Photo Penchant

Photo Penchant

Exploitation Film of the Month

"I'd climb aboard a porcupine if it struck my fancy."

 A new month has finally arrived and James and I wasted no time in heading down to our favourite video store and purchasing this month's flick, Score. There were a lot of choices but this film just couldn't be ignored and with a recommendation from Cinema Sewer (a filthy, independently produced movie magazine written and illustrated by one of the guys at the video store), we knew it would be worth checking out!

Radley Metzger directs 1972's Score (was released in the US in 1974) based off a 1971 off-Broadway play of the same title, written by Jerry Douglas (who also wrote for the film). This piece of "high class erotica" is just one of many directed by Radley Metzger, having directed over 20 of these films between 1961 and 1984. After checking this film out (and seeing a couple of previews on the DVD extras) I definitely want to check out some more of his work.


Score tells the story of a swinging married couple, Elvira (Claire Wilbur who reprises her role from the Broadway production) and Jack (Gerald Grant) who have a sexual appetite for men, couples, telephone repairmen- you name it! Elvira, somewhat bored with their usual hookups, and looking for a bit of a challenge, decides to seduce an innocent younger couple, Betsey (Lynn Lowry of The Crazies, I Drink Your Blood) and Eddie (Calvin Culver gay XXX icon) and make a bet out of it. You see, they have this little game where they find a couple (or individual) that catches their fancy and one of them is challenged to seduce them within a 6-month time limit. It's sort of unclear about what happens when they lose but that isn't really the point.

Elvira is quite the sex pot. She goes out in a trench coat, wearing nothing under it, and parades around the house in a sheer house coat. You can tell that Claire Wilbur knows this character inside and out and everything about her exudes confidence and sexuality. She starts off "operation music box", as the humorously innocent sounding narrator puts it, seducing a telephone repairmen(Carl Parker who has only 4 acting credits, two of which being Radley Metzger films) in front of Betsey while Jack is at work. Poor, naive Betsey is a little shocked by this, thanks to her Catholic upbringing, and tries to feign sickness when her and Eddie are expected to be over for dinner that night.

After she shows up, wearing white lace practically up to her eyeballs, Jack and Elvira start their conquest. They begin by getting the couple to relax with a bit of pot (from their pepper grinder!) and innocent little Betsey, who's never done any drugs, keeps asking "am I stoned yet?". After a bit of "Chopsticks" on the piano from the ladies, and inhibitions lowered, a costume trunk is brought out. Jack reveals how he wishes he had been a sailor, goading Betsey into revealing that she wishes she had been a model and Eddie a cowboy. The two men don possibly the most homoerotic outfits you could pick, Betsey a very minimal black lace number and Elvira comes out in a rather revealing nun outfit, emitting the response of "Jesus Christ" from Betsey.

It's certainly on now as the clock ticks closer and closer to midnight and if they're going to score, they're going to have to do it soon!This leads to splitting up the couples, Elvira with Betsey and Jack with Eddie, and after some heart to hearts (Betsey confesses her marriage issues and suspicions of Eddie's sexuality) and some poppers, it doesn't take long for both of them to score!



It's a simple story with humorous and campy dialogue delivered in the best way that it can be by it's actors, despite being a little stiff at times. It's a bit talky but the pacing is very quick and smooth. Each of them seemed to have a strong sense of who their characters were and played them convincingly. And let's face it, it's a movie about sex and having fun so we're not expecting top notch acting and dialogue here. We also see a subtle degradation of religious views into sexual exploration which leads to the glorious and freeing transformation of Betsey.

The erotic aspects of the film are noticeably uneven. The sex scenes between the two women are never more than a softcore skin flick and camera tricks playing off the mirrors to make it look like the women are touching more than they are. I discovered that this was due to hostility between the two actresses off screen, apparently because of Lynn Lowry making more money. This unfortunately ruins their chemistry and makes their scenes together look a bit silly. The scenes with guys however, are very explicit and quite raw. Little is left to the imagination as we see the men engaging in actual felatio, sitting on the edge between soft and hardcore (no worries, there's no penetration or ejaculation). I think Metzger's exploration in homosexuality and not holding back is commendable and genuinely erotic.

All of this is of course aided by the bright colours and fun camerawork. It's all very tastefully shot and paired with a mixed and amusing soundtrack ranging from strange flute to the somewhat horrible but catchy uncredited song "Where is the Girl" the reoccurs throughout the film and switches to "Where is the Boy" at the end. There are also plenty of gorgeous shots of the village of Bakar, Croatia where the movie was filmed, or as they liked to call it "Leisure City".

