October Horror Movie Challenge - Final Week

Day 22 - THE KEEP (1983) directed by Michael Mann. Nazis guard a citadel in the middle of nowhere Romania that harbors a demonic force. Said demonic force runs into a Jewish scholar that can likely stop it. Good, scary stuff, if not a little on the predictable side. Ian Mcclellan and Gabriel Byrne star, giving this a little bit of a cult edge.



Day 23 - NIGHTWISH (1990). After much birthday carousing (drinks, brunch, more drinks, a bacon martini, a haunted hayride, and drinks), NIGHTWISH ensued. Although it has a 1990 date, it feels more eighties and stars a 'oh, that guy!' (Brian Thompson). Ghosts, aliens, a crumbling mansion, some grad students. If only this was made about eight years before it's time.



Day 24 - BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962). There used to be a band here in Richmond called Burn, Witch, Burn, and I always thought that was a good band name. A professor discovers his wife has been practicing witchcraft to advance his career, gets pissed, and destroys her occult supplies and unleashing terrible evil in the process. Without her help, he's fucked. Way above average and easily this week's highlight, I'm sorry I waiting so long knowing this existed and I never watched it.

Day 25 - PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011). The only film I watched in the theatre for the Challenge thus far, I had a blast watching this with two friends not used to watching horror movies. I am not gonna lie - I was a little scared to come home to a dark house all by myself at night after my girl dropped me off. I had to turn on every light in the house. Including a few nightlights. And four candles.



Day 26 - THE NESTING (1981). An agoraphobic mystery novelist takes residence in an old haunted brothel in the middle of nowhere. Decent, if not a little boring and predictable, this chiller seems a bit removed from its time. Not at all bad, but not at all good, either. The lead gets on my nerves a bit but I don't feel at all guilty when she inadvertantly kills her shrink. Not what I was expecting in a movie called THE NESTING. I was thinking killer wasps or roaches in somebody's weave or something not nearly as understated as this.



Day 27 - PUMPKINHEAD: ASHES TO ASHES (2006). Doug Bradley and Lance Henricksen in the same fucking movie? Yeah, maybe if the year was 1987 and this wasn't this. Still, how can I resist a vengeance demon movie with Doug Bradley and Lance Henricksen in it? I can't. So there. I enjoyed this shit show thoroughly, even though I was only a little wasted at the time. And is this the fucking third or the fifth? Do I care? Only a little.



Day 28 - BRAIN DEAD (2010). Oh, I love you, Kevin Tenney. You gave us NIGHT OF THE DEMONS and fucking WITCHBOARD, so I expect great things from you. Too bad you did not deliver with this cheap-ass crap-fest with the WORST lighting ever (hey, don't film a zombie/horror/captive people movie in BROAD FUCKING DAYLIGHT (the FINAL DESTINATION movies are guilty of this a great deal, as well) and expect it to be great.) There's a little something called atmosphere, which you should know. But hey, everyone needs a paycheck, so whatever. This is crap. I just wanted the zombie monsters to show up and eat all the losers that populated this movie so they would stop getting on my nerves. So much for that. By the time the zombies got around to it, my pizza was here and I had better things to do, like EAT PIZZA.

Day 29 - CHILD'S PLAY (1988). Duh. Only the second movie of the Challenge I had really seen before. Like really, really seen and know all about. Chris Sarandon! Brad Dourif! Give me the power, I beg of you!



Day 30 - GOOD NEIGHBORS (2010). The presence of two beautiful cats practically from the first frame made me very, very anxious. Any time you see cats in a horror movie, especially this early on, means they'll meet a very untimely death. And they figure so prominently I got very very nervous. Almost to the point where I stopped paying attention and started cooking dinner while only half paying attention. And of course I'm right, the cats do meet an untimely end and there is revenge taken, which is the only thing I find redeeming about this predictable piece of annoyingness. You care about no one, except the cats, of course, and the presence of Scott Speedman alone makes me want to kill myself. Not particularly recommended but partially because I'm a crazy cat lady. This was also NOT what I was in the mood for and I should have just netflixed a monster movie of yore. Or watched something from the archives. And oh, how I hate that outdated SCREAM style cover with the disembodied heads floating above or below the title. Oh, how I loathe it.

There's week four, y'all. Neighbors and witches and vengeance demons and Nazis and citadels and ghosts and nestings and zombies and killer dolls and cat murder (the horror!) and who knows what's in store for tomorrow! We're both off all day and it is THE actual day so we will decidedly stay in and drink wine and watch tons of classics. Halloween is much like New Year's to us, in that it's a total amateur night and we'd much rather be at home with cats and Bela and Boris and Vincent and Basil and the rest.

Until tomorrow....

Salon Kitty

Ah, the Nazisploitation film. An acquired taste, to be sure. I remember years ago the guy that tattoos me was telling me about the Ilsa movies while drilling ink into my skin, so I rented SHE WOLF OF THE SS thinking I would be in for a laugh. Uh, not the case. In fact, it was a little off putting. And by a little, I mean A LOT. The sheer degradation of the whole exercise led me to not really want to see another Nazisploitation film for awhile. I'm not a huge fan of the women in prison cycle of movies (and not just because I'm a WOMAN), and most Nazisploitation movies kinda follow that format.

However, Tinto Brass' SALON KITTY isn't your standard Nazisploitation flick. The movie opens at the onset of WWII, and SS officer Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger) is ordered to find and train the most beautiful women in Germany to sexually service the highest ranking men and women in the Third Reich. What these female recruits (and their clients) don't know is that Wallenberg is secreting taping all the sexy times action for blackmail purposes. Pretty young prostitute Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy) and the quintessential madam if there ever was one, Kitty (Ingrid Thulin), discover Wallenberg's plot and plan to expose him.

