The Sinister Urge (1960)

I'm pretty sure the enigma of Ed Wood will live on forever. If his little b-movies from the fifties and sixties still getting released and appreciated, even in a bad way, until today it mean he was something special. He almost created his own kind of cinema, with hilarious dialogues, fifties kitsch and special effects from hell - but still surprisingly consistent quality. Maybe not THE best quality, but his it shows that he had a specific style and that he tried to refine his storytelling more and more. The Sinister Urge was his last "real" movie, what I've heard anyway, and it's an interesting and not that bad trashy thriller-melodrama about "a smut racket" and a serial killer who lurks on innocent women!

Gloria Henderson (Jean Fontaine) is a cold-hearted and greedy business woman who owns a pornographic film company. Her right-hand man Johnny (Carl Anthony) lures naive women to star in their seedy productions (often against a beefy Hawaiian guy, Henry Kekoanui, with a big moustache - kinda hot actually, if he shaved that facial hair and didn't rolled his eyes like a cartoonish rapist all the time!). This is of course just a small-time business, but everything is owned by a big even seedier company in the background. Anyway, every time one of their actresses is causing problem, they're calling in their expert - a serial killer named Dirk (Dino Fantini) who takes care of them in the most violent and nasty ways! Will the cops stop them? Will Ed Wood get a chance to include a man in drag? The answer is yes on both questions, what did you expect?

The Sinister Urge has all the ingredients we learned to love from Mr Wood: goofy cops, teenagers dancing, men in drag, long dialogue scenes behind desks, tits, fist-fights, over-acting and superb melodrama á la random daytime soap. But here, finally, all of this comes together in surprisingly even mess. It's clearly one of Wood's finer moments as a director and he easily mixes sleaze with a couple of well-staged thriller-sequences. The murders, especially, are nasty and violent and I didn't really expect full frontal boobs, but hey - this movie has it all. I also like the quirky humour, like the porno director who only has an exotic "European" accent when he's directing, but not in private.

Ed Wood always created pure cinema, and there's no chance you ever will believe he's trying to create a reality. This is always set in a very special crazy universe, much like John Waters filmography or much of Ken Russell's cinematic world. An office without anything on the walls could be from any bad movie director, but when the actors start to talk and the storyline becomes more clear it's impossible not to guess that it's the work of another director than Ed Wood. More colour and much of the material could have been written by Waters, but lacking the seriousness that Wood wrote with.

Better than you would think, at trashy, sleazy movie who uses the word "smut" more times than explosions in a Michael Bay blockbuster. When I come to think of it, "smut" could be the perfect drinking game when watching this movie. So go ahead, have fun - and send Mr Wood a thought please.

I've started a new Thai movie blog!

After some thinking I've decided to start a another blog, only specializing in old and new Thai cinema. I'm slowly moving over the Thai reviews from Ninja Dixon to The Mee Noi Thai Movie Review, and will also focus on writing new and fresh texts about the fantastic cinema of Siam.

I will of course continue with Ninja Dixon, but everything Thai will be on the new blog. I think the world needs a specialized on this subject, especially just reviews and with a focus on genre films.

Hope you like it and if you want to, spread the link to everyone interested!

The Unborn (1991)

I never understood movies that somehow should reflect real life horrors, a demonic baby to symbolise the fear of pregnancy, an serial killer dentist to makes us fear the dentist even more. When it comes to killer babies and related subjects there's a lot of movies to choose from, but I've always found it very silly to actually think that Rosemary's Baby or It's Alive could scare future parents. In the first case it's because Satan don't exists and it's hard to be afraid of a mythological character the second, a quite overrated movie, focuses to much on the baby as a pure monster. There's a monster baby in The Unborn also, but the main bulk of the movie is spent on the horror of having something unknown inside you... and it want to get out...

Virginia (Brooke Adams) and Brad (Jeff Hayenga) is a successful couple who the last five years has been trying to have a baby. Through a colleague of Brad they get a chance to try one last time at a specialist, the awfully nice Dr Richard Meyerling (James Karen). He enhances the sperms of Brad so the baby will be stronger and handle the complicated birth process. Pregnancy succeeds and the young couple is preparing for their new life. But soon Virginia starts to feel weird, she seem to be controlled by another force (which the poor cat experiences...) and a new friend of hers, also a pregnant woman with the same doctor, stabs herself repeatedly in the stomach with a big kitchen knife. Something is wrong and Virginia is the only one understanding that both her own and others lives are in danger!

