Pulp Features

Over the years, Johnny Legend has been involved in many things. This California-based musician, film producer, memorabilia show merchant and wrestling manager has worn several hats. Likewise due to his strange appearance, being thin as a rail and with a beard one would expect to find on combatants of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, or more recently, ZZ TOP, he has landed various small parts in films. Like a pimple, he keeps popping up everywhere and has become a mainstay in the world of Independent cinema.

Legend likewise owes a brush with fame to the fact his sister was the celebrated girlfriend to the late Andy Kaufmann. Like the ill-fated actor, Johnny shared a passion for wrestling and weird films. They have similar, twisted tastes in comedy as well.

Among his various film exploits, Legend has produced some of his own material, including “Born to Bleed”, a wrestling spoof, and “I Am legend”, a documentary about himself and his exploits in his various career choices.

You can see him in one of his early film roles as a zombie in “Bride of Reanimator”. While “Reanimator” was, in my opinion, a great film and this sequel, one of the worst movies of all time, legend at least looks impressive, lumbering about with a dazed look on his face. At least he was supposed to act brain-dead. One can’t say the same for a lot of the other cast members in this bomb!

More impressively, though with a dubbed voice, Legend appears as The Street Prophet, a fanatical cult leader preaching to the homeless in “Severed Ties”, a Fangoria production of much greater interest than “Bride of Reanimator”. Legend steals the show in his role as this lunatic preacher. In the film, Legend demands people “testify” before being allowed to enter his domain, “testify” meaning confessing “Sweet Jesus, I’m a piece of shit,” to which the response is, “You may enter.” A lesson in blunt humility you won’t find with many of the more mainstream religions!

Par for the course though, Johnny doesn’t last long in this and dies, though his moments in front of the camera are both funny and frightening.

Legend also had a small part in “Children of the Corn III” and as a healer in “Man on the Moon”, the Kaufman biography.

Aside from such roles in horror flicks, Legend has been big on the club circuit with a rockabilly band. He has also done such risky things as presenting an El Santo film festival, in the heart of Los Angeles and arranged other low budget horror screenings; featuring movies that not even the worst of late night comedy hosts would run. Attendance has varied. Sometimes he has an astronomical turnout, at other times, well…

Too thin to become a wrestler (though he did do a brief stint as an inter-gender champion), he spent many years as a wrestling manager, mainly for the California based AIWA of Ed Ahrens. Appearing regularly in Los Angeles suburbs such as Maywood and Cudahy, he worked in the corner of a number of freakish wrestling idols from the regional scene. The cast looked like something from a John Waters movie. The Time Traveller, Rainbow, Dr. Jerry Graham, Bad Boy Bubba Storm, Outlaw Mark Kissell, The Universal Playboy, Lightning Cheryl Russa, The No-Mercy Man and Handsome Jack Studd were some of them, though not exactly WWF prototypes Legend and crew constantly pushed the crowds at these small town shows to riot pitched frenzies, at times having to require police escorts back to the safety of the locker room.

Legend later took things one step further, when he created Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Playing to adult audiences in bars, where profanity, sexuality and violence could be emphasized, he started presenting shows and then selling videos of the same. While he occasionally managed on these cards, he stayed more in the background while another whole cast of freaks performed in the ring. Among the luminaries this time were Harley Racist, Vandal Drummond, John “The Rapist” Pierce (no relation to this writer), Cletus The Fetus & The Abortionist, The Drunk, The Mistress Of Domination, and more. It wasn’t something you’d find on prime-time TV, but he managed to build a cult following during the time it lasted.

Legend remains active to this day, though his age has forced him to curtail most of his wrestling work. He has placed much more emphasis on his music, his re-introducing of forgotten horror films to the fans and occasionally taking part in a movie. Under his real name he also writes wrestling and film articles for varied magazines. None-too-surprisingly, the name of Johnny Legend has a habit of cropping up in the text.

Born Jacinto Molina, Paul Naschy has been one of Spain’s most prolific directors, actors and producers of horror films. While some of his films have truly worked wonders, especially when you bear in mind the shoestring budgets with which they were shot, others have been absolute disasters worthy of Ed Wood.

Whether you like his films or not, however, you must give credit for dedication to the man who, in “The Hunchback of the Morgue”, actually allowed himself to be bitten multiple times by rats, in order to complete a scene without having the funds for the special effects.

Naschy’s most famous projects would be the werewolf series.

A big fan of Universal’s old horror films, he created a European answer to Larry Talbot, Waldemar Daninski who, like Talbot, was constantly killed, only to be repeatedly brought back to life in sequels. In further tribute to the old Universal series, Naschy also dressed in a black shirt and pants, something many viewers never pointed out in their evaluations or commentaries on his films. (Curious point, in the old Universal series, no one ever bothered to ask how, when Chaney turned into the wolfman, his clothing also managed to change, so he always had this same set of clothes, at least Naschy had sense enough to wear them before the big transformation scenes).

