BLOOD GAMES

”I have been pushed around my whole life by lousy men and I’m sick of it.”

A common refrain sung during every viewing of Meir Zarchi’s immortal 1978 exploitation classic I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE goes a little bit something like this… “all the men in this movie are assholes!”... and yes. Yes, they are. That’s kind of the point. In a genre which typically depicts women as bubble headed life support systems for easy access vaginas, Zarchi’s film comes across as a nasty bit of tit for tat, a sucker punch right to the balls of self entitled, hyper masculine men.

Tanya Rosenberg’s 1990 pseudo rape-revenge actioner BLOOD GAMES tries to play the same tune. We begin at a softball game somewhere in the middle of Hicksville, USA. A bevy of beauties in short shorts beat the ever living snot out of some good ol' boys on the baseball diamond. This triggers a regressive and altogether violent response from some of the local men. With two of their own nearly raped and their head coach stabbed, the girls make a getaway attempt in the team bus, killing a man in the process. Unfortunately, a war hungry, ex-military misogynist and his army of beer swilling rednecks are in hot pursuit. Once their getaway fails and the gloves come off, it’s an all-out battle of the sexes, albeit one with baseball bats, crossbows and hunting rifles.

Virtually every negative action in this movie is caused by a man. The all-male baseball team repeatedly grabs their opponent’s asses, even throwing an elbow into the face of a woman running to second base. Had the girls simply left after the baseball game was over, all of this would have been avoided, but their head coach (who is also the father of our lead protagonist) feels compelled to hold someone up in a bar bathroom just so he can get money owed to him from a bet. The would-be rapists are not just looking for action but for revenge. The misogynist bastard leading the rednecks into battle repeatedly scolds his son for losing to a bunch of broads. It’s just a cascade of toxic masculinity, self entitlement and unhealthy machismo all the way down.

But unlike Zarchi’s film which goes out of it’s way to avoid the gross sexualization of it’s lead character, Rosenberg gives us a playful, nudity filled shower scene, endless shots of asses in barely there shorts, and copious glimpses of bouncing breasts. It also plays the same end game as SAVAGE STREETS, another exploitation film with loose female empowerment goals. Both films give us strong heroines who collapse in fear at the sight of the big bad guy they just seriously injured. Now maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found this sort of thing a bit confusing. While there’s no doubt that a sexually attractive, scantily clad woman can also be empowering, inspiring and even awe inducing, the clash between sexploitation visual tropes and a genuine female empowerment message can sometimes create a film which doesn’t quite practice what it preaches.

BLOOD GAMES avoids the typical slasher film idea of a single underpowered and underprepared woman overcoming an aggressive male threat. Despite the understandable fear of being shot to death, it’s bevy of ass kicking beauties are more than capable of aggression. We understand that they can easily handle this threat. But it seems the film often wants me to gawk at asses more than it wants me to pump my fists in solidarity, and that threw me off during some of the more tense moments the film offers up. The final half of BLOOD GAMES is great stuff, just a classic 90s action film set in dense woods. I feel the film might have been better off leaving the sexploitation visuals behind at that point. Unfortunately, they persist through most of the film, cluttering up the message along the way.

But perhaps I’m simply thinking too much about this. From start to finish, BLOOD GAMES is an absolute blast, a nicely executed and potent piece of exploitation cinema. It’s not a flashy film, but it’s certainly effective, perfectly paced with an engaging cast of actors and some rather effective action set pieces. It’s also a great bit of cornball fun that would definitely tickle the fancy of Andy Sidaris fans everywhere. So if women in short shorts killing rednecks in the woods sounds like your cup of tea, by all means, sip away.

WEREWOLF WOMAN

Rino Di Silvestro’s 1976 Italian sleaze fest WEREWOLF WOMAN wastes no time in announcing to the audience just what kind of film it is, offering up an ear piercing scream and full frontal female nudity right out of the gate. This is CAT PEOPLE by way of Joe D’Amato, a lurid little tale of a woman whose past sexual abuse and current, frenzied sexual desires cause her to deteriorate into something animalistic and murderous at the first sign of arousal.

