Amongst the thousands of physical copies of films I've accumulated and will likely be buried underneath, I have a short but steadily growing list that I set aside just for the purpose of eventually watching for this site. The criteria for inclusion is admittedly pretty loose, but one of the more recent guidelines I've tried to adhere to is this: the fewer references I can find to a film on the internet or in books, the higher up the list it goes. It did cross my mind that maybe the reason no one's written about certain movies is because they're so impenetrable, so beyond rational explanation as to exist in a place where they cannot be touched by words. I also knew that, eventually, I would come face to face with and be challenged by one of those movies. The day has come. Furious is calling me out.
Howdeedooit
At first, all I could remember were fur and rocks and, for some reason, I couldn't get the theme to SCTV's "Great White North" out of my head, so I wrote it down. Then it was spinning tusks and mysterious boxes, so I wrote that down too. Then, nunchuck deaths and killer chefs, sudden chickens and doggie kickin', beach dismission and pork exposition, skeleton flames and astral planes -- I wrote everything down. Out of six attempted viewings, I had successfully seen the entire thing once, written twenty paragraphs over four and a half pages and I'd fallen asleep five times. That's not just math; that's Furious math.
Jan and Dean and Simon and Tennille
Lest there be any misconception that I was bored to sleep by Furious, this was not the case -- it's just that trying to mentally organize this much nonsense is exhausting and emergency shutdown was the only option my brain gave me. I may never know how to accurately describe this film, but because we're friends, I'll take a stab at a plot synopsis: Mourning the death of his sister at the hands of a white Mongol who's as much a fan of Bob & Doug McKenzie as he is of killing ladies, Simon (played by Simon Rhee) and his red sweatshirt (raglan cut, tucked into the pants) are summoned to an office building populated by screwfaced martial arts students and new wave security guards, where he's given a gift shop medallion and a very esoteric set of instructions by his elderly, estranged tae kwon do teacher (Simon Rhee's younger brother Phillip). Seeking retribution, he soon finds himself beating the will to live out of dudes in exotic locales such as the middle of a field, the top of a cliff and a restaurant with a floor show that features a man spinning swords within five feet of a baby's face to a sparse audience of old ladies messily eating baked chicken. Occasionally aided by Hawaiian shirt aficionados with butt-cuts, a troop of scrappy karate kids and a gossipy Buddha statue, Simon eventually gets his revenge on his sister's murderer, but to defeat the true source of ultimate evil, he's gonna have to get FUURRRIIIOOUS! Or something like that.
Easy spirit
If it wasn't clear enough already, this is not your standard martial arts revenge flick, something that's immediately signified by the closeups of flubbed sleight-of-hand card tricks in the opening credits, accompanied by the exasperated sighs of the performer. So is it a farce? We've got death incurred by a butt-ful of throwing stars, an Eastern European sorcerer who shoots chickens out of his fingers and a Devo-esque synth trio breaking up band practice to go join a fight, but as to whether or not this is intentional comedy or just willful weirdness, the movie's keeping its mouth zipped shut. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum throughout, with the first spoken line ("All riiiight!") arriving at the twelve-and-a-half minute mark. In fact, only two characters in the film have significant speaking parts; neither are Simon Rhee, but one is a dying pig. Fight sequences are underscored by too-quiet background music seemingly lifted from Republic Pictures serials with sound effects provided by firecrackers and drum machines and are directed with such laconic detachment that they almost don't qualify as action scenes.
Whitey Cleanshoes and the Milktones
I can't remember when I've been so stymied by a film, and, in keeping in tradition with everything else I don't understand about Furious, I really liked it, even though I couldn't begin to tell you why. That said, I'm still not sure if it was a real film or a particularly screwy feature-length sizzle reel for Simon Rhee's kickfighting prowess. It's also entirely possible that I just dreamed the whole thing. I hope so. Maybe if I go back to sleep right now, there'll be a sequel.
I slid the tape out of the cover to check the condition and was immediately overcome with disappointment. Instead of finding "bloody horror at its best," as the back of the box had promised, I was staring down a stray copy of Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw. Shenanigans! Boyle's Joyland had bamboozled me! I checked the rest of the tapes, hoping that Death Nurse would turn up safely inside a different cover instead of being lost out in the world somewhere, naked and alone. No luck. Not even the mighty internet would prove to be of much use in locating a physical copy in the years to come. I had all but given up on Death Nurse and I ever crossing paths again when, in 2012, Slasher Video teamed up with writer/director Nick Millard and gave me the long-overdue opportunity to check into the Shady Palms Clinic.
