EyeAskance

In a rugged and desolate part of the untamed west, a young white woman and a warrior of the Cheyenne people are the sole survivors of a bloody clash during the Colorado War. The warrior prepares to kill the woman, but he sees a spirit bird fly overhead, behoving him to protect her. By and by, an unlikely mutuality is established, which blossoms into love. When the woman is latterly violated by a group of boorish white outlaws, the distraught warrior vows to avenge her...red man style!

Director JOHN CARR, noted mostly for a few low budget horror films made during the 80s, debuted with this unconventional black-and-white western with a light sprinkling of the supernatural. It was long thought to be a lost film until it emerged out of nowhere on Youtube, and I, for one, was pleasantly surprised by it. It's admittedly rough around the edges, and looks 20 years older than it is, but the bitterly poignant story is well told, and a few lurid scenes in the final third provide just enough of the old exploitation film gratification to keep things lively.

Not a classic, maybe, but certainly a worthy rediscovery. 6/10.

As a viral zombie contagion commences, one of the infected is bitten by an unsuspecting vampire. With the effects of the virus on nosferatu being as yet undetermined, his circle of vampire friends place him under guarded quarantine. As the outbreak proliferates, the vamps realize that ravenous zombies are dimishing their food supply, and that they'll need to eradicate the emerging competition quickly.

As I type this, thirteen years have passed since this awesome little internet series came and went with nary a trumpet call. How and why it flew under everyone's radar is mystifying...the writing was fantastic, and the characters were colorful and expertly vivified. A tantalizing handful of five minute chapters were produced, presumably on a piggy-bank budget, and then it just...stopped. Several key matters were left unresolved, which was a big disappointment for anyone fortunate enough to have merged with this underappreciated and surprisingly polished backyard project.

I was sad to learn that Eric Hailey, who portrayed the zombified vampire character central to the story, has since passed on...he had a very likable comedic presence, bless his soul.

7.5/10.

I'd love to know the backstory for this totally unmapped little shot-on-video wonderwork. It's an amateur entry in the cheesy "intergalactic action fantasy" subgenre, pretty much at its apogee when this was made. Due to the poor sound quality, I didn't really catch the drift of the story too well, but it seems to involve a rebel faction mobilized to disempower an evil female Darth Vader type of villainess.

I'm guessing this was an ambitious high-school theater department project(the entire cast are teenagers). Never mind that it looks like something you'd find at 2AM on a cable access channel in the late-80s...it's carried off with so much giddy youthful enthusiasm that it becomes instantly endearing. Too, everything about it is *SO* indisputably 1985...lots of Rick Springfield quasi-mullets, parachute onesie suits with superfluous zippers...I kept flashing back to my junior yearbook photo, and the ear-cuff, and that damn skinny satin piano keyboard tie...but I digress.

Long story short, this can be fun to watch in a very different sort of way...as a testament to resourceful button-soup creativity, and for its youthful, energetic brio. I won't give it a standard 1 to 10 rating, because it really doesn't apply fairly to something like this. I'll just say I enjoyed it on its own realistic terms, more for the effort than the upshot.

Hostile aliens demand the surrender of Earth women...their only hope in saving their race from extinction(the females of their own species have evolved into beasts too ugly to procreate with). When their behest is met with rejection, they dispatch a giant, lumpy monster to terrorize humanity. Meanwhile, men of science, militia, politicians, and brave citizens mobilize to devise a plan which will shield humanity from the alien menace(if they don't get too preoccupied with interpersonal dramas).

