Varied Celluloid

The Plot: Bruce Lee is not dead. Oh wait, my bad, he is dead. I just saw him alive in this movie and figured… wait a second, this is Brucesploitation! Whoops, my bad! In case you didn’t know Brucesploitation is defined as a subgenre that featured a film made in the wake of the pioneering martial artists’ death that featured a look-a-like in the lead role usually playing his brother or implying Bruce faked his death in some way. Anyhow, our film takes place in the underworld where Bruce has come to after his death. You see, when you die, you wake up looking bigtime different – as is explained by a character when another person remarks that Bruce Leong looks nothing like the real Bruce Lee; and with a fantastic explanation like that how can you dare argue the logic? So anyway, Bruce goes out into the city of Underworld Land, finds that the king is treating the people like garbage and makes it his personal mission to seek justice for them all. Something like that at least. You won’t pay attention and neither did I, you’ll instead be infatuated by how batsh** crazy this movie really is and you’re going to love every second of it!

	The Review

There’s a phrase floating around the internet that I suppose most appropriately describes Dragon Lives Again, and that is WTF!? More of an abbreviation, but oh my god – Dragon Lives Again is without a doubt the most insane Brucesploitation film I have ever seen and I dare say I doubt I will ever see one quite up to this level again. Imagine if The Monster Mash was made into a live action film – but some drunk re-wrote the script to no longer feature monsters but famous film characters… and then placed it in the afterlife… and featured people who weren’t dead and never existed. My mind is literally blown sky high, as the complete and utter lack of any common sense in Dragon Lives Again completely puts an end to the chase for those films that simply make no sense. I just cannot ever imagine running into another film quite as completey out there as DLA. How many films are going to have the guts to do this? Who would be crazy enough to try? Why would you raise a large amount of money to even attempt it? FOR SCIENCE! That’s the only answer, to see just how cooky you can get. Maybe not, maybe it was the more likely scenario of several producers getting together and trying to pack as many elements into one script as possible in order to maximize their return. I don’t know if the film did well in its native land (I doubt it) but my oh my, what a classic piece of exploitation this turned out to be. Going into The Clones of Bruce Lee – I was expecting something that would blow away all others in terms of sheer weirdness. I mean, it was a flick called The Clones of Bruce Lee! However, after that fairly ordinary scifi kung fu crossover, I find within this fairly ordinarily named piece of Brucesploitation schlock everything I had ever hoped for in the genre. You will not believe your eyes once this film starts, and your life will never be the same again.

From the very opening sequence, you know this one is going to be a weird one. Instead of the usual Kung Fu demonstration of most flicks, we get Bruce Leong here lating on all of his enemies from the film. What kind of enemies might he face? This is where it gets interesting: Emanuelle (from the European sexsploitation films), Zatoichi, James Bond, Clint Eastwood (played by a very Chinese man), The Priest from the Excorcist and Dracula. Along the way to help Bruce is Popeye the Sailor Man and The One Armed Swordsman (from the very popular series) as well as some bum-looking character that I couldn’t quite place (post a comment in this review and let me know!). Are you getting the picture that this flick is insane yet? No? Well, how about this being one of the most absurdly offensive Brucesploitation flicks in terms of their representation of Bruce? I can’t speak for everyone else, but I personally found Bruce’s character to be kind of a jerk in the film. Going from one scene to the next all but walking on the set and shouting “F*** YOU! I’m Bruce Lee!” immediately before jumpkicking someone in the chest. It may not be that bad, but Bruce is shown to be arrogant, cocky and unfortunately more powerful than anyone else on this underworld planet. I mean, the guy has POSTERS of himself plastered all over his wall! Then there is the fight sequence that starts a little concept of naming fighting styles; with Zatoichi coming up with names usually as witty as “Blind Man Finds the Target!” – and Bruce, not to be outdone, comes up with “Fists of Fury”, “Enter the Dragon”, “Return of the Dragon”, “Game of Death” and the icing on the cake: “Fingers of Fury!”. Holy mother of god. Apparently, even in death Bruce is absolutely infatuated with himself and often dresses as his old film/television characters for no apparent reason. A favorite sequence of mine involved Bruce dressing like his famous character of Kato from The Green Hornet TV show – while fighting Dracula in a rock quarry (that pretty much EVERY SINGLE FIGHT seems to take place in, no matter where the scuffle starts, it will end up there) and taking on the horde of ninjas with skeleton patterns screen printed on their uniforms. Did I mention Bruce is fighting DRACULA in the middle of the DAYLIGHT? Do WHAT now!? I honestly couldn’t make this up people, my imagination isn’t so vivid. This is all just the beginning though folks, I haven’t even mentioned that Bruce shows up in the underworld with what apears to be a raging boner but only turns out to be his nunchucks – which play a prominent role in the film. Also, Bruce Leong looks absolutely NOTHING like Bruce Lee. He does however have a stunning resemblance to a smaller Bolo Yeong. Oh, and Bruce apparently knows a style where he can grow a third leg! The Third Leg of Bruce! Just… wow!

