Snowpiercer (2014): The Faults in the System

Snowpiercer (2014)
dir: Bong Joon-Ho

The capitalist system has faults. It's a fact. Every pure ideological system has faults in it, especially when you take the human factor into account. The human urge for tribalism, as well as the human urge for natural selection both factor heavily into the capitalist system's faults.

As such, Snowpiercer isn't just an allegory for capitalism, so much as it is an allegory for every caste system that has ever been set up.

The set-up for Snowpiercer comes from modern times. There is an extremely long train that was built to continuously moves around a series of interconnected railways on an annual circuit around the Eurasian hemisphere. After it was built, the corporations decided to try to combat climate change by launching a chemical into the atmosphere, sending the Earth into an Ice Age, where the only thing that seems to have survived is this train.

The train is set up as a caste system. The rear of the train are the poor people, who have to eat protein bars that look like black Jell-O bricks. They live in squalor and tight quarters with bunk beds and poor lighting. The front of the train are the rich people, who are, according to the poor people, getting to eat steaks and live like kings. At the very front is the engine, where the leader rules the whole train from front to back.

The train runs on a perpetual motion engine, and so there is little to do but sit and wait. The poor people have sex and children, and wait around until the guards come in to give them their food. Now and then, the guards will take two children up front, and periodically scour the back for people to work with the front people. One such resident is a violinist, who is forcibly separated from his wife to live life in the front to play violin for the rich people. Two children are forcibly taken from their parents at the beginning of the film, for reasons not explained to anybody. When the poor start to revolt, the guards take one of the passengers and freezes his arm by setting it outside the window and then shattering it off.

Even though the poor don't work, and didn't pay to be on the train, the conditions are so insufferable that a revolt would always be bound to happen. Spurred on by Gilliam (John Hurt), Curtis (Chris Evans) and his side kick Edgar (Jamie Bell) lead a revolt to take over the engine, going through the various trains that get increasingly classier and more decadent as they get closer to the engine. Along the way, they fight guards and big bosses on several occasions, much like a video game.

Which brings us to the first problem of Snowpiercer. The fighting sequences are not that good. I know I've been a bit spoiled by The Raid, but the fighting sequences start out afflicted with shaky cam, and with an inability to discern who was fighting who, or where anybody was. Joon-Ho, who previously directed the suspenseful The Host, has very little grasp on how to direct a fighting sequence when there are too many people involved in the fight. The camera is all over the place, the editing is strange, and the people are indiscernible. Plus, the timing of the scenes are off. As the movie goes on, and there are fewer and fewer people to deal with, Joon-Ho's direction gets slightly better, but the initial rebellion, the axe sequence, and even a little bit of the classroom sequence are all fraught with problems that seem to dissipate by the sauna sequence.

The set-up for Snowpiercer isn't subtle in its intentions. Anybody paying attention to politics anywhere should be able to parse out Joon-Ho's political statements with a flinch of the eye. But, Snowpiercer is far more nuanced than one might give it credit for. It asks questions about food supply in closed systems. It asks questions about overpopulation, and slave labor. It asks questions about political indoctrination and obedience. Most of all, it asks questions about idealism and intent.

To say that Snowpiercer is a gung-ho radical "take over the system" movie is to deny it the whole final act it has been working towards. In the final act of Snowpiercer, Boon-Ho decimates all the ideology that he has been building up for the first 100 minutes of the film. For 100 minutes, Boon-Ho gives the microphone to the Occupy movement, essentially. The poor. The ones who have been oppressed. But, in the last 20, he gives it to the leader. The 1%. The owner of the train. The builder. And the controller of the engine. And in the final 3, he ends with the most radical note in an already very radical movie.

There are flaws in Snowpiercer. A lot of them, in fact. The fighting is the most major one, in my opinion. The score swings between not bad to HAAAAAANS ZIMMMMMER boring. The elements in the allegory don't always hold up to real world equivalents, or do so in much more minute/subtler ways. A simultaneous flaw and also benefit is that Snowpiercer doesn't answer all the questions it raises. The emotional climax is played too earnestly. And, there are a lot of weird techniques that seem to draw attention to themselves for illogical reasons.