Score is a great mix of sex and comedy and has such a delightfully cheery ending. Everything about it is just so upbeat, fun and sexy! Though it may not be for everyone, it is the perfect example of "high class eroticism" and is undeniably enjoyable to watch (It's just too bad the carefree notions of the film didn't foster more safe sex all around as both Grant and Culver died of complications related to HIV/AIDS). I think we made a good pick for this month!

VFX share

I came across this neat video showing a break down of some of the visual effects from Black Swan which I thought was really interesting. There were so many effects in that film so it's cool to get an idea of how some of them were accomplished. Just in case you're also interested!

I Spit on Your Remake. All over it.

I can't wait to tear into this one. 

The other night we sat down to watch the remake of the 1978 I Spit on Your Grave. When I first heard that they were remaking this film, besides thinking it was totally unnecessary to remake it, I figured Hollywood would find some way to fuck it up and completely miss the mark. And guess what, they sure did. They did everything that they could do to try to top the original film- releasing it uncut right away to try to achieve some shock value and focusing way too much on creating Jigsaw worthy, intricate kills that are purely there for the gross-out factor that the Saw generation of kids has come to expect. A waste of time if you ask me.

Steven R. Monroe directs the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave and it's not surprising to find that he's most known for camera operation and has mostly just directed TV movies (what you might call, a director for hire). This remake follows the same basic plot as the original- Jennifer (Sarah Butler) is a writer who comes to a remote cabin, deep in the southern backwoods, to get away from the city life and write her next novel. Unfortunately for her, she catches the eye of a nasty group of male locals who pursue her and proceed to rape and beat her in an extremely gratuitous fashion. She escapes and gets her revenge.

I'm really not even sure where to start with this one. First of all, I didn't get anything out of Sarah Butler's portrayal of Jennifer. She was a weak character, one that they overplayed as flaky and somewhat mindless. The supposed character development that much of the first part of the film  focuses on really showed us nothing more than some typical city girl that's clumsy, naive and probably only capable of writing Confessions of a Shopaholic during her writing retreat. I don't feel anything for her which immediately makes the film feel pointless. There's nothing interesting or at all special about her or her mediocre performance. This made all the rape scenes just feel like the most base kind of exploitation, rape for the sake of entertainment, and to set up for some overly explicit kill scenes. That was what made this film feel so wrong and off base with the original. It misses the point of exploitation films of 70s and takes it a step too far and in the wrong direction.

We are then somehow lead to believe that this girl, after being quite abusively raped, was able to jump into freezing cold water, fully nude, and hold her breath long enough to swim completely out of sight of her captors. It would be pretty impressive for anyone to do that in peak physical form but after the exhaustion of what had just happened to her, just minutes before, that's pretty goddamn amazing. This is where all the terrible plot holes start coming in to play. In the original, they leave her to go back to her cabin in her beaten down and degraded state and make no mention of killing her because it isn't really necessary. They show her going back and cleaning herself up, dealing with what just happened to her and becoming stronger so that she can get her revenge. This takes about a day and is pretty effective in my opinion. Now in this remake, we don't see what happens to her for a while. A whole month in fact. Uh, right. Instead we get an overly drawn out look at the lives of these detestable men in what I guess is an attempt to make us loathe them even more which, trust me, was pretty easy when we saw them raping her. So basically, this girl, who can't even hold her phone without dropping it in the toilet, was able to somehow survive in the woods for an entire month, living off what they briefly allude to as rats that she caught herself (oh yeah and apparently she can catch fish with her bare hands...), and somehow procuring some clean new clothes. Hell, she could have walked all the way home in that time! All of this defies all possibility of belief and reality. I don't see how we are expected to believe that this girl is capable of any of this when we're given such a poor definition of her character in the beginning. That destroys the effect of the film and is what makes it feel so gratuitous and unredeeming.

The original film is all about drawing everything out, every shot and every scene, making it feel realistically voyeuristic and making you really feel everything- her torture, her rape and her revenge. This remake is drawn out in all the wrong places. Way too much time is spent focusing on the men in the movie and their sorry attempts at portraying believable country boys. Our lead asshole looked like something out of a jeans ad, you know, a really forced attempt at styling a city boy to make him look country. I also couldn't get past that chubby guy who played the gay guy Damien in Mean Girls and his crappy attempt at a southern accent. They also decided to throw in a new character, the town Sheriff, who gets in on some of the rape action. They spend A LOT of time drawing out his story, showing his family life with his daughter, all to give our main character some weak leverage to get to him. Yeah we get it, it's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch him behaving normally at home with his wife and daughter when he enjoys going out and raping women, and she uses his daughter to get to him. But then we don't ever find out what she actually did with his daughter and she doesn't even use her in some way in front of him which I think, would have been more effective. Instead, she had to do something overly elaborate, which brings me to the revenge kills.

