More than 35 years on, The Evil Dead remains as beloved and influential as ever, ranking alongside Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween and The Blair Witch Project as one of the most endlessly ripped-off horror movies of all time (that list is by no means exhaustive, by the way). Of course, Sam Raimi’s feature debut
ranks not only as a perennial genre classic, but also as one of the key video nasties, so given contemporary indie horror’s fascination with revisiting the VHS era, it seems timely for a low-budget film to emerge with designs on directly recapturing that spirit.
As we can rather easily ascertain from its alternate title The Japanese Evil Dead, writer/director/actor Shinichi Fukazawa’s Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell is modelled so closely on The Evil Dead that it seems just as much a remake as Fede Alvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead was; indeed, it’s considerably closer to Raimi’s film in tone, content and most notably visual aesthetics. And given that this new DVD from Terracotta (released under their Terror Cotta imprint) boasts artwork from none other than Graham Humphreys, the iconic artist behind the classic Evil Dead VHS cover, Fukazawa’s film is very much being sold on that link. The key question, then, is whether we can regard Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell as a notable new addition to the horror canon, or essentially a fan film done good.
Continue reading “DVD Review: Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell (AKA The Japanese Evil Dead) (2014)”
It was inevitable that giant monsters would return to the blockbuster arena, and Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures are leading the way. With Pacific Rim and Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla reboot in the bag, a new take on King Kong was the next logical step, paving the way to the announced Godzilla Vs Kong lined up for 2020 (but this only coming after their 2019 Godzilla sequel from director Mike Dougherty). All this being the case, it’s easy to regard Kong: Skull Island with disdain, viewing it merely as a stepping stone in yet another megabudget Hollywood franchise. However, commerce and creativity are not mutually exclusive, as I think plenty of contemporary franchises, the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular, have demonstrated; and Kong: Skull Island offers further evidence to this effect. Jordan Vogt-Roberts is a director I must confess to having been completely ignorant of before now, and I gather this is his first time working at blockbuster level, but he’s put together a movie which pretty much exemplifies blockbuster filmmaking at its finest: simple storytelling, spectacular visuals, and enough thrills and spills to comfortably fill up a running time with the common decency to clock in at just under two hours (the latter being a particular rarity these days).
It’s an old cliche, and sadly a truth in most instances, that a pop culture figure is never more loved than when they’re recently deceased. Few would dispute this has been the case with David Bowie since he left us just over a year ago, but at the same time many would quite reasonably argue the man and his music never stopped being vital and relevant. The comparative merits of Bowie’s numerous musical shifts can, and no doubt will be debated until the proverbial cows come home, but we can surely agree that it was the introduction of his Ziggy Stardust persona on his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars that Bowie really earned his rock legend status. As such, Bowie devotees young and old alike will surely be intrigued and excited to see that the iconic concert film of his final performance with the Spiders is returning to the big screen in cinemas across the UK – although, in the great showman tradition, it’s for one night only.
You only really need to give it a moment’s thought to realise how absurd it is that movies starring Wolverine were ever geared toward kids. The guy is the product of heavily invasive surgical experimentation, his skeleton grafted with an indestructible metal which bursts forth from his knuckles in the form of lethally sharp claws – yet we’re expected to believe that when he goes snikt and swings his fists, the bad guys just fall over? Logan is by far the most violent, gruesome and potty-mouthed X-Men movie made to date – yes, even more so than Deadpool – and it would be easy to write this off as 20th Century Fox cashing in on a newly-rediscovered market for adults-only action which Deadpool proved still exists. However, there’s no denying how natural it all feels. In the first fifteen minutes alone our hero drops the F-bomb at least once a sentence, bloodily hacks limbs off his adversaries, and even enjoys a gratuitous tit shot, yet none of this in any way feels like a betrayal of what went before. Really, it feels like this is what Wolverine movies always should have been like. And not before time if, as has been promised, this will indeed be Hugh Jackman’s last time in his signature role.
What a difference a weekend makes. When I first got word last week of an upcoming new release called Mean Dreams, it was simply a promising-looking thriller; but when I finally sat down to watch it, I did so in the sad knowledge that I was about to see one of the very last performances from the late, great Bill Paxton, who left us far too soon this past Sunday.
Funny thing; it’s just over a month since we relaunched as Warped Perspective, our mission statement being to diversify from the horror-specific focus of our previous incarnation Brutal As Hell – and yet in that time, I personally have still wound up reviewing nothing but horror movies. Old habits really do die hard. Of course, we never said we’d stop covering horror, nor would that be especially feasible given our standing within the industry, small fish in a big pond though we may be. And given that we’ve always been something of an underdog site, it’s important to me that we support other underdogs, gearing up for their own David/Goliath stories. One such plucky so-and-so ready to let fly with his sling is Justin M Seaman, writer-director of microbudget Halloween horror The Barn – and like all the best microbudget horror filmmakers, what Seaman and co lack in funding, they more than make up for in ideas, ambition, and enthusiasm.
Watching this movie, I felt as if I was getting glimpses of multiple alternate realities. One was a universe in which we didn’t generally regard the 1990s as a wasteland for the horror genre; another was one in which Michele Soavi became as major a Hollywood player as Peter Jackson. Watching The Sect, neither of these options seemed too implausible. The 1990s rarely comes up when discussing the great eras for horror cinema: it was the period when the trusted old hands like Carpenter, Romero, Hooper and for a time Craven hit dry spells, derivative straight-to-video bilge became the norm, and the few new directors who showed any promise seemed to hit the wall at double speed. And yet in the early 90s in particular, there were more than a couple of relative newbies who showed such promise: Clive Barker, Richard Stanley, and yes, Jackson and Soavi. We know how most of these stories turned out: Barker largely left film behind in favour of writing and painting, Stanley had his infamous meltdown on The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Jackson, to the astonishment of anyone who ever saw Bad Taste and/or Meet the Feebles, convinced some bigwigs to let him make a megabudget three-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, netting himself many millions and a bunch of Oscars in the process. Soavi, by contrast, remains a largely anonymous figure outside of Italian horror devotees, and since the mid-90s has largely worked in Italian TV; but watching The Sect, it’s not hard to envisage him reaching far greater heights.
By Ben Bussey
Shakespeare’s celebrated adage “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” may carry some weight, but it’s fair to say that when it comes to exploitation movies, by any other name they might not get such great numbers. Director Abel Ferrara’s more-or-less debut feature (he’d previously directed hardcore porno Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy under a psuedonym) may well have courted controversy and gained a cult following under any title, but would it have gained anything like the same attention had it not been given the attention-grabbing moniker of The Driller Killer?