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366 UNDERGROUND: THE GRUESOME DEATH OF TOMMY PISTOL (2011)

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366 Underground is an occasional feature that looks at the weird world of contemporary low- and micro-budget cinema, the underbelly of independent film.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Aramis Sartorio, , Vincent Cusimano, Kimberly Kane, Camilla Lim, Karen Sartorio, Gia Paloma

PLOT:  Struggling actor Tommy Pistol isn’t much of a success, but he doesn’t let that hinder

Still from The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol

his dream of becoming a star, even when his wife and child leave him.  Left alone with hot dogs, porn and a penis pump, Tommy dreams his dreams of success and stardom, but even in dreams, things don’t turn out as he hopes.  And his reality is just about to get even worse…

COMMENTS:  It’s not inaccurate to call TGDOTP a Troma-esque grossout horror-comedy anthology, but that description leaves out quite a lot. It’s also a cautionary tale about obsession, fame and filmmaking in Los Angeles with autobiographical elements.

Unfolding as a series of dreams, the first, “Snuff Said,” has a young Pistol fresh off the train, answering an ad on a web site to act in a movie.  It turns out to be a snuff film, but Pistol, not being the sharpest tool in the box (so to speak), thinks that it’s just extremely realistic special effects.

The second dream, “10 Minutes of Fame”, sees Pistol sneaking onto a location set of a major film and gradually worming his way to become the assistant of the star—Arnold Schwartzenegger!  He accidently kills Arnie and takes his skin, which gives him the ass-kicking skills to take out the rest of the crew.

In the last dream, “Attack of the Staph Spider”, Tommy is a porn director whose lead actress is bitten by a radioactive spider in the alley just prior to the shoot.  Things do not turn out like “Spiderman,” unfortunately—the actress develops boils and starts leaking addictive fluids, which end up infecting the crew.  Meanwhile, Tommy’s biggest problem is getting the makeup person to make her presentable so the shoot can go on.

The humor is pitch-black; as in most of the Troma-esque lot, the grossness factor is pushed pretty much past the hilt, then doubled.  All of the characters in the dreams are, at their best, amoral to immoral; but in a satire about fame and filmmaking, that’s probably an accurate portrayal.  It also helps that the movie’s pretty damn funny.

What raises TGDOTP a notch above most of its cousins is that the grossness isn’t merely for the sake of grossness—there’s actually some substance behind it.  “Tommy Pistol” is actually Sartorio’s nom de porn when he was acting in adult films such as Repenetrator, The XXXorcist and Neu Wave Hookers.  Deciding to branch out, he made “Staph Spider” as a short, then pursued other opportunities as a struggling actor in Hollywood.  Although his wife did not leave him, many other elements in the film—being late for auditions, getting fired from ‘real’ jobs and dodging creditors—Sartorio probably knows all too well, as well as the other side of Hollywood: sketchy characters willing to do anything to anyone; narcissistic actors; and the desperation and self-delusion of everyone in town, especially those attempting to find their big break.  It may be exaggerated, but there’s a definite sense that there’s some personal experience involved.  The best example is a scene in the first dream, which mocks the aside to camera in JCVD, but also functions in the very same fashion.  And surprisingly, the movie ends in a sad and strangely graceful place, something completely unexpected, and also appreciated.

The acting is strong—better than you would expect in films of this ilk; and tech is pretty good, especially in the effects.  The humor is not going to appeal to everyone, obviously, but those who ‘like it black’ will enjoy it, especially the segment about Schwarzenegger.

Ultimately, it’s not a weird film, despite the over-the-top humor.  Most reviewers have been calling this Troma-esque, and Troma, especially “balls-to-the-wall, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink grossout humor Troma” is just not “weird” anymore.

Even calling it a “horror-comedy’ isn’t quite correct, but a “horror-comedy” is a much easier sell than a “pitch-black Hollywood satire.”

The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol facebook page

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

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CAPSULE: SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY:  Lucifer Valentine

FEATURING:  Ameara Lavey, Pig Lizzy, Maja Lee

PLOT: A bulimic teen makes a pact with the devil in this nonsensical odyssey of ICK!

