Manborg

Stop motion magic.

Manborg is a 2011 spoof/homage to cheesy action/horror/sci-fi from the late 80s/early 90s. So, it takes the most ridiculous aspects of films like Cyborg, Robocop, Hellraiser, Terminator II, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Hardware, Mortal Kombat, etc. and turns them into a brilliantly entertaining film that should satisfy fans of Full Metal Yakuza, Hobo with a Shot Gun, Tokyo Gore Police, Isle of the Damned and most of Troma's output. It's unbelievably good, a result of mixing conventional latex effects, stop motion, and comically bad laptop effects.

Manborg was originally a soldier in the last great war against Hell's armies, led not by Satan, but by the dreaded Count Draculon, a bio-mechanical demon created on a shoe-string budget. But of course, that soldier was killed in combat and made into a super-warrior, only to wake up in a futuristic time full of future cassettes and future locks and total world domination by Hell.

A blonde Peter Sellers plays a future Dr. Strangelove.

Manborg is quickly captured and locked up with several archetypal prisoners --Liberty, the Australian punker whose power seems to be to shoot two revolvers at once while dancing, Mina, the kick-ass knife ninja chick who has the power of going into anime attack mode, and #1 Man, the superstrong and disciplined martial-arts master. They are held captive by the evil Baron and his henchmen Dr. Scorpius and Shadow Mega, a hot cyborg woman, and forced to fight in an arena against Hell's minions and giant robot monsters.

Liberty, his sister Mina, and #1 Man. The good guys.

All of the usual action cliches follow: Manborg suffers from amnesia and can't explain himself, so he is not trusted by the other prisoners. But then he quickly masters his robo-human powers and becomes their hero. They break out of prison and go into hiding. Heads get blown off. Lots of scary skeletal and zombie-esque bad guys in Nazi-style uniforms. Liberty and #1 Man try to make a box of instant macaroni, blah, blah, blah. 

A jailer-bot and Shadow Mega. Bad guys.

The movie works great as a parody, but also contains a lot of really witty and bizarre additional humor, and some really great horror effects. Totally recommended if you like anything cool. It kept me entirely entertained the whole way through and I laughed out loud at least a dozen times. It's great. Made me happy.

RATING:

The Visitor (1978)

Nothing to do with the movie. 

The Visitor is getting a lot of buzz as they've recently re-released it to theaters, which is where I saw it and it was AWESOME. Seeing something like this on the big screen is just indescribable.

Let me describe it for you.

There are very few films like The Visitor. First of all, just take a look at the cast: Mel Ferrer, Glen Ford, Lance Henriksen, John Huston, Joanne Naill, Sam Peckinpah, Shelley Winters and Franco Nero as space-age Jesus Christ.

Shocked speechless by basic information for the rest of the movie.

That's right. Django himself. As the savior of mankind. In space. 

Kardashians got nothing on Katy.

John Huston stars as some kind of galactic warrior who, along with his often misplaced theme music, tracks down the evil children (indirectly?) spawned by some space criminal who sowed his seed all over the universe. He is locked in combat with an eight-year-old Earth girl (played by 12 year old Paige Connor) and her evil pet falcon. How does he conduct this combat, you ask? By going up on a skyscraper roof top, where interpretative dancers cast their shadows on white sheets, and lights dance around like a low budget Close Encounters. In the psychedelic world, he turns her into popcorn or something.

This little girl spends most of her time wreaking havoc at basketball games, gymnastics meets, ice rinks and any other sporting event she manages to attend or compete in. She also cusses out old cops (who seem to be incapable of applying the breaks of their cars when blinded) and generally sasses baby sitters, house keepers and anyone else who can't escape her insidious presence. She's a low budget Damien.

John Huston as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

There's a weird cabal of rich white stuffed shirts who, for no reason ever fully explained, want to control the sex life of the evil girl's mom, using young Lance Henriksen to impregnate her and bring forth a boy child... for no reason every fully explained. They even resort to hiring evil futuristic football players with no faces to kidnap her and implant something in her womb. (SPOILER: It's a baby.) This gives her a great opportunity to reconnect with her ex-husband (Sam fucking Peckinpah) by seeing him for an abortion.

Hint: This is not a homoerotic incest scene.

Then, it sort of turns into The Birds. Birds were apparently the weapon the good aliens used to kill that space criminal guy, "fatally wounding him, in the brain."

Add together the Birds, Close Encounters and the Omen II... and throw in an Italian space Jesus.. and you've got The Visitor.

This movie is full of beautiful, arty, psychedelic scenes that make no sense whatsoever. The plot is so convoluted that it's brilliant. And the dialog... just see this damn thing, already. Or you'll never forgive yourself.

RATING

The Brood

If you like early Cronenberg (and if you don't, you are probably at the wrong blog) then this is a movie you should see, because it is early Cronenberg. It's not exactly a secret, but it's probably an easy one to miss. It slides right under the radar because it's not as popular as Scanners, not as weird as Videodrome and not as Viggo Mortensen as Eastern Promises. 