It’s also slightly reminiscent of George Romero’s early masterpiece, MARTIN. Daniela, a striking young blonde, is having nightmares of her ancestor, a woman believed to be a werewolf. Ever since her rape at the tender age of 13, Daniela’s libido has triggered panic attacks, fugue states and worse. When her sister and her new husband arrive at the family villa for a stay, Daniela loses control of the beast within, so to speak. 

She murders the husband in secret and is hospitalized, her increasingly dangerous behavior threatening to spiral quickly out of control. Upon escaping the hospital, Daniela goes on a sex fueled murder spree.

This is essentially a tarted up sexploitation film, but there is the same kind of genre deconstructionist undercurrent flowing through it that Romero would use to masterful effect two years later. Is Daniela really a werewolf? Of course not. Martin wasn’t really a vampire either. But both films use these supernatural monstrosities as a kind of allegory for poisonous superstitions, and arcane ideas about sex and adulthood. Romero purposefully kept things vague, but Di Silvestro either doesn’t have the patience for subtlety or simply doesn’t care. WEREWOLF WOMAN is full of scenes of a doctor and a police inspector talking endlessly about clinical lycanthropy (which is a very real psychological malady), explaining away all subtlety and intrigue in the process.

It’s a bit strange to call WEREWOLF WOMAN, a movie in which Dagmar Lassander’s credit is superimposed over an undulating woman’s fully exposed vagina, a pseudo-feminist horror film, but to some small degree it is. The film morphs into a full-on rape-revenge flick during the final act and is never shy about pointing out that Daniela’s condition is both caused by and aggravated by aggressive, sexually abusive men. Daniela’s constant abuse of other women, calling them whores and bitches, is more or less internalized misogyny brought about by the fact that virtually every man she meets thinks of her as just a hole to be filled. 

When Daniela finally finds love, it’s with a man who tells her, directly and honestly, that he doesn’t intend on hurting her and that the choice of a relationship with him is entirely up to her. He breaks the mold of what she has come to expect and in doing so effectively removes the trigger for her illness. Her subsequent gang rape (and the death of her lover) prompts the usual response, a channeling of abuse into a kind of righteous reclamation of self, her murderous vengeance acting as a bloody reckoning. This isn’t going to win the praise of feminist film critics everywhere, but it’s a soft progressive attitude you wouldn’t expect to find in a film like this.

And that’s kind of the problem. Simply put, WEREWOLF WOMAN is all over the goddamn place, never sure of what it really wants to be. It seems to want to put forward a more progressive message at times, but it surrounds that message with endless shots of exposed breasts and labia. If the camera clearly views our character as little more than flesh, it’s difficult for the audience to reconcile the presentation with the message. It seems to want to be a sexploitation film, but it constantly derails the eroticism by cutting away to endless scenes of two men sitting or standing in a room explaining the subtext to us as if we were children. It seems to want to be a horror movie, but it consistently sacrifices atmosphere for pornographic sensibilities.

It’s a film I couldn’t really come to grips with during my viewing because I couldn’t ever find a solid enough piece of land to stand on. The ever-changing tone of the film, the strange mixture of psychological drama, police procedural, gore-drenched horror, soft pornography and sexual politics… it should have left me feeling rather giddy. I happen to like schizophrenic films. But it all just kind of falls flat here. It’s not a bad film, per se, just a horribly undisciplined one. I suppose if you simply latch on to one of the many threads the film offers up and don’t pull so strongly that it all unravels, you could find a lot of joy in WEREWOLF WOMAN.

BLOOD AND LACE

Philip Gilbert's 1971 shocker BLOOD AND LACE feels downright prophetic in many ways, anticipating the later breed of cynical exploitation roughies like THE CANDY SNATCHERS and PETS while also prefiguring the slasher films that would come around near the end of the decade. It begins with the familiar face that launched a thousand slasher films, the POV murder set piece. Here we see an unknown killer bludgeon a middle aged prostitute and her John to death with the claw end of a hammer, all before setting the house ablaze. Luckily, the prostitute's daughter, gorgeous 17-year old Ellie, survives the ordeal unharmed.

