GUZOO: THE THING FORSAKEN BY GOD - PART 1

The titular monstrosity at the heart of GUZOO: THE THING FORSAKEN BY GOD – PART 1 is a primordial, amorphous blob of tentacles and teeth capable of adopting the physical appearance of any organism it comes across. In other words, it’s The Thing of JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING. But unlike THAT Thing, this Thing never adopts the appearance of anything. It just lounges around the basement of a hot springs resort in some scenic corner of Japan, waiting for people to munch on.

Thankfully, it won’t have to wait much longer as there just so happens to be a quartet of bubbly teen girls on their way to the resort right now.

At least I think it’s a resort. It has unoccupied rooms like a resort. It has a swimming pool like a resort. There’s even a manager/chef named Tomoko. But something doesn’t quite add up. One of the teen girls, Minako, is the daughter of a professor who happens to work at the building. The manager/chef is his right hand woman, an archeologist who is all too aware that there is a monstrosity lurking in the basement. They're even carrying out tests on the creature.

So why exactly are you taking in guests when there’s a bloodthirsty beast downstairs? And what kind of hot springs resort doubles as a science lab? Why are archeologists studying a biological organism and why is it a better idea to keep it behind a single wooden door than, I don't know, in some kind of actual containment facility? So many questions...

Minako has brought along some friends. There’s pushover Yuka, nosy ‘sleuth’ Kazuko and pouty Mayumi. Kazuko is the first to catch whiff of something suspicious. She wanders downstairs only to be told off by Tomoko. That area is off limits. Later, Kazuko spies her carrying a basket full of rotting meat into the basement. While the girls are out, Tomoko smashes the mirrors in the makeup compacts. Why? Well, as we see later on, the Thing in the basement can manifest out of mirrors.

So why is there a mirror hanging by the fridge in the kitchen? Seems like a massive safety oversight. 

None of the girls seem very intelligent. After one of the teens is bitten by something unseen in the swimming pool, Tomoko tells them that the injury was caused by (I shit you not) an invisible weasel. No one questions that at all. Later, Yuka is attacked and bitten by Guzoo in the kitchen (see? I told you the mirror was a safety hazard) but survives. Tomoko chalks it up to a wild animal attack. Again, no one questions a single absurd word that comes out of Tomoko’s mouth.

And then, just to underline the idiocy of these girls, the very next day, Yuka decides to go back into the kitchen and stand in front of the mirror again. This time, Guzoo drags the young girl through and rams a wiggly appendage down her throat. Yuka all but explodes into pieces, torn apart from inside out by a mass of writhing tentacles. After discovering their friend is missing, the girls finally grow a brain cell, tying up Tomoko and demanding she tell them the truth.

Cue more splattery gruesomeness.

I was on edge from the moment this little slice of mid-80s V-cinema started. It’s directed by Kazuo Komizu, the miscreant psychopath behind the notorious rape nasties ENTRAILS OF A VIRGIN and FEMALE INQUISITOR, the former featuring a scene of a woman having her internal organs pulled out of her vagina. GUZOO: THE THING FORSAKEN BY GOD – PART 1 (I have no idea if there ever was a Part 2) does start with an exposed thigh and a close-up of full, pouty lips. The teen protagonists strip down to bathing suits for a romp in the pool. But by the midway point of this 40 minute flick, not a single nipple had been exposed. I kept expecting it to go full blown sleazy. I half expected lesbian rape when the girls tied up Tomoko. I knew the monster in the basement had more tentacles than you could shake a stack of UROTSUKIDOJI OAVs at, but, to my GREAT surprise, none of those tentacles ever found their way inside... well, you know. 

So at the very least, GUZOO: THE THING FORSAKEN BY GOD – PART 1 is completely rape free. Thank god for small favors. It’s plenty gory though with a handful of really entertaining deaths, chief among them a gross disembowelment and a decapitation which results in great geyser of blood. The creature effects range from bad to slightly above bad. Wobbly tentacles on sticks and strings don’t really inspire fear, and Guzoo itself is just an ill-fitted rubber suit. However, the staging of the attacks are fairly impressive and I will admit to actually feeling a bit of claustrophobic anxiety during the final five or six minutes. All in all, I’ve seen a lot worse.

The film is a nitpicker’s dream though so if you have movie logic ADHD, stay far away from this one. The geography of the house makes no real world sense with hallways and staircases suddenly appearing out of thin air. Character motivations exist solely to push the story forward and the whole underlying premise beggars belief. But I don’t think those things matter much. This is, after all, just a throwaway bit of Japanese V-cinema, one which would have fit in well in shows like Tales from the Crypt or Masters of Horror. It’s short, sweet, dumb and gory, an overall pleasant well to kill an hour.

