Ruptured Book Review: VHS Ate My Brain by Andrew Hawnt

I don’t usually review books, but I felt an irresistible desire to review this one. VHS Ate My Brain is a fascinating and sincere account of what it’s like being a VHS collector in an age of Blu-Ray, DVD and criticism from people who think you’re a bit odd. The book explores the hobby in great detail, and has an undeniable charm and humour that kept me grinning like an idiot throughout. The book also gives a very personal, and in my case very relatable account of staying up late into the night, exposing ones still developing mind to an endless stream of horror and Sci-Fi goodness. The book also delivers a short breakdown, and review of each of the 72 Video Nasties, which were of course synonymous with the VHS age in the UK.

 
Whether you’re a VHS collector, or like me, just somebody who has a passion for weird and wonderful cinema, I highly recommend this book. Andrew Hawnt has done a tremendous job, and I applaud him for it. 

  
The authors site- http://www.andrewhawnt.blogspot.co.uk/

Ruptured Review: Frankenstein meets the Space Monster (aka Duel of the Space Monsters)

Country of origin- USA  
Year of release- 1965 
Director-  Robert Gaffney  
Stars- Marilyn Hanold, James Karen, Lou Cutell


 

So, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, or as it should more accurately be called, stock footage: the movie. After a rather peculiar opening credit sequence, we see an alien space craft hovering outside the earth’s atmosphere. In the control room of the ship we meet are villains, Princess Marcuzan and the pasty faced pointy eared Doctor Nadir. It seems they have been monitoring earth for some time, and are getting ready to enact some kind of sinister plan. Suddenly a blip on the alien radar makes them think that we humans have fired a missile at them, when in fact it is a NASA rocket. The Princess and Doctor Nadir decide to blow it out of the sky, and then do so, using stock footage of course.

The film then cuts to the most overcrowded car I have ever seen. Sitting in the back is; a General, two NASA scientists and a blank faced astronaut called Frank. This scene looks ridicules, especially as it looks like the General is sitting in the lap of one of the scientists, who looks very un-happy about the whole thing. We then get a real time sequence in which we see them driving into the NASA headquarters and parking. Why did we need to see this in real time? Well let me tell. This film is 50 minutes stretched to nearly 80 by extended use of real time driving put to music, and grainy stock footage that the film will cut to at random points for apparently no reason. This stretched out run time is almost painful to watch. When the group eventually get into the NASA headquarters they go to the world’s smallest press conference. It is in fact so small that it looks like they are announcing a new kind of Sellotape, instead of what they are actually announcing which is a manned mission to Mars. I am pretty sure more than four journalists would turn up for that, but apparently no. During the press conference Frank has some kind of wired seizure that leaves a huge creepy smile frozen on his face. We then discover that Frank is in fact a cyborg, who was created especially for this very dangerous mission. At least that explains the terrible acting.  

We then cut to stock footage of a NASA rocket getting ready to take off. But we all know how this launch will go because we watched the Aliens blow it apart 20 minutes ago. So of cause the rocket is destroyed but Frank manages to bail out just in time, and lands safely, with the help of some stock footage. But the aliens are not happy about leaving survivors, so they land and begin to hunt down Frank, who during a fight with one of the alien soldiers is badly burned and driven into a crazed rampage due to damage to his cyborg brain. This means he then begins to wander around killing people for no reason. It is soon after this that we find out what the aliens evil plan is. They want to kidnap are earth women and bring them back for ‘breeding’, I can’t take the unoriginality, it’s too much!  

We then get a montage of some of the most hilarious kidnappings I have ever seen, most of the women don’t even bother to resist, they just have zero shits to give. As the women are brought back onto the alien ship (which by the way is far too small for all these people) we are introduced to the ‘Space Monster’ of the title. He is called Mull, and looks a bit like the inbred nephew of the creature from The Robot Monster.

