Hands up if you didn’t expect me to review this one. Well, to be honest, this movie was offered for free by my digital tv provider. It’s as good an excuse as any, really.

Anyway, it gave me a chance to see a recent Wayans brothers movie. I knew them from long ago (when they made In Living Color, which was responsible for the success of the Wayans family as well as a certain James Carrey). I also know their recent reputation (makers of unfunny comedies) and watched The Daily Show episode with one Wayans family member. A clip from their most recent movie Little Man was shown and – literally – three people in the audience had to laugh. Not the best of signs.

Scary Movie is better than Little Man, though do not force me to watch Scary Movie 3. The first two scenes (incl. a parody of Scream - which used “Scary Movie” as a working title) I found genuinely funny. In fact, don’t believe the people who maintain In Living Color was highbrow. It wasn’t.
After a good start the movie continues with unfunny material. In the end I decided to keep a chart, carefully noting the scenes and jokes I loved vs. those I hated. The result? 21scenes and jokes made me laugh (or chuckle), 54 I truly hated. (That would’ve been 52, but the end credits feature two jokes, one even worse than the other.) Nevertheless, 21 good scenes or jokes isn’t that bad: it means that statistically Scary Movie is seven times as funny as Be Kind, Rewind (the horror, the horror).

Among the scenes I really didn’t like were the overused joke that one character may be gay and all the scenes with Marlon Wayans as a pot smoker. You’d almost be excused for thinking Marlon is a crappy actor (he’s also the unfunniest person in the joke-free Little Man) but don’t forget he was also in Requiem for a Dream. So, it isn’t that he isn’t a good actor, it’s just that he has a horrible taste for comedy.

All in all, for every excellent parody Scary Movie tends to serve you (i.e. Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer) you also get an unfunny parody (The Blair Witch Project‘s parody is by far the worst) and own material which should’ve stayed on the drawing board. There’s also much too much emphasis on the meta-joke (“It’s as if we were in a movie.” – “We are, there is the director and the scriptgirl.”) even though this sometimes works (“You can’t do this to me!” – “Why not? Did you think I Know What You Did Last Summer made any sense?”).

The math genius in me decided that 21 in favour versus 54 against with a lot of undecided moments equals 28%. If we’re lenient, we’ll make that 3/10. But don’t expect me to find screenshots or posters for this post.

Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in one movie? With the addition of Hammer girl Yutte Stensgaard (Lust for a Vampire, Zeta One), surely such a movie can’t be bad! That movie is Scream and Scream Again and unfortunately I couldn’t find myself enjoying it.

Scream and Scream Again was a co-production of AIP and Tigon, released in 1970 and directed by Gordon Hessler. Hessler is mainly known for three other movies: The Oblong Box, Cry of the Banshee and KISS meets the Phantom of the Park. All movies which rate him as a cult movie director, just not a director of good cult movies. All have a certain je ne sais quoi (note we’re trying to overcome our shortage of French words at the Avenue) which make them watchable but not exceptional.

In Scream and Scream Again we witness a maniac on the loose, nicknamed ‘the vampire killer’ because he also sucks the blood out of his victims. We hardly see this happen, as this isn’t the focus of the movie. Which brings us to my key point: what is the focus of the movie? The film begins with an exhausted jogger dropping on the ground, someone trying to get into some sort of Nazi-like regime (yes, they even copied the red and white design, just with a different symbol in the circle’s middle), a überstrong killer on the loose… this movie is going places!

Sadly it’s going in four directions at the same time, which leaves the viewer feeling quartered. It’s a cop thriller, a sci-fi movie and a vampire flick. As mentioned before, the vampire scenes are barely mentioned, the sci-fi element seems directly lifted from an episode of Doctor Who or The Avengers and the cop thriller is so overexposed and stretched it’s still full of cops, but not exactly thrilling. And don’t be fooled by the poster of the movie: the acid bath is hardly there.

