A PUBLIC CEMETERY OF WOL-HA (Korea; 1967)

NOW UPDATED WITH CLIPPAGE!

This review was previously published on this blog in 2008.



Adultery. Suicide. Murder. Insanity. Drug addiction. Severed arms. Severed Heads. Impaled eye sockets. Acid facials. Attempted infanticide. To name a few.

Sure, it all sounds like the grocery list for some lurid Category III thriller from Hong Kong, or a par-for-the-course exercise in J-horror.

But it's not.

Welcome to Korea, 1967.

The film is A PUBLIC CEMETERY OF WOL-HA, a contemporary-set chiller about a conniving housemaid who keeps her wealthy matron in perpetual sickness in the hopes that her eventual death will free up a little space in her husband's love life...and bank account. While the victim takes the eternal yawn by her own hand, and in abject sorrow and humiliation as befits only the most beautiful Korean tragediennes, payback begins in earnest for her tormentors (and yes, there's more than one!) when her ghost returns home to settle up the bill.

There's some remarkably effective imagery here on what appears to be a modest budget (jazzed up with enough cheap-scare violin shrieks to make then-WKU student John Carpenter proud). One might easily draw visual links to similar Japanese films of the period, but on the basis of this, my first foray into old-school K-horror, I'm tempted to think the Korean shock film industry was vogueing to it's own gruesome beat, one that still reverberates in many of the country's unique modern shockers.

Regardless, Michael Carreras would most definitely have been impressed.







Click through to YouTube via any of the above videos for more clips from this and other amazing (and often rare!) Asian Cinema!

Available at many fine retailers near your keyboard

INVITATION ONLY (Taiwan; 2009)

D: Kevin Ko Mang-Yung
W: Carolyn Lin Chia-hua, Sung In
Taiwan's first slasher movie brings little innovation to the global form, but replicates the cadence and ultra-gory mechanics of American and European forebears like HOSTEL, SAW, MARTYRS and their kin with such a ruthless efficiency that it's almost forgivable to overlook a comparative lack of indigenous flavor, as well as talking points that might seem profound to the average 18-year-old. Gorehounds will surely be satisfied, at least on the level of technical artistry: this is extremely gooey stuff, well-crafted and glazed in warm, golden-grimy hues by DP James Yuan, about five working class strangers lured—under false pretenses—to an executive networking party for "second generation people" at a secluded, abandoned factory warehouse. They're swiftly "exposed" as unwashed social climbers and subjected to prolonged, torturous executions in front of an appreciative audience of the privileged class, who are sickened by the envy of those beneath them, but not so much so that they can't watch the poor saps have their faces and throats carved open. In short order, the quintet is gruesomely reduced to the resilient "Final Boy" (Bryant Chang) and the resourceful "Final Girl" (Julianne), who navigate a punishing gauntlet of narrow escapes, invasive instruments, corpses and body parts (generally not their own) in order to turn tables and open doors to a sequel. Stunt casting of Japanese hardcore starlet Maria Ozawa will no doubt appeal to her onanistic fanbase, and she photographs beautifully in clothes or out of them, but her acting skills aren't likely to push her further into the mainstream as much as her willingness to disrobe as thoroughly as she does here. Make-up effects by Fei Wen-pin and Huang Ming-chu are every bit the equal of their western counterparts. Director Ko makes his feature-length debut here, after buzzing local film festivals and the internet in 2004 with his impressive horror short THE PRINT.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (Canada; 1981)

D: J. Lee Thompson
W: John Saxton

There's a reason Anchor Bay's new release of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME has turned up for as little as five dollars in certain big box retailers in the U.S.: it's an awful movie.

The infamous tagline "Six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see!" is of course part and parcel of the old-school hucksterism used to peddle these "event-related" slasher movies back in the 70's and 80's, but here it's more of a blatant case of false advertising than was usually the case back in those days. Sure, in concept, some of the murders are a little off-the-wall (kebab-skewer through the mouth; weights across the nuts 'n neck, motorcycle spokes to the face, etc.), but they all happen so quickly there's little time to find them anything but frustrating (and upon rewinding, you discover how little you actually see). This movie more likely earned its R-rating for its now-quaint profanity than it's gore (of which there is little) or it's nudity (of which there is none).

