Ruptured Review: Black Past

Country of origin- West Germany    
Year of release- 1989 
Director-  Olaf Ittenbach
Stars- Olaf Ittenbach, Andrea Arbter, André Stryi  


 

The film begins with a pre-credit sequence set in a sleepy village in 1978. We then see a man who looks very ill, who begins to have horrible visions of him killing a little girl with a meat clever. The next thing we see is him picking up the worlds biggest meat clever, and walking out of his front door to where his young daughter is feeding the dog. You can pretty much guess what happens next.

 

After the credits roll and we are introduced to are main character Thommy who is played the director Mr Lettenbach himself. Thommy and his family have just moved into a new house, which is in fact the same house that the child killer from earlier lived in. As we begin to follow Thommy in his day-to-day life we find out pretty quickly he is a bit of an outcast and a bit of a waster. This is a fairly common character point for the parts Lettenbach plays in his early films. Eventually Thommy is sent into the attic of the house to fetch some things, but while he is up there he finds a wooden box that has been chained shut. He manages to open it and finds a diary and an old mirror, both of which used to belong to the child killer form earlier who we find not only killed his daughter, but his whole family. Thommy decides to hang the mirror on his bedroom wall, because I am sure we would all do that if we found a murders mirror. But Thommy begins to wish he had never even opened the box in the attic, as his life starts to become a living nightmare filled with horrific visions of torture and murder. And as Thommy descends deeper into his own personal hell, his visions start to become reality.      

This is film is the directorial debut of Lettenbach, and in my opinion one of his best along side The Burning Moon, and Premutos both of which I love. Although this film is a little slow to get going and at times the pacing is a bit off, it is still very entertaining. As with all of Lettenbach’s films this one delivers on the gore and then some. The last 20 minutes of this film was almost nothing but gore, and I’m not talking about your nice clean modern gore, no no no, this is grimy shot on video gore that looks like they just ripped it out of a cow. Throughout the film I was able to see some of the director’s influences, mainly The Evil Dead, Hellraiser and Demons. I personally really enjoyed this film, and would recommend it to gorehounds like myself, although the extreme gore may not sit well with some people. I am going to give this one a 8/10, it’s a fantastic watch.          

 

                 Its such a good watch she cant keep hers eyes off it. 

  

                      

Ruptured Review: Hotel Inferno

Country of origin- USA/Italy   
Year of release- 2013 
Director-  Giulio De Santi
Stars- Rayner Bourton, Jessica Carroll, Michael Howe


 

 

This film has the unique selling point of being ‘the first splatter movie in first person view’ which is honestly why I wanted to see the film. Never have I seen this type of cinematography used so well, and in such a fun way. I could recommend the film based on that aspect, and that aspect alone, but this film has much more to offer.

 

The film begins with are main character Frank Zimosa being driven to a hotel, where he is due to carry out a ‘job’ for his employer. As Frank arrives at the hotel he puts on a pair of glasses that have some kind of built in computer that allows him to talk to his employer, and allows his employer to see things as Frank sees them. After Frank puts the glasses on he gets a call from his employer Mr Jorge Mistandria. As Jorge begins to outline the details of Frank’s mission, we establish that Frank is a contract killer, who has spent some time as a solider and a mercenary and is being highly paid for this particular mission.

 

Frank finds out he must kill a couple staying at the hotel, who are apparently responsible for over 150 murders. But Frank is told he must kill them in a very specific way. He has to smash open their skulls, remove their brains and then rip out their guts. Frank is naturally curious as to why he has to kill them like this, but he seems to being paid enough not to question much. Eventually Frank sneaks into the couples room and finds much more then he bargained for. And as the job gets ever more out of hand Frank finds himself trapped in a living hell, filled with bloated and decaying killers baying for his blood.