If there’s still a chance you want to watch this, it’s because of the cast. Cushing, Lee and Price in one movie is always worth an hour and a half of your time. Even if Cushing was a late addition to the cast and only shows up in a couple of scenes. Of the three movie legends, Price gets most of the screentime. Sometimes it looks as if he’s rehearsing for Dr. Phibes. Well, who can blame the man? Years later, Vincent Price was interviewed about the movie and confessed he’d never understood the script. See, now there’s a consolation: you’re not alone.

4.5/10

P.S. Anyone want to see the trailer?

Howdi, stranger. I saw you hiking and decided to pick you up. It gets fairly lonely here on this long road. So buckle up and tour with me for a full week of horror movies.

Our trip begins with Rest Stop, a straight to dvd movie released in 2006. The writer and director is one John Shiban, a name that shouldn’t be unfamiliar to you if you followed the Chris Carter series. He wrote quite a few good X-Files episodes, one Harsh Realm episode and was one of the creative forces behind The Lone Gunmen show. Erm, maybe I should’ve known that last bit before I bought Rest Stop. All I knew was that he was a staff writer for The X-Files and that some of the better episodes were penned (and occasionally directed) by him. I learned something today: if part of someone’s filmography is okay, it isn’t bad to also look at the lesser successful part of the filmography. It shields you from extra disappointment.

The story in short: a young couple stop at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere because the girl needs to go to the restroom. The toilet doors are filled with scary sentences about a killer and everything inside is dirty. When the girl leaves the toilet, her boyfriend and their car have disappeared. Every time she tries to leave the place a truck manages to block her escape. Etc. etc.

Rest Stop isn’t awful, but you couldn’t force me to say it’s good. Not even if you try some of the persuasion methods seen in what’s sadly called “torture porn” movies. Rest Stop starts as a thriller, then opens a can of supernatural elements (not bad if you can show your X-Files pedigree here) before sadly opting for the path of torture porn. Is there really a need to see someone drill holes in parts of the body that don’t need them? If there is no ass-raping sequence in Psycho, it’s not only because Hitchcock wasn’t allowed to include it. It’s because it’s just not necessary to show every gory bit in detail… because sometimes it just hurts the movie.

The moment Rest Stop stops trying to be a supernatural horror movie and starts trying to cash in on the popularity of movies like Saw and Hostel (and their 700 sequels), the carefully built-up premise is thrown out of the window (complete with explosion, of course). Gone is Rest Stop‘s sense of atmosphere, now it’s replaced with an attitude of “Look how twisted we dare to be!” Shiban, who was a story editor during season four of The X-Files, should’ve known this. That was the season of “Home” (with freak brothers) and “Unruhe” (where a mad guy tried to lobotomize Scully). Those stories worked because the atmosphere came first and the gore (mainly in “Home”) only came second. What wasn’t shown on screen was filled in by your own imagination. Which is far superior than seeing someone bite off a finger (for no obvious reason).

Speaking of which, it takes a looooong time before you can feel sympathy for Nicole (Jaimie Alexander). Mainly because she decided to flee from her parents with one of the most annoying douchebags you’ve seen in a horror movie. By the time you do feel sympathy for her, the story becomes so incredible it’s impossible to the movie characters any longer as living creatures (because you’re too aware you’re watching a movie). That’s what an overdose of gore does to a viewer.

Yes, like Aja’s abysmal remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Rest Stop gloats in gore so much you see through it. Here is another movie that tries to be scary, is what you come to realize. And none of what follows will still scare you, not even the occasion return to its original form (the atmospheric supernatural thriller). What doesn’t help either is that most of the plot is quite familiar from other movies: a mysterious car blocking your exit, the torture porn, the weird (and deeply religious) family who are in the neighbourhood, the maniac you just can’t kill… stop me if you haven’t heard those before. And no, I’m not saying Rest Stop should’ve been a horror movie with brand new scares, but I can’t accept its soulless attempt to suck some blood (or money) out of Hollywood’s latest horror franchise. And yes, like all the torture porn movies, there is a Rest Stop 2.