Much like the ice formations that build on the tracks, the flaws in Snowpiercer present merely elements that jar the movie, but never completely derail it. The pacing and visuals of Snowpiercer outside the fight sequences are spectacular, the tension is top notch, and the acting is completely aces. Tilda Swinton practically steals the show with her imitation of Margaret Thatcher, and Evans is perfectly capable of most of the scenes in Snowpiercer, with one major exception towards the end.

Snowpiercer gives both action movie thrills, and intelligent fodder to chew on for days. Modern caste systems, constant rebellion, the justification on either side, and how it could be applicable or not to modern society are all topics that aren't left with answers, and the most dangerous answer is still in the movie, which ends with a note of hope and promise. The allegorical fodder makes Snowpiercer a Required Viewing, even though it has some deep flaws throughout the film.

+1 (2013): The Insanity of Unchecked Sci-Fi

+1 (2013)
dir: Dennis Iliadis

The phenomenon of Deja Vu is always fascinating. But, what if you actually have been there before? And, what if you got a second chance to fix the things you have wanted to fix? +1, the horrifically titled new movie from IFC Midnight, asks us some of these questions, but doesn't really care about the answers.

The concept of +1 is an original one. As an alien meteor crosses overhead, it disrupts the circuits of the Earth causing phase shifts in the fourth dimension. Whenever there's an electrical outage, suddenly there appears another copy of you in the place you were at a set distance in time. At one point, it's about 30-45 minutes in the past. And, with each turn, the phase shift gets shorter and shorter.

All of this is set at a rich kid's rave party at the start of summer vacation. David has just screwed up his relationship with Melanie because he misidentified another girl with the same fencing braid and Melanie found him kissing her. David, Teddy, and Allison all go to the rave thrown by their mutual friend, as does Melanie and a new boy toy. After Teddy hooks up with a girl, and David screws up his chances with Melanie, the first phase shift occurs putting a copy of everybody 30 minutes in the past.

Which leads to questions. What do you do when you find a copy of yourself? Can you fix the past? Can you get the girl back? What do these copies want? What the hell is this movie about?

+1 never really answers any of these questions with any amount of satisfaction. In fact, +1 is really intent on playing with your expectations for a solid explanation and any sense of moral justice. Instead of presenting a story with strong moral grounds and a cohesive conclusion, Iladis merely is presenting us a night where the answers aren't given, morals aren't learned, and nobody is any better or worse by the end of the night. Well, unless they're dead.

+1 has a sort of nihilistic take no prisoners attitude that is so refreshing and maddening in equal measures. Isn't a movie better when nobody changes? Is it more realistic, even though it is a movie about phase shifting? +1 highlights humanities worst tendencies when confronted with fear and an other. And, it goes batshit crazy as well.

I do mean batshit crazy. And, no I'm not spoiling it. But, to say that +1 flies off the rails early and often is understatement. As Joe Bob Briggs would have said, "Anything can happen at any time."

What makes +1 worth watching is that Iliadis handles the crazy with a master's hand at pacing. Once the movie hits the party, the movie knows exactly what the pacing should be for the specific hits to let the audience process, even if it is processing nothing but air. The pacing builds and builds until a rip roaring climax that is amazing.

Iliadis is heavily assisted by Mihai Malaimare Jr, a cinematographer who started as a Francis Ford Coppola protege who worked on each of Coppola's previous three films and most recently was the 70mm director of photography for P.T. Anderson's The Master. If you've seen The Master, you know how gorgeous Malaimare's work is, but here the camera is alive and electric.

Malaimare doesn't let the image go less than full bore saturation for one second. The screen is almost oversaturated in a way that makes you feel like you've taken a tab of LSD or Ecstasy. Everything is bright, electric and lush, all hitting your eyeballs in ways that you've not experienced before, appropriate for a rave party movie. Iliadis opens the movie with a camera pan over lush red roses, and they're redder than red. But, while it is oversaturated, it's never garish as Showgirls tended to be. This is a full spectrum movie which will blow your mind.

