Hobo With A Shotgun

Jason Eisner won the SXSW competition to have his grindhouse style trailer featured in some territories as part of the GRINDHOUSE package. Now Eisner gets to expand that wonderful exploitation trailer into the film that never was.

The premise is simple enough, Rudger Hauer is the titular down and out who comes to town a rather fucked up almost post-apocalyptic Nova Scotia where he is trying to mind his own business and gather up a few bucks to buy a lawnmower and earn an honest living but this dis-honest town won't let him. From the broadcast "bumfights" in the street to the wanton prostitution and drug dealing this hobo has had enough so he buys a shotgun...

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN is a wack job of a movie and a delightful one at that. Eisner is more of the generation of crappy VHS movies than grindhouse cinema and the garish colours and pulsating synthised soundtrack testify to this as much as the inclusion of 80's action star Rudger Hauer. Shooting in his home town of Nova Scotia invokes a totally different world than the LA and Hollywood scenes we are used to seeing on the big screen and lends HOBO that home made feel like in Rodriguez EL MARIACHI. Troma style gore and the inclusion of the bizarre bounty hunter team The Plague who look like a set of Doctor Who villains take this ode to movies gone by down a route that Happy Horror Hard On never expected.








It's a fun movie if you are sick, twisted and abnormal, which we all are.

A semi-erection for HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN.

Mothers Day

The Koffin boys (terrible name) have robbed a bank (I think you never see it happen) and one of their number has been shot. Mortally wounded the boys retreat to their mothers house where they find it occupies by an up and coming young couple and their friends. The unhinged young men seize control and being in their cool and calculate mother to deal with the situation. As a remake of the Troma realeased original this home invasion thriller turns away from the comedic backwoods slasher in favour of a more modern type of horror film.

MOTHERS DAY is a movie with problems. The scenes are disjointed, the geography of the house puzzling. There's too many characters to cover and control and no real threat to feel as people just stand about waiting on action to unfold in other parts of the room. Many of the shocks are quite tame in relation to some of the envelope pushing we have seen in recent horror flicks. There are strengths, Rebecca Di Mornay's performance is great but even she is left walking up and down stairs to carry out conversations and Briana Evigan always meets Happy Horro Hard On's approval.

As a big Darren Lynn Bousman fan (I feel he did just as much to establish the formula of SAW than Leigh Whannel and James Wan did) I was disappointed that MOTHER'S DAY did not work for me. The majority of other viewers at the Frightfest screening enjoyed the movie a lot so Happy Horror Hard In will return to the movie on its he media release and see if the lay of the lam changes from that perspective.

In the mean time it is a floppy for MOTHERS DAY.

Territories (Checkpoint)

Returning to the States from a friends wedding in Canada a car full of young friends runs into trouble with the border patrol. Two unforgiving cops subject them to a rather aggressive stop and search resulting in the inevitable drug find and the shocking unprovoked shooting of one of the group. The night of misery does not end there as the two cops are revealed to be imposters and the group find themselves interned in a replica of Guantanamo Bay and it's now infamous torture techniques. it may not be the most subtle political statement made by a horror movie but it certainly serves as a sharp reminder of humanities misguided attempts to maintain the status qui by harming others.

TERRITORIES carries a French pedigree with it's director and production team as well as being a Canadian/French co-production and despite its lack of subtitles it very much belongs in the grim bleak ouvre of French horror with some nasty extreme torture sequences and an unconventional narrative approach where the third act is almost an entirely different film. The film makers also adopt an unusual approach to the deaths of the characters as one by one they are forgotten about and they slip from memory. Sometimes people are just forgotten about and that may be a tough selling point to those who do not like ambiguity in a movie.

Brutal, bleak and quite brilliant the only proviso I would ask for when Arrow Video release this in the UK is please do not change the title to CHECKPOINT I'm still annoyed at SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE!

Full on hard on for TERRITORIES.

Rubber

Yes it is a killer tire movie. Yes it is from the director of the Flat Eric/puppet Levi adverts. Yes i don't think there is anything else out there quite like this. Yes i love it and it is cemented in my top five films for the year end.

