In my ongoing tribute to the land of MAD MAX and CHOPPER I have come across another good giant crocodile movie that pre-dates ROGUE by a good 20 years. But this one actually has John Jarrat – the widower Russell in ROGUE, the fuckin maniac in WOLF CREEK – as the park ranger hero.

This one reminds me of RAZORBACK a little, because it reminds me of JAWS a little. The director, Arch Nicholson, was second unit director on RAZORBACK, but his movie is in a more realistic vein, less stylized and exaggerated. The crocodile never runs through the side of a house and steals a baby like the razorback did. The photography is pretty naturalistic, it’s by Andrew Lesnie whose name seems familiar because he did the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, the BABE movies, and I AM LEGEND.

There’s a scene that has to be a deliberate homage to JAWS where everybody’s playing on the beach and a woman spots the croc and tries to warn the kids to get out of the water, but one kid gets eaten in front of everybody. But it’s an Australian twist because half of the kids on the beach are aborigines. That’s what makes this story unique is the conflict between the “white fellas” who just want to kill the crocodile, and the aborigines who won’t let them.

Jarratt plays Steve, a conservationist who believes in the protection policy put in place to appease the tribal leaders who consider crocodiles sacred. He points out that crocodiles have lived in these parts for millions of years, but Australians made them endangered in 20. But if you ever get a chance try convincing white people to protect crocodiles when one of them just ate a kid whole in front of 30 or 40 witnesses. It’s not easy.

So Steve’s plan is to kill the one giant croc before all the yahoos come in and kill all the other ones. Pretty good plan, but he has trouble finding the one and before you know it poachers are going ape. I’ve never seen so many crocodile head shots in a movie before. Or any for that matter.

What makes the movie cool is the twist that happens when Steve tries to enlist the help of the tribal leader Oondabund, whose family has had a relationship with this croc for generations. It seems the only way to find the croc is to get eaten by it, but this guy knows how to find it. Steve needs his help because a poacher just got his arm bit off and the hoopla is sure to get the protection policy lifted.

Oondabund won’t kill the croc so they hatch a plan to capture it and bring it to the breeding grounds away from civilization, then kill a different croc and pretend that was the right one. So the climactic action sequence is not a crocodile hunt, but a truck chase with the giant crocodile strapped to the back and the one-armed hunter and his friends trying to catch up to kill it. Imagine JAWS but instead of killing the shark Richard Dreyfus puts it on the back of a truck and drives off before Quint can kill it.

This is an enjoyable movie and another feather in the cap of Australian cinema. Unfortunately it was apparently never seen in Australia (due to the distributor going under before its release) and in the US it’s only on VHS.

SPECIAL BONUS REVIEW: TRIPWIRE

Here’s another obscure VHS-only release that I watched this weekend. It has no connection to DARK AGE but I don’t have much to say about it and I’m a critic who plays by his own rules, so what the hell. I’m sticking it on the end of the other review. And you can’t stop me.

TRIPWIRE caught my eye with its painted cover of a dude being dragged behind a truck. Strangely enough there’s that other movie THE HIT LIST which caught my attention with its cover of a guy being dragged on the front of a car about to drive over tire spikes, and HIT LIST director William Lustig is credited with the story for TRIPWIRE.

It’s not much of a story though. Something about a suspended cop (some dude named Terence Knox) who visits his ex-wife just before his son gets kidnapped by a terrorist (David Warner). The son is played by Andras Jones of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 fame – the only guy besides Jason to have a martial arts duel with Freddy. The cop/dad isn’t on the force anymore so he makes a fake ID and goes to transfer a prisoner so he can torture information out of him. One of the few succesful attempts at badassery in the movie is when the prisoner boasts that he can’t do anything to make him talk without getting in trouble and then he reveals that he isn’t really an FBI agent and has just kidnapped him.

Yaphet Kotto plays an FBI captain or somesuch, which is kind of cool because you can just pretend you’re watching HOMICIDE.

The box description plays up the stunt team on the movie, which was smart because it got me to rent it. Sure enough there are a bunch of motorcycle chases and shit. All pretty cool but not spectacular when you’ve watched the best. The standout was definitely a snowmobile chase, I liked that one. The get lots of air, one of them goes over a cliff, then they fight in the snow.