While +1 is a rather empty headed calling card of a sci-fi film, the actual craziness within combine with amazing pacing and visuals to create a toxic heady concoction that is far better than it deserves to be. It's imminently rewatchable because of the human story. The acting is good enough, though rarely anything to write home about. +1 an imminently weird and brilliant film that feels as filling as the techno song you were just dancing to for 8 minutes while high at that rave that one time, that sort of goes doof doof.

Paprika (2006): A Tale of Two Cities, With a Little Bit of Spice

Paprika (2006)
Dir: Satoshi Kon

The final finished movie of the late, great, Satoshi Kon was 2006's Paprika, a film exploring the space between what are considered to be polar opposites: reality and dreams. It was a continuation of Kon's fascination of the spaces between, as well as what perception is to reality, as he previously explored in Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress. Kon, as always, is also fascinated with the exploration of film itself, and the storytelling devices within, including meta-filmmaking, and what it means to make a meta film.

The title character Paprika is a dream-world alternate persona created by the psychiatrist Dr. Chiba for use during dream sessions with her patients. Where Dr. Chiba is a serious woman with black hair and a stern, professional demeanor, Paprika is a redhead with bright clothing and a chipper demeanor. Using a new device called the DC Mini, Dr. Chiba is able to insert herself into her patients' dreams to analyze them and to create a deeper connection.

Somebody has stolen a few extra DC Minis, and is using them to start penetrating even the waking conscious of anybody who has used the DC Mini at any point to pull them into a singular dream world. That dream world is a chaotic parade of toys, technology, and symbols marching to...somewhere, absorbing and destroying any and all of the participants that it brings into its reality. Now, Dr. Chiba, her boss, and Dr Tokita, the inventor of the DC Mini, must figure out who stole the DC Minis, and stop them from taking over the minds of the world.

Of course, that description barely even scratches the surface of what Paprika does, which is float in between reality, dream world, the internet and cinema with a reckless abandon that is breathtakingly fluid. The relative straightforwardness of the plot is just a device on which Kon hangs his favorite obsessions. He opens the movie with a dream collage based in several different movies establishing a detective character and patient through his recurring nightmare. Then, it flows right into a dream-like reality opening credits sequence where Paprika breaks all the laws of reality as the credits are projected onto the reality of the buildings.

Kon's obsessions with where real life ends and our perception begins causes the worlds to beat and bash at each other throughout the movie, creating an almost hallucinatory sense of what is actually being put on screen. Which is exactly what the medium of animation should be used for: to create a fully integrated world where reality isn't what it could be. Like Spirited Away, the animation used in Paprika creates a fictional world where it feels like anything can happen.

Kon's intentions is purely to have fun and a nightmare world is part of that fun. If you're frightened, grossed out, offended...it's all part of the game that Kon plays with his audience. Those feelings are the opposite of the light-hearted, carefree feeling that much of the film creates. All of this adds to the themes of opposites - old vs young, new vs old, technology vs luddite, dreams vs reality, man vs woman, good vs evil, fat vs skinny, mental vs physical, life vs death, etc. - that Kon injects throughout Paprika. Even in the parade, old fashioned Japanese toys mix with robots, and refrigerators lead the dolls. Kon seems to be calling for the new Japanese culture that has been brewing since before the '00s to not completely reject the old Japanese culture it seems intent on ousting. What Kon wants is a culture that is based in the new but doesn't forget the old, and has a bit of a twist to it all in order to make things original.

Paprika is a movie to obsess over. There's a lot of information to process the first time through as you're being pulled in and out of the various worlds that Kon creates. It's a hell of a lot of fun too. It's only flaw is a single use of bizarre sexual violence to create a feeling of violation, but even that seems to be about emotional wreckage more than evil dudes just being evil. Leaving that little bit out, it is an excellent mind trip of a movie that remains Kon's most accomplished work.

