It’s Nothing Mama, Just a Game (1974)

It’s Nothing Mama, Just a Game (AKA Beyond Erotica AKA Lola) is a Spanish-Venezuelan co-production and it’s crazy twisted eurosleaze. This is definitely not a giallo. It’s not supernatural horror but I would still class it as gothic horror.

Juan’s family owns a sugar plantation in Venezuela. To say that Juan (David Hemmings) is odd would be putting it mildly. He lives there with his mother (played by Alida Valli). She is every bit as crazy as he is, but in a different way. The plantation has been slowly going broke since the death of Juan’s father. Now they’re reliant on financial support from Juan’s uncle. The uncle despises Juan’s mother but he despises Juan even more. He is concerned that Juan may be not just useless but dangerously crazy.

We already know Juan is crazy after the opening scene in which he watches a pretty young woman named Lucia mauled to death by his dogs. Lucia had been the maid. Now she will have to be replaced. Lola (Andrea Rau) is the lucky girl.

Lola isn’t completely stupid or completely innocent. A man trying to get into her pants is something she can deal with. She is probably no naïve virgin. Her problem is that she has no idea at first that Juan is playing a much crazier game than that.

She is also over-confident.

Juan is not primarily motivated by sex but I don’t think he’s motivated by power either. He seems to be a man still stuck in his childhood, playing games of make-believe. The games do not seem to have a specific objective. The game is an end in itself. When he’s playing his games he can forget that the estate is failing and that he has contributed to the decline through his incompetence and childishness. He can feel that he is in control of his life, when in reality his life has been spiralling more and more out of control.

Lola does not want to play the game, but she ends up doing so. She even learns to enjoy doing so. Perhaps, even in a perverse way, it makes her feel more in control. On the surface she might be the submissive partner but in fact she has the real power. She starts to realise that she can end up calling the shots. She might now be a better game-player than Juan.

Juan’s uncle arrives. His aim is to sort things out and if Juan really does prove to be insane he intends to pull the financial plug on Juan and his mother. Juan is outmatched by his uncle but the uncle is outmatched by Lola.

Lola has something that gives her the whip hand over both men - the sexual power of women. She can make them dance to her tune. But if power always corrupts it corrupts Lola as well.

There’s some powerhouse acting here. David Hemmings is superb. He’s incredibly creepy and scary and evil but Hemmings also makes us realise that Juan is more of a deranged child than anything else. He makes the character chillingly believable.

Andrea Rau (from Daughters of Darkness) is equally good as Lola, a young woman who finds herself both repelled and fascinated by Juan. She is drawn into the game, and develops a bit of a taste for sexual kinkiness.

The bizarre relationship between Juan and Lola is something you probably wouldn’t get away with today. It would almost certainly be seen as dated and offensive and problematic, but in the 70s it was assumed that audiences for grown-up movies were in fact grown-ups and could deal with subject matter that was a bit confronting. One Spanish critic at the time compared this film to The Night Porter, and there is a certain affinity between the two films.

Alida Valli is excellent as well. The mother is possibly more evil than Juan since she has more awareness of the evil she is covering up.

It would be tempting to see this as yet another film attacking the decadence of the bourgeoisie but that’s a tedious and simplistic interpretation. This movie is more in the gothic mould of Poe - a story of familial decay and degeneracy. The flashbacks scattered throughout the story suggest that the decay and degeneracy were already well and truly evident in Juan’s father’s day. The decay and degeneracy are now blossoming in a truly unhealthy way.

I’m always dubious about attempts to over-explain character motivations by relating them to traumas in the past. That can lead so easily to half-baked Freudianism. This movie seems like it’s going to succumb to that temptation but it doesn’t really. The flashbacks just let us know that things have been getting crazy in this family for a very long time.

This is a very unwholesome family and their evil infects everybody with whom they come in contact. We know just enough about Lucia to assume that she had been drawn into Juan’s twisted games. Lola is certainly drawn into those games.

The men and women are equally twisted. To try to see this movie in feminist terms is to miss the point. Every member of the family and everybody who comes in contact with them is tainted by madness. Whether they’re male or female is irrelevant.