THE ABOMINATION

A man wakes up from a nightmare, screaming and covered in sweat. A woman has her throat slit. A man wakes up from a nightmare, covered in sweat. The man is seen sitting in a field, a jet of blood splashing his face. A man wakes up from a nightmare, screaming and covered in sweat. A body is placed in the back of a truck. A man wakes up from a nightmare, screaming and covered in sweat. The man is feeding a giant monster in a kitchen cabinet. A man wakes up from a nightmare, screaming and covered in sweat. A bloody skeleton lies on a kitchen counter. A man wakes up from a nightmare, screaming and covered in sweat.

No, I didn’t just have a stroke. This is the opening 30 seconds of THE ABOMINATION, a 1986 Super 8 horror flick from Z-grade auteur Bret McCormick. This pre-credits sequence runs almost 4 minutes, offering up a synth-soaked spoiler reel for the entire film. Every death is shown, every effects gag ruined. It’s a strange way to begin a movie, that’s for sure, but in hindsight it feels rather apt for this film. Simply put, THE ABOMINATION is so strangely structured and bizarre that I’m not sure any other opening sequence could have lived up to the weirdness that follows.

The man suffering from nightmares is Cody, a 20-something guy living with his hyper-religious mother. She believes she has lung cancer, not because of an actual medical diagnosis, but because a television evangelist told her so. One day, the mother coughs up a nasty lump of… well, something. She tosses it into the garbage can and heads off to bed, believing herself cured of a malignant growth. That night, that fleshy, nasty lump squirms its way into Cody’s bedroom and slithers down his throat.

The next day, Cody becomes ill. He also hacks up something nasty, placing it under his bed. He begins to suffer fugue states, driven to kill by some unseen force. After murdering his best friend’s girl, he sticks her corpse under his bed. The next morning, the gooey lump of flesh has grown into a monster, thanks in no small part to the tasty snack Cody procured for it the day before.  

From this point forward, Cody begins killing virtually everyone he comes across. His friends, the television evangelist, even his own mother, each time feeding the remains to the monster he has come to call ‘the Abomination”.

THE ABOMINATION is a little bit BASKET CASE, a little bit LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and a little bit SHIVERS, with a few nods to ALIEN and BRAIN DAMAGE tossed in for good measure. It’s also a little bit confusing. After the credits have rolled and the entire film has been spoiled for us, we’re treated immediately to a scene of Cody murdering a woman in a graveyard. This murder is accompanied by voice-over narration from Cody and his unseen psychologist. Apparently, what we’re witnessing is simply a dramatization of a recurring nightmare Cody has been having.

But once that sequence reaches its bloody conclusion, we flashback, again with voice-over narration, to Cody and his mother, his mother’s obsession with the evangelist, his mother coughing up the lump, the monster crawling down Cody’s throat… all that stuff. At this point, we seem to have left the dream and are now listening to (and witnessing) the events which led Cody to this point in his life. 

And way down the line, near the end of the film… we see that murder in the graveyard again. So when exactly did this dream end and real life take over? Is the entire film a dream? There’s a bit of voice-narration (which completes after the end credits have rolled because whoops) which attempts to answer this question, but it conflicts with pretty much everything we’ve been told throughout the film. So it’s never entirely clear what is a dream and what is reality. That might have been a massive boner killer had this movie not been THE ABOMINATION.

Because the slip and slide between the mundane and the outrageous is what makes this film such a low grade joy to watch. It’s absurd and ridiculous, over-the-top gory and downright stupid. All of the audio in the film is post-synch, all its effects concocted from stage blood and animal offal. The titular Abomination is a massive, vagina-like puppet crammed into cabinets, stoves and toilets. It’s the kind of film you will either love or hate, chock full of amateur shocks, histrionic performances and wood chipper editing. Don’t feel like watching a man shovel pitchfork after pitchfork of real animal guts into a tentacled and fanged vagina puppet tucked inside a fake kitchen cabinet? Probably best to stay away. But if you’re like me and you love a good bit of try hard, backyard filmmaking from time to time, you might just find a lot to love here.

The use of voice-over narration was probably just an afterthought, a way to skirt the limitations of low budget filmmaking. It imposes a narrative onto a loosely connected series of scenes, most involving chainsaws and kitchen knives. Had the connective tissue of the film been shot and edited together (ie. conversations between friends, montages showing a proper passage of time, establishing shots, etc.), THE ABOMINATION might feel more like a traditional movie than a ultra-gory slice of religiously tinged monster horror (there’s quite a bit of talk about the Whore of Babylon, the book of Daniel and the inherent dangers of religion to people too weak minded to see through the false promises of divine intervention). That would have actively harmed the film, in my opinion. The scattershot nature of the story and the almost absurdist horrors it contains help to turn a low budget snoozer into a bona fide B-movie great.

