I Drink Your Blood (1970)

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Against the Dark (2007)

I wonder how many cows had to die to make
Seagal that leather jacket?

Seagal is... Against the Dark. And by "dark" they mean vampires. Yes, that's right: Seagal vs vampires. Kind of sells itself doesn't it? However, it's not the first time Seagal has attempted to dip his feet into the realm of the supernatural. In Attack Force and Submerged Seagal was supposed to be fighting aliens and biological mutants respectively, but whether the result of cold feet or studio meddling they pussed out and switched it over to terrorists at the last minute. This time however, the film promises Seagal versus vampires and it delivers. Sort of.

You see, these vampires are treated more like biological mutants than immortal bloodsuckers. It's more of a 28 Days Later kind of thing where it's a highly contagious virus and while the infected do drink blood they also tear people up and eat their flesh like zombies. Sometimes they are mindless zombies, other times they are smart enough to set traps or string people up and drain their blood (into an "Allergic to Mondays" mug, nice touch). Although it's repeatedly mentioned that it's more dangerous to go out at night they never explain why or even if daylight has any effect on them at all. For all we know they glitter in the sun like Twilight emo vampires. No crosses, no garlic, nothing like that. They get killed by swords and guns just like normal humans. Fuck, I don't know why they are called vampires at all, now that I think about it. They don't even have fangs, they have to file their teeth down manually.

So in this film Seagal plays Tao, leader of a group of bad-ass vampire hunters. They seem to work for the military, but they are rugged individualists so they all wear leather trenchcoats, carry swords, walk in slo-mo, etc. The sort of thing that would have been pretty awesome about ten years ago but now looks pretty cheesy. Seagal kills a few vampires here and there but his role is mainly to slur military orders and occasionally interject with some nonsense like "We're not here to decide who's right or wrong... we're here to decide who lives or dies", which makes even less sense in context. In one scene he rescues a kid who asks who he is and he replies "My name is Tao" and turns away as some rockin' guitars kick in, as if we are supposed to be blown away by his badassery. I don't know man, I don't think you've earned those guitars just yet. Maybe start with a kazoo and work your way up. The rest of his team aren't much more interesting, although there's one beefy guy named Tanoai Reed who is pretty cool. Apparently he's the Rock's stunt double so he's pretty imposing physically and he gets to jump around with some wrist blades and throw vampires around. I reckon he could have pulled off the guitars.

The problem is that we don't see Seagal and his team that much at all. Nintey percent of the time is spent with a large group of survivors who are wandering around in an abandoned hospital. They were all so uninteresting that I couldn't keep their names straight or remember what they were doing or why. Apparently they have to find the hospital exit before the generator runs out and the security doors get locked permanently, but they don't seem to be in any rush to do so. They keep getting separated and splitting up into groups for no reason. When they come across a locked door they just shrug and move on instead of finding something to bash it open. They don't even carry any weapons. Eventually they meet with Seagal and his team, but until then you are stuck watching these dipshits wandering around like a flock of fucking sheep. Protip: If a woman or a child is curled up crying in the corner with their back to you he/she is probably a vampire.

I'm struggling for things to say here because this is one of those shot-in-Romania Sci-Fi-channel-caliber movies that dissolves from your brain immediately after viewing. There was something about an evil scientist who kidnapped one of them to feed to his infected daughter I believe. He says something about her having the capacity for reason and being the next step in evolution but Seagal puts an abrupt end to that plot point by impaling her head with a sword (offscreen unfortunately). They also stuck in a few scattered pieces of I Am Legend style "we are the real monsters" introspection from both the survivors and the monsters, but they didn't go anywhere either. There's a fair bit of blood and gore if you're into that, but nothing special.

The great Keith David and Linden Ashby turn up for a day of shooting as military officers who are trying to get Seagal and his team out before they level the building in an air strike. It's never explained why this air strike is necessary and Seagal never shares screen time or interacts with them in any way so it's largely pointless. They already have a time limitation with the security doors, so all this impending air strike adds is a few minutes of padding and an utterly wasted character actor.