What was so great about the original was the smart and effective ways that she went about killing the men and how much you could feel her pain from what they caused her. Not only that, they were simple. In this remake however, they've fallen into Saw/Hostel territory. Though yes, they are some pretty exceptionally gross and cruel kills, I give them that, but I just couldn't get over the improbability of them all. It also didn't help that they kept throwing cheesy one-liners for her to say that pushed this film further and further into cheesy, torture porn caliber film making. And even though they were trying so hard to think of the outlandishly clever and ironic kill schemes, I was bored watching them and waiting for her to carry each one of them out in her petty, unsatisfying way. They spent too much time trying to make her scary looking, using typical, used-up imagery like long dark hair hanging in front of her face and making her look dirty and menacing. She's not supposed to be Samara from The Ring, she's supposed to be a broken down woman who's angry, not demonic. It completely cheapened any humanity and pain that Jessica had to begin with, therefore canceling out any attempt this film ever made at female empowerment or really any point at all.

I went into watching this film very openly and I really tried to give it a chance but it just didn't deliver. I think that when you're remaking a movie, solely for the purpose of trying to make more brutal rape and torture scenes, something has been lost and doesn't feel right. Some of my favourite modern horror films are some of the most disturbing (Martyrs, A Serbian Film) but they have a point, an underlying message in them that makes the violence justifiable and significant. This film just gives audiences an excuse to indulge in some guilt-free sadism that no matter how hard they tried, really isn't justifiable.

"Jesus is just a guy who cuts my lawn."

Been on a bit of TV watching rampage recently, which means watching the first two seasons of Sons of Anarchy in two days...Needless to say, we're obsessed. I enjoy finding a new TV series to watch that's actually decent and somewhat engaging. What is there not to like about about a TV show about bikers? Actually, I'm sure a lot of people could come up with a whole list of reasons. Though it can be a little overly American at times, perhaps a bit misogynistic and lately, there's been a little too much religion, I still love it. Awesome cast, interesting characters (actually some of the most interesting characters you can get on TV), exciting plot lines, violence, Irish accents- there's a lot to like! The last episode we saw was so tense it actually had me sweating. I'm so involved now, I can't wait to watch more.

Besides that, James has started on my intro to Westerns. I've seen the odd Western on TV and am a fan of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Giant (which is more of an epic romance-style western) but never any of the classics, and certainly no Clint Eastwood films. So we started with A Fistful of Dollars and I really liked it. I've discovered how much I love the look of old westerns, the sweeping, barren landscapes, riding around on horses (which I've always loved, maybe because I'm a girl), leather boots and gun holsters, it's just all very cool. So I'm excited to watch the rest of the Sergio Leone set and take it from there.

Other than that, we recently watched City of the Living Dead, most of The Burbs (I may have fallen asleep...) and the piece of shit remake of I Spit on Your Grave which you will be hearing about very soon.

"Your mouth smells like a borscht"

"We're flesh, potential carcasses. If I go to the butcher, I'm always surprised for not being there instead of the beef."

As James and I generally like to look for films that push the boundaries of the grotesque and horrifying, just to see what will finally, truly gross us out (Salo I think has so far come the closest), we thought we'd give the infamous La Grande Bouffe a shot. It didn't exactly satisfy our appetite for shocking cinema but did offer an interesting take on wealthy European culture.

Director Marco Ferreri's scandalous 1973 film La Grande Bouffe (which can also be found under the title Blow-Out) scathingly addresses European conspicuous consumption and sociocultural issues. The film may seem a bit empty at first but it actually offers quite a bit of witty and somewhat subtle insight.

It follows the story of four middle-aged friends- Marcello the pilot (played by the wonderful Marcello Mastroianni), Phillipe the judge (Phillipe Noiret), Michel the television executive (Michel Piccoli) and Ugo the chef (Ugo Tognazzi). They decide to hole up in Phillipe's gorgeous Parisian villa for a gargantuan, non-stop feast. They hire some floozies to keep them company and invite the local school teacher Andrea (Andréa Ferréol), a plump and somewhat more sensual and healthy contrast to the other women, whom Phillipe proposes marriage to almost immediately. Their living is reduced to the most basic functions: eating, drinking, burping, sleeping, vomiting, fucking, pissing and shitting, with the men's ultimate goal of eating themselves to death.