The problem is this Knox guy, while convincingly tough, doesn’t have alot of charisma. He’s adequate but not enough to make you excited about this generic story.

The one thing that kept me watching was waiting to see if Viggo Mortensen would ever talk. He plays one of David Warner’s two thugs, and mostly stands around looking menacing. Toward the end he finally talks when he threatens to strangle Andras Jones, and that’s when you learn he’s supposed to be German. (That explains why the credits call him “Hans”.) Then he gets acid thrown in his face and he screams. It’s funny, because you could never imagine a guy playing a thug in a low-rent action movie like this would go on to a performance as jawdroppingly spectacular as the one he did in EASTERN PROMISES last year. But at the same time I imagine it probaly helped to have played roles like this, because at the beginning of the EASTERN PROMISES he’s the same type of character – hired thug who stands around trying to scare people without saying or doing anything.

Anyway, interesting cast with some good stunts but if you’re searching for gold mines like I am you can move along.

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Basically this is the story of a regular guy whose kid is mistakenly kidnapped and he tries to get him back. I thought because of the title that he would have a list of people to get revenge on, but really he’s just going after this one guy who has his kid.

Like VIGILANTE alot of the fun is in the ridiculous way the story unfolds. There’s this mobster (Leo Rossi) who gets busted and the feds are trying to get him to turn over on his mentor (Rip Torn!). Torn has a badass hired killer to take care of any potential prosecution witnesses, so the feds have Rossi and his son cooped up in a suburban house. But the phone is tapped so the killer is dispatched to this address.

Meanwhile, our hero’s son is having trouble being picked on by bullies. His “Uncle Brian” (Harold Sylvester in a Steve James-style thankless role as the badass African-American friend who gets killed immediately) teaches him a few karate moves. Then he shuts the door too hard and the 9 on their address flips over to look like a 6. So the killer comes to the wrong house, shoots Uncle Brian and mom and kidnaps who he thinks is Rossi’s son.

Our hero, dad, comes home to the crime scene and is understandably upset. And he gets more upset when he happens to overhear that one of these feds (Charlies Napier) is not gonna go after the kidnappers but instead will lock him up to keep the mistake a secret until Rossi is able to testify.

So dad goes out for justice himself, and ends up getting Rossi as a mismatched partner. So the stage is set for a good b-movie, something Lustig has been known to deliver. But there are two fiends who conspire to obstruct Lustig from his goal: an actor named Jan-Michael Vincent and a disease called alcoholism.

Yep. The hero is played by Jan-Michael Vincent, who’s no Robert Forster in terms of presence. I guess people know him as the guy from AIRWOLF, but I never watched that show so I mostly think of him as a young motorcycle riding hotshot in movies like THE MECHANIC with Charles Bronson and DAMNATION ALLEY with George Peppard. Time and spirits have not been kind to his face between those movies and 1989, but he doesn’t end up looking grizzled. He just doesn’t look like a movie star. Maybe a little league coach. More importantly he must’ve been hard to get ahold of during moments of clarity. Scenes without him seem like a real movie but alot of the scenes with him are awkwardly pieced together with him obviously not in the same shots as the other actors. In one early scene he’s in his backyard laying on a bench trying to play it off as “just kickin it” as opposed to “too drunk to stand up.”

So poor Jan-Michael holds the movie back but the other elements are strong enough that I think it’s still kind of a gem, or at least kind of a smooth shiny rock you find on a beach. An agate. The best thing about the movie by far is the guy who plays the hired killer, Lance God Damn Henriksen.

I’m always looking for a good Lance Henriksen performance that I haven’t seen, and damn if this isn’t one of the better ones, up there with his villains in STONE COLD, HARD TARGET and maybe even NEAR DARK. I mean, the guy is introduced as a shoe salesman. We learn that he makes all this money doing hits for the mob but he doesn’t do it for the money, he just has a passion for murder. So he keeps it real and keeps his day job at the shoe store. There’s something creepy about that, I can’t quite put my finger on it. But next time some dude is shoehorning a pair onto you just think about how many people he’s killed. (This one’s “killed so many people he owns his own cemetery.” Not literally, I don’t think.)

And then as soon as Lance starts killing it’s clear that he’s even more of a badass than you’ve ever seen him play before. He seems to have ninja training. He effortlessly goes into a jail and kills everybody on both sides of the bars. He does martial arts, he’s good with knives, he’s acrobatic, he likes to drop from above. Okay, he’s kind of stupid about finding the correct address, but otherwise he’s a master killer.