Not surprisingly, in many Spanish horror fans identify Naschy as “The Wolfman” more readily than they do Lon Chaney Jr. To be honest, film quality aside, Naschy played the werewolf in his European ventures far more times than Chaney in the USA.

Naschy of course played other characters as well, including a particularly moth-eaten mummy, an evil inquisitor in “Inquisition”, suckered into a fatal fall from grace and being burned at the stake himself in the end, an unusually stocky vampire in “Count Dracula’s Great Love” and a ghoul of undefined origin in “Terror Rises from the Tomb”.

In this writer’s own opinion, one of his best works remains seldom seen, “Panic Beats” or “Latitudos De Panico” in the original Spanish. In this plot, Naschy conspires to kill his wife, who has heart trouble, by scaring her to death. He and his adulterous lover work out a “haunted house plot” at the castle where centuries ago, a crazed knight killed his unfaithful wife with a mace. Naschy is able to scare his wife to death, causing her heart to go out, when he dresses as a knight and comes for her, but it doesn’t end there. His lover than does him in, by throwing an electric heater into a bathtub while he is washing up, humming and smoking a big cigar (Naschy was an avid cigar smoker prior to a near fatal heart attack in the late 1980s). The lover then gets hers, in the last ten minutes of the film. The castle ends up being haunted, the ghosts are real, and the evil knight does return from the grave, clubbing the living hell out of her at the end. Again, the film could have been better with a bigger budget and the plot sounds silly on the surface, but it works out rather well.

Another of his better projects, marred with controversy, is “Howl Of the Devil”, an interesting project in which the actor plays a marathon of characters including the lead heavy, his own “brother”, Frankenstein’s monster, the werewolf, Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, Bluebeard, the devil, Rasputin, The Phantom Of The Opera, and more. First came charges by scriptwriter Salvador Sainz - who had bit parts in both this film and the previously mentioned “Panic Beats” - that he, not Naschy, had scripted this project and had credit stolen from him like a scene from “Phantom.” The two were going at it, accusing the other of everything under the sun for years until time mellowed the controversy. To make matters worse, the movie was never released in the United States as intended, because Naschy utilized Karloff-type makeup for Frankenstein’s monster, and risked copyright action had the movie been shown in continental America.

The plot is too complex to go into in great depth here. Naschy plays a villain, raising his brother’s son (played by Naschy’s real-life son, Sergio). The boy hates his uncle and wants to kill him. As he creates a dream world, speaking to the various monsters, Naschy is “possibly” up to some kinky things of his own. Dressing up as famous sexual psychopaths such as Rasputin and Bluebeard, he makes loves to a series of prostitutes before casually discarding them. The prostitutes end up dead and mutilated.

The question is, is Naschy killing them, is someone else, or has the kid actually summoned up demons to get revenge on his hated uncle! The end has some odd twists, with the little kid revealed as the culprit, killing his reviled uncle while in the act of making love (not a bad way to die though). He then discovers he is not who he thinks he is, his “father” is not his father at all, but he is the son of Satan and the antichrist is in the world!

Sadly, for every good film he has come up with or been in, Naschy has had several bad ones, but these have helped, rather than hurt his career with some of these tacky horror projects elevating him to true cult hero status.

I met Naschy once and conducted an interview with him, years ago, while in Spain.

Although some of the people he has worked with didn’t like him and made no bones about it, I found that he was hospitable, to say the least. I was surprised however, to learn his characteristic black hair is a wig. He’s bald in real life.

Though no spring chicken, he still keeps going. I had heard he planned an internet movie titled “Bullfighters from Outer Space”, a couple years back, but a quick search turned up only a passing reference to it.

No-one can keep going forever and, whether he retires or drops dead from overwork, one thing can be certain, Naschy will have left behind a host of horror films others will find hard to match, in sheer productivity. Not all of these have been good projects mind you, but that’s all part of the Naschy legacy.

The 2003 Festival van de Fantastiche Film (FFF) ran from 10th to 16th April in Amsterdam. The main location was the Filmmuseum Cinerama with a secondary location at the Melkweg, which also provided the Festival Café.

Two countries dominated this year’s festival – Japan and Spain. Japan, of course, has always had anime which at its best can provide a beautiful and often hallucinatory experience. More recently, we have also seen a renaissance of Japanese horror, starting with Ring. In the case of Spain, following Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre Los Ojos, the country has seen an explosion in fantastic film making.

Of course, a retrospective dedicated to Jesus Franco also helps.

The festival is split into several parts.