THE INCUBUS

John Hough’s 1982 horror oddity THE INCUBUS opens in typical slasher style, with bikini-clad babe Mandy and her boyfriend attacked by someone unseen as they putz around the beach. Though the boyfriend doesn’t survive the attack, Mandy does, albeit with a ruptured uterus, the terrible side effect of a rather brutal rape. New-in-town doctor Sam Cordell, a distant and troubled middle aged guy with a vivacious teenage daughter, can’t find a drop of semen in the victim. With Mandy currently comatose, the chances of finding the culprit are pretty slim.

Thankfully (unfortunately?), the rapes don’t end there. The next victim is found dead and ravaged, her uterus positively overflowing with what appears to be red semen. The savagery and excessive bodily fluids lead Sam and the local Sheriff to believe these attacks might be caused by a vicious gang of brutish men. But the real answer might be something much more fantastical. Across town, Tim, the teenage boyfriend of Sam’s daughter Jenny, is having nightmares of a woman trapped inside what appears to be a medieval torture dungeon, replete with numerous robed Inquisitors. Tim’s dreams seem to correspond with the attacks on the local women. Is this a psychic premonition or is Tim somehow connected to a dangerous, supernatural force leaving a trail of mutilated and violated corpses all across the little town of Galen?

THE INCUBUS is a real mixed bag of nuts, emphasis on the nuts. It’s one part murder mystery slasher and one part supernatural monster flick, all wrapped in a kind of plastic reality nightmare film that instantly calls to mind other better plastic reality nightmare films like THE SLAYER and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. To say that these individual narrative styles abrasively rub against each other is a bit of an understatement. It’s the slasher elements that most get in the way. There are simply too many POV shot-laden stalk and slash set pieces going on here. THE INCUBUS was based on a pulp novel by the prolific author Ray Russell and I imagine the film works better as a 100 plus page tome than a 90 minute film, if only because Russell didn’t have to factor in the amount of theater showings during his writing sessions.

The supernatural side of things is pushed way to the side in the film so Hough can squeeze as many slasher set pieces in as possible. As a result, once we finally learn what’s going on in this little town, the solution doesn’t quite hold up. Tim’s dreams really do have a connection to the rape/murder spree, though the quick three and a half sentence explanation just brings up more questions. At this point, I don’t think it’s spoiling anything (I mean, the film is called THE INCUBUS after all) to say that the culprit is an ancient, magical rape monster with a major backlog of red semen to purge. But why exactly is this beastie roaming the streets? We learn that the town already had a rash of unexplained rape/murders 30 years ago. Why is the Incubus back on the prowl? Why does it choose to take the form it chooses to take and what exactly is the solid, concrete link it has to Tim? 

None of this is ever really answered because the film doesn’t have any running time to spare. And those are far from the only unanswered questions. We learn that Sam’s age inappropriate girlfriend had died quite awhile back, possibly even murdered by Sam himself. As a result, Sam is a big bundle of aimless sexual yearning, a fact that is most obvious when he spies his 18 year old daughter naked in the bathroom. As Sam begins his investigation, he meets a local reporter named Laura who is the spitting image of his dead girlfriend. But why? In a film where nothing is really a coincidence, I would expect something to come from Sam’s sudden face-to-face with his dead girlfriend’s doppelganger yet nothing ever does. It’s like there’s a whole other movie lurking just below the surface that the film keeps hinting at, possibly as a way to sell more paperbacks.

That isn’t to say that what is on offer here is worthless. There’s a lot of fun to be had with THE INCUBUS. If you’re looking for a film that truly embraces its inner sleaze, you’ll probably be disappointed. It might be a film about violent rape/murders, but it rarely indulges in graphic bloodletting (well, apart from a half-decapitation with a shovel and a most unfortunate errant shotgun blast) instead focusing more on an upsetting tone, and a nice, oppressive atmosphere. The performances are actually quite good all around and that really helps the film stay firmly in the realm of believability, even as the narrative takes a turn for the loopy. It also boasts a remarkably great final scene, a real shocker that sends the film out on a high note.

