Marty Stouffer's Wild America: Fantastic Follies

Marty Stouffer's Wild America: Fantastic Follies

United States - 1996

Director - Mark Stouffer

King World Direct, 1996, VHS

Run Time - 58 minutes

Cat's Eye

Cat's Eye

United States - 1985

Director - Lewis Teague

Key Video, 1995, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

I know that Key was only the distribution arm of FOX, but I fuckin' love those rainbow striped boxes. They were all glued shut on the top and had flaps glued open on the bottom. The branded video boxes of the early VHS years, when each distributor had their own distinctive design are my absolute favorite. Key and VCII are great ones, as were the old boxes from RCA/Columbia. Paragon was good too but was a little bit of a latecomer as was Charter.
In many ways I wish I had the space to keep all of these boxes around. Then again, I know that I don't want to be tied down my material possessions. Property is confinement, rent is theft!

The Birds

The Birds

United States - 1963

Director - Alfred Hitchcock

MCA Home Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 59 minutes

Unceremoniously remade by Mexican biologist Rene Cardona Jr. in 1987 under the title Beaks: The Movie, Hitchcock's The Birds was itself based on a short story in which the birds were a metaphor for the sinister specter of communism. That's deep.

Beaks: The Movie

Beaks: The Movie

A.K.A. – Ataque de los Pajaros (Attack of the Birds)

Spain/Mexico – 1987

Director – Rene Cardona Jr.

International Video Entertainment, 1987, VHS

 Run Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes

Smack!

From the intrepid Mexican biologist cum rogue scriptwriter/director who brought you the homoerotic Latin Jaws knockoff Tintorera: Tiger Shark comes another film with a full-colon in the title, this one an eco-disaster re-envisioning of The Birds. Where Hitchcock depended on sheer psychological terror and statistical visual illusion, Legacy director Rene Cardona Jr. banks on American "actors", the realism of stock nature photography, a stapler, and the pitching arms of several professional pigeon throwers.

Opening with the finest enucleation by bird-of-prey we’ve seen in the decade since Day of the Animals introduced us to such asinine ornithological antics, Beaks! quickly begins testing ones powers of logical conjunction. When a second attack, this one perpetrated by chickens, takes place, news reporter Vanessa (Michelle Johnson) is convinced, despite her employers totally not-sexually objectifying assessment of her (tits)ability to do actual (sex)reporting that there is some kind of connection between all this feathery antagonism. Dragging along her smart-ass boyfriend/cameraman Peter (Christopher Atkins), the pair do a leisurely and agonizing bickering/flirting-couple tour of stock bird photography scenes.

The casual viewer may have a hard time adding panoramic images of birds in flight to claustrophobic close-ups of pigeons smashing into the actors faces and coming up with horror as a sum, but if Christopher’s groan-inducing one-liners don’t provoke an anticipatory cringe or two, just think of the birds. They must be terrified.

Both of these European VHS covers are from the Cinehound Forum.

Tintorera: Tiger Shark

Tintorera: Tiger Shark

UK/Mexico – 1977

Director – Rene Cardona Jr.

Media Home Entertainment, 1983, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour,31 minutes

Tintorera came to my attention because of the Hugo Stiglitz name and the raggedy old Media box in which I spotted it. It quickly became evident that despite more obvious on-screen distractions, there was a lot of subtext in the sex and violence that pervade the film, and I wanted to figure it out. Monsters pretty much always represent more complex issues than their own physical or spiritual presence. Animals as monsters, despite common connections to fears of science, can also embody some socially or personally repressed aberration (or both).

Tintorera: Tiger Shark centers around Steve (Hugo Stiglitz,) an affluent and bored middle aged bachelor vacationing in Mexico and his relationship with Gabriella (Susan George) and Miguel (Andres Garcia). Initially Steve chases women in the bars and beaches, but his interest is ambivalent at best. After an insincere argument with Miguel over one particular woman, he and his rival quickly become friends and begin chasing women together. Soon they meet Gabriella with whom they establish a Menage a Trois with some important rules; no attachment to her, and no other women. Much of Steve and Miguel’s remaining time together is spent interacting with one another while Gabriella, whose character remains largely undeveloped beyond her introductory lines, remains peripheral and safely within the prescribed confines of female sexual object. Her presence serves to superficially deny what is becoming increasingly readable as a journey of sexual discovery between our two brotagonists.

