The Abductors (1972)

The Abductors
Directed by Don Schain (1972)
Genre: Exploitation
Country: USA
Language: English
Subtitles: no
IMDB: http://imdb.com/title/tt0068164/


From IMDB:

Plot Outline: Someone is stealing cheerleaders and other pretty girls and selling them to the highest bidder. Female super sexy spy Ginger is soon employed to investigate the disappearances. She does so by going undercover with a fellow agent and doing whatever is necessary to put an end to the operation and take down the leaders.

Review: Ginger shakes her maracas.

The Abductors: 8 out of 10: Lets face it some bad movies age better than others. From the wonderfully horrible fashion and hair worn by the leads to décor including shag carpets (that they actually shag on) and chintzy coconuts holding push pins. (in the bank presidents office no less) the Abductors is filled with seventies kitsch.

It also has an attitude towards woman so politically incorrect they would burn down the theater today. (Great film to show during a Take Back the Night meeting just make sure you park away from the ensuing riot.) The Abductors is a bit like a feminist raison de ere.

Like any good exploitation film there is a ton of nubile flesh on display. The Ginger films add bondage, rape and generally cruelty that separates it from the cheerleader and nurse pictures that were its competition at the seventies drive-in. In addition the girls are silicone free with tan lines to boot which I admit I find more appealing than the cookie cutter Playboy models of today's exploitation.

Downsides include remarkably incompetent gunfights (the prop guns don't fire on cue) and the state police (who look Canadian for some reason) are out of a thirties gangster movie (Complete with a Tommy gun that smokes like a Cheech and Chong extra.) Strange pacing including a gratuitous drum solo and maraca-shaking scene. (No really Ginger brought her own maracas to the disco) and a lead actress Cheri Caffro who looks like a hooker a few years past her prime complete with pancake make-up (The other lead actress Jennifer Brooks is so hopelessly nubile Caffro looks like her mom.).

Great flick to watch while the significant other is out of the house (preferably safely out of town.) The Ginger films like that other exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave is a viewing pleasure best kept close to the vest.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song! (1971) Melvin Van Peebles

Director: Melvin Van Peebles
Cast: Mario Van Peebles, Khleo Thomas, David Alan Grier
Rated: R
108 minutes
Released on Criterion's Laserdisc Collection

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was a 1971 independent film written, produced, scored, directed by and starring Melvin Van Peebles. It tells the picaresque story of a deprived black man on his flight from the white authority.

The film, funded and distributed outside of the Hollywood system, broke conventions with its visual style, as well as its content. It was a major success, and was credited by Variety with inventing the blaxploitation genre. -Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

Reviewed by Nathan Rabin (Onion AV Club)
May 25th, 2004

The unprecedented commercial success of Melvin Van Peebles' incendiary 1971 independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song supported the then-revolutionary idea that a huge, untapped market awaited uncompromising black films that made no concessions to white audiences. Famously rated X by, as the posters pointed out, "an all-white jury," Sweetback aspired to refute decades of cinematic stereotyping by focusing on a strong, overtly sexual black man who not only takes on "The Man," but survives.

But before Van Peebles could revolutionize black film and kick-start the blaxploitation boom, he first had to get Sweetback made, an ordeal as dramatic as anything in his cult classic. As the new biopic Baadasssss! shows, Sweetback's origin story is far more compelling than the film itself, which can charitably be described as raw and unpolished, and uncharitably described as misogynistic, self-indulgent, and borderline incompetent.

The making of Van Peebles' movie is memorably brought to the big screen by his writer-director-actor son Mario Van Peebles, who plays his own father, and gifted young child actor Khleo Thomas, who plays the young Mario as a sad-eyed bundle of insecurities. The elder Van Peebles is a role Mario was literally born to play, and he's co-written himself a hell of a part. The Van Peebles are not known for their humility, and the portrait of Melvin that emerges in Baadasssss! is ultimately heroic, but it's also unexpectedly critical and multidimensional.

