Soul Vengeance

I first saw a trailer for Welcome Home, Brother Charles on one of the 42nd Street Forever compilation DVDs.  I didn’t notice anything especially unique about it, but I recall the narrator intoning the title ominously several times during the trailer.  Somewhere along the way I found out why Welcome Home, Brother Charles was considered a blaxploitation classic.  It has to do with a  murder that takes place near the end of the film.  Charles strangles a lawyer that was responsible for sending him to prison.  He strangles the lawyer using his unnaturally long (I’m talking anaconda long) penis.  Yes, he seduces the man’s wife, hypnotizes her with his amazing manhood, and then wills it to grow to at least 20 feet in length and wrap around the man’s neck.

Prior to getting to this scene, we get an interestingly structured blaxploitation film.  The film starts with Charles on a ledge ready to commit suicide, and then fades back to before his arrest as a prostitute makes a deal with a client that takes place right in the middle of a police sting where the cops hope to arrest dope dealers Charles and his partner, N.D..  We watch as the dealers realize they are being watched by the cops and try to split.  One cop makes it a special point to try and capture Charles.  He misses, but another officer catches him.  The cop starts beating on Charles, and has to be pulled off by his partner.  Another flashback reveals that Charles had been having an affair with this cop’s wife.  The cop ends up beating Charles nearly to death and even attempts to cut off his manhood with a pocket knife.

Charles goes to court where he is railroaded and sent away to prison.  In prison he goes through a change and decides to give up pushing drugs.  When he gets released, he tries to get back with his girlfriend, but she is now a stripper and taking up with his ex-partner.  His partner explains that he owns her now, and proceeds to have Charles beaten up to drive the point home.  Charles ends up being befriended by the prostitute that was there at his arrest.  They move in together and he tries to get a job.  She quits hooking and becomes a waitress.  They try and make a life, but one night Charles sees the racist cop that beat him and starts his plan for revenge. 

Welcome Home, Brother Charles, or Soul Vengeance as the DVD is titled, is a pretty fun blaxploitation film.  The way the film plays with timelines to show us things before they happen or well after they have happened gives the film a different feel from most exploitation films.  And while I am not about to seek out the title music to put on my ipod, it works remarkably well with the feel of this film.  There are plenty of plot holes or things that don’t make sense in the film, but they actually add to its charms.  The fact that the cop’s wife doesn’t recognize Charles when he shows up at their house after getting out of jail and deciding to start getting some payback seems odd, but maybe she wasn’t really paying attention to his face.  The scene where she gets mesmerized or hypnotized by his manhood is priceless.

The IMDB lists Welcome Home, Brother Charles as 91 minutes, but the Xenon DVD lists the time as 87 minutes.  One person commented that the Soul Vengeance DVD had been edited which might explain the difference.  I did notice that there were several places the DVD seemed to skip, like a bad splice in the master had went through, but I just chalked that up to the film being a 35 year old exploitation film that was not released by a major studio.  If it is cut, I would love to see the uncut version.  There are some scenes in this film that have to be seen to be believed.   I give it 2 1/2 stars as it is.

Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite films of all time.  I loved the original which I saw when it first came out in 1978.  The film was supposed to be no one under 17 admitted period, but my mom took me and at 14 I was hooked on Romero’s film.  A few years later the WV Library Commission purchased a 16mm copy for their film library.  I checked it out and was surprised to find a lot of footage that I hadn’t seen before.  I liked this version much better than the original and I spent a huge amount of time trying to track down a copy on VHS.  When the movie came out on DVD, it was released in two versions by Anchor Bay.  I kept trying to figure out which version was the longer one before I bought a copy.  I was also disappointed that the disc was a “flipper” where half the movie is one side of the disc and the rest is on the other side of the disc.  While I debated which one to buy, both discs went out of print.  I eventually bought a couple German edition DVDs before Anchor Bay released the Divimax edition.  They then followed that up with a wonderful box set that contained three different versions of the film.  I purchased both of those.  I also picked up a copy of the original Anchor Bay edition and over the holidays I ordered yet another edition.  That means I have 6 copies of the original Dawn of the Dead (assuming we count the box set as 1 instead of 3).