It occurred to me while watching him fight Uncle Brian that this is kind of a glimpse at what it would’ve been like if he had played The Terminator like Cameron originally planned. In fact he might as well be a cyborg in the great final battle where Vincent drives around a parking garage with Lance hanging on. He grips the top of the car (Jan-Michael bites his hand), he hangs off of a swinging car door, gets bumped against walls and pillars, almost falls off the edge, hangs on the bottom. Man, how is Jan-Michael gonna get rid of this guy? I can’t imagine how he’ll be able to do it. Oh, by the way here’s a picture of the cover:

Another thing that puts this one over the top into unheralded agate territory is the hilarious behavior of the kid during the climactic showdown. Henriksen is carrying the kid under one arm, busting off shots at Jan-Michael, who’s dancing around behind some parked cars like a coward, and all the while the kid is yelling “Get him dad! Get him!” as if dad has the upper hand. Then as soon as dad has managed to shoot Henriksen the kid is happy and smiling and he says “Where’s mom?” As if he expected both parents to come along on this gun battle/car rampage. I guess she doesn’t really care about him, does she? What a terrible mother. Then moments after that they’re driving away and Rossi, who the kid has barely seen before, if ever, has his arm around him and they have big smiles on their faces. Not a traumatic event at all. Everything’s great now. Dad killed the bad guy. I’m not sure how, because he’s just a regular dude, and Lance Henriksen is a ninja. But he did it. You got him, dad!

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But there are some pretty good ones in his filmography, especially the first one, MANIAC. That was a sleazy, brutal horror picture about a sweaty New York pervert who kills women, staples their scalps to a mannequin, handcuffs himself to the mannequin and cries. Then during the daytime he puts on shades and tries to make it as a hip fashion photographer. It’s a real sick movie with ridiculous gore effects by Mr. Tom Savini. Not recommended for anybody unless they like that kind of crap, which in this case I do.

VIGILANTE is not as good but it’s sort of like what you might expect in a DEATH WISH type revenge movie from the director of MANIAC. It follows the completely stripped down revenge movie formula with the occasional bit of more gore than you expect. Good ol’ Robert Forster plays an everyday type dude with a wife and young son. But he lives in New York City and they got lots of ’70s/early ’80s style crime. One day while he’s out drinking with some car work buddies, his wife has a run-in with some asshole Hispanic gang members in berets (they must’ve seen THE WARRIORS) who spray gas on her, then follow her home, stab her repeatedly, and blow the baby son out the window with a shot gun. At least in the director’s cut that’s available on DVD, this is a real brutal scene. I couldn’t believe they actually blew the kid away. I don’t want to sound like a prude but I don’t care if some lady insulted you at the gas station, you don’t shotgun a cute little kid like that. It’s just not right, in my opinion. Cut it out, babyshooters.

So anyway Robert takes these guys to court but the judge is a real dick and plus we all know what type of a picture this is so the leader of the gang gets off on a lesser charge and Robert has a big outburst in court: “This guy killed my son! You’re letting him get away with it!”

The biggest twist here is that not only does the killer get off, but the victim gets sent to prison for two years for his outburst! (On the commentary track Lustig calls this ridiculous method of audience manipulation “throwing more wood on the fire.”) Robert doesn’t fit in in the joint either, he almost gets punked in the shower, but fortunately Woody Strode helps him out.

Meanwhile, Robert’s buddies including Fred Williamson are on the outside executing some vigilante justice against weaselly motherfuckers in denim vests selling drugs to kids. Fuckers. There is alot of chasing and climbing around shit and jumping off roofs involved. I wouldn’t want the Hammer chasing after me if I was that little white bitch.

But the one classic scene in the movie is when Robert gets out of the can. It shows him leaving and then walking directly to the playground where the vigilante gang hang out to play handball with at risk teens or something. Robert just walks up to Fred Williamson and says, “I want him.” They all stand around, not saying anything, just looking intense. Then suddenly the badass music comes in and they are on their way for revenge.

As you know, I love that kind of shit. What else needs to be said? Nothing. The rest of the movie is completely what you expect (they kill the people responsible, the end) but it gets some kind of a kick out of being introduced in that simple manner.