Baadasssss! colorfully conveys what a major accomplishment Sweetback was, but it also makes apparent that in Melvin's undying passion to bring his vision to life, he was more than willing to bruise egos and hurt feelings, especially those of his long-suffering family. Mario's film presents Melvin as a passionate rebel willing to suffer for his art, but he's also a harsh and demanding father, an unfaithful husband, and a mercurial collaborator. (At one point, when the earnest white kid editing Sweetback dares to quit, a half-crazed Melvin whales on him.)

Baadasssss! has its rough edges: Some of its artier conceits fall flat, as does the faux-documentary talking-head footage, and there are a few too many shots of Mario looking studly atop a motorcycle. But Baadasssss! is a vibrant, funny, fully realized slice of oft-overlooked cultural, show-business, and black history. It's better than the film whose genesis it chronicles, though inherently doomed to be nowhere near as important.

McBain - 1991

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102422/

IMDB Review:


This is a rather nonsensical action drama, with plenty of (entirely unintentional) comedy to go round. To start with, the film itself is called 'McBain.' Anyone who saw that famous Arnold spoof in 'The Simpsons' could be forgiving for looking twice at this title, which essentially features the same cut-and-paste plot, cheesy acting, and incoherent developments that Wolfcastle parodied. It's really nothing great but worth watching for the belly laughs at all the countless errors and overbearing cheesiness!
The 'plot' involves a Vietnam Vet Bobby McBain (Walken)whose friend Santos, a Colombian revolutionary, is killed by the evil dictator on live TV, whose sister comes to McBain to help organize a revolution in that country. For no real reason, other than to alleviate his self-confessed boredom and to avenge his Columbian ex-colleague from Nam, he and his gang of overtly gay middle aged nerds get into a little prop plane and fly off to Colombia to do this.
I started writing a review for this, but deleted it because it ended up totally incoherent. No wonder really, as the madness I was trying to chart is so messed up it's really hard to know where to start. So instead of indignantly providing analogies of McBain's sheer crappiness, I'll just list a few examples from the film which sum it up suitably:
• several people are murdered by people who we have seen die themselves moments earlier
• the special effects, especially some mid-air explosions, look like they were done by a small child with a chemistry set
• at one point, McBain is sitting in the co-pilot seat of a small prop plane. Flying next to them is a jet whose pilot is trying to force them to land. McBain pulls out this stupidly small pistol, and shoots the jet pilot, who crashes, despite the noticeable non-smashing of either windscreen!
• Some rebels attempt to infiltrate the presidential palace using a stretched limo. The driver opens the boot and four men jump out. Four! • Near the end of the film, a government soldier was asking an old man at a café if he has seen Christina, the rebel leader. He beats the man who doesn't tell him anything. This is great because at the next table are a load of American mercenaries in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirts, and fedora hats!
• In a similar vein, during all the battle scenes the good guys can generally just stand around without so much as a bullet touching them, where the bad guys get routinely mowed, and in many cases clearly fail to even notice the machinegun-toting middle aged mercenaries!
• The doctor of the group has to perform emergency surgery on a little girl after a battle. He says she would die without proper facilities, but McBain tells him to go ahead as she would die anyway. After briefly slicing her with a little knife (the girl has had her rib cage severely crushed), she sits there for a second, and smiles! The stupidest survival from mortal wounding since Marie in Biggles: Adventures in Time.
• A tall, Germanic looking drug dealer is really running Colombia. Predictably, he is called Hans.
• A typical example of the nonsense value of the plot: the group doctor declares he is going to stay with the wounded to help them. Then, in the next scene, he is back doing soldiering!
• And another: at the start, the guys are told the Vietnam War is over, and they get into their helicopter to fly home. All of a sudden they see one VC on the ground, and decide to launch a full scale covert assault on a POW camp they hadn't even seen. Yeah, that's exactly what you do right after getting discharged.
• You know a movie is in trouble when even the extras don't look convincing. I blame the director.
Normally I like mercenary movies. They make great viewing and the body count is typically high enough to make up for the lack of plot. Skeleton Coast and Wild Geese were both enjoyable. But McBain, thanks to a total lack of plot development, realistic effects, bearable acting, and tongue in cheek humour, comes across merely as a convoluted, confused mess. In honesty it looked like a load of set pieces had been brought in from a variety of scripts, banged together any which way, and then tagged together with the formulaic 'South American dictator/drug baron revolution' shtick.
Don't get me wrong I sat through it fine, it was never boring, because I was splitting my sides most of the time at the hilariously bad production values and situations. There are some pretty good moments, such as when McBain's gang kidnap a gangster called John Cambotti and dangle him off a skyscraper pretending to be Israeli agents. That part was cool. But the set-up for it, where they killed everyone in a crack house without either taking the money or destroying the drugs, and getting a lecture from the drug chief, was so artificial I just didn't understand why it was put in. Needless to say, mindless killing and slaughter is only entertaining if its well done on a technical level, unlike this ham-fest, where someone is dragged out of a window after a ceiling fan and hundreds of extras overtly mis-time their exaggerated death throes
There is lots of violence but some of it is so poorly done that it actually looks funny, which is not always a good thing. I bought this DVD for £1.49, which in retrospect seems like a bit of a rip-off. I'll hang onto it though, for any occasion in which I want to either play drinking games for number of dead etc, or as a showcase for some truly shoddy film-making.

