Voivod/Innocence of Muslims

Here is an update on two posts that did fairly well on here, even though they are both sort of peripheral to the one subject that does really well on here, which is horror cinema.   About a year ago, I think I dug up some artwork by Voivod’s drummer Away.  This was, as far as the text blog as opposed to the radio show, a fairly popular blog.   I have to admit to being an avid Voivod fan having been exposed to them on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball when I was in 6^th grade.  I re-discovered them when I was in my 20’s.   The new single sounds exactly like Voivod sounded in the 80’s.   For a while they used old guitar tracks that the late Piggy had left behind, but they have a new guitarist who sounds just like him.   Jason Newstead of Metallica played base for them during the 200’s, but the current bassist is the original bassist Blackie. The new single is called “Mechanical Mind”.  “Mechanical Mind” sounds like an outtake from Nothingface.   If you want to see what the pinnacle of rock and roll really was, there are really two sides to it, as far as I can see.   One side would be those really classic early goth bands- Joy Division, Bauhaus, Christian Death, Sisters of Mercy, Souxsie and the Banshees, The Cure maybe, early Cult.  The other side of that would be the original Voivod line-up.   That band the Templars are pretty sweet- a really underrated band would be Blitz who put out both an early oi punk album and an early goth album and did both very well.   However, with regards to Voivod, that’s really the original Voivod album I’m speaking of, really.  I like to remember them as young, as they were.  The release last year of To the Death 84 last year was a bigger deal in my mind.  I have very odd and very specific musical taste.                                                                                                                                                  

  Elsewhere in the news, we have an update on the Innocence of Muslims saga.  The filmmaker has been identified as an Egyptian Christian named Nakoula Nakoula- although with the response to his filmmaking in the Muslim, his new name should be Dead Dead .   Nakoula Nakoula has been arrested.  Before you get your panties tangled up about the first amendment, he was not directly being arrested for making Innocence of Muslims.  Uploading the video to YouTube is what he is in jail for, because he was violating terms of probation.  He was previously in trouble for bank fraud and wasn’t supposed to be using aliases or the internet.  He’s a freak. Oh yeah, the killings at the US embassy had nothing to do with the Innocence of Muslims trailer, it turned out later.

Innocence of Muslims Trailer

I can assure you this movie is not coming to a theater near you anytime soon. 

I’ve written on here about some controversial films.  But Serbian Film, the Bunny Game and Human Centipede don’t come anywhere near the level of controversy of Innocence of Muslims.  The U.S state department said this got the U.S. Ambassador to Libya assassinated without having any kind of theatrical release.  The producer of the film’s identity is unknown and the actors involved with the film are in the media saying that they were mislead as to the film’s content.   That is probably a very  good thing for them to say as soon as possible for their personal safety.  Innocence of Muslims is a weird, anti-Muslim propaganda film in which the Prophet Mohammad engages in pedophilia and homosexuality, brutal murder, and fabrication of the Quran for the sake of defrauding his followers.  Michael Savage was banned from entering the UK for making statements about Islam far more moderate.  People like Salmon Rushdie and the makers  of South Park received death threats for much less provocative statements about the Prophet. 

It may seem a mote point, but based on the trailer, the film also probably doubles as one of the worst films of all time.   The costumes look like they were taken from some kids’ Christmas pageant at some church somewhere.  They shot on blue screen and edited in the desert badly.   You have likely seen better acting in pornography.  The thought that this is art worth dying for is sort of hilarious.  The filmmakers appear to be mostly successful at coming up with an excellent way to get your head blown off- for whatever cinematic value that has.  

I don’t know in what form we may ever see this film released in its entirety- perhaps on some sort of hate webpage somewhere.  Based on the trailer I doubt I will not dedicate time to watching the film in its entirety. The only case in which I can see their being reason to do so would be if someone was a real specialist in U.S/Middle East relations.

Update: without getting into it all, it has since turned out that this video was made by a guy named Nakoula Nakoula who was in trouble for white collar crime.  The video had nothing to do with the murders at the U.S. embassy in Libya, it also turned out.