There’s a moderate amount of sex and nudity. There’s lots of kinkiness.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray looks terrific and there are plenty of extras.

Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death (1978)

Kim Ki-young’s Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death (also known as Killer Butterfly and several other titles) is a 1978 Korean horror movie. Although whether it’s really a horror movie can be debated. It’s certainly an exercise in weirdness.

At a picnic a young woman offers a young man named Young-gul an orange juice. She then tells him the orange juice was poisoned and that they will both die. Young-gul survives.

He then tries to kill himself. He is obsessed with death.

A strange old man turns up in Young-gul’s seedy apartment and tries to sell Young-gul a book on the will. The old guy claims that he cannot die. When it’s put to the test it appears that the old guy might be right, in a way.

Young-gul gets a job with an archaeologist who collects skulls. He is trying to prove that Korans are descended from Genghis Khan’s Mongols. Young-gul finds a 2,000-year-old skeleton for him.

This is when Young-gul encounters the ghost. In Chinese and Japanese folklore ghosts are corporeal. They can even have sex. They can also fall in love. On the evidence of this movie that is true of Korean folklore as well. The ghost is a very attractive young woman. She wants to have sex with Young-gul. She wants his love. She also wants to eat his liver. Young-gul doesn’t know much about women. He wonders if all girls are like this.

Later Young-gul gets mixed up with the archaeologist’s daughter. She is obsessed with death as well. She is a virgin. The archaeologist offers to pay Young-gul to pop her cherry.

There’s also a cop investigating the headless corpse mystery. And strange masked guys stealing corpses.

There’s still more weirdness to come. And butterflies are important.

I have to confess that this is my first Korean movie and I also know nothing of Korean culture so I may be missing some cultural nuances in this movie. It’s not always easy to understand the humour of other cultures. It’s possible that quite a few scenes in this movie were being played for laughs. Or the movie might just be very crazy. It is very crazy, but maybe it’s supposed to be crazy in a funny way.

There are plenty of horror movie elements here but this does not feel like a horror movie. It feels like an art-house movie or an experimental film.

It’s a depressing movie obsessed with death. Maybe it’s supposed to be about the triumph of death over life, or the triumph of life over death.

I like weird movies but I did not find watching this movie to be an enjoyable experience.

It is however undeniably very very strange and morbidly fascinating. They don’t make movies like this any more. In fact sane people never did make movies like this.

This was a very low-budget movie. The special effects are laughably bad. I don’t mind bad special effects if they’re done in a fun way but in this case they’re just very very bad. It includes the worst skeletal transformation scene I have ever seen in a movie.

I have no idea what the director was trying to achieve in terms of tone. Despite all the weird goings-on it doesn’t really achieve an effectively creepy atmosphere but maybe Kim Ki-young was just aiming for morbid artiness.

It’s a movie that should tick all my boxes (I generally like arty horror) but somehow it just never grabs my interest. I don’t think I could honestly recommend it but it might just be a case of a movie that doesn’t work for me but might work for others so I’m hesitant to advise people to avoid it. It sure is weird.

Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death is available on Blu-Ray from Mondo Macabro.

King Kong Escapes (1967)

King Kong Escapes was a Japanese US co-production between Rankin-Bass and Japan’s Toho studio. Made in 1967 it was directed by Ishirô Honda but was inspired as much by The King Kong Show animated TV series of the time (which I've never seen) as by Japanese monster movies or the original King Kong movie.

At the North Pole the mad scientist Dr Who (Eisei Amamoto) has built a giant robot ape. He needs the robot ape to dig deposits of Element X out of a cavern. Dr Who is in the employ of an unnamed country which it’s reasonable to assume is meant to be China (Red China hysteria was huge in 1967).

He is taking his orders from the beautiful but deadly superspy Madame X (Mie Hama).

Meanwhile a super-advanced United Nations submarine skippered by Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason) has to take refuge in an inlet in a tiny island. The island is of course the island on which the legendary King Kong was supposed to live and by one of those amazing coincidences which abound in this movie Commander Nelson (a character clearly heavily based on Admiral Nelson in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) and his executive officer Lieutenant Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada) are totally obsessed by the subject of King Kong. They believe he really existed. They’re Kong experts.