By 1980, when this was shot, veteran director J Lee Thompson still had some craft left in him, if barely, but he was clearly painting by numbers on this outing, and sloppily so, as in two key scenes involving cars. Early on (and early enough to be an omen) one character's snazzy Trans Am jumps a rising river bridge, firmly planting (and utterly destroying) it's nose end on the other side, but a moment later, the car's in pristine condition. A little later, the car occupied by our possibly deranged heroine (Melissa Sue Anderson) and her crazy mother becomes lodged between the rising panels of the same bridge, eventually falling into the water below on it's roof, a plunge captured from three different camera angles, all of which are shown in sequence. Then, a fourth shot of the plunge completes the sequence, only this time, the car lands on it's wheels! How stupid did the filmmakers think audiences were in those days, anyways?

And poor Glenn Ford. He took a lot of flack at the time for appearing as Dr. Faraday in this, and his name value is really all he brings to it (as well as the opportunity for the filmmakers to insert another blatantly obvious red herring ("I'll never let anyone hurt you" he reassures Anderson in a disquietingly creepy fashion). One surmises that he took the role because it brought him back to Quebec, the land of his birth. He certainly wouldn't be the first actor to wrangle a free vacation out of a film role (Paging Michael Caine!).

The whole picture is sloppily made and poorly thought out. The red herring count is high, but it's also egregiously stupid, with virtually every character required to do bizarre things or exhibit strange behviour that no human being would ever do or exhibit (especially among a group of friends) in order to supposedly keep us guessing. It's insulting, as is the "rip off that rubber mask" finale straight out of the old Scooby Doo mysteries.

This would be a one star review were it not for the fact that Anchor Bay offers a very nice transfer on this edition, with the original music restored, thus the second star. The film itself barely merits one star. The only extra on the disc is the trailer.

MIA on DVD: TWICE DEAD (1988)

D: Bert L. Dragin
W: Bert L. Dragin, Robert McConnell



Found this advertisement for the video release of the direct-to-video horror flick TWICE DEAD while skimming a small stash of bound-for-the-recycling bin home entertainment magazines for the various technology articles I've been posting in the past few days. I haven't seen this little B horror, actually, nor am I likely to, but I thought the packaging looked appropriately garish enough to share.

I.C. KILL (Hong Kong; 1999)

I. C. KILL (1999)
D: Mihiel Wong Chung-ning.
Y2K jitters conjure up yet another ghost in the machine in this moderately (but surprisingly) witty, suspenseful videogramme that has slacker Michael Tse fearing for his life after roommate Jason Chu intercepts a date with his pretty new internet ICQ chatmate (Liz Kong) and turns up face down at the Ma Liu Shui pier in Sha Tin shortly thereafter. Tech-dumb detective Vincent Wan sizes up the clues, discovers a small chain of victims—including an embarrassed, defensive young female survivor in the hospital—and deduces that the perp is, in fact, a vengeful ghost with a firm deadline for Tse’s departure from the mortal coil. Taking their cue from last year’s phenomenally successful RING pictures from Japan—not for nothing is this film’s bogeywoman named Hiroko—director Mihiel Wong and writer Andrew Wu, who shared these duties between them last year on their debut project B. FOR BOYS, think cinematically on a home video budget and come up with a (very) rough gem distinguished by smart blocking in visually interesting locations—aided in no small part by cinematographers Ng Wing-sin and Lau Wai-kwan, and art director Ginnie Fung Suk-fun (the lamp in Tse’s apartment radiates golden-orange like something from a Wong Kar-wai movie)—and two lead characters that are generally more rounded, both in the writing and the performances, than one usually finds in this corner of the shot-on-video arena. The picture’s most notable asset might very well be it’s unvarnished depiction of computer user interface and online chat sessions (watch the video), something far too many filmmakers unnecessarily “enhance” with phony graphics and sound effects. It should be interesting to see what Wong and Wu are capable of should they return to shooting on film.

