A Zombie Movie Made On the Cheep

Steve Porter (Timothy Watts) leads up a team of enthusiastic ornithology students who venture into rural Louisiana in search of a rarely-sighted woodpecker. Along the way, they stop in to meet Dr. Fredrick Brown (Robert Vaughn), one of only a few people to have ever sighted the bird. Brown was blinded in a terrible bird attack decades ago, and his academic endeavours are spent analysing birdsong – but he does have tucked away a map of the area where he saw the bird, and the team head out in that direction to see if it’s still in that habitat.

Dr. Brown, however, didn’t tell Steve and his pals everything. Before Brown was a blinded academic, he was a sighted soldier who returned home from a tour of duty in Vietnam only to find his wife in bed with another man. In a rage, he went on a killing spree, sparing only his baby son, and his rampage was only interrupted when he was attacked by the large number of captive birds he kept out on the veranda of his house. That house now stands abandoned, deep in the Louisiana wilderness – square in the middle of the region the map leads to. When Steve and the gang seek shelter there, dark forces evoked by Brown’s traumatic rampage stir…

Say what you like about Joe D’Amato – and trust me, there’s an awful lot you can say – but one of his better qualities was a willingness to cultivate younger talents. After Michele Soavi cut his teeth on projects for others, D’Amato gave him his big break as a director, yielding the excellent StageFright. And on that production a young, enthusiastic up-and-comer named Claudio Lattanzi, who had previously helped Soavi on a retrospective documentary about Dario Argento’s career, served as Soavi’s assistant director.

Soavi, in fact, was D’Amato’s first pick to direct his 1988 release Killing Birds – but then Dario Argento offered Soavi the chance to direct The Church, which he jumped at. D’Amato then turned to Lattanzi, offering him the director’s spot for this project… kind of. As it turns out, there’s a lot of question marks over the extent to which Lattanzi can actually be said to have directed Killing Birds; more or less everyone involved in the production, including Lattanzi himself, agrees that D’Amato himself did some of the directing but left himself uncredited, and some argue that Lattanzi was basically there to tag along and put his name on the thing and D’Amato did the entire thing himself.

“They’re Rereleasing It… and Then They’re Going To Rerelease Me… OH MY GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWD!”

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

The story is well-known, Troll 2 having been skewered on bad movie websites since the early days of the Internet. The Watts family – father Michael (George Hardy), mother Diana (Margo Prey), older teen daughter Holly (Connie McFarland) and preteen son Joshua (Michael Stephenson) – have had a rough time of it, what with Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby) having died six months ago and Joshua regularly seeing vivid visions of Seth delivering bizarre warnings about goblins.

These warnings come thicker and faster as the Watts family embark on a holiday trip to Nilbog, a tiny rural town that happens to be the home of a gang of goblins with a remarkable knack for disguising themselves as human beings but absolutely no subtlety when it comes to coming up with town names. (Joshua only figures out the Nilbog/Goblin thing after seeing the town’s name reflected in a mirror, because ultimately he’s just not that clever a kid.) The goblins are strict vegetarians, but also love murder and anthropophagy, so they have a fun little compromise: before they kill people, they feed them an evil potion concealed in ordinary food which transmutes unsuspecting humans into vegetable matter.

There’s a wildcard factor provided by Holly’s loser boyfriend Elliot (Jason Wright) and his loser friends Arnold (Darren Ewing), Drew (Jason Steadman), and Brent (David McConnell) coming along in their RV in the vague hopes of getting laid – but they’re made short work of by the goblins and their leader, the gothy druid Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed). Will the Watts family be able to summon Grandpa Seth back from the dead in a necromantic seance to help out in the final conflict? Will Seth and Joshua be able to destroy the “Stonehenge Stone” which gives Gielgud her powers? And what power lies within Joshua’s special double-decker bologna sandwich?

George Eastman: Absurd Anthropophage

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Among the various movies added to the so-called “video nasty” list in the UK in the 1980s, few have as as much in common as Anthropophagous and Absurd. Both are projects by expert trash merchant Joe D’Amato, and both have George Eastman in almost identical costuming. And both are incredibly grim, though in mildly different ways…

Trigger warnings would be appropriate at this point: both of these involve cannibalism and murder, one involves violence against a pregnant woman, one involves violence against a disabled person.

Anthropophagous

As with many of the video nasties, this one was released under a whole swathe of different titles; the print 88 Films seems to have used to prepare this high-definition rerelease actually has the title “The Savage Island” appear during the opening scenes. The film kicks off with a young German couple exploring a delightful Greek island, with a lovely old village and decent beaches. As the man sunbathes, the woman spots a boat sitting apparently abandoned just off the beach. She swims over there, only to be shocked by what she finds therein – the occupant being the eponymous anthropophage, who after slaying her makes short work of her blissfully unaware friend.

The Sophisticated Soavi

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Italian horror cinema is generally held to have had a peak of creative accomplishment in the 1970s and a rather sad decline in the 1980s, with the former masters of the genre suffering from diminishing returns and a tidal wave of second-rate material glutting the market.

A happy exception to this critical slump is the work of Michele Soavi. After serving an apprenticeship with a number of small acting parts and stints as an assistant director or second unit director for more prominent directors like Lamberto Bava, Joe D’Amato or Dario Argento, Soavi would direct four movies that are often taken to represent the best in Italian horror of the 1980s and 1990s.

Unfortunately, his career was derailed when he was forced to step back his involvement in the industry to care for his terminally ill son, though in the 2000s he did make some non-genre TV movies, and it’s still possible that – particularly with recent blu-ray releases of his own movies and those projects he assisted on coming out – the stars might align to allow him to produce another horror feature one day. If he does, these are the films that work will be measured against.