In The Brood, lots of people get beaten to death with blunt objects (primarily mallets) by weird mutant albino children who seem to be distant cousins of Chaka. 

At least Chaka had teeth and sexual organs. So you know he was a fun date.

Melodrama (or psychodrama, specifically, Psychoplasmics) and body horror abound, and everyone needs a new hairstyle. (See: Early Cronenberg.)

But this film does also contain some really great, disturbing scenes that make it one of the more memorable horror films of the late 70s. Cronenberg was well on his way to becoming a weirdo icon with this one. It might be the first film of his classic era (which ends with Spider, I'd say).

Don't eat the baby.

Oliver Reed turns in a brilliantly bombastic performance, as usual. And it's fun to pretend the little blonde girl in this movie is Carol Anne from Poltergeist. Make a riffing game out of it by quoting classic lines from that franchise. Drink if they don't make any sense in the context of the Brood.

You have something on your face, grandma.

Shockingly, the blood in this film is as tomato-red as any typical 70s schlock, and there is zero attempt to make any of the blunt trauma wounds look realistic. You'd think that might have occurred to Cronenberg, but he certainly puts in a lot of effort into other weirder effects. Like lymphatic chin tumors and boil babies.

Give us better make-up, father!

RATING:

Repo Chick

Repo Chick is a 2009 film by Alex Cox, but it's not a sequel (nor prequel nor postquel nor NyQuil) to his 80s film Repo Man. He still decided to cash in on the name here, and it's safe to say that if you like Repo Man and maybe latter-era John Waters or highly stylized comedies like But I'm a Cheerleader, you will probably like this movie. It's also got some nods to Dr. Strangelove.

This is a pretty good indicator of what this movie is like.

Someone called Jaclyn Jonet plays the titular Repo Girl. She's cute and wears a million cute outfits in this movie, but when I googled her has an exceptionally short filmography, though she does star in some TV series called The Boring Life of Jacqueline. Old Karen Black is in it. That's a pretty good sign. And an even older Francis Bay. Rosanna Arquette shows up, too. Along with Miguel Sandoval and Danny Arroyo.

Yep. A Pink Pith helmet.

It's also pretty evident that no actual sets or locations were used. Everything was green-screened, giving it a low-budget surreality. Like if you dreamt in bad superimposition. A lot of the backgrounds are from model train sets. At first you will cringe, but trust me, this actually works really well for the film.

Rosie Arquette standing in front of toy trains.

It's pretty interesting satire of pop culture, the post-housing market collapse economy and post-9/11 politics. Billboards that say "God Loves Golf" and "Eat Meat." There's a white dread who uses a horrible Jamaican accent. It really has it all.

RATING:

Kamikaze Girls

Kamikaze Girls is a Japanese movie starring two J-Pop stars. If you are into J-Pop you probably recognize them. If you aren't into J-Pop, it doesn't matter, so let's move on.

Kamikaze Girls is a Japanese movie about two cute girls. One is a rococo-obsessed Lolita who can embroider the hell out of shit. The other is a biker gang chick who seems like she would have made a good pair with Fonzie, except her bike is more of a Jetsons Bigwheel. She needs some really good embroidery done on her jacket. Somehow, the two become friends in spite of themselves.

Cute.

Cuter.

The quirkiness of the movie comes across in the way it is told. It's narrated by the rococo Lolita girl and she's clearly deranged, at least by non-Japanese standards. There's also an anime backstory segment, which is entertaining even if you aren't into anime and don't listen to J-Pop.There's some story of betrayal in there, too, but that's not really what I remember about Kamikaze Girls.

This happens.

And this happens.

And this guy is in it.

If you like quirky, highly stylized Japanese movies, there's no reason to not watch this ASAP. If you like cute Japanese girls, there's no reason not watch this ASAP. It's good, it's fun, it's heart warming and it's ridiculous.

RATING:

Killer Tongue

This obscure gem is a Spanish-British collaboration, set in New Mexico, USA, and filmed in Spain. It's dubbed in because it's shot using largely Spanish actors, except for the inimitable Robert Englund, who plays a prison warden with a bad toupee.

This is not his bad toupee. 

Nothing about this film is good in any conventional sense, but everything about it is great. It's basically the story of some criminals, a meteoroid, some nuns and some poodles. Some kind of object comes into Earth's atmosphere and crash lands in the desert, but not before a chunk flies off and into a woman's soup, giving her a Venom-like body suit and a long, vampiric tongue, and turning her four French poodles into drag queens that do her bidding, mainly by capturing people for her to eat.

She is pretty sexy, if that matters to you. Less sexy when her tongue is killing people or talking to her in a ridiculous New York accent.

There's also a very sexy nun, pictured here with the drag queens.

 

And seen here forcing a criminal to give a gas nozzle head. 

And that dude winds up dead. 

Ridiculous effects, absurd violence, strange and uncomfortable humor, brightly colored sets and costumes. It's really fun and totally bizarro and I can't believe it isn't more well known. 

RATING: