Schmollywood Babylon

The Search for Weng Weng (Andrew Leavold, 2013)

Once upon a time I went down in a basement second hand store and came up again with a tape of For Y'ur Height Only, and so started my life-long love for the odd superstar Weng Weng. It took a year or so, but then I found another one: The Impossible Kid… and that’s it. It wasn’t till the other day I actually saw my third Weng Weng adventure, D’Wild Wild Weng, so rare is his movies. The movies themselves are crazy little z-movie adventures, but I’ve seen crazier. The thing with them is Weng Weng himself, a character who’s mystery Australian ex-video store owner turned lecturer and filmmaker Andrew Leavold set out to solve in The Search for Weng Weng!

The documentary about Weng Weng have been in the works for many years now, so it’s fantastic to finally see it in an lovely 3-disc Australian DVD release, which includes not only the soundtrack but also a whole movie with the little fellow, the above mentioned D’Wild Wild Weng! That’s the icing on the cake! But back to the doc itself. I’m holding back to write about the content, because I think it’s important for you to see it for yourself, but it’s truly a great piece of film. At first I was slightly annoyed at the very uneven visuals, which of course comes from it being made during a long time, so some footage felt less good than others. But after a while I got used to it because it’s part of the story, that alone tells the story about Leavold’s search for who Weng Weng really was.

Thankfully Leavold focuses on the people he meets and the stories he tells, instead of focusing on himself which is a trap way too many documentary filmmakers do nowadays. Leavold is present, because it’s his search, but lets the subjects talk...and talk, and chat and gossip and it’s a fantastic listen. I’m so happy he decided to keep some of the rough footage from the filming, for example when he accidentally runs into the editor of most of Weng Weng’s movies Edgardo 'Boy' Vinarao on a parking lot or the magical sequence when he follows “the Bruce Lee of the Philippines”, Franco Guerrero , when he sits and talks with some other old actors and stuntmen in what feels like a shopping mall restaurant, a place where they just hang out.

It’s the best form of fly on the wall, stuff just happens - and in the last mentioned sequence director Eddie Nicart walks by just by chance, which makes it even more a sign of something very special than just a normal documentary. But The Search for Weng Weng is not only a quite sad story about a very special guy (I won’t say anything, it’s up to you to see!), it’s a film about the Philippines and the soul of the Pinoy. In a way Weng Weng represents the outsider of the Philippines, his rise and fall - and he’s not alone in this, just very special. We get a chance to meet some people who tells us not just about the actor but about the way of life in this country, the attitude, the culture - but it’s very subtle and you won’t realize it until you’ve seen it to the end. The most open-minded interview is with actor Rez Cortez, who really spills his guts in what he think about the (ab)use of Weng Weng as a money maker, so even film academic Tilman Baumgärtel and the view of handicapped people in the Philippines. He makes the parable with Weng Weng being a jester, and it connects so brilliantly to one of the bizarrest twists in the documentary: Imelda Marcos.

Here we get to meet the old wife of the dictator, still living what seems a life in luxury. Leavold and the team gets invited to her birthday and follows her on a smaller trip the day after, while she’s both - without knowing it - putting the the finger on the bizarre life she’s living and how Weng Weng belonged there. Her daughter, Imee, is also interview. She’s far more realistic and have a distance to the pop culture of her country, but also comes off as a person who really want to do good on camera and with what she’s saying.

It’s so much details and stuff and twists and love in The Search of Weng Weng. I think we after this have a quite good look in who he was, after meeting his last surviving family member, colleagues, movie festival people and people on the street. It’s a documentary build on the talents of a very curious person and Andrew Leavold really delivers what we want. It’s not the biggest budgeted documentary about there, and it has some minor flaws - but who the hell cares about that when the whole thing is SO good? I loved every second of it and I’m pretty sure everyone will like it, even if they have no idea what Pinoy filmmaking means or meeting Weng Weng for the first time.

The ending though, it’s my favorite. Filmmaker and historian Nick Deocampo goes on analyzing the phenomena and gets some kind of personal revelation, finds a new reading of Weng Weng’s purpose in Filipino society. He gets so excited, so happy, he can finally connect with Weng Weng, put the final pieces of the puzzle together and it’s that enthusiasm The Search for Weng Weng ends with.

