Mindflesh

A cab driver obsessively records his sightings of a hallucinatory woman, who he ends up having sex with, and who turns out to be his own mind, the (truly) inexplicable result of his mother having drunken sex with him and then killing herself. This (the sex with the woman, that is, his own mind) pisses off the guardians of the galaxy (or dimension or plane or whatnot), ostensibly because he is not facing his trauma (but is instead shagging it?), so they start killing off his friends/acquaintances/former employers in order to make him "face his trauma" (this is the only clear part, as it is repeated ad nauseum towards the end), which he does at the end (by remembering his mom having sex with him) just in time to save his ex-girlfriend, patch up his relationship with her, and mail off his manuscript (which is undoubtedly the screenplay for the film).

That about sums it up. The film starts off well, good psychosexual-thriller or whatever it calls itself, but unravels horribly when it attempts to explain what is going on. Everything but the kitchen sink gets thrown in by the end, in an apparent attempt to impress the viewer with the sheer number of concepts introduced. Tough to imagine the chemical cocktail that drove this screenplay, though the tendency of each scene to ignore the entire rest of the movie argues against anything they give the kids for ADD.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Mindflesh (IMDB)

Wince : [*****]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [***__]
Gape : [*****]

Beerequisite : [********...there's not enough beer in the world.
Pornability : [****_]
Obscurity : [****_]
Explicability : [**___]

Notable visuals: Maggot crotch.

The Slaughter

"You can't spell slaughter without laughter!" And apparently you can film The Slaughter without a slaughter.

Six college students (the jock! the slut! the misfit! the valedictorian! the pothead! the other one!) with a crappy job (clean up an abandoned house, where have I heard that before) are attacked by a racked demoness. Throw in a sleazy corporate exec and his aide, drop some blood on a buried occult book, stir, and let set.

OK, there are some potentially funny references to other horror films ("what kind of zombies are those?", "we're not going to split up like they do in the horror films"), but the timing is quite bad, and the quality of the acting isn't exactly top-notch either.

Ultimately an enjoyable college-kids-killed-by-demons-and-zombies film, though it does overreach a bit.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

The Slaughter (IMDB)


Wince : [*****]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [***__]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [*****]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [***__]
Explicability : [***__]

Important zombie fact: In addition to slow-moving Dawn of the Dead zombies and fast, kung-fu master Evil Dead zombies, there are slow-moving-with-fast-reflexes Slaughter zombies.

Imprint

Billy Drago returns to 19th-century Japan to find the woman that he loved and abandoned years before. He has tracked her down to an island inhabited only by demons and whores, where a disfigured prostitute explains to him the (naturally horrific) fate that befell her.

This is everything you want in a Takashi Miike film. The acting is very, very poor. The torture is very, very good. The ending is very, very odd. Maestro!

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Masters of Horror: Imprint (IMDB)

Wince : [****_]
Flinch : [****_]
Retch : [***__]
Gape : [****_]

Beerequisite : [****_]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [**___]

Line that sticks with you: "Do I have your attention now, mister?"

Position on the Audition-Needle-O-Meter: Off the scale.

Jigoku

Two students hit-and-run a drunken yakuza on a back road in the middle of the night, leaving him dead and his mother and wife out for revenge. The students immediately become a good/bad angel pair; the good one tries to fix things but only finds himself with more and more blood on his hands, while the bad one delights in thwarting the attempts of the good one to redeem himself.

Eventually everyone dies and they end up in hell, where they witness and endure the tortures of the damned.

There's really not much more to say than that. The Hell sequences are surreal and gory enough for the time, but will not prove terribly striking to a modern audience. The demonic bad student, however, is fun to watch.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Jigoku (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [**___]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [***__]

Army of Darkness

How many times can one see Bruce Campbell Vs The Army Of Darkness? Never too many, apparently.

Caught this in a midnight showing, deciding to make this the first sober viewing of the film. The film is just as funny without the aid of anaesthetic, though the production quality and continuity flaws become glaringly obvious.

Unfortunately, this was the original American film distribution, with the lame S-Mart ending instead of the proper "I slept too loooooong!" one, and minus quite a few battle scenes (e.g. "We... are... des-er-ted!"). Luckily, that didn't stop the audience from knowing the lines and shouting them with impunity.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

Army of Darkness

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [****_]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [****_]

Beerequisite : [**___]
Pornability : [*____]
Obscurity : [*____]
Explicability : [***__]

Surprise sober realization: Man, Ash really is quite an asshole, isn't he?

Blade Runner flashback: So *that's* how you win a woman over, eh?

Possession

This one is definitely going to require a second viewing. Perhaps a third and fourth. The ambiguity of the title (is it about a woman being possessed, or about a man possessing a woman?) carries over into the narrative. In spades, as it were.

The film is about a disintegrating marriage: Mark, a guy working for shadowy people doing unexplained work (though hints are dropped towards assassination, implausible as it seems), is away from home a lot, and unable to please his wife. Anna, his wife, has had a lover for a long time. The two fight a lot, sullenly refuse to communicate a lot, get weak and weepy a lot, and use their kid as weapon against each other. Typical light-hearted family fare.

The trouble begins when Mark confronts Anna's long-time lover and finds that this isn't who she's been running off to spend time with. Well, who is it then? Her best friend Margie? Her appeared-out-of-nowhere twin, who is their son's schoolteacher? The man with the pink socks? A manifestation of her own desire gradually becoming flesh from the inside out?

The answer is fairly obvious, but less obvious is the nature of the Allsexthing and the role of the title: many characters act possessed, particularly in the proximity of the creature, but given the general craziness most of them display due to stress, emotion, or drugs, it is hard to be sure. Even more difficult is explaining why, after tightly wrapping things up and preparing to close the plot, Mark suddenly goes off the deep end in the last 15 or so minutes of the film.

I could probably spill forth pages of possible explanations with key points to watch in the film, all of which would be invalid. Find a copy of this (make sure it is the 127 minute version), sit back with a notebook, and prepare to spend 4 to 6 hours scrutinizing it.

* * * R A T I N G * * *
Possession (IMDB)

Wince : [**___]
Flinch : [***__]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [*****]

Beerequisite : [*____]
Pornability : [***__]
Obscurity : [**___]
Explicability : [**___]

Scene I'd watch on endless loop: "Almost... almost...".

What I would do different: The breakdown at the end looks like it is missing a couple of supporting scenes, perhaps to speed things up. On the second viewing, things became more clear, but there is still the matter of the police showing up outside of Margie's house, and who the pink-socked man turned out to be. Explaining these requires a bit of hand-waving, which means the extra four minute of film should have been spent justifying them, minor as they are.