Listomania: Thomas' January Jetsam of 2013

Good lord I watched a lot of movies in January. I'm sure Mr. Christensen still has me beat, but my count of 55 feature films is a pretty respectable number, I think. Depending on your definition of "respectable". Here are some of the titles that are notable, that didn't, or have yet to, make it into full reviews.

DREDD (2012): This has gotten a huge amount of post-theatrical praise and it’s definitely one of the best action movies to get a wide theatrical release. Set in a hyper-contemporary re-envisioning of MegaCity 1, crime lord MaMa (here re-envisioned by Lena Headey in a slightly dumpy, petite version) has the hot new street drug slo-mo which causes time to move at a fraction of its normal rate for the user. After making an example of a couple of double-crossers, by skinning them and throwing them off of the top of her apartment bloc, 200 stories up, Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) and rookie Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) take the call. Once in side, the Judges find themselves trapped in the bloc with a bounty on their heads. Yep, that’s it for plot, it’s action on top of action with Urban and screenwriter Alex Garland doing a great job of staying true to the characters (which Stallone found impossible). Dredd and Anderson are so well represented here that it is a real shame that the rest of DREDD’s trappings have absolutely nothing to do with the source material. It's interesting that the filmmakers comment on how rich and deep the source material is and then use hardly any of it. It looks like a slightly more futuristic modern city – which it is, as Johannesburg is MegaCity 1 with very few changes.

The costumes (of everyone except the judges), vehicles, buildings, cars, etc; none are from the source material and MaMa is in the comics (dealing Umty Candy) and she’s a older, fatter and angrier. There are so many details they could have put in, but weren't  The set dressers were the only ones who got it as they threw in little authentic details in the graffiti. I can see how they would think that the bizarreness of the comic might not come off right to a modern audience who hasn't read the comics and maybe there’s some truth to that, but at the same time it sure would be nice to see an adaptation that stayed true to the source material for once. Stallone’s version had fantastic production design, but completely destroyed the characters with a insipid and moronic script. Here, the characters are great, but the production design is for a completely different film. In spite of my nerdy gripes (which, granted, make up the bulk of this review), it is a lot of fun and those of us who skipped it in theaters can hold ourselves responsible for its untimely demise and lack of sequel. Since it’ll probably be another 20 years before anyone can convince backers to try another adaptation, maybe we’ll at least get some sort of incredible animated film like BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS (2012). Maybe.

SPIDER-MAN (1978): Much has been said about the Toei SPIDER-MAN TV series over the years and I have always meant to get around to seeing it, but haven't until now. Remember the whole Peter Parker / Daily Bugle / Doc Oc stuff? Forget all that. They Japanese ain't havin' it! A spaceship called The Marveller crashes into Earth awakening a 400 year old warrior from the planet Spider. The spaceship, carrying Professor Monster (who apparently is a cyborg), is the spearhead of an invasion by the Iron Cross Army. Using his telepathic powers the warrior summons a motorcycle racer named Takuya (Shinji Tôdô) to find him in a cave, where he can snap a spider bracelet on the hapless tween, altering his DNA and turning him into "Spidah-man"! Not only can he spin a web any size and catch thieves just like flies, but he can also command the Marveller to transform into a giant robot (named "Leopardon" - really), drive the GP7 (a flying, jet powered car) and wield a deadly sword. That's right, Spider-man uses a sword. While at first it seems completely freakin' wacko, it's actually really familiar stuff to anyone who has seen any Kamen Rider episodes. Ultraman too, come to think of it. It's a pretty blatant rip-off of Kamen Rider, with Takuya racing around on his custom cycle, then using a device to transform into Spider-man so he can then fight a group of clones (none of them say "Eeeeeee" though) and ultimately fight a cybermonster straight out of any one of the Shocker labs. The GP7 flying out of the Marveller is pretty much the Science Patrol's shuttle on the VTOL from ULTRA-MAN.

Spider-Man realizes that he's...
HOME ALONE!

Once you get over the initial culture shock of seeing Spider-man reinterpreted as an alien with a sword, it is actually a fairly unimpressive Kamen Rider wannabe with Tôdô providing some of the most ghastly over-acting you've ever seen, even by Japanese TV standards. When he receives a slight nick on the left side of his neck from a badguy's blade, he writhes around on the ground screaming like he's lost a freakin' limb and then proceeds to limp and gasp like a dying man for the next 10 minutes favoring the right side of his body! Plus you get some dialogue that is definitely "amazing", such as when a badguy asks Spidey "who are you?", Spider-man throws a pose and says "I'm the messenger from hell - Spider-man!" Prove to me that Japan is not on a completely different planet.

SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK (1971): Mario Colucci's haunted house movie in which nothing creeps and it's never dark. It should have been called PEOPLE ARGUE IN THE LIGHT.
A group of mismatched people head to a remote mansion after discovering that a bridge is washed out on a dark and stormy night. Two cops with a "homicidal maniac" named Spike (Farley Granger in a 50's greaser outfit), a rich married couple who spit venom at each other faster than you can say WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, a chain smoking doctor, his mousy assistant, and a professor who's mind is open to possibilities of the occult kind. At the mansion they meet a couple who are caretakers for the estate of a woman who was widely believed to be involved in the dark arts. Hey, I'm a sucker for "old dark house" kind of movies and it doesn't take much to make me happy, but this movie doesn't offer much, but what it offers ain't a ghost story. It offers a lot of aggressive drawing-room beatnik discussions about social conformity and a couple of murders, one being Spike killing a cop while trying to escape the other two being involved with a spirit possessing one of the cast and making them look bored and mute. I'd act the same way if you put me in this snoozefest. The dialogue scenes are the bulk of the movie and boy are they something! Spike, who we discover is an accomplished, soulful pianist has this to say at the wealthy socialite after she asks him how it feels to kill someone:
"Do ya think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand prejudices  a thousand fears, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life of vanity and compromise. You couldn't be able to understand what it means to free yourself of all the hypocritical and stupidity of this decadent world!"
Well, ask a stupid question...

BLOOD BEAT (1983): Holy freakin' jumped-up jeezus!  Sorry, but words fail me. I saw this back in the day and remember thinking it was pretty crappy, but somewhere over all these long beers - I mean, long years, my brain decided that it was GHOST WARRIOR (1985) or maybe SWORD OF HEAVEN (1985). If you've seen them, you know that those two can get mixed up pretty easily, but how the hell did BLOOD BEAT get in there? Maybe it was just wishful thinking.
A cracker-ass family gets together for Christmas at a house in the Wisconsin woods to do some huntin', some drinkin' and some paintin'. Painting? Oh yes. Mom, Cathy (Helen Benton), is a bit on the different side. She likes to paint and make her would be husband Gary (Terry Brown) miserable. He wants to get married, she's lukewarm on the subject. She loves him until he tries to reciprocate, then she pushes him away. Ugh, it's like my social life back in highschool, why am I watching this? Oh yeah, there's supposed to be a killer on the loose, according to the box. Mom doesn't like her son Ted's (James Fitzgibbons) new girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton) and gets really wound up screaming at him about how she's not trustworthy. While painting Mom starts getting strange visions of Sarah, while a sleeping Sarah has some serious orgasms while having visions of a samurai warrior stalking the woods. Of course, to get there it takes a good 80 minutes of some other family's unpleasant Christmas, complete with abuse, crying, shouting matches and lingering resentment. Fun, right?

An audience member at the half-way point

Loaded with long, dry tracking shots of the forest ground, the floor of the house, a fence and so on, for no other purpose than to pad out the running time. Same with the never-ending shots of people shouting other people's names: "Sarah? Sarah! Sarah! Sarah? Sarah!" Shut up! *ahem* Yeah, if that doesn't drive you off the deep end there's the soundtrack. Virtually every single scene has a completely different library soundtrack and they are all awful. At one point we have cheesy electronica, cut to another scene and we've got ear-shredding violin, cut again and we have a harmonica, again and we have gregorian chanting, and so on. I'm pretty sure the dialogue is ad-libbed and the script was made up while they shot the movie. Sometimes the scenes seems to have been something made up after collecting all of the pieces that spilled on the editing room floor. There is no way for me to adequately describe how completely brain-bruising this movie is. It has very little bloodshed, but there is some amusing nudity. If you can make it to the end, there's a hilarious confrontation between the kids (who suddenly have supernatural powers) and the possessed suit of armor which actually possesses a voice that sounds a bit like a whiny Dalek when expressing it's disdain at being defeated. I guess there's a reason that writer-director Fabrice A. Zaphiratos has never made another movie. You've been warned.

LIVID - THE BLOOD OF THE BALLERINAS (2011): Incredibly slow-moving and pretentious French horror yarn that really just wants to be a Hollywood film. A young nurse trainee, Lucie (Chloé Coulloud), is taken to a creepy old mansion that is surrounded by local superstition. Inside, her trainer reveals that the owner of the house, a wealthy former ballet instructor, is in a coma and has a key around her neck that might be for the rumored hidden treasure. Of course this is simply bait in a trap, and sure enough after telling her loser boyfriend about it, three of them break into the mansion to find the treasure, or, as you could easily guess, gruesome deaths. While there are one or two cool little touches that will no doubt give 13 year old goths screaming hard-ons, this trip is strictly by-the-numbers until the last 20 minutes. It literally takes 50 minutes of the 88 minute running time from the introduction of the main character to the kids walking through the house. Much of the whole breaking into the house-thing is done in real time, so there are painfully long sequences of people walking, opening doors, looking around, walking some more and saying things like "hey, over here! Oh it's nothing". Hell, I can get that on any episode of "Ghost Hunters"! Once you get to the big revelation of who the woman is and why there are missing children in the village, it turns into a goth fantasy film with moths being used to change the souls in bodies and some other odd stuff that seems like a complete departure from the film we have been sitting through for the past 70 minutes. Add to that the fact that none of the scant few ideas the script has are fleshed out at all, instead opting for long scenes of mundane action, and you have something that's paper-thin and rather dull for almost the entirety of its running time, only then to turn good ideas into stupid ones.

Well, at least they aren't any CGI ghosts.

DEMON OF THE ISLAND (1983): Subtle (for the most part) and strange French horror film that uses some of Stephen King's favorite themes, but in a strange, French sort of way. A chain-smoking mainland doctor, Gabrielle Martin (Anny Duperey), moves to a remote island to take over the role as village doctor from Dr. Marshall (Jean-Claude Brialy), who is neither liked, nor trusted by the locals. As a string of bizarre appliance accidents sweep the island, it becomes obvious that Dr. Marshall has no plans of leaving and is working on some very strange medical research involving endocranial disease. Writer-director Francis Leroi, whose other credits almost entirely consist of soft and hardcore erotica, takes a while setting the stage and once he does things get very interesting and bloody. Being French, he has no problem leaving things very ambiguous. He drops hints, but never bluntly tells the audience motivations and explanations. I actually liked it that way, to be honest. The way Leroi builds up to the bits of graphic nastiness is very well done, with the tension being cranked and mis-directional cues perfectly executed. Will it make everyone happy? No, but I really enjoyed it and maybe that's because of all of the completely lifeless swill I've been sucking down this month.

QUEEN BOXER (1973): First time director Yue Fung-chi’s fun, period kung fu flick, was at one point reportedly in violent in the realm of Sonny Chiba's STREETFIGHTER (1974) before it was heavily censored. After a local crime lord kills a would-be hero, his family comes to town looking for him. Just to show 'em who's boss, the boss has them all slaughtered in the street! That'll learn 'em. All, except for his sister, Su Chen (Chia Ling aka Judy Lee) who sure seems pretty and unassuming. A local tea merchant and martial arts badass (Yeung Kwan) has been waging a one-man war against the crime boss after his not-so-badass brother was murdered and it isn't long before the two team up to take the bastard down. She may not be Angela Mao, but Ling's graceful martial arts moves come from formal ballet training and it makes watching her fight scenes pretty riveting stuff. Definitely more than they might otherwise be, considering almost all of the graphic violence is missing from even the longest of available versions. Rumor has it that an uncut, widescreen German DVD was in the offing, but that was months ago and either it was another one of those super-limited pressings that came and went over night, or it's another vapordisc. If anybody has any info on this, I'd love to hear it.

BLACK DOG (1998): Arguably the last of the real, honest-to-fucking-god metal-crunching vehicular mayhem flicks ever made. Ok, maybe someone will come along and make another one, but I doubt it. Using real cars and trucks is like, hard work and stuff! It's so much easier to sit at a computer in an air-conditioned office... eating Funyuns and playing with your 'puter. Jack Crews (Patrick Swayze) is an ex-con looking to make a fresh start in the world of trucking. Like so many of us, he picks a soulless ratfuck bastard to work for and suddenly finds himself trucking illegal weapons through interstate lines with a small army of goons shootin' lead up his tailpipe. That's pretty much the long and the short of the plot. Sure there are some sub-plotty things about how they got his wife and kid, the Feds trying to bust 'em, a traitor in the midst, a fox in with the chickens, and so forth. Plus our good ol' boy gets double-crossed by one Mr. Meat Loaf in what may be his best film role ever (not saying much I guess) and certainly the best work he's done since attempting to sing some song while completely shitfaced at some sort of political thing. Speaking of singing, Randy Travis is also along for the ride as a two-bit loser that wants to sing country, but has no talent. But screw all that. No, no, what we care about here is the stunts, oh the beautiful stunts! Not content to just wreck cars on what is essentially an extended chase scene taken straight out of the mid '70s, writers William Mickelberry and Dan Vining (who have sadly done nothing since) make this a badass trucker movie straight out of the mid '70s as well. Ok, so it's a truck chase movie, but these trucks, smash, crash, explode and get air! Constantly! I am a sucker for a good car stunt, but great stunts with huge 20,000 pound metal, glass and rubber beasts, like semis, flying through the air is nothing short of spectacular. Creating an entire movie around such events? Genius, pure, unadulterated genius.

