Here at The Umbrellahead Review, we try to come up with common themes for our entries -- themes, that is, that go beyond merely saying "Well, these films were on the sixth disc of the box set." Sometimes it's very natural (as in K.'s upcoming entry about Doomsday Machine and End Of The World), sometimes it's a stretch, but we always do our best.
And the theme for this entry? Puppetmasters. In all three of these movies, someone has an evil, depraved agenda, and is secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes to make that agenda happen. And all these puppetmasters have servants who do their bidding -- though the servants in question run the gamut from willing accomplices, to unwilling accomplices, to no-thanks-sir-I'm-just-gonna-get-the-hell-out-of-here.
Fury of the Wolfman (La Furia del Hombre Lobo)
Objective Grade: F
Camp Value Bonus: D
We're not familiar with the other films in this series, nor any of the films of Paul Naschy, who's apparently a beloved Spanish cult horror icon. What we can say is that this one doesn't make any fuckin' sense. Ostensibly the story of a researcher who suffers from the titular affliction, within minutes it degenerates into a slapdash, wildly incoherent mess -- we had to rewind several scenes at the beginning just to sort things out. Terrible direction, jarring transitions (including footage that's obviously taken from a completely different movie), and stupid dialogue about chemotrodes and pentagrams, plus a score so overwrought and inappropriate that it makes those silent movies with random overdubbed classical pieces seem like masterworks of music editing by comparison.
If the stories are true, the director spent his days on set drunk as a skunk, abdicating most of his responsibilities to his teenage nephew. Based on the evidence, we believe it. There's a decent amount of camp value to be had, and we laughed a bit, but the sheer randomness of it gets oppressive after a while. Having said that, this version is apparently cut, removing several scenes with sexual content that are also integral to the plot. A longer version is around, under the title The Wolfman Never Sleeps, and is supposedly a minor improvement.
Good Against Evil
Grade: C
Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, the devil takes her away. With the aid of Christian iconography, boy goes after her high-maintenance ass. Then he has to fight through multiple levels of demonic opposition, occasionally ending up in his underpants somehow, and when he gets to the end of the whole thing he finds out he's not even done, and it's not the real ending...wait, sorry, that's Ghosts 'n Goblins for the NES, a game that still pisses P. off to this day.
Even so, this Rosemary's Baby-meets-Exorcist knockoff is about as frustrating as playing a session of that aforementioned, godforsaken piece of junk, since about five minutes before the end, we realized that it was not merely a TV movie (that much was obvious), but actually the pilot episode for a series that never got made...and thus, it ends without any sort of resolution. Much booing at the screen ensued, but hey, at least that means we still cared.
The damsel in distress, Jessica, is a nightmare amalgam of negative female entitlement archetypes, i.e. a completely unlikable, spoiled, neurotic ice queen; P. suspects his friend S. would classify her as a quintessential example of borderline personality disorder. We have no idea what the male protagonist, played by one Dock Rambo (!), sees in her, especially given that (1) he practically has to stalk her to get a date out of her, and (2) a young, brunette Kim Cattrall is also hell-bent on getting into his pants. (Not that K.C. is all that, but from our perspective, it'd be an upgrade.)
Speaking of K.C., it has them too, though not in the Caribbean. Am I right? Or am I missing something?
House of the Living Dead
Grade: F
A nineteenth-century South African vineyard is the setting for this interminable tale depicting the last remnants of a tortured, madness-prone expat family. Son #1 tries to get Mom to assent to his marriage, while son #2 hides in the attic, conducts mysterious experiments, plays bad organ music, and generally creeps out his future sister-in-law. British accents and picturesque locations provide a veneer of respectability, but really this movie is total crap -- muddy, dull, and tedious. The pacing is ponderous at best, the score hackneyed and trite, and we're given no particular reason to give a damn about any of the characters, except for that poor baboon.
Tries to regain some ground with a "twist" ending (which K. saw coming, P. didn't), but it's the wrong twist, and the ending proper is hilariously pathetic. It surely doesn't help that the print looks pretty lousy -- fuzzy, washed-out to the point of colorlessness, and prone to some sort of automatic level control that abruptly darkens several scenes that were already dark, rendering them basically unwatchable.
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