In 2004 Universal released a remake of Dawn of the Dead.  I missed it on its initial run, but as luck would have it, I was working in Beckley and the film was playing at the $1 theater.  I paid for my ticket and was very impressed.  When the DVD came out, I bought the Widescreen Unrated Director’s Cut with the cardboard slipcover.  This was followed by the R rated version in Full Screen from Wills.  Then I went looking on eBay.  I got the region 2 edition from England, the limited 2 disc version that was released with a bonus disc when the DVD was first released in some locations, and several editions that may be official Asian releases, but may be bootlegs.  I especially love one version I got that lists the rating as PG-13.  It’s almost as good as the copy of American Pie 2 that I got where the box makes the movie sound like a political uprising instead of a teen sex comedy.  The last copy of Dawn of the Dead (2004) I added to my collection was one in Spanish that I found at Big Lots for $3.  That brings my total copies of the remake to 8.

As much as I love the original, I think I love the remake equally well.  I love the cast.  I especially love the cameos by some of the original guys from Dawn; Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Tom Savini.  Zack Snyder pulled off a rare feat by making such a wonderful film.  When I heard that he was doing Watchmen, I felt sure he would do the movie proud.  I was not let down there either.

Dawn of the Dead is just as exciting watching it for the fourth or fifth time as it was the very first time.  I have to give it 4 stars.  As further proof of my fan love for this movie in both of its incarnations, after my wife and I had been married for about a year and a half, I got a vacation.  We decided to go to Monroeville, PA so that I could visit the Dawn of the Dead shopping mall.  The wife was 7 months pregnant.  I had a cold.  We had no map, but had gotten vague directions from a map that was on the side of a trashcan at her parents’ house.  We were driving a white car in fog that was so thick that truckers were pulling over.  We stopping at a rest area right inside Pennsylvania, and I found a better map.  A short time later we saw the sign “Now entering Monroeville”.  The wife looked at me and asked, “Now, do you think you’ll be able to find the shopping mall?”  No sooner had the words left her mouth than a sign appeared exclaiming, “Entrance Monroeville Shopping Mall”.  I looked back at her and said, “Yeah, I think I can handle it.”

Shock Treatment (1981)

I first heard about the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a movie magazine or book back in the mid to late 70s.  During my sophomore year of high school, some of my fellow members of the SC Chorale had seen the movie and loved it.  I assume they saw it at a midnight show in Huntington, because the film had not yet played Charleston.  At one point it was going to be brought in as part of the WV Cultural Center’s film festival, but somehow a bunch of politicians allowed themselves to be deceived by some local religious leaders into believing that the film was a porno.  The truth of the matter is that these moral guardians, who later decided to also protest Monty Python’s Life of Brian, didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about.  They were fresh out of the recent textbook burnings where schools were picketed and children pulled out over textbooks that these people found offensive, and they had heard the film had some g-a-y themes and a song called Sweet Transvestite.  The Cultural Center ended up caving in and pulled the film from its festival.

The same friends that had seen Rocky Horror also carried with them the cassette of the original soundtrack album, so long before I ever got to see the movie, I knew all the songs.  I eventually go to see the film on one of the last nights I was attending a workshop for student journalists in Athens, Ohio.  A little theater in the college town was playing the film and a group of us who had come to call ourselves The Unicorps got in line and had the time of our lives.  There was Pat Murphy, Steve Bates, Kurt Kleiner, Linda Inman, Gena Gallagher, and several others screaming along and singing with the movie.  It was an amazing night in 1980.

I don’t recall when or where I first heard about the sequel to Rocky Horror, but one week I found out that Park Place Cinema 7 was going to be playing Shock Treatment on their midnight movies.  I was ecstatic.  Then I saw the film.  It was nothing like Rocky Horror in many ways.  The plot and the setting and most of the characters were completely different.  It was brand new, so there wasn’t a loyal cult following and no one had any clever lines to shout at the screen.  I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it because it wasn’t what I expected and wanted.  I did pick up the soundtrack album once I found a copy, but the movie only stayed one more night before it disappeared.  It wasn’t until years later that Key Video finally released the film on VHS.  I bought a used copy and gave it a second viewing.  I liked it a little bit better.  Several years passed and I pulled it out again and watched the tape.  The film still wasn’t available on DVD, so that was my only option.  I watched it and liked it a lot more.  Knowing not to expect Rocky Horror Strikes Back, I was able to enjoy the film for just what it was; a fun film with a great soundtrack.

