Somewhere, In Australia... [Houseboat Horror (1989)]

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Dirs. Kendal Flanagan and Ollie Martin

I went into Houseboat Horror knowing how bad it was likely to be. Scraping the bucket of Australian exploitation films, it's also a while past the golden age of American slasher films its transposing to the outback. I really don't like the slasher subgenre. I'm willing to watch them still, to be a completist, in hope of finding one or a few I would like, always willing to give something another chance. To maybe be converted into a slasher film fan who can get past the flaws and love the films with enthusiasm. This subgenre can be great, technically starting with Halloween (1978), a damn good film let alone a great one in the subgenre. Even if Houseboat Horror was ridiculous, it may have still been entertaining, to a lesser extent The Nail Gun Massacre (1985), more obviously the jaw dropping Pieces (1982). But the concept of the slasher film could be seen as easy to dismiss, workmanlike in creation, with no atmosphere, teenagers being picked off repetitiously whose only characterisation is the bland dialogue that fails to give them character and their dated fashion. Going through the z-grade slashers would make these factors worse. But I wanted to enjoy Houseboat Horror even as bad trash.

From http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/JGlHJNwSwY8/hqdefault.jpg

Dear Lord, it was worse than I presumed it to be!

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsrUJ48dI8DOcJvYCvvcpdJYYXg70rlHliwYGPs1_AwI0aVwrG_V7-NzL74hk82xYfYCd77Uqdu4v-ZgFec6_tj5XFrRgya6A6i3SwSZuZ_NQ4kJrxd-2iDCt4tMFILJJcY-SccjnUlJGA/s1600/Houseboat_Horror_1.jpg

A rock band, subjective because their music is diabolically bad, dated pop with tinny synth, go to record a music promo, renting a houseboat or two and travelling up the river of the Australian woodland. Unfortunately a killer with clear burn marks on their flesh is stalking around the isolated location picking off unwelcomed visitors. After that, if you've seen at least one, imagine the bog standard slasher plotline. And if you watch Houseboat Horror, prepare for the worst. I didn't expect it to be this cheap looking. Shot on a low price video camera from near the turn of the early nineties. Awful music that evokes the low rent cousin of a Casio keyboard. The title is shown as a cheap text made on a computer of the time. It could be seen as cruel to dismiss this from the beginning, but my heart sank when it came obvious that the creators weren't trying at all here. Even if passion was here, it was for such low aspirations. They merely wanted to make an average slasher film with no creativity, and the realisation of how painful the film would be grew when a main character was introduced and spoke. I wanted to avoid evoking the word "Neighbours", as in the Australian soap opera shown on the BBC and the show my parents once watched all the time, even though it was in my head, because I feared it could be seem as racist, by accident, to immediately evoke this for an Australian film. Then I discovered one of the directors of this made episodes of Neighbours. That series was at least a soap opera with some ridiculous drama. This is that soap opera stiltedness through the lowest budget possible and as horrible as it sounds.

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In another context, stuff in the film would be entertaining even if it was technically bad. There is one laugh that I had surrounding a running motif of a jet ski. As the band make the promo and cavort, sleep around and drink, they brought a jet ski with them since, hey, maybe they could use it in the promo since it was still the eighties but only just. Maybe they wanted to create a Duran Duran video even on a shoestring and Russell Mulcahy was unavailable since he was riding high on Highlander (1986). Its naturally used in a death scene in the only amusing moment of the film. But the rest is lifeless. Actors left stranded with insipid dialogue. I tried to engage with the film, but eventually gave up mentally halfway through. Apathy met the film as it went through the motions, as the killer does their thing and cheap prophetic gore effects are thrown about. Something this low budget could have been charming. The Nail Gun Massacre, for how bad technically it was, felt like the locals of a middle American town bringing their idiosyncratic personalities to a mess of a film that yet let them breath through its gaping structure holes. Houseboat Horror is just shockingly low rent. So tedious that it's been difficult to actually write about. Paper-thin characters died with no sadness or tension released, any visual flair or any engaging luridness stayed away from the film, and the gore and nudity is here but missing any jolt to it. Its defiantly an Australian film, but blasphemously it lacks the insane energy of an Australian exploitation film, more when in the nineties a similarly very low budget film, Body Melt (1993), was everything you wanted from such a movie. It's one of the worst films I've seen in a long while. Probably the worst covered on this blog so far. It's not worth the viewing. It's pointless to view it.