Well, forget It's Alive! The Unborn is for me, from now on, the only killer baby movie worth the name. Not only does it deliver some truly macabre scenes of carnage, the atmosphere is genuinely creepy and the script tighter than Scottish catholic nun! First of all, Brooke Adams is a good competent actress - not to you either - that actually gives everything she's got to make this movie feel realistic, or at least very, very dramatic. There's no subtle acting when she's getting crazy and ripping her dear house away, or sitting in a chair screaming like a madman. She obviously understood the genre and respected it, something very few actors do I think, especially if they are at a low-point in their career and just trying to pay the rent.

Another fine performance comes from veteran James Karen, a bloke I've always felt have a problem with over-acting, but here does his way-to-fake-nice doctor perfectly balanced and with a cold, calculating under-the-skin psychopathic persona.

Staying away from sleaze and nudity, which would have dragged the fun script down actually, the story focuses more on some light gore (well-made, but not that graphic) and the descent into madness for poor Virginia, and here we have everything from a very violent fight between a lesbian couple (involving hammers), a down-and-dirty backstreet-abortion and of course the final monster baby (created by a simple but effective animatronic).

The Unborn is a violent, dark movie which is many notches above the usual DTV crapfests. Recommended!

Closed Circuit (1978)

Sometimes you see a movie that you never have heard of before and have no expectations about, and many of these movies turns out to be a lot better than I ever could imagine. Why? Maybe because no one have hyped - or hated - them and they stayed fresh because of the lack of interest from the cult movie community. Closed Circuit is a TV-movie from 1978, and even if some people call it giallo I'm not so sure I would consider it one. Sure, a giallo in Italy is a thriller/mystery with none, one or several murders. Even if Closed Circuit actually has three deaths and at a first glance is a thriller, it's more of an absurd black comedy with a healthy dose of Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury.

It's time for cinema! A spaghetti western matinée with Giuliano Gemma and William Berger in the leads, I Giorno Dell'Ira (not to be confused with the 1967 classic with Van Cleef and Gemma). The audience is gathering. We have the young couple, the dirty old man spending more time on the toilet than watching the movie, a man and a woman having a secret affair in the darkness, a hysterical man who don't want to be disturbed by anything, two gangsters waiting for a "business companion" etc. Everyone from every part of society. During the last act, the dramatic duel, a man in the audience gets shot exactly when Gemma shoots first. He dies and within seconds panic strikes. The police seals the cinema very fast and keeps the whole audience locked up, while they're trying to figure out who's the killer is and where the weapon is hidden... but soon a second murder, identical to the first, happens right under their nose and the police gets more and more perplexed...

Closed Circuit is first of all a celebration to cinema and how the movies can work as a second reality that can affect us in the same way as real life. The movie is filled with movie posters, which is natural because it's set at a cinema, but it's only genre posters. A huge billboard of Paul Leder's  insane A.P.E (under it's Italian title Super Kong) adorns the outside wall, the lobby has a gorgeous posters of Tentacoli and in the room where the police interrogates everyone Mimsy Farmer looks down from a very nice poster of The Perfume of the Lady in Black. The movie on the screen is a fictional western made to look like the real deal (but I suspect that some of the footage comes from California, a western with Gemma and Berger from 1977). The mystery becomes even more a mystery towards the end, but is not the most important thing in the movie. What's strong about Closed Circuit is it's fantastic gallery of characters, all with their own secrets and agendas and how some of them starts to enjoy being prisoners in the cinema, demanding food, cigarettes, 12 different TV's (one for each channel). The most fascinating character is the first victim, a character we know very little about, but somehow creates the situation with his almost absurd interest in the moving pictures.

Don't expect blood and nudity in Closed Circuit, it's still an Italian TV-movie quite far away from the budget and spectacle of the cinema thrillers from the same time. But it's also a damn fine and intelligent movie, original and almost spooky. It has one sequence that gave me goosebumps because it was so intense, so magical and so macabre with very small means. It's not out on any official DVD what I know, but a TV-rip is able to download and is also used at the bootleg I have, from ZDD Visual Media.

