TUBI CONTINUED… THE HITLER TAPES (1994) **

Lonely loser Marcus (Andren Scott) miraculously survives being shot in the head by a prostitute at the end of Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.  After seeing a shrink and trying his hand at being a stand-up comedian, Marcus slowly starts creeping back into his old habits of perving on people and hiring call girls.  Meanwhile, a prostitute (Karen Zaczkowski) listens to Marcus’s audio tapes and watches his video encounters with other hookers.  

The Hitler Tapes is a big step down in quality from the classic Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.  Even though it’s only an hour long, it feels much longer than the original.  In fact, it might’ve been unfinished as Scott was tragically murdered the same year it was released.  (He was shot in a 7-11, which is eerie because there are scenes in the movie where he works at a convenience store.)

The film feels more like a footnote to the original instead of a true sequel as it often plays out a collection of outtakes than a cohesive narrative.  That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was out and out hilarious.  However, it lacks the sharp wit and constant belly laughs that made Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend a classic.  Scott (who wears a bandage on his head most of the time) is pretty good.  It’s just that his dialogue and observations about life in general pale in comparison to the brilliantly written original.

Even though it’s a good half hour shorter than the first movie, there’s still a lot of padding here.  The most egregious padding comes in the form of two music videos that serve no purpose whatsoever besides eating up screen time.  It also doesn’t help that the film sorely lacks the non-stop gratuitous nudity of Even Hitler Had a Girlfriendl.  I mean if you’re going to pad things out, you might as well do it with T & A.  Do yourself a favor and stick with the original.  

TUBI CONTINUED… EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND (1992) ****

Marcus (Andren Scott) is a pathetic loser that has nothing going for him.  He works as a security guard at night and spends his days sitting on his couch in his underwear, eating Slim Jim’s and watching porn channels.  When that no longer does it for him, he takes to hiring hookers (but not before lowballing them on the price).  Marcus makes audio tapes of his encounters, and eventually buys a camcorder to make secret videos of his humiliating attempts to score.  

Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend is like a low budget version of Taxi Driver without the extreme violence.  It’s also frequently hilarious thanks to Scott’s tour de force performance.  (I mean, he better be good as he’s in virtually every scene.)  He gets lots of big laughs, especially when he’s delivering his long, whiny narration.  Some of the lines are downright priceless.  (“My chin is being swallowed up by the abyss once known as my neck!”)  He’s so good that you eventually wind up feeling kind of sorry for Marcus in an oddly touching way, even though he is a total creepy perv.

Whenever the lightning pacing threatens to slow, there’s a long scene of Marcus watching “Cable X” where we get to see women doing long stripteases on television.  I don’t always recommend putting padding in your movie, but if it’s an absolute must, then this is the kind of padding I would go with.  When he switches out cable video starlets for hookers, we get lots of scenes of hookers undressing.  Variety is the spice of life as they say.

Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend should be shown in film schools across the globe.  It is a lesson to future filmmakers that even though you might not have much of a budget to work with, you can still make a classic if you have a hilarious guy in the lead role and plenty of extras who are willing to get naked at the drop of a hat.  It’s a one-of-a-kind, surreal experience and one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.

TRAILERS #26: HORROR/SCI-FI (1992) ***

You know, once you get to the twenty-sixth installment in your long-running compilation series of horror and science fiction trailers, you tend to start scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to selection.  Fortunately for Something Weird’s Trailers #26:  Horror/Sci-Fi, I a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of guy.  The first half-hour or so of this collection contains a great grouping of obscure, awful, or just plain weird trailers.  Some of the highlights include:  Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, Pyro, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, and Island of the Doomed.  Your mileage might vary of course, but for a guy like me, that’s a great way to kick things off.

The trailers tend to get a little more respectable as it goes along, but not too much.  It’s particularly fun seeing previews for H.G. Lewis movies (Something Weird and The Gruesome Twosome) hobnobbing with the likes of Hammer films (Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein).  Down the homestretch there are a lot of mainstream ads.  We get trailers for everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Jaws to even Star Wars, but not before a few side jaunts into the world of Sunn Classics (The Outer Space Connection), William Castle (Bug), and Ilsa (both She Wolf of the SS and Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks are shown).  That’s the kind of variety I enjoy from a trailer compilation.

Of course, there are a lot of recycled trailers from previous collections.  (You can’t get to your twenty-sixth installment if you don’t pad these things out with repeats.)  The familiar likes of Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Legend of Hell House, and Beyond the Door are all trotted out once again.  The good news is that at eighty minutes, Trailers #26:  Horror/Sci-Fi is a good forty minutes shorter than a lot of these things (and the pace is a lot brisker), which makes for a perfect night of drive-in fun.

The complete collection of trailers is as follows:  Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, Pyro, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, Munster, Go Home!, Castle of Evil, The Projected Man, One Million Years B.C., She Freak, Island of the Doomed, The Gruesome Twosome, Something Weird, Torture Garden, Destroy All Monsters, a double feature of Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Legend of Hell House, Tales That Witness Madness, Andy Warhol's Dracula, The Outer Space Connection, The Land That Time Forgot, Death Race 2000, The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, Jaws, Rollerball, Beyond the Door, The Devil's Rain, Bug, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Logan's Run, The Omen, Star Wars, and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

HEY FOLKS, IT’S INTERMISSION TIME VOL. 2 (1993) ** ½

Here’s the second installment in Something Weird’s collection of drive-in snipes, intermission ads, and concession stand commercials.  I don’t think it’s as good as Vol. 1, but I am certainly glad it exists, if only as a time capsule and/or piece of film history.  

The first hour or so mainly consists of holiday commercials and Season’s Greetings interstitials that would play in movie theaters in between the features.  Most of these are from the ‘50s, but there are a couple that come from the ‘30s as well.  The best ones are the Christmas Seals ads starring such celebrities as Rosemary Clooney and Virginia Mayo.  Too bad the overabundance of holiday ads get tiresome after a while (especially the New Year’s ones).  I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if many of them didn’t reuse the same animation and footage from the previous year’s ads.  I mean, you can only stomach so many “Auld Lang Syne” sing-a-longs in one sitting.  Maybe if I had watched it in December and was looking to get myself into the holiday spirit, I would’ve felt differently.  It just didn’t hit the same in February.  

Fortunately, the last half-hour contains some terrific concession stand ads and vintage commercials.  I especially liked the Vespa commercials and the Budweiser ad starring Ed McMahon.  The “Show Starts in _____ Minutes” commercials were also a real treat.  I think my favorite ad though was the trippy 2001-inspired Sprite commercial.  Although there are a couple of print ads for films here and there, the only real coming attraction is fittingly enough for Drive-In, which ends the compilation on a high note.  

I think this might’ve gotten a *** review had there not been so many damned holiday ads.  Then again, this might just be the thing to put on in the background at your next New Year’s party.  Either way, it’s a solid, if unspectacular addition to the Something Weird compilation library.

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.