The characters of the 4 men seem to personify power and the three manifestations of that ideology- justice (Phillipe), spectacle (Michel), food (Ugo) and adventure (Marcello). Their male sexuality is reduced to impotence, indifference and regression as their bodies begin to deteriorate as a result of the mass gorging. You will never see so much farting, humping and humping whilst farting done in such an artful way in cinema such as this. Marcello is a self proclaimed "sex maniac" and once all of the prostitutes leave, Andrea stays and proceeds to do all of the sleeping around...and all of the men in the house. Though it is unclear if she is sticking around simply to indulge herself or if she shares the same goal as the men, she stays around right until the very end.

What's unfortunate about this film is that it really lacks any semblance of a plot or back story and more so focuses on some rather drawn out bingeing, farting and rather unappealing looking sex. There isn't any apparent reason for any of these men to be doing all of this in the first place, we're just sort of led to chalk it up to mid-life listlessness and ennui with their rich-man lives. This makes it all feel sort of meaningless and is what left me feeling a little disappointed.



Ferreri does reveal their double-mindedness at points like when they are faced with the first death of the group and Michel finds himself uncontrollably weeping over the body. This also marks the point where most of the dark humor stops and you're left to endure the slow turmoil and melancholic descent of the rest of the characters. I really appreciated the subtle ways of showing the human-animal parallel, like how they placed the bodies of Marcello and Michel in the refrigerating room, their bodies occupying the same space as the animal carcasses, as Ugo, Phillipe and Andrea sat down to attempt to eat another meal in front of them. All of the sort of soul-crushing inevitability of the ending of this film is lightened just once more (well lightened in a, you know, very dark sort of way...) with Phillipe's death. This plump and somewhat breast obsessed man gorges himself to death at last by eating two enormous, tit-shaped mounds of pink pudding, complete with nipples! That to me was a great way to end the film and bring together all the dark wit and satire of the first part of the film. My other favourite scene, and definitely the most absurd, was when the toilet in Marcello's bathroom somehow erupts and showers him with a river of shit. Horrifying but hilariously played.

This film is just riddled with so many small details and pretty much every scene is open to interpretation, most likely leading to some existential meaning and view on the bourgeois. I think if it weren't for Ferreri's ability to lace the film with all of these clever allusions and intelligent black humor, it may not have been able to keep me watching for the entirety of it's nearly 2 and a half hour running time. I mean, there are only so many food fueled sex scenes one movie can sustain without a little more of a point. Did I find it shocking? No. Did I find it gross? Excessive eating tends to put me off food for a bit, but not long, and the thought of having sex with someone while they may possibly be soiling themselves is pretty nasty. So, a little bit, yes, but not very much. Overall, I'm still unsure as to how much I really liked the film. I still feel somewhat unsatisfied and think that perhaps curiosity draws people to the film a little more than it's substance. If you've watched Last Tango in Paris, La Maman et la Putain and even The Cook, the Theif, His Wife and Her Lover, then you should watch this film.


Oh, and a couple of random but interesting facts: the Chinese ambassador that we briefly meet when the men first arrive at the villa apparently happened to be just walking by during filming and put in the movie; the villa is now the Vietnamese Embassy; the actors apparently did a lot of real eating for their scenes in the film.

A tire...named Robert...

Could this actually be real?? I think I'm going to have to see this.

I've been having a lot of zombie dreams lately...

Just a quick update while I'm working on a couple of reviews. We've been doing a bit of movie watching lately and I've been doing A LOT of comic reading.What I've read through and started reading include:

 In terms of movies, we've watched: The Slime City Grindhouse Collection that I picked up a while ago (and intend to dedicated a future entry to it because it's ridiculous)
Phantasm (which I had actually never seen before)
Time Bandits (brilliant)
   Tenebre (currently reviewing)
   and True Grit which we watched last night that was also really good. So there shall be more to come very   soon!

"If your life had a face, I would punch it"

I just finished reading the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World comics and feel kind of sad, like I'm missing something now! I saw the movie when it came out and loved it and now, after reading the comic, I'm really impressed with how they translated it into film. Obviously there's a lot more to the characters and story in the comic, but I think that they condensed it into a 112 minute film effectively. The casting was pretty much perfect and they did such an amazing job of making the actor's look like the characters in the comic. There is also a really interesting making-of feature on the DVD that is worth checking out. I now feel the need to watch the movie again, to fulfill my new need for Scott Pilgrim.If you haven't already, read the comic and watch the film. Both are awesome. That's all.  

