FRANKESTEIN, THE VAMPIRE AND COMPANY (1962) **

Frankestein, the Vampire and Company is an unofficial Mexican remake of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  On second thought, the term “remake” is a little generous.  “Rip-off” is more like it. 

Two idiot baggage clerks are given the task of delivering two crates containing the bodies of Frankestein and “The Human Vampire” to a wax museum.  When the bodies disappear, the bumbling boobs are accused of theft and must find the monsters to clear their name.  A stranger also lends a hand in finding the creatures, but he has an unfortunate habit of turning into a werewolf at the most inopportune times.

Given what I had heard about this movie, I was kind of expecting this to be more of a blatant rip-off than it actually was.  Some of the scenes copy Abbott and Costello very closely, but others are just different enough to keep the sense of déjà vu at bay.  For example, when the Larry Talbot stand-in turns into the Wolf Man while talking on the telephone, he isn’t in his apartment, but rather a public phonebooth.  Also, the vampire is kind of an idiot himself.  There’s a scene where he acts like a little girl when he thinks he’s about to drink some blood that’s just painfully unfunny.  You’d never see Lugosi do shit like that in a million years.  We also get a long scene where an equally unfunny detective looks for a thief at a costume party that has fuck-all to do with the plot. 

These slight changes don’t make much of a difference, ultimately.  I think were only done to prevent Universal from calling their lawyers.  You can almost hear the filmmakers preparing their defense.  “But Your Honor, in our movie, the fraidy cat nincompoop isn’t short and fat, he’s tall and skinny!  And besides, he hears a voice in his head that makes him play ‘pranks’ on his poor buddy.  Does THAT sound like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to YOU?”  However, these changes aren’t remotely funny enough to make it worthwhile either. 

I know it may look like my Spell Check has crapped out on me, but yes, the title is actually Frankestein, the Vampire and Company.  I don’t know if they slightly altered Frankenstein’s name so they wouldn’t get sued or what, but it’s kind of funny.  I know in Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters, the character’s name was “Franquestain”, so it’s possible it’s just a Spanish variation of the word.  That doesn’t explain why the Dracula character is called “The Human Vampire” though.  I mean, aren’t all vampires human?  Again, I think they just called him that to skirt around any issues with Universal.  It’s still kind of goofy though.

So, in short, there’s no real reason to watch this, unless you want to see a cheaper, unfunnier, Mexican version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  That’s why I watched it, and while I don’t exactly regret my decision, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not very good.  Then again, if you’re like me and you’ll watch just about anything that comes from south of the border and contains Frankenstein (or Frankestein, even), Dracula (err… The Human Vampire), or the Wolf Man, you can do a lot worse.

WORLD’S WILDEST RAREST TRAILERS (1995) *** ½

 

You know World’s Wildest Rarest Trailers is going to be a great trailer compilation right out of the gate with the first trailer, Smooth Velvet, Raw Silk (AKA:  Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle).  Any time you get a trailer that’s a thousand times better than the actual movie, it’s a win in my book.  This trailer is great, mostly because it keeps showing the names of the stars, Laura Gemser and Annie Belle while repeating the title over and over again as lots of footage of the two cavorting around nude plays out. 

There’s a good mix of genres represented here, which should satisfy exploitation and horror fans alike.  We get trailers for out-and-out classics such as I Drink Your Blood (on a double feature with I Eat Your Skin), Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Let Me Die a Woman, House by the Cemetery, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (under the title The Phantom of Terror), Flesh Feast, Re-Animator, Deranged, Tenement (which appears under TWO titles:  Game of Survival and Slaughter in the South Bronx!), and Massacre at Central High.  We also get a solid amount of drive-in fare like Girl in Room 2A, Journey into the Beyond, Cult of the Damned (AKA:  Angel, Angel, Down We Go), Amin:  The Rise and Fall, and Don’t Open the Window (AKA:  Let Sleeping Corpses Lie).  ‘80s horror is represented by the likes of Girls School Screamers (“The finishing school that finishes you off!”), The Oracle, Trick or Treat, Invasion of the Flesh Hunters (AKA:  Cannibal Apocalypse), and Don’t Answer the Phone.  Fire in the Flesh, Without a Stitch, Women for Sale, Succubare, The Rape Killer (AKA:  Death Kiss), Sweden:  Heaven and Hell, and The Depraved (AKA:  Exposed) hallmark the sexploitation offerings.  Action fans should enjoy trailers for Blood, Sweat and Fear (“Before he’s through, a lot of pure white snow is going to be bright blood red!”), The One Armed Executioner, Riot on 42^nd St. (which clocks in at a staggering seven minutes), Jungle Warriors, Battle of the Amazons, and The Death Dealer. 

