Angst (2003)

This Teutonic tawdry tale tells of a timid temptress whose trysts terminate on thanatological and tragic terms thanks to her talking twat.

Ok, ok, in non-alliterative English. A woman haunted by a childhood trauma discovers that her ladyparts will eat anyone that “visits.” At first it starts with would be rapists, then with Johns when she starts turning tricks to support her nether region habits. Sucks ‘em right of their clothes. And when it gets hungry for more “food”, it starts talking like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Too bad they didn’t have a bigger budget, they could had used a puppet or some funky CGI.

The parallel story to this is of a milquetoast who is pining over this woman for the duration of her vaginal trials and tribulations. When she spurns him for fear of consuming this ‘nice guy’, he looks for love elsewhere, temporarily finding it in one half of some conjoined twins. He eventually gets fed up with the other half and tries to sever ties using an electric carving knife. How does the surviving twin thank him? Dumps him and rats him out to the po-po. Women. He then takes up with a stripper who cozens him into robbing a bank or something and they head for the hills, seeing how he is already a wanted man for killing a twin. They eventually cross paths with his original obsession who has reluctantly just gotten married but hasn’t consummated it with her new husband for fear of consuming him. The police and the living twin catch up with the lot and chaos ensues. It violently sorts itself out and the lead woman with the penetration angst finally remembers the entirety of the childhood trauma that seems to have caused her voracious vagina and realized that it wasn’t traumatic after all and her condition is cured, so she walks off into the sunset with Mr. Milquetoast.

This is a German directed/produced movie, shot on digital video by necessity rather than by choice, and the few special effects they had were decent given the obviously very low budget. The acting is not stellar, but the storyline is definitely something original. I am fairly certain that all main female cast members get naked at some point in the movie, so it also earns a Golden Treehorn. I can’t tell if this movie is intentionally hilarious or not, either way:3 Georges.

Satan Digs Nekid Chicks – Satan’s Blood (1978) or if you want to be all proper Escalofrío

Jeff – as requested. Karl already posted his review, here’s mine. Where’s yours?

Caveat: Jeff & Karl gave me the Cliff’s Notes version of the film as I came in 47 minutes late. They kindly provided their thoughts on the well thought out and superbly written plot, Machiavellian twists, the rules of Jewish Ouija and pointed out that skull butter is probably a better lube than Crisco.

So now I know that Bob & Carol along with their dog Blackie setting out for a mini-break when Ted & Alice came along and invited them along to Satan’s Cabin. Side note: if I took one step in the house and saw Evilyn the doll displayed on the table, I would have turned around walked right out of the Manor and headed home – dolls like that are always up to no good.

Carol gets attacked by the guy who is wearing the same outfit as the fisherman who gets hit in I Know What You Did Last Summer, minus the hook of course, freaks out completely and persuades Bob to get dressed and leave. They come upon Ted & Alice all nekid in the living room and before they can say “Jesus save me” Alice channels Kathleen Turner or I suppose, it could have been Satan, and Bob & Carol are nekid too and then the fun begins.

From here on, as Karl mentions in his review is where it all gets a little confusing – Ted somehow gets shot in the temple; whether Alice killed him or he shot himself, this time getting it right, is the question. Immediately after it happens as she does her best Eddie Izzard impression and takes off on her scooter to parts unknown. Carol, apparently a nurse, sets about trying to keep him alive by applying pressure to the wound. When Alice and Doctor come back some time later, the Doc takes one look at Ted and declares that Bob killed him.

Apparently there’s some more naked stuff and something about Alice killing herself – I don’t know if Satan commanded it or not, as I was doing important stuff like hulling strawberries. I do know that Carol is an excellent shot and blows little Evilyn’s head off resulting in a geyser of blood the likes of which hasn’t been seen in sometime. For some reason the house decides that this is a bad thing, I don’t know if it was the zombies or the doll, yet our heroes escape and manage to get home only to find that the Salvation Army has all their crap and the neighbors are shooting the video for Dead Man’s Party.

I would say it’s worthy of 3, maybe 4 George’s based on the amount of nekidness and for the awesome soundtrack alone.

The Abandoned (2006)

“Russia sure is a confusing country.”
I said this very phrase to Jeff as we recently watched this movie on DVD about ¾ of the way through it. It confused the hell out of me. At the end of the movie I had to think back through it to try to connect the dots to figure out the course of events and why what happened happened.

From what I have gathered from piecing together my understanding of the movie, the plot is this: An orphan woman returns to the abandoned farm in Russia where she was born. The farm is on an island in a river. Whilst traipsing around the very dilapidated homestead, she bumps into a guy who says he is her fraternal twin and their birthday is less than two days away. They keep bumping into doppelgangers that appear to be dead versions of themselves that sort of chase them around. Through ghost-flashback vision she learns that her father fatally stabbed her mother because she threatened to leave with the babies, then the mother shot the father. Through another location/time slip, the woman appears in the office where she originally started her trek from and learned that the ghost of her father was the one who sent her to the family farm. On the way out of the office she bumps into herself from the beginning of the movie. Then she time/location slips back to the family farm where she and her brother meet their fates and die in the manner that their doppelgangers’ appearances suggested, shortly after their dual birthday which the movie made to seem important but I could not figure out why. What a country! (Whatever happened to Yakov Smirnoff?)