The Visitor (1979): Wackiness foiled by pacing

The Visitor (1979)
dir: Guilio Paradisi

When I was a child, I used to be fascinated by the horror movie VHS art in the aisles. Some of them completely frightened me, like the original are for Fright Night, which had the clouds over a house turning into a vampire about to descend onto the suburban home. Whoever did that poster deserves an award for making me frightened of its contents.

Other notable VHS horror art were Black Roses (which had dimensional bubble art), April Fools Day, Gothic, TerrorVision, and today's featured film, The Visitor (shown at right). What's notable for The Visitor is the the strange absurdity of the art: a giant eyeball floating over a large city with two monster hands holding a bloody wire pulled taut between thrm. Add in the lightning strikes, and this is probably the origins of my personal fascination of using eyeballs in marketing imagery. They're fascinating, visually stunning, full of meaning, and generally kind of hypnotizing. Other people think they're creepy, but that's only when the eyeball comes in pairs, and with eyelids.

I hadn't actually gotten around to watching The Visitor because I believe the film was removed from the shelves by the time I was old enough to rent it. This year, in 2014, Alamo Drafthouse has released a remastered high-def extended full length version of The Visitor and revealed that, for all of its crazy psychotic beauty, the key art for The Visitor has almost nothing to do with the Italian ripoff content within.

The Visitor is but one in a long line of European ripoff films that featured riffs on a variety of original American titles. The horror genre was especially intent on focusing on Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen. Some movies would throw one or two of these films into a blender and see what comes out. Beyond the Door was The Exorcist meets Rosemary's Baby. The Devil Within Her was mainly It's Alive combined with Rosemary's Baby and would predate The Omen.

The Visitor, however, wasn't content to rip off just the four American films about. It would also include The Birds, Carrie, THX1138, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Holy Mountain. Basically it takes all 8 films and throws them haphazardly into a blender so you get a mismashed slurry that comes out the end.

The film opens on a Jodorowsky-esque surreal landscape that tells some story of an evil demon/spirit/God that was destroyed by a good evil/spirit/God through the use of some birds that would peck its brains out. The evil spirit also turned into a bird to kill the other birds. Though, the evil spirit died, he was able to copulate with humans, Zeus style, leaving bits of his spirit to continue popping up in random human wombs.

All of this exposition is relayed by a Jesus figure who is also the leader of a cult of bald children in some form of extraterrestrial white room. Suddenly, another figure pops his head in and says that they found the next vessel, and she JUST TURNED 8!!  Duh DUH!!!

Fairly soon, the movie then turns into a cross between The Omen, Carrie, and Rosemary's Baby, with the story of an executive trying to marry a single mother whose kid is the aforementioned vessel. The executive is under the guise of some evil outfit who is working for some evil spirit. The single mother is pregnant with another kid, who she feels is evil and is harassed into keeping the spawn. The 8-year-old, however, is an evil spirit who can make things happen with her mind just to spite everybody. But, she's also the biggest, most foul-mouthed brat in the world, even telling Shelley Winters, her new nanny, that she shoved her birthday present up her ass. Not in a The Exorcist foul-mouthed demonic way, but in a Fuck You, I'm A Spoiled Brat kind of way.

There's also a story where the second adult figure from the Jesus white room is tracking down the kid and the demon spawn in order to defeat them before they release evil into the world or something. And, a police officer is also tracking down the kid, after a birthday present bird became a gun that shot her mother, paralyzing her from the waist down.

With all of this going on, one is tempted to say this is would be a fantastic piece of gonzo trashiness, but in the Drafthouse release the pacing of The Visitor is more languid than any of its brethern. With a runtime of 109 minutes, The Visitor's crazy non-sequitorness doesn't hold up to sustained watching, instead feeling like the ultimate party movie rather than a real film. One you can talk through and then look up and see somebody get shot, or a kid swearing and then continue the conversation without having missed much because there isn't much to miss.