As she is still considered a minor, Ellie finds herself a ward of the state and is sent to an orphanage run by the domineering Mrs. Deere. Little does Ellie know, her stay at the orphanage isn't going to be a pleasant one. We've already witnessed Mrs. Deere's right hand man, Tom, chase a young man through the woods. The chase ends when Tom cuts the boy's hand off with a cleaver, leaving him to bleed to death in the bushes. This is just how things work at Mrs. Deere's place. First offense, you get slapped around a bit. A second offense might end with you being tied to a pole in the attic and left to starve to death. Trying to run away… well, we know how that ends, don't we? Mrs. Deere can't allow children to run off, can she? That would hurt her bottom line. After all, every kid she takes in comes with a nice stipend from the state.

But Ellie's first few days at the orphanage aren't that bad. She meets a few of the other kids, like Pete, a wormy chump who is always trying to steal food. She is given a roommate, a slightly younger girl named Bunch (seriously). And then there's Walter… Oh, dreamy, dreamy Walter.

Ellie also has a friend of sorts in Detective Carruthers, the man investigating her mother's death. But I'm not too sure Carruthers is the kind of friend Ellie needs. Maybe it's the way he looks at her or the way he describes her as “good breeding stock”. Truth be told, there might not be a single person Ellie is safe to be around. We already know that Tom is a killer, but Mrs. Deere is showing instabilities of her own. She sometimes creeps into the basement to have conversations with someone unseen. Worse, Ellie begins to see a man standing above her bed at night, his face charred, a hammer clutched in his hand. As the walls slowly close in around her, is there anything Ellie can do to escape this nightmare? Or is she destined to end up like all those missing “runaways”, slowly rotting inside Mrs. Deere's meat freezer?

BLOOD AND LACE is probably best described as “comfortable”. I know that might sound like an odd way to describe a movie that contains murder, implied pedophilia, attempted rape and child abuse, but the attitude of the film is far more unoffensive than you might think. Sure, it's sardonic and confrontational at times, but the film somehow manages to skirt around the potential offensiveness of its subject matter by being effortlessly charming and not forgetting its sense of humor along the way. Despite some narrative and thematic similarities, it lacks the cruelness of films like HOUSE OF WHIPCORD and though the violence on display is sometimes graphic, the film doesn't wallow in its bloodshed. It's a good Saturday afternoon kind of horror film, the kind you watch when you want some thrills and chills, but don't want your day ruined by being reminded that the world is a toilet in desperate need of flushing.

The film is good looking with a swift and steady pace, doling out new developments and fresh shocks every ten minutes or so. The casting is absolute perfection. We have Gloria Grahame (of OKLAHOMA and THE BIG HEAT fame), Len Lesser (good ol' Uncle Leo from Seinfeld), Vic Tayback (Mel on the great sitcom Alice), a young Dennis Christopher (probably best known by horror fans as adult Eddie in IT) and most importantly, the lovely Melody Patterson (who looks a bit like a prototype of Naomi Watts) as Ellie. Put simply, these people have personality and as Sam Jackson once said, personality carries great distances. The entire cast is full of life, just a parade of great faces and voices. Even if you're finding the story of BLOOD AND LACE a bit underwhelming, chances are the performances by this first class batch of character actors are going to pull you through.

And there's a damn good chance you WILL be underwhelmed by the story at times. BLOOD AND LACE is all too familiar and some of its shocks have been rendered somewhat moot by decades and decades of higher profile films that played many of the same games. You're likely to guess the identity of the killer from the first scene (even if you'll probably never see the second and third twists of the ending coming) and because of the age of the film, it never commits to either of its two closest sub genres. Had the film been made three or four years later, it would have tumbled down the hole of crass sexploitation, a hole it spends a full half of a film digging. Had it been made around 1979 or so, it would have descended into full blown slasher territory. I can imagine some people growing frustrated with this films commitment issues.