Rest Stop 2 seems fairly impossible after watching the first movie, but they did manage to find a way to make the sequel credible. However, Nicole is no longer played by Jaimie Alexander. Now there’s a smart girl.

I have second feelings about ending this review with the usual score out of 10. Because sadly I can’t say the movie was as awful as I may have made it look now, even if that’s only thanks to a good performance by Jaimie Alexander and to John Shiban’s experience at The X-Files. The man can sure polish a turd. Now, how would you like me to rate the movie? As the excellently polished turd it now is? Or as the turd that’s still smelling underneath the surface? Rationally I should give this 4.5 or 5 out of 10. Emotionally, I want to go for a lower score. You decide.

Amongst the ideas you may have never expected to be turned into a movie, Enzo G. Castellari is proud to present you Johnny Hamlet, Shakespeare’s famous play served with an Italian western sauce.
If not anything else, it’s definitely quite different. But is it any good?

The idea was penned by Sergio Corbucci, director of a.o. Django and The Great Silence.
Preoccupied with directing too many movies himself, Corbucci couldn’t find enough time to make this idea into a movie. And that’s where Castellari stepped in.

Before we can discuss the movie further, let’s have a look at the various names of this film: the original title is Quella Sporca Storia Nel West.
The English title mixes the names of the main character and the character’s source and so we end up with Johnny Hamlet.
The German version is called Django – Die Totengräber warten schon. Never mind that this film isn’t related to Django or that there’s only one gravedigger in the film (and that he isn’t exactly waiting). You have to understand that in Germany it was apparently mandatory by law for every Italian western to be released as Django.
Django was of course a popular character and even the Italian producers tried to stick the name in as many westerns as possible: take Pochi Dollari per Django.
Castellari claims he was hired as a second-hand director for Pochi Dollari per Django (Some Dollars for Django), a Django rip-off that was going to be realized by Leon Klimovsky.  Castellari’s description of Klimovsky says it all: “A real gentleman, but I couldn’t see him turn out a great movie.”
Castellari helped the man and – as westerns were so popular at the time there were at least 300 made per year – did good enough a job for him to asked as a director for a western: Vado… l’ammazzo e torno (Any Gun Can Play). Soon afterwards he heard about Corbucci’s idea to turn Hamlet into a western… when Corbucci backed out Castellari stepped in.

Though the travelling circus company begin the movie with “To be or not to be”, Johnny Hamlet isn’t a faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet is called Johnny, for instance and Ophelia is not Hamlet’s girlfriend (Ophelia is part of the circus, Hamlet’s girlfriend is called Emily). However, certain names have made the transition: Hamlet’s uncle Claudius became Claude, there’s Horaz (Horatio) and Hamlet’s mother is Gertie, an acceptable abbreviation of Gertrude.

That not everything is strictly followed is a good thing: the basic idea (Claudius killing his brother, Hamlet avenging his father) is kept, but other plotlines have been changed. The effect is that you can’t always guess what’ll happen next and who will kill who.

Castellari can be a good director and you can see Johnny Hamlet was early in his career: you see the director’s enthusiasm in a lot of scenes. The camera swings nicely, sets are colourfully decorated… Castellari wanted to show the world he wanted to become a good director.
Of course, adapting Shakespeare is also a bit problematic: most people know the original and will have to agree that, if they kept a bit more of the original play, the movie could’ve been even better. Now it ends up at 7 out of 10 and it’s an entertaining spaghetti western, with a few nods to Hamlet.

But it is an beautifully made and entertaining film, so you won’t be disappointed when you choose to spend your evening watching Quella Sporca Storia Nel West.

DVD Review

How do I look?
Koch Media have done a nice job with this film: visually the movie looks quite stunning, especially if you compare the images to those of the trailers. A lot of work has gone into this and we’re more than happy to forgive the release the occasional visual line or crack in the audio. You’d have a tough time finding more than a handful, anyway.