Eat-Em-Ups
Gordon and Edith Mortley are the brother-and-sister medical team that run Shady Palms, which is less a medical facility than it is the house they live in. Doctor Gordon wears swishy, ill-fitting slacks, eats chocolate ice cream by playing "one for you, one for me" between the bowl and his mouth, and frankly, he's a wimp, likely the result of a childhood of untold psychological tortures at the hands of big sister Edith. Edith -- the angel of mercilessness of the title and cover image -- is large and intense, keeps piranha rats in the garage (two of which are shown), and punctuates her sentences with a granite-eyed stare that not only commands the camera to repeatedly zoom in on it, but also has the power to quell the interminate cough of a tuberculosis patient.
Stare-Em-Downs
The Mortleys use the clinic as a means for fleecing Medicare out of cash for their patients, though it's unlikely that they've ever been medically certified and, therefore, equally unlikely that a patient will survive even a single day in their care. If Edith isn't asphyxiating them with pillows or feeding them rats, Gordon's inserting dog hearts and mismatched sets of steak knives inside them. On their time off, Edith takes nightmare-filled naps on the couch and Gordon trades a recovering alcoholic booze for sex. Their only problem is a meddling social worker who likes to check up from time to time on the people she's escorted to Shady Palms. The Mortley solution? Dig 'em up, spray off the dirt with a garden hose in broad daylight and pull a junior Weekend At Bernie's on her. However, entry-level corpse puppeteering can only work for so long until somebody gets suspicious, and if there's one thing Edith and her butcher knife don't cater to, it's a nosy old bitch (her words, not mine).
Kill-Em-Offs
People exhibit only mild discomfort while being dismembered. A cat appears from nowhere to make off with a heart during a transplant. Shots are repeated multiple times and often linger to the point of awkwardness. Stilted dialogue and tape rolls abound, and to top it off, it appears to have been shot and edited on consumer-grade video equipment. It's unquestionably a gutter film, but a sincere one, and the same fantastically inept things that make it charming to trash-film votarients will no doubt serve as subjects of ridicule to the "so-bad-it's-hilarious" crowd. If you're the latter, just stick to the film and go no further, but for those wishing to fully appreciate Death Nurse on its own terms, the 25th Anniversary DVD is more than accommodating.
Hose-Em-Offs
In addition to a full-length commentary track (where the genial Millard is joined by his wife Irmi and moderator Jesus Terán of Slasher Video), there's a Q&A with Millard about the film, a photo gallery, a newly-produced outtake entitled "Shady Palms Waiting Room" (with Nick and Irmi reprising their roles as clinic patients), a particularly damning on-camera review from VHSCollector.com's Paul Zamarelli (who considers this the worst film of all time), and longtime Millard collaborator and Death Nurse star Priscilla Alden receives a 14-minute tribute featurette which includes scenes from several of her collaborations with Millard, including Funeral Parlor (the last Millard/Alden film completed before her death from diabetic complications in 2007) and some particularly interesting promo footage from Mad Midnite Movies, a proposed television series that would've featured Alden as a horror film host in the character of Nurse Edith Mortley.
Sit-Em-Downs
Nick Millard stated that if he had a million dollars to make one movie, he'd just make lots of small movies, as cheaply as he could. It's comforting to know that even with a suitcase full of cash, Death Nurse would've turned out the same way -- a languid but astonishing hour of home-movie horror at its most cost-effective and unpretentious. Thank goodness. Had I known nine years ago that I'd be in for an introduction like the one this DVD release provided, the wait would've been a lot less difficult.
When a film opens with a super-tight shot of a shimmery, turquoise belt buckle, you might think to yourself, "Well, self -- someone is about to get naked," or, "Someone is so about to get sold some authentic Native American Jewelry." Nope, it's neither of those. Someone is just gonna do some open-air peeing, and that someone is Chuck. Chuck is a hippie -- a man who loves his freedom almost as much as he loves his secondary minerals and HAM radios -- and, this being 1975, you couldn't even pick up the newspaper or take your grandmother for a walk without getting your Florsheims damp in a puddle of hippie piss. The more comfortable you were with peeing outdoors, the freer you were, and let me assure you: Chuck is FREE, baby.