A couple of legendary exploitation directors are also given a mini spotlight.  Ron Ormond’s Please Don’t Touch Me and The Exotic Ones (which looks amazing) are among the two highlights of the collection.  Al Adamson’s films Angels’ Wild Women, Satan’s Sadists (which ghoulishly exploits the Sharon Tate murder), and Brain of Blood are also featured.  Fans of Linda Blair will dig seeing trailers for Savage Streets and Savage Island too.  There’s  an assortment of stinkers like Vampire People (AKA:  The Blood Drinkers), Blood Demon (AKA:  The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism), Brides of Blood, and In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro in the bunch, along with a smattering of Kung Fu flicks (The Super Weapon, Dragon’s Inferno) and Blaxploitation (Super Spook, Ghetto Freaks).

World’s Wildest Rarest Trailers packs a lot of fun into two hours.  While there are enough oddities here to justify the “Rarest” moniker, it does have an abundance of trailers you (or at least me, anyway) have seen before.  That’s not a knock against it.  When you’ve seen as many trailer comps as I have, it gets harder and harder to make new discoveries.  That said, this is a thoroughly enjoyable collection that even managed to satisfy this jaded exploitation fan.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: DON’T FUCK IN THE WOODS (2016) **

Don’t Fuck in the Woods has the typical boilerplate plotline you’d expect from a low budget horror comedy:  A bunch of annoying characters (they look too long in the tooth to call “teens”) go camping in the woods, smoke a bunch of dope, have lots of pre-marital sex, and are promptly killed by something lurking in the dark.  I guess the big difference is that instead of a killer in a mask, the characters are killed by a rubbery looking monster.  So, at least that’s a slight change of pace. 

The early scenes hold promise.  The opening sequence in particular is surprisingly clever and laugh-out-loud funny.  If only the rest of the movie had the same amount of ingenuity, it could’ve been a worthwhile parody of the genre.  However, instead of spoofing the conventions of a horror film, Don’t Fuck in the Woods succumbs to laziness and decides to merely follow them.

The characters are your standard issue stock archetypes that usually populate these things.  There’s the stoner, the horror nerd, and naturally, the horny teenagers.  The big difference is the lesbians who actually manage to seem like a genuine couple.  Or at least a lesbian couple you’d find in an indie drama and not a low budget horror spoof. 

At 72 minutes, the movie is relatively short (it’s only an hour if you don’t count the credits and/or blooper reel), but it runs out of gas about halfway through when the jokes start to dry up.  (The indifferent scenes of our heroes sitting around the campfire and playing games of Truth or Dare and Marry/Fuck/Kill help to pad out the running time.)  Another problem:  Despite a decent gut ripping scene, many of the gory bits feel rushed. 

The good news is that the film is just as preoccupied with scenes of scantily clad women disrobing as it is with scenes of formerly scantily clad women being killed by the monster.  Ultimately, there’s just not quite enough of these scenes to make Don’t Fuck in the Woods recommended.  It’s almost as if the characters took the title seriously after a while.

PLANET OF THE FEMALE INVADERS (1967) ***

I’ve seen a lot of Mexican wrestling movies in my time, but Planet of the Female Invaders might be my first Mexican boxing movie.  A boxer double-crosses a gangster and refuses to take a dive.  He follows the pugilist and his hot girlfriend to an amusement park where they hop on what looks like the park’s latest attraction, a UFO ride.  Well, as it turns out, it’s a real-life flying saucer that winds up transporting the would-be parkgoers to a planet populated solely by sexy women. 