The DVD release itself looks nice: its yellow draws immediate attention and I was almost able to find this DVD in the dark. If you take the DVD out of the cardboard box you’ll find the DVD presented as a book, with the film’s title on the cover and a Shakespeare quote on the back. “Sein oder Nichtsein, das ist hier die Frage: Ob’s edler in Gemüt, die Pfeil und Schleudern des wütenden Geschicks zu dulden oder, …” and then another 20 lines of Hamlet in German.

Language options, the more the merrier
You can choose between watching this movie in German or the original Italian track.
The German track is incomplete as the movie used to be cut. The scenes that were cut before are presented in Italian with German subtitles.
If you select the Italian track you can opt between German and English subtitles. A recent visit to Xploited Cinema told me that there were no English subs despite what it says on the box. Weirdly enough, the DVD I own does have English subs but doesn’t mention it on the cover. I don’t know if there’s a new version (not likely though) or if Xploited made an error here. Anyway, I’ve just seen the film and with English subtitles.

Any extras on the side?
Which brings us to the extras: the most interesting extra is a 34 minute long documentary, Strange Stories from the West. It’s mainly an interview with director Castellari and it sheds some light on the man’s career. Castellari’s interview is interrupted for an interview with Francesco de Masi (who’s responsible for the soundtrack). Afterwards, Mr Django himself, Franco Nero, comes to tell us why he wasn’t in this movie.

A nice release can’t do without the original trailer and we find two here: a German and the original Italian. Not understanding a benign word of Italian, I can’t tell you what the Italian blurb was, but I can tell you someone let his child loose on the trailer. Almost every scene presented in this 3 minute long trailer has been coloured in by a hyperactive toddler without taste. Never did drugs, but would like to know what a bad trip feels like? The Italian trailer will help you out!
The German trailer shows the same scenes, but without the insane colour schemes. Though it does draw a bit too much attention to the German title Django – Die Totengräber Warten Schon. Best line: “Though there are many Django movies there’s only a few by Corbucci and only one Django – Die Totengräber Warten Schon.” Hey, it wasn’t our idea you’d rename every Italian film Django, my German friends, so don’t blame us!

Wolfgang Luley wrote a 4-page booklet for the release. Actually, that’s one page for the cover, one page for a giant picture and only two pages of text in German, but it’s a bit informative, so we won’t make too much of a fuss about it.

And finally, a selection of 149 pictures (stills, covers and artwork) close the extras section.

Koch Media have done a nice job on this release. There’s enough extras to make you happy and most of them were relevant and don’t feel like they’re dragged out of some vault as filler material. And, unless you’re allergic to the colour yellow, the release looks nice too.

Overall review:
FILM – 7/10
EXTRAS – 9/10

Quella Sporca Storia Nel West (Johnny Hamlet / Django – Die Totengräber Warten Schon)
Italy, 1968
Director: Enzo G. Castellari
Based on an idea by Sergio Corbucci
Cast: Andrea Giordana (Johnny), Gilbert Roland (Dazio aka Horaz), Horst Frank (Claudio aka Claude), Manuel Serrano (Santana), Françoise Prévost (Gertie), Ennio Girolami (Ross), Ignazo Spalla (Guild), Gabriella Grimaldi (Emily / Ophelia)

The DVD has been released by Koch Media (Germany) and is a Region 2 release.

Welcome to my latest DVD review, offered at least a week too late. And if you’re wondering why: be glad you’re reading this and you don’t have to listen to my voice, as I’m still sick.

Equally sick, be it in a different meaning, is the movie that’s on review today: Django Kill: If you live shoot!, which was called Se sei vivo spara when it was released. I’ve already written about the success of Corbucci’s Django and the stream of ‘sequels’ that popped up shortly afterwards.
This is one of them: the producers changed the title (much to the dismay of the director), but for once something good came out of something bad. Even though Django Kill can still not be called famous, the Django suffix gave the movie the extra boost it deserved. Do remember that in the late 60s several euro westerns were released every week and it became hard to distinguish the handful of great movies between the hundreds of releases.