And, while some of the visuals are stunning (especially the opening sequences and the one featuring a discotheque lighted airport runway. It isn't sustained for too terribly long. It's a competent film that just doesn't rise to the occasion of the early and closing sequences. While individual sequences of randomness are

Overall, The Visitor suffers from too much bluster without anything substantial to connect the threads. One could easily argue that none of the other knock off blender films have much substance either, but most of those either have a strong throughline, or keep their running time blessedly short.  The constant throwing of random scenes from other films does nothing to help keep the viewer compelled to see what's next when half of the film is rendered with a slow, languorous pacing that lulls the viewer toe distraction. Yet, at a party, this is a feature not a flaw.

Is it a success? No. It's an archival piece of weirdness that should be treasured, but it doesn't live up to the trashy camp highs and lows that Drafthouse's cult has built up around it. There's a reason its cult status never followed through on creating a following.

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973): Beware of the Sexy Feminists!

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)
dir: Denis Sanders
wr: Nicholas Meyer

It's well known that men had a problem with feminism through the 70s, into the 80s and beyond. In cinematic representations, feminists were frequently portrayed as purposeless women who were hellbent on destroying families and killing men in order to achieve their silly little quest for equality...that is, if equality was ever mentioned, as most men couldn't wrap their heads around that.

Invasion of the Bee Girls is one of the primary movies about feminism, especially in terms of the sexual revolution. But, strangely, Bee Girls ends up almost being a meta version of an ultra-feminist screed.

The concept of Invasion of the Bee Girls is exploitatively simplistic. Men are being found dead from congestive heart failure due to sexual exhaustion. Through investigation, a federal investigator discovers that the scientists at the nearby research facility are sexual freaks, and that one woman has decided to merge women with bees through radiation for...whatever reason.

What Denis Sanders and Nicholas Meyer are hinting at, on the surface, is that women are the seducers, and that they're out to destroy men. The bee girls, who always wear Jackie O glasses to hide their compound eyes, are the new sexually free women who are perfectly OK with fucking men, and are actually sexually aggressors. The conversion process of the bee girls involves a lesbionic ritual of rampant nudity, breast rubbing, a white frosting covering and bees. They're practically hinting that sexually free women who want to fuck men are lesbians who just are out to kill men. The end of the movie is a big destruction of the bee girl transformation plant, killing all of the bee girls including the lead scientist bee girl. The federal investigator then takes his girlfriend, ignores everything she says, and flings her on the bed as a sex object.

As a movie from 1973, Invasion of the Bee Girls actually may be espousing some radical tenements. One of the scientists has a secret sex room behind his office that has doves or lovebirds (who has birds in their sex room?!), leather accouterments, a fish tank and a bed. That scientist is also gay, and has a secret lover. All of the other scientists are having litanies of after-hours affairs with anything that moves, and lying to their spouses about where they are.

Of course, it takes two to tango. But, finally, the women are starting to kill the men through sexual exhaustion. A lot of the women are scorned lovers or women who have otherwise been hurt. The men, actually, do a lot of hurting by constantly lying to women, treating them like objects, loudly pronouncing some as "iceburgs" and crowing about their sexual conquests. Not to mention the mid-movie sexual assault, that's about to lead to gang rape, in order for the men to take their revenge on an innocent woman.

Is Invasion of the Bee Girls truly an anti-feminist screed, if it has all of these terrible male behaviors which are frequently used as a reason for women to become feminists? Is it actually saying that raping women is a reason to become a feminist, or that it is a legitimate form of keeping women in line? Is Invasion of the Bee Girls presenting the double standard of freaky-deaky scientists to the sexy-wanting bee girls as a way of exposing the double standard in the hope that somebody will read the subtext? Or, is it completely condemning the feminists, especially given its celebration of the eradication of sexually forward women?

This is written by Nicholas Meyer, who, at the time, wanted his name taken off the film for currently unknown reasons (Meyer, write me!). Sci-fi fans will know Meyer from the films Time After Time, Star Trek II, IV, and VI, and The Day After. Was Meyer originally sending up the male-dominated society of double standards and almost making the men the villains? It's still in the movie a bit. Or, was Meyer actually damning the women, but the filmmakers decided to also damn the men as well?