Chuck's mom knew exactly what to get him for Life Day
Urine-soaked openings aside, Pick-Up has little to do with pee-pee and even less to do with Ford F-150's. Freewheelin'-as-hell hippie chick Carol and her introspective-as-hell bestie Maureen are inexplicably hitch-hiking in the Florida Everglades when they are picked up (title clues!) by our roadside urinator Chuck, who has been tasked with driving a tricked-out, groovy-as-shit Hump Bus to...well, somewhere. Chuck's loaner rig has it all, from a wall-mounted 1970's rotary phone to a swingin' kitchenette. What's that? Oh, so you think you can pretty much fill in the blanks from here, do ya? Well, think again! Okay, okay -- you're right, there is a lot of nudity (the good kind), but once the bus gets stuck in some mud during one of those freak Everglades Plot Device Rainstorms, things take a turn for the weird. And if there's one thing I know about scary Floridian swamps, it's that they're filled with spooky theremin music, dirty priest flashbacks galore and the Priestess of Apollo.
A typical day in the Everglades
Not two minutes into this swamp business, Chuck and Carol are off hunting raccoon babies in the marshes and Maureen is tripping the light fantastic with Apollo and his minions. Shortly following her solo sex scene on top of a swampy, marble, sacrificial altar, Maureen accepts the Scepter of Apollo, and Carol most definitely kisses a baby raccoon. Yes, it is exactly that straightforward. What follows is what happens when you watch Easy Rider too many times and realize that it would be a much better movie if you took the "trippy graveyard scene," substituted Fonda and Hopper out for naked hippies and inserted a healthy dose of Greek mythology. We've all been there, right?
Awwww
Carol and Chuck make the most out of their time trapped in the swamp by shedding those oppressive clothes and humping the hours away on everything nature has to offer (including a homemade sex swing!) and loner Maureen is kept company by a roving senator, a little self-inflicted campfire stigmata, and an oh-my-GAWD-creepy clown. So don't worry about Maureen -- she's good. But I think the real moral of the story here is: don't ever play dress-up in togas and attempt some nighttime sex on a swamp altar, because Bobo The Pants-Shittingly-Scary Clown and The Voyeur Senator will most definitely show up and try to spoil your evening. But you've got to persevere and just bone your way through the distractions -- this movie is going to end soon! These are just the kinds of cautionary tales that the Everglades provide for us, my friends.
Carol's dancing gains the approval of the Everglades Rotary Club
"But are the hippie chicks hot?" Of COURSE they are, dummy! And super out of circulation, to boot! Good luck finding these junior Meryl Streeps in any other 1970s custom-bus, boobie-filled, sacrifice-fantasy movie. These ladies (and the director, too) knew they had hit gold right out of the gate and decided to quit while they still had most of their dignity. Luckily, Carol makes the most of her debut/swan song by going "half monty" at the six minute mark, during an enticing(?) dance that looks like it was choreographed by a drunk Thom Yorke (but only on a dare).
Come for the peeing. Stay for the boobs. And the dancing. And the clown.
For the next 110 unsubtitled minutes of your life, you and Sompote Sands' Magic Lizard will waste time together in ways you never dreamed possible. I hope you packed some wet wipes.
Magic sold seperately
Our hero, Magic Lizard, is a seven-foot-tall frilled lizard and a below-average roller-skater. His sole responsibility is to guard a cave that houses an extremely powerful and coveted crystal, a job that he carries out by sleeping and scratching his lizard balls. This level of security poses no problem to an invading alien (courtesy of an earlier effort by director Sompote Sands, Jumborg Ace & Giant), who chases Magic Lizard around with a lightsaber and eventually steals off into the cosmos with the crystal. Magic Lizard awakens his also-napping boss (the previously-mentioned Giant) with a blast of steam from his mouth and reports the theft in a frantic, high-pitched woman's voice. The Giant awkwardly flies off to retrieve the loot -- alone -- and Magic Lizard, incessantly chattering away for the remainder of the film, is free to completely waste a perfectly good day off work.