 

In the opening scenes while pursuing women, Steve is horrified by a local fisherman’s wanton killing of sharks, but as his relationship with Miguel quickly becomes closer (although never explicitly physical) his friend teaches him how to hunt sharks and he actually begins to enjoy it. Up to this point the violence meted out against sharks is largely implied, but when they start hunting together it is shown quite explicitly, and becomes rather difficult to watch in its gruesomeness. For both the narrative and the film itself, this graphic penetrating violence clearly implies sex between the two men and Steve’s increasing comfort with this new identity. The first time they take Gabriella on one of their hunting forays she is shocked when she witnesses what the men are doing, and as if on cue Miguel is eaten by a Tiger Shark. According to the established rules of the three way, Gabriella takes her leave and Steve is left alone again.

Until this point, social disapproval and condemnation of his sexuality have pushed Steve into bitterness and even self repression which, with Miguel’s tutelage he has overcome. Through their commission of the transgressive act, the sex as violence, the men kill their feelings of lonely ostracism and guilt. In the final scenes after his lover’s death Steve goes completely apeshit and begins clubbing and spearing every shark he sees in a desperate attempt to find the one that ate Miguel. When he does, he kills it at the cost of his own arm.

Violence committed by men has a long and multicultural filmic tradition as a metaphor for sex, so it is not really a surprise to find it surfacing in a Mexican Jaws knockoff. What is interesting are the connotations of that violence as meted out against sharks in Tintorera, and the fact that contrary to Hollywood’s imperialist tradition, it ends on a positive note with the outsider still outside and unrepentant. Although Miguel’s death truncates the possibility of an continued or overt relationship, and the brilliant white hospital room in which Steve wakes suggests a return to safe institutional normalcy (that is, the hetero-normative), Steve is undeniably and visibly marked by the experience. The look of satisfied serenity on his face leads me to believe that his guilt-demons have been finally exorcised.

 This post is part of Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Garbo Laughs

German poster from Grindhouse Database

Japanese art from Super Trash Cinema

"Cult" Classic? I hardly think so.

Three French VHS inserts, all from Agressions Animales

Night of the Lepus

 

Night of the Lepus

United States – 1972

Director – William F. Claxton

Monster movies come in all sorts of forms, subgenres and species. Monsters both in literature and in cinema are almost always a symbol for something more than just a monster. Night of the Lepus ranks alongside such trash classics as Them! , Slithis and Godmonster of Indian Flats as one of my favorite among the nature twisted by science flicks. Fear of atomic power, industrial pollution and even computers have all become cultural boogeymen reformulated as screen monsters. “Progress” is scary because it’s unpredictable, and because man’s intellectual reach outdistances his ethical grasp, and so on and so forth….

It wasn’t until a second watch through of Night of the Lepus that it suddenly dawned on me that the film is a not so thinly veiled parable for the issue of Mexican immigration that has repeatedly proven anathema to deluded United Statesian racists since at least the 19th Century. The rabbit metaphor should be a familiar one, although parallels between “breeding like rabbits” and well established stereotypes about low income ethnic groups are rarely drawn explicitly. “Takeover” by the exponentially reproducing vermin, which threatens to subsume their typical hardworking all-American victims and ruin their good cultural traditions is clear enough. In Night of the Lepus the growth of the rabbits to human proportions and their proclivity for fresh blood and flesh remains mysteriously unexplained leading me to believe that not only are regular sized rabbits just not scary, but that these Lepus are meant to be even more like their analogues, making them still scarier.

The solution in Night of the Lepus, as parroted time and again in real life immigration paranoia rhetoric and literally realized along the large portions of the U.S. Mexico border, is a giant fence. Not only does this one keep them out of “our” territory, but it's also electrified such that any invaders attempting to cross it are thoroughly electrocuted to crispy death.

It is likely true that we often find the evidence we’re looking for. The fact that the film was set in Arizona although based on a novel (Year of the Angry Rabbit) set in Australia, and that it so clearly reproduces established stereotypes about Mexican immigrants in an era immediately following the end of the Bracero Program (and new immigration legislation) is too much coincidence for me to bear! Night of the Lepus is nothing more than a hilarious and ludicrous reification of United Statesian white supremacist paranoia, but damned if it doesn’t make for some entertaining cinema.

Once you know what the movie is about, the posters become even more awesome.
This one is from The League of Dead Films

Is the tagline in this ad meant to mimic the 1967 race-film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

 Ads from Criticonline.