 

 From here on in the film spirals around in a haze of stock footage and B-movie tropes that eventually leads to the inevitable battle between Frank and Mull. This battle however is rubbish; it is over in just a few seconds and has one of the most anti-climactic endings of all time. This film didn’t finish, it just gave up the will to live.

For all this films MANY problems I did find myself to be entertained throughout some of the runtime, although nearly all of this came from unintentionally funny things. But the big problem for this film is that it doesn’t deliver on what the title promises, in fact we barely even see ‘the Space Monster’ and Frankenstein as you or I would know him isn’t in it. Instead Frank assumes the roll of the Frankenstein’s monster character, and is even referred to in this way at one point in the film. At the end of the day this film has nothing new to offer, but it has plenty of unintentional humour and is a decent enough watch if you skip through the stock footage and long winded driving scenes. This one gets a 4.5/10 from me; it is perhaps worth a watch.                                                     

 

                        

Ruptured Review: Satan's Slave

Country of origin- UK 
Year of release- 1976 
Director-  Norman J. Warren 
Stars- Michael Gough, Martin Potter, Candace Glendenning

 

After a pretty trippy opening credit sequence, the film cuts to a satanic ritual in the woods. We get everything you could expect to see in a satanic ritual; hooded figures with burning torches, a man in cheap goat mask and of course, a naked woman who is about to become the host to some kind of demonic evil. After this little scene the film abruptly cuts to a woman having a glass of wine with one of the creepiest looking guys I have ever seen. His facial expression is somewhere between, rape and drowning puppies. The woman he is with is apparently an American, but I honestly wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. The Director obviously said to her ‘ok, you’re an American, but don’t bother doing ANY kind of accent because nobody gives a shit!’. Eventually the two of them end up in bed, and this is where I can shout ‘told you so!’ because suddenly the creepy guy attempts to violently rape her. But after ripping her clothes off, he basically just gives up and starts laughing like a maniac. Now I don’t know about you, but if somebody had just tried to rape me, and was now laughing manically about it, I would run out of their like Speedy Gonzales with mustard up his ass! But apparently this  woman doesn’t do that, she instead walks calmly towards the front door as if nothing had happened. As she opens the door to leave, the creepy guy somehow crushes her head in the door, then proceeds to repeatedly stab her corpse. I am sure there was a complex life lesion in all of that, but frankly I just don’t give a shit.

 

After this, the film makes another abrupt cut and we now see are main character who is a young woman called Catharine. She is getting ready to visit her long lost uncle Alexander; she is going to be travelling with her parents. But things start to become weird on the drive down there, when her dad suddenly gets a sharp pain in his head, for no apparent reason. He then crashes the car into a tree outside Alexander’s massive house. When Catharine wakes up from the accident she is still in the car with her parents, but we see that her mother is badly injured and her dad decides to stay with his wife while Catharine go’s for help. But suddenly as Catharine is running to the house for help, her parents car explodes, now I have to admit, I didn’t see that coming. Catharine’s reaction to this is to almost immediately faint. She wakes up in Alexander’s house, it turns out he is a Doctor and he lives with the creepy guy we met earlier and his ‘secretary’ who we quickly establish is batshit crazy.

Catharine proceeds to spend the next few days being remarkably unaffected by her parents horrible death. It seems her grief is manifesting itself in the form of boredom, it is around this point that she begins to have visions. While out walking with Steven (aka the creepy guy) she has a vision of a medieval woman being branded with a cross and whipped. This whole scene came off less like a horrifying vision, and more like the beginning of some dodgy porn. Pretty soon Catharine wants to go home, but Alexander isn’t having any of that, because he has something devious planes for her.