We as viewers feels it too, it’s almost a supernatural experience going through the rise and fall of Weng Weng and finally see him for what he really was, not just like a very, very short guy on the silver screen.

The Tunnel (Carlo Ledesma, 2011)

When I was younger I had an interest in urban exploring. Not anything extreme - and not to tight spaces either, I suffer from a splash of claustrophobia. UE is quite far from being just another game, I see it as a way to look into yourself by visiting places people haven’t been in for many years. It’s just something that needs to be done, to make yourself stronger and somehow make you analyze yourself. The problem is that I hate to get dirty, so my career in this particular hobby didn’t go that far, but I’ve seen some places you haven’t seen - I can guarantee that. Instead of doing it for real I really dig movies set in that kind of environment: Underground, Urban Explorers, Catacombs, As Above, So Below and countless of ghost-hunters-visit-a-haunted-asylum-movies. Not all of them good of course, Catacombs is terrible and Urban Explorer could have been so much better. Then we have The Tunnel.

I heard about it some years back and my pal Jocke mentioned it from time to time, but I forgot about it and it wasn’t until our annual visit to Weekend of Horrors I got reminded of it when I found a blu-ray for 9 euro. I can’t stop myself when it comes to found footage - or fake footage as I prefer to call it - and bought it. Then it took me a couple of months to actually watch it, but that’s a completely different story.

The Tunnel - or The Tunnel Movie as it’s called also - should have been called Tunnels in my humble opinion, because that’s where it’s set - in the disused tunnels under Sydney, connected to the subways and - according to the film - having shelters left from WW2. Natasha (Bel Deliá) is a journalist who’s in desperate need of a story. She fucked up the last one and now she’s on the brink to loose her career. She convinces a cameraman, Steve (Steve Davis) and his sound guy Tangles (Luke Arnold) to follow her into the tunnels to investigate the rumours about homeless people living there. Producer Pete (Andy Rodoreda) joins them to keep an eye on Natascha and the team. After some troubles getting in they start their shoot and everything goes well… until one of them suddenly disappears! Someone...or something is down there and it’s very, very hungry! Trapped down in the mazes, will they ever come out alive?

Lets talk about something many movies in this special genre forgets: backstory. When you just get thrown into something mysterious without any fucking clue why these folks are doing what they’re doing - or their reasons for doing it is extremely uninteresting - the movie will fail. That goes for every kind of movie by the way. But look at the classics: in Blair Witch they’re shooting a doc about a witch, in Borderlands the catholic church is investigate the supernatural, in Welcome to the Jungle they’re gonna solve the mystery of Michael Rockefeller. They have something important to do, they’re just not kids who’s going out to party, smoke pot and fuck in the foods - leave those awesome things to the slashers. The Tunnel is packed with backstory and it takes a while for it to get going, but that’s fine with me. That’s actually one of the things that makes it a great thriller. You care about the characters and you understand why they’re doing this.

It also have one of the best reasons for filming everything, something that’s usually a problem in fake footage films: Steve decides to roll all the time because he’s not sure if they’re allowed to do this and needs proof that he and Tangles didn’t have anything to do with it all, except being camera and sound. That’s a good reason to shoot every damn second of their adventure.

Another strong point with The Tunnel is the wonderful locations, which makes it more credible. The actors are all fine and you believe in them. When the horror finally hits it’s quite subtle but scary and very disturbing. The first shot of what’s down there is very, very creepy and shot in a way you can’t figure it out to 100%, but still get an idea of what’s eating people in the darkness.

The Tunnel might not deliver something new and unique, but it’s extremely well-made and packs a lot of tension. I loved it and consider it one of the best horror films in that controversial sub-genre called found footage.

Cubbyhouse (Murray Fahey, 2001)

Just when I thought it was safe to watch movies I find one about a demon possessed cubbyhouse, yeah, that’s exactly what Cubbyhouse is about. And it’s cheesy as hell - which is a perfect comparison becausw this cubbyhouse is not an ordinary cubbyhouse, it was a long time ago the centre of a coven of Devil worshippers! Uhhhh! Scary! Not only this, this is actually an Australian movie released in 2001 and it feels like it was shot and unleashed on the unsuspecting audience in 1989. It’s that corny!

