We looked at Abel Ferrara's 1981 film Ms .45 first. I'm pretty sure I saw it in the 1980's but I didn't remember anything much about it. It was Abel's follow up to The Driller Killer and it's about as goofy. Both are about crazy people murdering people and they are filled with nastyness and violence. In Ms .45 a young mute woman named Thana works for a sleazy dress designer. She's raped on the way home from work and left in an alley. She makes it home only to have a robber break in. He rapes her but this time she fights back and bashes his head in with an iron. Rather than call the cops Thana decides to chop up the body and distribute the pieces around New York City. The robber had a .45 pistol and she carries it around to mete out justice to the sleazy wankers and rapists in the city. It all ends badly for a lot of people. Many of them were innocents who didn't deserve death. Those of us watching were sorry that the trumpet player inthe night club scene didn't get killed. He was friggin' awful. It's not going to be a movie everyone likes. There's a certain level of unpleasantness through the movie as Thana goes madder and madder. The acting isn't the best and the script is kind of weak. There are some nice shots of New York's garment district. I wondered if the people on the streets knew they were going to be in a movie. I thought there was some humor and I laughed even if they weren't nice jokes. Occasionally the movie takes a turn that leaves you wondering what's up in Abel's head. You can see for yourself, YouTube has the movie, you can see it in the link I posted. Not a movie anyone needs to see but an interesting bit of low-budget exploitation work.
The Evil Clergyman started out as a dream by HP Lovecraft. He wrote it down in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer in 1933 and after his death it was published in Weird Tales. The adaptation was made back in 1987 by Charles Band as part of a longer anthology horror film called Pulse Pounders. Sounds like a porn title. Each segment was a half an hour long. The film was shot and shelved when Empire International Pictures went bankrupt. Sometime after that the film got lost. A VHS work print of The Evil Clergyman turned up in 2011 and it came out on dvd a year later. It doesn't look very good but it's watchable. Barbara Crampton arrives at a church where a clergyman had committed suicide. The two of them had had a love affair and she'd gone away. She wanders around his huge room and he appears in the flesh. Jeffrey Combs plays the clergyman. He's in full on creepy mode but she's all into him. After some shaggin' Barbara wakes up to find David Gale, as a human faced rat, talking to her. David Warner appears to warn her about Jeffrey and his familiar. He was a priest who tried to stop Jeffrey in the past. Jeffrey bashed in his head with a candelabra. More things happen. Eventually Jeffrey takes over Barbara's body and he leaves. Sad for her but it reminds you that screwing the clery just leads to trouble.
Since the first two films were short we watched the 2000 Japanese film Crazy Lips. It's the film that Gore From Outer Space is the sequel too. In this film a family is being besieged in their house by the common rabble and some bags of shit from the media. The brother of the family is supposed to have killed four young woman by chopping off their heads with an axe. The locals are angry and toss rocks through the windows all the time. The police do nothing and in fact treat the family like criminals. The detective thinks they know where the brother is hiding, he just barges into the house, then harasses and threatens them. One of the daughters goes to a psychic in hope of finding out who the killer is. Turns out the psychic and her assistant are pretty weird. Things get nastier and nastier, there's plenty of violence, some humor and some slaughter. While it gets pretty crazy near the end I didn't think it was as zany and over the top as the sequel. It wouldn't be something I would go out and buy but it was watchable and odd enough. It's going to appeal more to the Japanese horror fan. It's nice to see odd or interesting genre films from other countries.
Comments