Django Kill: If You Live Shoot is a good euro western and the British release by Ardent (which was released in 2004, but completely slipped by me at the time) is the best version to buy. Here’s why.

Giulio Questi is the director of Se Sei Vivo Spara and he’s mainly known for two movies, the other being the equally weird giallo Death Laid An Egg.

Tomas Milian plays the lead and it definitely helped the producers that his character in the movie was either nameless or just called ‘The Stranger’. This made it so much easier to redub the character Django.
Fair enough, though this movie has nothing to do with Corbucci’s classic movie, of all the fake Django sequels this is the movie that resembles Django the most. It’s an incredibly cruel and violent movie: you’ll see a lot of people being killed, tortured and more of that unpleasantness.
One scene that had many censors worried at the time was the one where people realize someone has been shot with golden bullets and they tear the (still living) man apart to get their hands on the gold.

Ardent DVD offered the British audience the movie in its uncut glory, a very first for the British audience who probably heard about the movie when Alex Cox introduced the movie in BBC2′s Forbidden season in 1997. (Though the scene with the bullets couldn’t be shown in the film, you could see (most of) it in Cox’s introduction.)

The good news is that Alex Cox was willing to do another introduction for this movie, especially for the DVD release. This introduction can only be found on this edtion, which is why the British DVD manages to beat Django Kill‘s American release by Blue Underground.

Also present on the Ardent release are an exclusive interview with the director and co-star Ray Lovelock and a set of trailers for other Argent western releases, as well as Se Sei Vivo Spara‘s trailer.

The cut scenes have been reinserted and you have to know where they were to find them. The movie was restored from the original negative materials and a splendid job was done.
This, of course, means that people who aren’t familiar to Italian cult movies, will be able to complain that the blood is far too red to be believable. We, however, like our blood as red as can be.

Django Kill is a very good movie: if people disagree, shoot!

P.S. As a bonus, here’s Alex Cox introducing the film for a spaghetti western series on ITV4 (with thanks to Cultextras):

Django may be incredibly popular in Italy, the UK, the US and Germany, but the rest of the world is often unaware of this spaghetti western hero. Quite a shame, so let’s talk about the film.

The main character’s name, Django, refers to Django Reinhardt, the famous jazz musician. Django wasn’t just known for being an exceptional musician, he also had a copule of fingers missing. Why director Sergio Corbucci chose this name for the main character of his movie will become painfully clear when you see the movie.
A sick joke, yes. But far from the only sick joke Corbucci has put in the movie.

Django was supposed to be shot on a spaghetti western set. Sadly, heavy rainfall had made the grounds considerably muddy, probably too muddy for a western to be shot there. Corbucci did not despair, he even liked what he saw and decided to make the set even soggier. This is just one of the details that draw you into the movie when you’re watching the opening scene.
While not many spaghetti westerns will start with the film’s hero dragging himself through the mud, Django has another extra: the hero is dragging something along with him, a coffin.
As human beings tend to be curious, you want to find out why someone’s carrying around a coffin and who or what is inside this coffin. The film’s main character is definitely not the guy that’ll tell us: Django is a mysterious character. It would be wrong to describe him as a hero, he’s more of an anti-hero, just like it’s hard to find a good character inside this film.

Franco Nero is excellent as Django, in fact so noteworthy lots of producers tried sticking the name Django to all their spaghetti westerns with Nero. Actually, Nero didn’t even have to be in the film… it was enough that the movie was a spaghetti western. With more than 20 movies using the name Django, it should be noted that there is only one official sequel, Django 2: Il Grande Ritorno, made 20 years later with Nero once again as Django. Sadly, the movie is not that good.
Much more noteworthy is Django Kill, a spaghetti western that was released just a couple of months after Django and which had its title changed from If You Live Shoot, much to the annoyance of director Questi. While being completely unrelated to Django (the main character is played by Tomas Milian), it is the one movie that comes closest to the unhealthy atmosphere of Django and is even way sicker (the scene where bandits pull golden bullets out of a wounded guy’s chest springs to mind).
Django itself has its fair share of whipping scenes and torture scenes, including a rather notorious one where one guy has his ear cut off and then has it put in his mouth.

