Two new releases:

A  couple of minor releases from last week's haul at Blockbuster.

Machined is a horror/splatter wannabe that was made with an ultra-low budget, and a strange conception of lighting. Do you remember how indoor home movies were made back in the fifties and sixties? Basically, some very intense track lighting would be directed on the subject to be photographed.  If the room itself was quite dark, the film would look like a harshly-lit person or persons standing in front of a black background. This film cultivates (I guess it was intentional) that same look with digital video, using unlit rooms and spotlight-style lighting. Hey, when you have no money, you have to improvise to give a film any unique pizzazz.

The story is about a fat, bald, hairy mechanic who lives in a cluttered garage in a remote desert. His name is Motor Man Dan, and he's a collector of serial murderer memorabilia. Hey, his mom threw out his baseball cards. Having raised the collection to its practical limit, he dreams of the ultimate acquisition  -  an actual serial murderer. Realizing that he can't just obtain one, and being a technophile, he decides to make one instead. He kidnaps an accident victim and "repairs" him with machine parts. Other machines make the victim into Dan's robo-killer. Assuming you buy into that, you can deduce how Dan uses his new toy. Well, he collects serial killer memorabilia, after all, and this guy is not yet a serial killer, so he had better get crackin' ...

This is a very poor film in many ways, as you might expect from the description and the zero budget, and yet it accomplishes a lot of what it hopes for. Although the pace sometimes slows to a crawl, it is creepy and disgusting, and might leave you feeling that you have to vomit. And I don't mean in the same sense that Glitter makes you want to vomit. It's genuinely nas-tay. The guy who plays Motor Man Dan is a truly gross individual. Think of the once-famous wrestler George "The Animal" Steele. A gruesome atmosphere is created by the flickering lights in otherwise stygian darkness, the clutter, the ominous rusted-out technology, and the ubiquitous buzzing and crackling of electrical shorts.

Surprisingly, the violence isn't very explicit. You'd think the premise would lead to a gorehound's delight, but basically the victims get bound and then stabbed from behind. There is some messy bleeding, but no exposed internal organs, not much shown on camera. (Budget constraints, I guess.)

If the writer/director had had a few bucks at his disposal, he might have created a creepy cult classic like Saw. As it is, it's a macabre curiosity.

 

Nessa Hawkins

 

Don't Tell is an Italian film which was one of the nominees for last year's Oscar for the Best Foreign-Language Picture. It tells the story of a woman who is suddenly overcome with trepidation when her significant other starts to talk about having a bambino. She starts having nightmares about herself as a child ....

The essence of the film consists of her need to understand what caused her sudden psychological breakdown. The general theme of the film is to present the sorts of effects of child abuse which can linger into adulthood. I would have given you a "spoiler" warning about writing that except that there is no mystery for the audience, only for the character. Even though I speak no Italian, I could figure out from her very first nightmare that she was molested by her father when she was a girl. She, on the other hand, has repressed that memory, and spends the entire film trying to discover what we already know.

Although the film has some soap opera undertones and even a gratuitous lesbian sub-plot, there's no sensationalism. The film is sensitive, classy and mature. It's also beautifully photographed, but frankly, that Oscar nomination is difficult to understand. The Academy has many procedures to review in the next few years, and the nominating process for these foreign films should be, in my opinion, at the very top of the list.  You would think that there had to be hundreds of better choices than this. It is rated a dreary 52 at Metacritic, and RT reports that it received only 29% positive reviews - and it was only reviewed by the most serious critics. The film is scored 6.9 at IMDB and only two demographic groups score it higher than 7.1: females under 18, and females over 45. Does that sound like Oscar territory to you? The reviewers noted that this is basically an Oxygen or Lifetime movie, except with better production values and people speaking in Italian. There's nothing very negative to be said about it, but there's really nothing very special or very cinematic about it either, especially given the fact that the audience is not allowed to solve the mystery along with her, and thus spends the entire movie waiting for her to figure out the obvious.

 

Giovanna Mezzogiorno

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

What can you say about a movie that died?  Oh, that's not fair.  Aroused (1966) is not half-bad.  And that's not true...it is half-bad but that means its also half-good and so you wind up paying a price for some entertainment. 

Story starts with a professional gal, played by Marlene Stevens, servicing a client who acts as though he's out on a date.  Treat a hooker like a lady, I suppose.  At her bedroom window is another fella who has a problem with prostitutes...something about his mommy or some such nonsense.  So what does the poor lad do?  He spends his free time peeping on them as they work their craft.  This is something like a vegetarian who hangs out at a steak restaurant watching 'em fry up some dead cow.  Deranged guy kills off Marlene's character, after which he ... uh, well ... has her do in death what she'd done so well in life.  End Scene 1.

Marlene's lesbian lover comes home, finds a guy hovering over the body of her roomie and gets about this close to sticking a knife in him.  A few side notes: 1) This gal is one strange lesbian because she will do a guy for fun later in the movie; 2) The actress playing her is credited as Djanine Lenon, but IMDb says her real name is Janine Lenon...but this is the only movie she ever did, according to them, so how did they know what her real name was?  And since it was the only movie for which she was credited, why not use the name in that one, lonely endeavor?  3) The guy she almost knifes plays a cop who is as big a fuck-up as John Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction.  Not that he blows the head off some guy named Marvin ... no he does things that are way worse.  First he sets up another hooker as bait without providing her with adequate protection.  That woman, played by the gorgeous Fleurette Carter, bites the dust.  Then he screws the hooker played by Djanine after he's sent his wife home with a guy he barely knows and who, as it turns out, is the deranged prostitute killer.  In The Big Apple you do not send a gal home with anyone who is not related to you or her.

Not to worry. The young wife (played by Joanna Mills) survives, then a host of working women get their revenge by removing the bad guy's offending masculinity. Yikes!  A suppose if a guy's gonna eat fried chicken, he's a-gonna get greasy. 

What about the nekkidness?

• You see Marlene topless in bed, topless in the mirror of her bathroom (no, Doris Wishman did not make this movie) and finally in a triple-B shower performance.  The third, furry B is unintentional and occurs in only a frame or two.  You will find it in the middle frame of her last collage.  Marlene was a real cutie who shoulda done about two dozen more movies.

• Djanine is topless in a post-coital scene.  Her expression changes as she realizes her cop-lover is a dumbshit. Djanine was also more than sorta attractive ... reminds of me a 70's actress whose name I cannot remember.  She, too, should have had a very long career.

• Joanna Mills, who plays the wife, gives up some bum and exactly three frames of one nip. I got them all.   Joanna did make several more movies and did a couple of guest shots on TV.  It seems from Aroused and the other of her movies that has been capped ... The Love Merchant ... that she preferred to give up very little on camera.

• And then there is Fleurette.  Her topless and bloodied body makes an appearance but the "blood" looks so amateurish ... as if she had let a chocolate ice cream cone melt all over her...that I didn't mind doing a couple of caps. 

So there you have it.  No one I know would watch this puppy more than once but lots of people I know would find it worth 75 minutes on a cold night when the cable was down and the streets were frozen over. 
 

Film clips:

• Djanine Lenon (zipped .avi)

• Marlene Stevens (zipped .avi)

• Joanna Mills (zipped .avi). Don't blink. You'll miss the exposure.

Marlene Stevens

Djanine Lenon

Joanna Mills

Fleurette Carter

 

Lindsay Lohan. No shenanigans this time, just a day at the beach in a bikini. Look at that weird skin! This woman should NOT ever be in the sun. My dad had the same kind of freckles everywhere on his body. Fortunately for me, I didn't inherit a single freckle.