I think one of the other reasons I may have been more taken with Shock Treatment on these later viewing might have had something to do with the fact that Jessica Harper was one of the stars and had several musical numbers.  I was a fan of her work and songs in Phantom of the Paradise, so this was like a hybrid sequel for me.  It was part RHPS sequel and part extension of Phantom.  Either way, I was hooked.  Eventually 20th Century Fox decided to release the film to DVD.  They released it as a single disc and as part of a 3 disc Rocky Horror/Shock Treatment box set.  The box set was all I could initially find, so I snapped up a copy.  Later I found the single disc edition at Wal-Mart for $5 and I grabbed it as well. 

I had been thinking a lot about the songs in Shock Treatment, and so I decided to make it one of my last of the year DVDs.  I popped in the disc from the box set and settled in.  I know the film uses color saturation and video style footage, but it seemed a little off for some reason.  I think my television may be going bad or need adjusted. 

The plot concerns Brad and Janet (Cliff De Young and Jessica Harper) returning to their hometown of Denton after being married.  The town of Denton has now been turned into a big television studio where all the residents either appear in the shows DTV broadcasts, or they sit in the audience watching it live.  Richard O’Brien, Patrician Quinn, Nell Campbell, and Charles Gray all return in different roles.  Jeremy Newson returns as Ralph Hapschatt although with a different actress (Ruby Wax) as his now estranged wife Betty Hapschatt.  Imogen Claire who played a Transylvanian in Rocky Horror also has a small part as the wardrobe mistress.  In addition to Janet’s parents, two British celebrities, Barry Humphries and Rik Mayall, also join the cast as Bert Schnick and Ricky.  It’s a little odd getting used to the new characters at first, but they are all easily as eccentric as the characters in Rocky Horror.  Another important character is Farley Flavors, also played by De Young.

Farley engineers for Brad and Janet to be called down as contestants on the Marriage Maze.  Once on the show, Brad is taken to Dentonvale for psychiatric evaluation while Janet is groomed to become a star as the host of Farley’s new show Faith Factory.  Who is Farley Flavors?  Why does he want to destroy Brad Majors and take Janet away from him?  The answer is that he is Brad’s long-lost twin brother who took a different turn in life.

I have grown to love Shock Treatment over the years and like others have stated, I actually find I prefer the music in Shock Treatment over the music from Rocky Horror.  It is definitely one of my all time favorite soundtracks along with Phantom of the Paradise, Streets of Fire, Magnolia, and Bugsy Malone.  I don’t think there is a bum song in the entire movie.  Shock Treatment gets 3 1/2 stars and one of those stars is purely for the music.

Brad and Janet

Blood Orgy Of The She Devils

When you see a title like Blood Orgy of the She Devils, you expect a few things.  You expect to see blood and gore.  You expect lots of sex and nudity.  You also expect little in the way of a plot.  Unfortunately Blood Orgy of the She Devils only delivers on the last of those expectations.  I suppose if I had examined the case a little closer and noticed the PG rating, I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but instead I was taken in by the other elements.  There is a disclaimer warning advising viewers not to mess with forces of the occult.  The DVD is part of the Cut Classics collection.  And the writer/director is Ted V. Mikels.  All of those factors drew my eyes away from the PG rating which would have let me know to lower my exploitation hopes and dreams.

Blood Orgy of the She Devils concerns a black magic witch named Mara (Lila Zaborin) who performs rituals, makes deals with Satan, channels spirits, and has an army of women who spear her sacrificial men.  The film does have a nice early 70s feel of an underground satanic cult film.  Unfortunately the gore is extremely tame, on the par with some of Dan Curtis’ Movie of the Week horror films.  Blood Orgy is also an extremely talky film.  There is a professor of the paranormal that is there to provide a scientific voice to say witchcraft is real.  He does this with several extremely long monologues to two of his students that have been going to Mara’s seances.  Picture the doctor’s speech at the end of Psycho where he explains Norman’s condition so that the audience can understand it.  That is what this character does in every scene he appears.

