Pulpmovies Reviews

Regardless of the music we listen to when we’re young, the lifestyle we affect or the subculture we identify with, most of us eventually grow up, get a sensible haircut and haul ourselves on to the 9 to 5 treadmill. But what if you don’t? What if you stay uncompromisingly true to your youthful values?

Meet Bill.

Bill (Bill Zebub) is metal all the way through. He has the attitude, the look, the girl. He has no job, no car and no money. And this inability to secure any sort of income is really beginning to grate on his girlfriend, Elaine (Emily Thomas). Although Elaine wants more than Bill is able to offer, he is available and not going anywhere so Elaine satisfies herself with the apparently safer option of lusting after Bills friend, Rich (Tom Goodwin) instead of risking making any real changes to her life.

And that pretty much sums the film up. Writer/director Bill Zebub doesn’t give us a huge amount of plot with Metalheads, preferring instead to allow us to simply spend time with the three main characters as they drift, aimlessly through their lives. What the film does manage to do very successfully, however, is bring these characters to life. It achieves this with both a very well observed script that accurately captures the cod-philosophical self-justifications of this collection of no-hopers and with a solid set of performances that manage to parody the the characters without descending into over-the-top silliness.

The film is more than a collection of scenes, however, and as the characters come to life, conflicts – both real and imagined – emerge and, while often trivial, these are enough to drive things forward and ensure that everything hangs together.

All of this makes for a film that is consistently funny. Metalheads is packed with jokes. And gratuitous nudity. And jokes about gratuitous nudity, many of which are laugh out loud funny. It’s a film that know what it wants to achieve and one approaches its subject matter with a real sense of fun. Not only you do get a real sense that the people behind it had a lot of fun making this film, but this sense of fun really does make it on to the screen.

Metalheads tries to do two things at once by affectionately mocking both the metalhead culture and the stereotypes that surround it. Although not all of the scenes work – and there is one scene near the end of the film that is jarringly unpleasant – the film as a whole does achieve its aims and manages to be very funny to boot. It also includes the funniest portrayal of drug-induced paranoia I have seen in a long time.

It can always be a dangerous move for a filmmaker to include familiar characters in their movie. By doing so, you immediately set audience expectations as to how the characters will behave and, if they defy those expectations without sufficient explanation, events will ring less true than they should.

In the case of Blood Scarab, writer/director Donald F. Glut unites Countess Elizabeth Bathory – who was notorious for bathing in the blood of virgins to retain her youth – and Count Dracula. Also in the mix are Dracula’s assistant, Renfield and a 3000 year old Mummy with a habit of reanimating itself and wandering off.

Bathory (Monique Parent) has left Transylvania and arrived at the modern day Los Angeles castle of Count Dracula (Tony Clay), her vampire husband, with the intention of taking control of the property.

Dracula, meanwhile, is about to discover that his lechery will finally be his undoing. While watching a pair of potential victims – Tanya (Cindy Pucci) and Mina (Natasha Diakova) - he loses all track of time and fails to notice the lateness (earliness) of the hour until he realises that the sun is about to rise. Renfield (Del Howison) fails to get his master home in time and Dracula comes to the inevitable fiery end.

The Countess Bathory shares with her former husband an inability to tear herself away from the sight of nubile flesh and, fearing an end similar to that of Dracula, instructs Renfield to find a way for her to survive in the daylight. Although fearful of his life at the hands of a mistress that so obviously despises him, Renfield begins to research the problem. Conveniently enough, his investigations lead him to the local history museum and our wandering Mummy which he and the Countess need to locate in order to put Bathory’s wishes into effect…

I have to admit that I found Blood Scarab to be a bit of a mixed bag. There are certainly some good ideas in here and, if you enjoy seeing your gothic horror wrapped up in plenty of female flesh, there is plenty here to enjoy. The vampires are effectively realised – more so with the Countess than with Dracula – and the effects are never less than competent. Indeed, there were a couple of cases where I was very impressed with the effects achieved – especially when you take the size of the budget into account - and the Mummy itself was superbly brought to life.

It was a bit jarring, however, to hear both Dracula and Bathory talking – and often behaving – like modern day Californians. This probably wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, however, if I’d been able to fully buy into the character of Renfield.

Although Del Howison put in a pretty good performance, his character was undermined by a combination of the plot requirements imposed by the script and my own expectation of how any character called Renfield should behave. In short, I tend to assume that any character with this name is going to treat us to a display of bug-eating insanity and, although the film acknowledges this, the plot also needs him to remain lucid enough to drive the story forward. This left the film with a character that was a little too contradictory for me to really buy into. As a result, I was unable to suspend my disbelief as far as I really needed to.

On a slightly more minor point, you really do need to do more with a character called Mina when you make a film with Dracula in it.