COP OR HOOD (1978): Considered to be one of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s best films, it certainly is slickly produced, if nothing else. A charmingly roguish criminal Antonio Cerutti (Belmondo) finds out that his prostitute sister was gunned down while having a hotel liaison with a police commissioner, he vows to get to the bottom of it. Except he isn't Cerutti, he’s actually Stanislas Borovitz, head of internal affairs, and he’s going to nail the killers and the dirty cops his way! How? By being incredibly charming, witty and sticking his 6" Colt Python in everybody's face. Yeah, I know, it looks like it's a 12" barrel when he's holding it, but that's just because he's French. Oh and at the same time romancing a wealthy author and dealing with his neglected 14 year-old daughter who, realistically, has every right to be resentful of this self-absorbed jackass.
Clearly Belmondo had reached the “Jack Nicholson phase” of his career and could just show up and completely “jamon” his way through a movie without a backwards glance.

Many of his scenes involve broad physical gestures such as snapping his collar with a flourish, doing pirouettes on the heels of his boots and whipping open his coat to show off his gun, always with a big goofy grin. On the plus side, the movie does have a few really great set pieces, such as when Belmondo jacks a driver’s license test car in an attempt to evade his pursuers. I can imagine Jackie Chan watching this in the theater and getting inspiration for some of the car gags in the LUCKY STARS movies. There are even a couple of explosions, nice cinematography (if a bit over-lit) and some split-screen work, too. Even so, it's only mildly enjoyable and kind of feels like if you've seen one Belmondo flick, you've seen them all. I guess it really seems to rest on how much you enjoy Belmondo’s obvious enthusiasm for himself and don’t mind the all-too-brief action sequences being few and far between.

BUBBA HO-TEP (2003): After being slightly underwhelmed by Don Coscarelli’s latest film, JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012), a friend of the VJ family said that my expectations were probably set a bit too high. It didn’t really occur to me in the moment, but he was right. They were set pretty high. Why was that? Well, yeah, there’s the whole PHANTASM thing, (which, trust me, will be rambled about at another time), but PHANTASM IV (1998) was err, disappointing. But there’s also BUBBA HO-TEP. Based on a Joe R. Lansdale short story, Coscarelli creates what is probably the best film of his career about an aging Elvis Presley (Bruce Campbell) and a black JFK (Ossie Davis) in an East Texas rest home that is being stalked by a cursed mummy that sucks the souls of those about to die. I mean, does that even sound all that great? I’m not even a big Bruce Campbell fan, but he can go to his deathbed proud of his work in this film. It’s clearly a labor of love and it not only has a multi-layered story, but it also has multi-layered performances, multi-layered visuals and a multi-layered score that works beautifully with a film that effectively mixes comedy, drama and horror. BUBBA HO-TEP is also richly detailed, holding up to repeated viewings, so much so, that I actually enjoyed it even more coming back to it almost a decade later. I think that is why my expectations were so high. Coscarelli set the bar out of arms reach.
I guess I have to mention the cringe-inducing proposed prequel, BUBBA NOSFERATU: CURSE OF THE SHE-VAMPIRES. Written by Stephen Romano and Coscarelli, the plot is supposed to be about Elvis shooting a movie in Louisiana only to find himself battling a coven of female vampires. Campbell refused the role several years back (the guy is obviously smarter than I give him credit for) and the project was thought dead. Post JOHN DIES AT THE END, however, we have had Paul Giamatti resurrecting the project in interviews, saying that is it's on the front burner and he has been cast as the Colonel Parker character (presumably if it ever gets made). Just let it go Don, let it go.

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The "Never Got Made" Files #89: THE MINING CAMP ENCOUNTER (1981) part 1

“Time is at once the most valuable, and the most perishable of all our possessions.” - John Randolph
                                                                                           
The passage of time possesses a certain cruel duality.  A perfect example is our latest unmade film examination, THE MINING CAMP ENCOUNTER.  Time was certainly a friend to the full page ad in Variety from 1981 that I spied in 2010.  Nearly 30 years after the fact, the drawn image of a monster's hand silencing a human face was doing exactly what it was intended to do – draw interest.  However, it didn’t come from a potential producer, but a fan curious as to why this film never got made.  With the help and nudging of Bill Picard (the internet’s greatest detective), an effort was made to contact the folks involved in this unmade movie.

And here is where it is exhibited that time can also certainly be the enemy.  In August 2011, Bill emailed me with the unfortunate news that he discovered Marc Fagone, the film’s writer and producer, had passed away in 2003 from cancer.  Hoping there was a story still to be told, I sent Donna Fagone, Marc’s widow, a letter expressing my condolences and inquiring if she knew anything about the three-decades-old project.  Much to my surprise, Mrs. Fagone replied via email and gave me a great deal of information about this mysterious project.  You see, not only was it her husband’s pet project for several years, but it was also the very thing that brought the two of them together.