	The Conclusion

If you’re up for a b-movie, you need to see this. You cannot have more fun while watching a movie, I just cannot fathom it.getting much better than this. Trust me, at this point you shoudl know whether this film is going to be for your or not. If you’re shaking your head, thinking that I am a complete moron and a threat to all things great in cinema – chances are; you might not dig on Dragon Lives Again. Might not be your thing. If by chance you were sold like a mofo by the time I mentioned Emanuelle and Popeye the Sailor Man; then saddle up partner – it’s just as crazy as you could like and then some! If you’re a drinking man, bring along a cold six. If you’re not, like me, grab some gatorade and prepare to spew it out your nose. This is a majestic experience that simply has to be seen to be believed.

Plot Outline: The Freeman (As in Free-Man) is an extremely talented assassin, kind of like a murdering McGuyver. He works for a highly elite Chinese mafia, but the thing is, he’s not exactly in control of his life. Every time he lays someone to rest, he sheds a tear for his victim. That’s what I call a gracious man. Anyway, whilst chasing down three no name yakuza thugs in the woods of Japan, he is spotted by Emu O’Hara, a beautiful (and I do mean beautiful) woman who likes to paint the scenery. The Freeman doesn’t kill her, but does remember her. Both become infatuated with the other, but when the Freeman is told to kill her, he can’t go through with it. His first ever act of defiance, but it won’t be his last. Add in a crooked cop and the mafia willing to give anything to have the Freeman dead, and you’ve got a wicked action flick!

  

The Review: Let’s just get it out of the way now, I hated Brotherhood of the Wolf. I actually despised it. I don’t know exactly why I did, I suppose because I found it boring and the action that was presented was terribly lame. Men in large coats performing acrobatic martial arts? No sir, not my thing. Even with Philip Kwok doing the fight choreography in that film, I still thought it terribly sucked. If you loved that film, I don’t know what to say other than sorry but it’s my opinion. I still thought I would make it clear what I thought of Christophe Ganz’s most famous picture. I was skeptical going into Crying Freeman, but I wasn’t overly critical just because of my vehement hatred of the filmmakers most popular work, and after sitting through it, I have to say I’m surprised at how much I liked it. It’s not a ‘great’ film, but as I’ve stressed countless times, sometimes a film just has to be entertaining. Crying Freeman is a prime example. While watching the film I couldn’t help but notice the MANY plot holes and inconsistencies, but this isn’t the type of film that should be held under a microscope. It’s only here to entertain, so just shut off the analytical portion of your brain and just marvel at the action scenes, be in awe of how hot Julie Condra is and wonder why it is that Hollywood hasn’t caught on to the fact that Mark Dacascos has just as much star potential as Jet Li, and thirty times as much as the donut munching Steven Seagal.