RUBBER opens with a hilarious intoductory speech from one of the principle characters, the town sheriff, who explains that what you are about to see happens for no reason and needs no reason. What follows is a meta-feature that is more than flavoured with ingredients from Spike Jonze and Michael Gondry. A car tire rises out of the dump and begins to roll through an unnamed desert. As he encounters obsticles, bottles, insects, humans, the tire becomes increasingly aggressive and develops psychic powers using them to explode heads.

The whole film is rich in silliness and cool with style. Its strength comes from taking a serious art approach rather than spoofery with slick photography and sonorous sound design which results in a peculiar and brilliant little oddity.

Full on hard on and ejaculation!

Machete Maidens Unleashed

From the guy who did NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD comes another documentry about genre and ezplottion filma this time concentrating on the Fillipino made films of Roger Corman's New World Pictures and the hundreds of woman in jepordy films that came out in the 70s.

It is a talking head documentry with Roger Corman, John Landis, Joe Dante, Pam Grier, Jack Hill and many many more ofering insights into a crazy gung-ho era of film making where tita and ass were used to sell tickeys and the Philipines were a cheap sourxe of government sponsered labour.

From the Markos regime stoppimg by at the making of Apocalypse Now and ending up with the short story of Weng Weng the Philipines "biggest" star director Mark Hately once more delves into the thick of it the only crticism that the subject matter is not as deep and varied as that of the history of Australian explotation.

Semi-erect.

I Saw The Devil

The Korean trend for dark and violent drama continues with Kim (THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD) Ji Woo bringing the OLD BOY Choi Min Sik himself into a serial killer film with a very different skew.

After the murder of the Police chief daughter her fiancé Kim Soo Yuen, a member of the Chief's protection staff, begins a hunt for her killer narrowing the suspects down to four men who have been involved in or suspected of similar crimes. When he does find his man he engages in an unusual game of cat and mouse or more like catch and release. Without the aid of some nifty GPS and bugging devices he is able to track the sick killer and stop him every time he tries to rape or kill again. Each time leaves the killer injured but let's him go persistently following and interfering with him until can take no more and has to find a way to fight back.

South Korean cinema is a hotbed of talent at the moment and for those seeking dark and intelligent horror and drama this is the place to go. I SAW THE THE DEVIL is violent and brutal which cause it some censorship problems in it's homeland but director Kim Ji Woo uses violence to equally express the ultimate frustration of seeking vengeance against those who have wronged as well as using it as a tool to keep the audience on edge and squirming in their seats. Also present is that dark stream of humour that has been observed in recent South Korean films such as THE HOST or MOTHER. It is not used to spoof or undermine the plot and the darkness at the heart of the movie but it does give I SAW THE DEVIL a disturbing grounding in reality

Glorious cinematography, pitch perfect performances and a smart script mean that I SAW THE DEVIL is a real contender for film of the year and we're only at February.

A full on errection and ejaculation for I SAW THE DEVIL.

Little Deaths

Brit horror (Grit horror?) anthology Little Deaths plays with the subject of sex and sexual practices in three short form narratives from three independant UK film makers.

Conceived by writer/directors Sean (LIE STILL) Hogan, Andrew (I, ZOMBIE) Parkinson and Simon (RED, WHITE AND BLUE) Rumley over a pint or two after knowing each other from the film festival circuit and produced on a low budget the trio of stories, HOUSE & HOME, MUTANT TOOL and BITCH take three different slants on horror and push at boundaries that need to be pushed at. Within the first story we are treated to a woman being jissed on (ejaculated on for those outside the UK), pissed on and nipples beimg severed. following that we get a giant spunk dribbling cock and not to be out down the third tale had a man wearing a dog mask being banged up the arse (ass) by his girlfriemd wearing a strap on. Your usual night out to the pictutres this ain't.

Equal parts intelligent dark drama (Rumley), exploitative Henenlotter (Parkinson) and torture porny (Hogan) LITTLE DEATHS is a slap to the face for the viewer and the best use of the anthology format since THE SIGNAL.

Now i am aware that the scoring system for this blog os a little ironic considering the amount of cock on show in this film but still: a full on hard on.