BLACK MAGIC 2 (Hong Kong; 1976)

BLACK MAGIC 2 (Hong Kong; 1976)
D: Ho Meng-hua
Heeding what I can only assume was a public outcry for a followup after the success of the previous year’s wild dark arts exploitationer BLACK MAGIC, director Ho Meng-hua, writer Ni Kuang and their mischievous horror elves not only come up with a more intricate story that repurposes most of the earlier film’s leading players, they crank the freak-show dial way, WAY up.


Lam Wai-yiu, Ti Lung, Tanny Tien Ni

More gore! More nudity! More zombies! More lesions, skin ulcers and blood worms! More lactation! A miscarriage! Wait a minute...ewwww! The opening credits haven’t even rolled before a topless native girl is devoured by a fairly convincing crocodile, after which a frizzy-haired old wizard (Yeung Chi-hing) guts the beast to retreive a cherished bangle for her grieving family. Things get decidedly more outlandish from there as skeptical Hong Kong docs Ti Lung and Lam Wai-tiu take wives Tanny Tien Ni and Lily Li on vacation to what a title card informs us is “A Tropical City,” where they run into all sorts of gooey Southeast Asian mysticism at the hands of suave sorcerer Lo Lieh.


Lo Lieh

From his basement lair, Lo whips female pubic hairs and breast milk into powerful zombie potions, controls his creations via giant metal spikes pounded into their heads (the removal of which expedites the decomposition process in Hammer-style dissolve-o-vision), and doesn’t take kindly to city folk sniffin’ around the rotting corpses of his victims. Not only does he turn Li into an walking husk after luring her from the group, he casts a love spell on both Ti’s wife (Tien) and his colleague (Lam).


Lily Lee

Shaken free of Lo’s remote-controlled adultery by a rightfully perplexed Ti, Lam’s subsequent race to rescue his own wife from Lo’s clutches ends rather poorly for both of them, leaving Ti to seek out the services of wily old wizard Yeung, who helps him break Tien’s spell by extracting live worms from the oozing sores on her back. After he loses a subsequent battle of the hex dolls with an agitated Lo, Yeung bequeaths his own eyeballs to the young hero, who’s not a little nauseated that he has to eat them to gain the arcane powers needed to take on Lo and his battalion of druid-robed zombies.

The increased budget is not only evident in the quality and abundance of the movie’s visceral special effects, including some fairly effective process work during the fiery finale, but also in soft, atmospheric lensing by Cho Wai-kei and an eerie, detail-rich production design by Chan Ging-sam that works as hard as the actors to play up the popular Hong Kong perception of Southeast Asian countries as literally crawling with all manner of evil and exotic threats. Definitely one of the all time great Hong Kong horror pictures, with a few bits of Yuen Cheung-yan’s martial arts play thrown in for good measure—dig that kooky fight atop the gondola lift— and a flavorful music score by Frankie Chan Fan-kei.

I'm told you can pick this up on DVD in Region 1 from Media Blasters some time in the Fall, but when I want to see a movie—especially one as hyped as this one has been over the years—I don't like to wait. And like others in the know, I grabbed a membership at www.jaman.com—a LEGAL online distributor of a phenomenal selection of international cinema—and downloaded it myself, an act all the more necessary when IVL/Celestial apparently withdrew it from their release schedule for some godforsaken reason. And while I'm glad I didn't wait, I'll still pick up the Media Blasters edition when it streets or better yet, when it inevitably ends up in one of their price-reduced three packs that follow about a year or so after they release the titles individually.

BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL (Japan; 2003)

BATTLEFIELD BASEBALL (Japan; 2003
D: Yudai Yamaguchi

This low-budget baseball zombie comedy is arguably a mixed bag, but one likely to develop a sizable cult following if it hasn't by the time you read this. While it successfully pokes fun at the clichés inherent in most sports movies, particularly those emotional cheats where spectators spontaneously applaud the most mundane, often personal actions of the main characters, it doesn't deliver on the action and gore quotient promised by the concept. And yet, as a budget-conscious live-action adaptation of a Shonen Jump manga, it plants tongue hard in cheek and certainly feels faithful to the source material, never for a minute taking itself seriously and gleefully indulging in the most eye-rollingly obvious visual gags.

