Shaun Luu Horror Fest 2009

Last weekend most of the Samurai Dreams writers and I drove to Syracuse, NY for the fifth annual Shaun Luu Horror Fest. Held as a fund-raiser in memory of Syracuse-based hardcore singer and horror-nut Luu (who died of brain cancer), the fest is a two day marathon of genre flicks and hardcore music. We were there for the films only, eight 35mm prints* shown in a row at the Palace Theatre. While they showed some pretty strong stuff this year, none of it can compare to what they've shown in the past. Can you imagine the 2008 fest, which featured Salo, Holy Mountain, Re-Animator and Cannibal Holocaust!? Insane!

Never in my life have I sat through so many movies in a row. While it was a great experience, by the end I was tired and my eyes were totally wrecked. Check the lineup: Ghostbusters 2, Monster Squad, Black Devil Doll, City of the Living Dead, Deep Red, Cannibal Ferox, The Warriors and The Thing! I thought I'd post a play-by-play of the marathon.

Ghostbusters 2. I hadn't seen this in probably ten years, so it was interesting to revisit it on the big screen. This was the "family friendly" portion of the fest, and GB2 began at about 1pm after some introductions from fest organizers. As much fun as I had, my enjoyment was blunted slightly by my anticipation for seeing Monster Squad. Not surprisingly, this was probably the best-looking print of the night aside from Grindhouse Releasing's restored print of Cannibal Ferox.

Monster Squad. Yes! This was the flick I was looking forward most to seeing on the big screen. I would have loved to have seen this one as a kid, so this was major wish fulfillment. I noticed so much I hadn't before (the complete matte painting of the town seen from Sean's roof at the beginning, the Being poster in the clubhouse, etc). And the print was in great shape too, which I wasn't expecting.

After Monster Squad there was a two hour break, and we went to a cool vegan restaurant in the area. Drinking a bottle of Kombucha boosted my stamina levels.

Black Devil Doll. The only contemporary film of the fest, this is the debut feature from Rotton Cotton's Jon Lewis. Billed as a cross between Child's Play and Dolemite, the titular villain is an executed black serial killer reincarnated in the body of a wooden ventriloquist dummy. He spends the rest of the film killing women and raping their corpses, shitting on people and quoting Chapelle's Show. As tasteless and offensive as this low budget flick tries to be, it's more dull than anything, and I actually dozed off at one point. While I admire Lewis for making this small movie and promoting the hell out of it--and for releasing those awesome VHS-company logo shirts at RC--this really just isn't my kind of thing.

City of the Living Dead. The second in Fulci's trilogy of zombie films, I was really excited to see this one for the first time. A rare uncut print with dutch subtitles was used, and it took me about fifteen minutes to stop instinctively looking at them, even though the dialog was spoken in english. Of all the films, this felt the most unique to me, because when do you get a chance to see something like this in the theatre? The maggot-shower scene was particularly gross on such a huge screen. By this point the theatre was pretty packed, and I really felt that the audience was in synch. A totally respectful and enthusiastic crowd.

Deep Red. While it was still great to see, this was probably the most damaged and faded print of the night. But man, it ruled to hear that music at such volume. I think I may have dozed off for a few minutes here and there, but by the end I had caught my second wind.

The Warriors. Since I saw a midnight showing of this at the Hadley Cinemark last year I was thinking of taking a walk or something during this, but the audience's hype level was infectious, and I had to stay. Each gang introduction drew applause, and I was grinning through the whole thing. Really keyed into the homoerotic subtext of the film, amazed I never really noticed it before. Before the film began, the main organizer of the event (whose name escapes me) warned that Paramount was so worried about the condition of the one print they could find that they sent it over for free with warnings of extreme damage. Who knows why, because the print was absolutely beautiful, and one of the best of the night. Weird.

Cannibal Ferox. Of all the films, this was the only one I was kind of afraid to watch. While I've seen Cannibal Holocaust, Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Mountain of the Cannibal God and Porno Holocaust, the jungle adventure genre of Italian sleaze usually makes me queasy, especially the nasty animal-slaughter bits. And in Ferox, the scenes of animal torture and slaughter are relentless. Apart from this unfortunate business, Lenzi's film is equal parts camp and sleaze, and even at its bleakest there's humor and disarming weirdless to laugh nervously at for most of the film. The humor slowly drains out of the film however, and the last third is relentlessly dismal and depressing. And that ending! While I can't condone the animal bits, this film, like Cannibal Holocaust, is at least loaded with social commentary as well as gore and exploitation (which makes it kind of hard to deal with critically, as it makes itself impossible to dismiss, as much as one might like to do so). The audience groaned and squirmed practically in unison at every turn, and while this is an unpleasant film, viewing it with a huge audience on a large screen was a singular experience.

The Thing. It was about 2:30 am by this point, and I had to keep moving around the theatre just to stay awake. Only the most hardcore of film freaks were still in attendance by this point, and I saw more than a few people totally cached out and napping. While I wasn't at my sharpest, and I had to take my glasses off to soothe my eyes, it still ruled to see one of my all time favorite films up there. Tried to pay really close attention to where all the characters were at all times, and noticed that MacCready's shack is still standing at the end. Awesome.

Fun to notice: Mary Ellen Trainor in both Ghostbusters 2 and Monster Squad and Thomas Waites in Warriors and The Thing. Also, James and I got pretty excited when we realized that the protagonist in Cannibal Ferox is played by Lorraine De Selle, the warden from Women's Prison Massacre.