The action scenes leave me a bit perplexed. Part of me thinks that the gun fights are great and would do John Woo proud, but then part of me looks at it as glorified plagiarism. Ganz apes John Woo’s style throughout the film, to the point where I was almost rolling my eyes during some portions. The least thing that can be said on his part is that he interjects his own style enough in the film so that it doesn’t feel completely like a total ripoff. The Matrix did it, I’m no fool, but at least The Matrix had the wire work that crossed different boundaries. Ganz just seems like he’s been watching A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled far too much. This is all groundless though, just because John Woo perfected the style doesn’t mean he’s the only one allowed to do so. The action here, and there’s really not that much so don’t get your hopes up, feels like the cartoon version of Woo. Considering how animated Woo’s films are, that’s quite the statement. Dacascos flips and rolls on the ground relentlessly, always firing his gun, and almost always hitting his target. He’s always confident and his character is almost always on the money. It can either annoy you that his character is basically flawless (and I’m talking about technically doing his job, not emotionally), or it’ll just make you say ‘cooool’. His acting on the other hand is far from perfect. I’m sure in time he’ll grow into his craft, as all action stars eventually do, but what is displayed here I hope won’t be considered his best work. I think Dacascos just seems too much like a baby face. He has no commanding voice, no gruff. He just sounds like an average guy, maybe even with a tiny voice. The first thing I would say he needs to do is get down the voice. I’m not exactly saying he should mimic Eastwood, but a little Clint in the voice wouldn’t do him too much harm.

The rest of the cast don’t do much better, but if you look at the heart of what the film is, it’s just a b-movie. Now, before the fans of the film (does it have any?) try and torture me, a B-Movie doesn’t necessarily mean anything negative. Some of my favorite films are B’s. To tell the honest truth, the film struck me as if it were something that would be made-for-video, and considering I usually hate straight-to-video action flicks, I would say Ganz did a great job with what he had. The film was obviously shot on a limited budget, but there are moments where you can’t even tell. The most apparent moments are the scenes in Japan near the end, the stagey sets become obvious but didn’t take me out of the film very much. Truly, the only two things that took me out of the film and made me look at it objectively was the acting and the story. I’ve covered the acting already, pretty much everyone embarrassed themselves at least once, but I haven’t gotten much into the plot. During the film I had so many questions that were never answered that it almost became frustrating. Thankfully I knew beforehand that the film was based upon a manga, or else I might have really became upset. When watching a film based upon manga though, anime or live action, I find it easier to look over the gaping holes. Why? Because rarely do you see a manga based film that is able to be adapted to the screen without losing so much content that it becomes nothing but a shadow of what it was. Just read the manga for Akira and then Watch the anime. The anime was basically incoherent to me when I watched it, then I read the book and it became clear… and I still didn’t like it. Regardless, manga based films never get the treatment novels do. You would think it would be easier considering the imagery of a manga, but for some reason it seems harder. In conclusion (yes, I’m that pretentious!): it’s got holes, and if you can’t look over them and you need films to be whole, what are you doing watching a live action manga?

Now, I’m giving the film a four. This may seem insane to some, but the film was just so easy to watch, I couldn’t help but love every minute of it. It’s not high art, it’s not exactly a work of pure originality and it’s definitely not to be judged on the same principals as something like American Beauty. The safer bet would be to rate this a three, and for your average B-Movie fan, I would probably say that’s what it’s deserving of. My own personal opinion is what the site is about though, and a four is what came to me instinctively. Like it or lump it, I thought it was a ton of fun.

Plot Outline: Li Ho is an ex-escort for a very lethal gang, and once the boss grows tired of Li Ho’s company (there’s not a huge reason why the boss wants it done), Li Ho has both of his arms severed from his body. Li Ho doesn’t waste time sitting around feeling sorry for himself or visiting a doctor, no sir, he goes on with his life as usual and tries to get something to eat, but is humiliated by a cruel waiter (aren’t they all?). He’s tossed out in the streets and begins to fend for himself, but while take a sip of water from a stream, he is washed downriver where he awakens outside of a farm house. He is then put to work by the farmer who owns the house where he takes residence, and begins to make a life for himself. As we all know though, the movie just wouldn’t be too entertaining if he continued watering crops for the remainder of the time. Nope, Kung, the man who oversaw the order to have Li Ho’s arms removed also has run into trouble with the big boss. Instead of having his arms removed though, Kung has acid poured over his legs which cause them to shrivel up into useless boney ‘things’. Crawling away in pain, Kung actually runs into Li Ho down by the river side and Li Ho being the man that he is then goes on to beat the legless man to the best of his abilities. While fighting in a cave though, Li Ho and Kung find an old man who can squish himself into shapes I didn’t know were possible. The old man takes the two handicapped men under his wing in order to teach them Kung Fu so that they can get their revenge.

