Dead Leaves

2004 anime mayhem

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Your guess is as good as mine, even if you've never seen or heard of this movie. A guy with a television for a head and a a feisty gal wind up imprisoned on the moon where they befriend a guy with a golden penis drill. They try to bust out.

You've probably heard somebody, probably while watching a classic like It's a Wonderful Life, say, "Well, they don't make 'em like this anymore." I almost got the exact opposite feeling while watching this and actually said out loud, "They didn't make 'em like this ever." Nobody was around or I would have been made fun of. This is hyper-frenetic nutsiness, the kind that can only come from the Land of the Rising Acid Flashback. It's loud and seizure-inducing (not that I experienced any) and includes, as I mentioned, a guy with a television for a head and a guy with a penis drill. It's a comic book, complete with harsh lines and onomatopoeia, splashing out of its pages and getting all over your pants and walls. If your imagination isn't broken, go ahead and look at that poster up there. Then, imagine it all coming to life and moving really really fast. No, faster than that. Add a crazy assortment of odd-looking characters, several broken laws of physics and/or comic sense, a very strange sense of humor, and a golden penis drill. There you go. Wait, make it all move a little bit faster. Now, there you go. You've pretty much seen the movie. The storytelling's a mess, and if it was any longer than the 50 or so minutes that it was, I'm not sure I would have gone to sleep that night and woke up the same sane man that all my readers know and love. And, I have to confess that I felt a little tense while watching the whole thing. My nutsack shriveled, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. But you know what? I really enjoyed almost every second of this thing. It's creatively fervent, unapologetically wacky, and unquestionably unique. Absolute insanity! Penis drill!

The Wizard of Gore

1970 horror movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: The titular magician has a gratuitously violent stage show in which he dismembers, decapitates, and disembowels female volunteers from the audience before magically putting them together again. It's really stupid. Later that night, the volunteer's wounds reappear which is even stupider. And the fact that nobody can put the pieces together and figure out what's going on? That would be stupidest. A writer--a female one, of course--is intrigued enough to investigate.

If Herschell Gordon Lewis was more well known (read: more infamous) outside B-movie/gore circles, this is the movie that would have given him his nickname. He could have gone down in cinematic history as the Wizard of (Cheap and Gratuitous) Gore. It's easy to see that Lewis had absolutely no budget at all to work, and all the funds he did have (fifty bucks?) was used to purchase meat and tomato juice. The stage show violence is so over the top that it crosses the border between Scaryland and the Continent of Goofy and then continues all the way around the world like a squelchy perverse Magellan so that it can scoot over the border another time. The goofiest thing about these scenes is that they're shown multiple times. So you'll see the saw going through a woman's abdomen, then a shot of the audience looking rather bored, then Montag digging around in the woman's viscera, then another shot of the audience, then a shot of the woman's abdomen without any injury at all, then a shot of Montag's face, then a shot of her being sawed again. It's awkwardly edited. It's the same with the spike-in-the-noggin scene and a scene featuring a guillotine. Movies with guillotines, by the way? Automatically more awesome. Orson Welles wishes he had some guillotine action in Citizen Kane, and according to an unauthorized biography I imagined and then pretended to read, that was his biggest regret. Montag is played by Ray Sager, a guy with an arguably respectable career. Here, he's predictably terrible, but straight from the get-go, it's almost like he's lost his faith in the words he's been given. It's hard to say, "And you were expecting a mere handsaw!" in a way that makes you look like a real person. At one point, he mispronounces his own name. He's such a talky magician, going on and on and on about. . .well, magic, I guess. The audience doesn't know how to act during these scenes, so they just randomly gesture. I didn't take the time to verify, but I'm willing to bet the same extras were used for the audience members. Sager's bad, but the auxiliary actors might be worse. There's one guy who discovers his wife dead in bed and shows off what might be the worst acting ability ever. And the delivery of the line "Craig, Craig! Look at your hand! Your hand is bleeding!" is pure classic B-movie bliss, a line that I would have quoted endlessly with my brother if we had seen this as kids right along with "Give me back my hand!" or "Oh no! A bimbo with a gun!" Screenwriter Allen Kahn, whose only other writing credit is the Lewis-directed The Year of the Yahoo, throws a Shamalamadingdong-esque twist into the climax which, on the surface at least, seemed kind of cool until I thought about it a little more and realized I didn't even understand what happened. And maybe that's my fault, but I'm just not ready to take the blame.

Two more notes: 1) I really liked how there was plastic on the floor of a restaurant where the sawed-in-two lady falls apart. "Yes, you can use our restaurant for your stupid movie, but we're putting plastic on the floor so that you don't mess up our carpet." 2) "The guy's no magician. He's just a hell of a technician." It's 1970, and some white dude invents rap music in The Wizard of Gore. Little known piece of trivia there.