The Blood Orgy of the She Devils DVD does an excellent job of furthering the old exploitation/grindhouse circuit marketing of these films.  In addition to the DVD case, the menu screen lists all of its offerings under some sort of sinister sounding option.  You don’t choose play.  You “Start the Ritual”.  And the scene selections are “Satanic Scene Selections”.  There aren’t many bonus features.  Mikels has a commentary track which might be interesting to check out now that I’ve watched the movie.  There is also a collection of trailers from other Mikels DVDs that are available including The Worm Eaters, Doll Squad, and 10 Violent Women.

Blood Orgy of the She Devils gets 2 stars.  I really think it deserves a lower score, but it is pure exploitation fun despite being a lot of bait and switch as far as the title goes.  This would be the perfect film for a Halloween party after everyone gets a little tipsy.

The Ice Pirates

I saw The Ice Pirates at the Plaza East Cinemas when it first came out.  I didn’t really care for it.  It seemed silly and actually a little boring.  26 years later I’m browsing the DVDs at Big Lots and I find a copy of The Ice Pirates.  Surely it can’t be as bad as I remembered.  Maybe I didn’t get the jokes.  I decided that for $3 I would take a chance and check it out again. 

I am sad to report that even upon a second viewing and 26 years in between them, I still didn’t care for the movie.  I think there might be a half-way decent movie buried inside of this one, but it’s like digging through a pile of dog crap to retrieve a quarter the pooch swallowed.  Is it really worth it?

The Ice Pirates is set in the future in another galaxy where the only valuable commodity left is water.  Blocks of ice are worth their weight in gold.  Of course with anything this valuable there are bound to be people who try to hijack it.  In this case it would be Robert Urich’s band of ice pirates.  His crew consists of a very young Ron Perlman, Michael Roberts, John Matuszak, and Angelica Huston.  In the midst of one particular heist, Urich also kidnaps a princess played by Mary Crosby.

From that point on we’re taken on a cross galaxy quest to find the princess’ missing father and the mysterious 10th planet which is covered with water.  Along the way we get a robotic Bruce Vilanch, space prairie dogs, a pirate bar, and in a nod to Alien, a space herpes.  Of course the princess falls in love with Urich’s pirate and they have a passionate tryst while heading for the mysterious planet. 

The movie is definitely campy and not meant to be taken too seriously, but I still found myself rather bored by the whole ordeal.  If it wasn’t for the nostalgia factor, I don’t know if this would rate above 1/2 a star.  As it is, I give it 1 star.

Bad Santa

It just wouldn’t be Christmas without a viewing of the modern Christmas classic Bad Santa.  I love Christmas, but I have to admit that three of my favorite Christmas entertainments are rather dark and twisted.  Blackadder’s Christmas Carol is a British television special that turns both the Christmas Carol and Blackadder on their heads with a kind and generous Blackadder being turned into the more evil Scrooge like persona we’re used to seeing.  The first Married With Children Christmas episode where Santa jumps out of a plane, his chute fails to open and he plummets to his death in the Bundy’s backyard always makes me laugh.  But the most twisted Christmas film that I have come to treasure is Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa.

Bad Santa is available in 3 different versions.  There is a theatrical R rated cut, an unrated Badder Santa, and an unrated director’s cut.  I have the Badder Santa edition, but will probably pick up the others at some point as well.  Since I know I will eventually upgrade to Blu-ray for this title, the Blu-ray is supposed to contain both unrated versions.  In that case I just need to watch the pawn shops for the R rated cut.

Bad Santa in any of its forms is not a film for kids.  Billy Bob Thornton is Willie Stokes, a con man who dresses up as a department store Santa each Christmas to rob the place with his partner, Marcus played by Tony Cox.  Willie is also an alcoholic which means Marcus has to keep an eye on Willie while playing his role as the photo elf.  Willie has been getting more and more out of control through the years.  This year seems to be his worst.  Willie returns home one night to find someone, possibly the police he thinks, going through his house.  He quickly hatches a new plan and moves in with a young boy named Thurman Merman whose father and mother are both gone.  The kid is living in a very nice house with his granny (an unbilled Cloris Leachman) who has no idea of what is going on around her.  A relationship slowly develops between the kid and Willie.  Willie also finds a girl, Lauren Graham, with a Santa fetish who becomes more than a one-night stand.