  

The Review: Well, it’s December 2003. It’s chilly outside, Christmas is right upon us and I’m feeling the holiday spirit. So with that in mind, I could think of no better way to commemorate my favorite holiday than to throw a marathon of cinematic treats from my personal favorite cinematic style. The Kung Fu genre boys and girls. I’m going through seven randomly chosen Hong Kong classics, all coming straight out of the old school, and hopefully you the reader will join in on the festivities as well. I’m at number six on this huge countdown of Kung Fu and this is a review I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while. Crippled Masters is one of those genre defining films that, if you ask me, if you haven’t seen it already then you’re missing out on the cinematic art form all together. I consider it to be the type of film that if I’m at a Kung Fu website and I don’t see a review for it, I begin to wonder what is up. I knew some day I would get around to finally publishing my own opinion of it, but you can never be sure about some of these other guys on the block. It’s not a particularly rare film, and it’s most certainly not a particularly ‘good’ film, but it is something that pretty much any fan of the genre should see at least once. Why? Because it’s just too strange a film to pass up. I first bore witness to this outlandish bit of psychosis about five or so years ago. At this time Joe Bob Briggs’ Monstervision was where my attention was being paid nearly every Saturday night. For those that don’t know, Joe Bob hosted a show that focused it’s time on the truly horrific/monumental bits of b-movie cinema, and I learned many things while watching that show. Turner Network Television had the rights to a lot of strange movies at this time, so after Monstervision would go off, they would continue airing their freakishly strange films in a block called 100% Weird. I was never a huge fan of the films that would come on, usually they were in black & white and at this time I just wasn’t as big a cinema fan as I am now, but one night a film caught my eye and that film was Crippled Masters. After I sat through the first five minutes, in which a man has both of his arms sliced off with a sword, I was petrified, but still interested. Crippled Masters still has a lot of the same effect on me while watching, it’s not a film I find easy to grow comfortable with. It’s what you would get if you took Todd Brownings’ Freaks, but added Kung Fu to the mix and a whole lot of crazy characters. What I’m about to say may be offensive to some, but I really can’t stand to see visibly physically disabled people. People with no arms/legs/lower torso/facial features or whatever, they all really leave me gagging. I know these people have it rough and I more than sympathize, but I find it hard to look at anything like that. Which I guess is reason enough for me to have searched out long and hard trying to get a copy of Crippled Masters. Yes, I am somewhat stupid. Crippled Masters isn’t a great film by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it really all that ‘good’, but for some reason it leaves me in awe every time I force myself to sit through it. The missing limbs within the film don’t make me want to purge, but staring at the nubs of Frankie Shum is enough to hypnotize even the most strongest willed person in the audience.