Schizophreniac: The Whore Mangler - 1997 - Ron Atkins

Schizophreniac: The Whore Mangler

Directed by Ron Atkins (1997)

Genre: Horror / Comedy?
Country: USA
Language: English
Subtitles: no
IMDB: http://imdb.com/title/tt0433047/
Files: 1 x .avi
File size: 699 MB
Duration: 1:24:51
Video Resolution: 320 x 240
FPS: 29.970
Video BitRate: 1002 Kbps
Quality Factor: 0.435 b/px
Video Codec: XviD
Number of Audio Channels: 2
Audio Sample Rate: 48000 Hz
Audio BitRate: 135 Kbps
Audio Codec: MP3
Source: DVD

From IMDB:

Plot Outline: This ultra-low budget film chronicles a few days in the life of one Harry Russo (John Giancaspro, who also co-wrote), a nut-job who receives a Rubberneck doll from his bitch girlfriend. He starts to take orders from the doll to take massive amounts of drugs, rape and kill, not always in that order......

Review: An extreme viewing experience.
This film is like marmite. You either love it or you hate it. If you go into this film expecting a proper film with decent production values, a good plot and great characters you'll hate it. If you go into this film expecting a low budget slasher you'll probably hate it. If you go into this film expecting to see one of the most deranged characters ever put to film in the form of Harry Russo you will love it. John Giancaspro is absolutely brilliant in his over the top portrayal of the insane, murderous coke fiend.

The special effects are abysmal at best but really, who cares? If you're the kind of person who's prepared to watch a film Schizophreniac: The Whore Mangler you've undoubtedly seen scores of horror films filled with gore. With the budget this film was made for even if they had tried it probably would've mediocre at best. I'd much rather be able to laugh at something abysmal than be unaffected by the mediocre.

To sum it up, you'll probably hate this film but if you're one of the few who decide to see it anyway it'll become the best thing since sliced bread. #2 I hate marmite.

Review: Not even for lovers of low budget. More whore mangling wouldn't harm.
Well this is the perfect example of mediocre exploitation movies from the late 90's. The 70's was the decade of exploitation by excellence, the 80's had some highlights but in the 90's things got simply awful! "The Whore Mangler" is one of the worst Horror movies I've seen and that's a lot to say! The make up or f/x are as cheesy and cheap as you can get and without a doubt the producers didn't spend more than 1000 on this crap.

The killer is laughable I wonder if the actor is ashamed of this role. The guy looks like a total freak. I only dug his rape in the ass expectations. You can't say the guy had a specific meaning for life.