One of the defining hallmarks of the 80s was an irreverent rhapsody of 1950s America. The passing of years had endowed the cultural landscape of that decade with a patina of high-camp humor, a quality which is never more obvious than in B sci-fi flicks. THE IT THAT ATE THE WORLD, lensed in Reno, Nevada, is one of numerous 80s-era loveletters to such dubious cinema icons as Tom Graeff, Phil Tucker, and Ed Wood. These homage/parodies tend to be a mixed bag which leans slightly toward the negative. I'm of the mind that the original camp classics are far funnier by dint of their own incidental virtues than any lampoon could ever be. There are a few decent examples, though, and they're probably more enjoyable to card-carrying genre fans than random, casual viewers. This one falls somewhere in the middle. It has some funny moments, and is clearly made by sincere genre enthusiasts with a lot of heart, and looks to have had a slightly more workable budget than many similar projects(especially observable in the special effects, which are occasionally rather impressive). As grassroots regional cinema goes, it's a commendable effort, and it would have been a perfect component to an installment of NIGHT FLIGHT. How/why it's presently represented by only a low-quality Youtube upload is anyone's guess...it may not be a great film, but it's certainly better than many others which have managed to attain distribution in various home-viewing formats.

5.5/10.

A group of Japanese schoolgirls on holiday at the secluded home of their professor are menaced by a flesh-eating, basement-dwelling monster that attacks people through mirrors. The formless monster design is unique, and variably redolent of a MUMMENSCHANZ puppet.

There's really too little of a story to warrant commentary...this is essentially just a string of scenes with pretty girls getting mulched by this "Guzoo" thing. It's certainly not for all tastes, but if you're gore-horny and like them really ooey-gooey and gross, put on a bib and dig in! It's pretty fun, as these things go, and clocking in at just 40 minutes, it doesn't exactly overstay its welcome.

6/10.

As a fan of dodgy, gonzo oddities from every stripe of cinema, I've seen my share of hard-X flyballs...FORCED ENTRY, HARDGORE, BATPUSSY, and CAFE FLESH spring to mind. The gay porn undertow, however, seems somewhat lacking in supremely left-field specimens...there's the bizarre THUNDERCRACK!, and a deeply dispiriting work of anti-erotica called DO ME EVIL, but no others have come to my attention...

...until recently. A like-minded internet acquaintance asked me if I'd seen a gay porn/romantic musical called ROMEO AND JULIAN, and when I said I hadn't, he insisted that I watch it...NOW. I found it with ease online, and boy howdy...I haven't laughed so hard in ages. The syrupy, rosewatered love story at hand is a total nothingburger...lovestruck lonely boy meets man of his dreams, and they hit a few bumps in the road on their way to happily ever afterland. What makes this a particularly unquantifiable little outlier is the...*ahem*...original soundtrack. These simpering, kitschy little squirts of synth-in-a-can would seem better suited to a low-budget kiddie flick. The performers are lipsynching, but otherwise static...just sitting or standing in place, no random subito dance moves, no expository essay, no sweaty man-on-man dorsal corking...just guys in cutoffs sitting there singing, and a few laggard horizontal boppin' scenes that could narcotize a speed freak of the highest octane. It should be noted that there's a lengthy shower scene, possibly the most obvious and open-handed opportunity for a song...and there's no song. NOT EVEN ANY INCIDENTAL MUSIC. Good God, this might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever witnessed, and that quality alone makes it worth a watch. I seriously doubt you'll be touching yourself, aside from covering your ears and facepalming through this non-compos-mentis little bozo-eruption. Seriously...you never had it so good...

Lori is a hard-luck barroom hooker who dreams of a better life, and her dream seems to come true when Jeff, a dashing and successful bachelor, sweeps her off her barstool and straight to the altar. Jeff, however, is not the man he appears to be...he's still living with his overbearing, manipulative mother, and she's none too pleased by her new daughter-in-law's presence. Worse yet, Jeff's a serial killer who's been blazing a gin-slicked trail of terror through Sin City, hitting all the sleaziest Vegas nightspots and exterminating every slutty, passed-out slag who crosses his path. He kills in a variety of gruesome ways, snipping a swatch of hair from each victim with a pair of giant ceremonial ribbon-cutting scissors. The implied reason for this psychosis is that his mother kept him dressed in a sissified Little Lord Fauntleroy getup with long hair until late in his childhood. Lori is perplexed by her new husband's nightly absence, and the fact that he still hasn't layed a hand on her...much to her mother-in-law's cruel amusement.