Their plan is rather diabolical too.  They want to steal the lungs of children to help them breathe in our atmosphere so they can take over the world.  Luckily, a handsome scientist and his bumbling sidekick hop in a rocket ship and try to stop the aliens’ devious plot. 

Planet of the Female Invaders is a sequel to Planetary Giants (which I haven’t seen).  It’s sort of like a Mexican riff on Hollywood’s low budget sexy spacewomen movies like Cat Women of the Moon and Queen of Outer Space.  It takes a little while to get off the ground (no pun intended), but it’s worth the wait once you realize that none other than Lorena (Santo vs. the Vampire Women) Velasquez is the one playing the sexy evil alien leader.  As a bonus, she also plays her sexy goodie two-shoes twin sister who helps the earthlings escape!  Seeing Velasquez in her regal form-fitting space queen outfits sharing the screen with herself as she wears her slinky sisterly apparel is quite a treat.  She gives not one, but two great performances that will surely leave you seeing double.  Because of that, the sluggish first act and the overlong boxing scene are easily forgiven.

Planet of the Female Invaders also contains a scene that is curiously prescient that’s worth mentioning at some length.  Once the earthlings are brought to the sexy space gal planet, they are repeatedly told by their captors to wear a mask (that looks like a modern-day face shield) while on the planet for their own safety.  Naturally, one dumbass ignores the rule and… well… you can probably guess what happens to him.  It’s as if director Alfredo B. (Santo vs. the Martian Invasion) Crevenna predicted the anti-mask sentiment of the current lockdown.  Of course, his vision of the future includes twin Lorena Velasquezes, which instantly makes the world the movie inhabits preferable to our own.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MAN (1966) ** ½

I’m a big fan of Doris Wishman, although I readily admit I much prefer her wild, anything-goes ‘70s work to the nudies and roughies she made in the ‘60s.  Having said that, this one is pretty good.  It has all the hallmarks you’d expect from a Wishman joint, namely:  Awkward editing during the dialogue scenes (to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound), random ass cutaways to planters and clown paintings (again, to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound), and gratuitous close-ups of feet and breasts whenever things slow down (again, to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound). 

Ann (Barbi Kemp) just got married to Steve (Tony Gregory).  When Steve comes down with a mysterious illness, it leaves their household without an income.  Forced to support her ailing hubby, Ann turns to her former roommate’s lecherous pimp for help, who promptly puts her to work hooking.  Naturally, when Steve finally figures it all out, it leads to predictably tragic results.

A lot of the fun comes from seeing Ann’s transformation from mousy housewife to sexy lady of the night.  By that I mean, the change is almost immediate.  One minute she’s wearing demure wardrobes, and the next, she’s slinking around in a skintight bodysuit and sporting a beehive hairdo.  Her hubby is often hilariously oblivious to the change in her.

Like many of Wishman’s films, Another Day, Another Man looks great.  Wishman’s cinematography is usually on-point, and this is no exception.  The big issue is the odd plot detours that often lead to a bumpy ride.  At one point, the plot stops abruptly and goes into the pimp boyfriend’s backstory.  The stuff with the pimp courting twin sisters into a life of prostitution, and the subsequent subplot about a boyfriend breaking off his engagement because he learns his girlfriend’s a hooker eats up a lot of screen time and gets in the way of main plotline.

Another Day, Another Man is also kind of tame and a lot less seedy than Wishman’s best work.  It’s still fairly enjoyable though.  I’d say it’s about on par with Bad Girls Go to Hell, but it’s far from the dizzying heights of Let Me Die a Woman.

The most memorable part is the awesome music.  The main theme, “The Hell Raisers” by The Syd Dale Orchestra is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.  It later became the iconic Something Weird theme, and if you’ve ever watched one of their videos, you know it will be stuck in your head for days after you hear it.  The rest of the music in the movie isn’t quite as memorable, but it’s still pretty darn good.

The dialogue is often a hoot too; my favorite line being:  “I haven’t seen you since yesterday… and that’s almost twenty-four hours!”