While Invasion of the Bee Girls is hard to read from 41 years later, it doesn't make it any less fun At 85 minutes, Sanders keeps Bee Girls crackling, with new bizarre events happening with regularity. It's a zippy, hilarious almost-send-up of the sexploitation genre that had been bubbling at the time. Hell, even the theme is cracked and seems to be the launching pad for the theme of The Sinful Dwarf. If you want something that kind of makes you wonder about the politics behind the camera because the politics in front are so cracked, and also want a bit of sexy girls on top of it, Invasion of the Bee Girls may be straight up your alley.

Barbarella (1968): Love in Space, Euro-Style

Barbarella (1968)

dir: Roger Vadim

Any viewer of fine camp classics knows the name Barbarella. It has three things that make up the movie: 1) Jane Fonda in and out of a lot of awesomely 60s costumes; 2) Jane Fonda doing a zero-gravity striptease with some very frisky credits; 3) Gloriously 60s modernist psychedelic sets. 

Yet, that hardly touches the glorious camp efforts of Barbarella, the oversexed space heroine who goes tramping around the galaxy to rescue Durand Durand, an agent who may have been kidnapped by the Great Tyrant for his weapon, the Positronic Ray. Along the way she does battle with evil bitey dolls, hooks up with rough trade and blind angels, and defeats Durand Durand's death by orgasm machine. And, that's just a touch of the gloriously silly trampiness that is in Barbarella.

Barbarella was actually adapted from a French erotic comic of the same name from the early 1960s. It was a comic associated with the swinging '60s and the feminist-driven sexual revolution that also came around with the pill. It was a male fantasy of an empowered woman who felt free to have sex with anybody she chose, with no real consequences. While totally couched in male fantasy, Barbarella also served as an early example of men trying to give women actual agency. It's quite telling that the only ones chastising Barbarella for her libido are the villains of the movie, namely Durand Durand after she breaks his pleasure organ.

Roger Vadim, as a director, had made his breakthrough a decade earlier with the French movie, ...And God Created Woman, which was his first calling for liberation of sexual mores, even though he laced it with conservative moral underpinnings in order to make it palatable for that earlier time. Barbarella has no such hang-ups, and sheds all of the conservative morals that pinned down ...And God Created Woman.

Vadim has a particular love affair with the female body, and it shows in Barbarella, in which he leers and lusts after Jane Fonda. From the fantastic and iconic zero-gravity striptease, to her frequently mussed hair after numerous courtships, to any number of her skin tight outfits of fabulousness, the camera is always making sure we know this is an attractive woman who welcomes most attention to her. And, so, the audience is invited to leer over Barbarella's body, just as Vadim did.

In the current feminist culture obsessed with desexualizing men and women, instead of owning the sexuality inherent in the human body, both male and female, Barbarella has become something of a male fantasy demon. But, in a culture where sex is seen as a healthy, zesty, and fun part of human life, Barbarella marks a point where women and men both are leered at and lusted after. This is marked by John Phillip Law's blind angel, who wears nothing but a diaper and a pair of wings. He is considered the height of beauty, and if you're into the slim but muscled blond type, he is. Vadim actually lets the audience lust after Law when he's on screen as well.

Of course, all of these politics are just extra-textual threads interweaved into the fun romp of a sci-fi sexploitation tale of a woman in outer space who has a fantastic wardrobe. Really, Barbarella isn't even a sleazy sexploitation movie, and instead just has fun with the scenarios that constantly pop up. Originally, due to the nudity in the credits, Barbarella was R-rated, but a later reissue with altered credits received a PG-rating. Vadim achieves a fun-for-the-whole-family feeling in Barbarella that undercuts any of the nasty feelings one might have towards the movie. As such, Barbarella is required viewing, if only for the fabulous sets, costumes, and creepy dolls.