Marc Douglas Fagone was born in 1949 in Boston, Massachusetts.  Like any healthy child growing up in the 1950s, he was a movie watcher and enjoyed horror thanks to his mother.  “Marc and his mother both loved horror films and watched them together while he was growing up,” Donna Fagone says. As an adult, his occupation was that of a construction contractor and carpenter.  Fagone displayed his creative side as a member of several bands (The Breakaways, Kaliope).  It was in the late 1970s that Fagone began toying with the idea of filmmaking.  His first copyrighted script was SPY IN THE KEY OF C from 1978/79.  “It was a suspense/mystery/whodunit set in Las Vegas and the main character was a Las Vegas male singer.  He wrote two songs for it as well,” Mrs. Fagone reveals of this earlier unmade film project.

Perhaps sensing the world might not be ready for a Las Vegas-Philip Marlowe mix (it might still not be), the now Pennsylvania-based Mr. Fagone opted to go the more conventional route with a horror picture as his introductory effort.  After all, a fellow Pennsylvanian (George Romero) had struck gold just over a decade earlier with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), a film that eschewed the Hollywood system to great success.  So THE MINING CAMP ENCOUNTER was born.

As far as the plot was concerned, Fagone drew his inspiration from one of the most newsworthy events to happen in the United States in the 1970s that occurred within his then-current home state – the Three Mile Island disaster.  “I do know the main plot was that after Three Mile Island Nuclear Reactor accident in Pennsylvania,” Donna discloses, “some nuclear waste seeped into a coal mine and came into contact with a small animal (maybe lizard like) and became a mutant creature that began attacking the coal miners.  Enter the female news reporter and the man that helps her solve the mystery.”

THE MINING CAMP ENCOUNTER opening

(click on all documents to enlarge):

Press release for the film:

Xerox copies of
location Polaroids

One thing is for sure, Fagone certainly had his finger on the pulse of the horror genre, which was again booming post-HALLOWEEN (1978).  Despite the resurgence, no one had yet set a horror film in the blue collar profession of coal mining when Fagone had written his script, which was copyrighted in July 1980.  This would change as the next several years would see a deluge of coal mine set horror films (MY BLOODY VALENTINE [1981], THE BOOGENS [1981], THE STRANGENESS [1985]).  “Marc had created the plot, written a story, created a script from the story and lined up all the details,” she reveals of the script.  “He told me he visited a coal mine in Pennsylvania as further inspiration and for accuracy.”

With a script and budget in place, Fagone set about trying to obtain financing for his project.  With his own money, he paid for the art for the aforementioned Variety full page advertisement.  Although never formally finalized, there had been talks with Hungarian immigrant Andrew Szitanyi to direct the picture.  And, in another move showing Fagone’s innate understanding of the exploitation aspect of filmmaking, he had considered a popular Playboy model as the film’s protagonist.  “The actress under consideration for the lead female role was Barbie Benton,” Donna reveals.  However, Benton never officially committed to the project.  Fagone did receive a letter of commitment from actress Jacqui Evans, who was previously seen as one of the science-made models in LOOKER (1981).

Letter of interest from Jacqui Evans' agent:

Fagone's level of detail and attention extended to all facets of the project, including mapping out the area of their chosen location for the mine.

Mine shooting location map:

One element of planning that was given a lot of attention was the design of the mutant monster.  Fagone’s files show several pages of early drafts by an unknown artist (possibly Fagone himself) from 1981.

Early FX sketches:

A few years later, Fagone started talking with Houston-based special effects artist Bart Mixon, who supplied a detailed breakdown and his own sketches for the monster (you can read more on Mixon’s involvement in part 2).

Bart Mixon's FX sketches:

Cover page of Fagone's
detailed 9-page budget

Anyone familiar with our “never got made” columns will feel prescient when it comes to the major stumbling block for lack of production.  Yes, our old friend “lack of money” pops up once again.  Fagone had several “almost successes” according to his wife when it came to achieving his goal of getting the film financed.  As is the case with most independent filmmakers, Fagone met a number of unusual characters during his attempts to get his film funded including an investor who wanted to go all in on the project, but hated horror movies.

“Marc was trying to raise a million dollars to produce the film. He had a budget completed,” Donna explains of her husband’s attempts to secure capital.  “I know that he put thousands of his own money into the project but did not have resources to invest heavily so the risk would fall on the investor.  I was told that it was easier to do this back then because failures and losses could be written off. (VJ – via popular tax shelter laws) But I think the fact that Marc didn't have funds to ‘risk’ himself caused some of the close deals to fail.  There were a couple investors that said ‘you put up half and I'll put up the other half’ but Marc didn't have that kind of money.”

Wishy-washy producers are a dime-a-dozen in this industry, but no one can top the billionaire oil baron somehow related to the Saudi royal family that Fagone interested in the project.  “One interesting attempt and unique opportunity had been with the wealthy Sheik that was upsetting some people in the U.S. by going around and donating money and financing many things in the early 80s,” Fagone’s wife discloses.  “His name was Mohammed al-Fassi.   He was looking for positive press in the U.S.” (Al-Fassi had made national news in 1978 when he drew the ire of Beverly Hills residents by buying a multi-million dollar mansion, painting it pea green and filling the grounds with realistic, sexually explicit nude statues.  The house mysteriously caught fire in 1980, resulting in the affluent neighbors pouring into the street and – no joke – chanting “burn, burn, burn” as flames engulfed the eyesore. Al-Fassi passed away in 2002.)