The proceedings are directed with a minimum of flair by first-and-likely-only-time director Richard Crudo, who was cinematographer on Pistol Whipped, Out of Reach and a bunch of other films that don't star Steven Seagal. If I had to say anything good about this film it's that I could usually see everything that was going on even though it was in darkness a lot of the time. You know, cause it's him Against the Dark. Other than that, I can't recommend anything about it. Kind of like Hasselhoff versus giant snakes, this is another one that's much better in theory than execution. I was hoping for vampires in a Seagal film but I got Seagal in a pseudo-vampire film. Oh well. At least he threw a vampire through a window.

Book Review - Twilight

Look, I know. This is for research purposes I swear. Normally I wouldn't read something like this. I prefer books about giant crabs or aging action stars. However, the phenomenon of Twilight is getting harder and harder to ignore, with friends and relatives of mine - women who are intelligent and responsible human beings - having read and loved this book. And for the straw that broke the camel's back, my wife saw a grown man reading this book on the train. Pubescent girls I can understand. I certainly had some dubious choices of reading material at that age. But grown adults? Surely this book must have some sort of Dracula-like hypnotic allure. Naturally I had to read it and find out for myself. Vampire/human star-crossed lovers, with blood-drinking as a none-too-subtle metaphor for teenage sex. Buffy pulled it off pretty well, maybe lightning can strike twice.

Bella is a teenage girl who is forced to move in with her dad in Forks, Washington (apparently the rainiest city in America) after her mother shacks up with another guy. Upon arrival at her new school, Bella finds herself the object of attention for several boys. This comes at a surprise to her and especially me, since Bella is one of the most vapid characters ever committed to the printed page. She is immediately transfixed by a group of aloof, beautiful teens, the Cullens. In the real world they'd probably be the most popular kids in school, but in the Twilight-verse, this makes them social outcasts. She is particularly attracted to Edward, the most non-threatening of the group, but she is coldly rebuffed. Eventually she discovers that Edward is actually incredibly attracted to her, but he's got a few internal struggles of his own (spoiler: he's a vampire). Then, over the next couple of hundred pages, we discover what happens when an dimwitted force meets an idiotic object (spoiler: nothing).

Edward's attraction to Bella is utterly mystifying. She is not particularly beautiful, with a sucking void where her personality should be. I think she's supposed to be mildly intelligent, since there are a few references to advanced classes though they make sure she hates math so as not to alienate her from her target audience. There's certainly nothing else in the book to indicate she's above average intelligence. Her singular trait is that she is outrageously clumsy and wanders obliviously into dangerous situations, like a lemming. This is trotted out again and again so Edward can swoop in and rescue her. Bella's hobbies, interests and life goals begin and end with Edward. Everything else in her life is a background murmur. Especially her friends, whom she drops like a hot potato whenever Edward is around.

As for Edward, well, he is such a fucking pussy he makes the foppish dandies of Anne Rice novels look like Blade. Sure, Dracula seduced countless maidens, but at least he had the courtesy to rip their fucking throats out once in a while. You've probably heard that these vampires sparkle in the sun instead of bursting into flames, and I think that gives you a good idea of how castrated these poor vampires are. I kept hoping that his infatuation with Bella was all an elaborate ruse, and any moment he was going to brutally murder her. But it never happened.

He's also a psycho stalker, something common in the romance genre but here taken to new extremes. He watches her while she sleeps and spies on her phone calls. He's jealous, possessive, manipulative and condescending. Worst of all, he likes 50s and 80s music and hates the music of the 60s and 70s. Really, Edward? Really? Okay, so maybe you associate the 70s with disco, but how could anyone hate the music of the 60s, one of the most vibrantly creative periods in music history? The Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan. Johnny Cash. The Who. Jimi Henrix. The motherfucking Beatles. Any of these ring a bell, you glittery closet-case?