Bad Santa isn’t for everyone.  Some people will be shocked and offended, but for those that like their Christmas cheer a little darker, this is the Citizen Kane of holiday films.  I give Bad Santa 4 stars.

Eating Raoul

Having watched Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 with my daughter, I decided to dust off another Bartel classic that seems to have been largely forgotten recently.  Eating Raoul was a very twisted comedy for the time when it first came out.  Eating Raoul starred Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov as Paul and Mary Bland, a boring couple with dreams of opening their own restaurant.  The Blands live in an apartment building that has become overrun with swingers, and when one of them accidentally mistakes the Blands’ apartment for the site of that night’s sex party and starts making advances on Mary, Paul quickly hits him in the head with a frying pan and kills him.  As they prepare to dispose of the body in the garbage chute, they remove the man’s wallet and discover that these swingers have a lot of money.  Soon they have an idea to make the money they need to open their restaurant.  They place ads and lure swingers to their apartment where they kill them, rob them, and then dump the bodies.

The plot thickens when they hire a locksmith to rekey their apartment.  Raoul is running a scam of his own.  He rekeys the apartment and then sneaks back in to rob the place himself.  When he sneaks back into the Blands’ apartment, he stumbles upon one of their fresh kills and a partnership is born.  Raoul (Robert Beltran) agrees to let the Blands keep everything in the wallets in exchange for the rest of the body.  He takes the keys and finds their car which he sells and then he sells the bodies to a dog food company.

Eating Raoul is a dark comedy, but a very effective one.  It also has a great amount of talent in the cast.  In addition to cult film veterans Bartel and Woronov and future Star Trek Voyager regular Beltran, the movie features Buck Henry, Don Steele and Edie McClurg in supporting roles.  Bartel had a wonderfully dark sense of humor that is terribly missed these days.  Eating Raoul was extremely edgy when it was released.  Today it’s not as edgy, but it is still very funny.  I give Eating Raoul 3 stars.

Death Race 2000

After Easy Rider, I decided to offer my daughter a lighter classic film.  I popped in the cult drive-in classic Death Race 2000.  I hadn’t seen it for several years, but I had always enjoyed it.  Death Race 2000, starring David Carradine, was set in the far off future of 2000 when the most popular sport in the world is the Transcontinental Road Race where racers in suped up funny cars score points by running over pedestrians.  The film was produced by Roger Corman and directed by the darkly humorous Paul Bartel.

Highlights of the movie for me include most any scene with Don Steele.  Steele plays the excitable announcer of the race and he plays it perfectly.  I love the scene where he initially reports on an attack that occured on the race resulting in the death of one of the drivers.  As he reports this somber event, a government agent enters, hands him a note and whispers something in his ear.  He quickly flip flops the story announcing that the dead driver has in fact just made a huge score.

Being a mid-70s Corman film, the movie also has plenty of nudity to keep the drive-in crowd awake.  One scene involves a mid race massage for the drivers and their navigators.  Mary Woronov once recounted that all of the actors and actresses were to be nude, but Sylvester Stallone who played Machine Gun Joe Viterbo was prepping Rocky for release and didn’t want a nude scene damaging his family friendly and serious image, so Stallone wore a towel for the scene.  Woronov had no such problems and so we get a nude cat fight between her and Roberta Collins.

Death Race 2000 is a fun film and I highly recommend it.  The violence is almost cartoonish, especially by today’s standards.  It’s also worth watching so you can recognize stock footage from the film used in other Corman classics like Joe Dante’s Hollywood Boulevard.  I give the film 3 1/2 stars.

Easy Rider

I don’t know how I made it to 2010 without having seen Easy Rider, but I had.  I picked up the DVD a few years ago, but I just never got around to sitting down and watching it.  I was listening to The Bob & Tom Show on the radio during my drive to work and they mentioned a song from Easy Rider.  That reminded me that I hadn’t seen the movie, and so it moved up to the top of my list of DVDs to watch.  I also figured that since my daughter was wanting to watch classic films, this would fit in with that as well.