 Before watching this film I thought it was going to be a basic cheapo Hammer rip-off. And, in a lot of ways it was. But there were strange moments when it felt more like an Italian film. Certain moments in the film felt so out of place, especially the scene where for pretty much no reason we get a satanic lesbian sword fetish ritual. I didn’t even know that was a thing! There was also a pretty gory moment that looked like it just came from a Lucio Fulci film. Moments like these were in fact the best thing about the film, everything else was just formulaic and dull. Something that really let this film down was the acting, at times I couldn’t distinguish between the cast on the screen and the logs in the fireplace. Overall it’s nothing special, so I am going to give this one 3.5/10. Also that tag-line has nothing to do with the film. 

                         

Ruptured Review: The Madmen of Mandoras

Country of origin- U.S.A 
Year of release- 1963 
Director-  David Bradley
Stars-  Walter Stocker, Audrey Caire, Carlos Rivas

The opening scene of this film actually made me pretty angry; it appeared to be real stock footage of an elephant who had been dosed with nerve gas. As the elephant dropped to the ground and died I was about to turn off the film and walk the fuck away because the only thing I can not watch in a film is animal cruelty. But against my better judgment I decided to continue to watch. After the elephant footage finishes we can see it was being played to a small group of military advisers, by a man who we find out is called Professor Coleman. The Professor was teaching them about the dangers of a deadly nerve gas he has created, we then find out he also created a antidote to this gas. The antidote is called ‘Formula D’ (feel free to insert a dick joke here). After this meeting we are introduced to are hero ‘Phil’ who I expected to be really annoying as most film hero’s of this time were. But I was surprised by just how dull and inoffensive he was.

After everybody from the meeting has left the Professor gets a phone call that says his daughter ‘Susan’ has been kidnapped, and that he needs to get to her apartment. The Professor then rushes there, only to find her apartment a wreck and her ‘David’ husband beaten and bruised. David tells the Professor that some armed men took Susan away and then knocked him out. After hearing this, the Professor and David decide to seek help from the police, but as soon as they walk out of the apartment building they too are kidnapped. If the kidnappers wanted to take all of them, they could have just done it in a much easier way, but no they have to all mysterious!

The film then cuts to Phil arriving home to his wife who is also dull and inoffensive, its nice to see such a well matched couple. A little later they leave the house to go out for the afternoon, only to find a shifty looking man waiting for them.  He tells Phil that he needs to warn the Professor, Phil basically tells him to go away and the man pulls a gun. He then makes them get in their car and start driving. During the drive he tells them about a plan concocted by a secret group from the fictional country of ‘Mandoras’ to kidnap Professor Coleman. But just as he is about to tell more about the plan, he is shot by the passenger of sinister looking black car. The killer used possible the worst silencer on his gun ever, his attempts to be stealthy sounded more like somebody throwing a toolbox down a staircase. Phil pulls the car over in an attempt to save the mysterious man, who promptly dies. Now faced with the problem of what to do with the corpse, Phil comes up with a brilliant plan, he leaves the body in a phone box! Of all the possible places to leave a body he chose to just lean him up against the inside of a phone box like a cardboard cut out. I never said Phil was smart.

Eventually Phil and his wife decide to travel to Mandoras themselves to uncover the mystery. What they actually find is a town full of sinister looking people who act like they just got off the set of the Spanish version of the Wicker Man. They eventually find out that Mandoras is under the control of a secret Nazi cult, and they are the ones who have kidnapped Professor Coleman. It is around this point that the plot starts to wander and gets pretty confusing. But we very quickly forget that the plot no longer makes any sense as we discover that the Nazi cult managed to save Hitler! Just not all of him.

 

 

I went into this with low expectations and I was pretty surprised by much fun this film was. It dose suffer very badly from a plot that makes little to no sense throughout most of the film, and I found this to be pretty distracting at times. It also has some pretty hopeless acting and some strange dialogue. But if you look past that it’s a very enjoyable film about Nazi’s keeping Hitler’s head in a jar, and we just don’t see enough of those sort of films anymore. I am going to give this film 5/10, it is well worth a watch just to see Hitler’s face melt. And yes, that happens.