To be completely honest about the film, the only real attraction there should be is for the fact that it’s so completely bizarre and disgusting. That doesn’t make it without merit mind you, and for some this is probably a drawback, but you have to take the film for what it is and it most certainly isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s a cult film for cult fans, to say the film is targeted at a niche market would be understatement. When you get your first glimpses at Frankie Shum with his protruding nub where an arm should/would (I assume he was born the way he is, if you get your arm cut off I doubt there’s any way to grow a defected hand-thing out of your shoulder) have been, you’ll know if this film is going to be up your alley. As disturbing as Frankie’s arm is, I find his partner Jackie Conn’s weirded out legs to be far more mind bending. I literally have no idea what may have happened to this man’s legs. I’ve thought about the idea that maybe he has no bottom torso and they glued a couple of fake legs on to him, but when you see the bottom of his deformed feet, you can tell it’s real. He looks like a grown man with the legs of a seven year old Ethiopian child, but his upper body and even his feet seem to be in perfectly fine shape. In the film he has some kind of acid poured on his legs that makes them shrivel up the way they do, I question if perhaps something similar happened to him in real life. After staring at his legs for an hour, it’s enough to drive any man to madness, and the fact that he seems to have two cavity’s in his front teeth doesn’t help anything when watching the film. I don’t demand that a film contain beautiful people, and maybe I’m shallow, but birth defects and deformity’s really freak me out. Body abnormalities aside, the film actually contains some decent Kung Fu from our Criplled Masters. Frankie Shum uses his half-hand to toss around a staff with which he lays the beat down on people, and Jackie Conn throws his half-body around either smacking his enemies with his rear or punching them from the ground. The Kung Fu it’s self is what makes the film even more interesting, just the fact that these men are able to overcome their disabilities and come out as super heroes is quite the sight, although I doubt the producers were going for a film to uplift people with a story of the disabled overcoming adversity. The film was made to display a couple of crippleds who beat the crap out of people, and if you can get down with that, you’ll find that it’s a relatively fun film to just sit with and let the time pass bye. Other than our two main characters, the film also gives us a few strange characters worthy of even a Jimmy Wang Yu film. The lead villain, Ling I think his name was, is one incredibly strange bad guy, and I mean that as a compliment. He has a gigantic scar on his face that is never actually explained, and looks as if someone just threw a few anchovies on his cheek, but that’s not all, he has a gigantic hump on his back made of metal. That’s right, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, but with one made of metal. Is the hump ever shown with his shirt off? No, you know how the audience knows that it’s made of metal? Because every time someone hits it, or he slams it against someone, it makes a giant clanging sound. Talk about a weird and pointless weapon. His Kung Fu on the other hand is quite great, and the way in which he uses the metal hump ranges from absurd to quite impressive. The two other big characters would be Black and White. Black is a fairly large bald man who dresses all in black, while White is a smaller guy who dresses all in white (obviously) and even wears white makeup over his face. What purpose do these two serve? Nothing other than being somewhat cool. The acting by all involved is on the terrible side, no one except Frankie Shum seems to have any kind of on screen presence that wades through the terrible English dubbing, and I might only favor Shum because he favors the late Victor Wong who all genre fans tend to admire. It doesn’t really matter though, because no one would watch a film like this for acting, I’m just covering the bases. The direction is pretty low, even for a film like this. Continuity is a dirty word when discussing Crippled Masters. The way in which they try to hide Jackie Conn’s disability is shoddy, during the final fight sequence the fight starts somewhere and then when we cut to a different scene and return, it’s in a completely different location. Too far away for them to have ran to from the first destination. Then there’s the terrible attempts at storytelling that just comes off as rubbish, but you know what, who cares. This is a film about a man with no arms teaming up with a man with no legs in order to fight a metallic-hunchbacked villain. Why would common sense enter any of this?

Crippled Masters is a b-movie, so it should be treated that way. There’s not a lot of really ‘good’ things one can talk about in a review, it’s more about the good things you individually find in it. To put it bluntly, this is a party movie. You invite some friends over, you tell them you have the strangest movie they’ll ever see and you pop it in. End of story. It’s the kind of film that won’t reach out to a crowd that considers themselves “sophisticated”, this is dumb fun just like mama used to make. With that in mind, that doesn’t mean I’m going to give it a very high reward. Maybe I’m giving it a three because I want to deviate from my previous films in this Kung Fu marathon that have almost all garnered a four rating, but I like to think that I’m giving the film what it deserves. I think everyone out there who can stomach this kind of cinema should see it, but when watching it alone, the film can be fairly gross to sit and watch and although the pacing is actually fairly quick there are moments that seem to take an eternity. It’s a one of a kind film and if you’re the least bit interested you should seek it out and prepare to freak out your friends. It’s a classic of b-cinema, no doubts about it.

Plot Outline: Tu Tin Tao (Kuan Tai Chen), a wealthy and powerful Kung Fu master, is turned bitter and evil after his wife is murdered and his son’s arms are cut off in a raid on his home. As his son grows, Tao makes him iron hands and teaches him his special Tiger Style Kung Fu so that his son can do his evil bidding. Soon enough, everyone in town is frightened of him and his ego is enormous. Whenever someone opposes him, or offends him or his son, he has his son cripple them in various ways. After four men are left crippled, they decide to learn Kung Fu and take revenge. The blind man (Phillip Kwok), The Deaf and Mute man (Lo Meng), The Legless man (Chien Sun) and The man made into an idiot (Chiang Sheng). Together the four join forces to take down this tyrant.