Sic 'em
He's dancing with baby elephants! Rough-housing with a bear cub! Using his tail as a boat propeller! Saving the village from a mean ol' crocodile! Taunting an elderly herpetologist, Scooby Doo-style! And the monkeys are goin' coconuts! Then, with only a couple minutes left of the film, the Giant catches up with the alien on an asteroid, effortlessly blows him up, flies back to Earth to return the crystal to Magic Lizard, the end. But who needs a plot when you've got talking jungle animals?
And who needs jungle animals when you've got ladies?
Sompote Sands' main focus as a filmmaker seemed to be Thai-ifying the Tsuburaya library of rubber-suited heroes and giant monsters (a practice that inevitably attracted a flurry of lawsuits), but Magic Lizard, at least for me, has way more in common with Ray Dennis Steckler's The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters than any episode of Ultra Seven, in that both were patched together out of slapsticky vignettes, seemingly made up on camera with no semblance of a greater story arc to be found. The Bowery Boys' influence even appears in both films: Steckler's uncanny Huntz Hall impersonation in Lemon Grove Kids, and here, in a lengthy scene where two dim-witted treasure seekers are spooked during a cave heist by an autonomous, cackling, haunted-house skeleton. Steckler, however, had the good sense not to grime up his whimsy by including scenes involving sex, gore and actual feces. Oh, did I forget to mention that?
The amorous Mr. Bones
A well-endowed skinny-dipper has an underwater frolic with her boyfriend, who manhandles her sizable breasts and tries to fit one in his mouth when, suddenly, she's eaten by a crocodile. Later, the croc gruesomely devours a few others, chasing after one with the fleshy, sanguine remains from the last dripping from his jaws. Most heinously, Magic Lizard is thrown from the back of a live water buffalo that does not wish to be ridden and receives an overflowing mouthful of the beast's, um, "retaliatory discharge." It's all fun and games until you have to watch the poop ACTUALLY COME OUT -- like a sloppy, nightmarish Play-Doh Fun Factory -- and rest assured, this movie's not playing around.
This is pretty much how I felt the whole time
Sands recently claimed that Magic Lizard was produced as a TV movie at the behest of a Japanese network. If you're a Japanese television station in 1985 and you're going to show a close-up of a ten-inch-wide buffalo turd being grunted out into plain view, do you have to warn your viewers ahead of time? Because I tried to get a few different friends to watch Magic Lizard with me, and I only thought it fair to warn them.
Jake's a teenager. He's about seventeen or eighteen, I guess, and is, like a lot of people that age, pretty conflicted. He's the kind of guy who'll stare through the window at a church social, yearning for inclusion, only to sulk around the refreshments table for a while and then get thrown out onto his face for starting a fight. He walks around looking tortured with half a liter of Jack Daniels in his shirt pocket and is prone to melodramatic outbursts like, "I can't get near anyone without ruining everything!" Adolescent whining aside, this statement couldn't be more true -- any human or animal tissue he touches dissolves upon immediate contact, and he's carelessly infecting inanimate objects with the same disease. As his hometown of Sleepy Rock suddenly becomes overrun by killer mirrors and bloodthirsty Dr. Seuss books, the population lathers themselves into a paranoid frenzy, wearing plastic tarps, hoarding cats (for object testing) and violently feuding with their neighbors. Jake didn't have many friends before this whole mess started and he sure doesn't have any now. Even if you wanted to be his friend, you'd have quite a set of baggage to unpack to get there.
Lotsa luck, lady
For better or worse, Jake's our main character. It's not necessarily a rule that a main character be likeable, but it helps if they're relatable. I was never quite "a prisoner of my own skin," as he's heard to snivel, but like Jake, I was also a brooding, damp-shirted, greasy teenager for a short time. My hormonal acne may have been a less tragic affliction than causing people's flesh to melt, but both are fairly unsavory. So, I can relate to Jake, but that doesn't mean I would ever wanna hang out with the guy, or, for that matter, myself when I was his age. But my eight-year-old self? I'd babysit that kid. Every Friday night. Overtime. And I wouldn't even charge my parents for it.