Nelson and Nomura, accompanied by the ship’s nurse Lieutenant Susan Watson (Linda Miller), land on the island. They discover that Kong not only was real, he’s still around. The island is also swarming with dinosaurs.

Given that we know that Kong has an eye for a pretty girl we’re not surprised that he takes a shine to Susan. I can’t say that I blame him. She’s cute and blonde and adorable. But of course Kong has lousy luck with women. Whenever he thinks he’s found Miss Right something always goes wrong.

Kong has more urgent things to worry about. Dr Who’s robot ape has broken down so he decides to kidnap Kong. A real giant ape should even more useful than a robot one. Kong will be easy to control. He’ll be hypnotised. What could go wrong?

So far the action has taken place on Kong’s island and at the North Pole so the good people of Tokyo are probably breathing a sigh of relief that at least their city is not going to get stomped this time. But they’re wrong!

Doctor Who is perhaps not the brightest of mad scientists. His schemes always seem to contain some fatal flaws. He loses control of Kong. He thinks he can threaten Commander Nelson into helping him regain control of the recalcitrant ape. The key of course is Susan. Cute blondes can persuade giant apes to do anything.

Meanwhile Madame X seems to be cooking up schemes of her own.

There’s no point in complaining that this movie is very silly. It’s fairly obvious that it’s supposed to be silly. We’re not supposed to take it the least bit seriously.

The special effects are not very convincing but they’re fun and fun matters more than realism. The submarine miniature is cool. And there’s a flying sub. It’s not as cool as the one in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea TV series and it’s more of a miniature hovercraft sub but it’s kinda cool as well.

We get a reasonable amount of mayhem with both Kong and the robot ape slugging it out, not just for dominance but for possession of the luscious Susan.

Mie Hama has huge amounts of fun as the sexy but evil lady spy Madame X. Linda Miller is just bursting with cuteness as Susan, Kong’s love interest. The two male heroes are perfectly adequate.

Eisei Amamoto as Dr Who manages to seem evil, crazy and incompetent all at the same time and his performance is most enjoyable.

King Kong Escapes is lightweight good-natured goofy fun and if you’re content with that then it’s definitely recommended.

King Kong Escapes looks lovely on Blu-Ray. The disc is barebones.

Mosquito (1994)

Who doesn’t love giant bug movies? So how could you go wrong with a movie about giant killer mosquitos from outer space? Such a movie is Mosquito, directed by Gary Jones and released in 1994.

A spacecraft from some unknown planet crashes into a swamp. Pretty soon the locals are having a major problem with mosquitos. A really major problem. These mosquitos are as big as a dog. There’s not much left of a person who has been bitten by one of these gargantuan insects.

Ray and Megan are young marrieds who encounter these bugs when Ray’s car splatters one. They hook up with an Air Force meteor chaser and they run into a nasty bank robber named Earl and his halfwit brother. They also hookup with a ranger from the State Park, the inept Hendricks. These six people will be all that stands between our planet and conquest by the giant killer mosquitos.

They are all pretty standard character types.

It turns out to be an epic battle for survival.

This movie doesn’t bother itself too much with complicated pseudoscientific explanations. The bugs are radioactive which doesn’t have any real significance but is presumably a nod to all those 1950s monster movies that used radiation as an explanation for everything.

This movie also doesn’t bother too much with the standard trope of the genius scientist who discovers the fatal weakness in the alien invaders. Our six heroes just rely on blasting the bugs with shotguns and hacking them with axes.

Earl also uses a chainsaw at one point which is a kind of in-joke - Gunnar Hansen who plays Earl is best known for playing Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

On the subject of casting, Hendricks is played by Ron Asheton, Yes, Ron Asheton the guitarist from legendary proto-punk band The Stooges.

Apart from the obvious influence of 1950s giant bug movies Mosquito also borrows ideas from a stack of well-known movies, from Aliens to Night of the Living Dead.

For my tastes Mosquito relies too much on crude humour, especially early on. It also relies too much on gore but in 1994 that was presumably a commercial necessity. I’m just not a fan of gore. But if you like gore and you like seeing giant insects getting splattered there’s plenty here you’ll enjoy.