Fagone letter to Al-Fassi:

“[Al-Fassi’s] right hand man told Marc that if Marc could get some positive press about how kind the Sheik was, that they would consider investing.  Marc did get his home newspaper in Massachusetts to write up a story and al-Fassi set up a meeting with Marc at resort in Florida.  Marc traveled to Florida to meet but when Marc arrived, was told the Sheik and his staff had suddenly left Florida and returned to their homeland (i.e.; chased out).  We never knew if this [funding offing] was true or if the entire thing had been a scam for publicity for the Sheik all the time.”

Article Fagone got published 

on Al-Fassi's behalf:

As if the financing game weren’t frustrating enough, Fagone soon found himself discouraged when a similar film hit the market before him.  “I recall Marc being upset that a later horror movie, ALLIGATOR (1980), had been produced,” Donna reveals, “and he felt that the ‘mutant creature’ was similar to his and was a bit unhappy about that.”  Indeed, it appears to have a cruel case of synchronicity.  Fagone received a copyright on his MINING script on July 25, 1980. ALLIGATOR hit theaters just a few weeks earlier on July 2, 1980. With fandom not nearly as advanced as today’s news-a-minute world, it is highly unlikely that Fagone was aware of the low budget ALLIGATOR’s production.  A more likely hypothesis is that both productions were cashing in on the decades-old “baby alligator flushed down the toilet” urban legend, which had resurged in popularity in New York City in the late 1970s.

Fagone's 1980 copyright form:

Original painted artwork

Ultimately, despite Fagone’s best efforts, the project never got off the ground. However, as mentioned earlier, THE MINING CAMP ENCOUNTER served Marc Fagone in a different way. “It is the reason we met,” Donna explains of the unmade project.  “In 1982 I was divorced with 2 children and both were represented by a modeling agency.  The modeling agency put me in touch with Marc after they received notice he was looking for two ‘unknown’ children for a part in his planned movie. The rest is history.”

Indeed, Marc and Donna eventually married and had a daughter of their own.  So while we might mourn the loss of another “mutant monster on the loose” movie, it appears THE MINING CAMP ENCOUNTER existed for a better reason altogether as the couple brought together by the project spent the next 20 years together.  “We miss Marc very much and talk about him every day in our family,” Donna Fagone says of her late husband.  “He was a tireless worker, very resilient and always had an idea or project in the works.”

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Cinemasochism: BLACK MANGUE (2008)

Also known as MUD ZOMBIES, this is probably the first, and so far only, Brazilian river zombie movie in the history of cinema. Impressive sounding, right? Made on an extra low budget, using what appears to be home video equipment, and shot on location in picturesque Mangue on the mudbanks, this really could have been a contender.

The river-dwelling inhabitants of Mangue are having a hard time finding the usual fish and crab to sell to the sleazy middleman who collects all the catches and sells them to restaurants in the city. Even worse some folks are starting to take sick with a mysterious illness and there is some talk of a haunted mangrove.

Louis (Walderrama Dos Santos) is a skinny, mopey guy who pines after the local beauty Rachel (Kika de Oliveira) who doesn't seem to realize he exists. After some fishermen discover dead bodies are coming to life and attacking, the world is turned upside down (or rather turns into a STAR TREK set with massive shaky-cam action) and Louis and Rachel find themselves alone against the armies... uhhh, couples... of the undead. So now what? Slog through the mud to find more dead people, that's what! Ok, so technically the premise is that they are going to slog through the mud to find their relatives to see if they are ok. They aren't.

Along the way, we get what would normally be a subplot, but here takes up so much of the film's running time, that it is pretty much the main plot. Rachel is accidentally bitten by a zombie and slips into a catatonic state. In spite of the fact that most of the locals infected with zombitis fall on the ground only to pop back up seconds later, Rachel must not have been bitten that hard because she has plenty of time for Louis to come up with a plan. If I'm honest, planning doesn't seem to be Louis' strong point. Neither is talking, walking or shooting zombies. Louis must really hate the audience as much as he loves Rachel because he decides that the best thing to do is to find Benedita, the local old woman who may be some sort of witch-kinda-personage, but appears to be a guy in drag under a bunch of latex.

