I Eat Your Skin
I, Monster
The Incredible Petrified World
Incredible Shaolin Thunderkick
I Walked with a Zombie
Joe
Junk
I
Eat Your Skin (B&W, 1964) AKA
Zombies, Voodoo Blood Bath
The first time I saw this was late night on a cable superstation under
the title Zombies, and it was a while before I realized that what
I'd seen was actually the infamous second half of the legendary I Drink
Your Blood double-bill. A smart-aleck writer of pulp fiction is dragged
by his agent - along with a complaining pampered annoyance of a woman
- off to Voodoo Island to investigate reports of walking dead (and native
virgins). On the island they find zombies with faces like a nutritious
breakfast: oatmeal skin and fried eggs for eyes. They don't eat your skin,
but at least you could probably eat theirs. One machetes the head off
a local man (but his head looked kinda loose, anyway) and that's as close
as you get to gore (I Drink Your Blood had to carry most of the
"blood horrors to rip out your guts" claims from that pairing, as well
as all the footage in the trailer, since this one's not in color).
While the writer romances a professor's daughter, the natives do voodoo
dances, presided over by a guy in fringed sunglasses. But despite all
the voodoo, the zombies are actually people who've been injected with
radioactive snake venom, in research for a possible cancer cure. Considered
pretty bad, but I've always liked it in a kind of pulp-horror way. Went
unmarketed and unreleased until they needed a second feature for I
Drink Your Blood. -zwolf
Ilsa, Tigeress Of Siberia (C,
1977) AKA Tigeress
The third and last real Ilsa movie (Ilsa She-Wolf of the S.S. and
Ilsa, Harem-Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks are legit - Ilsa The Wicked
Warden is just some other sadistic movie that had Dyanne Thorne in
it, so they retitled to capitalize). Here the sadistic bitch (played by
the always lovely-yet-threatening Dyanne Thorne) is working for Stalin
- she runs a gulag in Siberia with an iron fist. Anyone who tries to escape
is hunted down, brought back... and decapitated messily with a giant mallet!
The blood drains into a pit to feed Sasha, her pet tiger, who also gets
live victims once in a while. By night, Ilsa dances and has sex with the
two guys who win the brawls everybody has over the right to bed her. Meanwhile,
her comrades try to make political prisoners develop a higher opinion
of Stalin by shocking them, dunking fevered prisoners in freezing water,
or making guys arm-wrestle over chainsaws (this includes a graphic dismemberment
scene that's missing from most tapes - pretty nasty, ya'll). Then Stalin
is assassinated, the gig is up, and the sicko-fun part of the movie is
over, 'cuz Ilsa kills all the prisoners (except this one revolutionary,
Chakrurin, who gets away), and escapes. She ends up running a brothel
in Montreal in 1977. And it's downhill from there - the modern Ilsa looks
goofy (red hair, styled like a combo Farrah/helmet, and she wears ball
gowns) and the torture techniques have no gore - she just wires people
to a machine and shows them slides to determine their phobias, which are
then exploited using holograms. Enemies she puts in barrels and sinks
into a freezing lake. She does a slow shower scene, which is good... until
you remember that the character would be pushing sixty at the time, and
that kinda kills it. The plot - she finds this Chakurin guy again and
tries to break him, while agents are trying to track him down - starts
to drag. Ilsa puts Chakurin in chains and has sex with him. A guy gets
ground up in a snow-sweeper. There's a neat (if implausible) trick with
a gasoline-filled waterbed. Then a hit squad comes for Ilsa just as she's
going to castrate Chakurin with an eggbeater (!) and she makes an escape...
but, since this is true to the Ilsa formula, she gets her just desserts
anyway. I didn't know Pinto made snowmobiles... She shoulda bought higher
quality equipment - after all, she had money to burn... Good first half,
but the second half is blah. But, it's still better than Wicked Warden.
-zwolf
I, Monster
(C, 1971)
Amicus version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Christopher Lee
as Dr. Marlowe (the Jekyll figure) injecting himself with chemicals as
part of an experiment to separate good and evil. He first tries the formula
on a cat, who becomes so crazed that he immediately has to kill it. Utilizing
Freudian concepts, he psychoanalyzes a girl and then gives her an injection
that turns her into a wanton slut. He injects an aggressive bully who
becomes a frightened, childish coward. When he finally tries it on himself,
he becomes a grinning, sadistic loon. He starts calling himself Mr. Blake,
wears a top hat, gets in razor-fights in the street, and becomes a bit
more bestial-looking with each injection. His friend Peter Cushing tries
to figure out what's going on and lands himself in trouble. Solid version
of the horror classic is rarely seen; I first saw it once Saturday afternoon
on a local TV station around 1980 and didn't manage to track it down again
for over 20 years (it's now on a DVD available from Sinister Cinema).