From http://www.wirelessfodder.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/HBH05-300x224.jpg

Representing Australia: Lake Mungo (2008)

From http://www.impawards.com/2010/posters/lake_mungo_ver2_xlg.jpg

Dir. Joel Anderson

Told as a documentary, Lake Mungo is the story of the disappearance of a sixteen year old girl named Alice, her family coping badly with her loss but, over the next two years, dealing with the possibility that her ghost haunts their home and certain other areas. Using the tropes of the stereotypical documentary found on television - talking head interviews, establishing footage, archival material from the hauntings and slowly discovered events - the story peels away the layers until the truth about Alice' life and her last days alive are revealed. It sounds very interesting. The film reaches something of immense interest when there is more to the story than a mere haunting, the contradictions of a family where members don't reveal things to the others, expectations are not met and new discoveries are found, including an almost mythological or Edgar Allen Poe-like conclusion to the story. But there is a fatal flaw. It may be only a personal one for me as a viewer, but it's a major aesthetics issue that ruins the film. The documentary structure itself.

Fromhttp://thewolfmancometh.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/lake-mungo-movie-film-alice-ghost-woodas.gif

It looks like a lot of documentaries made nowadays on purpose, on cinema screens as well as TV, which is worth praising for accuracy, but this is a bad mistake in terms of cinematic style for Lake Mungo as it continues a side of filmmaking I hate for its laziness. Now if the film had manipulated and scrutinised the style, this would have helped the film immensely, but aside from actual documentaries on cinema itself, which feel more like moving resource books, it is completely insipid for me as a style that has been repeated ad nauseum. Creating it for verisimilitude in this fake documentary was not a good idea. Filmmaker Peter Watkins dubbed this kind of presentation - in editing, use of music, number of shots - the Monoform, a basic structure of audio-media composition repeated continually in most works, a barrage of audio and visuals. It's used in documentaries, sports coverage, the news, many places. Replicated in countless documentaries from talking heads and musical scores that make you feel emotions from the beginning of the work instead gain them yourself, Lake Mungo as a fake documentary replicates it all without ever questioning it in context of its story. For me, you have no time even contemplate anything in the film, no time to think to bring it altogether for yourself, as narration immediately goes into the next interview, no time to illicit emotions of your own because the film's score tries to force you into how it feels you should at that moment. In replicating the real examples of this filmmaking, Lake Mungo becomes a tedious work, where a potentially disturbing and emotionally affecting story is transformed into the kind of supernatural documentary on television that trivialises concepts of death and trauma for cheap emotional pull. Pandering to our desires to feel sadness for others' plights without caring for them once the show ends, not even as fictional characters in a  good drama. It's a potentially meaningful ghost story turned into a trivial piece of (fictitious) tragedy porn, straight jacketed into the format it has. Again, it could have played with the format, especially as this happens in the film with the haunting footage itself, while other films have television formats and made great use of them, but barring the story idea surrounding the titular lake, you are being forced to watch a replication of documentaries with rarely any real soul to them and tiring for me to see.

From http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q80/trungcang/hdbitz-org/lake-1.png

Fake Gucci, Rubber Shark (Bait (2012))

