"Romance Via Disturbing Motion Picture Art"

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The Adventures Of Indiana Jones
Trilogy Box Set:
Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, directed by Steven Spielberg, Color, , 1980
Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
starring Harrison Ford, Ke Huy Quan, directed by Steven Spielberg, Color, , 1984
Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, directed by Steven Spielberg, Color, , 1990
Distributed by Paramount Home Video
DVD Reviewed By: Ryan Lies

I’ll just say it now: THIS IS THE BEST DVD RELEASE OF 2003.

Which isn’t to say it’s necessarily the BE-ALL END-ALL DVD I would’ve liked, but hey, it’s the Jones movies, so whatever. It rocks my world.

Truth be told, this box set is pretty tight. As per usual, there are no Spielberg commentaries, but on the fourth supplemental disc, there are four featurettes covering the special FX, the stunts, the music and the sound design of all three films. And then there are three fun, informative, fairly exhaustive Making-Of documentaries, one for each film.

Raiders gets the most attention here, with the longest Making-Of and the most prominent coverage in the featurettes. This is to be expected. Raiders is probably the most revered and favorite among movie goers and critics. The sequels get their due, but on a diminishing scale.

This is where my only complaints about the box set come in: I would’ve liked the same amount of attention thrown at all films equally, as I feel they are all genius, kick ass fantasy action flicks, and while each has its strengths and weaknesses, they are all classics in my mind, and thus deserving of the same attention to detail that is given Raiders.

Temple of Doom has ALWAYS been my fave of the three. In fact, behind the original Night Of The Living Dead it is my second favorite movie of all time. I loved Raiders to death when I saw it back in 1981, but it was Temple of Doom that solidified my love of Indiana Jones, and it entrenched in me a love of action-fantasy cinema so deep that its influence is still apparent in everything I write. As an adult I can now see that it is an obviously darker, more intense film than the first, or the third, and I guess I can see why some folks might not dig on that, especially in a supposed “family/kids” movie. Whatever. I love every second of it. And I still demand that Short Round makes an appearance in the fourth film in 2005!

Spielberg and Co. seems to not care very much for Temple and it’s obvious in their discussions about the film in the Making-Of. George Lucas seems to be less ashamed of it than Spielberg, but neither really has many fond words for it. I really wish they would just stop whining about it. The movie has tons of fans, it was a huge hit at the box office, and as adventure filmmaking goes, it’s a superlative example of craftsmanship and filmmaking prowess. They should be proud of it and stop trying to appeal to the “sensitive masses” so much. So what if it’s dark and gory … screw the public of they can’t take it.

But those minor quibbles aside, I still say this was the sweetest DVD release of 2003. This is the movie trilogy I adore the most (sorry Romero and Lucas) and just to have this package of goodies sitting on my shelf is enough to warm my heart and set me humming that immortal theme song the whole live-long day!

Buy it NOW …

He’s a "Fiend From Beyond Time!" and he’s also known as Baron of Terror! He's The Brainiac! Evil occultist burned at the stake in 1661 by the Inquisition, hitching a ride on a passing comet at the last minute, vowing revenge on the ancestors of those who executed him! Only to return three hundred years later, pissed off and ready for carnage! And hungry for brains!

This is another one of the $4.99 DVDs my brother rescued from the bargain bin one cold, December night. This is classy, campy stuff here, folks. One of the goofiest Mexican horror treats this side of Santo! If you don’t have a good time with this, you need to check your pulse.

When the Baron returns to Earth after his joyride on the aforementioned comet, he has metamorphosed into a hideous ratlike THING. He can change into his human form when needs be, but when he gets hungry for brains, watch out! Sure, watching the evil dude feast on ice-creamy looking brains is nifty enough, but the real treat is watching him attack his victims by slapping his rubbery tongue against the sides of their faces and sucking out their grey matter. Thank God for cutaways, friends, so we don’t have to witness the horror of what we KNOW is happening. We can hear the sounds, catch the glimpses of that tongue slapping away … Don’t tell me they couldn’t afford brain-sucking effects! The directors MEANT for us to rely on our imaginations!

I hope that makes sense. Watch it, you’ll know what I’m getting at. A maladroit, slapping rubber tongue thing. It’s perfect. It’s sweet. It’s what life’s all about. Give me The Brainiac over Matrix Revolutions ANYDAY!