THE INCUBUS is a film best watched at 50% cognitive power. There are plot holes and unexplained narrative developments galore, but as a piece of understated supernatural horror, it’s actually a decent little film. I just can’t help but think it would have been a better film had it ditched its fang toothed terror for a true blood slasher villain or vice versa. It’s positively jam packed with enough shit to fill three low budget, semi-obscure horror films from the early 80s. When the film is at its peak, the schizophrenia enhances the absurdity and, as a result, enhances the fun. But that aftertaste… When it’s all said and done, it’s what isn’t explained or explored that really sticks in the mind after the credits roll. I'm not sure that's what Hough was going for.

WAXWORK

I think I love the idea of WAXWORK more than I love the actual film. It's a simple tale about a group of rich kids who stumble upon a waxworks, a grand museum of horror in which every display is a gateway to a pocket dimension. That right there… that's where I fall in love. Anthony Hickox's debut film is built on a wonderful cinematic idea, a series of short horror set-pieces taking place in virtually every kind of horror movie experience. One might have something to do with a young man being terrorized by a werewolf. One might feature a rampaging mummy. There might be zombies, vampires and maybe even a mad Marquis or two. It's a brilliant concept, an anthology film without the typical anthology structure.

As a film however WAXWORK does have more than a few issues. Our cast of characters here are all rich kids, a bunch of Beverly Hills layabout types that don't elicit much sympathy (but their self importance does make their deaths a great deal sweeter). They're not grating on a Less Than Zero level, but they're far from lovable. The waxwork museum of WAXWORK is located right in the middle of an upper class neighborhood. In fact, it's just some rich asshole's home with a wooden “waxwork” sign above the door. I suppose one could call the cast of spoiled rich kids and the presence of a haunted house (of sorts) in an affluent neighborhood a reversal of expectations butttttttt I don't know. I prefer my spooky houses to be spooky, not lavish, and I have a hard time relating to people who live in mansions and get berated for paling around with their goddamn butlers.

Thankfully, once the film moves out of the realm of interpersonal, whiny bullshit and into the halls of the waxwork museum, things pick right up. David Warner, always a welcome presence in any film, plays the caretaker of this most peculiar museum, a kind of inter-dimensional prison housing the souls of multiple maniacs, monsters and monstrosities. Crossing the stanchions of a display will teleport an unlucky guy or gal into a pocket dimension ruled over by one of the museum's many inhabitants. An idiot trying to retrieve his lighter ends up in a small cabin with a sick man as a full moon rises outside. A hoity-toity gal falls victim to Dracula and his brood. Dying in one of these dimensions means dying for real, your body forever frozen inside the wax display. But the evil caretaker isn't simply collecting new bodies for display. No, he's collecting souls and soon he will have enough to awaken his wax figures, spilling true evil into our world.

OK, I have to get this out of the way right now… I find it rather odd that Hickox chose the Marquis de Sade as the film's final boss of sorts. That's a rather strange choice, almost as strange as using Sade as the fulfillment of the repressed, primal sexual urges of the film's female lead character. I mean, that's all kinds of fucked up. Out of all the “evil” characters in history, why oh why would anyone choose Sade over Elizabeth Bathory, Gilles de Rais, Jack the Ripper, H.H. Holmes… It's just a weird, weird choice in my opinion and it certainly isn't helped by the fact that Sade is presented in the film as an English pirate. Seriously, look down. What in the holy shit is that?

But I guess complaining about historical inaccuracies in a film about pocket dimensions and undead mummies is pretty pointless.

My biggest annoyance with the film however is how it falls apart in the end. Once the wax figures are up and moving (they were always moving, by the way. The actors they cast to play wax figurines in the early scenes didn't do good jobs of standing perfectly still), the film becomes a kind of comedy/action clusterfuck of bad editing, cheap sight gags and even cheaper special effects. So while I appreciated the sight of Patrick Macnee driving an armored wheelchair around a crowded room, smacking werewolves and zombies over the head with a rubber club, I would have preferred the film to play it straight all the way to the end.

Because for as weird and wacky as some of WAXWORK can be, the film is actually a straight horror film for most of its running time. Once we move into the museum, there are quite a few creepy moments (though the gory stuff is mostly missing thanks to the MPAA). I would have liked the film more had it gone for an EC Comics styled final ironic shock instead of a comedic free for all that peters out with a cheap bit of sequel bait. But sandwiched between a shaky first 10 minutes and a crappy final 15 is a really good, monster filled bash. It genuinely is a hell of a good time when it's all working as intended. It's a cult classic for a damn good reason.

THE STRANGENESS

David Michael Hillman's 1985 snoozefest THE STRANGENESS begins with two idiots attempting to surreptitiously blast open a sealed over entrance to the Golden Spike Mine, a long abandoned gold mine located, well, somewhere in America. The fact that they've been instructed to do this in the middle of the night by some mysterious, unnamed individual is our first clue that something not quite kosher is going on here. Our second clue is that a few minutes after achieving their goal, some snarling, unseen beastie drags our two idiots into the darkness, silencing their horrible line delivery once and for all.