Luckily, it's as good as I remembered, with a menacing performance from
Christopher Lee and atmospheric direction. It was originally begun as
a 3-D movie. -zwolf
The Incredible Kung Fu Mission
(C, 1982)
Hong Kong variant of The Dirty Dozen. A top fighter (John Liu)
is given a nearly impossible mission and five unruly recruits to train
for it. They're arrogant and undisciplined, but he's a top notch leg fighter,
and if anyone can make a team out of them, it's him. One is a coffin-maker,
one's a sex fiend, one's a juggler, one's a carpenter, and one's a professional
fighter. John Liu starts training them immediately, making them run miles
with rocks in their pockets, running them over obstacles, getting them
in brawls in brothels, and teaching them kung fu. He manages to whip them
into shape pretty quickly and then it's off to rescue a revolutionary
from an albino warlord's prison. They disguise themselves as acrobats
(and one woman!), but still get in constant fights, hand-to-hand and with
weapons like swords and umbrellas. Finally, reduced in number, they try
to infiltrate the fortress. Some great fighting sequences and enough plot
where this one might even appeal to people who don't usually like kung
fu flicks. The Dirty Dozen plot was used a lot in kung fu movies,
and another notable example is Deadly Strike with Bruce Li. -zwolf
The Incredible
Petrified World (B&W, 1959)
John Carradine stars in this old sci-fi flick. A diving bell sent to explore
extreme ocean depths breaks loose and the scientists on board are trapped
at the bottom, running out of air, until they discover some caves... caves
which, like everything else in a Jerry Warren movie, look incredibly cheap.
There are two guys and two girls (one of whom is bitchy). They discover
an old man who's been living in the caves for fourteen years because there's
no way out. While they're adjusting to the idea of live in the caves,
John Carradine is on the surface planning another dive mission. This brings
the movie to a screeching halt - not that it was just eat-up with momentum
to begin with. Back in the cave, they're learning that the old man is
homicidal and isn't really wanting company, plus a volcano is active.
And there's nothing petrified in the whole blamed movie. Cheapo '50's
B-flick is pretty bad but kills an hour well enough if you're in the mood
for such things. -zwolf
Incredible
Shaolin Thunderkick (C, 19??)
Godfrey "Oh no!" Ho directed this comedic kung fu flick, but it's not
as bad as some of his work - i.e. it isn't patched together from bits
of other films. A goofy young martial arts student makes a living by hauling
water around. He's trying to romance a pretty girl but has an ugly one
after him, and his kung fu teacher is a lazy old slop who makes him steal
food offerings from the cemetery. As his training progresses, he learns
that the white-haired killer who murdered his father is back in the area,
and he and his henchmen kidnap the waterboy's girlfriend. He tries to
rescue her and gets beaten up, and then they smash his genitals and cut
them off. He becomes a woman for a while, but then his teacher helps him
regain his manhood through acupuncture (it works in kung fu movie logic,
just as the idea that the guy gets stronger by drinking gallons of water
- just stop thinking, damn ya!) and then trains him to get revenge. Turns
into an okay kung fu movie after they decided not to make a comedy after
about 1/3rd of the way in. The Saturn DVD is really muddy and suffers
from some digitizing of the picture. -zwolf
The In-Crowd (C,
2000)
A teenaged girl named Adrian, who has mental problems involving sex manias
(and is a dead ringer for Christina Applegate) is released from an asylum
to try to resume a normal life. She's given a job at a beach resort where
there are a bunch of horny rich kids. So... we've established early on
that this is a dumbass movie and gotten that out of the way. She mixes
with this completely detestable crowd of bitches and brats and one
girl named Britney (who looks like a mid-morph between Tiffany-Amber
Theissen and Yasmine Bleeth) befriends her, but appears to just be setting
her up for something because Adrian looks like Britney's sister, who Britney
was jealous of... possibly insanely jealous! When another girl
tries to warn Adrian about Britney's plot, someone rigs the girl's motorcycle
to crash. Turns out Britney's got dangerous mental problems of her own,
and it all turns into a Betty & Veronica comic book gone horribly
wrong, and people who cross Britney start ending up dead. Adrian, whose
insanity-streak is now way outclassed, has to try to save her ass while
holding on to her job (if she get fired then she gets sent back to the
nuthouse). It's pretty standard suspense-horror stuff, fairly well-handled
and not boring even if it's familiar. Then again I could be being lenient
because I have a thing for Christina Applegate, Tiffany-Amber Theissen,
and Yasmine Bleeth, and was kind of squinting my eyes a little and pretending
these actresses were them. Try that, it can't hurt.