(Ryan Lies is a staffwriter for No-Fi "Magazine" and changes into his human form nightly.)

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Elephant
starring Alex Frost, Elias McConnell, directed by Gus Van Sant, Color, , 2003
Distributed by HBO Films/Fine Line
DVD Reviewed By: Claire Donner

With his most recent effort, Gus Van Sant sloughs off all of his usual sentimental moralizing and bitchy cleverness to create a seamless, grim, and perhaps totally amoral work of art describing the Oregon school day leading up to a Thurston High School-like student shooting. Elephant does not create heroes and villains, tragic or otherwise, nor does it posit causes or cures for the chain of events that lead to tragedy. Its contribution to the ongoing Columbine-spawned dialogue is simply that such things may be fundamentally unexplainable, and thus, unavoidable.

The camera follows one character after another in a series of preternaturally patient virtuoso tracking shots, moving with grim steadiness through the halls of an Oregon high school. Each character is as well-defined as any randomly-selected student would to any other; an assortment of guileless improvised performances by young unknowns contributes to the film’s unsentimental authenticity in no small way. One is presented with virtually every detail of this day in the life, from the grave and intimate to the seemingly meaningless; sometimes moments are repeated in order to establish every possible point of view of even the most mundane interaction, sometimes in slow motion as if new evidence might be extracted from between frames. The camera scrutinizes every detail of a person’s face, his clothing, his gestural vocabulary, his responses to stimuli. In darkened corridors a girl discusses an ominous doctor’s appointment with a boyfriend; in a sunlit classroom students myopically debate visible evidence of homosexuality; a young punk develops his film in a dark room; in a bathroom, a sullen youth picks spitballs from his clothing and hair. As one student moves aimlessly through the halls, ambient noise is overwhelmed by a sound that is not music, a blend of human voices and jazz hooks and white noise, a sound that is as vivid an emulation of undirected human thought as any film has born in recent memory.

One might think that such an impossibly intimate investigation of a real event could reveal a key to understanding why and how tragedy comes about, that from it one could produce a sure preventative strategy. Mr. Van Sant does not entertain such fantasies, but rather insists that the impossibility of truly understanding or predicting human violence is as certain as the fact that entropy will produce it. Elephant generates a sensation of dread and inevitability of almost Lovecraftian proportions. The longer the camera pores over the anonymous, undistinguished environments, the less we know about how they will affect an individual psyche. The closer we get to individuals, the less we are able to see what is behind or before them. To attend to one thing is to forfeit awareness of another. As we gaze at a student’s face the room around her blurs and contorts. As we focus on a victim, his assailant wavers and fades. Yet and still, no matter how many times a moment is revisited, it remains the same; even if we cannot see more than the back of a head, the camera glides onward with eerie assurance; outside, jet streams score the sky and fade, clouds congeal and dissipate, day turns to night.

After a long string of trashy urban fairy tales, Gus Van Sant has crafted a startlingly lucid portrait of the course of tragedy that is somehow more honest than Michael Moore’s documentary claim to an empirical formula for human cruelty. Though declaredly fictitious, Elephant is as inscrutable and unavoidable as the real-life event it describes.

(Claire Donner is a writer for No-Fi "Magazine" and a member of every militia.)

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Ghosts...Of The Civil Dead
starring David Field, Vince Gil, Nick Cave, directed by John Hillcoat, Color, , 1988
Distributed by Umbrella Entertainment
DVD Reviewed By: Claire Donner

Australian director John Hillcoat’s first film (one of only two) is a work of what he calls “faction”, fiction steeped in the facts of real-life tragedy -- in this case the disastrous effects of social instability and administrative corruption within the prison system. GHOSTS...OF THE CIVIL DEAD is structured around segments of a report created by a Committee on the Judiciary examining the escalation of inmate violence that lead to the 37-month lockdown of maximum security Central Industrial Prison (based on the permanently locked-down Marion in Illinois). The opening passage states, “The reasons for this escalation are not the subject of this report, although the actual incidents have been well documented.” Contrarily, Hillcoat’s preference for paranoid conspiracy theory drives him to treat the violence with a strange casualness - excising outbursts of horrifying violence from surrounding events, or thrusting his audience directly into the bloody melee without a care as to what catalyzed it or if it will end - in order to focus instead upon the minutiae of prison social structure and uncover the impetus behind its disintegration. Whether or not one buys the grim political assertions herein, Hillcoat’s investigation results in a heady bank of sturm and drang so dense as to inflict upon many an audience the kind of psychological injury and violent physical reaction one would expect of a film overwrought with the visceral shocks Ghosts largely avoids.

