad of designs for the 1994 Brandon Lee movie The Crow – they signified that you were serious, sensitive, and had a wardrobe that was 90% various shades of fading black. It also aligned you with the nebulous tribe of “alternatives” that found common ground and shared symbolism in one of the greatest movies about a comic book… one that everyone swore they had read the first time it was released.
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Anthologies are, by their very nature, a mixed bag, but Love, Death & Robots often feels like it’s an utterly random hodgepodge of stories and tones thrown together with no cohesive themes. To give you an idea, the first half opens with a solid 18-rated, by-the-numbers gore, and pseudo-sexy cyberpunk then skips to a charming little comedy about three robots taking a tour through the post-apocalypse, follows up with the way too long and far too exploitative Naked Woman Running In Terror sequence. It’s then on to a charming story of space farmers defending a homestead with mechs, tries to be serious with an 80s inspired Vampires vs Cats, hits another high note with a highly evocative social comedy about hyper-intelligent Yogurt and tails off with the double act of The Opening Of Aliens: Let’s Have Sex In Space, and Steampunk: Mystic Asia With Rich Europeans Being Terrible.
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Trash or Treasure 