Tokyo Gore Police

2008 gore police movie

Rating: 13/20

Plot: Ruka, a witness to her father's head explosion, overcomes tragedy to become the main mutant-killing cop. Those mutants, known as "engineers," have the ability to turn their injuries into weapons, and Ruka and her po-po buddies have to find out who is behind their creation. Meanwhile, she tries to figure out who was responsible for her father's murder.

Well, this was hard to take seriously. You're five minutes in and you've already got an exploding head, a decapitation, a severed arm that grows back as a slimy chainsaw arm, a guy who gets a chainsaw arm to the mouth, a fight with chainsaws. You have to wonder: Did this movie shoot its proverbial wad too early? How can anything top this? Well, hold on to your scalps, motherfucker, because this is a wild ride down a bloody slip 'n' slide. I was unsure whether or not I was liking this movie and actually had to watch it in a few installments. Around the time a character I didn't recognize Michael-Jacksoned his crotch and ended up at a party where people are wearing inflatable costumes and gas masks and the entertainment is a urinating chair woman and a snail girl, I realized that this is my kind of movie. My kind of party, too! I sighed and realized that I would eventually, when my stomach could handle it, watch all of Yoshihiro Nishimura's movies. I figured that Meatball Machine was one of those, but apparently there are a bunch of people in Japan making movies like this which once again makes me wonder what is wrong with the Japanese. H-bomb dust is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. Since I watched this movie in fifteen installments, I found it almost completely incomprehensible. But its cheap style--lots of askew camera work, assaults on at least two of your senses, a rhythm inspired by shaken baby syndrome--keeps you enthralled, and the mathematical part of your brain has all kinds of fun trying to figure out what the budget for "red squirty stuff" might have been. There are some goofy satirical moments in this with some commercials that ironically seem to poke fun at the masses' need for violence--including a Wii-type game where you slice a guy up--and some commercial propaganda about how nice the police are, but this is either too silly or too completely insane to really make any kind of point. You really can't watch the scene where a guy [SPOILER ALERT] gets his penis bitten off by a woman whose legs later turns into a giant alligator (or crocodile) mouth and take things seriously for the same reason that somebody trying to film my honeymoon to release as a sex tape wouldn't have been able to take things seriously. I'm sure the actor who played the guy who gets his penis bitten off read all the way to the part of the script that said "And then the guy walks in with his new giant penis gun," stopped reading, and said, "OK, I don't need to see anymore. I'm in!"

That penis gun puts us all to shame.

If you're ever in the right mood for something like this, I'm kind of worried about you. But this will definitely be your cup of whatever that red squirty stuff is if you are.

Back to the Future

1985 time travel classic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Marty McFly, a guy who apparently is on an eight-or-so-year high school graduation plan, zips to 1985 via his eccentric scientist friend Doc Brown's Delorean/time-machine. He saves his future dad from injury by pushing him out of the way before his future grandfather hits him with a car. Unfortunately, that's how his parents met, and Marty McFly has inadvertently changed the course of history. He has to get his folks together before the rest of his body disappears like his hand does when he's trying to play guitar and sing a Chuck Berry song, all while Doc Brown tries to figure out a way to send him back to the year 1985. It's a thrill a minute!

I haven't been able to get the music of Huey Lewis out of my head since I watched this. I'm not talking about the last time I watched it either. I'm talking about since I watched it in 1985. But since 1993 and the release of Robert Altman's wonderfully-depressing Short Cuts, I haven't been able to not have Huey Lewis's music stuck in my head without it being accompanied by the image of Huey Lewis's penis. And the really interesting thing is that on certain days--stormy ones when my hair is longish and unkempt--that combination of Huey Lewis's music and penis actually seems to have the power to send me into the past or into the future. No, I've not been able to harness this time travel power and go wherever I want. Once, I went to 1985 and watched Back to the Future in a theater with my younger self (no, my younger self didn't see my current self) and my friend Vernon. Once, I traveled into the future, the year 2025 to be exact, and found out that I turn into a fat guy. (Yes, my future self did see my current self and couldn't keep his hands off me; we may have made out.) But anyway, this is one of those movies that gets a hefty nostalgia bonus as well as the Crispin Glover bonus. It's not perfect film-making, but it very well might be close to perfect story-telling. Self-referential and endlessly surprising (unless you've seen it a dozen times, I guess), this has great character development and a contagious creative energy. I absolutely refuse to pay attention enough to stick my fingers in the (probably numerous) plot holes because this is the type of movie you really want to watch with the innocent gut of a child instead of the mind of a snobby adult. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd have great chemistry. The former is perfectly likable and gives a performance that makes this easy to watch countless times. The latter's performance is inspired and perfectly loony. Of course, Crispin Glover is great because he's always great, but this movie has one of my favorite Crispin Glover moments, his character's big turnaround. It makes me cry every time. I also like Thomas F. Wilson as the villain here. This movie is a tremendous amount of fun. And it's only the first part of a trilogy! I'm sure the next one has to be great, too!