TUBI CONTINUED… ANARCHY IN (JA)PANTY (1999) **

Mizuki (Yumeka Saski) is an infertile hooker who desperately wants a child.  Left with no other options, she resorts to kidnapping a baby, and raises him as her own.  Eight years go by, and a lonely convenience store owner named Tatsutoshi (Kazuhiro Sano) enters her life.  They slowly fall in love and become a dysfunctional family unit.  Tragedy strikes however, when Mizuki is killed in a car accident, forcing Tatsutoshi to bring up her son.  Ten years later, the young man turns into a kidnapper himself, and things predictably end in tragedy yet again.

Let me get this out of the way first, Anarchy in (Ja)Panty is a fucking great title.  The movie, of course, never comes close to living up to the title, but hey, with a title like that, what possibly could?  Despite the awesome title, the tone is all over the place.  Although technically a “pink” film, this is more or less a standard crime thriller with occasional detours into luridness.  While it never quite comes together, the unique structure (not to mention the title) is enough to make it memorable.

Anarchy in (Ja)Panty runs a scant fifty-seven minutes, but even then, it’s heavily padded with long scenes of people playing ping pong.  The gratuitous kaleidoscope effects in some scenes get pretty annoying too.  However, there are a few WTF moments that help offset some of the stuff that doesn’t work.  I liked the fact that Mizuki had a penchant for pissing on the side of the road whenever the inspiration took hold.  There’s also a dude with diaper fetish that is pretty much only there for shock value.  Some of this runs against the grain of the serious family drama, although the family drama isn’t quite strong enough to make the tragic finale work as well as it probably should’ve.  

There’s a good chance that in time I’ll forget the ins and outs of the plot.  However, there’s zero chance I’ll forget the title.  So, at least Anarchy in (Ja)Panty has that going for it.

AKA:  Anarchy in Japan-Suke.  

TUBI CONTINUED… ARCADE (1994) * ½

Cyborg director Albert Pyun passed away recently and I never got a chance to do a proper tribute to the man.  I guess reviewing this sci-fi film he did for Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures will suffice.  Like many of Albert Pyun’s movies, it’s not very good, but it is a distinctly Albert Pyun movie through and through.  

The plot is basically a rip-off of Tron and the “Bishop of Battle” segment of Nightmares.  Arcade is the latest in Virtual Reality gaming.  The game is test marketed at a small arcade where a group of friends try it out for the first time.  Many of them wind up getting sucked into the game, and it’s up to Alex (Megan Ward) to get them out.  

Just one look at the movie and you can tell Pyun directed it.  That is to say it is ugly as hell.  The indoor scenes are garishly lit and full of smoke.  It’s enough to make you wonder if there was a fire at the color lightbulb factory next door when they were filming.  The outdoor scenes look like a ‘90s jeans commercial and the stuff inside Arcade resembles a CGI version of a Sid and Marty Krofft show.  These scenes are downright atrocious, and the effects are so bad they are almost painful to watch.  There are definitely worse Pyun films out there, but this is in the running for his ugliest looking. 

For a Full Moon flick, it’s got a stacked cast though, which helps somewhat.  Crash and Burn’s Ward is pretty much wasted as she spends the last part of the movie with a clunky motorcycle helmet on her head.  However, it is fun to see Peter Billingsly a decade after A Christmas Story playing her platonic video gaming friend, as well as a young Seth Green as the dork of the group.  Star Trek:  The Next Generation’s John de Lancie injects the film with a little pizazz as the slimy video game salesman, but once the players jack into the game, you’ll want to jack out of the movie.

Screenwriter David S. Goyer (who went on to write a bunch of comic book movies) also wrote Pyun’s Kickboxer 2.

AKA:  Cyber World.