Sauna (2008)

It started a year ago. Maybe later actually. Jocke over at Rubbermonsterfetishism saw Sauna and said to me - more than once during a short period - that this was something I should watch. And he told me it more and more times, he called my mother, he stalked my grandma... he even claimed to be my son to be able to infiltrate my workplace to tell me to watch it. When he started to put photos of us together, torn into a million pieces, into my mailbox I had to confront him. But it got worse.

And then, a couple weeks ago, we had a booth at the Scandinavian Sci-fi, Game & Film Convention in Stockholm, selling The Killer Elephants on DVD. Everything was calm until he suddenly disappeared and came back with the Njuta Films release of Sauna. I tried to avoid it for a week, but this morning I sat down and watched it...

The year is 1595, a delegation of Swedish and Russian officials travels through Finland to divide the country between the states. It's been a long and hard trip and the war isn't far behind them. Erik, the older brother, is plagued by the memories of those he killed - but continues to behave like it's war. The younger one, Knut, gets more and more worried of his brothers behaviour, but tries to keep out of his way. Soon they come to a big swamp, and according to all sources no one lives there - until they find a whole village in the middle of it. Soon a girl, that Knut thought Erik killed, starts following them and soon they realize that something is terrible wrong there. Or maybe it's that weird sauna, standing out in the wilderness, that haunts them all...

While Sweden still is a desert when it comes to genre cinema our neighbours churns out classic after classic. Denmark has been a force of cinema since many years, and Norway and Finland is there with them creating imaginative genre movies which aren't afraid of being bloody and commercial, but still stands with both feet in the Scandinavian mythology. Sauna is clearly one of the best. A meditative trip into the wilderness of our minds darker areas. Don't expect hyperactive editing and typical jump scares, this is so much more and with an amazing ambition to create something unique and genuinely scary.

I love how the camera sets in on a character and stays there. Reads the facial expressions, the eyes and the charisma of the actor. With no hasty cuts, director Antti-Jussi Annila gives us time breath the characters, feel the story and let the atmosphere creep up on us. Some people say it's impossible for someone from another country to judge if the actors are good or not. That's of course bullshit. An experienced, thinking viewer have no problem reading the actors of the most exotic origin and Finland is just next door to Sweden and I'll tell ya, this is some magnificent acting going on. Ville Virtanen and Tommi Eronen is of course perfect, but the biggest surprise for me was to see Viktor Klimenko's name in the end credits - and I finally could put a name on that familiar face. Klimenko was, and is still, a famous Finnish singer with a Russian heritage. Damn fine singer to and with some of the most outrageous "manly" album covers ever. In the beginning of the eighties he got a religious experience and turned his career to gospel and religious songs and the last I heard of him was that he claimed to be something of a prophet, telling the future and having a close contact with that absurd being called "God". So I thought he was lost - but obviously not, because starring in a very dark horror movie is quite a different career for a former preacher...

Sauna, which is the only good title, is also known as Evil Rising - but don't be fooled by that. This is a lot more than a simple supernatural horror movie. This is a Finnish masterpiece.

Ghostwatch (1992)

I love when people get upset. I just f**king love it. Why? Because I’m one of those that can be quite easily upset because of nothing, and I know violent stream of energy, power of live, that flows through your mind and body during such a thing. But I also learned to be very critical and not believe everything I see, read and hear – which sometimes borders to paranoia. That’s why I love mockumentaries. It mixes a genre I adore, documentary, with fantasy, imagination – stuff that boring people people without humor hate. When you look at Ghostwatch today I’m quite sure it wouldn’t fool so many, except the very naïve, but that’s of course because TV has changed a lot since then. But what still a fact is that Ghostwatch is a damn fine TV-drama made to look like a live broadcast starring the one and only Michael Parkinson.