This is about as simple as a movie could be, following the formula with almost no extra flourishes at all. I mean there’s just nothing there. But it’s such a good formula, though. With the charisma of Forster and Williamson, it’s hard not to enjoy it at least a little bit. I get kind of a kick out of the heavy-handedness of the movie. It opens with Williamson in a basement giving a big speech about how we need to fight back against the “scum.” When it’s Fred it sounds a little less fascist and a little more cool.

When I see this kind of movie I have to wonder – is that really how people saw the world back then? I don’t really know. It seems like in the movies you can’t walk down the street without some corny black or Hispanic gang pulling a switchblade on you and trying to rape your wife. And the fuckin bureaucrats man, and the red tape and what not. Getting off on a technicality. And there’s no choice but to go Abu Ghraib on the motherfuckers, I guess. I can’t really remember if that was the general mood at the time or just during the 90 minutes that you were watching the movie. My guess is that at one point there really were people that had experienced that type of victimization and were so emotional about it they couldn’t see criminals as anything more than subhuman “scum” and “slime” and “dirt” and “filth.” But then the movies tapping into that got popular so a bunch of people who really didn’t give a shit either way started copying the movie version of criminals until the rest of the world really started to believe in them.

[ratings]

So I got this notion the other day that it’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed the horrors and whattaya know, suddenly this week there is a new horror picture in the theaters, American Psycho. This is a gorey picture based on the hated killer yuppie novel by Bret Easton Ellis, which brought up an assload of controversy at the time even when there were no plans for it to be published. Imagine writing a book and just the fact that it’s been written causes everybody to get all worked up and bust out the pitchforks. Ellis was attacked by everyone from feminists to right wing bible christians, to probably even drug addicts in superman costumes as well as the media who you would think would enjoy the american rights of free speech. Only a handful of critics and authors even noticed that the book was supposed to be a dark satire of yuppie values.

Now ten years later American Psycho is a major motion picture so what I decided to do was rent some horror DVDs and maybe I’ll see American Psycho later.

The first one I saw was Maniac and to my surprise this is some kind of a minor classic or what not. I don’t think this one has much of a reputation as far as, “this movie is good” however, let the reputation start now. This is a gritty picture made in New York around the time of the Son of Sam murders. It is made in the tradition of the chainsaw pictures and what not that try to push the envelope of what is acceptable in a horror piece, and make everybody get uncomfortable and hopefully piss their pants or at least leak a few drops without realizing it. The movie is VERY fucking sleazy and gorey, but what makes it work is that it also has heart.

You see the protagonist, an abstract artist named Frank Maniac who looks more like some kind of truck driver or maybe television repair man, really is a maniac – but as played by the late great character actor Joe Spinnell, you start to have a bit of empathy for the poor bastard. I mean, a real small amount, but more than you’d have for a Jason or a Freddy or even a Chucky.

I mean yes, this motherfucker does blow a dude’s head off, stalk and kill some gals and staple their scalps to mannequines, and etc. I am not justifying all that business. But Spinell doesn’t play Frank as some cackling evil man like Freddy, he plays him as a lonely, vulnerable bastard who was beaten as a kid and still suffers from delusions about his mother that cause him to have a BIT of a problem with women. I mean this dude is like Norman Bates, except fatter and sweatier and he moans alot and is a landlord in a small apartment building instead of a hotel manager in a big scary house at the Universal Studios theme park.

Most of the picture is from Frank’s point of view, forcing us to live the life of the maniac. One of the best parts requires some suspension of the disbelief, because it’s in the part where Frank starts dating a glamorous fashion photographer. While a bunch of models strut around and the cameras flash and the disco music plays, our man the maniac sits on the side waiting for his gal to get off work. And he’s all dressed up, his hair combed and he’s holding a teddy bear. I mean this motherfucker looks so out of place. We know what he’s like underneath, we’ve seen what happens when he hires a hooker, we’ve seen him cry and handcuff himself to a mannequin and moan, “I’m so happy.” We know this maniac’s secrets and now here he is wearing hipster clothes trying to fit into the social scene.

The setting is really important too, this really is a realistic take on the scary side of the “big apple” as they would say on entertainment tonight. What the fuck is that all about? Anway apparently the picture was shot real cheap on the 16 millimeter film and I think having to stretch the budget and not make it so slick is part of why they came up with something so good.