Please avoid this attempt of ultra low budget exploitation. There isn't even an attempt to make a decent movie. The director's vision is impossible to be understood and what about the plot? there isn't. The idea of the rubber doll telling the killer how to act is simply dull. I mean the idea is "okay" for a Horror movie but the way it develops in the movie is simply painful. Also, filled with horrid dialogs. Ugh.

Happy End

Starring: Vladimir Mensik, Bohus Zahorsky, Stella Zazvorkova, Helena Ruzickova

Directed by: Oldrich Lipsky

http://imdb.com/title/tt0061029/

PLOT DESCRIPTION: In this extremely strange Czech film, the grim story is told in reverse. The film literally runs backwards at the beginning as it depicts Mensik's severed head rolling back onto his body during a beheading. The protagonist is then seen walking back into a prison and out the front door. He then finds a suitcase on the sidewalk and brings it to his house. Opening the case, he begins taking out the body parts of a dead woman and reassembles them into the woman he fell in love with. He takes the woman to an oceanside resort where he begins thinking that she has been flirting with a man whom he drowns in the sea. He is unhappy, so Mensik unmarries the protesting girl with the aid of a priest. He next throws the woman into a building that is burning and goes off to find another lover. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

From IMDB:

The great idea is something else: the WHOLE film was shot backwards. Even the dialogues are spoken backwards.

Nu, pogodi!

From Wikipedia

Nu, pogodi! (Russian: Ну, погоди!, English translation: Just you wait!) is a series of Russian animated shorts directed by Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin, produced at the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow, between 1969 and 1986. Additional series were produced in 1993 and 2004.
The plot of the series follows the mischievous and artistic Wolf (Волк, Volk) trying to catch the Hare (Заяц, Zayats), presumably with the intention to eat him.

Characters

The two main characters are Wolf (voiced by Anatoli Papanov) and Hare (voiced by Klara Rumyanova).

Wolf

Wolf is initially portrayed as a hooligan: a heavy smoker who eagerly turns to vandalism (e.g. knowingly destroys museum exhibits), abuses minors and breaks laws.

On the other hand, many of Wolf's attempts to catch the Hare are often characterized by uncanny abilities on his part like figure skating, ballet and waltzing which demonstrate his more refined side. Wolf can also play the guitar very well and ride the powerful rocker motorbike, making his character more complex and interesting. In the first episode, while climbing a high building to catch Hare, Wolf whistles the popular and officially disrespected mountaineer song, "Song of a Friend" (the author and performer of this song, Vladimir Vysotskiy, says in one of the existing sound records that the song is officially criticised before singing it).

Unfortunately - in spite of these talents - most of Wolf's schemes eventually fail or turn against him.

Wolf is also shown to be very goal-oriented, especially in the later releases. He needs this Hare, not a hare in general. There are scenes where Wolf is trying to recognise the wanted Hare between multiple others. To reach this goal, Wolf is always ready for drastic actions. Most of these actions are directed toward catching the Hare, but in one instance he also breaks everything in his flat just trying to eat a hard dried fish.

Hare

The Hare is portrayed as a supposedly positive hero. He gets much less screen time, however, and is less developed than Wolf - most of his actions are simply reactions to Wolf's schemes (i.e. running away and hiding, sometimes in ingenious ways). Therefore, the sympathies of some spectators are on the side of the Wolf, contrary to all didactic intentions. Only in the latest releases does the Hare become more active, several times even saving the Wolf.

Others

The story also features supporting cast animal characters, the most common of which is the physically strong and heavy Hippopotamus who participates in various roles (i.e. as a policeman, museum caretaker, shop keeper, passer-by, etc) and whom Wolf usually annoys and has to run away from. In one episode, he shows up as the captain of the ship.
Another persistent character is the cat, a specialist in magic who appears in several stage performances throughout the series. This cat is shown to be a good magician, but very self-absorbed and highly sensitive to applause (in one scene, he twice drops the levitating Wolf as he accepts the applause from Hare).

Many episodes feature friendly bears in various supporting roles.

List of episodes

The Nu, pogodi! episodes are numbered but not named. Each episode is set in a different environment. Release dates in parentheses.