TUBI CONTINUED… AMOR EMANUELLE (2023) * ½

You know how the old saying goes.  Fool me once into watching a Fake Emmanuelle movie that has no nudity in it, shame on you.  Fool me twice into watching the sequel to a Fake Emmanuelle movie that has no nudity in it, shame on me.  Fool me into watching the third installment in your fake Fake Emmanuelle movie series that has no nudity in it, shame on…society, I guess.  I don’t know if that’s a saying or not, but it should be.  What can I say?  My brain is pretty much jelly after watching the trilogy in the span of three days.  

Yet another new actress, Kali Kiyasumac stars as “Emmy”.  This time out, Emmy is a hooker who accepts a job escorting rich guys at a ritzy party.  An entrepreneurial madam (Allie Perez) offers Emmy a full-time position at her high-class brothel, but Emmy soon learns things aren’t quite as they seem at the shady establishment.  

Amor Emanuelle is the cheapest looking of the three new Emanuelle movies.  The inconsistent lighting is especially irksome as shots go from light to dark within the same scene.  It’s also funny to see scenes which are supposed to be crowded (a fundraising party, a bar on New Year’s Eve, etc.), but only like four people are shown  in the foreground and one, maybe two extras loitering about in the background. 

Like its predecessors, The Awakening of Emanuelle and Call Me Emanuelle, Amor Emanuelle has no nudity.  God knows there were plenty of opportunities.  Emanuelle hooks up with lots of babes throughout the film, but for whatever reason the filmmakers are so prudish that we never see below her shoulders.  

I do think it’s neat that each film has changed Emanuelle’s ethnicity.  (She’s Latina this time around.)  However, just because the series is progressive doesn’t make it good.  At least this is the shortest of the three.  

Kiyasumac is OK as the new “Emmy”.  Not quite as good as the other actresses who previous played the role, but not bad.  Fortunately, Perez is fun to watch as the calculating madam.  I almost wish they cast her as Emanuelle instead.  

I don’t know why in the world anyone would want to make a Fake Emmanuelle movie and not put any nudity in it.  These jokers have made three.  Chances are, if they make a fourth one, I’m just dumb enough to watch that one too.  

TUBI CONTINUED… CALL ME EMANUELLE (2022) * ½

Here’s another crappy Fake Emmanuelle movie from the makers of The Awakening of Emanuelle.  This time, Shoko Rice, who had a small role as Lilly in the first movie, stars as “Emmy”.  That’s right.  Emmy.  Not Emanuelle.  If The Awakening of Emanuelle was the world’s first fake Fake Emmanuelle movie, this has got to be the world’s first fake Fake Fake Emmanuelle movie.  (To be fair, she does say, “Call me Emanuelle”, but it’s at the very last second of the movie, which is a rip-off if you ask me.)

Remember in The Awakening of Emanuelle how Emanuelle had a bunch of mind-numbing narration?  Well, in this one they eschew the narration for an opening scene where Rice delivers a longwinded monologue directly into her mirror.  When her husband (Chris Spinelli, playing a different character than he did in the first movie) catches her spouting off about God knows what, he asks out loud what the audience has been silently wondering, “Are you high?”  

Anyway, Emmy looks into her husband’s phone, and finds evidence her man has been cheating.  She drops him like a bad habit and shacks up with a dorky bartender (Shane Ryan-Reid).  Since he’s a religious nerd, he isn’t ready when she introduces blindfolds and rope bondage into their sex life.  Naturally, it all ends in heartbreak.

Call Me Emanuelle is less linear than Awakening, which makes it a little more frustrating.  However, it does have a bunch of multi-colored S & M fantasies/dreams/flashbacks (one set to an electronic remix of “Happy Birthday to You”?!?), so it has that going for it.  Too bad, like its predecessor, there’s no actual nudity.  

Emmy’s relationship with the bartender holds promise.  At first, it feels like it’s leading up to be sort of a reverse 50 Shades of Grey situation.  Unfortunately, the dude is so cluelessly inept that the bondage scenes (which are short and tame) never build up any steam.