Central Industrial is one of many “new generation” prisons, humane penal institutions that house inmates in candy-colored cells decorated like dorm rooms and allow a progressive degree of freedom of movement about the building. Within these walls, a population of decaying addicts, rough trade and ink-riddled Neanderthals has established a kind of dirty harmony with crooked correctional officers. Rouged Lilly weaves calmly through a seething crowd of potential johns. Small-time Mafioso Waychek admires his jewelry and patiently awaits a delivery of cocaine from a corrupt screw while enjoying video of male strippers at work and play. A mute diminutive long time man crafts an unimaginably detailed model ship from minute wooden scraps. Everyone knows what to expect of each passing day of their sentences. However, this delicate balance is gradually corroded by an influx of hardcore subversive psychopaths who need more than the new generation’s kinder gentler brand of behavioral correction – a deliberate act of hostility, if Hillcoat is to be believed – and as the rules of this societal microcosm are turned inside out, tension mounts until restraint can no longer be maintained by any of its factions.

But the insidious administration responsible for this destructive decision remains faceless, its intentions only revealed through the pithy ruminations of the prisoners, and Hillcoat never presumes that the underpinnings of human violence and degeneration can be understood by simply analyzing their external manifestations as the central Committee document does. So, while the film could be sending the audience on a juvenile thrill ride through the actual mechanics of a riot, it instead allows a stifling intimacy with the emotional climate at Central Industrial, which in some ways proves to be a far more sickening experience. Music seeps in ceaselessly through every crack, warped by blown speakers and bizarre acoustics and a thousand other voices into a kind of anxious gurgling static that fills the set like miasma. Above this rises the relentless shrill baying of the new breed of incurable psychotics (could be rabid young prince of darkness Nick Cave in one of the film’s most powerful performances), sending fight-or-flight signals coursing through the neurons of cons and screws alike at all hours. An agitated gang seizes and violates a naïve young offender, and Hillcoat elides the event itself to focus on the victim’s broken anatomy and in particular his withdrawn, fractured countenance in the aftermath. The most information the audience ever receives comes from the near-constant stream of inner monologues belonging to a remarkable number and variety of figures, sometimes overpowering the actual progression of a concurrent crisis (which of course affords the viewer the highest possible degree of intimacy with the players). When the riot that incurs the lockdown finally comes about, one is thrown directly into the center of the gruesome action without any sense of how it started or how it will end. Although the grizzly visions of the perforated bodies of police officers will not soon be forgotten, the true focus of this scene is a series of portraits of each face in the crowd. Whether or not Hillcoat’s rather terrifying conspiracy theories regarding the disturbance of the social order hold water, he intuits the experience of its victims with astonishing lucidity, and the effect of this meditation is more potent than a simple portrayal of the sensational events Ghosts documents.

GHOSTS...OF THE CIVIL DEAD is brought back to us after twenty-five years by Umbrella Entertainment in the form of a lovingly programmed DVD with an overwhelming selection of extras. The score and script make this a must for any fan of Mr. Cave, and his brief brutal performance in the film hints at what must have made The Birthday Party the most notoriously violent act in its native Australia. Fancy meeting God?

Some days I’m just flabbergasted by the sheer number of movies that have been made over the years since the advent of cinema. I mean, there seems like there’s a billion of ‘em! Every week, so many new titles are released on DVD, stuff even I’VE never heard of, and I’m thinking...will they ever run out of movies to release?

I digress. Truth is, I love discovering flicks I’ve never seen or heard of, especially the kind you can find sitting in the bargain bins at your local department store. Besides the countless shoddy versions of Little Shop of Horrors, The Terror and Night of the Living Dead, there are some real gems that just somehow slipped through the proverbial cracks. Just waiting to leap into your paws for the low-low price of $4.99.