There are several tropes that set SK apart from it's brethren. Firstly, the women - the prostitutes - are willing participants. They're female Nazis and are selling their bodies to perpetuate the Third Reich. There's not the typical level of degradation at work here; in fact, quite the opposition, making it much easier for this viewer to sit through.

Secondly, Nazisploitation never looked so damn good. No shot is wasted - it's elegantly put together and the music isn't incongruous. Go figure. Yeah, some of the sexy stuff is kinda gritty (a lesbian bondage scene springs to mind) and some of it does seem padded in places, but damn if the costuming, large-scale sets, and deliberate maneuvers on the part of Brass don't make this one of hell of a sight to behold.

Thirdly, there are attempts at wacky humor. You don't get this so much in other movies like this. When an air raid horn goes off, it's coitus interruptus all over the place, as old SS officers in various states of undress flee the salon with their prostitutes flung over their shoulders. And seriously, what is funnier than a dick made out of bread? Little else.

Fourthly, this movie takes place in a brothel, not in a concentration camp or prison. It's a stunning brothel at that - all stained glass and pink settees and luridly made up working girls, with an exquisite nightly cabaret by Kitty herself. One particular performance even has Kitty doing her best Glen/Glenda impersonation, which totally works. That's actually how the movie opens, so it had me at Hello.

Other highlights include:

Group testing of all the women Wallenberg's men bring in for sexy purposes. What erupts is a veritable orgy that seems more art house that grindhouse and looks almost choreographed, complete with live orchestra and light acrobatics all caught on camera, in that someone is filming the whole shebang.

Then comes the sex test - my favorite part! The women are sequestered into cells and then observed making the beast with two backs with various partners. What follows is some midget sex (she doesn't recoil in horror - APPROVED!), a forced lesbian coupling (REJECTED!), and some double amputee reverse cowgirl (you guessed it - APPROVED!). A fool proof system, but of course.

Margherita is a sexy piece. Yes, she looks waaaay too young to even be in this movie in the first place, but she owns her role as the smart-as-a-whip willing call girl in love with a defecting Nazi officer who must avenge his death.

That being said, yes, there's a love story. It is easily the most boring part of this whole thing and feels extraneous. It's the one thing that keeps the WTF factor significantly low for this slice of exploitation. While there are some interesting moments (a giant dildo - and I mean GIANT - and a gimp mask, as well as the aforementioned sex tests and bread penises), it strangely never strays too over the top. There are long stretches of love story/exposing the Nazis stuff that drags, and while Kitty and Margherita bring a very strong female presence here that isn't demeaning or degrading, I still have trouble buying that these two are going to bring down the regime from the inside. Well, not Kitty so much, she just wants her brothel back; and who can blame her, really?

Still, is SK a sexy movie? Not really. Is it interesting? Yeah, sort of. Is there a point? Probably not. Still, I had a good time drinking my pino grigio and waiting for the good times (read: the perverted stuff) to roll.

Come for the orgy, stick around for the double amputee sex, get drunk to the cabaret performances, and leave feeling pretty darn good about Nazisploitation. There's plenty to enjoy here and while not as wild as I would have liked, it still resonates.

P.S. This is based on a true story! Yeah! Well, not the love story/exposing the Nazis blah blah, but there really was a Salon Kitty back in the WWII days and there was quite a bit of controversy surrounding it. Look it up!

Night Train to Terror

If I told you one movie contained within Nazis, stop motion animation, a Russian roulette death club, breakdancing, a porno scene involving a squaw and an explorer, an omniscient narrator, a carnival, and Richard Moll in a dual role, would you be all like, hell yeah, sign me up, that sounds like a real coherent good time! Or would you be like, hmmm, I don't know, it sounds like a leeetle to much for my poor senses to take in right now.

Such is Night Train to Terror. If I was to describe it to you play by play, you would be like, hell yeah, Jenn, that sounds right the fuck on! But then I would have led you astray with my comedic writing style (ha!), and you would watch the movie expecting this great marvel of cinema, yet you would be sorely disappointed. Sorely, my friends. And then you'd hate me. Since I want nothing more than to win your love and adoration, I won't write a play by play of Night Train to Terror. I will merely say this: when you have a movie with a frame type situation (here it's God and Satan on a train discussing the fates of three people - those who you see in the vignettes involving Nazis, squaws, Russian roulette, et. al.) make sure....wait, I'm not really sure what you should make sure of. That shit makes sense? You know, I don't often care if stuff doesn't make sense, in fact sometimes I rather enjoy it when it doesn't. But this movie made little sense and not in good, I'm watching a fever dream, let me sit back and enjoy it kinda way. If a movie can take you (in fifteen minutes of screen time or so) from seeing a girl selling popcorn at a fair to the same girl and her lover, as well as ex-pimp, all strapped to electric chairs while a computer chooses who gets to be electrocuted, it's done something. I'm not sure what. And if that same movie can take you from watching 'band' (in the loosest sense of what constitutes a band - drums? guitar? lots of dancing while wearing headbands? One song to their repertoire?), to seeing a Nazi demon mow down with a machine gun imprisoned females playing the violin for the entertainment of Nazi troops, I guess that's talent. I shouldn't be so harsh on NTtoT. It makes some pretty impressive leaps.

I'm at a loss for words. And I love bad horror movies! You know, as I was watching this last night, I didn't even feel like finishing my glass of wine! I went to bed at 11 pm! Well, I tried watching Drive-In Massacre but was too exhausted emotionally after NTtoT, I couldn't even commit to another movie! I hope I'm okay. I feel a little better now, thank goodness. Your sympathy is appreciated.