Taking a cue from Darmeus, here’s another quick review. It took a while to get around to watching, but I’m so glad I did and wish I’d actually seen it sooner. It’s a perverse but incredibly beautiful movie with everything a Japanese Pinku Nunsploitation should have. Hot lesbian nuns, whips and vibrant red blood splashed over religious iconography. I would even go as far as to say it is the best Nunsploitation film I’ve seen. Don’t waste anymore time, go watch it now and if you’ve already seen it … go watch it again! The power of christ compels you!
Slaughter (2009) – God awful… slow moving, turgid… barely a tv movie of the week quality fair with far too few bloody scenes. Unoriginal.
Autopsy (2009) – Robert Patrick goes bug nuts in an abandoned hospital, harvesting organs to keep his wife alive. Highly watchable for this sort of fair, and the setting is suitably lit and scary. The teens are hard to like, as usual, and once again its the bad guys who really bring the fun.
Punisher War Zone (2009) – Awesome old school fun action movie, with lots of blood and death.
Dead Snow (2009) – A slow start but becomes super awesome. This may not be the Nazi Zombie movie I’ve always wanted, but its definately the Nazi Zombie Comedy I needed.
Turkey Shoot (1982) – Ozploitation classic. The old “hunt the prisoners for sport” routine, with lashings of nudity and one of the weapons of choice being a bizarre kill bladed bulldozer co-piloted by a hairy ape-man. Recommended.
When one is ill, as I was this past week, one wants a film that can be regularly left for indeterminate periods of time whilst one calls for Ralph on the giant porcelain telephone. So nothing too engaging or requiring deep focus. Also this is not a time to be watching Feast 2, or Mermaid in a Manhole or anything else overly… vomitous. One wants something safe and tame and preferably not too serious. And I had just the film saved up for this rainy day. Santa’s Slay. Ooh, a pun in the title. I love puns.
Bill Goldberg, the thicker-necked version of Stone Cold Steve Austin from the world wrestling federation, plays Santa. Given Santa/Wrestling crossovers in the past, this could be dire, but Goldberg has served well as moving scenery in other films and was really rocking the beard on the DVD cover so I didn’t dismiss the poor flick out of hand. So wrapped in duvet, with my grapes and Lucozade I fired it up.
Opening scene: family of arseholes, including James Caan and Fran Drescher, act like arseholes over Christmas dinner. The term “moist” is used in respect to food and sex.
Enter Santa. Through the (polystyrene) chimney.
Before the opening credits even scroll, before anything close to exposition bogs us down, we see Santa kill an entire family including the dog using festive treats like turkey legs, eggnog, and Christmas ornaments. And he sets Fran Drescher on fire.
We don't need no water...
Yes folks, this might be the best movie ever.
Fine, it all slows down when plots get involved, the plucky kids, the mad old Grandpa who doesn’t trust Santa (Robert freakin’ Culp in a mad professor wig, no less) and believe me the story they came up with (Demonic Santa forced to do good for a millennium due to losing a game of curling to an angel) is a bit naff but the long and the short of it is Santa is off the fucking chain and allowed to rip shit up in the sweet little town of Hell. Said shit-ripping a mix of novelty festive deaths (wreaths of holly, stars from atop trees, reindeer attacks…) and wrestling moves. Santa suplexes ahoy. Mixed in with this standard holiday-slasher schtick are some jokes that could not survive outside the realms of this single film. The strip-joint line “Ho, ho…hoes” for example, take a man of Goldberg’s stature not to make one wince. And the stripper pole gag? Glorious.
Anyhoo, the film is very much comedy first, slasher second, so the deaths are comical and the high rating comes more from the tits and swearing than anything. But seriously, when you’re dying of cholera and wallowing in your own watery shit there’s nowt better.
Ooh, bonus points for a Charles Dickens joke.
And the tazer-to-the-scrotum.
So there’s these two best friends who work in a video store and fill their time with snappy banter with disregard for customers, but before you can say Kevin Smi … in walks a blue faced zombie straight from the Monroville Mall circa 1980’s and is casually shot in the head followed by another clever one-liner.
The boss then promptly fires them both for making a mess and so the guys have to find a new job. Enter ZOM-B-GONE, a business who specialise in ridding their customers of whichever monster problem they may have, whether it’s zombies, vampires or werewolves. And so this sets the scene for the movie where these two wise-cracking guys go about slaughtering the legions of the undead.
Proving that even if you have a low budget, having a good script and well written dialogue you can have a good movie with a great sense of humor. Take for instance the B&D/S&M Dungeon that tried to incorporate Zombie-Play into their list of services available only to have to call in the boys for a cleanup job or another scene with one particularly distressed man who calls up and needs help with a vampire infestation. The boys kit up and head in to stake some vampires but it turns out that the man was mistaken and it was just a bunch of goth kids hanging out. Although I’m not sure if the director was going for authenticity or just happened to accidentally cast the most unappealing people they could find, but nevertheless if you ever wanted to dissuade someone from becoming a goth, show them this scene and they’ll never want to be associated with it ever again.
This film is definitely well worth your time if only to see the one of the crappiest final boss fight scenes with a setup so stupid that it would cause Wyle E Coyote to revoke his Acme Catalogue subscription, oh and did I mention it has werewolves?
Finally got to see one of the legendary Weng Weng movies and it is so many levels of awesome, the non-stop action and kung fu scenes, the hilariously bad english dubbing, the height of garish 70’s fashion, the funky-ass discotheque music and of course really stilted acting. Some movies are just plain bad, but this is just soooo bad it crosses a threshold into unbelievably good. Seriously, it just doesn’t get much better/worse than this. Where else could you hear lines like “You’re very petite, like a potato”.
Highly recommended cult classic viewing!