The Review: I can say this without any hesitation whatsoever, Crippled Avengers is one of the greatest old school Kung Fu films ever made. Of course this isn’t news to any of the fans out there, but if you’re interested in getting into the films of the Shaw Bros then you absolutely HAVE to see Crippled Avengers. It should be shown at the world’s most prestigious film schools, it should be celebrated amongst fans of HK filmmaking but should be held in high regard with any red blooded film fan who walks the earth. Children walking dirt roads in the rural south should scream the blessings of Phillip Kwok and Chiang Sheng amazing training scene involving a set of circular bars. This is a film that EVERY single person on this earth should see, regardless if they’ll like it or not. If Five Venoms was the greatest kung fu/drama Chang Cheh ever made, Crippled Avengers was his greatest all out action film.

I of course hold Five Venoms in higher regards than CA, but when it comes down to having to watch a fun Kung Fu film on a rainy day, I’ll always choose Crippled Avengers. The film is as silly as they come, and in some circles I’m quite aware it would be considered a ‘bad’ film, but if you were to call it something like that in front of me, you had better be prepared to face my Tiger style. I could never, and would never, consider a film that brings me such joy to be a ‘bad’ film. This was a film made with no other expectations than to please the audience, and that’s what it does, but the fact that it exceeds on every level is what keeps it elevated above many of the other films produced by The Shaws. The Venoms put in what is in my opinion their greatest work, and Cheh is so on top of his game here it isn’t funny. The zooms, the dialogue, the Kung Fu, the film is just viciously brilliant, on every possible level!

I realize films like this only have a niche audience, and what’s here probably wouldn’t appeal to many of the more ‘civilized’ of the film spectrum. If you have ever in your life though, felt the craving to watch a 70′s Kung Fu flick, or if you have ever been impressed by the ability and acrobatics of a martial artist in film, then you at least owe it to yourself to give Crippled Avengers a shot. If you’re a fan of hokey dialogue and bad dubbing, this film was made for you! At least every ten minutes you’ll get about three memorable and hilarious lines. The dialogue between Kuan Tai Chen (the father) and Lu Feng (The Son) when he just gets his iron hands is so priceless I’d be hard pressed to find another bit of dialogue that I love as dearly. “I got you Iron Hands. It took quite a while, but I think this pair is good” goes down in history as one of those timeless phrases that you can’t forget. Like “pass the meatloaf” or “a shark on whiskey is mighty risky, but a shark on beer is a beer engineer”

Anyway, I’ll move on to the facts. I haven’t seen every one of the Venoms collaboration’s, but from what I have seen, this is there absolute greatest work. The fight scenes are just breathtaking at times. Every member of the clan just exudes energy and it shows in their fighting. Backflips, somersaults, the clan does it all. It’s hard for me to choose who puts in the best show really, Lo Meng is phenomenally nimble for such a big guy, and watching him flip around like he does is almost surreal. Then again, Chiang Sheng’s character may get a little annoying, but his skill and his jumping ability seems unmatched. When I think of the best fight scenes in the film, I generally think of him. The fight scene I mentioned above with Sheng and Kwok together is really more of a sparring match, but it’s impressive none the less. Sheng throws a bunch of circular iron bars to Kwok, who then catches them in midair and puts his body through them. Things get interesting when Sheng gets aggravated and decides to take the bars from Kwok. Watching the two go through the choreography is so fun to watch, and it’s just so on timing and balletic, that it’s just incredibly engaging. That’s just a sparring match though, it all comes into play during the final fight scene with Chiang Sheng, Phillip Kwok and Lu Feng in a three way battle that goes down as probably my single favorite old school fight scene ever filmed. That says quite a lot too. Anyway, everybody puts in great performances in the film. Chien Sun as the legless man is probably the least impressive of the four, but that’s probably just me. I didn’t feel he got to do as much of the rest of the clan, but he was involved in one of my favorite scenes in the film. Can you say ‘foot through the chest’?

What else is there to say? As far as silly kung fu films go, you can’t get any better than this. Not to mention it’s probably the greatest team up of Chang Cheh and the venom’s since Five Venoms it’s self. If you haven’t seen it yet, get up, get out, and pick it up. I can almost guarantee you’ll at the least laugh at it.