Chopping Mall (1986): Robots vs Teenagers

Chopping Mall (1986)
dir: Jim Wynorski

"I'm just not used to being chased around a mall in the middle of the night by killer robots." - Linda

Here at The Other Films, we have a long love affair with Mary Woronov.  From her start as a Factory Girl, with a part in Chelsea Girls, to her career with the Cormans, following up with her long pairing with Paul Bartel (whom we also love), and her late career moves in throwback films The House of the Devil and The Devil's Rejects, Woronov has always lit up the screen and elevated a b-movie above its current state.

Her best movie has always been Eating Raoul, where she and Paul Bartel play the Blands, a couple who seduces and murders swingers in order to attempt to fund their restaurant. Less known, however, is that the Blands make a cameo in the beginning of Chopping Mall, a B-movie about a bunch of teenagers getting killed by security guard robots after hours in a mall.  The Blands' cameo adds up to little more than harassing the presenter of the killer security guard robots, but it is a nice addition.  It also gives you the fantasy of a sequel that has killer robots roaming around a small country cottage restaurant, which, let's face it, we'd all watch the hell out of.

While this is a great example of cheesy 80s drive-in fare at its finest, Chopping Mall is most infamous for being one of the strongest examples of great 80s poster art that promised far more than it delivered.  Look at the example on the right.  With a name like Chopping Mall, with its bloody slasher logo treatment, and a severed pseudo-robotic hand with a bag full body parts that has a head peeking out of the bag, one might be inclined to think that there was some actual chopping to be done at this mall, perhaps by sexy lady cyborgs with long fingernails. But, instead of lady cyborgs with long fingernails, the robots are something like a Dalek had sex with Johnny 5, and then stole Geordi LaForge's glasses. And they don't chop, they shoot darts, electrocute, and sometimes make people's heads explode.  

Originally, Chopping Mall was titled Killbots, with completely different art that featured the actual robot, and looked more like an action science-fiction movie.  This art is more upfront about what the movie is, but if you saw that movie when you discover that the robots are essentially stand-ins for the slasher in your generic 80's horror movie stalking them through a mall, you'd probably be disappointed as well.  At least, with the Chopping Mall art, you know you're probably being lied to. Roger Corman suspected that the Killbots poster made the movie look like it was tied to Transformers and was actually a kid-friendly movie.  But, it was an R-rated sci-fi horror comedy, and the advertising didn't communicate that.

Chopping Mall is the usual fare of robots stalking and killing teenagers who hang get the keys to a mall department store to drink and have sex after hours.  There's nudity, sex, and explosions, and exploding heads, plus the Blands, all packed into 77 minutes.

There really isn't much to say about Chopping Mall beyond HOW AWESOME IT IS.  The virgins survive, everybody else dies, and really, Chopping Mall knows its delivering schlock on a high level. Every fan of cheesy sci-fi horror should watch this movie now.  I'm actively not commenting on anything because...why spoil the fun?  But, there is an interesting note here.  The director of this piece of awesome is Jim Wynorski, who is known to B-Movie aficionados for being a hugely prolific dealer of schlock containing frequent large exposed breasts.  In Chopping Mall there are large breasts on display, but there is also beefcake on display, sometimes past the point where it would seem the guy should put a shirt on.  So, Wynorski is an equal opportunity exploiter in this movie, which is more than you can say for some other films.

Jim Wynorski would go on do The Return of Swamp Thing, Dinosaur Island, and Munchies before the budgets for B-movies would dry up, and he would resort to doing soft-core Skinemax porno on the dirt cheap.  But, you'll find more about Jim Wynorski in tomorrow's review of Popatopolis, aka The Making of The Witches of Breastwick.  Meanwhile, go watch this pure piece of cheesetastic goodness that I'm purposely trying not to say anything about beyond robots killing teenagers in a mall.  Go watch.