1. City and beach (1969)
2. Fairground at Night (1970)
3. Road (1971)
4. Stadium (1971)
5. City (1972)
6. Countryside (1973)
7. Sea voyage (1973)
8. New Year celebration (1974)
9. Television studio (1976)
10. On construction site (1976)
11. Circus (1977)
12. Museum (1978)
13. Olympic games (1980)
14. Children's extra-scholar activities center (1984)
15. The house of Culture (1985)
16. In the world of Russian folk tales (1986)
17. Exotic land on island (1993, released in 1994)
18. Supermarket (1993, released in 1995)

Monanieba (Repentance)

Yugoslavian Poster
Russian Poster

Czech Poster

Georgian Title: Monanieba
English Title: Repentance
Director: Tengiz Abuladze
Year: 1984
Language: Georgian
Subtitles: English (softsubs)
Source: DVD

Biography:

Tengiz Abuladze' studied theatrical direction af the Chota Rustaveli Theatre Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, and film- making at the VGIK Cinematography Institute, graduating in 1953, when he joined Georgia Film Studios as a director. He made documentaries before making his feature debut in 1958. His best-known work in the West is the trilogy The Plea (1968), ,Natvris khe (1977) and Monanieba (1984), the latter being one of the first films to be released in the post-glasnost era, and one of the most controversial, thanks to its allegorical portrait of a small town under Stalinist terror (Stalin, like Abuladze, hailing originally from Georgia). It was a huge success in the Soviet Union, and achieved reasonable distribution abroad, almost unheard of for a Georgian film.

Plot Synopsis from AMG

Repentance (Pokayaniye) features Avtandil Makharadze in a dual role. As Georgian mayor Varlam Aravidze, Makharadze is a strutting, arbitrarily cruel dictator, something of a composite Stalin and Hitler. Visually he very closely resembles Lavrentiy Beriya, Stalin's right hander and one-time KGB chief. As Abel, the mayor's son, Makharadze finds himself in the middle of an ideological squabble when his father dies. Zeinab Botsvadze, a local woman who had suffered mightily under the mayor's regime, refuses to allow the old man's corpse to be interred. Despite the son's Herculean efforts, Botsvadze continues digging up the late mayor's body, a symbolic gesture to prevent the dead man's villainy from being forgotten. Repentance was the first Soviet film that openly denounced the horrors of Stalinism, though the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze (known for his poetic and surrealist films) chose to make it allegorical, deliberately using anachronisms and making the leading character look like a combination of Stalin's henchman Lavrenti Beriya, Hitler, and Mussolini. An interesting point -- the last name chosen for the leading character is totally fictional, there is no such name as Aravidze in Georgia. In fact, "aravi" means "nobody" in Georgian. The filmmakers opted for such a name in order not to offend any real person in the Republic of Georgia. Filmed in 1984, Repentance fell victim to Soviet censorship from the moment it left the editing room. When it was finally released in 1987, the film was deservedly garlanded with several awards, including the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize.

A voice from IMDB

This wonderful Georgian film emerged from the last years of the Soviet regime, but seems to have disappeared without trace. The final film of a trilogy by the veteran film-maker Tengiz Abuladze, it portrays a composite monster, Varlam (Hitler moustache, Mussolini shirt & braces, Stalin boots, Beria pince-nez) and his equally grotesque son Abel, both played by the same actor.

The film has a surrealist, dreamlike quality about it, framed by initial and final scenes in a cake-shop and with police almost comic in medieval armour. The main actions which initiate the plot are surrealist with the repeated exhumation of Varlam's corpse. The two monstrous central characters are no more than mayors of a small Georgian town - but there is nothing comic about their actions and the reign of terror they bring to the community. The elements of tyranny are revealed economically, with hints of atrocities and disappearances but only one brief torture scene. The overall message is that of personal responsibility. The tyrannical regime is not an anonymous bureaucracy but the deliberate creation of evil men. And the final repentance is a horrific recognition of those responsibilities. An unmissable film, beautifully made and superbly acted - if you can find it.