Crash Of The Moons is just such a flick. I’d never heard of this one, but my brother found it (along with another one called The Brainiac, which I will review later) and snatched it up. Trough it at me when he walked in the door, spilling my Cap’n Crunch all over the place. My face lit up. That night, I watched ‘em both.

Crash Of The Moons is pure 50s space adventure cheese. But good cheese. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a “so bad it’s good” kinda way. This flick is actually pretty entertaining. It’s silly, dated and the special effects budget was probably less than that of most public access shows, but so what. There’s a decent, diverting, if somewhat shallow, storyline and everything proceeds along with a naive charm that is the hallmark of many of these old Saturday-afternoon time-wasters.

What do you want to know? Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, must save the day when he discovers that a roving, “gypsy moon” is on a collision course with another planet. Tensions flare, men of science furrow their brows in consternation as they try to understand “how they could’ve overlooked such a thing.” The space vixens bat their eyes at the stalwart heroes. The rocket ships look like cardboard cutouts being pulled along on string. They even throw in an anti-fascist message! It’s all there. I loved it.

This “movie” is actually a collection of episodes of the Rocky Jones television show, which ran on NBC many moons ago (Ha! That was good), smashed together into one white-knuckle, intergalactic thrill ride! Well, anyway, it might not be really all that good at all, but dammit, I loved the heck out of it. As far as I’m concerned, special FX technology NEVER needed to advance beyond 1954! Screw CGI!

And it was only $4.99. Screw YOU if you can’t get $4.99 worth of enjoyment out of it!

This is one double-feature disc I’ll just go of. Usually there’s at least one movie on these things to make the purchase worthwhile, but unfortunately, I wasn’t too impressed with either. In fact, the second feature, Satan’s Bed was downright soporific. So much so I never even finished. And while cheesy, exploitation flicks are a big part of my life, even I can step back on occasion and say “life’s too short for this crap.”

Scare Their Pants Off features two deranged young men who get their kicks by kidnapping women and then convincing them, through bizarre, ritualistic play-acting, to sleep with them. Once their done, the dudes dump all the chicks in a car on a ferry boat and send them off to wake up confused and frightened a few hours later. There’s not really any violence to speak of, or much nudity, which would really be the selling point for a flick like this, but it’s pretty tame by exploitation standards. It’s misogynistic, yes. Almost gleefully so. But it’s so monotonous and well … well, GENTLE, really … that it’s hard to even raise an eyebrow at it. I’ve seen some offensive junk, man, and this just wasn’t it.

This might have made an interesting short film. MIGHT have. As it stands, it just flounders around for 61 listless minutes without a half a quarter of the energy of the fish at the end of that FAITH NO MORE video from years ago. (I just saw clips from it on VH1, give me a break.)

And the second feature, Satan’s Bed just didn’t even LESS for me. Usually I can find SOMETHING entertaining in even the most fetid celluloid dreck (hell, I actually liked The Milpitas Monster) but this one just put me to sleep. It stars Yoko Ono, but who care? She doesn’t actually DO anything in it. (Well, in the first half hour, anyway, which is all I was able to watch.)

At first, I thought this might be a good one. It had a nice, sleazy ambience to it. But it just got boring and threatened me with a headache. (Kind of like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, although I actually sat through all of that, God help me.)

Now I realize me admitting that I didn’t watch the whole thing pretty much negates any legitimacy my review of it might possess, and that’s fine. I’m not even gonna tell you not to watch it. Just cuz I thought it was intolerable doesn’t mean you might not get some kicks from it. I’m just telling you what I thought of the little I saw. Go buy it, make your own opinions. E-mail me and tell me I suck if I like totally missed out on a low-budget sleaze triumph. Maybe I did.

Either way, I can’t really recommend this DVD, unless you’re a cult/exploitation completist. And really, who cares in the long run? These kinds of flicks are an acquired taste anyway, and that acquired taste can be just as eclectic and contentious as any other.

If you liked these two, great. If not, hey, I’m with ya.

Something Weird does it again! Tossing two obscure, low-budget pieces of junk onto one DVD! And is usually the case, the movies are barely watchable, simple curiosities from the lowest depths of the Underground.