NO TEARS FOR THE DAMNED/LAS VEGAS STRANGLER is, centrally, a tit window from pre-porn times, when more than just a mouse click was needed to get an eyeful of the female mystique. It's a bit more ambitious than the quotidian example of this extinct realm of cinema, putting forward a fairly coherent story with developed and passably limned characters. It could easily be shorn of its naughty bits and passed off as a sub-B mainstream thriller(in noting the choppy placement of mature content, it would seem that may, indeed, have been intended). It shares several parallels with the little-seen post-noir shocker ANGEL'S FLIGHT(1965), another sexed-up poverty-row precendent to the modern "slasher" subgenre. Additionally, this one's a real treasure for anyone with an appreciation of kitsch midcentury furnishings...there's no fewer than three mini-bars in this flick!

All things considered, a welcome addition to the recent windfall of rediscovered regional indies which had long been feared lost, and it's got some great footage of iconic Vegas hotels which are no longer standing. 6/10.

A Lutheran church funded short subject which illustrates mankind's propensity for cruelty and self-destruction, ostensibly by dint of the rejection of God.

Veteran actor LEW AYRES, himself a notedly resolute pacifist, narrates this chronicle of our steady march toward armageddon since the time of Christ, and offers us a glimpse of the horrors humanity may face in the near-future. The film's animation technique using puppets and miniatures is largely just a consecution of dioramas. Here and there, a character will raise an arm or turn their head, but it's primarily the camera which is in motion, scanning the dramatically lit, but mostly static shadowbox displays. The culminating doomsday sequences are a bit more kinetic, envisioning the Earth's destruction in a choppy swirl of collapsing miniature structures, combined with practical pyrotechnic effects. Iconographically, it's rather primitive by modern standards, but audiences of the late 1940s probably found it forceful.

Long unattainable before its beautiful restoration at UCLA, THE WAY OF PEACE is, expectedly, a bit on the preachy side, but it imparts a calling for peace on Earth which transcends compartmented belief systems. Too, it may well feature cinema's earliest depiction of nuclear Doomsday. While it lacks the terrifying punch of more recent films such as THREADS and THE DAY AFTER, it amuses as a quaintly naive forerunner.

Young Paul has a secret world, a place in his mind where he can escape the drudgeries of the here-and-now. It's a place where he feels welcome...a place with snow. Gradually, he is drawn further, deeper into his frosty dream world, and his growing detachment worries those around him. They don't understand his uncommunicative behavior, because they aren't aware of his secret snow...snow which is now overlapping reality, BECOMING reality...at least for Paul.

Paul, frustrated by his mother's whiling concerns and ceaseless badgering, finally reveals to her the reason for his widening distance. He tells her about his secret snow, and the comfort it brings him...and that he hates her. He rolls over in bed, and the wintry isolation welcomes him back...

"...and with that effort, everything was solved, everything became all right: the seamless hiss advanced once more, the long white wavering lines rose and fell like enormous whispering sea waves, the whisper becoming louder, the laughter more numerous. "Listen!" it said. "We'll tell you the last, the most beautiful and secret story-shut your eyes-it is a very small story-a story that gets smaller and smaller-it comes inward instead of opening like a flower- it is a flower becoming a seed-a little cold seed-do you hear? We are leaning closer to you..."

Gene Kearney's 17-minute black-and-white adaption of Conrad Aiken's subtle horror masterstroke is lovingly true to its source material, and overseen with an artful eye. The story advances with the creeping pace of a dying hearbeat, elegantly italicized by chillingly austere camerawork, relaxing narration, and George Kleinsinger's mournful, sussurant score. Kearney understands and shares Aiken's vision, and he limns it here judiciously.

It's widely agreed that SILENT SNOW, SECRET SNOW is an intimate potraiture of a young man touched by schizophrenia or Aspergers. I'm of the mind that Aiken may be suggesting something more. The afore endued closing paragraph of Aiken's story may be inferring that our minds are vulnerable to external influences of an intangible, supernatural, perhaps even demonic nature. Soothing, beckoning voices from the world beyond, coercively pulling us ever inward, away from love and mutuality, and into a dark prison of the mind.