Plot Outline: Ethel Janowski is an obese woman in the local mental institution because of her fits of violent rage, but after some electro shock therapy and a good pat on the back the system somehow feels she’s fit to enter back into society, even though her doctor seems to feel otherwise. Her grandmother picks her up from the home and drives her back to the home for some rest & relaxation. Turns out though, Ethel wants to eat, even though her doctor warned her to hold off from some meals for the sake of her heart. Mrs. Janowski takes it upon herself to place all of her food in the pantry and lock it, which turns out to be a big mistake once Ethel stabs her in the back and cuts her hand open to get to the key. Now Ethel is alone in the house and before long she’s out of food so she calls on the delivery boy to bring her some food. She agrees to pay her bill once the boy brings her the food, but since she only has four bucks she backs out of the deal. The boy almost gets away but Ethel hits him over the head with a glass bottle then stabs him in the stomach repeatedly. Now Ethel has two dead bodies rotting in the upstairs section of her house and now her cousin has decided to stay in the house as well. She brings along her tricks and her pimp, all while Ethel starts having to deal with the cops knocking at her door about a missing delivery boy. It’s only a matter of time before she explodes once again.

  
The Review: I really shouldn’t be ‘reviewing’ this film, I really shouldn’t, because to be honest it’s not really even a movie. I don’t know what this is. It’s something one would imagine a bunch of friends would shoot over the weekend just on a whim for fun, but then someone actually sold the distribution rights. I find it hard to imagine the circumstances behind a film like Criminally Insane. It’s too out of my reach to possibly understand. This is a film I would have never thought could be made in a million years and I don’t even want to trash it, because frankly that’s just too easy. The film has absolutely no plot nor a budget to make the film on, it just exists. There’s no logical explanation for the film, but if you’ve got a high tolerance for b-movie pain, there might be some satisfaction for some of you. Just to be able to say you’ve seen a film where a fat woman kills people that try to stop her from eating. Seriously, try and tell someone about a film like that and see what kind of reaction you get. It will either be sheer horror that someone could be so cruel or uncontrollable laughter followed by questioning into whether you are lying to them or not. Either way, the best part about owning something like Criminally Insane is the sheer fact that you own it. The novelty of owning something so ridiculous and obscure holds true value for a lot of us. The content of the movie only counts on just how bad the film is, and Criminally Insane is quite fitting for anyone’s ‘worst films ever’ list. I don’t hate the film personally, not like I did Blackenstein. Criminally Insane is just as inept as that film, probably even more so, but the fact that it isn’t even a full hour long kind of prevents it from dragging ‘too’ much and if you like to laugh at a b-movie then it’s a fairly easy film to amuse yourself with. I’ve watched the film twice, more than any man need to, and on both occasions the film just blurred past my retinas. It’s as boring as any film ever made, but at least it’s stupid enough to be entertaining and short enough for me not to care.