Usually on these double-feature discs, the first film is the most enjoyable and the second nothing but filler. And saying one of these kinds of movies is better than the other is tantamount to saying that hunk of roadkill over there has less flies on it than the one right here. With this DVD, though, that isn’t the case. Here, the primary feature is the weakest entry and the ALSO PLAYING is the real treat.

The Beast That Killed Women is yet another GUY IN A GORILLA SUIT movie (which you all I know I love), but this one hasn’t much gorilla. It’s mainly got a lot of nudists walking around, playing volleyball, lying in bed, walking around, splashing in pools, walking around and walking around. Occasionally a gorilla comes along and beats someone to death. The police investigate but the only eyewitness testimony is “It was big and hairy …” To which the cop asks: “How big? Big as a man?” To which the eyewitness says, “I don’t know, it was too dark and I didn’t see anything.” To which the cops says “But you say it was some kind of animal?” to which the eyewitness says “Oh, it was big and hairy.”

Yeah. Just like that. The director can’t seem to decide if he wants to make a travelogue for nudist colonies or a monster feature. Absolutely nothing happens for such long periods of time that I found myself fast-forwarding. Didn’t miss anything either. If you do this, make sure you stop at the scene where two African American women are talking in front of a window. I’m willing to bet that this is the worst acting EVER. Watch it a couple times.

Other than that, a chick shakes her tush right in front of the camera and then walks away, revealing a director’s chair that says THE END. Har har. Liked the tush, though.

The second flick here, The Monster of Camp Sunshine was a welcome relief. It wasn’t really a better made movie, it was just more entertaining. It’s an odd amalgam of monster movie, nudie cutie and silent film. No joke. Every once in awhile, a title card comes up, with either dialogue on it, or plot exposition.

Again, as in Beast a killer of some sort is terrorizing a nude beach. After attacking a girl the girl’s friends make one phone call and suddenly the army shows up. Well, army stock-footage anyway. Like, it’s CRAZY stock footage, too. Paratroopers, machine guns, guys in civil war uniforms, brandishing muskets and canons. It’s the most completely absurd and surreal climax to a movie I have ever seen. Naked people running around, army guys spraying bullets all over the place, and the Monster never even leaves the wide-open field it’s standing in.

At one point, the Monster is stalking a skinny-dipper and he’s no more than a yard from the girl. The Monster steps in a bear-trap and bellows like the Damned, but she never even hears it.

I really got a kick out of Monster and kinda wish it would’ve been the feature presentation on this disc. But a minor quibble. Oddly enough, it plays like a Woody Allen movie, with its black-and-white NYC settings and jazzy score. If Allen had ever made a monster nudie film. Which he should.

Get this disc, but get it for Monster At Camp Sunshine.

This is a film I've always wanted to see, but never got around to. Don't Look Into The Basement is set at a Sanitarium where the head doctor has just been murdered by one of the many violent patients. A new nurse comes in to start her new job when she finds out from the head nurse what had happened and while upset by the news, she tries to adjust to the hopital and its odd residents. It's soon after she arrives when more strange things start to happen and by the time it's all over she finds herself questioning her own sanity. And just what is in that basement anyway?

I liked this film and it had interesting characters and the lead actress actually impressed me with her reaction to the things going on around her. Another actor who impressed me was Bill McGhee who portrayed the slow, but large Sam. Most of the cast do a great job really. The whole production has shades of both Hershell Gordon Lewis and Alfred Hitchcock and how can you go wrong with potential influences like that? Well, you could, but they did a pretty good job here with what was probably a very very small budget...which is evident by the lack of hospital staff (read: more actors)and more emphisis on the patients themselves. But I guess the story would be very diffeent if there were more actors as staff people.

Brentwood Video / BCI Eclipse is known for putting out those new DVD compilations you may have seen in stores with 10 movies for 10 bucks or so and that is how I saw this film on the "Evil Places" 2 double sided disc DVD set. Not a bad idea and I've been suprised at some of the transfers I've seen so far. So far I've seen a some crappy ones, but some have been good to great. Most seem to be at least of video tape quality. This film which I haven't seen before seems to be slightly above that quality. It's got some rich colors, but also can be a little dark at times. What I HATE HATE HATE is that they burn their stupid menu credits into the film about 4/5ths into the movie. What the hell is that about?!? Are they worried that people are going to bootleg the films like how TV networks brand their logos on to TV shows? That's sort-of ok for TV, but not for cheap DVDs you just bought. Put that kind of info AFTER the movie not during. Anyway, beside that travesty,, this a nice little film to pick up cheap to own or definitely as a rental.