Night of the Sharks

Night of the Sharks

Italy – 1988

Director – Tonino Ricci

Media Home Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 27 minutes

Whether or not he intended it, writer/director Tonino Ricci managed to revive explicitly in Night of the Sharks many of the cinematic tropes that had become taboo yet implicit in popular Euro/American film by the time this was made. It immediately evokes an era when overt racial characterization was the norm, with ethnic characters that are so cartoonish that they seem to belong more in an American film of the 40’s or 50’s than of the late 80’s. It’s as if the practiced subtlety of Hollywood prejudice was profoundly lost in translation. Perhaps Ricci (who also co-wrote) thought that if he was just more blatant audiences would like it that much more. Because of a few moments of sloppy editing I get the impression this film was longer and gorier at one point but was cropped to retain what must have been perceived as the more appealing elements in a trimmed running time. At 87 minutes, a poor mix of action and intrigue steeped in crude racism barely warrants the title “Night of the Sharks”.

Life in the affluent U.S. is difficult. One must toil and toe the line to keep even a modicum of dignity and stability, and a lifetime of struggle rarely results in anything more than terminal averageness. That is why Latin America and the Caribbean are so appealing. It is untroubled by the modern complexities of civilization, making it desirable, nigh on imperative that Northerners take advantage. Domination isn’t a matter of intent then, it’s simply the natural state of things because those Others are in need of leadership and guidance. Of course, no matter how hard they try they can never quite achieve parity. It is a well worn assumption that the Global South is an impoverished and backwards fruit ripe for the gringo picking. If you want something or want to make something for yourself, Latin America is the place to go. It is escape and opportunity all in one. All of this is simply the backdrop however for Night of the Sharks' peculiar Italian take on the transnational cultural politics of the Americas.

The anonymous* locals in this case fit the bill perfectly. Lazy, shiftless men sit around waiting to fight gamble or drink, both at the slightest provocation. The local woman Juanita in particular is the idealized exotic subject, never quite acceptable in polite white society, but desirable and always, always available to satisfy the protagonists needs no questions asked. Dave (Treat Williams) likes to spend his time in a sleepy beach village drinking beer, sleeping with Juanita and laughing at the bufoonish antics of his buddy Paco (Antonio Fargas). Paco also serves as Dave’s foil, being both black and Latin (Panamanian to be exact) and dressed awkwardly to the nines in a baggy white suit. His is the quintessential “coon” character, cowardly, lazy and constantly pulling inept attempts at “refinement,” all which serve to reify Dave’s superior cultural status over and over again.


Dave’s reverie of self-satisfaction is soon wrecked by the arrival of a series of painful reminders of his former life. His brother James shows up from the States with a load of stolen diamonds and a bunch of hired goons trying to get them back. Shortly after James is killed leaving Dave with the diamonds, Dave's ex-wife Liz also shows up to to make things even more difficult. Liz repeatedly tries to deny Dave the expression of his masculine independence, something Juanita surely never did. However, she is reassuringly white and thus poses no threat. Juanita suddenly vanishes from the script, nowhere to be seen.

The remainder of the story are Dave's confrontations with these external reminders; quibbles with Liz, trying to keep Paco in line and one prolonged shootout with the goons sent to recover the diamonds. But the plot does actually feature a shark, the one-eyed “Cyclops” with whom Dave has a longstanding rivalry. Cyclops makes his presence felt in important if peripheral ways. Dave and Cyclops’ relationship is really more symbiotic than antagonistic to tell the truth because Cyclops never goes away and is never defeated. It is Dave’s lingering sense of identity and past, a perpetual threat of return to anonymity. Dave has tried to escape, and he won this battle, but no matter how easy his exile may be or how much he tries to justify it, it is always there waiting in the reef for another chance to bite him in the ass.

* NotS was filmed in the Dominican Republic

This gnarly screencap of Janet Agren's Liz getting recycled by Cyclops only lasts about .5 seconds on this VHS version so I think it was sloppily censored. I don't know what would make someone think that cheesy gunfights and Jim Crow should be left in instead. Maybe they knew their target audience better than I give them credit for.
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 An amazing poster by prolific Italian artist Symeyoni, from Wrong Side of the Art

Poster that became the VHS box, this comes courtesy of Movie Poster Shop

. The artist's signature is "S. Dewey", but I cannot find anything else on or by this person. Any tips would be appreciated.