All said, this is a laudable and unduly sidestepped effort, and arguably the sincerest adaption of a nimbly penned and achingly personal paragon of the written word. 7.5/10.

In the early hours of the morning, a watchman at the Louvre makes a shocking discovery...The Mona Lisa has lost her celebrated smile. Under assumptions that the painting is inauthentic, or that it has been vandalized, scientists are called in to perform numerous tests, ultimately concluding that it is, unquestionably, da Vinci's authentic masterpiece, with no evidence of adulteration. The matter becomes even more perplexing when replicas and photo images of the portrait are found to have also changed expression. She now appears mournful, pensive, and hopeless...a sad countenance which initializes a global contagion of deep despair. Soon, there's nary a smile left in all the world, and it's ensuingly surmised that this sweeping deluge of sorrow is an augering of mankind's ultimate end. The citizens of the world strain to crack a smile as the clock ticks away to a cataclysmic final curtain.

MONA LISA IS SAD is a solemn and quietly compelling meditation on mankind's ecological, societal, and spiritual problemata from the director of the 1972 miniclassic THE TELEPHONE BOX. Comparatively, this one's a lesser effort, but the core concept is so admirably outside-the-box that it can't be wholly dismissed. The paranormal mystery at hand is alluring and incisively imagined, but it precipitates circumstances which are limned in a rather vague and extemporary manner. Newspaper headlines and TV broadcasts are the primary expository means of illustrating a developing global crisis, one which culminates in a non-specified extinction event. The apocalypse is visualized as a concurrence of natural disasters, chiefly excogitated through stock film snippets of erupting volcanoes, intercut with shaky shots of crumbling drywall and miniature cars being tossed about. It's not very effective, but noting the production's budgetary constraint, it is forgivable.

All things considered, it's a better film in concept than composition, with a narrative that may have been more sharply defined at feature length. At forty-odd minutes, it feels a bit shoehorned and summarized...but efficiently so.

6/10.

A little boy has a tough time adjusting to his new rural environs, and can't seem to fit in with the other local boys(in a nothing-little town with about five kids living in it, you'd think they might make an effort to establish some sort of mutuality).

The director does a marvelous job of drawing the viewer into the picture...you can really feel the hick-town boredom. No...I mean, REALLY feel it. Around seventy minutes of it. It's sort of like THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, but without all that pointless character analysis and forceful iconography. BUZZARD is a minimalist work...it's powerfully plain. Flattened, washed-out, and unstimulating, because it's supposed to be that way...a "less is more" type of thing. They nailed it. It should probably be noted that there's a random wisecracking buzzard on-hand to narrate this steamrolling dreadnought of unseasoned dormancy. It has no direct placement in the proceedings, it just keeps us abreast of things as they're happening. That way, it almost seems like things ARE happening. See? You can have an expository device without a story. That's what they did here. It's supposed to be like that.

A film for the whole family to enjoy, especially if your kids are on Adderall. You can take one too, it's okay!

In order to win the hand of the girl he loves, a bumbling but good natured fellow must find her string of pearls which is hidden in a spooky old mansion. A group of mischievous pranksters stage some ghostly going-on for a laugh at his expense. Horse-and-buggy chills and old-timey chuckles ensue, and our humble hero gets the girl despite himself.

From film-industry outsiders THE WEISS BROTHERS, whose output was of uncommonly low quality, SPOOKY SPOOKS is a harmless enough waste of a few short minutes, interesting more for its antiquity than entertainment value. There are numerous other one-reelers of the period with the exact same premise, and all of them are better than this one.

3.5/10. The majority of silent era films are lost forever, but somehow this survives...proof that there is no order in the universe.

A group of female nymphs enjoy the sunshine, dancing and playing together in naturalist esprit. A hirsute satyr emerges from the forest, causing them to flee like deer. One in the group stumbles, and is caught by the satyr, who carries her into the deep woods. There, they engage in various sex acts until the nymphs discover them, and the satyr is chased away.