You’ll notice the bad guys wear red masks. Great (it stands out so much you remember those scenes forever), but it wasn’t planned. A major production that was being shot at the same time as Django had hired the best-looking extras, so Corbucci could only get his hands on ugly extras and had them wear capes.
This is probably what makes Django such an interesting picture: if the extras are ugly, have them wear capes; if the grounds are muddy, make them muddier and insert a scene where the prostitutes are sitting by a stove in an attempt to get warmer, that’ll convince the viewer it’s late autumn or even winter.
Add to this the wonderful looks of Franco Nero, who looks good but isn’t as clean cut as many heroes in spaghetti westerns. You could actually believe Nero spent a couple of weeks in cold and dirty areas. In fact, once again movie magic helped establish that: the make-up crew gave Nero a few extra wrinkles, to make him look tougher.
All in all, that’s what makes this film so exceptional: its combination of luck/coincidence and a relentless creativity that manages to work all the misfortunes into the film as if it had always been planned like that.

One important name hasn’t been mentioned in this review: that of the assistant director, one Ruggero Deodato, who later became a director himself and got his name into movie history books as the director of Cannibal Holocaust.

Being quite brutal, the English censors did not take kindly to the film and had Django banned in the United Kingdom. The British audience only heard about the film’s reputation and were only introduced to Corbucci’s film when The Harder They Come was shown in British theatres, a reggae movie that included a few scenes from Django.
This is the sort of stuff that does wonders for your reputation.

2008 may be remembered for a lot of things, but it’s the year we decided not to go to Pukkelpop. Instead, we watched it LIVE on our computer and wrote four articles about it. Given that the internet is full of pages trying to grab your attention, it may have been difficult to keep track of those pieces. For a time, my website’s frontpage led you to them, but those links are only there temporarily. So here’s a handy link to the reviews:

Prelude: Pukkelpop 2008 – The Home Edition
“if you look up “Pukkelpop 2008 line-up”, your second hit would be a blog saying this was the worst line-up in years. It is.”
(read more)

Pukkelpop Unlive (day 1)
The Subways gave me mood swings, Amy MacDonald is overhyped and Mercury Rev raise the bar for the next bands. That and reviews on Die! Die! Die!, Triggerfinger, Santogold, Tricky, Editors, Danko Jones and Stereo MCs.
(read more)

Pukkelpop Unlive (day 2)
In which we didn’t become fans of Robyn: “What’s the difference between me and thousands of people at the Dance Hall? They seemed to like Robyn, I didn’t. I listened for two and a half songs because I’d told myself I couldn’t dislike them more than ‘Who’s that girl?’. And while that’s technically true, that still doesn’t mean I liked them. Well, the second one was bearable.”
Reviews of State Radio, Dusty Kid, Spearhead, Girls In Hawaii, A Brand, Deadmau5, Foals, Robyn, Miss Kitten and the Hacker, Boys Noize and more than a dozen of video links.
(read more)

Pukkelpop Unlive (day 3)
Samim & Miguel Toro play percussion, Lykke Li is almost awake, The Black Box Revelation show their potential, The Rones are ynnuf, Black Kids are no Fiery Furnaces, The Wombats are the flavour of the month with an upcoming expiry date, Plain White T’s and Anti-Flag are clones, Girl Talk benefits from the rescheduled line-up, The Dresden Dolls are very good, Bloc Party are good and popular, Étienne de Crécy gives people who like cubes with electric light an erection, plus the jury’s verdict.
(read more)