Oddly enough, it's from the director of Pet Sematary. -zwolf
Indian (C, 2001)
Sunny Deol, who is kind of like the Sylvester Stallone of India, stars
in another over-the-top cops vs. terrorists action flick. He's a cop who's
so tough that aspiring cops carry his picture in their wallets. And he's
involved in more mayhem and destruction than a whole division of regular
cops. First there's an insane car chase (a wrecked car rolls over his
and he just keeps driving... plus, he's doing all kinds of stunts in an
SUV and it doesn't roll over, which is really amazing).
Then he breaks up a brawl by kicking the crap out of everyone involved,
and then he stomps a corrupt official into signing a confession. But his
worst problem is dealing with a terrorist leader that he already has in
custody. Even though the guy's in a special isolated cell, he still manages
to orchestrate actions on the outside. Sunny gets in real trouble, though,
by killing his wife's father when he finds out the man was a traitor in
league with terrorists. Then he finds out that one of the richest men
in India is also a terrorist-supporter, and has to overcome a high public
opinion of the guy (he's a big philanthropist, so everybody loves him)
to bust him. He also has to take on about 20 guys in a brawl that has
some inventive, Jackie-Chan-like mayhem ('cept in this case it's special
effects and stuntwork, not skill - lots of Sunny's punches pretty obviously
miss by a foot or more). Eventually Sunny gets enraged and does some not-exactly-kosher
rule-breaking to settle things. Call him Dirty Raj. Typically unbelievable
Bollywood actioner with so-tough-he's-comical-already Sunny is much kick-ass
fun and entertaining, much like Farz. The musical numbers are pointless
and distracting but well-done nevertheless, if you like that sort of thing.
It's long - about three hours - but you shouldn't have much trouble sticking
around to the end, which features the craziest bus-driving since Speed
and The Gauntlet. -zwolf
In The Heat of the Night
(C, 1967)
A land developer is killed in 1960's Sparta, Mississippi, and a black
detective named Virgil Tibbs (the great Sidney Poitier) is unlucky enough
to be vacationing from Philadelphia (the one in Pennsylvania... there
is one in Mississippi, y'know), so the racist cops accuse
him of the crime. When he's cleared, he gets asked to stick around and
solve it. The local cops - especially the sheriff (Rod Steiger) - don't
like him because he's too good at his job and doesn't let them just "solve"
the case by finding scapegoats. Eventually Tibbs's guts and intelligence
- as well as the scummy behavior of some of the white locals - changes
Steiger's mind and teaches him respect for Tibbs. And, oh yeah, the case
gets solved, too. American classic and very well-done, with career-highlight
acting from Poitier, Steiger, and Warren Oates (as a deputy). Spawned
two sequels (They Call Me Mister Tibbs! and The Organization)
and a hit TV series. The first PG-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar.
-zwolf
In The Line of Fire (C, 1993)
Suspenseful and engaging thriller starring Clint Eastwood, which was tailored
to his advanced age (he was 63 at the time). He plays a secret service
agent who, thirty years before, had failed to protect JFK. And now a disgruntled
CIA assassin (John Malkovich) is planning to kill the president, and wants
to make Clint a two-time loser at his job. He calls Clint on the phone
to talk about their weird "friendship" and the "game" they're playing,
and Clint has to figure out a way to stop him. Some have called this "the
ultimate Dirty Harry movie" bit's it's not really Dirty Harry-like, but
Clint's character is pretty cool and a bit obnoxious, and the action he
gets involved in is credible for his age (as long as he's one physically
fit old man). I avoided this for a while because I haven't liked a lot
of Clint's newer input and I hate political thrillers in general, but
this isn't like that Tom Clancy movie crap, and I'm glad I finally gave
it a chance. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, of Das Boot fame. -zwolf
The Invincible Barbarian (C,
1983)
Incredibly stupid and boring sword and sorcery junk, made in Italy. One
of a pair of twins has to battle the evil leader who killed his parents.
