Braindead (Dead Alive)

 I have no idea how much damage Peter Jackson's Bad Taste did to my brain when I watched it as an impressionable child; It was the best thing ever for a long time, overshadowing even this when it came out a bunch of years later. I've watched both a lot of times over the years and while I'll always love Bad Taste, now it's Braindead that consistently blows me away. Every single time.

 It mixes the then-burgeoning splatterpunk movement with slapstick - Splatstick, if you will, which is actually a thing, according to the internet. It's juvenile, over-the-top, full of actors going full ham and the broadest of broad and gross-out humour. It is glorious.

 The film's silly sense of humour is on full display right out of the gate, with a (on the uncut version) patriotic homage to the queen as an expedition of the New Zealand zoological society goes to Skull Island to pick up a rare rat-monkey, a species that's later explained to be the result of a horde of plague-rats raping the local monkey population. The hunt devolves into a busy chase scene that finds time for a cricket gag and ends with a hilarious amputation joke. Zingaya! indeed.

 From there the action moves to Wellington for some light farce between Lionel (Timothy Balme), his domineering mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody), and Paquita (Diana Peñalver), a local shopkeeper. Paquita falls madly in love with Lionel because (in one of the film's weakest conceits) she's basically predestined to. Lionel is definitely interested, but Vera immediately dislikes the girl and forbids the affair (she hilariously describes Paquita as experienced; Moody is so good in her role).

 You can't stop young love, but Vera is nothing if not persistent - and while they're on a date in the zoo she follows them and gets bitten by the rat-monkey. Dear old mother mines this for maximum drama, and uses it as an excuse to pull Lionel and Paquita apart - after crushing the rat-monkey's skull with her high heels in a scene that strives to be as disgustingly goopy as possible. Bonus: the scene also includes a cameo from sci-fi legend Forrest J Ackerman.

 As foreshadowed by the prologue, the rat-monkey carries a deadly illness that quickly starts turning Vera into an undead monstrosity; And as she turns, the film's ghoulish sense of humour starts ramping up to overdrive.

 Lionel keeps her from running amok by keeping her zonked out with animal tranquilizers, but errors are made and undead abominations proliferate. His containment efforts finally fail spectacularly at a party held in his house, which results in a protracted battle against a horde of the undead that remains one of the best I've ever seen even after all these years.

 This is an incredibly well-crafted, imaginative movie. Not just the gore and creature effects, which are a staggering feat of low-budget wizardry; The script (by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair) is incredibly elaborate, introducing a lot of elements that then keep effortlessly weaving in and out of the action.

 Jackson's direction would get sharper with time, but many of the gonzo camera moves he would use in his later, much more polished movies -particularly dramatic pans and zooms- can be traced back here. It's slightly amateurish, especially when compared to his simpatico American colleague (and obvious inspiration) Sam Raimi, but it's incredibly energetic and propulsive. And the visual storytelling is top-notch, always keeping the many plates it's spinning on-screen, ready to be dropped tactically for maximum carnage.

 Much as I love the Lord of the Rings movies, I mourn this early, deranged Jackson, and wish he would have found a way to temper his more mainstream instincts with these deeply goofy, overtly bloody offerings. Put me against the wall, and I'd choose this over the whole of that much more polished trilogy.

Waxwork II - Lost in Time

  I must have watched Waxwork a dozen times as a kid/teen, and upon a recent rewatch I discovered I remembered a lot more from it than I thought I did. This sequel... not so much; I don't remember disliking it. But I did not remember a single scene except for a couple of bits at the climax.

 Waxwork II picks up straight after the events of the first; the waxwork is going down in flames, and our heroes Mark (Zach Galligan) and Sarah (Monika Schnarre, replacing Deborah Foreman) catch a cab to take them away.
 Sarah arrives home to her stepfather, and... well, we get some proof that writer/director Anthony Hickox unfortunately hasn't gotten any better at writing dialog or directing actors in the four years since the first one. There's some pretty embarrassing drama between Sarah and her stepdad, interrupted when an animated severed hand kills the stepfather in a homage to evil dead 2 (Waxworks 2 is even more overt in referencing other movies than the first one). The music remains wacky even as the poor guy's face gets hammered to mulch which... you know what? Fair enough; It's really hard to make animated body parts not be ridiculous.