"It's easy to kill live people"

During some of my reading/research in one of the many horror magazines out there, I came across an article on the film Psychomania. Before I even read anything, I took one look at the bikers in the picture and asked James if he'd ever seen it. He hadn't and we were both shocked that neither of us had even heard of it before. We were immediately seduced by it's quirky charm and premise, and vowed to see it as soon as possible. Our viewing has finally occurred and we were quite enticed by what we saw.

Don Sharp directs the undeniably likeable 1973 euroshock, Psychomania (or The Death Wheelers) about "The Living Dead" biker gang who end up quite literally being just that. Tom Latham (Nicky Henson) is the leader of this fab gang, clad in embroidered leathers and some wicked matching skeleton helmets. The gang likes to pass their time playing chicken with highway motor vehiclists, driving in circles around 7 big stones (or witch burial rather) and driving through city squares and grocery stores, knocking things over.

Tom is a bad boy. He wears leather pants and has funny, Brian Jones-esque hair (Nicky Henson blames other roles for the hair but I think he dug it) and at the ripe age of 18, just isn't feeling satisfied with his life. He confesses to his girlfriend Abby, the nice one of the gang, that he wants to commit suicide and she tells him that she can't join his suicide pact because she has to help her mum with the shopping tomorrow. He also appears to have a short attention span because midway through their graveyard make-out session, he stops to snatch up a frog (and I do mean that literally). He takes it home to his mother (Beryl Reid) and her manservant Shadwell (George Sanders who ironically committed suicide before the film's release, claiming to be "bored", but sadly did not come back on a motorcycle) and tries to figure out it's relation to his family and bringing back the dead. Turns out his family are some sort of occultists and after getting trapped in a secret room in the house and having vague, frog related hallucinations, Tom learns the secret to coming back from the dead. Turns out all you have to do is really, truly believe you can come back. Hmm...why have I never thought of this? Oh yeah, and some sort of frog ornamented jewelry is also required.

Tom wastes no time in meeting his demise and drives himself off a bridge. Abby requests that his mother let the gang bury him their way, which is sitting upright on his bike in the grave (which was cool until you saw the gang out of their leather and in garish hippie attire, singing cheesy acoustic ballads and making floral wreaths). There was something about this that seemed vaguely familiar to me, that I just couldn't put my finger on. Turns out Lemmy from Motorhead must have been a fan of this film because he pays homage to it in their video for "Killed by Death". Anyway, back on point, Tom drives out of his grave, in the same perfect condition he was in before he died, hell-bent on wreaking havoc and taking lives. His gang decides to follow suit, jumping out of buildings and planes, riding in front of trucks, walking into the river donning chains and a speedo...Amazingly, only one or two chicken out right before death, even though most of their methods spare plenty of time for second thought before actually killing you. Abby however, is not so easily seduced by the idea. As the police close in on Tom and his undead comrades, Abby struggles with her will to live and her inexplicable love for Tom who, let's face it, is kind of a cold-hearted ass. She also picks the least fail-proof way to attempt to off herself. Can these evil forces be stopped or will idiotic romanticism win out?


Nicky Henson delivers a pretty solid lead as Tom, a rather spoiled and selfish outsider who just wants to live forever and mess with people as he pleases. George Sanders brought such a great sense of old-school sinister and macabre acting that made all of his scenes increasingly enjoyable. The rest of the gang all brought their own little quirks to this charming cast, each with a different, odder-looking British face than the next.


Psychomania isn't your typical film involving the undead. It isn't laden with gore and special effects, nor is it rampant with nudity or really much sexuality at all (seriously no boobs!). It instead utilizes the grainy 1970s cinematography that we know and love to set the tone of the film, with foggy moors and some simple live action stunts to the tune of an awesomely psychedelic soundtrack by John Cameron. That, paired with the colourful characters and the aforementioned bad-ass outfits, are what make this stylish biker flick a cult classic.


As for the DVD, it has some pretty informative special features that are definitely worth checking out, including an introduction by Fangoria Editor Chris Alexander, interviews with the cast, and an interview with the writer of that cheesy, hippie ballad. The film's negatives were apparently lost, so it's been taken from the best 35mm stock available, and looks pretty good.


All in all, Psychomania is a fun, stylish film that will keep you grooving and hanging on from that foggy opening scene to the utterly surreal ending. You really can't miss out on seeing "the grooviest zombie biker movie of them all!"