.
After the maniacal murmuring of
Ogroff: Mad Mutilator (1983) and the disembodied-from-reality delirium of
Devil Story (1985), I figured I had seen the most prominent gore ultra-obscurities hailing from an '80s coke-fueled France. Then I ran across an auction on eBay for an Italian tape of a number entitled
Sexandroide a few weeks ago. My hopes of ownership of this particular VHS were dashed when the final price blew past my measly bid to settle north of $80. So I started digging around and found this
incredible cover for what's presumably the original French VHS. It should go without saying after seeing that artwork I
had to see this nasty European exercise and that's when I discovered that
Cinema de Bizarre carried a copy. I received my DVD-R in short order about a week ago, but sat on it until last night.
You see,
Sexandroide is definitely not to be seen with
anyone or
anyone around. Disowned loved ones and your girlfriend erupting into tears before locking herself in the bathroom would be left in your wake. Well, unless your girl was a rail thin syphilitic ex-junkie/whore with daddy issues and a real knack for self-mutilation. Or one of your siblings happened to have perfected the art of homebrew feline vivisection and believes
Happy Tree Friends makes a good substitute for
Baby Einstein. One shouldn't make the mistake of lumping this in the slew of other "watch alone" material, everything from the
August Undergrounds to the
Guinea Pigs, as
Sexandroide is so little known that it still feels very "wrong" while watching without that bug in your ear about it being sold virtually everywhere. The best way to put it is, at times, it's like the mysterious snuff transmission in Cronenberg's
Videodrome.
This 57-minute, unsubtitled film is broken up into three unrelated vignettes each featuring performer Daniel Dubois carrying out dastardly deeds upon women which I assume are his act partners. The first concerns Dubois in a dungeon poking, cutting, and burning a wax figure of a girl in a voodoo ritual. The bleached blonde victim is in an equally dungeonous dive where she retreats to the restroom before having her clothes ripped off. The invisible force then makes her bleed from her nether regions (
seems to like it), cry blood, slits her throat, burns her face, and finally hangs her from the ceiling.
The second segment is the real entrails and potatoes of
Sexandroide with an oatmeal-faced Dubois as a zombie that tortures a hapless woman that wandered into his dungeon. After shooting a cloaked figure dead, the woman suddenly feels the urge to strip nude and dance about with torches and beat her own backside with a cat o' nine tails. Soon the figure returns from the dead, takes control of the whip, and then handcuffs the woman to a chair. Then we witness the wholesomeness of long needle nipple and tongue piercing, nipple slicing (
and eating), arm butchering, severe ocular trauma, and knife bludgeoning. Finally, the blood-drenched zombie disembowels himself before his dead bride as she returns to life and they fall in love.
It makes me tear up just writing that...
I warned you not to watch this one with anyone else, but this entire scene is a bit of extreme performance art. Although I haven't found proof, I imagine Dubois and his scene partners had been acting out this particular piece in clubs before Michel Ricaud decided to showcase it in this short film.
These photos at least prove that Dubois appears to be still doing it as of 2007. Dubois as the butchering zombie and his victim/dancer also exhibit very "theatrical" motions during this sequence like Dubois providing several lurching false starts before plunging a fake blood-filled knife into his own arm. This deliberateness and pacing points to the act being well-honed for a live audience. Most of the violence isn't real, but the nipple/breast piercings are and Ricaud provides lingering close-ups of this particular event.
The last portion isn't nearly as showstopping and plays more as a last bid for some T&A. A grieving woman is completely disrobed and bitten by her undead lover that just rose from his casket. She then reawakens as a vampire, or something, and shows us
everything while dancing to Tina Turner's
I Might Have Been Queen and
What's Love Got to Do with It. She climbs onto her lover's casket while he pulls the cover back on and hangs a "Do Not Disturb" sign off the side. FIN.
Yeah, there's not much to
Sexandroide and the most bizarre question gleaned from its impressively gory non-content is what kind of audience Ricaud and Dubois were hoping to tap with the creation of this video? Horror fans usually like splatter
and bountiful womanly nudity, but given how dead the genre was in its native country at the time of its inception, was there really that much of a demand? Was it made for some seedy slimeball niche of French society? Or perhaps Dubois's freakish sideshow goes far beyond my perceptions and should be accepted into the Criterion Collection someday for its snapshot of the country's '80s dark subculture? No idea, but
Sexandroide is pretty fucking gory with pretty nude women of loose morality combining to result in something you won't soon forget.