You may be wondering what a vampire is doing attending high school. Well, it's his self-imposed purgatory, his penance for becoming a monster. It's a good punishment, I can't imagine anything worse than an eternity of high school. Also, apparently the family can blend in better if the "kids" attend four years of high school before they move on to another location. This doesn't make sense on any level, but it gives him an excuse to be preying on high school chicks, like a reverse Matt McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

There's an inherent creepiness in a guy who is, for all intents and purposes, over 100 years old and attracted to teenage girls. Sure, the book makes repeated claims that she is more mature than most girls her age, but it runs contrary to everything she thinks or does. Edward finds her fascinating because her mind is particularly hard for him to read. This has something to do with her being more introverted than her peers, but by my estimation it's because there's nothing there to read. Needless to say, Edwards glaring faults are swallowed up by Bella's all-consuming starry-eyed infatuation. It's utterly pathetic. She makes it clear that she would rather die than stay away from him. In fact, she uses exactly those words. And this is before they've even kissed. This is a really sick and twisted relationship. Edward's 107 years old, he should know better.

Then there's the Cullen household itself, where an older man sucks the blood of beautiful teenagers - and lest we forget, blood-drinking is a metaphor for sex - and then lives with them as their surrogate father. Ew. The sex metaphor gets even more hilarious when you consider that in order to stave off their hunger, they drink the blood of wild animals. Edward's favourite is bears. No comment. Naturally they all live together in a huge mansion, because Edward couldn't be a perfect dreamboat if he wasn't filthy rich.

I don't know what else to say because I'm not kidding when I say that nothing happens in this book. It's like listening to teenage girls mindlessly babble on their cell phones. How anyone can get emotionally invested with these paper cut-outs is a mystery to me. I've seen finger puppets with more characterisation. If there was a plot of any description I might be swept along for the ride, but this like watching paint dry.

I never really got into Harry Potter, but I read the first book and I could recognise that it was nicely written and a well-constructed fantasy world. But this, this is something else entirely. This book is horribly written. It's like bad fan fiction. The prose is torturous and Meyer can't write a single noun about Edward (and there are a lot) without cramming it full of adjectives. There isn't a single page that doesn't make reference to his "beautiful, ochre eyes" or his "smooth, sensuous voice". Every. Single. Fucking. Page. Jesus! We get it! He's hot! Several times the book hilariously describes his hair "gelled to perfection". When I saw the poster for the movie I thought it was pretty funny that a vampire would use half a tub of hair product every day, but apparently it's just being faithful to the text. How does he do that without a reflection?

I went into this half-expecting to like it a little in spite of myself. If anything it's galvanised my dislike of it. It's turned a mild annoyance into a full-blown hatred. Even the clumsy "forbidden fruit" metaphor on the cover makes me grit my teeth. I hope Stephanie Meyer enjoys the mountain of blood-money she's received from loosing this literary abomination on the world, and may God have mercy on her soul. If you're ever tempted to experience this book/movie for yourself (no, I haven't seen the movie but I can't imagine it being any better) just go and read/watch Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire movie that has more genuine emotion, characterisation, atmosphere and horror in any single scene than Twilight has is it's interminable 400 pages.

Cruel Jaws (aka Jaws 5) (1995)

Aaah! Fibreglass shark head!

Jaws is widely credited as being the first true "blockbuster" film, and although that term has become something of a pejorative these days, you can't deny that Jaws is fuckin' awesome. After it's release the cinemas were flooded with animal-on-the-rampage films, most of which copied Jaws' plot down to the unscrupulous capitalists and exasperated nature experts. Mattei may have slowed down in the 90s, but in 1995, well after the animal-on-the-rampage genre was dead and buried, he popped up under his one-time pseudonym William Snyder to not only rip off Jaws, but rip off the rip offs. For his 1995 made-for-TV killer shark movie Cruel Jaws he lifts huge chunks of footage from Enzo G. Castellari's own Jaws rip-off The Last Shark. Pretty much every action sequence was taken from that film, as well as small segments from the first three Jaws films and Joe D'Amato's Deep Blood. This is the Citizen Kane of people-standing-around-reacting-to-stolen-stock-footage movies.

The film opens with a couple of divers trying to recover some top secret documents on board a sunken Navy ship so that they can sell them. Guys, I'm pretty sure that any secret documents lying at the bottom of the ocean would be pretty much ruined by now. Before long they are attacked by a giant shark and chased into a cave. The angry shark then rams the mouth of the cave until it collapses, trapping the divers. Luckily they have some explosives to blast their way out, but before they reach the surface the shark eats them up in a flurry of bad editing.