EL SATARIO, discovered within the holdings of a Canadian film archive, is a work of unclear provenance, as we have no record of its personnel or production history. Dates between 1907 and 1932 have been suggested by historians, with most opinions leaning toward the earlier date, and it's generally agreed that it was filmed in Argentina, possibly Cuba. It has been more recently noted that a 1913 article by a German journalist mentions a stag film he'd viewed in Berlin, and his description strongly suggests that the film was EL SATARIO. This tacitly infers that a number of prints may have existed, and that their sub-rosa circulation spread far and wide.

Besides being one of the earliest surviving sex films, it's also notable as a prelusory monster movie, and it's almost certainly the first hybrid of both. It's more explicit than other extant stag films of its era, with close-up shots of genitals and fully visible penetration. It's primitive, as such material typically was(and, in many cases, still is), but it's a rare and fascinating specimen of antique erotic curiosa which demands preservation. That it survives today is something of a miracle, and its significance as a cultural artifact should not be minimized.

It's been years since the untimely death of his wife. The loss has left him empty inside...his days are a stagnant repetition of stuffy formalities, living ghostlike in a meticulously kept home with his elderly charwoman, and a shrine of various trinkets dedicated to the memory of his departed love. Then he sees her...a dancer in a traveling troupe of stage performers. It must be her, the likeness is too great...but she's different now. Coarse, and more assertive. Is it really her? Has his beloved returned to him from the beyond? A ghost...a doppelganger? A hallucination of his agonized mind? She will accompany him through a dark night of the soul...before day breaks, he will face a tragic truth which he has long denied, and both will be set free.

Adapted from a like-titled 19th Century novella which was regarded as a work of some importance in its time, BRUGES LA MORTE is a brooding, surprisingly aesthetic little arthouse endeavor, well dramatized, and endowed by the semi-experimental scoring of WINSTON TONG(formally of TUXEDOMOON). In the true spirit of Victorian melancholia, it's deliberately glacial in pace, but the mood and mystery remain strong enough to buoy intrigue throughout its hour-long duration.

6/10...an interesting, overlooked curio.

A young Earth man, presumably in a prehistoric time, encounters extraterrestrials in a glowing ship. He is bewildered, but the beings communicate to him a message of peace, and show him the reasons why he is resisting advancement to a higher existential plane. He is burdened with guilt over deeds from his past lives, not least that he was responsible for the annihilation of an entire civilization. With this close encounter, he has an option of choosing the way of love and light, or a continuum of lowly existence under the rule of dark forces.

This hour-long film was produced as a sort of explicatory treatise and recruitment device for an esoteric organization called UNARIUS, which I presume is centered in the cosmic science/new age periphery. I will refrain from further commentary on this, as I know little about it. On the film itself...it's a peculiar merging of outre eternalist spiritual musings with old-school tech futurism(think OMNI magazine, circa 1980). Clearly formulated under budgetary constraint with a no-name cast, it features some surprisingly skillful FX for the time. More interesting as a cultural oddity than anything else, but I think it could find an appreciative viewership within the brotherhood of WTF cinema obsessives.

5/10...a "cult" film, in the literal sense.

One of the less-noted luminaries of the beatnik/Bohemian undertow, HARRY SMITH was an artist of multiple mediums whose film index is chiefly comprised of animated short subjects which are now either lost or rarely screened, and this, his most celebrated work, released in 1962. The stark black and white feature is a jittering collage of 19th Century newsprint snippets which swirl and cavort upon a black expanse. As the images interact, amalgamate, and transmogrify in their jerky ebb and flow, they conduce to a colorless kaleidoscope of defamiliarized objects which vivify in gelastic, absurreal ways. The visuals are punctuated strangely by ectopic stock audio effects.

Iconographically alluring at first, HEAVEN AND EARTH MAGIC gets a bit repetitious by the 20 minute mark, and seeing it through to the end is a moonshot for a dauntless few. Still and all, it's an admirably figmental and singular cinematic unicorn, and its stylistic flourishes inspired a minor movement in commercial art which was observable into the early 70s.