He was raised by Amazons because they knew he was a predestined gift from
the gods. Padded with lots of stock footage, stuff stolen from other movies,
and astounding overuse of slow motion. Sucks, and sucks hard. -zwolf
Iron Monkey (C, 1993)
AKA Iron Monkey: The Young Wong Fei, Siunin Wong Fei-hung tsi
titmalau
Donnie Yen stars in this wire-fu epic that rode the coattails of Crouching
Tiger Hidden Dragon into American theaters, but didn't make quite
as much of an impact even though it has more action. The plot involves
a masked Robin Hood figure who fights oppression in turn of the century
China, and your viewing experience will be aided by having some knowledge
of historical Chinese hero Wong Fei Hung, who appears as an adolescent
here. Even though Wong Fei Hung is supposed to be a little boy, that's
actually an extremely talented young girl named Sze-Man Tsang playing
him! One thing making the movie too confusing is that they picked actors
who look too much alike and then gave them the same clothes and hair.
With characters having secret identities in the first place, and then
all that flying around and spinning in the air (my oh my do they love
the corkscrew plancha) you lose track of who's who and, subsequently,
interest. That I'm not major fan of wire-fu doesn't help, either, but
this does have great editing, special effects, and production values,
so if wire-fu is your thing, this can be considered essential. -zwolf
I Vampiri (B&W, 1956) AKA
The Devil's Commandment, Evil's Commandment, Lust of
the Vampire, The Vampires
This was the first Italian horror film since the silent era and the start
of two important careers, Ricardo ("Horrible Dr. Hitchcock")
Freda and Mario Bava. Freda directed mostly and Bava did the camerawork,
but he directed some as well. Because horror was out of vogue in Italy,
they set the film in Paris to add interest, and it's about a killer who
uses needles to drain girls (all of them the same blood type). The police
and a journalist are obsessed with catching him, not suspecting that a
mad doctor is draining the blood to revitalize an old countess, making
her young and beautiful again so she can seduce the son of her former
lover. But as usually happens in these situations, the change isn't permanent,
so they have to get more and more girls... It's not all that scary, because
most of the evildoing is kept off-screen, but it does have some atmosphere
and lots of historical importance. -zwolf
I Walked
With A Zombie (B&W, 1943)
One of the front rank of Val Lewton horror films of the 40's, directed
atmospherically by Jacques Tourneur and based - at least superficially
- on Jane Eyre. A spunky nurse comes to an island in the West Indes
to care for the catatonic wife of a moody plantation owner who's hiding
some terrible secret. A calypso singer warns her of misery in a song,
but she insists on trying to cure the "zombie" wife and drags her through
the sugar cane fields to a secret voodoo ceremony. On the way she meets
Calaphor, one of the creepiest figures in horror filmdom. He's a tall,
thin, silent black man with staring eyes that never move or blink. Totally
nightmarish. A quietly-eerie film with a lot of effective use of shadows.
-zwolf
Jacktown (B&W, 1962)
Stark, low-budget J.D./prison drama in which a young hoodlum named Frankie,
who was possibly "born to be bad" (the movie starts with his birth!),
gets caught with some jailbait and is sentenced to a couple of years in
the world's largest prison in Jackson, Michigan... known to its inmates
as Jacktown. The other prisoners hate Frankie because his morals charge
is "against their religion," so they make his life hell. Then his friend
on the outside gets killed in a robbery and Frankie goes a little nuts,
and the warden takes pity on him and lets him work in his garden during
the day... which gives him access to the warden's daughter (Patty McCormack,
who was "born to be bad" in the classic The Bad Seed).