I popped in Easy Rider and wasn’t really sure what to think.  The opening scene with the drug deal is so loud and noisy, it was actually unsettling.  Of course that was the intent.  I really didn’t know a lot about Easy Rider other than the basics and the ending.  Yes, knowing the ending does make the rest of the film seem more depressing than it would have been if I hadn’t known how it would end up. 

Watching Easy Rider, I kept thinking back to The Wild One, which was another classic biker picture I watched early this year.  It seemed strange how different the two pictures were.  Of course the big difference between Brando’s bikers and Hopper and Fonda was the length of their hair.  Brando was a bad boy, but he had short hair, so he could be a good guy inside.  Even the town could agree to let him and his gang ride away.  But Fonda nad Hopper had long hair.  They were deviants, terrorists, communists, hippies.  They were up to know good and they had to die, even if they actually caused less of a disturbance than Brando and his gang.

My daughter couldn’t understand why the townsfolk in the diner and several other scenes treated the guys in Easy Rider the way they did.  I explained to her about the hippie culture, long hair, and the Viet Nam War and how these things played out in the deep south.  It just didn’t make any sense to her, which caused her to sort of lose interest in the film. 

I admit to being a little disappointed in Easy Rider, but it had been built up so big in my mind, and hyped as being so important and revolutionary for its time, that watching it 41 years later, it’s hard to appreciate how ground-breaking the film truly was for its time.

Two things that absolutely have not lost any of their power in those 41 years are the cinematography and the performance of Jack Nicholson as lawyer George Hanson.  Nicholson was on the verge of giving up acting when he took on the role of Hanson and to say we witness the birth of a star in his performance is not just hyperbole.  He elevates the pictures as do the gorgeous scenes of the American countryside.

I give Easy Rider 2 1/2 stars.  Down the road if I watch it again without such high expectations, I may be able to raise that grade, but for now it was just a disappointment.

Phantom Of The Paradise

Since my daughter and I were going through all the classic Universal Monster movies, I decided to introduce her to a variation on one of them.  Phantom of the Paradise also happens to be one of my favorite movies primarily due to the wonderful soundtrack.  I was first introduced to Phantom of the Paradise through some articles in the monster magazines of the time.  I don’t recall it ever playing around Charleston, WV, but it was playing in Virginia once while I was visiting family there.  Unfortunately, I had no way of getting to the theater since I couldn’t drive at 10 years old.  I can’t honestly remember when I did finally get to see the film, but I definitely recall when I picked up the soundtrack album.  I was on a trip to the 1982 World’s Fair with the SC Chorale.  I wasn’t really interested in a lot of the displays and rides they had, so I caught a bus and went shopping.  I found and purchased the soundtrack to Phantom and Shock Treatment.

Phantom of the Paradise is a rock mash-up of Phantom of the Opera, Faust, and Dorian Gray.  There is the tragic artist whose work is stolen and face disfigured who becomes the murderous Phantom.  There is also the element of Faust where a deal is made with the devil and Dorian Gray’s eternal youth is touched on as well.  Phantom of the Paradise takes all of these elements and mixes them with satire and the previously praised music of Paul Williams for a truly unique viewing experience.

The acting is especially enjoyable with Jessica Harper, Gerrit Graham, William Finley and Paul Williams all doing wonderful jobs with their roles.  Paul Williams has been involved with so many of the movies that mean a lot to me emotionally that I would love to shake his hand and say “Thank you”.  His music filled not only Phantom but another unique favorite, Bugsy Malone.  Williams himself has roles in Phantom, my never fail comfort food movie, Smokey and the Bandit, and the film that first got me hooked on Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

My daughter seemed to enjoy Phantom of the Paradise.  For me it was a visit with an old friend.  I have often said that one of the songs I want played at my funeral is a tune from this film called The Hell of It.  (For the record Green Day’s Good Riddance is the other song I have specifically requested.)  I love this film.  I love the costumes.  I love the music.  I love the musical numbers.  Is there any way I could give this film less than 4 stars?  I don’t think so.