Cinema de Bizarre's DVD-R is part of their Eurotrash Collector's Editions with high quality cover art printed on Kodak paper stock that looks indistinguishable compared to professional DVD covers. The full frame image, probably the original aspect ratio, looks decent for an old SECAM VHS with no major tracking issues. Sound quality sucks, but the flick doesn't seem well-recorded to start with. No extras are included. The DVD-R is also properly authored in the DVD-R VER. 1.0 standard.
.
I know what you're thinking. Does he really mean Meatballs? Yes and I'm not referring to an extremely obscure gore flick where some maniac replaces his male victim's testicles with everyone's favorite meaty pasta accoutrement. Ivan Reitman's 1979 summer camp comedy, Meatballs, has been a favorite of mine outside the realm of cinematic head cleavings for longer than I can remember. It's curiously innocuous when compared to other teen comedies of the early '80s period, especially its raunchy mirror Summer Camp, and predates much of the horror genre's camp hackers like Friday the 13th, The Burning, and Madman. I mean, there isn't really even a hint of adult innuendo to be inferred anywhere in Reitman's breakout film behind the camera after producing John Landis's Animal House. That's extremely commendable and something seemingly lost in today's marketplace of continually winking at narcoleptic parents dragged to whatever Dreamworks-produced CG animal garbage their kids begged to see.
If it's tough to call Pericles Lewnes's Redneck Zombies a "zombie classic", then it should hopefully be easier to call it one of the best shot-on-video horror flicks ever made. In one of the interviews on the new Tromasterpiece DVD, Lewnes makes the point that his 1987 SoV wonder plays best to smart horror fans that understand the backbreaking rigors of such filmmaking. Not to say some horror fans are stupid, but I couldn't agree more that it's very important taking Lewnes's assertion into consideration while watching. Sure, it's a super-amateurish cheeseball, but Redneck Zombies has an undeniable soul and much like Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, Lewnes mines tremendous mileage from its dumb premise. In a way, the zeal of those involved and "fullness" Lewnes pulls from the simple story through comedy is the best testament to the film's enduring popularity. It's deceptively challenging to look past Redneck Zombies's goofy, splattery facade, but so worth it, as it speaks for itself and hits much more than misses. Most of the time, SoVs either have better cover art than their actual content or were solely made to sell the cover art to unwitting renters, but Lewnes's undead hillbilly opus delivers exactly what it promises. They're Tobacco Chewin', Gut Chompin', Cannibal Kinfolk from Hell! 
Just a quick note that I finally snagged Alliance's Canadian Blu-ray of Robert Rodriguez's pre-Grindhouse grindhouse flick From Dusk Till Dawn and the A/V quality passes muster. Alliance has a dodgy track record with the format, despite releasing several Canuck exclusives. Their Blu-ray of Fincher's Se7en is unmatted to 1.78:1 from its original 2.35:1 widescreen ratio. Good Will Hunting and The English Patient feature 1080i interlaced transfers (along with Se7en). Sin City exhibits a strange blocky pattern on large displays and projectors. A Nightmare on Elm Street was waxed to hell with digital noise reduction until New Line saved the day. So I was very weary about the chances of this title, but found it over the weekend at a local music shop and what can I say? It stuck to my hand right out the door. 
The audio is similarly "okay". Despite a listing of standard "DTS" on the back cover, a fully lossless English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that hovers around 4 megabytes per second is included. Compared to other DTS-HD MA tracks, the dialogue here sounds noticably mixed too low, but the mix comes alive when the soundtrack queues up. A lossless French 5.1 dub, standard Dolby 5.1 English/French tracks, and English/French subtitles are also included.
After the maniacal murmuring of Ogroff: Mad Mutilator (1983) and the disembodied-from-reality delirium of Devil Story (1985), I figured I had seen the most prominent gore ultra-obscurities hailing from an '80s coke-fueled France. Then I ran across an auction on eBay for an Italian tape of a number entitled Sexandroide a few weeks ago. My hopes of ownership of this particular VHS were dashed when the final price blew past my measly bid to settle north of $80. So I started digging around and found this incredible cover for what's presumably the original French VHS. It should go without saying after seeing that artwork I had to see this nasty European exercise and that's when I discovered that Cinema de Bizarre carried a copy. I received my DVD-R in short order about a week ago, but sat on it until last night.
This 57-minute, unsubtitled film is broken up into three unrelated vignettes each featuring performer Daniel Dubois carrying out dastardly deeds upon women which I assume are his act partners. The first concerns Dubois in a dungeon poking, cutting, and burning a wax figure of a girl in a voodoo ritual. The bleached blonde victim is in an equally dungeonous dive where she retreats to the restroom before having her clothes ripped off. The invisible force then makes her bleed from her nether regions (seems to like it), cry blood, slits her throat, burns her face, and finally hangs her from the ceiling.