There’s a certain amount of excitement and lots of mayhem.

The acting ranges from bad to very bad.

The most interesting thing about this movie is that it was made in 1994 so it was made almost entirely using practical effects, not CGI. The giant mosquitos are mechanical giant mosquitos suspended on wires. There is even stop-motion animation. Some of the effects work well, others not so well, but that’s largely a result of the very small budget rather than the limitations of practical effects.

This is a very bad movie. This is Z-grade schlock. Mostly I like Z-grade schlock but this is just not quite my kind of Z-grade schlock. How much you’ll enjoy this movie is a matter of taste. If you enjoy gore and crass humour more than I do then you’ll enjoy it more than I did. I’m hesitant to recommend it but I’m also hesitant about advising people not to see it.

The Blu-Ray from Synapse looks fairly OK. I suspect that this is a movie that never looked all that great. There’s an audio commentary featuring director Gary Jones and a couple of other members of the crew.

Léon: The Professional (1994)

Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional came out in 1994 and while it’s not a sequel to his La Femme Nikita it is a kind of spinoff and the two films have lots of thematic affinities.

Both movies deal with professional killers, and with people for whom killing is a vocation rather a job. Besson took that same central idea and came up with two different stories which complement each other. La Femme Nikita deals with a young woman, Nikita, who is a vicious killer and is recruited by the French Government as an assassin. She is totally emotionally disconnected in every way. Léon: The Professional deals with a middle-aged man, Léon, a hitman who is also totally emotionally disconnected in every way.

Léon is a very successful hitman. He refers to himself as a cleaner. He has made a lot of money but lives in a grotty apartment. 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) lives in the same building. Her home life is miserable. Her father is a dope dealer. Her entire family is wiped out by DEA agents led by an agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman). Even by the standards of murderous corrupt cops Stansfield is a nasty piece of work. His fellow DEA officers are brutal thugs.

The DEA officers had intended to murder the whole family but Léon saves Mathilda.

Now he doesn’t know what to do with her. He knows nothing about kids. He doesn’t want a kid. He is a loner. And Mathilda knows what he does for a living. He should kill her. It would be safer. But he can’t. He’s an ethical hitman. He only kills people who are criminals anyway and he never kills women or children.

So he’s stuck with her.

Mathilda wants to learn to be a cleaner. She thinks it would be a cool way to make a living. And she wants revenge against her family’s killers. She’d like Léon to kill them but if he won’t she’s prepared to do the job herself. She just needs Léon to teach her to be an efficient killer. Léon begins her training. She learns quickly.

An emotional bond develops between these two troubled loners.

And eventually there will be a showdown with Stansfield, which is likely to end in a bloodbath (and it does).

This is in a sense a coming-of-age movie but not in a sexual sense. Mathilda’s childhood came to an abrupt blood-soaked end and she was hurled into the grown-up world. Not the regular grown-up world but a grown-up world of outsiders and crime and corrupt cops. It’s a lot for a 12-year-old to cope with but she doesn’t have much choice.

It’s also in a way a coming-of-age story for Léon, who is emotionally stunted and now has to deal with the fact that he is now responsible for a kid. As Mathilda tells him, he saved her life so now he’s responsible for her. Their emotional connection is dealt with in a very sensitive and touching way.

The original cut ran for 135 minutes. After negative responses at previews in the U.S. it was cut by 25 minutes. The theatrical release was the cut version. Besson prefers to call the longer version the Extended Version rather than the Director’s Cut.

The Extended Version would have been too much for mainstream American audiences to cope with, partly because it clearly shows Mathilda as an accessory to a series of murders and partly because it explores the relationship between Léon and Mathilda in greater depth.

It’s difficult to see why anyone would object to the Extended Version. There is absolutely no sex and no nudity and not the slightest suggestion of a sexual relationship between Léon and Mathilda. It is obvious that Mathilda has developed a major crush on Léon. She does some very serious flirting. Léon makes it very clear that nothing is going to happen between them.

The problem of course is that in the U.S. there always has been and always will a knee-jerk reaction to any movie that deals with human relationships in a grown-up complex way. Besson was undoubtedly wise to agree to the savage cuts for the U.S. theatrical release. The original cut is subtle and nuanced but the subtlety and the nuance would not have been appreciated by mainstream American critics.