Where does one start with a film like this? All I guess I can do is run down all of the little strange and stupid moments. Okay, lets’s start with the terrible music cues because it was one of the first things I noticed while watching the film. The soundtrack it’s self is almost done fairly well, it’s a jangly tuned out piano playing over dead air, and sometimes it can even evoke a certain atmosphere in the film. As silly as it sounds. The tune plays through most of the movie, but while watching, keep an eye out for the extremely bad edits. In one instance we cut from Ethel being tortured/healed with electric shock therapy into a scene with Ethel’s grandmother talking to her psychiatrist at the mental institute right before she is set free. The scenes are so badly spliced together that I still wonder if my copy of it was screwed up. We go from the jangly piano score, right into this scene with the doctor and the words out of the grandmother’s mouth are “…all right now doctor?”. I can assume that she’s asking about her granddaughter, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that I only heard half the question asked. The worst part about it is the jumping on the soundtrack, which is repeated throughout the film. We go from this eerie, atmospheric score right into some horrendous dialogue or even worse, some scene that could have benefited from the score being lowered into the background. The music never fades away, it just stops at a dead halt. The editing within the film is joke, another favorite of mine is the dream sequence towards the end. If you thought you knew strange, trust me you don’t until you see Criminally Insane. At one point Ethel is lying in her bed next to a dead body, and she starts laughing for like three minutes all while we cut to this strange scene with her hacking up a dummy. It’s hard to understand what is going on in this sequence, because it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I have no idea if the dummy on the ground is supposed to be real and Ethel is dreaming of killing a person or what, if it is supposed to be a human then… my god. The dummy lying on the ground isn’t even a full dummy, it’s half of a mannequin. It has no lower torso, it’s pale white with a black wig on it’s head and a black dress (or something like one) wrapped around it’s upper half. When Ethel slams her knife down on it’s arms it bleeds, so one would assume it’s supposed to be real, but how could they ever expect an audience to fall for that? It tops the scene in Zombi Holocaust where the arm flies off of the dummy that hits the pavement. At least it had all of it’s limbs before it hit the concrete. The dream sequence, which I guess would be the technical term for it, really is about three minutes long. It starts off with Ethel laughing and ends with Ethel laughing. I would be willing to bet the whole thing was thrown together just to add some length to the film, maybe to get it beyond the hour mark. The special effects in the film as noted are extremely amateurish. You can’t exactly hate the film for that, it’s obvious they had no money, but I wish they would have had some more convincing blood. What is used in the film really does look like red paint, and as demonstrated in the dream sequence where Ethel washes blood off of her blade, it’s extremely thick and hard to get off. I doubt it was actually red paint because several characters put it on their head, more like tomato sauce or something similar. The blood just shows up in gallons on top of whoever Ethel kills. One thing that kept annoying me throughout the film was that even though Ethel is slamming this meat cleaver into the head of her victims, she never actually penetrates the skin. She just keeps slamming it down, while we hear sound effect as if she were hitting wood with an axe, and pulling back with no hesitation. Then after it’s over it looks as if the dead bodies were stabbed in the head and nothing more. If someone really bashed your head in with a meat cleaver about twelve times, your head would have had slices all the way up and down it, that is if your head wouldn’t have been split into pieces. I of course wasn’t expecting state of the art effects, but it’s just one of those things you laugh at while watching the film. They should have limited Ethel to hitting her corpses in the chest, that way at least we could assume that all the blood was part of the act.

The directing in the film, for the most part, really isn’t ‘that’ bad. The director probably chose to place the camera in too many different angles (thus cutting to several different reaction shots) but he at least added some style to the film. The dream sequence took things a little too far with the cutting between inverted color special effects and ‘arty’ slow motion shots, but for the most part he was more impressive than something like Blackenstein (Referenced twice in this review now! Must. hold. back. comparisons!), and I’ll commend him for such. The acting, well, do I even have to say anything? The acting is laughable and if you’re reading this review then I’m sure you already know that. Priscilla Alden as Ethel is fairly decent in her role I guess, but she’s not exactly doing Shakespeare and the film doesn’t ask for such. She is intimidating and freaky, so I guess she does her job well. The rest of the cast aren’t really worth mentioning. Well, maybe I could mention the guy who plays John. He gets to utter the single greatest bit of dialogue I think I’ve ever heard. After Ethel’s sister, who is lying in bed with John, gets angry because John beat the living crap out of her. She asks, if he loves her so much, why did he do it? John’s reply is a cinematic treasure. “Rosalee I’m going to tell you the truth for once. Okay? You need a good beating every once in a while. All women do. And You especially. Okay?”. What truly makes the scene so hilarious is that she immediately starts passionately kissing him. I mean, after words so beautiful, what girl wouldn’t!? Just one of the many standout moments in the film. Do I recommend the film? For b-movie enthusiasts, absolutely. It’s only an hour long, but it’s an hour worth of true insanity. Believe it or not, I’m giving this film a two. It’s on the same level of horrors as Blackenstein (Strike three, please get out of here) but whereas Blackenstein was boring and stupid, Criminally Insane is entertaining while being boring and stupid. The scenes move slow, but the film is over before you can even comment on how crappy it is. It’s not PC in it’s treatment of ‘overweight’ people and that’s one of the main reasons to even have it. Criminally Insane is a very special movie, now someone please shoot me in the forehead.