Tag Archives: bikinis

The Cave

The important thing is, I’m back in the groove. Well, and that there’s a lot of stuff coming out over the next couple of months, now that the summer dry season is over. I am disappointed to realize that no matter how good I think Flightplan is going to be, it cannot possibly stand up to the sheer artistry that is its preview. Still, though. Also coming soon, Venom and The Fog (not to be confused with The Mist, by Stephen King; I can tell, because I did for nearly half the preview) and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Not to mention the couple that I missed. My point here is to say that, although slasher movies haven’t quite resurged, the horror movie is back. Hooray!

Oh, right, also I watched one last night. The Cave is the story of… well, you see, there’s this hole in the ground, under an old Templar church, with rock formations and underground dwelling creatures, and an underground river to boot. It’s sort of… well, I suppose the best way to describe would be that it’s a cave.

And, yeah, the plot is every bit as straightforward as the title. People die in approximately the order and number that you’d expect them to, after having seen the entire cast introduction sequence. (In fact, at one point I thought the wrong person was about to die, and I was aggravated at them for ruining the formula pointlessly. But, no, they came through.) The biggest flaw[1] was that rather than let the killer monsters just be random killer monsters, they attempted to explain the cause behind the random killer monsters, but then just left the cause dangling instead of doing anything particularly interesting with it.

Well, no, the biggest flaw was PG-13 rather than R. There’s something altogether off-putting about seeing a bikini rather than boobies or hearing ‘motherf-‘ rather than motherfucker in this kind of movie, and just so that the distributors can trick themselves into believing it will sell more tickets this way. Schlock cinema, even in the midst of its resurgence, is basically dead.[2] Woe.

[1] No. Being a formulaic horror movie does not qualify as a flaw. Shut up.
[2] I blame the homogenization of the movie theater landscape, combined with how the theaters are beholden to the movie studios, in a way that they were not just twenty years ago. The death of the drive-in is not a cause, but it is certainly another effect of this same cause. As usual, anytime massive success in a sector leads in the slightest amount toward monopolization, the niche suffers. Luckily, I can still go into a Fry’s and find such brilliant titles as Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker! But without any kind of advertising or preview budget, most of these movies languish unwatched in direct-to-video limbo, simply because they are completely unheard of. So… you’re welcome? I’ll keep doing my job, anyway.

Placer Sangriento

mv5bmti5mjq1njiwnv5bml5banbnxkftztcwmtkzodeymq-_v1_A few months ago, the Alamo Drafthouse was showing Night of the Bloody Apes on the Weird Wednesday midnight show. I was all prepared to go and had talked Laylah into joining me, but she had to be on a plane the next morning and didn’t want to miss the sleep. Luckily, Netflix had it. Unluckily, she hasn’t had time to come over and watch since it arrived, what with the law school thing going on. But, in the meantime, I’ve watched the rest of the DVD, which included Feast of Flesh and a wealth of special features designed solely for me.

Lots of previews for movies far too bizarre to remember anything of. Four short subject films, including a burlesque of a stripper (eventually down to pasties and whatever passed for a thong in the 1950s) being carried around by an ape, a short of four topless chicks bathing with each other in a stream on film stock that would have embarrassed Zapruder, a female wrestling championship round announced by the most condescendingly misogynistic man I’ve heard in a really long time, and, um, a fourth one.

As for Feast of Flesh, it was your average Phantom of the Opera knockoff where the masked organ player stalks the 20-something party set on the beaches of Argentina, first hypnotizing young women in dated bikinis with his music (which, to be fair, had a haunting quality to it) and then overdosing them with heroin once they annoy him and leaving their bodies strewn on the beaches. And he might have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those pesky cops!

The plot has nothing to recommend it; I was just barely able to keep my attention on it over the three days it took me to watch, and I’ve reconstructed some of the particulars from the imdb link above. It’s not impossible that I simply made up other details. If you can watch it and get a more accurate summary of what happened, then you’re a better man than I.

The reason to watch this, aside from the outstanding extras from a bygone movie era, is to laugh at what Argentinians and Americans considered shocking in 1963, including topless dancing girls, topless ocean swimmers (in all cases, the nudity can only be verified in slow-motion or frame-by-frame), bodies with large hypodermics sticking out of the chest, and lipstick lesbian volleyball players. According to imdb, that was enough to earn an X-rating in the United States. In any case, I’ve revealed every interesting point the movie has to offer, so unless you’re actually me (I’ve found that very few people are), give this one a pass.