From http://images.mymovies.net/images/film/cin/350x522/fid12864.jpg

Dir. Kimble Rendall

Unfortunately, the genre film of yesteryear, which upstarts like myself, far too young to have grown up with them, celebrate, are missing from now. For the most part you have two options. The first, with exceptions, is the blockbuster - B-movies made with too much money, don't use the budget to their advantage, and worse, have pretentions to being great art when they barely scrape together a few virtues. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) rears its ugly head for me now for example - if there was ever was a film that needed to have been made in the seventies with less money available and someone like Roger Corman to kick its writing and presentation up the backside, it's that sort of film. Far from being a Grindhouse snob, at least some of the Hollywood films of yesterday, like Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), felt like they had more on their minds and a lush presentation even if the results are failed. On the opposite end, however, are those films that never take anything seriously. They're always ironic, they never take anything seriously, they're happy with their crappy special effects and laugh at them, try so hard to be cool, amused with how bad they are and/or cram as many references into the material they can instead of fixing the narrative plots. I.e. The Man With The Iron Fists (2012), The Asylum films like The Almighty Thor (2011), Troma's Terror Firma (1999), Machete (2010), and Sharktopus (2010), a film unfortunately presented by Roger Corman. Films which all belong to the same circle even if they're very different from each other. With these options, if it wasn't for the exceptions genre cinema would be screwed and doomed to become the plaything of churned out CGI alligators and snarky audiences. The most interesting films, in most cases, are those that dangerously veer to the pretentious but with real artistic value, are divisive, or from a non-English language country because, even as comedies, they take themselves seriously. They want to be good films, and even if they're in on the joke, or suffer from some dodgy effects, they are played completely straight. They are all sincere, a word lost in most cinema in general. I can gladly say that I can stick Bait in this category. I will confess to this being a legitimate candidate for a guilty pleasure of mine for the year, but it's a hell of a lot more entertaining legitimately than other movies.

From http://www.aceshowbiz.com/images/still/bait09.jpg

I will confess, moments in Bait, done seriously, caused me to giggle, but it's a film that knows how absurd it is, but unlike a Sharktopus, still makes the drama dramatic, the situation serious, and tries to be great even with its obvious flaws. If this was the sort of thing at the cinema more, or what straight-to-DVD meant unless better films were made, I would actually be a happier man knowing someone was actually having fun with their work than merely making a product. In an Australian coastal city, the characters of the film are set up together in a supermarket - a tragedy in the past, a father-daughter conflict, kinky sex in the underground car park, a robbery about to go wrong. Then a giant tidal wave hits the city. People are killed in the supermarket barring a few survivors, the building is mostly submerged underwater, and there's a great white shark or two stalking around the isle for cereals. The film is (mercifully) played as a serious story; even if it's a slight B-movie, where you know how it'll end, this conviction supports the story more and allows you to drop your hesitance and actually enjoy a film for once. It's acceptable and rewarding to empty your mind with Bait because it never dares to claim to be an important message film or insult your intelligence. No pretence that it never dares to try and actually aspire to. No insipid political message. No attempt to pander to liberal or conservative viewers. No attempt to pander to anti-authoritarian teenagers. Not trying to be high art without any sense of artistry or experimentation. Not being a jokey film like the films I've mentioned in the first paragraph. The violence, surprisingly gory for a film that fifteen years in Britain can buy and see, is never uncomfortably fetishistic like the remake of Pirahna (2010) becomes.  It's done sincerely with some budget to it.

From http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/9/92/Bait_g.jpg/600px-Bait_g.jpg

And yes, it's a film about sharks in a supermarket. Yes, this is the premise for a Z-movie let alone a B-movie. Yes it has a slight plot. Yes, when you see a CGI bird at the beginning, it shows the computer effects aren't the best. And yes its amusing how wooden one of the actors' lines are especially when they're all talking about how they will become shark food and being almost giddy about it. But it's made with quality for all its flaws, never slouching and is made with entertainment. It sets itself up quickly and the drama, while well worn, is interesting. It even includes a very sober moment, in the middle of a lurid and cliché presentation, that is actually effective. That I could suddenly chuckle or giggle at certain serious moments as well as the intentionally comedic parts is a positive for the film, amused that it followed into a moment or piece of dialogue often said in films before, but delighted by its prescience here rather than annoyed by it. That the film is structurally well made - bright, put together perfectly, able to prevent the flaws with the CGI from undermining it - makes it more rewarding because it was made with consideration. That I came to it with no expectations helped it, but it's great to see a completely un-jaded film that does what it sets out to do perfectly. It would be a minor film if there wasn't as many bad genre films in existence, but I wished films like this existed more. Those above the middling range that are merely good but have a fun or a craft to them that make them eventually memorable and virtuous for actually accomplishing something fully even if the goal is slight. With some of the awful genre films in existence, it's a lifesaver to be perfectly honest, and I wish the director can only go higher in quality from here. Considering some of the awful horror films released this year, this is one I was fully grateful for even if it'll never get into the Top Ten list.