Sleepy Rock Humane Society
When I was eight, the existential woes of pubescence were an absolutely unfathomable concept, and even if I could've wrapped my mind around the forthcoming complications of teen romance and skin conditions, I wouldn't have had the time to worry. My free days were a stringent schedule of getting cranked up on Cocoa Puffs in the morning, whipping around town on my cheap Huffy wearing a Batman cape during the afternoon and capping it all off with a sleepover at my friend Marshall's house, where we'd stay up until 4:00am eating pizza and watching "USA Up All Night" (the Caroline Schlitt years). In short -- I ruled. It's hard not to rule when you're eight. Exhibit B: The Carrier's Seth.
A last name would just slow him down
While every other citizen of Sleepy Rock is going bananas in fear of the Jake plague, young Seth keeps his head firmly screwed on; the very definition of bravery in the face of adversity, sanity in the face of madness. When his three-kid team of cat-wranglers runs afoul of an equally-numbered but physically superior group of proto-punks with a feline hijacking in mind, one of his compatriots is killed and he fearlessly serves his duty as their leader by helping the survivor to safety. In doing so, however, he's caught, and confronts certain death at knifepoint by staring into the eyes of his would-be killer and warning him not to miss. For the too-few scenes he occupies in this film, Seth rules. And he's eight. And I would offer to babysit him as well, but I think he could probably manage by himself.
Tougher than leather
I'm not one to condone remakes, and to remake The Carrier would be a slap in the face of its scrappy regional magic (filmed on location in Manchester, Michigan). But if, for some godforsaken reason, someone decides to take on the task, I hope that they do me a personal favor by taking the only acceptable route -- the True Grit route -- by re-telling the story from the point of view of Seth. In return, I'll personally mail them a Davy Crockett cap (one size fits all) and two tickets to the annual Manchester Chicken Broil.
When Lou Rawls sang, "Love is a Hurtin' Thing," he probably didn't have in mind a five-foot-tall hayseed using her bright yellow platforms to stomp Mississippi mudholes in everyone who dared to disparage her man. Mr. Rawls (can I call you Lou?), allow me to introduce you to Emma Mae.
Fresh off the turnip truck
Compton, California: mid-70s. Definitely the weekend. The laziest of all block parties is happening and you're invited. The only dress code is short-shorts (for girls) and impeccable beards (for guys), but it's not strictly enforced. A friendly basketball game is underway, kids are abusing themselves on a Slip-N-Slide and a bongo/flute duo have built up a respectable audience using only four notes. The single thing happening that's even remotely exciting is a surprise shoulder-licking, and, though the licker absolutely looks like he deserves a knuckle sandwich for it, no such sandwich is administered. Very lazy indeed.
He's got it coming
Things get a bit livelier across town, as recently-orphaned Southern geek Emma Mae, with all the diction and optimism of Gomer Pyle, clomps off a bus into the home of her deeply embarrassed cousins, who are immediately guilted into taking her along as the fifth wheel on a double-date to a college cafeteria. Emma sits alone watching two of the worst-dressed breakdancers in history while her cousins' nice-guy boyfriends work the room, trying to pawn her off on a man. Just when they're about to give up, infamous local pillhead Jess sleazes into the room. They've spotted their pigeon. Luckily, he takes a shine to her, but just as they're getting to know each other, enter the shoulder-licker from earlier -- who, as it turns out, is Zeke, Jess' hot-headed sidekick. He protests their newfound union, referring to Emma Mae as "Ug Mug." In response, Emma delivers his long-overdue knuckle sandwich, laying his ass out and earning the respect of her cousins and their boyfriends, who celebrate by buying her her very first taco. A red-letter day for young Emma, to be sure.
People didn't like ass as much back in the '70s
That night, Jess takes Emma to a house party. She giggles at his bump 'n' grind. Jess' extended crew of unsavories (probably all a bunch of shoulder-lickers) show up uninvited with fightin' on the brain. Jess jumps in, seemingly to prevent a skirmish, but inevitably lands the inaugural punch and, next thing you know, partygoers who were once catching only a groove are now catching crowbars with their ribcages and bottles with their afros. One of Emma's cousins even gets her pants set on fire. The trouble around Jess only escalates over the next few days, but Emma is undeterred, remaining fiercely loyal to him, and in doing so, begins her metamorphosis from naive country girl to steely-eyed militant.