I think the Extended Version is clearly the superior version.

Jean Reno is excellent. Léon is a killer but he really does have ethical standards, which is more than can be said for the law-enforcement officers in this tale. Léon is a tragic figure, a basically decent guy who has never been able to come to terms with life.

Natalie Portman is superb.

As for Gary Oldman, his clownish absurd performance almost sinks the movie (as he almost sank Besson's The Fifth Element).

There are some memorable action scenes.

Léon: The Professional is a great movie with a definite neo-noir vibe. Very highly recommended and a fine companion piece to La Femme Nikita.

Bluebeard (1944)

Bluebeard is a 1944 PRC release directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring John Carradine. It combines melodrama and horror in a characteristically Ulmer way and it’s also interesting as being a serial killer movie which was fairly rare at the time.

Ulmer wrote the original story. It is of course inspired partly by the fairy tale but also by a real-life serial killer who was executed in France in 1922.

The movie clearly takes place in the 19th century and during the Third Republic so it has to be the late 19th century.

Gaston Morel (John Carradine) is a talented painter who has given up painting to concentrate on his marionette theatre. We know right from the start that Morel is a killer (in fact he’s the notorious murderer who has been dubbed Bluebeard). He has killed more than once.

We later find out that his killings are connected with his paintings and that he wants to stop painting so that he can stop killing.

He meets a pretty young seamstress named Lucille (Jean Parker). There’s an immediate attraction between the two of them. Morel is anxious to avoid painting her because he has no desire to kill her. She is not like those other women. She is a woman worth loving.

Inspector Jacques Lefevre (Nils Asther) is investigating the murders. Assisting him is Francine (Teala Loring) who just happens to be Lucille’s sister. Francine works for the Sûreté. She’s a kind of undercover cop. Neither sister is aware that they are both going to be involved in very different ways with the Bluebeard killer.

He is tempted to paint one of the sisters. He knows it’s a bad idea but he needs money and he’s been offered a very generous fee by art dealer Jean Lamarte (Ludwig Stössel). Lamarte is a less than ethical art dealer and he knows Morel’s secret.

The inspector and Francine have a plan to trap Bluebeard but it’s a very risky plan and Morel is a smart guy, and very cautious.

Gaston Morel is a tortured soul. He is driven to kill against his will. It’s a kind of madness that comes over him. It has to do with a woman in his past, and a painting. Morel is perhaps over-sensitive with an artistic but unstable personality. John Carradine gives his career-best performance and imbues Morel with a strange tragic dignity. Morel is doomed but although in his rational phases he tries to escape that doom he cannot escape his periodic bouts of madness. Carradine had been Shakespearian actor and he plays Morel as a Shakespearian tragic hero. It’s also notable that at no point in this film does Carradine overact. It’s a superbly controlled performance.

Jean Parker is very good. In fact the whole cast is good, and the performances are better than you might expect in a movie made by PRC, usually considered to be the cheapest and shoddiest of the Poverty Row studios.

It’s common to assume that all PRC productions were made on ludicrously low budgets. This has been considerably exaggerated and Bluebeard was not the ultra-cheap production it’s often assumed to have been. It cost $167,000 and the shoot took 19 days.

There’s some fine very moody cinematography courtesy of Eugen Schüfftan (who was the cinematographer but had to remain uncredited due to problems with the union). There are some definite hints of German Expressionism in the flashback sequences. There’s one particularly fine shot with shadows and puppets.

The script ran into some problems with the Production Code Authority. Joe Breen wanted some changes made. Ulmer agreed but when he shot the movie he largely ignored Breen’s objections and most of the material he had agreed to remove is still there in the final film.

Despite his rocky career path Ulmer managed to make some very fine movies and Bluebeard is one of his best. And there’s Carradine’s magnificent performance. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber have released this movie on Blu-Ray and it certainly looks better than it has ever looked before. It is now possible to appreciate to the full the fine cinematography and art direction. We can now see that this was really quite a classy production.

I’ve reviewed lots of Ulmer’s movies including Ruthless (1948), the very underrated The Strange Woman (1946) and his most acclaimed movie, Detour (1945).