Desperate to make it to the big leagues, the Seido High School baseball team must face their much more successful rivals at Gedo High, a team made up entirely of well-armed zombies. Their ace in the hole may well be transfer student `Jubeh The Baseball' (Tak Sakaguchi), whose signature fastball killed his own father, a tragedy which prevents him from helping the team. Directed by the writer of VERSUS (Yudai Yamiguchi), produced by that film's director (Ryuhei Kitamura) and starring that film's lead (Tak Sakaguchi), BATTLEFIELD shares that film's low-budget ingenuity, but wisely knows when to take up stakes and call it a day around the 90 minute mark. Can't speak for the R1 release of this title, but the Japanese R2 DVD I picked up has English subs and includes a hilariously inventive short film called Ramen Baka Ichidai, about a kid who hunts down the perfect Ramen noodles for his dying grandfather. Primo stuff.

TIFF 2007: GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD

GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007; USA/Canada)
D: George A. Romero

In an age where everyone's dying to tell a story, to make themselves known, and increasingly fitted eight ways to Sunday with the means to do it, it should come as no surprise that a reimagining of George Romero's DEAD franchise would be a timely affair, particularly now that it's been liberated from studio interference.

This time out—his 146th if I recall correctly, and I think I do—Romero's trademark unexplained zombie apocalypse rises up while the protagonists, a bunch of pretentious film school students and their besotted professor, are shooting a low budget monster movie deep in the woods outside Pittsburgh. The one in Ontario, Canada, that is. Armed with the videographic weapons of the digital age—cell phone cameras, DV cameras, Webcams, security cameras, Myspace and YouTube videos— and the knowledge that the end is nigh, the group sets out in their grimy Winnebago (with the "W" logo rather lazily taped over by Romero's set designers) to document the mayhem with an eye to uploading the results so that people can see the truth this bunch believes the world is being denied by the mainstream media, which has almost immediately attempted to put a positive spin on the plague.

Folks who like to piss all over Romero's last zombie flick, the narrative-driven LAND OF THE DEAD (which really wasn't that bad), will find much to savour here now that he's working to his own specs on a comparitively modest budget and freed of a standard narrative. There's a sense of urgency and nausea (and, of course, calculation) in the hand-held camerawork— much of it performed by cast members—that has been largely absent since Romero's original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.



That to achieve any of this Romero's characters had to be pretentious film-school students (and their besotted professor) was a bit of a bother, but in this age of untrusted media conglomerates and ubiquitous, listen-to-ME "personal reporting," I suppose it is the most topical route to catch up to the zeitgeist. But the concept wears a bit thin over the course of 90+ minutes, though by then you've invested enough in these characters to at least see how, or if, they die. The whole cynical "are you gettin' all this on your stupid camera?" ethical-moral routine is present and accounted for as pretty much everyone takes a shot at their student "director" (Joshua Close) for his seemingly callous drive to capture every gruesome moment on video. A brief snippet of Close's character talking to the camera is about all we're given to suggest he's NOT motivated by a filmschoolian lust for fame, and it's barely enough to convince. Indeed, the entire film is set up as a patchwork documentary pieced together from various sources by the director's girlfriend after he's no longer capable of finishing the project. Indeed, the film's opening title isn't DIARY OF THE DEAD, it's THE DEATH OF DEATH. Clever, if not particularly inventive. Her switch from loathing his decisions to finishing the project in his honour—replete with a horror-film score because she feels she needs to "scare you"—is just a bit too tidy (and quite how she does it is never explained, even though we're supposed to be watching the final results)

As stated, a lower budget apparently couldn't deny Romero the services of the folks at KNB Effects Group, and their gore doesn't disappoint in the least! A few little bits of CG are evident in the head shots, but that's acceptable in this day and age. Overall, though, the zombies meet some very inventive demises this time out, via defibrillator paddles, acid, scythes, gunshots, you name it. An attempt to be all meaningful in the final scene rings a bit hollow, but the effect used to put it across is exceptionally well done.

The film's most memorable character is bound to be Samuel, the deaf-mute Amish man who proves rather handy with his little chalk-board, with which he communicates with the protagonists when they stop at his farm, and sticks of dynamite, with which he dispatches three undead ghouls before turning around his chalkboard, where's he written an introductory "Hello, I'm Samuel" that he punctuates with confident little nod of the head! Priceless.