Acting!

 Sarah is accused of the murder, and her defense of 'a dismembered hand did it' is somehow not successful, especially since she ground the proof in the trash compactor. So Mark starts looking for a way to prove her innocence.
 This involves finding a compass that lets him find 'time doors', invisible portals that will take them to other vignette-dimensions across time and space in the same way the Waxwork exhibits did in the first film. So he convinces Sarah to blindly jump into the first one they find, and away they go.

 And so begin Mark and Sarah's further comedic adventures in slightly off-brand familiar stories. The first Frankenstein pastiche isn't a great start, but it quickly gets better with the next ones - a pretty well done (for its budget) sci-fi knock off, and then an excellent black and white piss take on The Haunting that recycles the best joke from the first movie (the guy giving exposition while suffering extreme, graphical torture) to great effect, not the least because the victim is played by Bruce Campbell.

 So far, so good, but then the movie stumbles badly and drops everyone into a pretty damn lame fantasy story that is kind of indistinguishable from any number of the turgid Conan wannabes that came out in droves during the eighties Think Beastmaster, but not as fun. And that's the longest story by far, taking up almost half of the movie.

 The action climax, thank goodness, is excellent (that's where, incidentally, all the bits I remembered were from). Mark faces off against the big bad from the fantasy segment (Alexander Godunov) in a really fun sequence where they have a swashbuckle-y duel across multiple dimensions, going through knock-offs of Dawn of the Dead, Godzilla, Nosferatu (blink and you'll miss a Drew Barrymore cameo) and others. The choreography and swordplay is just passable, but otherwise the execution is excellent and features the best jokes in the movie.

 It's a weird film. Like Waxworks the first (and all of the Hickox movies I've seen except Hell on Earth), it's got an almost childish enthusiasm and a sort of gleeful 'let's see how much I can get away with' attitude. This sequel is a bit more polished than the first one, and I have to say some of the segments are impressively shot. Hickox mimics Robert Wise with a real eye for what makes the Haunting memorable; Notice that the acting, especially Galligan's, gets better as soon as there's a clear direction to follow. The Nosferatu segment, despite an unconvincing vampire, is also a joy to watch, technically well made and with some good comedic timing. The guy could really direct, at least some of the time.

 But that charm-free hour of pseudo-medieval guff really ruined this one for me. I forgot to mention the soundtrack for that bit repeatedly references Enigma's Sadeness Part 1; if that doesn't date the movie...
 Even without that, the whole thing also feels much more muted than the first movie. There's some good gore, but not nearly enough. The comedy is just a little broader, lacking the abrasiveness or plain weirdness of its prequel. There are no interesting, weird, experimental camera placements. And while this one is still pretty horny (there's at least one instance of ex-president Trump's favorite courting method), it fails to top someone being whipped until orgasm - even when the same character is right there. Sarah is downright boring, a major downgrade from her previous incarnation (script-wise, no fault of the actress), and there's no one like the first film's China to perv things up either.

 ...And so on. It's still a likeable movie, but it's a hard one to root for. Having read a couple of interviews with Hickox and his crew, though, I'm happy to say that they apparently had a blast making these, and that the guy absolutely prioritized having fun and doing stuff that he wanted to do even if it didn't fit the material. Can't fault him for that, even if the end result this time around isn't as much fun as they had on the other side of the screen.

Honor and Glory

  Back in the eighties, Cynthia Rothrock had one hell of a career starter when she scored the lead in bonafide HK martial arts classic Yes, Madam. It really wouldn't be disrespectful to say she never got to top that, but she never really got the career she deserved either. She made several perfectly entertaining movies -China o' Brien, Undefeated, and Martial Law come to mind- but she never got as many or as good opportunities as her b-movie action star contemporaries, which is a shame. Too many of her movies require some caveats along with a recommendation.