6.5/10. Rather distended at feature length, but a cultural relic of Bohemian artistic exploration which is truly one and of itself.

A malevolent alien race is intent on conquering the world, so they dispatch a towering, biomechanical beast to wreak havoc. The toothsome, grimacing behemoth procedes to mulch everyone and everything in its path, while keeping a firm grip on a young bride to be. Meanwhile, a little boy pokes around inside the monster's ear canal and nasal passage, and Korean militia strategize plans to defeat the titanic terror.

This was, for many years, a frustratingly unattainable title. A few enticing still photos in the pages of monster magazines were presumed to be the film's only surviving integrand, until it reemerged unexpectedly in a crisp and presumably complete print. Was it worth the long wait? Oh, Hell yes.

WANGMAGWI is an endlessly entertaining, beautifully shot kaiju with effects that are admittedly primitive, but resourcefully supervised with creative vitality. Still, it's not without a few blemishes...a dud comic relief duo gets more screentime than they deserve, and there's a rescue which is so outlandishly implausible that you can't help but get a good laugh from it. One scene in particular deserves mention for being among the most random and exotically WTF moments in cinema history...a man steals a newspaper, and ducks into a corner with it. He then proceeds to drop a bowel movement as chaos erupts around him. Weirder still, the scene is cross-edited with shots of a woman giving birth, and the characters are never seen again. Wow. What a trip.

WANGMAGWI is a weird and wonderful rediscovery, and crucial viewing for any kaiju enthusiast. 7/10.

A benevolent space-man visits our world, and befriends a family and their talking pet dog. While traveling from the hinterlands to London, they meet a variety of odd characters, including a rodent-man who turns people into animals.

This largely forgotten British musical fantasy is presented in pantomime style, being performed for an audience of children who periodically interact with the stage actors. It's a relatively well appointed film despite its very modest budget, and the music, while a bit on the twee side, is pleasant and professionally orchestrated. The costumes and sets are fun and colorful, and they typify a classic midcentury modern aesthetic.

Some adult viewers might get a little impatient with this one, but young children are almost certain to enjoy it.

6/10.

So...you've finally decided it's what you want. It's been on your mind a long time, but now you're ready to close your eyes and jump. Jump...face-first into that ever-challenging, but richly rewarding world of the supermarket checker. You don't want to be just ANY checker, though...oh, Heaven's no. You want to be an AMAZING checker. The BEST checker. The be-all, end-all, mighty King Ashurbanipal of checkers. This brief tutorial film will give you one-up over your competition, and it might even give you some handy hair-styling incentives along the way!

Three award-winning cashiers will guide you on your journey...but beware! This a journey fraught with shoplifters, impatient housewives, and out-of-control rugrats, so trust in the sovereign guidance of your mentors. Wax on...wax off. You'll have your black belt in customer service in no time(and maybe an enormous, concrete-stiff bouffant, too).

This film is your key to supermarket-checker success. Live the dream.

As sirens wail to warn citizens that missiles are flying, the inpatients of a large mental institution, along with a few of the facility's administrators, take cover in a massive subterranean bomb shelter. After the bombing has subsided, it becomes clear that the person entrusted with remembering the code which opens the door has, in fact, forgotten it. The life-saving bunker is now a prison, and that prison will ultimately serve as a tomb for those inside. As days roll by, all attempts to communicate with the outside world fail. Stabilizing medications for the less docile patients run dry, and mounting tensions give rise to a fiery power struggle.

**spoilers** The doors ultimately do reopen, and the survivors step into a lifeless, ruined world. They realize that they are what's left of humanity, and that they'll be free to govern themselves as they see fit...once the authority figures have been duly exterminated.

This beggarly slice of near-future cynicism was long thought lost, or at least inexplicably unattainable, having never seen the world beyond its native Australia. It's not a particularly exciting rediscovery, quite honestly, though it's certainly no worse than a lot of junk which somehow manages to achieve wide distribution(if only in a home-viewing capacity). It's passably superintended where the various rudiments of production are concerned, but very talky and poorly paced, and it's scored with the infernal noise of an inharmoniously partnered bass guitar and church organ. Too, it fails to effectuate a mien of global catastrophe, and opts to focus squarely on a few people from a very large group, the rest of whom serve as little more than nameless background filler. This might have worked more efficiently as a short subject, but at feature length it feels diffused and unfurnished, and seemingly determined to put forth some nebulous sociopolitical message(as did many sci-fi films of its time).

