(contd.)
Schock
Mario Bava, 1977
Lars gets back up and announces that the next film will be Mario Bava. His last one in fact, entitled Schock. he then says that they retitled the movie Beyond the Door 2 because there was a horrible Exorcist rip-off called Beyond the Door that made money so when they imported this they called it the sequel. According to Lars, this is an insult to Bava and everything he stands for. Aside from that though, this movie has the best screaming ever in it.
Now, from what I know of Bava, he feigned sickness toward the end of his career to let his son Lamberto get some experience behind the camera. Schock seems closer to Lamberto's debut Macabre than the other films of Mario that I've seen. The body count is pretty low but it's very odd and very psychological and the few scenes of gore that they do show are pretty worth it.
This, perhaps a precursor to that boring-ass movie Birth, is about a woman (Daria Nicolodi, Asia Argento's hot (in an Italian way) mom) and her son (some kid they picked out of the freaky farm) and her new hubby move back to the house where she lived with her first hubby, who we're told was an addict and depressio and died at sea or something. Of course, the kid gets semi-possessed by the dead for-some-reason-vengeful first hubby. The kid proceeds to get mad whenever she screws her new hubby, tries to initiate some mom/son action, and acts weird and possessed-like for the whole movie. At the end we find out that she is psycho and killed her first hubby but her second hubby knows and has tried to hide it all this time but then she kills him too and assorted furniture moves and haunts her to the point where she thinks ghosts are slitting her throat but it's really her.
So check my entry for
Macabre against my entry for
Twitch of the Death Nerve and see if I'm not right about the Mario/Lamberto thing.
Devil Fetus
Hung Chuen Lau, 1983
At the beginning of the night, when we were still fresh and innocent, Harry said that the last movie had the best title ever, and neither he nor Lars had seen it.
Now here we are. The last movie of the night. Technically it's already daylight out but since we're all in the theater we don't know/care. The numbers have thinned, only the most hardcore are still present. Sitting there for about ten hours, stewing in our air-conditioned horror-adled geekiness. Lars silently approves of all of us with a gleam in his eye. As a treat, he unveils what the rest of the world will know in a few days: that Quentin Tarantino is coming back this September for QT6: the next multi-day film festival programmed by the man himself: Quentin Tarantino. We are the first people in the world (aside from QT and the Alamo folk... and the AICN folk.. and probably some other people too) to know about it. I remember reading about previous QT fests on AICN and being so jealous i would just close the window. I didn't even want to read the titles of the films he showed because all of Austin and their little slice of heavenly cool film community there could go and suck an egg as far as I'm concerned. Well, now I'm in that little slice of heavenly cool film community. In fact, at this moment I am in the red blood-gushing heart of it with maybe a hundred of my closest horror-gonzo bretheren, awaiting a movie with a name like Devil Fetus to start.
I should mention that they had vintage horror trailers preceding every one of the films. Some really classic ones too. I can't begin to remember any of them but just believe me when I tell you that they were cool.
Devil Fetus. chinese. made in the 80s. Very uneven in extremes. The bad scenes were pretty unbearable but the good ones... oh man were they goooooood.
This woman buys this "vase" that really looks more like a giant phallus with a little demon holding onto it than anything that could ever hold flowers. She touches this thing while laying in bed and suddenly this greyish veiny monster is on top of her having his "way." These two kids try to look at it and she snatches it away from them and runs upstairs to admire it again. Her hubby gets home from like six months away or something and walks in to see the devil mid-coitus. He reverts back to the "vase" and he grabs it and smashes it down on the floor. Dust rises up to his face and it immediately begins to turn purple and massive fleshy pustules form all over. He then rips off half his face, revealing maggots and worms, and gets so disgusted that he leaps out the window to his death. The woman also dies. During her funeral, the priest dude sees inside the coffin that her belly swells all up and this titular devil fetus pops out. He puts some ban on it in the form of a few flimsy pieces of paper hung precariously over a small stone plaque and says that it will take her a dozen years before she gets to go to heaven or whatever.
That's like, the first five minutes. After that, it's all about the two young boys grown up and blah blah blah, evil possession ensues, more furniture moves around, some pretty crazy stop-motion kung-fu-esque stuff happens, long story short one of the brothers kills the evil-possessed brother and he turns into the devil and he chops the devil's head off and the neck shoots out three or four snake/larva looking things with heads on them that he also chops off and it's all over. thank god.
Other highlights include an evil-possessed dog getting the samurai sword, spraying enough blood into this girl's face that she actually spits out like a mouth-full of it. There's also the old help-i'm-caught-in-the-sauna-and-the-walls-are-closing-in head explosion against the glass door chestnut, done adequately well, and a few scenes of the evil-possessed brother chowing down on doggy and human flesh thrown in for good measure. It's pretty safe to say that the movie fit our collective mindset pretty well as a "last movie" and the really really terrible subtitles gave us plenty of laughs in between the gore-outs ("something evil has beaitched your brother!").
And then it was over, just like that. Slowly we scattered out into the early Sunday sunlight, a bunch of zombies let loose on the deserted downtown Austin area. Soon we covered the streets, small groups of black t-shirt wearing horror fans twitching from too much sugar and caffeine each heading to their cars or homes. Just over thirteen hours after leaving, I entered my too-bright apartment. I survived. I'm ready for the next one.