From http://i.imgur.com/YHdfC.jpg

The ‘Umpteenth Martial Arts Film For This Season’ [Sword of Bushido (1990)]

From http://savetorrent.ru/uploads/posts/2012-05/1336757387_d5022003a354.jpg

Dir. Adrian Carr

Australia-Hong Kong

Film #26 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema

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The amount of martial arts films I’ve covered for this season suggests that I may have an obsession, one beyond that I judged in the review Strike of Thunderkick Tiger (1982). I didn’t expect tonight’s review to be Australian though; I wondered if the protagonist Richard Norton was slipping in and out of an Australian accent in the first scene of the movies, and the end credits, yes to my surprise, informed me of this continental co-production. Martial artist/architect/marine/samurai/lothario of the ladies Norton travels to Thailand to locate his grandfather’s body and a legendary sword that, claimed by his grandfather as spoils of combat after the Pacific War ends, he wants to return back to the Japanese government. Starting a relationship with school teacher cum guerrilla fighter Suay (Rochelle Ashana), the two will have to contend with numerous individuals, including the yakuza, trying to claim the sword for themselves.

From http://s019.radikal.ru/i603/1204/6f/c3944b5231a1.jpg

Acquired because of the potential pleasure of a quasi-American Ninja film, from what the DVD cover suggested, the film for three-quarters of its length really does not go in that direction. Neither does it really present something else during that time either. Nothing really interesting happens. Its star Richard Norton is just a typical early nineties action star who doesn’t really project enough charisma needed for a film like this. He seduces a female office worker, in a really tight white office uniform in a graphically vaselined-screened sex scene, then when he goes to Thailand, he’s a almost super being, even defeating a talented Thai kickboxer who gets the green eye over how Norton and Ashana interact, but he’s not able to be more than a cookie cutter, white male action star. It doesn’t help that there is very little for him to work with, to the point it isn’t really a martial arts film.

From http://s54.radikal.ru/i145/1204/0c/db54f7b98206.jpg

The only time this film vaguely gets interesting, not redeemably so but not a waste of time, is when the yakuza get involved in the last quarter. I have no qualms with writing spoilers because this film is only worth viewing through clips. In the sole moment where a ninja, promised on the DVD cover, appears they commit one of the most embarrassing moments in ninjutsu history. While taunting the hero, after he’s had his head kicked in and is fleeing, a ninja is distracted to the point that he is hit by a bus and squashed. The entire populous of ninja cinema would want to separate themselves from the clan who has this unfortunate member, one who was taught the skills of ninja assassination but not basic road safety. The film itself becomes more relieving and interesting, not just with the climactic battle suitable for a martial arts film, but a car chase where Norton pursues the villains in a go-kart, the dinkyness of him sitting in it against the car he is chasing somewhat amusing, especially as he is the typical rugged, muscular action film lead. It cannot save the whole film. Those three quarters before this is unbearable. And even in the ending there are problems. It shows incompetence in the director, when you could have your actors speak in their first language to help their acting, you force them to perform in English, out of fear of subtitles, even more so when one of your actors Toshishiro Obata, to be blunt, is incomprehensible in what he is saying. This is dubious on the director’s part, and when Obata is your main villains, the yakuza boss, it’s also idiotic. The film as a whole is an immense mess, an erratic narrative that really is a chore to sit through until that incompetent ninja onwards appears. The surge of YouTube compilation clips was designed for films like this that have not enough quality to sit through the whole of. A sad thing to say, but where it not for those moments of pleasure, this would have been a completely arbitrary viewing experience. 

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCwtXAQ1J-YXr-b9hGqIrnGMOwTYS82_17wWJJb34tX5nLSp1Jd4xTIK9V7R24jBJNDNT2xWKXwd_fm0K2bUzZT4-tTALrW2UsDIox8Xf3pvFoRkxug61WgemqTDjSvyn9mSNB_fNQDJU/s1600/bushido+3.jpg

The first phase is hallucination... [Body Melt (1993)]

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/body-melt/w448/body-melt.jpg?1313599007

Dir. Philip Brophy

Australia

Film #20, for Saturday 20^th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

At the beginning of October, I was contacted by the website Video Swapshop to write reviews for them. My delayed 20^th film for this Halloween project is one of the reviews that is published on their site, and can be viewed here.