 

To say I had an ass ton of fun with this one is a major understatement. This film promised a tsunami of blood, guts, gore and goo, and it definitely delivered! The effects are a brilliant mix of practical splatter and digital concealment. The first person view throughout the film made me feel really engendered with the carnage that was happening on screen, and made for some very tense moments. I would say the only thing that wasn’t particularly that good was a mixture of the voice acting, which was often unconvincing, and the pacing, which was usually good but at a couple of points slowed to a crawl. But overall this film was incredibly entertaining and I would highly recommend it, this one gets 7.5/10 from me, go and check it out.   

 

                       

Buy the film here-   http://www.necrostorm.com/movies/HotelInferno/HotelInferno.html                          

                        

  

Ruptured Review: Savage Vengeance

                                 

Country of origin- USA  
Year of release- 1993 
Director- Donald Farmer
Stars- Camille Keaton, James Cochran, Bill Gatson

The film opens with are main character Jennifer driving through a deserted country road. She eventually parks at the edge of some woodland, she gets out and starts walking though the woods looking for a good place to sit down and read. At this point a second car pulls up at the edge of the woodland, but this time four weird looking guys get out. I say weird looking because they each look like they turned up to do something different. One looks like he is off to a Slayer concert, while another looks like he is here to cut the grass. Clearly the costume design in this film wasn’t really considered all that much. As the four guys begin walking though the woods, they see Jennifer relaxing. They then ambush her and after a short struggle Jenifer is forced to the ground where the four men begin taking turns in raping her. Now, in almost any other film this would be a harrowing and unpleasant scene, but because this film is made with all the subtly of a kneecapping, it comes across as silly. The fact the rapists don’t remove their trousers, or even undo their fly’s suggests they are new to the whole raping people thing. The whole scene was as ineptly made as the ludicrous rape scene in the famously terrible Cannibal Terror.  

After this gruellingly long scene, the film jumps five years into the future. And we see a night club with a woman sitting at the bar. At this point a creepy guy who looks like a homeless Kenny Everett slides up to her and asks her to come back to his place, which I can only assume is a cardboard box. She obviously says no, and while walking out of the club she meets the creepy guy again, only this time he has a knife. This is the queue for some very low budget blood and gore. 

We then see Jennifer, who is now nearly 30, and studying at college. It is then established through a crap montage that since she was raped she tracked down and killed the men who abused her. This montage is very similar to the revenge montage in the original I Spit on Your Grave trailer, and to be honest that’s not the only thing that is similar. This whole film is littered with I Spit on Your Grave references, if you took a drink every time you spotted one; you would be dead before you were half way through.

Jennifer later convinces one of her friends (Sam) to go on a short trip out to a cabin in the woods. Have these people not seen The Evil Dead?! During the drive down to the cabin Jennifer and Sam stop for petrol, and are greeted at the pumps by Dwayne, who looks like a perverted Elvis. Dwayne then proceeds to be creepy, and Sam gives him the address of the cabin, I never said Sam was the bright one. After Jennifer and Sam arrive at the cabin, Sam decides to start wandering around the woods by herself at night…once again I never said Sam was the bright one. Sam eventually stumbles upon a cabin that belongs to Dwayne, and of course, he invites her in, and with the help of previously mentioned homeless Kenny Everett, horribly abuses her. The next morning Jennifer starts looking for her friend, but finds far more than she bargained for, in the form of Dwayne.  

I actually went into this film with high hopes. Its shot-on-video which I usually enjoy, it’s got a gory chainsaw kill in it, which I always enjoy. But the thing that really let this film down was…just about everything really. The soundtrack was migraine inducing, the characters were awful, 80% of what happened on screen made no sense, and to top it all off the film is only 65 minutes long, and 20 minutes of that is just rape! I am reluctant to call this a ‘rape revenge’ film because that means lumping it in with classics like the film this is trying to rip off, which is of course I Spit on Your Grave. Also for a ‘rape revenge’ film this doesn’t seem to have much revenge, just a lot rape. I don’t recommend this one, it gets 2/10 from me, very dull indeed.                                                                   

                         

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.