Now, this doesn’t necessary mean it’s bad or silly...well, it IS silly, but far from bad. And far from good also actually. Somewhere down in the middle I would say. The sales pitch with Cubbyhouse is the presence of Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project), as the over-aged teenaged son in this unlucky family - and he phones in his performance like he was Michael Madsen or someone.

So why are they unlucky? Well, for fucks sake, they have a possessed cubbyhouse in their garden, who attracts the two younger kids in the family - a boy and a girl - and makes them worshippers of good old Satan himself! Fun! What’s even more cool is that the trees around the cubbyhouse obviously also is possessed and attacks people - just like in William Friedkin’s The Guardian - and The Evil Dead of course. Can’t beat killer trees, like my grandma always said!

On a level of cheese Cubbyhouse is a fine Brie, not too tasty, not too weak. It’s perfect with a salty biscuit of campiness. Imagine movies like The Gate and The Unholy, but more like it’s been in out in the sun for an hour or two, melted to a pile of cheesy, sticky goo. It actually striking how much older it seems, from the acting style and visuals to the script and sometimes the effects - the only thing that makes it come out as a new movie, maybe late nineties instead, is the digital effects which appears from time to time.

It’s also - maybe even more than something else - a huge rip-off on The Evil Dead, specifically Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. Not the humor or the demons, because there’s the nothing like that in Cubbyhouse, but the whole thing with the tree, the colorful atmosphere and the ending which - now when I think about it - is very, very Evil Dead 2-ish. You’ll understand when you see it.

How about the gore then? Well, sadly enough not much, but there’s some blood splashing and a few kills - but it feels a lot like the above mentioned The Gate and similar movies from the late eighties, they’re really not that gory or graphic - which is fine by me. Cubbyhouse is still packed with silly effects and lots and lots of stupidity without getting too annoying. It didn’t change my house really, but I wasn’t bored and sometimes that’s all what you need on a slow Sunday afternoon.

Thirst (Rod Hardy, 1979)

Nearby our house, during the summer, you can find ants who breeds little beetles like pets, or cows - as I call them. They're using a small section of the vegetation near the forest taking care of these beetles. I have no idea what they're doing with them, but I guess the cows somehow produces something juicy and nice that the ants can eat. I find this very fascinating. One day my boyfriend took one of the beetles, he just touched it with his fingers and it got stuck on him. We looked at then noticed how an ant was looking up at us. So he carefully put the finger close to the ant - who reached up and grabbed the "cow". Magical. 

I'll never forget it and it came to think about these fuckers today while watching Thirst, an Australian vampire movie from 1974 starring Chantal Contouri, David Hemmings and Henry Silva. It's about an organisation called The Brotherhood, lead by high society vampires. They're using humans as blood-donors, through fancy luxury farms - more or less like slaves, but during very comfortable cirumstances. They've been using all their resources to find the last relative of Elizabeth Bathory, Kate Davis (played by Contouri) to make her the queen vampire in their new society. The only problem is that Kate isn't that fond of the idea and fights back with all her inner power to not let her win... 

Thirst is a highly original vampire movie, and even if it's not without its faults, it's from now one one of my favorites in the genre. What I especially like is the cold, calculated style of the movie. Have you seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? Yeah, something like that. Very 70's, very stylish and slick - no experientation, no fancy camera work. John Carpenter-esque is something I could call it also. Rob Hardy's directing is excellent and also dares to play with our expectations - we're not even sure this is real vampires, or what the hell is real or not. In a very smart movie it almost seems like the movie is gonna end in the suckiest way possible - but it's all a game, it's all another twist to wake us up. I love that. I friggin' adore stuff like that. 

While Chantal Contouri pretty owns the whole movie there's an excellent cast of supporting actors, including the always brilliant David Hemmings - here getting a bit closer to the chubbier version of himself, Henry Silva in a very straightforward baddie part and of course the mesmerising Shirley Cameron as one of the vampire-doctors. It's not a gore-fest of any kind, but have a lot of unsettling and disturbing set-pieces, a clinical look at sucking blood and some blood and really good effects. The stand-out sequence is when Kate hides out in a room - after finding a friend of hers melting away in a chair - and some unknown force tries to get inside the room by literary tearing it apart. Very impressive stuff!