Extreme Asian Torture Double Feature: Marebito and Infection

These two films, Marebito and Infection, were shown together (with subtitles) as a double feature at the William Powell’s Sci-Fi Center in Las Vegas.    I have to be cautious about what films I take the time to review on here because my schedule is becoming increasingly full and I only have time to review films that will attract public interest, if I can, which is by no means the kind of films that interest me much, but these films seem to be the kind that a review could attract some attention.   Those Japanese are sure to come up with some sadistic horror films given the opportunity- the Guinea Pig videos back in the 80’s actually had people thinking they were real snuff films,  Grotesque back in 2009 was banned in the UK outright.  If you want to talk about body horror, more recent Japanese horror cinema goes there in a big way.  Some of these ultra-sick and disturbing Japanese films are going to work better than others, obviously.  I strongly preferred Infection over Marebito.  Don’t get me wrong, Marebito is actually pretty good, but Infection is amazing.   Marebito I would be willing to sit down and watch again just to get a clearer sense of what is going on in the film, if such a thing is possible.  I don’t think you can necessarily sit down and map out the plot of Marebito and have it all logistically make sense really.  The main completely crazy and it is strongly suggested that what is going in the film is actually going on in his head.   The general gist of it is that the main character discovers an underground tunnel system beneath Tokyo in which he finds a woman that has never had human contact and lives entirely off of blood.  First he feeds her his own blood (which he says he enjoys and appears to get off on sexually) but then begins killing people to feed her.    This plot synopsis is a vast oversimplification but I hate writing out a plot synopsis for films in a review and, again, this film I would be willing to watch over because a lot of it didn’t appear to make sense to me much.   It is suggested at one point that one woman he kills is actually his wife and the strange woman that only drinks blood he finds underground is actually his daughter.   Obviously, this a wholesome family film that should be shown to children in elementary schools, especially around the holiday season.  Infection is hot.  It actually scared me.  This hospital in Japan is running out of money, not clear if there is some sort of economic depression going on, but that is sort of the implication. This hospital is running under budget and with inadequate staff.  There is an ambulance headed to the hospital with a mysterious illness.  This one becomes another one in which it is not clear how much is actually going on in the character’s minds.    There is an incident in which by making a mistake, one of the patients, a burn victim, dies, and the doctors and nurses involved discuss the ways to conceal the error.  Meanwhile, the ambulance has dropped off the mysterious patient which has a contagious infection which first effects the brain and then causes the internal organs to dissolve into green slime.   It is suggested that the disease is actually a disease that takes place in the mind, and has something to do with the death of the burn patient.  The answers are not given conclusively in the end, without spoiling too much.  A woman in the audience actually screamed during the screening of Infection.  It’s pretty sweet.  

Last Days Here Review

It makes sense for me to review this film now just because the DVD came out a few weeks ago and I just happened to see it.  I am not going to lie and say this is an amazing film- it is not.   It’s a documentary about the lead singer of the 70’s doom metal band Pentagram Bobby Liebling who spent years smoking crack in his parents basement.  He- I don’t know- Pentagram is a really good band but I am not crazy about this Liebling guy.  He’s really not especially insightful or interesting.  He’s a weirdo, and not really in a positive way.  He gets sober by the end of the film.   The film is similar in tone to the documentary about Arthur Kane of the New York Dolls except Arthur Kane had vanished from music and become a very serious Mormon, which is a lot more sympathetic.  Bobby is pretty annoying, he vanished from music to smoke crack in his parent's basement.  But who is really annoying is his wife.  He marries one of his young fans in the film.  This is an ugly crackhead who lives with his mom. First of all, she becomes romantically involved with a particularly ugly crackhead because he was in some band in the 70’s, which reminds me a lot of the woman who said she wouldn’t date me because I wasn’t a skinhead in high school.    Secondly, if you watch the film, the strong argument could be made that she was more of a hindrance to Bobby’s recovery than a help.  The documentary doesn’t even play that much Pentagram in it. 

More Whacky Snuff Flick Fun with Faces of Death 3!