Cut to a marine biologist and his foxy wife, who are going to visit some people at a Seaworld-type coastal attraction in the sleepy town of Hampton Bay. The owner, Dag Sorrenson, is a dead ringer for Thunderlips himself, Hollywood Hulk Hogan. I was hoping he would perform an Atomic Leg Drop on the shark, or at least grab a microphone and start trash talking it. "Watcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you? Your razor-sharp teeth ain't no match for these 24-inch pythons. You'd better believe it, brother!" Unfortunately he's a little more morose than his WWE counterpart, especially since an accident killed his wife and crippled his daughter.

Adding to Dag's misery is the fact that the local evil property developer wants to knock down his seaside attraction and build an addition to his luxury hotel. You know he's evil because Dag's seal pushes him into the water and everybody laughs. With the hotel owner's big real estate deal about to go through and his own daughter fraternising with one of Dag's employees, the last thing he needs is a shark going around eating swimmers in terrible day-for-night photography. With all of this shark mayhem, they'll have to delay the big regatta. No, not the big regatta!

Of course, the evil property-developer constructs a bay-spanning shark net and demands that the regatta go ahead as planned, allowing Mattei to insert footage of a windsurfing race from The Last Shark. This is sloppily intercut with shots of our hero and the property developer's no-good son trying desperately to look like they are windsurfing as they stand still on dry land. To nobody's surprise the shark busts through the net and turns the race into an all-you-can-eat buffet. After he's had his fill of the race contestants, the shark starts ramming the pier, knocking people in like dominoes. Even Dag's little girl gets knocked out of her wheelchair and dumped in the ocean, at which point she starts frantically kicking her legs. She's healed! It's a miracle! Unfortunately she doesn't get eaten.

After this massacre the property developer puts a $100,000 bountry on the shark's head, inspiring a number of unsuccessful attempts to capture it. During one such expedition a girl inexplicably douses herself in gasoline just as her friend lights up a flare, proving that no justification is too flimsy for Mattei when there is stolen footage of a boat explosion sitting idle. The sheriff also tries to take out the shark from a helicopter by using a hunk of meat attached to winch cable, but the short-sightedness of his plan is revealed when the shark grabs the meat and pulls the chopper into the ocean. I'm sure in his final seconds he regretted shooting at the shark instead of, you know, releasing the cable, but he didn't really have much choice since this whole sequence was footage taken from The Last Shark.

Eventually our marine biologist decides to mount his own expedition to hunt down the shark. According to him it's a tiger shark, and although most of the footage is clearly of a great white I don't have a PhD in marine biology so who am I to argue? Somehow he also knows that the shark is the result of a secret Navy experiment and likely to be hanging out in the sunken wreckage of the ship that was transporting it. They mark it's location on a map with a big red circle and an arrow saying "It's here". This proves mighty handy to some mafia goons who break in later and use the map to mount an expedition of their own, hoping to collect on the reward.

Of the course the mafia's shark-hunting expedition goes horribly awry, but our heroes' own expedition goes surprisingly smooth. In fact, they set the explosives and blow up the shark without any twists, turns or surprising developments at all. The shark even explodes three times so Mattei can get the most of his stock footage. Our triumphant heroes head back to collect on the bounty and save their business. The seal even pushes the evil property developer into the water again and you know what? It was even funnier the second time.

Cruel Jaws is more of a greatest hits compilation than a movie in it's own right, but it's worth seeing if only for Mattei's enormous brass balls in not only stealing footage from the Jaws films but also giving Peter Benchley a writing credit.

Zombies: The Beginning (2007)

You're kind of stretching the definition of zombie here

No "Best Sequel" list is complete without Aliens. It's a classic film that stays true to the central character while spinning things off in a wildly different direction, changing the tone, the focus and even the genre. I've heard many sequel directors reference Aliens when talking about how their film ups the stakes and changes the rules of the game, but rarely do they live up to their promise. It's been slavishly imitated over and over, and it's fair to say that Aliens clones have become a genre unto themselves.

