Short of the Week #53: The Adder's Bite

Digging back to 2010, here's a short that has always confounded me in Firas Momami's The Adder's Bite.

I haven't a lick of an idea of how the bookends of this piece relate to the nightmarish images of its middle, but maybe I'm not supposed to.

❤❤❤

R.I.P. Dick Miller 1928-2019

I was very sad to hear about the passing of prolific actor Dick Miller a few days ago. He was 90.

R.I.P. Dick Miller 1928-2019.

As someone who grew up watching genre movies, Miller was perhaps one of the most visible actors of my childhood. Along with John Saxon, his appearance would always bring a smile to my face. His longtime moniker as “That Guy” was apt because it was years before I even knew his name. It's fitting that became the title of his eventual biography in 2014.

Whether it was the ill-fated gun store owner in The Terminator, the crusty janitor in Chopping Mall or beleaguered veteran in Gremlins, Miller chalked up countless acting roles. Though most famous for said walk-on parts, he did have a few leading roles while working with Roger Corman in the fifties, in 1957's Rock All Night and A Bucket of Blood two years later. The former title should be sought out, as it's a terrific film and Miller is great in it.

Rest in peace, Mr. Miller. Here's to a wonderful career.

Potatoes

This week's VHS is Jackie Kong's 1983 monster movie The Being.

A mutated creature born of nuclear waste terrorizes a sleepy Idaho town.

Sadly, there were only a handful of women directing genre films during the eighties, but Jackie Kong made a name for herself starting with this debut. Is it great? Well no, as it suffered from the a lot of the usual pitfalls of low budget cinema.

For instance, the script was all over the place, aimlessly meandering from character to character as they got offed by a shadowy creature. And although that may have escalated the body count, a lot of the kills happened offscreen or were buried in darkness – admittedly some of that could've been my muddy VHS. Then Martin Landau showed up waving his geiger counter around to explain away why the only living thing affected by nuclear waste in the water supply seemed to be a lone missing child. What a missed opportunity!

Perhaps most perplexing was the lead actor (producer Bill Osco, credited as both Rexx Coltrane AND Johnny Commander) who put in a largely wooden performance as Mortimer Lutz. It also didn't help that his internal monologues were inexplicably dropped after the first act. From then on, Osco spent the rest of the running time barely reacting to the numerous things that kept popping out at him. Oh, and he was immune to cyanide gas apparently. Neat.

And speaking of the title character, until you finally get to see it in all its one-eyed glory at the end, it was really hard to get a sense of it because it seemed to change shape and size from scene to scene. Sometimes it was human-sized, sometimes smaller. Sometimes it had tentacles, sometimes it was like The Blob and phased from liquid to solid. At least Kong added a line about an underground tunnel system to rationalize how it seemed to be everywhere in the town at once.

So while not having as much bang for your B-movie buck as say Ed Hunt's The Brain or Greydon Clark's Without Warning, The Being still had its moments. At the end of the day, it's hard not to acknowledge that Kong was just twenty-three when she wrote and directed her debut that sported two award winners in Landau & Dorothy Malone. That's an impressive feat for any gender.

Short of the Week #52: Boniato

This week's short film is one of my faves from 2015 in Eric Mainade, Andres & Diego Meza-Valdes' Boniato.

Though its length is a bit cumbersome, I really love the world building in this short, as well as the level of confidence shown by this trio of filmmakers. Since Boniato, Mainade has continued working as a stunt performer and the Valdes Brothers are now in television.

ZZZombie Lake

While having a conversation about Jean Rollin (as one does) last weekend, I realized that I hadn't yet watched my Wizard VHS of his 1981 flick Zombie Lake. This has since been rectified.

A group of murdered Nazis spring up from a local pond to reap revenge on the townsfolk that ambushed them many years before.

During said discussion, I described his filmography as “running the gamut between Hammer art house and soft core porn” for which Zombie Lake feels closer to the latter. It sure doesn't waste any time in that regard, as a young nymph almost immediately strips before going swimming in the titular lake/barely disguised swimming pool before being pulled under by a zombie. I'd have felt bad for her if she hadn't literally pulled down the no swimming sign earlier.

A little history. I first became acquainted with Rollin back when the Scream channel was a thing back in the aughts. They used to play double bills of his films late on Friday nights, but I actually had to start taping them to watch the next morning because though his work is pretty, it is often like cinematic Ny-Quil. Zombie Lake was no different, as the first half was barely a movie and more of a thin construct to get from one nude scene to another and as I'm typing this I'm wondering why this sounds like a complaint... Eventually the essence of a story emerges, but it's more of a sloppy patchwork of better pictures – think 2000 Maniacs without the gore or personality.

Jean Rollin's Shock Wav-- I mean, Zombie Lake!

I read that Rollin was embarrassed by this movie, having been a last minute replacement for Jess Franco so I guess it was doomed from the start. I wager most of the budget went to the Nazi uniforms, vehicles and flamethrowers and everything else was just fly-by-night. Did I mention there were a lot of naked ladies in this? Because there are. If only they had some decent gore to go with it, they'd have really had something to hang their hat on here, but sadly it was of the green and red paint variety.

Only thing missing from this scene is a flower...

Apart from the sky high skin ratio, Zombie Lake was a snooze-fest. However, I came away from this with one burning question about that scene with the frolicking basketball team. In 1981, did Europeans (or at least the people who dubbed this movie) not know what basketball was?

Short of the Week #51: Special Day

This week's short is one of my faves from last year in Teal Greyhavens' Special Day.

I love everything about this piece. Greyhavens cut his teeth in the filmmaking biz with several documentaries, but in 2018 made a trio of narrative shorts with the above being the most recent. I can't wait to see what lies ahead.