BUT

Personally, I find the lack of a clear identity to be one of the films strengths. I like that the film sometimes meanders a bit thematically before ratcheting up the sleaze and intrigue. I like that the slasher elements only creep into the film once the trap surrounding our heroine has been set. When the man with the hammer makes his first appearance, it's already too late for Ellie to make a move. Stay or leave, chances are she will end up dead either way. With decades and decades of horror and exploitation films still fresh in memory, the undeveloped land BLOOD AND LACE inhabits comes complete with not quite recognizable back alleys and boulevards. The film doesn't need to work to subvert your expectations. It just needs to do its thing. We, the audience, are the people with historical hindsight and we, the audience, are the ones expecting the film to behave according to rules that no one had written yet. So when BLOOD AND LACE takes a sharp right, it sometimes feels counter intuitive. It's that element of the film that I enjoy the most. It's like taking a new path to a familiar place. You may end up where you always end up, but the way the trip plays out feels wonderfully different.

JANIE

I once summarized the films of Jess Franco by stating that Franco is really just Jean Rollin without the artistic pretense. Many of Franco’s films exist solely for voyeuristic thrills. They’re narratively sparse pieces with no real stories to them. They are only concerned with female flesh. When I first heard of JANIE, I was told that it would fit into the oeuvre of Franco rather easily. Having watched it, I can say that statement is completely false. Yes, it does contain copious female nudity. Yes, there is no real story to be found. Yes, it is, like many of Franco’s mid-career (and late-career) films, terrible. But no matter how many terrible films Franco made, they still had an undeniable energy to them. They were never boring… unlike JANIE.

The film seems like a checklist for all the terrible elements of 1970s exploitation cinema. The soundtrack sounds like one long, extended jam band riff. Worse, it never stops. I don’t recall a single scene that wasn’t scored by the same generic sounding rock music. The sound is so terrible that 90% of the dialogue is inaudible. Many scenes are filmed indoors with the camera pointing at the sole light source in the room, an artistic choice that renders everything onscreen completely indecipherable. The acting ranges from terrible to abysmal with many of the "actors" looking at the camera, bumbling their lines or appearing completely uncomfortable on camera. There are many scenes of above-the-clothes masturbation obscured by a generous smear of Vaseline on the camera lens. Everything about this film screams Poverty Row.

The story, or what passes as a story, concerns Janie, a chubby-cheeked, blonde weirdo. Janie is in love with her father. Worse still, Janie is plagued by a never ending internal monologue (provided by the one and only Roberta Findlay) that convinces her to kill anyone she comes across, usually after watching them have sex or seducing them. After committing the murder(s), she immediately goes about the business of masturbating. This is all the film contains. Janie meets someone. Janie kills them. Janie masturbates. The film is largely shown in flashback with Janie’s sexual escapades with her father as the bookend device. At one point, the film brings up the possibility that all this murdering and masturbating is really just sex talk to get her father all hot and bothered. This possibility isn’t given much play throughout the film but does factor into the ending, so I suppose we should applaud the film for at least not dropping its sole plotline worth exploring.

Let’s not dance around the issue: this film exists as nothing more than spank bank material. In that way, it does resemble most of Franco’s output. But again, it lacks the energy of Franco’s work. Hell, it lacks the energy of Ed Wood’s work. It is incredibly lifeless and dull, and probably only worth watching as a curio piece. Yes, Mary Jane Carpenter, the actress playing Janie, is attractive and does have a palpable sexuality, but it’s difficult to imagine this film really turning anyone on. Even as a piece of softcore fluff, it feels remarkably tame. I was hoping, for a film that contains serial murder and incest, that JANIE would eventually just go into a state of full-on sleaze mania but it stayed comfortably in first gear, barely even revving its engines during its 65 minute running time.