 Sadly, with 1993's Honor and Glory the caveats heavily outnumber any other consideration. After being directed by the likes of Corey Yuen and Robert Clouse, Rothrock did a couple movies with Godfrey Ho - a ridiculously prolific director whom I've long associated with cheap crap. One of them is Undefeatable, which is ridiculously entertaining and may be Rothrock's biggest claim to fame when its insane final fight and terrible one-liners ('Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.' 'Yeah, see ya!') briefly went viral a full yonk of years ago. The other one is, well, this one: your basic, cheap-looking crap with horrendously wooden acting and a script that is more interested in providing filler material than actual fight scenes.

 There is so. Much. Filler. Not a single scene goes by where a new character or a plotline is introduced, many of which are never mentioned afterwards. When the fight scenes do arrive, they're ridiculously perfunctory, and don't really convey properly the obvious fighting skills that Rothrock and some of her co-leads show, spoiling them with bad choreography, bad editing, or both.

 The plot is... something about a missing nuclear trigger, then something about a corrupt senator or something called Slade (John Miller, also in Undefeatable) who likes to illustrate his ball-crushing ways by alternately fondling and mock-crushing a couple of steel balls. Rothrock plays Tracey Pride, a CIA agent who goes to DC to see her sister Joyce (Donna Jason), a plucky news reporter/martial artist/Chinese culture enthusiast/all-round exposition delivery device.
 It just so happens Joyce is covering the corruption of Senator Slade, so Joyce, Tracey and a bunch of random characters that accrue around them for no good reason at all are set in a collision course against the villain.

 The first action scene consists of Joyce being called out for a report she did on some big public figure by a random lady, which... quickly escalates into a knife fight with her. All while her crew looks on, as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe it is.

 This movie has a fever dream aura that makes it hard to pin down any details. The script spins out of control almost immediately, oozing out in multiple directions and completely losing sight of the plot and main characters; if you were to cut out all the extraneous stuff, you'd probably only have twenty minutes left. It's kind of insane.
 Do I need to say that the extraneous stuff is not particularly engaging, either? It's not without merit- it's an oddly sweet, unjudgmental film where the two main protagonists (this thing has like seven characters that could qualify as co-protagonists) are ass-kicking women. It also sets up Jake Armstrong (Chuck Jeffreys,) a black guy who starts out as the evil senator's bodyguard and switches sides, to be Joyce's love interest; They have a hilariously terrible courting-with-chopsticks scene and everything.
 Only a few people get killed, too, all peripheral characters plus a should-be-peripheral pimp who gets a puzzling amount of screen time (his only function, basically, is to get Jake the bodyguard to quit in disgust.) This is rare in a genre that usually kills or maims innocent/sympathetic characters to establish motivations or as a way to make the villain more despicable.

 But man, does it ever drag. Put me against a wall, and I'd have to admit many HK Martial arts movies I do like have scripts that are as bad as this one. Except for one crucial detail: they know to set up and deliver lots of elaborate fights. Which this one really, really doesn't. When action does arrive it's choppy and lacking in any sort of energy, and fights are over almost before they register. Even the final fight, with multiple groups of people facing each other separately - the only fight in the movie which is allowed to breathe a little - has huge conceptual problems, like pairing off Jake with a completely random mook that hadn't been set up at all beforehand. This, in a movie where Jake's totally irrelevant boxing trainer gets a sizeable speaking part.

 The soundtrack is all easy listening shit, a lot of which doesn't fit the action in the least; and almost all of the acting is terrible, terrible, terrible. John Miller-as-Slade's scenery chewing is entertaining to watch, and I liked Chuck Jeffreys's turn as Jake. But everyone else -and this includes Rothrock, whose strength was never acting but is usually very likeable and has a good screen presence- everyone else is  almost painful to watch. Secondary and tertiary characters (of which there is a metric buttload) seem to have been picked randomly off the street and been given half an hour to prepare their lines; I can imagine someone is sitting just off the shot, forcing them to act at gunpoint.

 All par for the course for a director who has more than a hundred and fifty films listed on IMDB, most of which he's scripted as well (not this one, though; that dubious honour goes to one Herb Borkland). To get to that level, you can't really sweat the small stuff. Or the medium stuff, or some of the important stuff either, I guess.

 Thanks go to Eff and the rest of the Moviesign gang for both making me watch this and making it a bit more tolerable with the running commentary.