The Main Programme of the festival comprised 21 titles – including the Night of Terror - all of which were shown in the Filmmusem Cinerama. These are the films that compete for the Silver Scream Award (voted for by the public) and the Silver Méliés.

The Anime Programme takes a look at the unique genre of Japanese animation and shows some of the best fantastic anime of recent years, including Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.

The Jesús Franco Retrospective takes shows a selection of the 150 films that comprise the oeuvre of Jesús Franco.

Completely ignored by mainstream audiences and critics, yet with a devoted following and a far better name within the industry than his reputation would suggest, Jesús Franco has been bringing his often dark and personal visions to the silver screen for five decades. This retrospective is dedicated to bringing him the attention he deserves.

The European Fantastic Shorts programme was split into two showings which attempted to bring the best European short films to an appreciative audience.

The Children’s programme. For those that weren’t convinced, Harry Potter has decisively demonstrated the power of the fairy tale and this programme goes to show that children’s fantasy is a rich and vibrant genre.

The awards and the winners

The Silver Scream award is presented to the director of the most popular film, as voted by the audience. This year’s winner was Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki’s enchanting tale of a 10 year old girl who wanders into a world of gods and monsters.

The Silver Méliés for best European fantastic film is voted for by the jury. The winner of the Silver Méliés goes on to compete for the Golden Méliés at the final Méliés affiliated festival of the season.

And then there is the Lifetime Achievement award, presented for services to fantastic film. This year Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Films has joined the ranks of Wes Craven, Dario Argento and Paul Verhoeven in accepting the award.

Troma Films, ‘the last of the independents’, has consistently shocked, outraged and delighted – admittedly small – audiences with a unique mix of blood, sex, social satire, anarchy and provocation.

Over the course of almost thirty years, Troma gone beyond being just a production company and now also encompasses an attitude and a way of doing things that encompasses the entire filmmaking process from conception to distribution.

Through Tromadance, Troma has also become a philosophy of supporting the small independent filmmaker, rocking the boat and scorning the bland safeness that makes up much of Hollywood’s output.

The award was presented by porn start and occasional cohort, Ron Jeremy and, in a funny and often insightful acceptance speech, Kaufman called for seeking peace through the dropping of celluloid bombs.

The award was followed by a showing of Apocalypse Soon: The Making of Citizen Toxie.

Some of the Films

Since I needed a break, I took some time off work and caught a few of the films. My main intention was to catch some of the better films that aren’t going to be released for a while, if at all.

However, I started with The Castle of Fu Manchu.

The film is an amazing collection of plot contrivances - one convenient coincidence after another, topped off with an ethical debate that completely ignores the idea that cutting the heart out of a live donor might not be entirely ethical.

It’s a terrible, terrible film and one that really needs a few beers to endure.

Ju-On: The Grudge
Ju-On (The Grudge) has to count as one of the most mind-numbingly terrifying cinematic experiences I’ve endured in a long time.

The film revolves around a haunted house and the repercussions of a violent death which we see in the opening sequence.

Rika, a care centre volunteer visits the home of one of the outpatients to check on her condition. Here she finds the house is a mess and the old is woman practically comatose. While cleaning the place up, she hears a noise upstairs and, on investigation, finds a boy in a wardrobe that has been tapes shut. Releasing the boy starts a chain of events, passing the Ju-On curse to everyone who comes into contact with the house.

The rest of the story is told as a series of non-linear, self-contained yet interconnected vignettes each of which expands the story and deepens the horror.

And with no relief, the tension is continually ratcheted up keeping you on the edge of your seat throughout. If only all horror films were half as good as this one.

Deathwatch
British horror film set in the trenches of World War I. Another haunting, although this is more of a ‘haunted trench’ story in which a group of British soldiers get lost in the fog of battle and stumble on a German trench.

The trench is poorly defended - with most of the Germans being already dead - and is easily captured.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t just Germans in the trench…

Well acted throughout - with special kudos going to Andy ‘Gollum’ Serkis as the superbly deranged Quinn – the film ticks along in a reasonably linear fashion. The real star of this film, though, is the trench – murky, muddy and dangerous; there could be anything in there, and often is.

It’s a solid, if very linear, film but lacked any real scares and failed to engage on anything other than a superficial level.

28 Days Later
A group of animal rights activists break into a laboratory and manage to release a rage virus…

28 days later, Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a deserted hospital…

The opening scenes of Danny Boyles much anticipated zombie film reminded me a lot of Day of the Triffids with the solitary figure of Jim wandering through the deserted streets of London trying to work out what has happened.

The sense of emptiness, achieved through snatched and grainy shots of deserted landmarks, is both stunning and harrowing.

Before long, he meets the zombies. These are not your common or garden shufflers; infected by the rage virus they are both fast and angry.