Carne - Gaspar Noe (1991)

Carne

Directed by Gaspar Noe (1991)

Genre: short / drama

Country: France

Language: French

Subtitles: English (srt / sub)

Files: 1 x .avi
File size: 581 MB
Duration: 38:17.16
Video Resolution: 720 x 576
FPS: 25.000
Video BitRate: 1985 Kbps
Quality Factor: 0.191 b/px
Video Codec: DivX 5.0.2
Number of Audio Channels: 2
Audio Sample Rate: 44100 Hz
Audio BitRate: 128 Kbps
Audio Codec: MP3
Source: DVD

Review:
This short film certainly pulls no punches. The story is of a butcher who wrongfully assaults an innocent man who he believes has sexually molested his retarded daughter. The film goes onto depict how the butcher serves his time, and returns to life with his daughter in care, and having to come to terms with a life with no future.

The graphic opening scenes of a horse being slaughtered, and the full frontal birth of the butchers daughter puts you a brutal frame of mind that stays with you throughout the film.
The snappy flow of the film is very direct and adds to its brutality. Consequently alot of ground is covered in the 40 minutes. You are taken in fully with the butchers non-life - particularly after he loses his daughter to social services and his business. His story continues in the excellent film Seul Contre Tous.

Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses

Toshio Matsumoto, 1969

A feverish collision of avant-garde aesthetics and grind-house shocks (not to mention a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), Funeral Parade of Roses takes us on an electrifying journey into the nether-regions of the late-’60s Tokyo underworld. In Toshio Matsumoto’s controversial debut feature, seemingly nothing is taboo: neither the incorporation of visual flourishes straight from the worlds of contemporary graphic-design, painting, comic-books, and animation; nor the unflinching depiction of nudity, sex, drug-use, and public-toilets. But of all the “transgressions” here on display, perhaps one in particular stands out the most: the film’s groundbreaking and unapologetic portrayal of Japanese gay subculture.

Cross-dressing club-kid Eddie (played by real-life transvestite entertainer extraordinaire Peter, famed for his role as Kyoami the Fool in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran) vies with a rival drag-queen (Osamu Ogasawara) for the favours of drug-dealing cabaret-manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya, himself a Kurosawa player who appeared in such films as Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and High and Low). Passions escalate and blood begins to flow — before all tensions are released in a jolting climax that prefigures by nearly thirty years Tsai Ming-liang’s similarly scandalous The River.

With its mixture of purely narrative sequences and documentary footage, Funeral Parade of Roses comes to us from a moment when cinema set itself to test, and even eradicate, the boundaries between fiction and reality, desire and experience; consequently, the film shares a kinship with such other 1969 works as Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide and Ingmar Bergman’s A Passion [The Passion of Anna]. Yet Matsumoto achieves a zig-zag modulation between pathos and hilarity that makes his picture utterly unique: a filmic howl in the face of social, moral, and artistic convention. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses for the first time outside of Japan on any home video format.

Taxidermie

Hungary 2006

Directed byGyörgy Pálfi

Plot Outline: Gyorgy Palfi's grotesque tale of three generations of men, including an obese speed eater, an embalmer of gigantic cats, and a man who shoots fire out of his penis.

Taxidermia contains three generational stories, about a grandfather, a father, and a son, linked together by recurring motifs. The dim grandfather, an orderly during World War Two, lives in his bizarre fantasies; he desires love. The huge father seeks success as a top athlete -- a speedeater -- in the postwar pro-Soviet era. The grandson, a meek, small-boned taxidermist, yearns for something greater: immortality. He wants to create the most perfect work of art of all time by stuffing his own torso.

Historical facts and surrealism become intertwined as magical realism, like in the works of Gabriel García Marquez or the Hungarian writer Lajos Parti Nagy; the script is based on two of the latter’s stories. Palfi added the third story, that of the grandson the taxidermist.