What this movie did have in bucket loads was atmosfear. Unrelenting creepy spooky unnerving locations that the characters stumbled around in were present throughout the movie. There were also some great visual effects that I thought were pretty inventive. At one point the heroine is panning across a darkened room with a flashlight. The room is in complete disarray, mildewy bed, paint chips spread like confetti, wallpaper coming off in ragged sheets, splintered and rotting furniture, etc. As the beam of the flashlight plays across this miasma of decay, the beam reveals what the room looked like when her parents were alive.

Another element in the plus column for this movie was the use of sound. The creaks and groans of this unsettled house were omnipresent as well as all the disturbing noises from the ethereal flashbacks the heroine had.

3 Georges

Satan's Blood (1977)

This is what happens when swinging goes bad.
This ribald little Spanish ditty opens with a bang, in the midst of some sort of satanic ritual where a creepy priest? strips a nubile lass and has his way with her in front of the black mass and then sacrifices her. End scene and cut to something completely unrelated.

A young well-to-do set of DINKs (double income no kids) and their dog leaves their apartment and drives through town. During their drive, they are recognized by an old college friend of the male half of the couple while stopped at a traffic light. This new couple invite the DINKs to their place outside of town so they can catch up on old times.

After a verrrrrry long drive they finally arrive and they settle in for some good times. Well, they have a bite, have a chat, then they start to have a bit of fun with a Ouija table which gets a little weird. Later in the evening, the DINKs walk into the den to find the other couple nude and kneeling around a freshly made pentagram. The DINKs get mesmerized or hip-mow-tized or something –ized and get nekkid too. This is when the evening hits its high point and everyone gets it ON. There is a lot of writhing and canoodling going on and at one point some sort of body lube gets applied to everyone. The best part of the lube is the container, a skull. Yeah, baby. “Whenever I have ritualistic sex in the name of my Dark Lord, I always use Old Scratch Skull Butter.”

Anyhoo, after that it gets confusing. At one point the host male is shot in the head and no one can seem to determine if it was suicide or homicide and then his body goes missing, so even death is difficult to label here. A doctor is brought to the house but can’t help if there is no patient to treat. Then the host female tries to off herself. Again, difficult to tell whether she succeeds or not. Then the host male pops up again lumbering toward the male DINK who gives him a little more lead poisoning. The DINK couple tries several times to leave while all the post-sex confusion is going on. Finally they succeed in getting the hell out of Dodge.

In addition to the dead/not dead wackiness, there are several elements that add to the Hunh? Factor. Their dog is killed for some reason that is never explained. There is a creepy doll that becomes ambulatory at one point and cries blood. It gets dispatched with a gun and then the house battens all its hatches in response to the doll’s death. I guess Satan was really attached to his dolly and threw a hissy. There is also a lurking guy outside this villa that we see in cutaways throughout the film. At one point we see another lurker who gets killed by the first lurker. No one in the house ever becomes aware of this lurker Darwinism action.

The movie ends with the DINK couple arriving back at their apartment, only to find that all their belongings are gone. Confused, the couple goes back into the hallway where they are comforted by their neighbors across the hall, who take them into their apartment to console them. Inside their neighbors’ place is a the familiar pentagram on the floor, lots o black candles and everyone from the swingers villa looking like ghouls, even the lurkers!

The final scene focuses on a young couple driving through town and when they stop at a traffic light, they get “recognized’ by a “college buddy” and invited to a villa outside of town. Who is the buddy? Why, it’s the male DINK! Ahhh, the circle of life.

Even with the confusion factored in, I still give this 3 Georges for a good solid opening, for canoodling with skull butter, and for the creepy exploding bloody head doll.

Opera (1987)

This is an Argento piece. Another giallo-style who-done-it that takes place at an opera, hence the oh so clever title. It is fairly predictable in its plot and is faithful to the pattern of most giallos. Many killer-POV shots, the killer is not revealed until the very end, and the killer’s motives are so ‘out there’ you have no chance at guessing the killer’s identity.

Argento uses a lot of great camera angles and clever perspectives to add substance and style to this film. The music/soundtrack is almost all opera with a few metal-ish pieces during some of the more frenetic scenes. In terms of something new, well yes, Argento does do something new, but I yai yai. Lemme ‘splain.

The particular opera in production and being performed during the movie is Macbeth. Aside from it being the ‘unlucky’ play (boooooo, scary!), it also has a lot of ravens in it. So there is a bird handler and several large cages of these birds backstage for use in the opera. At one point in the film the killer kills several of these birds. According to the handler, these birds have long memories and are vengeful. So, near the end of the movie, the director of the opera decides to let loose all the ravens at once into the audience and they will identify the killer. Sounds crazy right? Well guess what, it fucking works!! So I guess something new isn’t always something good.

There is some decent gore sprinkled throughout and just a smidgen of nudity. Only one actor of note in the film, a young William McNamara who you may recognize as the killer from Copycat.

Good but not great, 3 Georges.

P.S.- Something I’ve noticed during the viewing of the past 4 or 5 Italian-made movies, with this film being the exception that helped me determine a timeframe. Italians love J&B. More specifically, they loved J&B in the 70s. Just about anytime someone is relaxing in the living room, or having company over, or trying to make time with a sexay lady, or toasting something, odds are good that they are doing it with some delicious Justerini & Brooks. Just look for the bottle with that big yellow label and red letters. Though I haven’t done any research into this (and won’t), it may be that J&B was a big sponsor or investor in the giallos of the early 70s, but I like to think that Italians just love scotch. Mmm mmm