An unspecified amount of time later, Myron Hemmings, a seemingly well off corporate type, leads a small group into the mine on a bit of an expedition. Along for the ride is Dan, a writer interested in the supernatural tales of monsters and death that have sprung up around the mine since its closing years back, and his hot blonde photographer wife, Cindy. There's also Angela, a geologist whose work equipment consists of nothing but a magnifying glass and a ball-peen hammer, and Morgan, a heavy drinking prospector with an ever-changing accent. Rounding out the group are two spelunkers, Tony and Geoff, the latter being a bit of a creeper who takes a shining to Dan's hot wife.

So why was the mine closed all those years back? Was it a labor dispute? Was it ghosts? Was it a giant penis-headed vagina monster that spews acid?

If you guessed it was because the mine is indeed home to a giant penis-headed vagina monster, pat yourself on the back because you guessed right. After a cave in traps them deep inside the mine, our cast of do-nothings find themselves wandering in the dark tunnels while the pecker-faced pussy beast bumps them off one by one. Oh, and the person that paid our two pre-credit sequence idiots to open up the mine? Yeah, that was Hemmings, adding one more threat to the mix. Will anyone survive the night in the mines, or will they all end up dead, either at the business end of a pickaxe or in a puddle of corrosive vaginal mucus spermy stuff?

Let me get this out of the way first. This movie is horribly paced. Not counting the pre-credit fodder, we have to wait approximately 60 minutes before a single person kicks the bucket. That's 60 minutes of characters wandering in the dark doing absolutely nothing. We get to see Angela knock a rock off the wall and sniff it. We get to watch Geoff throw multiple passes at Cindy. We get some terrible moments of humor from both Dan and Morgan, and that's really about it. Sure, there are some attempts at building atmosphere by having characters talk about Native American legends surrounding the mine or about how dozens of people have died in the tunnels they're now walking through, but that doesn't really add much to the film. In fact, it makes the long wait worse. It fills your head with all these great possibilities.

Ghosts! Monsters! Evil Native American gods! Wow! 

And then nothing. Just people walking and talking, shining flashlights, periodically lighting flares. It becomes clear as the film goes on where Hillman and Co. took their inspirations from. There's quite a bit of ALIEN here. There's more than a little John Carpenter's THE THING here. But the slow start of Ridley Scott's film is justified by the atmosphere of LV-426 and the mystery of the crashed alien space ship. THE THING gives us the destroyed Norwegian camp full of charred corpses. There's nothing like that in THE STRANGENESS. It's just rocks and darkness. No attempt at building a mythology. No finding a room full of bones or weird, alien-like constructs. Just nothing piled on top of nothing.

When the monster stuff finally kicks in at the 60 minute mark of this 90 minute movie, things perk up a bit, if only because the stop motion monster is absolutely, awesomely hilarious to behold. It's a mess of tentacles with a body that looks like it's made of brains. It's phallic head has a vagina shaped mouth that spits goo everywhere. Unfortunately, most of the kills occur off screen, robbing us of any kind of gruesome pleasures. There is however one showstopper of a death that actually made me cheer out loud. It's a scene this film desperately needed (actually, it needed about four more scenes like it) and when that moment happened, I felt genuine love swell in my cold, dead heart. But that scene had the unfortunate side effect of also amplifying my disappointment with the film. THE STRANGENESS could have been a great time. It could have been so much better.

I suppose it was a mix of budgetary constraints and lack of resources that killed the film. The pieces are all there. As evidenced by MY BLOODY VALENTINE, a mine is a great setting for a horror film. I loved the way the film was primarily lit using nothing but diegetic light sources like flares and flash lights. I love the absurdity of the monster. I even love the obvious Carpenter inspired soundtrack. But the film doesn't do much with those elements. The Hemmings subplot (another clear nod to ALIEN) goes nowhere, the monster is never explained, the setting is never properly utilized, and the lack of on screen violence feels like a cop out. It is just a bland, forgettable experience from start to finish. 

Wait. Make that “from start to 60 minutes”, because even though the final 30 minutes are not particularly great, they at least contain a glimpse of just how entertaining this film could have been had the filmmakers had a few more bucks in the bank. If you just skip to the one hour mark and ignore everything that came before, THE STRANGENESS might just do the job for you. But even that sounds like the faintest of praise. Because let's face it, if you have to throw out two thirds of a film just to enjoy it, maybe it isn't even worth consideration in the first place.