Nothing gets me in the holiday spirit like cold temps, snow falling like Times Square New Years confetti, Salvation Army bells jing jing jingling … and throwing Elves into the VCR!

Ho Ho Ho!!!

Elves is classic BAD. Just absolutely wretched filmmaking, from the man who brought the world Cyber C. H.I.C. “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the town, blood-thirsty elves are about to get down!”

Dan Haggerty (Grizzly Adams to us 70’s kids) star sa Mike McGavin, a burnt-out, cop-on-hiatus who takes a job as a department store Santa to make an extra buck, and ends up entangled in a plot by Nazi’s to bring about a master race to conquer the world!

Honestly, that’s it folks. Genetically bred elves are supposed to mate with a virgin. First time I saw this movie I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Not only is the plot completely wacky, there’s a plethora of silly treats sprinkled throughout. Stuff you just won’t BELIEVE!

I won’t spoil anything, but a highlight is watching Dan Haggerty (who’s very clean cut and “family-oriented” now) cussing every other word and chain-smoking his way through what was obviously a quick paycheck. There’s actually a scene where he’s brushing his teeth AND smoking at the same time! Awesome! That’s HARDCORE, folks.

Best of all is the fact that the movie is called Elves but there’s only one damn elf in it! JUST ONE. That’s it. It’s rubbery, floppy, and has its mouth open at all times. Even the box talks up the fact that elves (as in, MORE THAN ONE) are menacing the characters, but this elf does his yuletide dirty deeds solo.

Hunt this one down and have a ball. While others are watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time, you’ll be watching what will undoubtedly become your new holiday tradition: Elves. Trust me … this is the goods, baby.

So Merry Christmas … and to all a goodnight.

It doesn't seem that long ago when my own "sweet sixteen" came round and while it did ring in a whole new kind of life to me, after seeing this film I realize that anything or one I did during that year was nothing compared to the life of your average 16 year old German girl. I rented this movie thinking that it was a silly "after-school special" film about the tough lives of 16 year olds in the seventies...little did I know that it would be German 16 year olds in the 70s and that they would be half or all naked most of the time (the poster shown here wa not the generic cover I saw in the video store). Seriously 16 year old German girls are messed up (if you can judge them all by this film, and I'd like to think you can...at least for the purposes of this review). The film starts with a creepy guy luring a little girl to follow him with promises of candy and puppies. He takes her to an apartment building where one of the German 16 year olds in question sees him and calls over one of her fellow German 16 year olds over to help. So where does this creppy pedophile take this little girl to molest her? Well right in front of a glass door of one of the apartments. "Ok", you say to yourself, as you watch this part of the movie, "I guess since this guy is a sick pervert, I guess he is just blinded to the fact that he's trying to do this right IN FRONT OF AN APARTMENT'S GLASS DOOR WHERE HE WOULD MOST LIKELY BE CAUGHT BY AT LEAST SOMEBODY!!!" So let's just forget that little suspension of belief... He is then confronted by a pair of said 16 year old German girls, do they attck him with tooth and nail? Do they scream for help or chase him off? What would you do? Well if you were a 16 year old German girl (and, as I said, if you could judge 16 year old German girls by this movie) then you would do what these two did. They REMOVE ALL OF THEIR CLOTHES AND TELL THE PERV HOW HOT HE'S MADE THEM. What the hell!!! This is not the movie I thought I had rented. What follows is a series of short "stories" to warn us of the dangers of German 16 year old girls and the dirty dirty dirty things they do. I don't remember what the rest of the stories were about. I just remember pubes so thick that they may as well have been called "hair panties" (this was shot in the 70s after-all). All I know is that if I see one or many 16 year old German girls walking my way I'm going to start walking the other way... If anything, just because I wrote this review where I kept on mentioning "16 year olf German girls."

(Chris Beyond is the creator of No-Fi "Magazine" and has a German pal named Cristoph.)