The turnip truck is but a distant memory
Even with its quirks and detours (watch and see), Emma Mae is basically a modest little film about the lengths that someone will go to for love and the depths they can reach when it's compromised. So how do you sell a movie like that? Unicorn Video's VHS release carries a photo of a wet-lipped, well-endowed model with disco hair, guns gripped in both of her perfectly-manicured hands. The Xenon DVD version I watched features airbrushed art of three golden afro ladies in hot pants, the one in the foreground looking seductively over her shoulder at you, clutching her butt cheek. Judging by box art and home video retitling, you might expect Black Sister's Revenge to be some sexy Foxy Brown-style action spectacular with a human wet dream in the starring role whose hairdo does double-duty as a gun holster. Don't believe it. Jerri Hayes is no Pam Grier and director Jamaa Fanaka is no Jack Hill, but most importantly, Emma Mae is no Black Sister's Revenge. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
The "comedy re-dub" formula is shamefully simple: take a film, strip the soundtrack, record hilarious dialogue, accept death knowing that you've achieved your artistic zenith. Respected television scribe Chris Hayward's Fractured Flickers show was one of the first to utilize the concept, using silent film clips as a foundation. Three years later, Woody Allen lit the wick on his directorial career by reappropriating two films from the Japanese International Secret Police series into What's Up, Tiger Lily? The thing that makes the idea so attractive simultaneously serves as its own Achilles' Heel: it's so cheap that anybody can afford to do it. This being the case, many have followed Hayward and Allen's lead, but few have been as successful.
Shanghai Ink™
Meanwhile, somewhere within Staten Island's Chinatown, the Wu-Tang Clan's neglected stepchild Cappadonna dozes off in a weed-induced haze and dreams of himself, more fit and way more Chinese, getting a shitty tattoo of a butterfly on his chest. Gangland kingpin and father figure Smitty loses his life and his one wooden testicle to a surprise hit, despite the blade-slinging prowess of both Cappadonna and dapper, phlegmy Stays-High. Double-crossed Cappadonna takes the heat and the jail time while double-crosser Cain* turns the crew's studio over to strictly producing "show tunes and bullshit." Suddenly all the girls are offering up oily handjobs, an aging man loses his world-record shot at sitting in a chair, and a P-Diddy bullshit-ass poster gets ripped in half. It's serious business, but Cappadonna is the only one taking it seriously. Occasionally, an exciting, bloody fight will bust out, but I can't pay attention. I'm too busy thinking about the fart jokes.
Silent but deadly
Somebody go wake up Cappadonna and tell him he did it. Re-dubbing a rough-looking print of Chang Cheh's Duel of the Iron Fist so that it plays out like a street drama filled with junior-high bathroom humor is the best thing he's had his name over the title of ever since the RZA stopped making his beats.
"Ohhh, I haven't laughed this hard since Paul Lynde was center square!" Me either, nose hair guy.
*Squish Stalinsky, if you're out there, I want you to know that you deserve to somehow retroactively win a 2001 Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe. I've already got five signatures on my petition. Well, four right now, but my mom promised she'd sign it too.)
Lady Terminator, I've been watching you, and I have a confession to make: I'm in love.
I'll always remember how you were when I first saw you: a brash, bra-less anthropology student, more concerned with aceing her thesis on some mythical sunken castle than heeding the ominous warnings of spooky librarians and salty, beer-swizzing catboat cap'ns. "Bewaaare of the South Sea Queen," they said, and maybe you should've, but you can't live in the past, hindsight is 20/20, and gosh, you have really cool boobs.
The coolest
So you've changed a little since then -- so what? I don't care that you're possessed by a homicidal Javanese spirit or that you've got an ancient penis-shredding eel hiding in your vergenius. You'll always be beautiful to me -- then, demure in your reading glasses, and now, expertly cutting down an entire army with an M-16. (Aim for their crotches, darling. They're men and they deserve it.)
Especially these guys
Only now that I've seen you can I say that I truly know what love is, and mine for you can never die, much in the same way you couldn't be killed by gunfire, surface-to-air missiles, or even a tank-driving stoner with a mullet as orange as it was bitchin'. You're the most bulletproof girl I've ever met, Lady Terminator, and I'm asking you to be my lady.