It's surprising then, that Zombies: The Beginning stands out even amongst Aliens clones for slavish imitation and unoriginality. Of course, those of you astute enough to notice the Bruno Mattei tag on this post won't be surprised. Yes, as late as 2007 Bruno Mattei was making films like it was 1983. He would probably still be making them today if a brain tumour hadn't cruelly taken us from him shortly after making this film.

You see, after the Golden Age of Mattei in the 1980s, he retreated to the safety zone of softcore erotic thrillers and the occassional Jaws rip-off. However, the 00's saw a return to form for Mattei and (under his pseudonym Vincent Dawn) he produced some cannibal and zombie films and even a few women-in-prison movies. Audience tastes may have moved on since 1978, but Mattei hasn't. His 2003 cannibal film Land of Death is basically "Predator with cannibals" (and not his first Predator rip-off either), so it's a shame that he shuffled off his mortal coil before he was able to bring us a zombie/cannibal crossover film riffing off of Alien vs Predator. It couldn't be any worse than the real Alien vs Predator films, right?

Zombies: The Beginning was Bruno Mattei's last film. Like all of his recent genre films, it was shot back-to-back with a similar film (the previous year's Island of the Living Dead) and this film is a direct sequel. It has the same central character Sharon (played by Yvette Yzon, who proved to be something of a muse to Mattei, starring in most of his mid to late 00's films) and, well, you've seen Aliens so I don't really need to explain what happens. All of your favourite scenes are replicated here with drastically reduced resources and talent.

That's not to say that Mattei doesn't put his own stamp on the proceedings. For instance, in the boardroom scene where Ripley is chewed out by corporate executives she says "All of this bullshit you think is so important, you can kiss all that goodbye!" Mattei turns things up a notch by changing the last part to "...you'll only be able to use to wipe your ass!" Definite improvement! Instead of becoming a dock worker Sharon becomes a Buddhist monk, but like Ripley her nightmares drive her to accept a consultant position on a rescue mission to the island.

Actually, this whole beginning sequence is a pretty good illustration of the calibre of rip-off we are talking about here. James Cameron knew that showing one of Ripley's nightmares was sufficient. After that you could show her waking up in a cold sweat and leave the audience to fill in the blanks. Mattei has that original nightmare sequence (Sharon turns into a zombie with a truly horrifying monobrow) but uses subsequent dream sequences (at least three) to pad the running time with scenes of Sharon screaming as zombies moan and drool into the camera.

So anyway, it turns out that the corporation is using pregnant women to incubate baby zombies. Who knows why. There's an obligatory scene of a rubbery zombie fetus bursting it's way out of a woman's stomach, plus they also get attacked by a baby zombie, played by a heavily made-up midget with a hilarious eyeball poking out the top of his head. These zombie babies grow up into weird coneheaded mutants that look kind of like Greedo from Star Wars. Like Han Solo, Sharon definitely shoots first. Instead of the alien queen there is a brain in a jar, easily dispatched with a burst from Sharon's flamethrower, so the equivalent scene for Ripley's final face off with the queen aboard the Sulaco is missing entirely. This makes for an extremely anti-climactic ending and makes Bruno Mattei's subsequent posthumous shout-out seem kind of sad and pathetic.

Where Aliens differs from a lot of the imitators is that it gave a strong (if one-dimensional) personality to each of the secondary characters. So much so that to this day characters in films are often referred to as a Vasquez-type or a Hudson-type. Of course Mattei has a few analogs to those characters here (which are terrible), but most of them are completely interchangable. It doesn't help that they are all wearing SWAT-type face masks, leaving only the lousy dubbing to tell them apart.

There's also a lot of gore, all realised with practical effects with no digital touch-ups and aside from the fact that it's obviously shot on crappy digital there's barely anything to indicate this film was made just a couple of years ago. In another throwback to the 70s, all of the dialogue is dubbed (badly) in post-production. There's also a little bit of stock footage. A sequence aboard a submarine is taken from Crimson Tide and apparently Viggo Mortenson is visible in the background, although I didn't see him.