The warden's not crazy about a statutory rapist making nice with his daughter
so he finds Frankie some other work, but Frankie makes an escape to be
with Patty. It's not badly done and moves pretty fast at a running time
of just under an hour. Sporadic narration gives it somewhat of a Twilight
Zone feel even though the themes don't. The finale costs
it some of its grittiness. -zwolf
The Jade Claw (C, 1979) AKA
Ji Zhao, Crystal Fist
Charismatic Billy Chong shows up at a kung fu school wanting lessons and
gets sent to work in the kitchen with good ol' Simon Yuen, who gives him
the classic Simon Yuen hard time. Simon's being hunted by a Phoenix Eye
master (a style that utilizes an extended foreknuckle to strike pressure
points) and his bumbling sidekicks, Blind Man and Deaf Man. Simon trains
Billy (in typically torturous fashion) and he beats up a Russian boxer
and attracts the attention of the Phoenix Eye enemy, who recognizes the
moves and knows that Simon must have taught him. He beats Billy up and
burns one of his hands, and Simon figures out the Phoenix Eye master also
killed Billy's father, so he trains him in Eagle's Claw so he can get
revenge. Some truly amazing skill is well-displayed here, and it's one
of the best. This is comparable to Drunken Master, although Billy
Chong is too often called a "Jackie Chan imitator," which I don't think
he is; instead, he's another highly-skilled, comedically-gifted, acrobatic
actor with a style all his own, not a rip-off of anyone. -zwolf
The Jar (C, 1984)
AKA Charon
A friend of mine who trafficked in disturbing movies paid good money for
this and then taped over it because it bugged him so much. It is
pretty weird... The intentionally-freaky and surreal (and mostly plotless)
movie is very cheap - it looks shot on video and has a Casio-home-keyboard
music score. An awkward and clumsy-acting guy picks up a bum on the road
and brings him home... and the guy disappears, leaving behind a jar with
a creepy little monster fetus in it. From that point on, things get crazy:
the bathtub fills with blood and children come out of it, the floor's
covered with razor blades, lights change color (or the film goes to black
and white), he imagines spears through his guts, falls into a cave under
his shower, finds himself crucified in a dumpster, and crickets swarm
in his sink. Luckily for him, there's a woman down the hall who puts up
with him so he at least has someone to talk to. He can't seem to get rid
of the jar, however, so he ends up watching penitents in the desert and
having Vietnam flashbacks. In spots the movie's creepy, but overall it's
boring (man, I hope you like shots of a guy drinking water, that's all
I can say). Somewhat reminiscent of Combat Shock and Desecration
but without plot or payoff. It's hard to fathom what they were thinking...
or taking... -zwolf
J. D.'s Revenge (C, 1976)
In 1942 New Orleans, a black gangster named J. D. Walker is gunned down
for the razor murder of his wife, but he didn't do it. Cut to modern day
New Orleans, and a cabdriver named Ike goes to a hypnotist show with friends.
While under hypnosis, he sees visions from J.D.'s death that plague him
the rest of the night. He buys a hat like J.D.'s and sees J.D. in the
mirror, so he sees a doctor, who tells him to relax and smoke some weed!
He roughs up a woman who's riding in his taxi, then he goes to a revival
put on by preacher Lou Gossett, who was an enemy of J.D. back in the day.
J. D. wants to use poor Ike as an instrument of revenge, ruining his life
in the process. He konks his hair, tries to rape his girlfriend, and starts
hanging around bars as J.D., attacking people with a straight razor. He
challenges Gossett to a fight on the slaughterhouse killing floor where
J.D. was gunned down, and Gossett wants to try exorcizing the evil spirit
out of him instead. When they meet, dark secrets are revealed. Pretty
good blaxploitation horror with a fair amount of blood, including some
real stockyard footage that gets repeated a few times. -zwolf
Joe (C,
1970)
A rich white advertising executive named Compton kills the drug-dealing
hippie his daughter (a young Susan Sarandon) has been living with, because
he got her hooked on drugs. Afterward he needs a drink and goes to a bar
where a right-wing working stiff named Joe (Peter Boyle) is ranting about
how much he hates minorities and liberals and commies and hippies... a
perfect dittohead before his time. Joe doesn't have much to do but listen
to his wife talk about soap operas, clean his guns, drink beer, and watch
the news, so when he figures out that Compton killed the hippie he sees
a chance to make a friend and starts buddying up with him. Compton goes
along with it, partially amused by Joe's primitive nature and partially
to stay on his good side, since he knows The Secret. Compton's daughter
runs away and he takes Joe along to look for her... but Joe has some ideas
that aren't so amusing or funny anymore, and the movie shifts gears suddenly
with shocking effect. One of the cornerstone movies of the early '70's,
and still packs a wallop. Joe was partially the pattern for Archie Bunker,
although even Archie would stop short of what Joe does. -zwolf
Johnny Firecloud (C, 1975) AKA Revenge of Johnny Firecloud
A bunch of idiot rednecks in a backwoods Southwestern town entertain themselves
by hassling, humiliating, and beating up Indians. When they push a war
hero named Johnny Firecloud too far, he gets violent - like the atomic
bomb that was tested on the day he was born (hence his name). The cops
hassle him on the road, they make fun of his drunken grandfather, and
they kick Johnny out of his job and then flog him when he visits his white
girlfriend, before booking him on false rape charges. But then they lynch
Grandpa, and Johnny breaks out of jail and goes on a killing spree, scalping
and planting hatchets in heads and dynamiting and rattle-snaking and eye-gouging
and taking the concept of the movie's probable inspiration, Billy Jack,
to unheard-of extremes. Several of the Ilsa movie team are on hand
- the actor who played the general in She-Wolf of the SS, producer
David Friedman, and - most importantly for our purposes - makeup effects
man Joe Blasco, who provides some pretty extreme, nasty gore. Ralph Meeker
is brutal as the racist town boss. It's about as simple as it sounds,
but is fairly well-done drive-in fodder. -zwolf
The Johnsons (C, 1992) AKA De Johnsons, Xangadix
Netherlands horror with a weird plot. A professor is hired to study seven
unspeaking septuplet psychopaths who, when they were seven years old,
murdered a bunch of people and used their blood to draw weird symbols
on the walls. Even though his father tries to stop him from learning anything,
the professor discovers it's a symbol of the Mahxitu Indians and represents
the fetal god Xangadix, which lives inside a crystal. The psychos are
supposedly the god's seven sons, which are supposed to impregnate their
sister with a child that will destroy the world. Meanwhile, a mother is
taking her daughter out into the marshes of Holland to research herons.