The first section begins with a disembodied voice pontificating obliquely about creation and three generations, explaining that if something has to end, the beginning has to be important. Immediately we see the grandfather, Vendel Morosgoványi (Csaba Czene), who is berated by his lieutenant in a remote outpost, with only the lieutenant’s fat wife and two beautiful daughters around. He retreats into the realm of gratification, no matter how extreme. He peeps in the daughters’ bath, drinks the girls’ dirty bathwater, masturbates until his penis emits flames of fire, and sleeps with the lieutenant’s wife. She becomes pregnant and the lieutenant blows off Vendel’s head — but raises his child, Kálmán.

In the second part, Kálmán (Gergõ Trócsányi) has become obese and competes for Hungary in eating competitions that their backers hope will be recognized by the International Olympic Committee. Against a backdrop of empty Communist spectacle and military poseurs, Kálmán strives to win. He meets up with an oversized woman, Gizella (Adél Stanczel), another speedeating competitor, and the two get married, although she has sex with his teammate during the wedding party. She and Kálmán embark on a long honeymoon, returning to their respective factories to practice. Gizella gives birth to a tiny, tiny son, Lajos.

Section three, which is contemporary, is calmer, less manic than the previous two. Lajos (Mark Bischoff) has become a quiet taxidermist who has no prospects in love; he is rejected by the supermarket cashier, for one. He is as frustrated in his way as his grandfather was in his, but Lajos’s fertile imagination will prove to work in a very different way. His father, Kálmán, has reached enormous proportions and can no longer move. Kálmán’s wife has long ago left him, so Lajos brings food and cleans the apartment where Kálmán (now Gábor Máté, in a fatsuit) sits amidst boxes of food and the three cats he pushes to overeat. One day Lajos finds Kálmán dead, possibly having exploded from overeating or having been mauled by one of the cats. He stuffs him, and immediately after, begins stuffing himself by locking his body onto a board surrounded by perfectly attuned machines. At the end of the procedure, a glass blade he has set up decapitates him and an electric saw severs his right arm. The two men are found by a customer, Dr. Regõczy (Géza Hegedžs D.), who puts them on display at a chic art exhibition. Dr. Regõczy, whose lecture is a continuation of the voiceover at the very beginning of the film, maintains that one can mount one’s father and oneself but can not mount the essence, that being what Lajos felt at the moment the blade cut off his head. The camera moves into the black void beyond Lajos’s bellybutton.

Thriller - En Grym Film

Directed by Bo Arne Vibenius (1974)

Also Known As: They Call Her One Eye / Thriller: A Cruel Picture

Genre: exploitation / revenge

Country: Sweden

Language: Swedish

Subtitles: English (.srt)

Video Resolution: 640 x 384FPS: 23.976

Video BitRate: 980 Kbps

Quality Factor: 0.166 b/px

From IMDB:

Plot Outline: A young woman, muted after a sexual assault as a child, is trained to seek violent revenge on those who have wronged her after being kidnapped and forced to work as a prostitute.

Review: THRILLER is a very well done rape/revenge film in the same vein as LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. The storyline is different but the results are the same...

Girl is raped as a child which causes her to be mute. She is picked up by a slick-talking guy and taken out for dinner and drinks. Back at his house, he drugs her and shoots her up with heroin for several days, so by the time he allows her to wake up out of her heroin-stupor, she is an addict. At that point she is turned-out as a prostitute and given some cash and drugs as "payment". She is given some free time to herself, where she uses the money earned to take karate,shooting, and driving classes. Needless to say, when she becomes proficient enough in these disciplines, she uses her newly honed skills to go after those that did her wrong...

Christina Lindberg is excellent as the beautiful and seemingly innocent looking mute girl. She is a real pleasure to look at, and the fact that she's naked through a good portion of the film doesn't hurt either. There is some "controversy" surrounding this film due to a couple of hardcore sex scenes (obviously not Ms. Lindberg, unfortunately...) that appear to be cut from a bad European porno. The scenes are not necessary for the film but were obviously added to heighten the shock value of the film overall. Other than those few scenes, and the famous scalpel-in-the-eye scene, the violence in THRILLER is relatively tame by exploitation/horror standards. Overall a really good film, if you are into the rape/revenge genre - I think it's always cool to see a strong, sexy, female lead who kicks ass, one of the reasons that I gravitate toward this type of film. The eyeball and sex scenes may be a little much for the casual movie-goer, more "extreme" fans should like this one.