AKA:  Another Day, Another Way.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: I SAW THE DEVIL (2011) ****

While stranded roadside awaiting a tow truck, a pregnant woman is kidnapped and killed by a deranged serial killer (Min-sik Choi).  Her fiancé (Byung-hun Lee) just so happens to be a secret agent, and he sets out to exact revenge.  Not content to merely execute his girlfriend’s killer and be done with it, our hero instead allows him to escape, only to find him and punish him again and again.  Unfortunately, the crafty killer eludes his grasp, and he sets out to make his tormentor pay by making his family his next victims.

From Jee-woon (The Last Stand) Kim, I Saw the Devil is one of the most brutal, unflinching, harrowing, and disturbing films I have ever seen.  That’s not hyperbole.  I actually had to stop the movie a couple times because it became so intense and I was so emotionally drained.  Maybe 2020 wasn’t the year to check out such a bleak, nihilistic, and depressing flick. 

That said, the craftsmanship at work here is astounding.  It is a headlong plunge into the darkest recesses of man’s soul, and it never looks back.  it would’ve been easy to let something like this lapse into your standard torture porn scenario.  However, Kim proves to be a dynamic filmmaker.  There is a scene inside a car where the camera pans around the three passengers that is on par with anything the Masters of Horror have concocted. 

The performance by Lee is an all-timer too.  He is a complete badass during his stalking and torturing scenes.  As a fan of his work in the G.I. Joe movies, I expected that.  What caught me completely off guard was how great he is during his grieving sequences.  His final scene is downright heartbreaking, and in the last few seconds of screen time is some of the best acting I’ve seen in a long time. 

In short, I Saw the Devil deserves to be discussed in the same breath as Seven and Silence of the Lambs as one of the all-time greats of serial killer cinema.  Be warned however:  This movie will chew you up and spit you out. 

SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY (1988) ***

Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story is the wonderfully bizarre first film from director Todd (Safe) Haynes.  It tells the rise and fall of wholesome pop singer Karen Carpenter and her struggles to balance her career with her battle with the debilitating eating disorder anorexia.  That might not sound “wonderfully bizarre” until you realize it’s (mostly) told with Barbie dolls.  All this might seem a little quaint now, but I remember when it caused a sensation when it was first released. 

The film (which clocks in at a scant 43 minutes) was made in 1988, just before people were obsessed with Behind the Music, so seeing such a frank portrayal of fame, fortune, and mental illness was still something of a novelty.  The fact that it’s acted by Barbie dolls just adds to the overall effect.  What makes it so compelling is the acerbic wit that runs throughout the picture.  Any old YouTuber nowadays can film a movie using Barbie dolls.  It takes a gifted filmmaker to tackle the subject matter and craft it into something darkly funny and even somewhat poignant, especially when all your leads are played by toys.

At the height of her stardom, Karen is insulted by a journalist who calls her “fat”.  Soon after, she becomes anorexic.  Her bandmate brother Richard puts their career over her well-being, forcing her to tour, causing her to spiral further out of control.

Haynes’ uses many of The Carpenters’ songs (as well as a few other artists) throughout the film, and quite well, I might add.  The fact that he never got permission to use them ensured that this would never get an official release.  However, it’s that kind of bravado that helped to cement the movie’s underground status. 

Despite the fact the lead is a hunk of plastic, you strangely wind up feeling something by the end of the film.  That’s due largely to Haynes’ talent behind the camera.  Forget the fact he got all his actors from Mattel.  That montage of Karen singing and binging on Ex-Lax while the numbers on her scale continue to dwindle is as good as anything in a Scorsese movie.  I also applaud his clever set design, which is simultaneously low-tech (at one point, a Light Bright is used for stage lighting) and ingenious.

Even at 43 minutes, this is still probably a good fifteen minutes too long.  The live action snippets aren’t nearly as much fun as the stuff with the Barbies, and the man-on-the-street interviews could’ve easily been scrapped.  Despite its flaws, Superstar:  The Karen Carpenter Story is a fun glimpse into the burgeoning mind of a warped and gifted director.