Ingagi

Ingagi
United States - 1930
Director - William Campbell

Eaten Alive

Eaten Alive
United States - 1977
Director - Tobe Hooper
Diamond Entertainment, 1998, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 36 minutes

Here is another "nice" Diamond Entertainment Corporation VHS with an extra five minutes of run-time(?). Admittedly despite the low production value of their product, these guys carried a lot of otherwise obscure foreign horror and action flicks on DVD before anyone else ever touched 'em. I still have a Fulci movie and kung fu movies that they released from about 7 years ago. Still, I never saw any of their VHS tapes until I found this a couple of months ago.

Eaten Alive is one of my favorite discoveries of the past couple of years. It could be more accurately described as a re-discovery since I'd seen it years before. However, that first time I hated it for some reason, lets blame it on the transfer. My discovery that this movie is actually good can be blamed on the 2007 Dark Sky release whose cover is featured below. Y'know, for posterity and all that. This brings the total number of good movies by Tobe Hooper up to a grand total of 2, officially out of the one-hit-wonder club. My review of this was one of the first I posted on this blog oh so long ago.

Play Dead

Play Dead
United States - 1984
Director – Peter Wittman
Academy Home Entertainment, 1986, VHS
Run time – 1 hour, 26 min.

Play Dead is part of the long tradition of evil animal films which itself is a sub-premise of the classic man vs. nature theme. Though it wasn’t the first such entry in the subgenre, Jaws ushered in a host of spinoffs in the video-era that wound down to sporadic entries featuring all nature of random animals from alligators to earthworms turning aggressive and attacking humans. Seems like the relative popularity of Cujo (1983) spawned a brief attempt to coat-tail the evil dog concept. Play Dead is an incredibly absurd case in point.

At her mothers funeral, Audrey and her boyfriend Glen have a confrontation with Audrey’s aunt Hester. She’s been at odds with the rest of the family ever since Audrey’s father rejected Hester for the deceased. Now Hester hangs around her house drinking brandy and talking to Audrey's dead father and her dog Gretta. Typically, after a few glasses Hester will break out the satanic acoutrements and chant some incantations over the dog which at these special moments refers to as “canis diabolis” and adorns with a pentagram necklace.

This time she means business, and the day after her ritual she pays a visit to Audrey and presents her with the dog, as a gift. Prior vitriol and hatred aside, apologies are quickly accepted, hands shaken and all of that and Audrey graciously accepts an unfamiliar 100 pound carnivorous gift from her mortal enemy.
That night after visiting for dinner, Audrey’s brother returns to his car where the waiting dog, having calculated the velocity and mass of an oncoming vehicle leaps from cover and startles him into the path of the car where he is killed, or anyway some blood runs from his mouth and there is a funeral. Greta has harnessed the awesome powers of geometry and physics to mastermind a series of untraceable “accidental” deaths.
Devastated by her compounding filial devastation Audrey listens to her collection of food-court ambiance records and invites Glenn over for a romp between the poorly edited shots of body doubles with different breast sizes. Her face looks a little frightened, but “her” hands eagerly ply Glen's generously bulging shorts as Greta watches patiently nearby.

Suddenly a good-ol’-boy detective is investigating the death of her brother, squeezing out homely anecdotes all the while. Audrey’s neighbor is electrocuted by Greta who opens the bathroom door in effusive and unnecessary slow-motion, picks up the hot curling iron and drops it into the tub. Waiting long enough for the convulsions to stop, she then carefully removes it from the tub.

Next it’s Glen’s turn. After a totally exhausting tennis game with Audrey he sits down next to a tree and promptly falls asleep with Greta leashed to his wrist. The dog quickly runs around the tree and Glen wakes just in time to be choked to death by the leash. But is in the coroners report where the crescendo of logically and visually dissonant scripting comes to a head. The coroner and detectives assessment is that someone choked Glen to death with one incredibly strong hand, and that Glen fought back with one hand, while the dog stood idly by. The nature of film requires the suspension of disbelief, but really, that’s your theory? When the detective finally starts to suspect the dog, it's too damned late and she quickly dispatches him with a quick dose of lye powder in his alka-seltzer (Greta is also comfortable with basic chemistry). Hester suddenly decides that her work is done, and leaves her initial victim Audrey alive to cry about her mullet.

Rather than a clever script or a good idea for one, it’s clear that the backers for this movie just found a well-trained dog and decided to build a movie on that premise alone. And it’s abundantly clear why Troma, in an effort to build their reputation picked up this film for distribution.

This box art is from Horror Playground.com in case you couldn't tell. There also exists another alternate non-Troma video sleeve which I am hoping to track down soon.

One British and two French and VHS covers courtesy of the generous Agressions Animales.