This is a very well made movie, with lots of grit and dread and disturbing ideas. If you like the raw ’70s horror classics do not miss this piece. Also the DVD has a good commentary track with the director William Lustig, special effects guy/guy who gets killed in the movie Tom Savini, the producer, and some guy who was friends with Joe Spinell. Plus a whole pile of other crap.

From the same director Lustig comes Maniac Cop made ten years later and somewhere in those ten years the magic has gone. I guess it’s along the lines of how all the soul music and what not, they made good music in the seventies but then in the ’80s with the invention of the casio keyboard it all turned to crap, including Return of Bruno, sadly enough. The Lustig pictures apparently are the same way because this one oughta be gangbusters but it’s not.

I mean this picture has alot going for it. Number one, it stars Bruce Campbell. Number two, it makes fun of cops. Number three, and I think most of the “internet geeks” will agree with me on this one, it stars Bruce Campbell. But somehow, the picture still isn’t very good.

The idea is that there is this big tall maniac who kills people, who is wearing a police uniform and white gloves, and he keeps killing people. Nobody knows who he is, or if he is a real cop or just a guy who wants to be a cop and dresses up like them and acts like them.

Well there is this other cop played by Bruce Campbell, and I guess you’re supposed to wonder at first if he’s the Maniac Cop, but give me a fucking break do you think we’re retarded? Turns out he’s been framed and he has to prove he’s not the Maniac Cop, and then the Maniac Cop turns out to be a zombie or some stupid shit like that, I forgot exactly what it was. If I was a film critic I would check the press kit and find out for sure but actually I am a Film Writer, thank you very much. There’s a pretty big difference and don’t you forget it.

I have seen worse movies than this that’s for sure, and it does have a good point about how cops are maniac zombies that kill people. But it’s not scary, it’s not funny, it doesn’t have any of the gritty look or atmosphere of Maniac and it definitely doesn’t have any character (including Bruce’s) that is anywhere near as interesting as Frank Maniac. It’s pretty much by the books cop movies combined with by the books killer movie, with no twists or extra special touches worth mentioning. And the look is much to slick and full of cliches. I mean what kind of a jackass puts in a special effect lightning strike in to make a movie scary? This is 1988 pal not an Abbot and Costello movie. Why don’t you go back and study a little picture called Maniac starring Joe Spinell.

Bruce is on the commentary track on the DVD though so it’s worth listening to, and I like hearing this guy Lustig tell stories.

Then there is Henry the Portrait of the Serial Killer. This picture was made in 1986, two years before Die Hard, but was not released until 1990, two years after Die Hard. It was released unrated because the MPAA censorship board said that there was no way it could be given an r-rating, there was nothing that needed to be cut, it was just the whole mood of the film.

And I gotta admit the bastards have a point, this is not a movie you will want to watch on your birthday. I mean this is a pretty gloomy story. It is just like the title says, Henry is a serial killer and you follow his life as he teaches his buddy Otis how to get away with and enjoy murder, and as Otis’s sister unknowingly gets close to these crazy fucks.

Henry is played by Michael Rooker, who is kind of a scary dude who plays cops and villains alot, but this was his breakout role. He is very good, his eyes are dark and his soul really seems empty. The movie has kind of a realistic, documentary feel that is extra disturbing when these fucks steal a video camera and start making home movies of their killing spree. You thought “blair witch”, “man bites dog” and all this was fucked up, wait until you see THE ORIGINAL fictional video tape murder. It’s like clockwork orange meets america’s disturbing police chase videos.

Like I said man, don’t watch this one with your grandma. It is not a pretty sight and it is not something you are going to have fun watching unless you’re some kind of inbred leatherface type who masturbates to faces of death videos and reads books about snuff movies and satanic cults. But for the rest of you if you like a really well made movie that stares into the ugly blackness of the dark human heart of blah blah blah or whatever, well… have at it boys.

On the DVD, you got a trailer for Henry Part 2. I mean, gimme a fucking break. Actually it doesn’t look as bad as you’d think, but there’s some other dude playing Henry. In other words, it is not Michael Rooker. It’s some other guy. Sorry bud, but forget it. I’m out.

Anyway let me know how the american psycho is guys thanks

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