Fred Anderson, ex-ninja

Subspecies (Ted Nicolaou, 1991)

I've never been a fan of standad vampire movies. I want them to be something extra - a little bit more extreme, or smart - or dark. There must be a hook for me to be able to watch. Innocent Blood is a favorite, John Badham's Dracula another one. I love Salem's Lot and a couple of the old Hammer-horrors are awesome. Nowadays the vampires are too handsome (not that Frank Langella in Badham's Dracula is ugly...) for me. I want them to be more animalistic. 

And it's there Subspecies comes in. I've heard about this series before, but somehow I've decided to ignore it - until it recently got released on blu-ray in the UK. So I said to myself, why not? The producer is Charles Band, and his filmography is terrible uneven. But on the other side, it's directed by talented Ted Nicolaou - so that won me over. Most reviews I've read is very, very, very positive - but I'm not sure I can agree totally on that. What I find is a very ambitious movie, the first US production shot on Romanian soil, with overall good actors and fine effects. But it also feels a bit too restrained for it's own good. 

This is the story about Radu (Anders Hove), who actually was the brother to the more famous Vlad the Impaler. He's tired of being controlled by his father (played by Angus Scrimm in a ridicolous wig), kills him and takes over the castle. He also tears of three of his fingers and transforms them to red, small devils (no, there's never a Band-production without evil little critters). Some time later three american girls comes to Transylvania to... do something, maybe some research - and of course they ends up in the nasty claws of Radu! 

I was a bit unfocused when I watched it and... yeah, the story was a bit thin. I could spend the entire review whining about that, but I won't. It could have been a lot better, a lot more grittier - and more violent - but I guess the low budget and the fact that they was the first US production to be shot in Romania haltered the flow a bit. What they have instead is fantastic locations, nature and a nice cast of Romanian talents who seems to fucking love what they're doing. Anders Hove is of course the highligh, what an intense performance! He's drooling, bleeding, twitching like a dying animal, screaming... just being extreme. He's not a handsome vampire, and we should be grateful for that.

Now when I'm writing the review the movie feels a bit better than what I felt after watching it the first time. Maybe I needed some time to think about it, analyze it. I have a feeling that part 2 will be a lot better though, so I might try to watch it before the weekend. It depends on what workload awaits the me upcoming day - and this weekend I'll go to a geekend in the woods - only watching VHS!

Anyway, Subspecies is a very ambitious and great-looking vampire movie. It's a story for adults, not for teens or kids. It just dares to be grotesque and gothic, and that makes it a damn fine production. Try it out! Let me know what you think!

The Night of a Thousand Cats (René Cardona Jr, 1972)

I have a minor obsession with Mexican actor Hugo Stiglitz. I feel in love with his bored performance in Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City and since then it's been a pleasure to realize that he's not that bored always. He must have hated starring in Nightmare City. So much. Somehow he also was a sex symbol in Mexico during the 70's and I didn't understand why - until now. In Rene Cardona Jr's The Night of a Thousand Cats, also co-produced by its star, Hugo actually look very good and fresh. There's a lot of bare flesh and the women loves him (not usually for any kind of obscure movie star though...). So how about the movie itself? I've seen the shorter US version, just over an hour long, released on a very nice DVD from Code Red. It's not a good movie... but it didn't bore me. 

Hugo is... Hugo, a playboy millionaire who flies around in his helicopter and picks up lonely housewives, takes them to his castle, have sex with them and then kills them and feeds them to the thousand cats he have in the basement. He also have a mute and retarded servant named Dorgo (played by former wrestler Gerardo Zepeda aka El Chiquilin!) who he plays chess with sometimes. And then something happens and then it's over.

Now they've cut 20-30 minutes for story from this movie - and I wonder what the hell is gone from it? Must have been a side story, maybe more sex - I really don't know. As it is now it works fine for being an hour long and it's just a series of pick-up scenes and then a non-gory kill (often strangulation and stuff like that). I have to see the longer version someday, but it's not a priority. So, Hugo mingles around being awesome. He's so cocky he's a walking human sized hard-on with a cool beard and sunglasses. Just the presence of him makes the movie worth watching. The directing by Cardona is competent an have some stunningly beautiful slow-motion scenes, one chase scene reminded of what De Palma did in The Fury. 

The bad thing with it is the cats themselves. Or more how they're treated. Hugo handles them quite rough, to say the least, and they look very stressed being so many cats inside that big cage. Cats have nine lives, but it wouldn't surprise me of some of these cats dropped dead just because of the stress, heat from the lamps, being tossed around like dolls etc. I've seen worse animal treatment in movies, but it's still very unnecessary.

In the end The Night of a Thousand Cats is a pretty pointless movie, but it have Hugo, it have ladies, it have Dorgo - and it's a Mexican horror movie, which by itself is very cool. But it's probably just for extreme collectors like me.

Scalps (Fred Olen Ray, 1983)

I'll be the first to admit I never been a fan of Fred Olen Ray. But I also admit that he did some decent, trashy, exploitation movies in the beginning of his career - and those are - as we say in Sweden: "Inte fy skam". Nowadays he, IMHO, just makes super-mainstream shit with super low budgets. And when there's not edge to the scripts they just becomes mini-Transformers 3 and a big damn yawn. Anyway, enough with the whining. Scalps is one of my favorites from his wast filmography, which doesn't say much. It's one of those movies that belongs in the "mystråkig" genre, they're so boring they become good. 

There's a secret why Scalps is worth watching, but I'll get to that in a moment. This is the tragic story about a bunch of archology students (I think, but they seem pretty bored with what they're doing) going out to dig in the desert - after native American artifacts. This is of course forbidden, but their goofy teacher encourages them to do this. So they take the car and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive a little bit more for like 30-40 minutes, looking at the scenery, smiling, looking at the scenery again and smiles some more. Finally they're out in the desert, starts to dig and suddenly a demon wakes up and possesses one of the students  - who of course starts to kill them all in gory ways! The end!

First the good things: it's a very cozy horror film. Nothing happens, people talk - but there's something magical with movies set in the desert. It's like that scene in Natural Born Killers but for 80 minutes instead of 10. I could watch whole movies like this, seriously. The actors are hardly good - or it might be the lack of directing - but they do what they're supposed to do and happily gets killed during the last half hour. It's quite gory, but most of all very nasty and drawn out. No, it's no Maniac - but the scalpings and kills are well-made and the blood flows steadily.  

What makes Scalps work - I'm sure it would be painfully slow to watch without it - is the music by Drew Neumann and Eric Rasmussen. What we have here is close to ambient electronic music, sometimes with rhythmic acoustic, almost hypnotic beats, and then back to electronic experimental music. It holds pretty high class, except a few tracks here and there where the cheese-factor gets overwhelming. I wish this music was released on some kind of format, but noooo... no such luck. It would have been perfect listening to while out walking.

Scalps is a super-cheap, cheesy and trashy supernatural slasher - but I can't help digging it a bit too much for my own good. Maybe it's because Forrest J. Ackerman (who I once spent a whole day with, we ate mushroom soup together) is in it and makes a terrible performance (we all know he couldn't act, but still charming as hell!) or maybe it's that desert with it's romantic fog of natural drugs and mysticism - or maybe it's just the gore and music. I really don't know why, but it's still Fred Olen Ray's best movie. 

So give it a try.