TerrorVision (1986): Horror through the TV

TerrorVision (1986)
dir: Ted Nicolaou

"This is music. Mu-sic. It's almost as important as food.  This is TV. T-V. Next to food and music, this is mankind's greatest invention." - Suzy Putterman, TerrorVision

TerrorVision is the spectacle of pseudo-family-friendly late night television gone berzerk. Where else would you have a pair of braindead punk rock teenagers and their violent ADD-riddled little brother decide that a killer alien that came through the television could be a trainable pet?  And, why would they team up with a sexed-up late night horror host in the vein of Elvira to try to destroy this trash alien that came through their satellite to assimilate them?

Oh yes, TerrorVision is that hard-to-define movie that is far out in left field abusing horror and sci-fi tropes to make a ridiculous comedy and becoming rather undefinable in the process.  I remember it being in the horror section of my video store, but had I rented it as a horror I might have deemed it stupid, and not scary and a waste of time.  Had it landed in the comedy section, it would have required a complete change of video art (see right).  Sure, it has the tagline "People of Earth: your planet is about to be destroyed...sorry for the inconvenience" but the rest of the box looks like an actual horror movie, and wouldn't rent well in the comedy section.  So, it would get shuffled off to the cult section for being undefinable.

TerrorVision is a cult movie for people with...particular tastes.  It's a bag of the best 80's tropes that is collected, twisted and turned into one satirical movie.  At the center is the nuclear three-generation family that has decided to buy a satellite system that eventually eats everything in its path. The nuclear family has two swinger parents, a militant war veteran grandfather, a bubble-headed MTV addicted baby punk teenage daughter, and the ADD-riddled son who is more fully aware of everything than anybody else in the film.

At this point, I should also mention that the parents are played by Gerrit Graham (Beef from Phantom of the Paradise) and the always amazing Mary Woronov (Mrs. Bland from Eating Raoul, Calamity Jane from Death Race 2000).  And, the son is played by...Chad Allen?!  Yeah, this movie is one of those movies that is as ridiculous and means it too.

Soon after getting their new satellite dish, it is attacked by a beam from Pluton, which beams down a grotesque eating-machine alien that consumes everything in its path.  But, first the parents go out to pick up another swinging couple, Suzy, the daughter, goes on a date with her boyfriend O.D., and Grandpa is left to babysit Sherman, the son.  

The movie wears its bubbleheaded satire of tropes on its sleeve.  The swinger couples are as sleazy and over-the-top as ever, and both of them like it, except for the bisexual come-ons of the Greek swinger which gets a belligerent response from Dad. There are stupid sexy art prints on the wall, which includes one of my favorite paintings ever: a surreal Dali-esque four-breasted iron (featured in closeup at 29:27). They have a giant indoor swimming pool cum jacuzzi that they keep at 98.6 degrees ("It's like floating in your mother's womb").  The daughter purses her lips and headbangs to W.A.S.P.  Grandpa has two airplanes glued to his helmet.  This is a movie that sends everything over the top.  

When the alien comes around and kills people, it doesn't just consume its prey, it also retains the ability to pose as the prey.  It can use the heads and bodies it consumed in a lure-type facsimile and can imitate people.  The son and daughter try training the alien as a pet, even trying to teach it how to speak (this is after it killed Grandpa, the parents, and the swinger couple) like in E.T.  

Sure, the movie doesn't have anything smart to say.  Hell, it's even abusing the trope of "your tv is out to kill you."  But, that doesn't belie how stupid funny it is, and it intends it too.  It isn't going for insight.  It isn't going for social commentary, except to possibly comment on the trope-iness of generic social commentary movies.  It's purely silly and a gigantic cartoon of a trashy z-movie.  I haven't even mentioned the Elvira-esque Medusa who arrives last minute for some reason after being called by Sherman all evening.  I also haven't mentioned the amazing intro song by The Fibonaccis, an 80s art house band whose lead singer was also a patient in Dr Caligari.

It's easy to see why people hate this movie.  It's cheesy, the acting is bad, the effects are hilariously campy, it's intentionally dumb, it's silly with lots of horror tropes.  It does everything backwards.  But, if you have that special sensibility, you'll love this movie.