From BBC's studio Michael Parkinson and paranormal expert Dr Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan) leads the investigation of a haunted house at Foxhill Drive. In the house they have reporter Sarah Greene who’s there to check all the weird stuff happening and outside is comedian, actor and TV-host Craig Charles (more known from Red Dwarf and Robot Wars) interviewing the neighborhood. The family, consisting of a mother and two daughters, has been terrorized by an unknown entity for several years and now is the time to prove what the hell is going on. From the start everything is cute and cuddly, a bit funny, innocent – but everything takes a turn when one of the daughters is caught faking a haunting – but then it takes another turn, and it’s all for the worst…

Ghostwatch is a fantastic example of how to manipulate the audience. Every turn, every part of the dialogue is there to create the viewer’s road to complete belief. Just when something seems a bit too far-fetched, the filmmakers add something that will bring us back to that this could be the reality. What makes it stronger is the presence of Michael Parkinson as the TV-host, sitting there being fatherly and friendly, a bit neutral in the chaos, and this nice old man is slowly getting drawn into pure hell! The actors are also very good, and the dialogue never gets to hammy or unrealistic. Sarah Green and Craig Charles is also friendly, loved, TV-profiles, which makes it even harder watching them being scared shitless by the ghost known as “Pipes”.

To add to the paranoia created by BBC, the ghost makes several cameo appearances during the show, and all of them are ignored – or not seen – by the hosts and witnesses. A British family, spellbound by what they see on the telly, would probably react, discuss and maybe even call to the hotline telling what they’ve seen. By planting one of these ghosts in the beginning everyone knows that they should look out for more.

If Ghostwatch had been an American production we would have seen a classic happy ending. But here’s no such thing. The show just breaks and leaves the audience alone… at least until the credits comes and tells everyone this is just a bluff.

Paranormal Activity might be more famous, but if you want to see the beginning of it all, buy Ghostwatch on DVD and watch it during one of those dark winter nights together with the rest of the family. You won’t regret it.

Black Widow - Sleeping With Demons (2011)

I was raised with music, heavy progressive, pulsating, weed-smelling Brit-rock from the seventies. That and psychedelic pop, coming from my youthful obsession of Beatles, The Move and much later American legends The Beach Boys. But my heart has always been with the progressive movement, especially if the played on atmosphere and with songs longer than ten minutes. It's been an adventure rediscovering these classics but one group that stayed hidden from me until quite recently was Black Widow, the notorious "Satanic" rock group that shocked the audiences with staged rituals and occult lyrics. I fell in love with Sacrifice directly, a brilliantly written and performed satanic saga. Even if Black Widow III drastically departed from the satanic way, I appreciate it as much because of it's psychedelic pop - and King of Hearts has since then become one of my favourite compositions of Jim Gannon. I actually thought that was everything, that the demons of Black Widow never would unleash themselves on the earth again...

...until the cinematic nerd-genius Jason sent me an MMS with a photo of a NEW Black Widow-album, Sleeping With Demons. I hurried to the iTunes store and bought it within minutes. Now, I'll admit that this could have ended up in something very bad. Imagine yourself a couple of old farts getting together and pretend to be young again. But that's the good thing with Black Widow. That wasn't even that modern and "fresh" at the time, they stayed away from that bullshit and did their own stuff so far away from the normal crap being released on vinyl. So what we have here is an album that sounds - with a few minor problems - like it should sound: satanic 1970.

The album consists of 15 song, and I can honestly say that there was just of them I didn't like. Even the Devil Gets the Blues is one of them, which is a bad embarrassing because it has original Kay Garret doing the singing - which is awesome, but I'm just not that fond of this kind of blues. I'm sure others will like it more. The second is Party time for Demons, mostly because it's silly. I was thinking constantly of Spinal Tap (which, by itself, is a good thing). I'm sure the band glanced at Spinal Tap once or twice during the making of this album, which just makes it even better - but Party time for Demons is just a bit to lightweight for me. To much rock & roll the bad way.

BUT the rest of the album, wow! Black Widow has gone back to their roots for most of the songs, but isn't afraid to send out some winks to the modern audience. The first track, with Tony ‘The Cat’ Martin doing guest vocals is a perfect, powerful start filled leading to the catchy track Sleeping With Demons. My favourite track so far is Portal To Hell, but prepare for an album filled with theatrical singing, occult references for the whole family, dramtic interludes, nods to the original albums and last, but maybe most important, a lot of pure love and respect for their own past.

There's a sense of "what the fuck", which both includes a small dose of self-distance and a goal to make something that the fans want without pretending to be twenty five again. They succeeded, which very few bands to after such a long time. This is not Sacrifice, but it wasn't the plan either. This is Sleeping With Demons, take it or leave it! I just wish this means them going out on tour, because I - and many others - would love to see them in Stockholm!

Visit their homepage, feel the atmosphere and then go and buy the album at the nearest store or through iTunes!