However, to focus on these gripes is to miss the point of the film which is to reveal – both physically and figuratively – the lesbian depravity of the vampire Countess. To this end, Blood Scarab really is Monique Parent’s film and she clearly had a lot of fun bringing the Satanically sexy Elizabeth Bathory to the screen. She is both a stunning and a stunningly beautiful actress who delivers a great performance that brings both energy and eroticism to the events.

Ultimately, Blood Scarab is an homage to the sort of films that Hammer started making in the early 1970s and how you respond to it will depend on how you felt about these films the first time around. If you watched the likes of The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil and desperately wanted to see what was happening just outside of the frame, then this really is the film for you.

Lust for Vengeance opens with a gloved hand holding a small board with a list of women’s names on it. One of the names is already crossed out and, once we are into the film proper, it’s no surprise that a murder has already happened.

We’re then introduced to the characters – four women, all linked through friendship, each of whom has a dark secret and all of whom are being stalked (one by one) by our mystery killer. And I really couldn’t bring myself to care.

The cast aren’t bad and, apart from a couple of exceptions, put in reasonably solid performances but they are badly let down by a script that really doesn’t hang together.

The film plays out as a series of unrelated vignettes. In each case we are introduced to the next victim, who has a problem (usually drugs), has sex – explicitly - and is then murdered – remarkably bloodlessly.

Writer/director, Sean Weathers is clearly much more interested in the sex than the violence in this film but – given that this is supposed to be a slasher film - the fact that the slasher part of the film is such an afterthought really does let the film down.

This, combined with the jumpy narrative flow, left the film with no tension, no shocks and a painfully obvious final reveal.

Taking its inspiration from Animal Farm, Hookers in Revolt is the story of a group of street prostitutes who finally decide that they’ve had enough mistreatment at the hands of their pimps. Adopting the slogan “all women are equal to men,” they band together, pool their resources and start to look out for each other.

Success, however, breeds corruption and as the manipulative Cleopatra (Olivia Lopez) takes control of the collective, the rest of the prostitutes find that they were no better off than before. Indeed, for many of them, things take a distinct turn for the worse.

Hookers in Revolt is certainly an ambitious film, and writer/director Sean Weathers does have a lot to say. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite come together and I think that this is largely down to the fact that more time has been spent developing the films message and its themes than has been spent developing the characters and the plot.

The plot has a very jumpy feel. Scene follows scene and stuff happens, but there is no real sense of cohesion to hold it all together. No plot is perfect, of course, and I may have been willing to overlook the weaknesses here if there had been a strong central character to hold my interest. Unfortunately, the characters tended to feel more like stereotypes than people making it very difficult to care about any of them.

There is a lot in here and the film, quite bravely, aims to be both an intelligent social satire and an out and out exploitation romp. However, by trying to do so much, the film ends up falling short on both counts.

There are a fair few fun moments in here, as well as plenty of skin and no shortage of soft-core sex scenes. Unfortunately, the parts are better than the whole which doesn’t quite live up to its title.

Set in a brothel and centring on one of the establishments inmates, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan is a film unafraid to keep its exploitation elements at the forefront of the plot. But with its lavish sets and sumptuous cinematography, director Yuen Chor manages to make the film much more than a simple sleaze-fest and deliver a rather good revenge flick packed with overt, and very effective, eroticism.

The film starts with Ainu (Lily Ho), one of many teenagers kidnapped and sold to the brothel in question. Because of her stunning looks and feisty personality, she is an immediate draw for the brothel’s very wealthy – and very well connected – clients. She also attracts the lustful attention of the brothel’s owner, Madam Chun (Betty Pei Ti).

Initially Ainu resists but, following a failed escape attempt, her spirit finally appears to be broken and she begins to settle in to the life of the brothel. In doing so, she starts to take advantage of Madam Chun’s patronage which includes learning her martial arts skills.

The relationship between Ainu and Madam Chun is the core of this film and it is very well handled. Both Lily Ho and Betty Pei Ti put in sterling performances and really do bring their characters to life as the plot begins to twist.

Unfortunately, the strength of the two leads’ performances also highlights one of the weaknesses of the film, which is that the rest of the cast are a little one-dimensional. The script focuses so heavily on the central relationship that, although the supporting actors do put in perfectly competent performances, they aren’t given a great deal to work with. The result is that these characters often feel motivated by no more than a need to progress the plot.

This is a Shaw Brothers film and, even though the action sequences are not the main focus of the film, they are central and consistently spectacular. As with the rest of the film, the focus is very much on the two women and the way in which their fighting style reflects their relationship. And given that neither of the women is a martial artist, they both put in very creditable performances here indeed.

There is much to like about this film and it does work on many levels – as a martial arts action film, as an exploitation film with something to say about exploitation and as tragedy about love and vengeance. Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan also has a depth that is often missing from films of this genre, but it really could have done with an extra half hour to more fully develop both the plot and some of the supporting characters.