Mother Superior Jumped the Gun

Film: Ms .45
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I like a good exploitation film, which is why I tend to be at least mildly fascinated by the work of Abel Ferrara. Ferrara seems like a director who has genuine talent behind the camera, but has B-movie sensibilities. Moives like The Driller Killer are a good example of this. It seems strange to say this, but Ms .45 might actually be even more of an exploitation film. There’s not a great deal going on here beyond finding an excuse for murder. I wouldn’t normally call this a horror movie, but it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, so here we are.

Because there’s not a great deal of plot here, I’m going to keep it pretty simple. Thana (Zoë Lund acting under the name Zoë Tamerlis) is a mute seamstress working the Garment District in New York. One day, walking home from work, she is sexually assaulted in an alley. When she gets home, her apartment is invaded by a burglar who also sexually assaults her. During this attack, she grabs a heavy glass object off her table and smacks the guy across the temple, then beats him to death with an iron and drags him into her bathtub. The next day at work, her boss Albert (Albert Sinkys) rips the blouse off a mannequin, which sends Thana into a sort of fugue state.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Addiction

Film: The Addiction
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The Addiction is a film that I had heard of and been interested in for a number of reasons. Abel Ferrara is an interesting director, for starters, and when he delves into horror, the results are worth watching. I also like it when there is a very different take on a classic monster or myth. The Addiction is a vampire story, and interesting not because of that, but because it addresses the idea of vampirism as one of a sort of drug addiction.

Admittedly, that’s a natural place to go, and that in and of itself isn’t entirely unique. The idea that vampires are addicted to blood is, after all, a very obvious place to take the vampire story. The difference here is that our main character, Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), is a doctoral candidate in philosophy. So, while we’ve seen vampires dealing with concepts of their lives being controlled in some way by addiction, but we have rarely had a protagonist who has the philosophical chops to really address the idea in anything more than a visceral and basic way.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Driller Killer

Film: The Driller Killer
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine

Every now and then, you find a movie that feels like it comes with its own oil slick. The Driller Killer is that kind of a movie. I’m not going to say this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it is very much a true thing. This might be the grimiest movie I have ever seen, and that includes the lesbian shower sequence. The Driller Killer looks and sounds like it’s straight off the grindhouse circuit; I’m actually a little surprised there weren’t a couple of “scene missing” interstitials.

The Driller Killer is about an artist named Reno (played by the film’s director, Abel Ferrara under the pseudonym of Jimmy Laine). Reno is working on a new major piece, but he and his two roommates, flight attendant Carol (Carolyn Marz) and her drug addict lover Pamela (Baybi Day) are having trouble making the rent and paying their bills. Reno asks for $500 to cover the rent from his art dealer, who reminds him of all of the money he has already borrowed from him. However, the art dealer, Dalton (Harry Schultz II), promises that if the piece Reno is working on is good, he will buy it for the appropriate amount at the end of the week.

Ten Days of Terror!: Body Snatchers

Films: Body Snatchers
Format: DVD from Cordova District Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

One of the first movies that I can think of that scared the hell out of me was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the first one, which I saw when I was a kid. It’s a great set up for a film, and one that is so effective at what it does that the idea of “pod people” has entered cultural consciousness. Even if you’ve never seen any version of this story, you probably know what a pod person is. It’s one of the most adapted non-Shakespeare stories around in the sense that it has been done as a direct version of the book four times. Body Snatchers is the third version of the story, and while it doesn’t have the power or impact of the original or the first remake, it’s better than you might guess and far better than its obscurity would indicate.

One of the main selling points of the book by Jack Finney is that the base story and the concept of pod people is endlessly adaptable. In the 1950s, the original version of the story was accused of being both pro-communist and pro-McCarthyism. The 1970s version played in a similar sandbox, working at least in part as Cold War allegory. This third version in the post-Reagan years, seems to attack military culture in a world were enemies were suddenly fewer and further between.

...And He Lives in Queens

Film: King of New York
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Consider Christopher Walken for just a moment. When did he become extreme version of himself, the sort of Christopher Walken parody that he frequently is these days? At what point in his career did he go from being a well-respected, excellent actor into a guy who can still pull off a great performance but is just as apt to turn into caricature? I don’t know. What I do know is that it happened at some point following King of New York, which is much more in line with traditional Walken.

King of New York is a deceptively simple film, one that draws immediate comparisons to stories like that of Robin Hood. Frank White (Walken) is a career criminal just released from prison. As he is getting out, his second in command, Jimmy Jump (Laurence Fishburne) is both killing off the competition and stealing their cocaine as a sort of welcome back present for Frank. Frank continues in the same line, offering deals to other criminals to join his new enterprise, and when they refuse, he wipes them out. Frank also picks up with his girlfriend/lawyer Jennifer (Janet Julian), creating a new criminal empire comprising the entire drug trade in New York.