The End!


*Aside from Black Devil Doll, which must have been a DVD.

Women's Prison Massacre (1983)

While Bruno Mattei's Women’s Prison Massacre (Emanuelle Fuga Dall'Inferno, literally Emanuelle Escapes from Hell in Italian) is technically a Black Emanuelle film (Gemser actually stars as the character Emanuelle, and not just in re-dubbed and re-titled international cuts), it’s pointedly different than the original Black Emanuelle films made infamous by Joe D’amato. Despite directing films like Porno Holocaust and the fake Caligula sequels, Mattei’s films are much tamer than D’Amato’s (but, really, that isn’t saying much). While Emanuelle is still a head-strong, free-spirited reporter here, her character is quite different than the Emanuelle found in D’Amato’s classic exploitation films.

In films like Emanuelle in America and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Gemser plays the photo-journalist Emanuelle as a carefree, precocious nymphomaniac, following illicit thrills around the globe. So, it’s strange to find her locked in a prison here, robbed of D’Amato’s defining cosmopolitan characteristic. Consensus being that Gemser can’t act, one would assume that her performance here would lack the nuanced performance potentially afforded by this alteration. Granted, Gemser is wooden, but that may have more to do with her icy, impassable beauty, a disposition that can occasionally convey only aloof boredom. However, Gemser’s performance here is actually quite good, and certainly among the best of her career (the Russian Roulette scene is particular evidence of this).

The film begins with a perplexing bit of performance art that barely serves as exposition and fails to set the proper tone of the film. Emanuelle and two compatriots are seen on a make-shift prison stage, slathered in harlequin face-paint and flatly presenting a three-hander monologue, the type of “I’m a whore/ I’m a woman” pseudo-feminist hot-air found in many exploitation scripts. Workman Italian stalwarts Claudio Fragasso (notorious director of the D'Amato-produced Troll 2, which Gemser had a hand in) and Olivier Lefait (first A.D. to Mattei on Rats: Night of Terror and writer of the lesser Violence in a Women’s Prison, which this film is a sort-of sequel to) really outdid themselves with this bizarre trio of monologues.

While at odds tonally, this strange and off-putting opening scene in Women’s Prison Massacre seems added as some sort of notification (or warning) to the audience that this is not a typical women-in-prison film. In fact, nods in the film to genre convention (lesbianism, rape, riot, escape) feel compulsory and tangential; in the average by-the-books WiP picture, these moments would be highlighted and heavily presented, as the execution of lurid subject matter is the raison d’etre of most exploitation genre films. Chalk it up to characterization perhaps, but it’s rather unsuccessful in that regard. The inmates find this bit of theatre so offensive they begin to riot and throw fruit (where the hell did they get it?), at the urging of Emanuelle’s rival Albina (Ursula Flores, for some reason playing a different character than she played in ViaWP).

While Emanuelle is at the film’s core, Women’s Prison Massacre is in many ways an ensemble piece. Albina and at least two other inmates are adequately developed. And midway through the film, a half dozen new characters are introduced in an inspired run of scenes. The prison’s warden (Carlo De Mejo as Harrison) is for some reason tasked with housing a gang of vicious male killers in an unused portion of the prison (as to why they would be brought to a women’s prison is a question you’re going to have to ask the gods of exploitation cinema). Italian character actor Gabrielle Tinti provides the film’s best performance as the gleefully sadistic Crazy Boy Henderson (He and Gemser would reunite the following year in D’Amato’s post-apocalyptic sleeper Endgame).

With the introduction of these characters, the film nearly shifts into Poliziesco thriller territory, as the gang manages to take control of a police van en-route to the prison, enlisting police-impersonating thugs as blockade and taking the warden captive. The crew hole up in the prison, locking the inmates and guards away as they negotiate with the cops gathering outside the compound (including the corrupt D.A. who put Emanuelle in prison). These action scenes are incredibly visceral and lively, and perfectly complimented by Luigi Ceccarelli’s Simonetti-esque score. This is a welcome twist on the formula and a fully functional and successful genre-mash-up.

While up to this point the violence in the film is of a prisoner-catfight type nature (aside from a blackly-comic scene where Emanuelle takes a brutal baton-hit to the face from Cannibal Ferox's Lorraine De Selle), the sadistic nature of Crazy Boy’s gang pushes the film into new mean-spirited directions. While directors like Sergio Martino and D’Amato craft films with a pervasive tone of sleaze, Mattei’s WPM contains only isolated moments of shocking violence and sexual depravity, which makes these scenes more powerful than they would be alongside the non-stop cavalcade of shock formula of the D’Amato Black Emanuelle films or Martino‘s cannibal pictures. While Crazy Boy taking a mouthful of gore is a high-note, the film’s most gruesome scene has to be the sequence where a broken and abused prisoner fatally wounds a thug by inserting a razor blade into her vagina and seducing him (luckily this isn‘t a D‘Amato film, as Gianetto De Rossi would have actually figured out some way to film the appendage/razor contact).

Despite a predictable climax, Emanuelle’s fate at the end of the film is somewhat ambiguous. Presumably this device is a bit of insurance, material to fuel the start of more Emanuelle WiP films. However unless I’m mistaken, this and ViaWP are the only such major pictures. While the triumphant tone of the film’s dénouement is depleted by this bit of business, this film is still jam-packed and engaging, and certainly a high-point for both the women-in-prison genre and the sub-genre of Black Emanuelle films starring Laura Gemser. Recommended.