Thirst might have too many endings. We're not talking "kill your darlings" here, which is fine by me. But it also takes its toll by feeling slightly too long during the last half hour. This is nothing to worry about, because it's still a very original and fresh take on the vampire-mythology and is up there with John Badham's Dracula, John Landis Innocent Blood, Tom Holland's Fright Night and Ted Nicolaou's Subspecies series - my personal favorites in this suck-friendly genre. 

Strange Behavior (Michael Laughlin, 1981)

First of all, sorry Hardgore DVD. Around one thousand years ago I got a whole bunch of screeners - and I never even watched them. Until today, when I finally took the time to watch Strange Behaviour, an aussie thriller who had some kind of cult reputation over the years. I know it's way too late for a review of your disc, but... well, I don't know what else to say. Anyway, was it worth the wait? Oh, maybe. Maybe. I remember that I actually started to watch it, but then turned it off because it was too boring. That's still a fact, but thankfully it gets better.

Galesburg, Illinois (aka New Zealand), a string of brutal murders - all seems to have been performed by teens from the neighborhood, targeting certain families connected to the local crazy cop, John Brady (Michael Murphy). He's living alone with his son Pete (Dan Shor) and is dating the very nice Barbara (Louise Fletcher, in a rare sympathetic role!). Everything seems to lead to a the dead doctor LeSange and his lab that's still used for strange, mind-altering, experiments. Can it be true that they're fucking up the minds of teenage kids to make them murder each other? Well, guess!

This is a true oddity. The first 20-30 minutes are terrible boring, an uninspired Halloween-esque slasher-style thriller with some not-so-effective scares and awkward acting and writing. Then, finally, something happens and it turns around 180 degrees and becomes a very off-beat, slightly disturbing medical thriller with disturbed teens killing those who must die and a strange mix of social drama and eighties horror. It actually has a couple of great set-pieces - the overweight girl killer for example, the pissing of blood - stuff that sticks out like it never would have done if it was an American production. I also love the characters - who could have been the creation of Larry Cohen - human and almost realistic, but never stepping outside the comic book world. Louise Fletcher especially, and I rarely seen her doing such a nice character before. Or have I missed something? Let me know in that case!

Director Michael Laughlin wrote the story together with Bill Condon, and it's easily to see that a gay man was involved here (I'm one myself and can sense pretty good gay sensibility). A lot because of the camp qualities, pop-cultural references (which it has plenty off) and of course the very unexpected dance number - to Lou Christie's masterpiece Lightning Strikes (also covered by Klaus Nomi the same year, a fab version!) - during the eighties horror traditional party scene. The killer in one of the first scenes also wears the famous Tor Johnson mask, which is another nice touch.

I still think Strange Behaviour is very, very uneven. I wouldn't go so far to call it a great movie, but it's a good one mostly because of the second half and a couple of stand-out sequences. The music is awesome (Tangerine Dream did the score + of course also the soundtrack) and it have some decent acting. Not bad, not great, but something you should check out if you get some time off. 

(...and I must say the poster is fucking awesome. Feels very John Waters. I would like it on my wall!)

Lake Mungo (Joel Anderson, 2008)

I've seen so many fake footage films that they're blurred together in my mind. But one I'll always remember is Lake Mungo, the Australian sleeper from 2008 - still criminally underrated. This is one of those movies Jocke have nagged on me to watch, and I finally gave it a spin (after ordering it cheap from play.com of course). I would say that the traditionally "found footage" concept it's easier to make a movie of, Lake Mungo is more correctly a fake documentary. Most of the films in this sub-genre seems to be non-horror films, with a few exceptions - for example the semi-brilliant The Last Broadcast who ends in being one of the worst ever. If they just didn't fuck the shit up with a twist so retarded even I could have done it better. 