Yeah, there's not much to Sexandroide and the most bizarre question gleaned from its impressively gory non-content is what kind of audience Ricaud and Dubois were hoping to tap with the creation of this video? Horror fans usually like splatter and bountiful womanly nudity, but given how dead the genre was in its native country at the time of its inception, was there really that much of a demand? Was it made for some seedy slimeball niche of French society? Or perhaps Dubois's freakish sideshow goes far beyond my perceptions and should be accepted into the Criterion Collection someday for its snapshot of the country's '80s dark subculture? No idea, but Sexandroide is pretty fucking gory with pretty nude women of loose morality combining to result in something you won't soon forget. 
Here we have the same source treated badly by Echo Bridge and correctly by Network. Since the U.S. disc arrived two years after the British disc, I suspect Echo Bridge simply took the PAL video standard transfer of the Network and sloppily converted it to NTSC for their release. The Echo Bridge presentation is in anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen (like the Network), but exhibits massive amounts of image doubling or "ghosting" from the poor video conversion (example #3). Image quality is also damaged by interlace combing artifacts (seen around the edge of Jaime Lee below) and an incorrect resolution. Instead of the usual 720x480 for anamorphic NTSC, somehow Echo Bridge have vertically smashed that into the lowest 640x480 resolution seen in crappy "full frame" NTSC discs. A DVD player should be able to correct this, but the cumulative effects of everything wrong the U.S. presentation will reek havoc on a HDTV for even a player with great performance. Also note that because of the bad PAL-to-NTSC transfer, the slight audio "speed-up" of the PAL Network disc is there.
Three young women on a yearly get-together trip camping run afoul of two mountain punks and their deranged mother (Beatrice Pons) in the wilderness. After a strange night of backwoods cabaret and brutalization, the women escape and retreat to the woods to plot their revenge upon the bumpkins. 
This moment of dread is actually more potent than the impact of the rape of one of the women. I'm not going to be like Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies (read Annie Riordan's hilarious rebuttal to his idiotic Elm Street '10 review here) and say such unsettlingly "taboo" themes should stay out of the horror genre. Though in Mother's Day the depiction of rape seems out-of-place with the rest of the surrounding Alex Cox-vibed schlock. Instead of showing the abhorrent ugliness of the act like in Craven's Last House on the Left or Meir Zarchi's insanely difficult to watch I Spit on Your Grave, Kaufman seemingly throws it in once as a sign of the times or a then-trend that must be adhered to given the type of work. The subsequent, very feminist-tinged revenge by the night's surviving women is appropriately harsh with the resourceful team employing items like Drain-O and tampons against the dimwitted kin.
students of the Sigma Phi fraternity throw a New Year's Eve costume party aboard a train. But soon a killer taking the disguises of his victims targets six partiers responsible for a cruel pledge prank years prior. 
Grodnik's wife was at least half right as Roger Spottiswoode's directorial debut, Terror Train, proves lightning doesn't strike the same spot twice in this regard. Along with Paul Lynch's Prom Night, this boom times slasher is Jaime Lee Curtis's other Canadian maniac tango from 1980. While Prom Night has an effortless purity in its now formulaic, dead horse style and story; Terror Train almost always feels labored as it wades along. Well, I shouldn't be that harsh, the opening attention grabber depicting the prank involving a first time sexual encounter with a cadaver that drove a frat pledge to literal insanity and the climatic face-off between Curtis and the masked axeman are definitely solid highlights. The former is by far the single bloodiest and most uncomfortable encounter in a Jaime Lee horror turn. It's just that the in-between sags too quickly as we bounce between the party-goer's night of "magical" debauchery and the going-ons with the Conductor played by the late Oscar winner Ben Johnson.
These sequences involving the oddly blasé Conductor ultimately hurt our identification with the young adults up for the slaughter. The aspect of seeing ourselves and those we know or have known on-screen is one of the keys to a positive slasher experience and aside from the initial introduction there's not much to Terror Train's characters--and this dug the subgenre's first grave--besides being potential victims stamped out in either guy or girl molds. One could levy such a charge upon Prom Night, but its focus is more concise with caring performances. One clear example in Lynch's film is the scene after Jude and Slick's decision to break Slick's van's suspension. Although not mentioned, there's a palpable chemistry that calls to a budding relationship which might even result in matrimony before the whole neck-stabbing-exploding-van unfortunateness. Spottiswoode's stuffy locomotive slasher never has this on a consistent basis, even with Curtis, besides a well-executed "tie back" at the film's finale. I say "stuffy" because the actors usually look to have a gloss of oily sweat glistening on their brow and act with an urgency to stand in front of a fan at the shout of cut. Perhaps the confined rail cars got rather steamy?
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