On one hand this film is kind of interesting, like those kids who did a scene-for-scene remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Gus Van Sant's Psycho vanity project. Though it was a labour of love for them, I don't think Mattei had such lofty motivations. It certainly doesn't help your enjoyment when you're sitting there thinking "I could be watching Aliens instead of this stupid bullshit." Bruno's earlier films might have been shamelessly derivative, but ocassionally someone would strip off their clothes for no reason or pipe up with a nonsensical and profanity-laden piece of dialogue and all was forgiven. His films were at their best when they plumbed the depths of ridiculousness, like Reb Brown's speech to a dying boy in Strike Commando. So I wish this film had some of the same ridiculous touches but at least he died doing what he loved... ripping off other films. So long Bruno, I hope you're climbing popcorn trees in heaven.

TimeCrimes (2007)

Invisible binoculars!

One film I recently saw and mostly enjoyed was Primer, a low-budget film about a couple of engineers who accidentally invent a time machine (oops) and then spend the rest of the film abusing the technology and gradually getting themselves deeper and deeper into trouble. I appreciated the way it was grounded in hard science and didn't talk down to the audience, but it's definitely a film that requires multiple viewings. I saw it two and a half times and I'm still not entirely sure what happened. I mean, just take a look at this chart. I like intelligent films and all but Jesus Christ. It didn't help that the film had this detached, dare I say engineerish feel to it that put the mechanics of the plot above everything else.

Therefore it's really nice to have something like TimeCrimes, a Spanish film with the same intelligent time-travel plot and similar themes, but also a little more accessible and easy to follow.

Héctor (Karra Elejalde) is an ordinary middle aged dude (who actually looks like a normal dude and not a Hollywood actor pretending to be a normal dude) moving into a new house in the country with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández). He is lounging on a deck chair in his back yard spying on his neighbours, when suddenly he stumbles upon the holy grail of neighbourhood-spying: A hot girl taking her top off. Naturally he goes to investigate, but when he finds the girl naked and unconscious, a mysterious man with a bandaged face stabs him in the arm and begins to chase after him.

Héctor escapes and takes refuge in a mysterious laboratory next door. With the aid of a laboratory technician (played by writer/director Nacho Vigalondo) he soon finds himself transported about an hour into the past. Now he's got to make sure his past self plays things out the same way and gets to the time machine so he can travel into the past so he can make sure he gets to the time machine so he can travel into the past etc.

This film is quite cleverly structured and well-paced so that while some things are fairly easy to figure out early on (such as the identity of the bandaged man), a third act twist piles on some more mystery and keeps you guessing (almost) until the end. It's never difficult to follow but it takes some pretty dark turns and Héctor gets into a few nasty situations. His face gets so banged up and swollen that by the end he's barely recognisable. Not much else to say without spoiling things, so I'll leave it at that.

Time travel films tend to fall into two main camps. There are the ones where you have to avoid meddling in the past or you'll fuck everything up in the future and there are the ones where it doesn't matter what you do because it's all predestined to happen anyway. TimeCrimes tries to have it's time-travelling cake and eat it too. When Héctor goes back to the past he has to ensure that everything plays out the same way, but it seems like events unfold the same way whether he intends them to or not. The result is some sketchy character motivation that reveals the plot mechanics whirring underneath, but it's overall it's a pretty clever and intriguing tale. Way better than shitty Hollywood fare like The Butterfly Effect or Timeline.

Okay I'm going to push headlong into spoiler territory here so go away and see it if you haven't seen it already.

Okay are you back? Pretty good, huh? I found the ending to be a surprising bummer, what with him travelling millions of years into the past and being eaten by dinosaurs and causing a space-time rift that destroyed the universe. I didn't see that one coming. Okay, that didn't really happen, it was a trick for all you people who didn't see the film but kept reading anyway. Go away and see it for real this time.

You've seen it for real? Alright then. That poor cyclist had one lousy day, huh? Chased through the woods by a creepy guy covered in bandages. Forced to take her top off for some neighbourhood perv with binoculars and then knocked unconscious and stripped naked (and raped, for all she knew). Then, when she's on the verge of escaping, Héctor 3 cuts off her hair and all but pushes her off the roof himself. It's a pretty downbeat ending, but one that shows the terrible consequences of time travel. If you fuck about with the spacetime continuum then people are going to get hurt. Just wish it didn't have to be hot young cyclists.

Last Cannibal World (aka Jungle Holocaust) (1977)

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