Nothing spells class quite like the Faces of Death movies from the 80’s.  The original I know was at least banned in a number of different countries.  These “documentaries” have no plots and contain mostly fake footage of grizzly deaths of both humans and animals.  They’re ridiculous- people were fooled by them, amazingly.  It’s funny; Charlie Sheen took the second of the Guinea Pig videos seriously enough to contact the F.B.I about it, thinking he was looking at real extreme Asian torture and snuff flick footage, even though the video was very much a fake snuff flick.  Faces of Death 3 is a hilarious fake at points.  It does include what looks like real footage of a rabbit slaughterhouse.   The third one is the one where they show a secret political execution in El Salvador without explaining why their cameras would be allowed into a secret political execution.  3 is also the one where the skydiver crashes into water full of alligators that eat him.   We are talking serious gritty realism here!  The film as with it’s to preceding films is narrated by actor Michael Carr as Doctor Frances b. Gross (get it? He B. Gross!).  Apparently, the fourth films has a different narrator, but I have yet to be quite bored enough to watch Faces of Death 4.  Apparently, the 5^th Faces of Death film is all footage from the previous four films.  I find these films to be hilarious though devoid of any substance whatsoever.   Seriously, I cracked up when the guy skydives into the water filled with alligators.   If you’re a man looking to really charm the ladies, I’ll tell you what you do.  Early on in conversation, as early on as you can bring it up, mention being a huge fan of the Faces of Death films, in particular Faces of Death 3. Well, who can blame the ladies?  Doctor Frances B. Gross looks so sexy in his glasses, goatee, and timely late 70’s to mid-80’s suits.  You strat wearing that same suit, glasses, goatee and start narrating about the guy who skydived into the water filled with alligators, the tail is going to come crawling, I promise!   

Messiah of Evil (Full Film with Text Introduction)

The problem again and again with doing this site, as I’ve complained about at length on here lately, is that it tends to be only reviews of the more extreme kinds of horror films- Human Centipede 2, The Bunny Game, A Serbian Film, Men Behind the Sun- films that deal with torture, snuff films, rape- that get   many hits. As such I am forced to write on those to keep the audience expanding.  I did in all honesty enjoy many of those films, but it is frustrating that that must become the focus in order to keep the readership numbers high.  A film like Messiah of Evil is a good example of why I find this all very stifling. Even when it comes to horror cinema as the central topic, an extreme horror film like The Bunny Game of Human Centipede 2 does not represent by any stretch of the imagination the full scope of engaging horror films.  I kind of like this film Messiah of Evil from the 70’s that I saw last night at the Sci-Fi center in Vegas. No, this film only has flesh eating zombies, it does not involve prolonged sexual torture, rape and impregnation of human woman by aliens or monsters, or snuff films in anyway.  It was never banned in any country.  Messiah of Evil is like a zombie movie made by people on seven hits of acid or something.  I’d never heard of it but apparently a lot of people view it as a kind of a lost classic.  A good example of one such individual is Brad Jones “the Cinema Snob” (whose snuff-flick themed movie Cheap I reviewed on here).  Brad Jones has the whole shtick that he never likes anything, but he loves Messiah of Evil.  The general plot synopsis is a woman who has lost contact with her father, a painter- (and the paintings of his shown in the film are all tripped out, of course) goes to a small town in Northern California, where she meets up with some weird traveling bohemian types.  Her father’s notes suggest that something very bad is happening in this town, and then, you guessed it- flesh eating zombies.  There’s a kind of Antichrist figure that appears, as the title would suggest, but he’s a weird old west Antichrist, an Anti-Joseph Smith almost- it involves the Donner Party.  The film also includes some very nice early electronic soundtrack work akin to the soundtrack work of Can or Goblin from the same time period.  This film is more the sort of thing that I myself am into, weird zombie films from the 70’s and the like- but unfortunately on-line audiences seem focused on digging up images of sexual violation.   That is truly a shame in my book. 

The M Lady Tapes

Many of the people who have reached my site have used the search words “M Lady Tapes”.  I will make some brief notes here about what they are and some information about them.  This is not a subject I find that interesting myself, so I won’t go into that much detail about it.   Serial killers Leonard Lake and his accomplice Charles Ng in California tortured, raped and murdered a number of women up at their cabin where they lived.  Some of the sexual abuse and torture was captured on video.  I have seen some clips from these tapes which appear in the documentary Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera which I reviewed on here.  Apparently, this M Lady Tape footage is in some form available on-line but I have never had enough curiosity about it to try and get a hold of the footage.   This footage doesn’t constitute snuff footage because there’s no evidence they made the tapes for purpose of profit, a vital element in the definition of snuff.  The Luka Magnotta video which surfaced more recently is not authentic snuff footage for much the same reason.  Yeah, these M Lady Tapes are real unfortunately, and supposedly you can get a hold of them.   I can’t imagine why you  would want to, but apparently they’re around.