A YAKUZA IN LOVE

After a rocky start, a yakuza enforcer and a timid waitress develop a loving relationship thanks partly to a mixture of drugs and kidnapping. Kinichi vows to clean up his act but the drugs begin to take effect, sending Kinichi and Yoko on a downward spiral with only love left to hold them together.

Violence, drugs, sex…after all the film is called A YAKUZA IN LOVE. The film is entertaining despite the fact that it contains excess amount of shock value moments.

What makes the film entertain (other than sex and violence) is that main character is overly whacked beyond our imagination. But Eiji Okuda is such a good actor that he sells every single wackiness of his character. He goes from one emotional state to a completely opposite emotional state in the next scene. He continuously beats the living hell out of his young love and—bizarrely enough—she gets horny afterward. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I was watching a Yakuza film or some redneck film. And that continues throughout the film. Really he is the reason to watch this film. Because other than his performance (and sex and violence), the film doesn’t have much to offer. Production value isn’t anything to cream about. They are appropriate for the film and physical and mental states of characters (which is nasty) but it wasn’t anything special. The stylistic approaches of the film was a little too standard for the film with this nutty caliber. But then again sex and violence will take care of what the budget couldn’t have.

In the end, A YAKUZA IN LOVE is still entertaining and bizarre enough to find audiences who enjoy the craziness of low budget Japanese yakuza films. The film is seriously loaded with wacky moments with dysfunctional lovers.

Snowblood Apple Rating for this film:

Entertainment Value: 7/10
Violence: 6/10
Laughs: 5/10
Sex: 7/10, Rokuro Mochizuki sure knew his business when he worked in the pink industry
Cute Kids: 1 - and 0 scary ones, for a refreshing change
Scary Men In Bad Drag: 1, and that's really 1 too many
Cold Baths in Kiddies' Paddling Pools: good for the complexion, I hear
Incompetent Gangsters: more than you can shake a baseball bat at
Litres of Tomato Ketchup: a couple of full buckets' worth
Films in a Similar Style: Another Lonely Hitman is the good twin of A Yakuza In Love

Chappaqua - 1966

Chappaqua - 1966

Written and directed Conrad Rooks

Year1966

Photography Robert Frank

Music Ravi ShankarThe FugsPhilip Glass (musical consultant)

Starring Jean-Louis BarraultWilliam S. BurroughsAllen Ginsberg Swami Satchidananda Ornette Coleman

Summary Semi-autobiographical story of Conrad Rooks, who travels to France to undergo a drug-withdrawal cure. Flashbacks to the beginings of psychedelia in San Fran."Written, Directed, Produced, and Acted in by Conrad Rooks. A true Beatnik cult classic. Swami Satchidananda was the first Swami to ever be brought to America, by Conrad Rooks himself. The United States was in turn introduced to Yoga and to the Eastern philosophies of Spiritual Healing. Conrad knew Andy Warhol before Andy knew Andy. And Conrad was integral part of the beat movement. He could be found in the coffee shops of Greenwich village long before it was hip or "Far Out". He grew up in New York city, but lived in India for years,traveled the Globe and met some very unusual characters. One must applaud this Filmmaker for having the perseverance and foresight to recognize that America was heading in to a very twisted and "trippy" period, one of the most unusual times in American History for sure. He invested all of his own money, yes it's true, NO other investors, unheard of today, for So many obvious reasons, did all of his own stunts, and somehow cast the icons of the beat generation to "act" in this movie. Ravi Shankar, Allen Ginsberg, And William S. Burroughs to name a few, what a cast indeed. He then proceeded to lead the viewers into this strange and hallucinogenic world where everything was psychedelic. Strange, interesting, and definitely warped, see it for yourself, you will be sure to be left "speechless"."