Film Reviews by NK

***THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***

Fairly routine zombie romp with a set-piece Hollywood-style cliche for a plot - the hero has to travel across country to rescue his son who’s staying with his grandparents. He meets a few disposable allies on the way who help out then wind up dead. 

The zombies are of the ‘28 Days Later’ variety, i.e. infected people who have gone berserk and can run very fast, as opposed to the shuffling ‘Walking Dead’ variety who are actually dead. 

Switch off your brain and enjoy!

Unlike most apocalyptic mass infection movies, this one has a happy ending.  

If you like your early 80’s synth music then you’ll like this. 

There doesn’t seem to be an option for subtitles on the copy I received. You can either watch it in the original German or dubbed into English.  

This is an absurdist comedy/drama set in an office building where total chaos reigns. Everyone is always in the wrong place because someone keeps taking away the signs. And everybody just happens to be naked - not just in the office, but in their whole world, the police who arrest their boss are naked, the people they see on television are naked etc. Their nudity is never commented on, although they make the same kinds of remarks about people's figures, weight loss/gain as anywhere else. This is also a transgressive film because it breaks some sort of Hollywood golden rule that anyone seen naked or partially naked has to be young, slim and beautiful - these are just normal people. And everyone smokes too.

This movie has obviously been transferred to DVD from a 3rd or 4th copy of a VHS tape, so the sound and picture quality is poor. The film simply consists of a series of interviews with women who performed in low budget, straight-to-video horror movies in the 1980s, interspersed with the odd clip from one of their old movies. 

The actors only talk about their own careers so it’s not particularly interesting to the casual viewer.

I gave up about halfway through.  

This movie is shot in a kind of hyper-real style using sound stages rather than locations, so it looks a lot more like a play than a movie. Dialogue is in English. If you're a fan of Derek Jarman-style homoeroticism then this is for you.

It's difficult to go into any detail about this story without dropping spoilers. All I will say is that it's about real people trying to deal with a very real situation.

This film is based on some weird macho Christian morality which will particularly grate with non-American audiences (and probably a lot of Americans too). Apparently, if you see two strangers fighting (or, to be fair in this case, a total stranger being beaten up by another total stranger) then if you don't intervene you're a "coward" who deserves to be named and shamed on TV and spat at in the street. Never mind that you could end up dead, or in prison, or protecting a very bad person because you've misread the narrative, never mind that most police forces would advise you not to get involved in a brawl, however one-sided it might seem. And if you video the incident, however useful that footage might be to the police to identify the perpetrator or perhaps cause the perpetrator to pause and reconsider his actions when he notices he's being filmed - that's just another act of cowardice as far as this twisted movie is concerned. Add in a double heaped spoonful of saccharine-soaked tears and lots of "I love you so much!" and this piece of crap is what you're left with.

*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS *** A fairly unlikeable protagonist is having an affair with the wife of his best/only friend and strangles her to death during a bout of rough sex. The police only seen to carry out the most cursory investigation, but our hero is wracked with guilt. He confesses, first to his wife and then to his friend (the cuckolded husband). They both seem OK with it. The end.

I stuck with this film right to the end, mainly out of nostalgia - it reminded me of the trashy 'B' movies my friends and I used to see on the late show at the local flea pit. The scenery is quite stunning and, as a teenager, I know I would have enjoyed all the footage of our heroes riding their trail bikes through the wilderness (accompanied by banjo/fiddle music) and getting into scrapes with local hillbillies and law enforcement. The plot is quite lame, the sort of thing you'd expect on an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, albeit with a deadlier outcome. The action scenes are unconvincing, especially (spoiler alert!) when the hero gets shot several times but just walks it off.

The sound quality is dreadful. I can't tell if it has just deteriorated with age, although I suspect it was never very good. Half the time you can't hear what people are saying, although from context you can tell that they're probably not saying anything that matters much.

I won't be going out of my way to watch any more of William Grefe's output.

I like the idea of a film that transforms the myth of the vampire into a powerful metaphor for bloodthirsty fascism, with Dracula as the dictator who feeds on his people. That's certainly a metaphor we can relate to in 21st Century Britain where obscenely wealthy vampiric oligarchs suck huge amounts of money out of the economy into their bloated offshore tax havens, whilst ordinary people suffer cuts to vital services and sink into poverty and destitution. I didn't see that metaphor here though. Franco's censors would have had to have been sensitive to the point of paranoia to see any implied criticism of their government in this footage. It's basically outtakes from the making of the classic Dracula movie, shown in chronological sequence, with either no sound or inappropriate sound, like the Victorian funeral where a jet can be heard passing noisily overhead.

This film might be of a certain specialist interest, but I don't really think it's for general entertainment.

For me this movie definitely comes into that rare (and even more rarely agreed on) "so bad it's good" category. This film was on my list because I like to watch German language films to keep up my German, however this version is dubbed (badly) into English. It often sounds like the person reading the lines either didn't understand them or that they just couldn't be bothered to put any kind of emotion into them. The exotic settings are great, with plenty of sun, sand and sea, but this kind of caper has probably never been done on a lower budget. The story looks like they were making it up as they went along, the dialogue is clumsy (and probably poorly translated) the direction seemed non-existent, the acting sometimes so dire that it often seemed as if they had just asked a passer-by to step into the role, and special effects, such as when someone get shot, simply left out altogether. There's a really fab and groovy nightclub dance scene though. On the whole I really enjoyed it.

I enjoy oddities. I actively seek them out. But I found this movie tedious. What is it with Japanese dialogue? I don't speak Japanese, so I'm totally reliant on the subtitles, but are they really that bad at creating dialogue, i.e. most of the characters most of the time stating the bleedin' obvious? Or is Japanese a language so alien to our own that what they're saying cannot readily be rendered into English? Or is it that the people writing the subtitles don't understand Japanese either and they're just making up stuff that looks like it'll fit? I suspect the latter. The special effects are ropey in the extreme, even for 1977, but some would say that add to the film's charm. However for a horror film it lacks any sense of menace (or horror). And finally, because the protagonists are Japanese schoolgirls there is a lot of giggling. I mean really lots. And lots. And lots. Pretty much everything anyone says is met with giggling on the part of everyone else - but most of the time they were already giggling anyway. All. The. Time.

I stuck with this for about half an hour before I realised I was dozing off, so I gave up. A group of dissolute eighteenth century noblemen (and a couple of women) in a forest not doing very much, mainly just watching each other. There might be a few soft porn moments but the picture is so dark that it could just as easily have been my imagination trying to fill the void. 

Short (at only 57 minutes), but with plenty of tension, jump scares and brutal bloody mayhem. I really enjoyed it.

I'm sure this play made a huge impact on post-war audiences when it was first performed, but I couldn't watch it for more than half an hour. I had previously tried the film version with Richard Burton, which starts with him angrily playing a trumpet in his jazz band, before angrily meeting up with his friends for a drink and then angrily walking home and angrily going to bed and it soon became too much to bear. I thought I'd give Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson et al a go, but I think the problem is really with the play itself. It's just a constant rant. If you like the play then this is probably a good rendering of it - a made for TV play (Thames Television) - with the action confined to one room (as far as I watched it) but I just found the constant ranting and bullying exhausting.