All fur coats and nylon knickers

14 January 2014 (Later that day) Strip Nude for Your Killer.

After that title, do I actually need to say anything else? Apart from, it's Blood and Black Lace if everyone in it, male and female, was a...well, let the Ayatollah of RocknRolla say it for me...

Following a model's death during a botched abortion, who is the motorcycle-helmet-and-black-leathers slasher (looking like if Dario Argento sponsored a MotoGP team) switchblade-ing up vapid trollops and sleazy sexual predators alike in and around the Albatross [no, really] photo modelling agency in never-clearly-specified-but-probably-Milan?  

Can it be the predatory-lesbian agency owner? 

Or her Paul Bearer-looking lech of a husband-in-name-only? 

Or Edwige Fenech and her amazing cropped hairdo and nylon undies combo, as a photographer who secretly just wants to be a model? 

Or her sort-of boyfriend, a photographer introduced picking up a wannabe model at a swimming pool and getting her out of her bikini and into a public sauna room sex scene with an alacrity that would make an 80s New York bathhouse habitue dizzy [my legal team advises me to assure you that this is definitely NOT the Terry Richardson story]? 

Or the other photographer, who 'doesn't have much to do with women'?

Not telling!  Half the fun of these not-Bava films is being absolutely positive the culprit is him (or her, or they), only to have that be the very next victim.  The OTHER half, of course, is swooning over the groovy pads, counting the number of prominently-displayed J and B bottles (four), and grooving on the amazing theme music, which here is never more than 5 seconds away from breaking down and giving in to its urge to become 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone'

Film sets out from the first scene to be as 70s Eurosleaze as possible, with the first shot, and the about-to-be-botched abortion, from between the hapless girl's legs, looking up, with only the careful positioning of the OBGyn's head preventing it from becoming a Jess Franco film ("Why the doctor have an afro? Oh...that's not *his* hair...").  Then we're off through a whirl of switchblade stabbings, attempted rape, domestic abuse, blackmail, voyeurism, aforementioned predatory lesbianism, reckless driving, petty larceny, implied incest, and many 70s-style real breasts and abundant pubic regions, while police bumble along in the background and the actual detecting business is picked up by civilians for no particular reason, and the culprit is identified mainly by being one of the four-or-five speaking roles left alive by the end.  The few survivors seem remarkably untroubled by the grisly murders of almost everyone they know, and the film ends with an unsubtle joke reference to anal sex. Classy!

You'll like this if: You're old enough to remember the 70s, or you wish you were (but not in a tiresome Austin Powers-hangover way; if you're that person, you're an arse, and you're not allowed to watch this film.  Go on, piss off. No-one likes you anyway).

You'll hate this if: you're the chap who complains when the killer shown throughout the film in tight-fitting leather is obviously not remotely the actual culprit unmasked at the end; or you're Andrea Dworkin

This film is as old as your writer, and even more unfashionable and dubious.  Worth another watch? Worth MANY; if you need a reason to rewatch after tracking the plot holes and/or ogling the many implant-free 70s breasts have palled, and the mid-70s Italian interior design and fashions can't persuade you, then I don't know who you are, and we have no way to communicate.

Tomorrow's film has important advice: don't raise your child in an incredibly perverse and repressively religious environment; they'll grow up to have poor hygiene and develop a fungal nail infection.  Also, they'll probably kill people and collect their eyeballs.  Mainly the nail thing, though, because that is just icky.

She does enunciate very clearly, though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=aIoSlM1np1M

Look, she was in Friday the 13th: The Series, so that counts as a horror connection.

Besides, her 'British?' accent made my spouse whimper like a tiny girl, so into the horror blog she comes.

Stupid burns like a white-hot flame

Well.. if she can do it (or, perhaps more accurately, her underpaid PA can do it), then I suppose I can blog every day too.

I want you to know, non-existent readers, that I have never before in my life said "Bitch, please"...

But..."Bitch, please"

[adds a third spoonful of refined sugar to my morning coffee, and reaches over for another cinnamon roll]

Ill-Advised Remake Monday: The Wicker Man

I'm kicking off my semi-regular-when-I-can-be-bothered series of 'Ill-Advised Remake Mondays', with the Neil Labute remake of The Wicker Man. Yes, I know that it's a large, slow target, and it's very easy to mock it, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't, or make it any less fun when one does. Also, I've had a bad day at work, so I need to make cheap jokes about bees; indulge me.

Now, readers of this blog may already be familiar with the original; Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, Edward Woodward, human sacrifice and the concept of martyrdom, ideological battle between paganism and Christianity; bleak, almost existential fatalistic ending: right? Well...fuck all that for the remake; this film's all about the bees, baby. Well, bees...and bitches; because, see, right, the Summerislers in this new version are beekeepers (the island has been resited to somewhere off New England, as far as I can tell, so no more of the original's apple orchards maintained by a fluke of the Gulf Stream); and, like bees, you know, have a queen, and like all the men are like drones, see? So it's like a metaphor, cause the women are all in charge and stuff and...Fear not, gentle reader; I have not had a lobotomy over the course of the last paragraph; I am merely trying to put myself in the mental place where I find the endless fucking hive/bee/drone/queen references clever and interesting, rather than thuddingly obvious and dull. Thanks, Neil, but do you think you could keep the subtext, you know, UNDER the text? Rather than writing it on a cricket bat and hitting me in the face with it? I'd be ever so obliged to you.

When the film isn't chucking CG bees at you, it's tubthumping a hysterical 'OMG! Women in charge!!1!!' motif; yes, give women a sniff of power and all they really want to do is reduce men to shambling heavy labourers and sperm donors. I'm not saying that necessarily ISN'T what we want to do...Seriously, I'm not even going to call this as misogyny; it's too stupid and ill-formed for that. Not that the men come out of it any better; morons, cowed by bitches.

All the plot inconsistencies of the original, that become evident after a few viewings when you're used to the shock of the ending, come screaming out at you in this one; if it's necessary for the conspiracy to keep a person alive, why would they deliberately put them in enough peril to kill them...TWICE? So EVERYONE on the island is in on the conspiracy, and is just fine about it? And, sorry but; what do they get out of it, again? Christopher Lee's Summerisle looked like a bloody good laugh; drink, running around bonfires naked, costumes, a bit of a sing-song; Ellen Burstyn's overgrown hive looks about as much fun as an afternoon at a New Age Fayre, drinking wheatgrass and listening to a tabor. Actually, slightly less fun than that.

However, in the fine old Joel-era MST3K tradition; let's find something nice to say about the movie...









...scenery was nice; fields, trees, whatnot.

...It's always good to see Ellen Burstyn in a film (even if it is while wearing a nightie and a faceful of leftover-from-Braveheart woad).

...the climactic scene where a character is placed inside a human-shaped structure (I'm being coy for the one lost Peruvian tribe untouched by civilisation who haven't seen this or the original yet), by being hoisted up between the legs into the body cavity is a nice touch, in its unsubtle way.

There: 3 nice things, and 3 more than this film deserves; now I deserve a RAMchip and a lie-down. If you are wondering why I haven't mentioned Nicolas Cage's performance...honestly, I thought it was kinder not to. Wild At Heart was a long, long time ago.