After finding Benedita (André Lobo, a guy in drag under a bunch of latex), she talks so slowly and at such length that sometimes you will forget what the point of the dialogue is. Sometimes you just won't know regardless of the speed of delivery. Her sage wisdom is: "we are in a place that is already dead, it is not possible to remain alive here" (oh of course!) but, she continues, the gall bladder of the local baiacu fish might save her! Let me guess. More mud-slogging? Damn skippy! Of course it takes about 10 long minutes for this information to be delivered and then Louis must go wandering around the river looking for the fish while avoiding zombies. This is every bit as fun as it sounds. Once the fish is grabbed and zombies are avoided, it's another 10 minutes with Benedita slooooooowly rambling on about nothing that is intelligible. I know 10 minutes may not seem like a long time in the greater scheme of things, but it's like being in line at the post office and having woman at the front seriously discussing which kind of stamps she might like to buy with the clerk and then going off on a tangent claiming that Obama has hidden a terrorist message in the one with the impressionist Christmas tree. Time expands exponentially by the measure of the pointless stupidity you are subjected to.

Finally, Louis and Rachel leave Benedita and head to the hills thinking they will escape. Thank f'n christ! We can finally get on with things and maybe get some action. But no! We cut back to Benedita who is now sitting alone and rambling very slowly to herself for another 10 freakin' minutes! Not only does no old person sound like that, but I can think of no other reason than shameless padding for having so much of Benedita rambling. Matter of fact the movie runs a full 104 minutes with almost no budget, some cartoonish gore effects that would have probably looked cool if they had been shot with a high-def, non-shaky cam set-up. Unfortunately due to the lighting and the poor-quality SOV production, as well as the crap camera-work, it's really difficult to see any details whatsoever rendering this as much fun as having your sibling flick the back of your ear during a family road-trip through Nebraska.

This CG version of the old "see through head" chestnut would be cool if it wasn't CG.

Writer-director Rodrigo Aragão desperately wants to make a Brazilian BRAINDEAD (1992) and lifts a few things from Jackson's film, and plenty from EVIL DEAD, to try to achieve that goal. One of the running gags is that every time Louis and Rachel try to get a little romantic, zombies bust up their love-in. It's a gag that is barely amusing the first time and wears thin fast. In addition there is a serious pacing issue. Aside from Benedita's maddeningly long, pointless rambling, there are scenes such as one where Louis and Rachel are trapped in a cabin as a zombie swarm surrounds the cabin and attempts to break in. Apparently these zombies are a bit sluggish due to their meat-only diet, as it takes them so long to slowly break into the balsa wood cabin that Louis and Rachel have plenty of time to sit down, relax and have a few discussions. So ludicrous is this that I expected them to put the kettle on at any moment. In the realm of the food biz there's a phrase that denotes a necessity of quick action, it's called a "sense of urgency". Rodrigo Aragão would never cut it in a restaurant and I'm hard pressed to believe these two slow pokes would ever make it through the first six minutes of a zombie apocalypse. There is an extreme amount of dead wood in this movie and it could have easily been edited down to a much more tolerable 75 minutes. As if all that wasn't bad enough we have an acting level that is on par with a Tempe Video release and what paltry amount of production cash they had, they wasted on stupid things like CGI steam coming out of stove pots! I was really hoping this would be a neglected masterpiece, but it just isn't. Interminable scenes of terribly acted dialogue that go on long past the point of madness, obscured effects due to shoddy equipment and inept camera-work and a leaden attempt at comedy kill this sucker like a headshot in a shopping mall.

Hmmm... something looks familiar here...

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Sci-Fried Theater: JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012)

I realize that this is probably not what you are going to want to hear. You want me to squeal with delight and shout "duuuuuuude! this movie is fucking siiiiick duuuuuuuude fuuuuuuuuck duuuuuude fuuuuuuuuck!" If that is what you want you want to hear, just so you know... I'm sorry for everything that's about to happen.

Actually, I liked the movie. Didn't love it, but I enjoyed it well enough. I really, really wanted to love it, if that counts for anything.

A couple of too-cool-for-school college drop-outs (from what I understand), Dave (Chase Williamson) and John (Rob Mayes), sort of run some kind of paranormal investigation service that we are told pretty much nothing about, but consists of them cracking one-liners at apparitions that they are blithely unimpressed by. One night, at a party (at which John's neo-punk band play a song called "Cannibal Holocaust"), a Jamaican guy named Robert Marley (Tai Bennett), hooks up John with some potent shit called "soy sauce" that allows the user heightened perception. Heightened to the point where you can see events happening through time and space, parallel universes and even other people's dreams... and it's not from around here. "I'll try to explain this without cursing," says Dave. "but the black shit from Planet X that came out from that motherfucker looked like it had grown hair. Did I mention that the stuff was moving? Twitching?"

Told in flashback by Dave at a Chinese restaurant to a reporter (Paul Giamatti desperately trying to steal scenes from Williamson), the film is a series of vignettes through various points in time over the span of what seems to be a couple of days. Starting with a phone call from John who has apparently lost his shit completely, trashed his apartment and is running around in his boxers, Dave finds himself in a police station being interrogated over the deaths of several of the party-goers from the previous night including Marley, who is found disemboweled with all of his flesh torn off. After John is pronounced dead at the station (yes, the title lies), John calls Dave up on his cell phone to help him escape the police station so that he can grab more sauce from the crime scene, so that they can continue to communicate and together (sort of) find out what happened. Of course there is a larger conspiracy at work here and I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that the sauce is a self-aware tool to repel an alien invasion from another parallel dimension. Eh... sort of.