Eventually a group of four survivors gather in a tower block. The Britishness of the film comes across very strongly here – rather than collecting an arsenal and going on the warpath, these survivors are reduced to trying to collect rainwater in plastic buckets and living off whatever is still edible – chocolate.

However, plots must progress and, in this case one of the survivors, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) has managed to pick up a radio broadcast from a military unit calling on survivors to head to a blockade near Manchester. This sounds like their last best hope so they pack and go …

On the surface, 28 Days Later is a new take on the zombie genre – the zombies are fast, agile and angry – but the core of the film goes right back to the roots laid down by Romero in trying to use the horror genre to make a social statement.

Unfortunately, while Dawn of the Dead was a brilliant satire on consumerism, 28 Days Later lays it all on a little bit too thick so that, instead of exploring the way people try to survive – and the extremes they are willing to go to – in a desperate situation, the film starts to become a parody of itself with the soldiers becoming increasingly unbelievable as the one-note villains.

That said, who knows how any of us would react in a situation as desperate as this.

The Eye
Mun who has been blind since the age of two, receives a cornea transplant. The operation is a success, her sight slowly starts to come back and she can finally see her surroundings.

Unfortunately, it’s not just her physical surroundings that she can see.

Yep, Mun can see dead people.

What follows is a pretty classic ghost story overlaid with a stunning visual style and an incredible score that keeps the tension mounting and dives the story confidently through the minor holes in the plot.

It’s a truly stunning film.

My Little Eye
Five people – three me and two women – sign up for a Big Brother style psychological experiment. If they spend six months together in a house in the middle of nowhere, they win $1 million.

The catch is that if one of them leaves the house they all lose. And, of course, the house is fully wired with webcams – every aspect of their lives in the house is filmed from multiple angles.

The film itself starts in the final month of the experiment, and tensions are clearly frayed when things start to get really weird.

Director, Marc Evans certainly combines form and content effectively, certainly in the first part of the film, with grainy images and green-tinted night scenes effectively giving the film a very Big Brother feel.

And, as things start to go awry, the film also makes a few points about the audience, not only of reality TV but also of this film that are worth taking away with you.

Dark Water
Things aren’t going too well for Yoshimi Matsubara, recently divorced and looking for a job and home so she can support her 5 year old chid, Ikuko. And to make matters worse, her ex husband is trying to gain custody of Ikuko, bringing up her earlier mental instability as cause for concern.

Beggars can’t be choosers and Yoshimi ends up renting an apartment in an aging, and not very well maintained, tower block.

On moving in, she notices a dripping water stain on the ceiling which she reports to the apartment supervisor – and elderly and uninterested man who promises to make a note of it.

Yoshimi also manages to get herself a job. Unfortunately this proves to be something of a double edged sword as the pressures of trying to keep everything together mean that Yoshimi rarely manages to get to the kindergarten in time, leaving Ikuko standing alone in the rain as the other children leave with their mothers.

And things can only get worse as the stain on the ceiling keeps growing, a red bag keeps reappearing and Yoshimi starts to catch glimpses of another little girl…

Dark Water is another ghost story, directed by Hideo Nakata and based on a novel by Koji Susuki – both of whom were also responsible for Ring. But this film isn’t a patch on Ring.

The location of the ghost’s physical remains are pretty obvious, to say the least and, although it tackles an interesting theme – that of parental responsibility – the story has a less coherent feel than either Ring or the other Asian films I’ve seen this week.

Whereas Ring’s Sadako was indiscriminately vengeful, Dark Water’s ghost appears to be more discriminating in that she has lain silent for two years, yet there is no real sense to Yoshimi being the target of the ghost’s attention – she is effectively being punished for failing to cope with her new single parent status.

Certainly the film has plenty of creepy images, just glanced from the corner of the eye, and some highly effective jumps. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t hang together as well as it could.

House of 1000 Corpses
House of 1000 Corpses has been described as “The Film That Some People Didn’t Want You to See.”

There is a very good reason for not seeing this film. It’s boring. In fact it goes beyond boring into a place that is so mind numbingly dull that watching paint dry is a thrill ride of epic proportions in comparison.

Rob Zombie’s tribute to 70s horror films and roadside attractions has no humour, no suspense and not a single character with which the audience can identify.

What it does have is four unbelievably unlikeable teenagers in a car who, even before the obvious clichés are established, are kidnapped by a bunch of rednecks who, because they’re rednecks, proceed to torture and kill said teenagers.

It also has an unbelievable number of gimmicky negative shots and cuts to a black and white Halloween show, ostensibly being shown at the same time as the kids go missing. It’s a move that screams “look at me, I’m a director” and jerks you right out of the film ensuring that nothing that happens on the screen will scare you, disturb you or keep you awake.