4/10...at the ass-end of average, and likely to remain obscure.

There's a certain stripe of indie cinema which endeavors to accentuate the lyrical by virtue of a "less is more" modality. Laudable examples tend to be deeply personal and affective, typically meditating on particulars of the human condition. To succeed, these films depend on intimately fleshed-out characters and impactfully expressive dialog...failure to provide those essentials reduces "less is more" to "not enough". Case in point, a 1987 Canadian amateur effort called WHEAT SOUP.

A century has passed since "the great flattening", an informal appellation given to an unspecified apocalyptic event. Among the Nth generation of survivors is a young wheat farmer who exterminates anyone attempting to pilfer from his immensely valuable crops. Years of isolation have left him restless and piqued about the world beyond the wheatfields, so he drops his hoe and hits the road, eager to bore every oddball character he meets with prolonged sessions of pointless, meandering backchat.

This black-and-white backyard home movie could possibly have some sort of message or meaning to put forward. Perhaps it's hidden among the many deficiently postmodern directorial curlicues, or within the vast expanse where a story should have been. It may be a pearl of infinite wisdom cryptically encoded in the ceaseless stretches of unfunny, impertinent dialog. If you can find it...then you've earned it.

3/10...the eager spirit of indie cinema does variably shine through, and points given for shooting it on film. Understanding that bringing ANY film to fruition is no easy task, I acknowledge determination and effort, whatever the upshot.

Jose, a director of schlock horror films, is a high-functioning heroin addict who's experiencing a burnout phase in his career, and frustration over a rocky, on-again/off-again relationship he can't seem to terminate. He receives an unexpected parcel from a fleeting acquaintance named Pedro, a cousin of an old flame, who makes raw naturalistic films variably similar to the works of STAN BRAKHAGE. The parcel contains a filmreel, Pedro's housekey, and a cassette tape on which he's recorded himself expounding a bizarre personal odyssey which initialized at a time when Jose had assisted him in matters of interval time filming. The fervid, gravelly-voiced storytelling spans the film's remaining duration, cryptically implying that Pedro's Super8 camera has taken on a predatory sentience vaguely vampiric in nature...by sucking people away from the Earthly plane, and into the cinematic one(a metamorphosis which Pedro insists is sublimely blissful). This outlandish disclosure is confirmed when Jose watches the filmreel, at which point he realizes why Pedro had sent him the key to his apartment. It is there that Jose will face his destiny under the eye of Pedro's camera.

That ARREBATO comes from a director with such a minimal body of work is surprising...it's a professionally appointed abstraction which is comparable to little else, though touches of LYNCH, CRONENBERG, and ECKHART SCHMIDT are sometimes evident. It's a cynical, allegorical, and occasionally plaintive excursion into a dreary alternate reality, underscored with notes of homoerotic suggestion, heroin chic, and pointed political commentary.

There's an intriguing mystery in Pedro's prolonged tape-recorded anecdotes...it's an abstruse and strangely tantalizing expository device which juxtaposes the film's deliberately dallying visual tedium. Narcotics are a preponderance of the proceedings, chiefly regarding their potency to electrify creative vitality while simultaneously draining it dry. I might argue that the "vampire" of the story isn't the actual, tangible camera...rather, it is cinema itself. More specifically, it's the ART of cinema, which, like a god, casts judgment in accordance with one's personal relationship to the cinematic arts (**spoiler**) It would seem that Pedro has been raptured to a higher plane of existence, owing to his impassioned visionary buoyancy. Jose, conversely, has lost that creative brio, and is thus rendered unworthy or ineligible for Ascension. He is denied passage, and promptly exterminated.