I'm pretty sure this movie is one of those sort of films that is really only made for people who have already read the book, basically hitting the highlights without going through the rigors of actually having to set up characters and plot or really tell much of a story. I felt like I was watching a four hour epic that some suit in a studio office cut down to 90 minutes after having a fight with the director about theater bookings and how many a 240 minute movie screenings could be had on opening weekend. To say that it's episodic and thinly plotted is putting it mildly. Even Tony Jaa can feel like friggin' Tolstoy after watching this. That is not to say that it isn't well written at all. There is a lot of word-play going on, occasionally feeling a bit like someone read Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut and wanted to do something younger and hipper that would get people, who wouldn't normally be bothered, to pick up and read while waiting for their cell phone to be delivered after accidentally dropping the old one in the toilet. Often it's very clever, but sometimes it feels a bit forced, such as when John (via broken cell phone) instructs Dave to buy a bratwurst from a street vendor. He does and it's a fat, red sausage on a hot dog bun with a piece of lettuce on it. First off, that's not a brat, second who serves a brat with a piece of lettuce (in Illinois no less!)? The answer to that is a punchline; John tells Dave to look inside the bun and he will find a $100 bill. Dave looks and says it's only a piece of lettuce. That's the joke (a swerve on an old time-travel cliche), but it is really straining to get to that punchline and when you get there, it's a lot of effort for little reward.

Coscarelli's movie feels like a group of English majors had a spitballing session fueled by jello-shot sidecars laced with drops of untested lysergic acid diethylamide, watched NAKED LUNCH, GHOSTBUSTERS, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and BILL AND TED'S BOGUS JOURNEY, and then decided to wrap all four in a crispy won-ton wrapper with plenty of cell phones and penis gags for dipping. Yes, my friends, if you are a fan of phallus based humor, this is your movie. Just like THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996) was a gift of flatulent love to fans of the mighty fart joke, JOHN DIES AT THE END will be loved by penis punsters everywhere. This means that fans of the book can rest assured that the penis door handle has not been, uuhhh... manipulated, in any way. Watching JOHN DIES made me feel the exact same way as I did when I was 20 and decided to read a Goosebumps book to see what people were ranting about back in the day. This movie is aimed at a demographic that I am no longer part of. I don't have a bong on my coffee table, which is what I think this movie would be best viewed over in the wee hours of the morning. Mainly, though, the relentless smirking and mugging from the leads wears really thin, really fast. After all, that should be the audience's job.

While the leads are disappointing, Giamatti ferociously chews the scenery in his typically over-the-top fashion, which actually works well at the end when you find out what fate has in store for his character. Clancy Brown's underdeveloped televangelist-style paranormal TV personality Marconi truly does steal every scene he's in (which is sadly very few), and Angus Scrimm makes a meal of the appetizer plate he is given as a priest who gives some unexpected advice over the phone, with some great dialogue contemplating the nature of insanity and the inability to self-diagnose. These latter two, and maybe Giamatti if I'm feeling generous, boldly underscore the weakness of the rest of the cast. That said, Glynn Turman who has made a career out of playing cops, doctors, lawyers and elected officials does a really fine job playing a police detective that doesn't know what the fuck is going on, but will damn sure make it stop, even if it means shooting innocent people and setting mobile homes on fire.

Where the film falters in plot and construction, it definitely makes up for in visuals. David Wong's book (which I haven't read), clearly is interested in throwing as much wacky imagery at the reader as possible (always in a comic book way) and Don Coscarelli is more than up to the task. Better still, he uses a deft hand to inject his own signature visuals without reducing the film to tiresome overkill. His use of lighting, color saturation, lens distortions, color temperature and the like are all carefully handled, painting the screen with atmosphere, and setting an interesting tone for the scenes. There are several scenes that very subtly create the queasy sensation of things being... not quite right, which could have been handled in a flat, ineffective way in other hands. Also effective are both the practical and CGI effects, the former used liberally and the latter sparingly, which is exactly what we like to see. From toothy alien slugs and torn-up corpses, to exploding heads and flying mustaches, there is nothing really to nitpick here. Well, except for the climactic scene at the end with the dog and the bomb. What the hell happened there? Did the production run out of money all of a sudden?

Smirky teens and tweens will love love the bits of the film they see between text messages, and will no doubt bond with our bed-head buddies. Others may feel a bit like they've ridden an E-ticket ride that is a lot of fun, but is quickly forgotten. Your mileage may vary.

(no bloggers where harmed in the writing of this review)

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