The daughter has (for some reason I can't imagine) been anxious to get
her first period, and she's been having weird dreams about seven little
boys painting the walls in blood... And then the seven psychos break loose
from the asylum, which just happens to be situated in the marshes of Holland...
This has gotten some really horrendous reviews online, and it does have
plenty of drawbacks (too many very-convenient coincidences, a ridiculous
scene where a girl takes the time to splice the electrical cord of a carving
knife to use it on a psycho that's attacking her mother, and some other
cliches and implausibilities), but it also has some creepy scenes and
an interesting plot. Too bad it didn't live up to its potential. As is,
it's still at least as good as most of the modern horror dreck it unfortunately
emulates too often. -zwolf
Journey to the Center of Time
(C, 1967) AKA Time Warp
Journey to the center of my ass - this is just 82 minutes that you'll
never get back! Most of the movie is shots of a screen that's showing
stock footage from other films, so it's basically watching people watch
TV. I don't know if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever covered this
one, but watching a guy and two robots watch people watch a TV might create
some kind of vortex. There's a lot of hard-sci-fi babble about time concepts
that the characters can't even keep track of themselves. A team of scientists
accidentally go 5000 years into the future and watch animated explosions
around a model rocketship. Lyle Waggoner from the Carol Burnett show comes
in wearing a padded jumpsuit and takes them to talk to some aliens who
tell them that Earth is destroying itself in a big global war (started
by a fool named George W. Bush! Nah, just kidding... maybe...). The aliens
are under attack by the Earthmen, who want to get their alien weapons.
The scientists are told to return to their time and warn their people
that catastrophe awaits if they keep waging war, but they go too
far back in time and get attacked by dinosaurs... or at least one dimestore
lizard in miniature surroundings. Then they return to find everyone at
their lab frozen in time, so they have to get out before time catches
up with them and they collide with their past selves. This re-runs footage
from earlier in the film and things really stop making sense,
so they just end the movie. Austin Green plays what seems to be Hugh Beaumont
if he hadn't died. Total and complete mess that takes place mainly in
a couple of sparse laboratory sets, padded heavily with "historical" film
clips - WWII, Civil War, Romans, etc. Might entertain hardcore sci-fi
geeks but to most it's pretty stultifying. -zwolf
Junk
(C, 2000) AKA Junk: Shiryô-gari
Japanese zombie-gore-action epic. While a scientist is raising the dead
at a research facility, some Yakuza gangsters hold up a jewelry store.
They're supposed to fence the goods at an old military base... but that's
where the cannibalistic revived dead are being quarantined, and pretty
soon soon some pretty good imitations of Lucio Fulci's filmwork are happening...
and I mean that literally: they seem to be re-creating scenes from
Zombie. The gangsters don't fare too well against the gut-chewing
dead, who are slow but numerous (and nice 'n' creepy). One pretty girl
makes good headway, though, with some two-gun Chow Yun Fat style mayhem.
The military send in a couple of guys to clean up, but they're in trouble,
too. Plenty of gore, some of which is pretty extreme, makes this a solid
and respectable zombie fest that can hold its own with its Italian forefathers,
despite some points being lost to derivativeness. No explanation for the
title, though. -zwolf