Emmy’s boss gets the best line of the movie when he tells her to “Stroke the teat of possibility!”

And so ends the first month of my daily Tubi watching project.  So far, I have watched 31 movies in 31 days.  One month down.  Eleven more to go.  

At the start of the month, I had 365 movies in my Tubi watchlist.  At the end of the month, I have 441.  How can that be, you ask?  Well, because I keep adding more and more stupid shit to my watchlist, that’s why.  What other weird, dumb, or just plain bad movies does February have in store?  

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AWAKENING OF EMANUELLE (2021) *

When Tubi recommended this to me I was ecstatic.  The fact that they were still making Fake Emmanuelle movies this deep into the 21st century warmed the cockles of my heart.  The fact that it was a little over an hour was also enticing.  However, it’s pretty much a trainwreck from the word go.  

Emanuelle (Nicole D’Angelo, who also co-directed) is an out of work fashion model who comes crawling back to her asshole photographer boyfriend (Chris Spinelli).  It doesn’t take long for him to fall back into his pattern of abuse and Emanuelle is left with no choice but to stab him with a pair of scissors.  She then gravitates to another photographer (Lynn Ellison).  This one a creepy dude who likes to videotape his models before he photographs them.  Needless to say, Emanuelle is not one of stabile relationships.

I have seen a lot of Fake Emmanuelle movies in my time, but this might be the silver screen’s first fake Fake Emmanuelle movie.  Despite the fact that Emanuelle is a fashion model, goes on photo shoots, takes showers, and has sex many times, she is never once shown in the nude.  What the hell kind of shit is this Fake Emmanuelle movie trying to pull?

I love the fact that there are new Fake Emmanuelle movies being made.  In fact, everybody with a video camera and a hot actress at their disposal should be making Fake Emmanuelle movies.  There should be as many of these things as there are “Amityville” movies.  While I’m happy The Awakening of Emanuelle exists, it’s just not good.  Like at all.    

Turning Emanuelle into a serial killer/fashion model wasn’t the worst idea in the world, but the movie never fully commits to the premise.  The worst part is all of Emanuelle’s mind-numbingly bad, pseudo-intellectual, amateurishly existential narration.  It’s like they’re trying to make Emanuelle out to be more than a pretty face, but they make her sound even dumber as her narration feels like she’s just repeating stuff she heard on an ASMR YouTube video.

D'Angelo isn’t bad in the lead role.  It’s not her fault she has to deliver so much bad narration.  I’d even venture to guess that the narration would’ve been tolerable had she gotten naked like the Fake Emmanuelles that preceded her.  The best moment comes from Jim Wynorski regular Lisa London as a former model-turned-CEO who has a nice monologue about aging.  Too bad that kind of gravitas is missing elsewhere in the picture.

JANUA-RAY: ONE MORE TIME (2009) **

After Summer Fun, the next film on Severin’s Ray Dennis Steckler box set was Reading, PA, a four-part, four-hour (FOUR) shot-on-video documentary (cough, cough, home movie) in which Ray took his video camera, tooled around his hometown and attended his high school reunion.  Sigh.  Friends, I love Ray as much as the rest of you.  However, I just did not have the fortitude to sit through it.  Maybe there will come a day when I revisit it.  That day ain’t here yet.  

So, let’s just move right on to the final film in the Steckler collection, which also happens to be the final film in his filmography, One More Time.  I had never heard of this one before, but as it turns out, it’s a shot-on-video sequel to his magnum opus, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies.  As far as forty-five years later shot-on-video sequels to horror-musical cult classics go, I’m sure there are worse ones out there.

Steckler returns as Jerry, now an old man who spends his days wandering around the Santa Cruz pier while a narrator pontificates about God knows what.  When he does sleep, he dreams of footage of The Incredibly Strange Creatures.  He goes to his shrink and tells him about his dreams, but he isn’t a big help.  Jerry then goes to the amusement park in his dreams and visits a fortune teller who is amassing her own army of zombies.