As extravagantly outré as it is, ARREBATO is handled quite confidently, and the key players vitalize their characters with moxie. Sure, it's blemished, and certainly not for all tastes, but it's audaciously and undeniably sui generis. That's mighty refreshing in a time when remakes of remakes are the order of the day.

7/10...a worthy legacy for its late director, whose too-brief life is said to have had many unfortunate parallels with this film.

I saw this special the night it aired on NBC, and it really got me excited about all the new shows that were going to premier the next morning. Today, I'm in my 50s, and I just rewatched it, complete with the original commercials. To say it made me a little misty would be an understatement...I almost felt eight years old again. It was pretty heavy.

The late and well-remembered Freddie Prinze hosts this salmagundi of kiddie-show clips from what I *THINK* is the now-long-defunct Busch Gardens amusement park in Van Nuys, California. Mixed in with snippets from cartoon shows like WOODY WOODPECKER and THE PINK PANTHER, and live-action fare such as LAND OF THE LOST and BIG JOHN, LITTLE JOHN, are a number of twee bubblegum song-and-dance interludes, and a few guest appearances by players from the NBC stable. Sadly, Prinze would take his own life the following year, and castmember Biff Warren(of KIDS FROM C. A. P. E. R.) passed on from AIDS in the early 90s.

While the quality of these shows may seem antiquated to today's kids, they were magical to those of us who watched them in the 70s. I'd recommend that anyone in my age bracket make themselves a fluffernutter and a strawberry milk, have a seat, and watch it for nostalgia's sake. It'll really take you back to the time of scratch & sniff stickers, Pet Rocks, and iron-on tee shirts. It's a bittersweet experience.

An unacquainted man and woman become the last living people on Earth when an unspecified catastrophe wipes out humanity, and causes an apartment building to collapse around them. With no means of escape from their dark, cramped prison, and with limited resources for survival, an unusual nexus is forged between them. They spend uncounted hours waxing lyrical about life and love, and of starting a world anew. The eventual birth of their offspring quashes these Panglossian delusions, however, when the infant is revealed to be devoid of reproductive organs. It latterly dies from malnourishment, as do its parents.

ATRAPADOS is a unique and incisively realized film, and an impressive debut for its director. That it failed to bring him wide recognition or a fruitful career is unfortunate...it's a philosophical, spiritual, and stingingly plaintive brown study, characterizing two unexceptional people who find an unlikely mutuality in the face of impending doom, both defiantly disconfirming the fate which, deep down, they know awaits them.

An unduly sidestepped and utterly singular picture which is strongly played by the leads, and demanding of a more prominent placement in the colloquy of experimental cinema.

7/10.

In a post-apocalyptic future, what's left of mankind lives underground in a networking of small cubicle apartments. Life's a stagnant repetition of browsing the TV home shopping channel, and having sex with manufactured clones. Everyone is employed by a fascist overlord who keeps the citizens intellectually and creatively dumbed-down with booze, pills, and televised news reports which are anything but honest. Those who grow too curious about life as it once was on Earth are quickly "promoted", and disappear. The surprise resolve in the final moments is pretty clever, and will likely catch viewers off-guard.

DESIGN 2084 is a peculiar little bupkis-budget sci-fi obscurity, about which very little is presently known. It exists today solely in the form of a VHS rough-cut which managed to fall into the hands of a curious cinephile, who has since archived it online. The story is poorly developed, performances by the no-name players are all over the board, and there's a mere scintilla of intriguing visuals(the very 80s Omni magazine style hi-tech futurism is hilariously dated...dig that Buick-size TV remote!). That it's scored with oddly inapposite jazzy saxophone music only serves to enhance its supremely WTF appeal.

Nobody would call this a critically good movie, but it's such a uniquely quizzical little three-dollar-bill that it generally amuses in a specious, abstract sort of way. The story bears vague similitude with A BOY AND HIS DOG(1975), and the little-seen SIX-HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX(1972), yet it's really nothing like either of those films. Hopefully, this mystery movie's backstory will one day be told, as it's probably more interesting than the film itself.

4/10.