It's movie marathon time once again. Which I guess it's hardly surprising looking back at the usual review format here. But it's time to settle down in the dark with the strange and unusual, and it's time block out the outside world of bland mainstream blockbusters and tepid jump scare horror nonsense. Time to warm the cockles of our hearts with a lot of grotesque violence and nightmare visions. As ever there is quite a selection to choose from whether it's Italian gore or madcap visions of 1980s America. There's never a short supply of features that include pouring blood, dissolving skin and eye popping effects. So come on down; the nightmare has only just begun.
Like other movies which feature Japanese folklore there's a vengeful ghost involved, and like other horror films there's a band of teenagers. But this is where the familiar elements end since this is a film packed with dozens of surreal visual choices and weird editing effects that make it stand out from the crowd even today. A girl running away to avoid seeing her father's new girlfriend decides to visit her Aunt in the countryside, and she ends up taking her school friends along for the trip. But even this mundane opening has a lot of crazy matte paintings, animation and strange scene transitions. Normal daytime skies and background locations have been replaced by cartoon like scenery as they travel out of the city.
Some of this stuff was actually done during production, without anyone really knowing how the end results would look as they scratched colourful effects into the celluloid itself. As experimental art-house movies goes this is a pretty unique approach with pretty wild results. To add to this weird storybook atmosphere the girls all have silly nicknames like Sweet, Gorgeous and Fantasy which tell you their character traits. No prizes for guessing what Melody and Kung-Fu are good at. Of course they all get picked off slowly as the Aunt and her creepy cat begin acting strangely, although the way things unravel into madness is anything but predictable. Even the deaths themselves are often bizarre.
There's a lot of blood, a lot of music, and a lot of silly humour. Skeletons dance and pianos eat people. It jumps between wartime memories and floating body parts without ever feeling that incongruous. A few bits and pieces feel like a step too far as things go completely off the rails but it's only fleeting. One particular moment involves a character suddenly transforming in a mass of fruit. Maybe this is some kind of cultural reference I lack the right context for, or maybe it's just a really silly gag. But it's all strange and charming enough to work thanks to the handmade feeling of the production.
4/5
Jumping over to Italy, Lucio Fulci's The Beyond (L'Aldila) features another haunted house of sorts. However this one has even less narrative cohesion which is kind of impressive. The main location in this case is a hotel the heroine inherits under suspicious circumstances. Unfortunately for her the whole place is in pretty bad shape. As well as coming packaged with some rather creepy and unhelpful employees called Martha and... Arthur (really), it's also the location of one of the seven gateways to Hell. Which is just typical. It's very similar to Fulci's City of the Living Dead, not only in terms of this story outline where events allow the dead to rise, but also because of the random horror and violence.
Scenes seem to be picked at random for their shock factor, and then they're just sort of hung onto a vague and often nonsensical plot. His earlier movie Zombi 2 being popular seems to have have had an effect on both of these subsequent stories as they continue to feature shambling corpses, but whether they're the walking dead or just ghosts is never clear. Sometimes bodies appear after being moved to separate locations, and sometimes they materialise out of thin air. Sometimes they awake in morgues and wander around as you'd expect... so it's hard to say what is really going on.
In the 1920s an artist is brutally murdered after being accused of witchcraft. What he did besides create a sinister painting is never explained, but it's a great intro with moody monochrome visuals. In the present day the place has fallen into disrepair and the inhabitants have vanished, until of course the new owner arrives. Some storyline ideas present themselves including a blind woman trying to ward people away, and a subplot about a mystery book which tells of the building's secrets. But the rest is all pretty random with the kinds of gouging and stabbing you would expect. Amongst the grisly moments there are spiders, exploding heads and accidents with acid.
As far as Fulci's output goes this is one of his better efforts purely in terms of the style and all the wacky sequences. It's atmospheric and memorable but it's still not exactly a great film. There's at least an interesting dream like quality to the proceedings and there are some interesting set pieces. Viewing it as a surreal nightmare in which the underworld begins to cross over into reality is the only choice. But if you're in the mood for that kind of thing it's worth a look.
3/5
Street Trash on the other hand is at the other end of the narrative spectrum, with far too much plot. The results are... less than focused. A shopkeeper finds a box in his basement, it's filled with something called Viper which he assumes is liquor. It's many years past its sell by date, so of course he simply puts on sale at a discount and sells it to the local winos. But they local winos soon find out that the stuff has a nasty side effect. Not only is it poison, but it's also some kind of flesh melting acid which reduces people into multicoloured slurry minutes after they drink it. It's a bizarre starting point that offers some crazy special effects scenes as people dissolve in different ways. The dubious horror sub-genre of 'melting movies' certainly lives up to it's name here.
But everything else is less clear. To start with there's a thread about a gang of homeless people causing mayhem in the streets. They're being led by a psycho who has been mentally scarred by the Vietnam war, and large portions of the film forget the stomach melting booze to explore his grim existence. As an antagonist he kind of works but way too much time is spent here. Elsewhere our main characters are a separate pair of hobos who narrowly miss the effects of the circulating Viper bottles and the gang violence. There's also a cartoonish cops versus mobsters story playing out as a detective comes across these recent events. There are some particularly grotesque moments peppered throughout, some being more comical than others. The film is notorious for a drawn out scene where a game of catch is played with someone's dismembered genitals after all.
But it also features a paralytic woman being raped by some of the titular street trash and left to die. This part is off screen but adds to the overall gross factor and it kills any sense of levity. To make things worse her body is violated by a sleazy scrap merchant who owns the land where the hobos live. Considering everything that transpires during he is the worst character of all, and it sort of derails the movie. Even with all this other stuff going on this is a bit too repellent. But it's also a movie that ends with a My Way style musical number about someone drinking the mystery liquor so what else can I say. It's sometimes funny, it's often gruelling, it's... an experience. Only those with strong stomachs need apply.
3/5
(PART TWO)