Thank Satan Lake Mungo saves the day and we finally have a PERFECT fake horror documentary with so many intelligent and awesome twists I still can't comprehend it. The set up is simple but brilliant: teenage daughter Alice drowns in a dam one day and after a couple of days her body is found, identified and buried. A typical tragedy. Soon visions of her starts to haunt the family - mother, father and son, but everything is not what it seems and when you just think the answer is written on your nose - it's not. Brilliant.

What makes Lake Mungo so good is how it goes all the way in really making a very convicing documentary. There's old news footage, photos, crappy video recordings, cell phone material, new interviews with the family - even a couple of reenactments. But most of all, the actors are SO fucking good. Me, as a very experienced fan of genre cinema and an actor and sometimes filmmaker myself, might have been fooled under certain circumstances. This is one of those productions that easily would fool a TV-audience. 

What's even more important is that it's genuinely scary. It's not often it happens, but during this movie the hair on my arms stood up.  And this was in the middle of a sunny fucking day with fucking bird fucking tweeting outside my damn balcony. You can hear kids playing down in the park and my mother called in the middle of the movie telling me that she and her husband just bought a trip to Turkey. 

All this bliss... and still it scared me.

I'm pretty sure it won't happen again in a good while. So what to do until then? I have no idea. Continue my search for good fake footage films I guess, but after this everything else must fail.  

Like all great movies the drama is faboulous to. We care and we're interested in the family, we understand the motives of characters - and when we don't understand the reason, why suffer with them anyone. This is top notch filmmaking. So why the hell, director Joel Anderson, haven't you done a movie since 2008?

why? Why?? WHY???

Let me know if you read this. Please.

And you others, go directly and buy this movie. No, not later on pay day. NOW. Dammit.

Needle (John V. Soto, 2010)

By looking at the cover of Needle it's easy to believe it's a Hellraiser-inspired horror film, but it's very far from the truth. Instead it's an interesting mix of college slasher and occult thriller, without being totally moronic and generic. I didn't know it was a Australian movie from the beginning, so the accents surprised me - and it took a while to actaully understand that this crisp, very American-styled slasher-esque grand guignol was made in the land of Brian Trenchard-Smith. 

But he's not involved in this movie. But still. 

It's a fresh take on the slasher-genre with a few nods towards Italian giallos. It begins with a terribly brutal murder of an art dealer, by using this device - an ancient mechanical occult "transmitter" who works as a voodoo doll-connector. Ten years later and the box is found and given to the son, Ben (Michael Dorman) of the owner (who died somehow, I really missed that detail...). Soon the box is stolen and Ben's friends is getting killed one by one with the power of mechanical voodoo! And it gets bloody!

I love this idea. It's fun. The movie itself looks like a million bucks and the gore is quite plenty and graphic and looks great. If they spent the money on something it's on camera cranes and gory prostethics. Not a bad choice, especially with a script packed with good ideas - but a bit to standard to stand out totally. If I directed and wrote it I would make it more mystical, more European in style. More occult stuff. Now the device is more of a cool McGuffin in a normal murder mystery. The actors are good, but still a bit to handsome and easily to confuse with each other to make it perfect. Instead a reliable character actor like John Jarratt bring some star quality to the show with an underwritten but fun role as the coroner.

If you've seen Wolf Creek you will rememeber him for the rest of your life as the nasty killer in that one. One of the best redneck-psychos I've see. Can't wait to see him back in the sequel!

Anyway, back to Needle. Even if I've sounded quite negative up here I really liked it. It's a damn slick and well-made thriller with ingredienses I like. Instead of a knife-wielding maniac it's a nice solution with the voodoo device. Maybe it's one of those movies for us who prefer murder mysteries. You know, the same stuff like The Eyes of Laura Mars, Blackaria or Four Flies on Grey Velvet, detective stories with a supernatural/pseudoscience touch.

The only thing that really confuses me is the tagline: "Ten Suspects. Six Clues. One Killer...". I get the ten suspects and the one killer, but six clues? I must have missed something there, or maybe you need to be the screenwriter to actually understand what the clues are - because I have no friggin' idea. We're not talking Agatha Christie here, it's a slasher disguised as something fancier! 

Good one. I think you will like it if you're in the mood for somehing mainstream but still a little bit outside the mainstream.