There have of course been quite a few movies inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, one of my favourites being Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

The Fifth Element (1997)

To describe Luc Besson’s 1997 science fiction opus The Fifth Element as bizarre would be an understatement of monumental proportions.

The plot is nothing special but this movie is all about style over substance. I have no problems with that. I like movies that take that approach. Sometimes the style is the substance. That’s certainly the case here. Whether you will enjoy the style of this film is a matter of taste.

It begins in 1914 with an archaeologist in Egypt deciphering inscriptions. That’s when the aliens arrive and announce that the stones are no longer safe on Earth. The stones have something to do with an ultimate weapon for defeating evil. There are four stones. Each represents one of the elements - earth, air, fire and water. But the key is the fifth element.

Several centuries later Earth faces a terrifying undefeatable menace from space. Those aliens (the good aliens) promised to send the fifth element to us but their spaceship was destroyed by space pirates employed by the evil businessman/super criminal Zorg (Gary Oldman).

Some tissues samples are saved from the wrecked spacecraft and regenerated. The result is a strange but beautiful redhead named Leeloo (Milla Jovovich).

Leeloo is confined within an escape-proof isolation chamber from which she easily escapes. She ends up in the flying cab operated by Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis). He’s a retired special forces officer. Now he just wants to drive flying cabs. He doesn’t want trouble. He should hand Leeloo over to the cops when they order him to do so. But Leeloo seems so cute and helpless and nobody likes cops so he rescues her.

There is of course a secret to Leeloo. Crazy priest Cornelius (Ian Holm) has some idea what that secret is.

Huge amounts of mayhem follow, with Zorg and a bunch of disgruntled alien space pirates trying to get their hands on the stone. It builds to a climax on a report planet.

There are lots of explosions and gun battles.

One of the things that makes this movie interesting is that it was written and directed by a Frenchman, the cinematographer was French and the costumes were designed by a Frenchman. As a result this movie looks totally unlike any Hollywood science fiction movie. This is a very French science fiction movie.

Science fiction movies always predict the future wrongly and always get the aesthetics of the future totally wrong. Except maybe The Fifth Element. The people who made this movie were sure of one thing. Whatever the future was going to look like it was going to be crass and vulgar and an orgy of bad taste. Looking at the world today 27 years after the movie was made we certainly seem to be on track to making that prediction come true.

We are not going to get the uber-cool dystopian future of Blade Runner, but we might well get the bad taste on steroids future of The Fifth Element.

The costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Gaultier was notorious for designing clothes that no sane person would ever want to wear, except perhaps to a costume party with a bad taste theme. The staggering awfulness of Gaultier’s designs actually works well in a science fiction movie context. This is a future in which people dress like insane clowns at a fetish party.

Everything about the production design is overblown and vulgar beyond imagining.

Which does make it interesting.

There’s some staggeringly bad acting. I have no idea what Gary Oldman thought he was doing.

Bruce Willis on the other hand is excellent. He’s a Hero. A reluctant Hero perhaps, but a Hero. He’s cynical but fundamentally decent. He doesn’t let bad things happen to helpless girls. He might grumble but he’ll do his best to save them anyway. As for saving the world, yeah he’s in favour of that, but if you want to get him truly motivated present him with a cute helpless girl who needs to be rescued. Willis also has prodigious amounts of gruff charisma.

The movie’s biggest asset is Milla Jovovich. Playing an alien is tricky. You have to make an alien seem truly alien, someone who just doesn’t react in a normal human way. Jovovich does a great job at doing just that. She also has to be so adorable that even the most reluctant hero would risk his neck to save her. Jovovich takes adorableness to whole new levels here. Any man would be willing to sacrifice anything for such a girl. She’s also incredible amounts of fun to watch.

This is an incredibly bad movie, and yet in its deranged way it’s an incredibly good movie. It just depends on what mind-altering substances you’re consuming while watching it. There is so much about this movie that is so bad. But there’s so much that is so good. There’s just no other movie like it. It’s a badly flawed work of deranged visionary genius. For all its flaws it’s an absolute must-see movie and it’s highly recommended.

It also looks terrific on Blu-Ray.