It's nice to see Steckler, wearing a hoodie just like he did all those years ago, playing Jerry once again.  As a fan of The Incredibly Strange Creatures, it was a treat to see that some of the locations from the original are still standing (like the rollercoaster).  However, most of the new footage amounts to Steckler wandering around and/or setting up scenes from the first movie.  If you hang in there, you’ll be treated to a fun meta ending (it was probably the only way for it all to make sense anyway).  I won’t spoil the twist, but I think it ends Steckler’s filmography on an appropriate note.  The final results may be a tad underwhelming, but I’m glad he was able to dip his toe into the world of The Incredibly Strange Creatures one last time before his death.

In keeping with the meta spirit of the film, there are a lot of instances of Steckler’s shameless self-promotion.  Steckler wears a Reading, Pennsylvania hat (as well as a Steckler Films hat), Johnny Legend sings the theme song from Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (and “The South’s Gonna Rise Again” from Two Thousand Maniacs), a cover of “The World’s Greatest Sinner” (in which Steckler served as a cinematographer) is heard, people are seen wearing Incredibly Strange Creatures T-shirts, and the film ends in Steckler’s video store, Mascot Video.  There are also plenty of Steckler signatures on hand, including, lots of narration, recycled footage (in addition to The Incredibly Strange Creatures, scenes from The Las Vegas Serial Killer are used), scenic shots of Las Vegas, and the pizza motif from The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher crops up again.

Well, now that I have finished all the Steckler films on the box set (except for Reading, PA), here is my official Ray Dennis Steckler ranking: 

1) Rat Pfink a Boo Boo

2) The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies

3) The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher

4) Nazi Brothel

5) The Sexorcist’s Devil

6) Wild Guitar

7) Body Fever

8) The Thrill Killers

9) The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire

10) The Lemon Grove Kids

11) Red Heat

12) One More Time

13) Face of Evil

14) The Las Vegas Serial Killer

15) Count Al-Kum

16) The Strange Sex Life of Hitler’s Nazis

17) Dr. Cock-Luv

18) Sinthia:  The Devil’s Doll

19) Summer Fun

20) Slashed…

21) Blood Shack (The Chooper cut)

22) Blood Shack (Director’s cut)

Join me next month when we will take a month-long dive into the wild, weird world of Jess Franco for a column called Franco February!  See you then!

TUBI CONTINUED… BLOOD LAKE (1987) *

A bunch of the most annoying chuckleheads you ever saw in a no-budget shot-on-video horror movie go on vacation to their summer home by the lake.  There, they talk (and talk and talk) about sex, drink beer, smoke pot, and waterski.  Little do they know there’s a killer in a big-brimmed hat lurking around the lake with a hunting knife looking to make mincemeat out of them.  

I watched Blood Lake right after Ray Dennis Steckler’s Summer Fun, and it almost feels like a slasher remake of that film.  Both were shot using crummy camcorders on a low budget at a lakeside resort.  (There are instances in both pictures where you could swear the directors are trying to pass off home movies of someone’s vacation as a scene for their movie.)  This one had actual dialogue, but the sound and acting was so poor it made me wish I was watching a silent movie instead.

It doesn’t help that all the characters are raging buttholes.  They almost seem like they came out of a live-action version of Beavis and Butt-Head.  Minus the laughs, of course.  The constant use of waterskiing as padding is also a bit much and the hair metal song that accompanies these sequences (“Feelin’ Free”) gets annoying quickly.  

None of this would matter if there had been some gore or nudity to take the sting out of it.  There is a little blood, although not enough to live up to its title.  Besides, the nighttime scenes are so dark that you can hardly make out the blood anyway, and the red-tinted POV killer stalking sequences are irritating as well.  All the sexual innuendo involving a couple of preteens is a little creepy too.  To make matters worse, just when the movie should be over, it continues on uselessly for another ten minutes.

In short, all involved should go jump in a lake.