Still from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (2006)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite it’s feature length and small cult following, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is not really a movie at all, just a collage of clips. It was not structured to make any sort of sense, nor does it seem intended to be taken seriously. Regrettably, there does not appear to have been enough thought behind it to consider that it might be a joke on the audience, as was the case with Andy Warhol‘s notorious Sleep (1963).  Of course, I wanted to write about it as a joke. I was going to begin with an intro stating something to the effect that I always try to recommend good cinema. But my conscience won’t let me play that joke on you. The movie is really that bad.

COMMENTS: Abused teen Angela flees home, is sheltered by a lecherous priest, and sexually exploited by all she meets. Think Candy (1968), by Christian Marquand and Buck Henry, based on Terry (Dr. Strangelove) Southern’s novelized parody of Voltaire’s Candide. Only with mangled vignettes, jump cuts, smash cuts, blood, simulated violence, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, incoherent babbling, dancing bears, Nazism, and of course vomit. Lots of it. Minus the clever plot of Candy. OK, just kidding about the dancing bears and Nazism, but suffice it to say, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls makes Doors lead singer Jim Morrison’s UCLA film studies student project look like Citizen Kane.

Anyway, back to the “plot” (or lack of it). Drug addicted, alcoholic, and repeatedly used as a sexual bucket, a fed-up Angela refutes all worldly good and makes a pact with Satan in return for His protection. It doesn’t work out well. After setting fire to the priest’s church, Angela descends into stripping and prostitution, spiraling ever more furiously hell-bound, with lots of blood, gore, heaving breasts, full frontal nudity, vomit of course, and—oh wait, we already covered that.

Yup. That’s about it. Eye gouge scenes, raving girls rolling on the floor in religious mania, and naked strippers whom Valentine recruited from the local roadhouse. Hot, deranged, tormented, supple, quivering naked strippers covered with red corn syrup, sticking their fingers down their throats and retching on a glass table positioned over an upturned camera.

Apparently Lucifer Valentine is a film student with access to cameras, lights, makeup, and little in the way of clever ideas. He set out to make the ultimate work of shock value pop “art.” As pop “art,” it does indeed reflect abstract expressionism via a survey of superficial contemporary counter-cultural values: sex, drugs, rock and roll, violence, and nihilism. But so does a drive though Southeast LA. Valentine certainly succeeded in making the most deliberately offensive, ridiculous, non-nonsensical picture he could.

Only my most proudly deviant weirdo friends will want to see Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, the first entry in Valentine’s Vomit Gore Trilogy. (Yes, that’s right, there are three of these movies. The next two entries are the 2009 ReGOREgitated Sacrifice, and Slow Torture Puke Chamber [2010]). Yow!

All others avoid at all costs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…everything on display here (including its at times ‘film-school-esque’ execution) seems all to deliberate. How can we shock? How can we be disgusting? How can we seem weird? How can we gain attention? When your viewer feels as if you were asking these questions during the ‘creative’ process, much of its potential integrity and/or effectiveness is lost.”–Lawrence P. Raffel, Monsters at Play (DVD)


Scenes from Slaughtered Vomit Dolls

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CAPSULE: SMASH CUT (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Lee Demarbre

FEATURING: , Sasha Grey, Jesse Buck, Michael Berryman,

PLOT: An incompetent horror director discovers he can make realistic gore effects by killing his critics and co-workers and using their severed body parts as special effects.

Still from Smash Cut (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With Smash Cut, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter auteur Lee Demarbre pulls back the weirdness and takes a step towards the conventional (to the extent that a comedic tribute to Herschel Gordon Lewis’ cheesy gore films, featuring a main character who considers a dead stripper in the trunk of his car to be his muse, can be considered mainstream). The results are, frankly, a little boring, though camp gorehounds might find some entertainment here.

COMMENTS: The one-sentence plot synopsis tells you all you need to know; there are very few story surprises as Smash Cut unspools.  You can figure out that the diabolical director starts to enjoy killing as his megalomania grows, finds it increasingly difficult to cover his tracks as the bodies pile up, and is eventually thwarted by the clean-cut young heroes. Since we know what’s coming, it’s crucial that Smash Cut deliver on the gags (especially the weird gags), and unfortunately this is where the movie falls down on the job. The best parts are the two films-within-the-film, perhaps because they push their deranged style to its limits and stay true to their own madness. The first is director and future serial killer Abel Whitman’s trashterpiece Terror Toy, featuring a ragdoll clown murdering a busty psychiatrist with an ink pen and one of the worst “dangling eyeball” scenes you’ll ever witness. The second featurette is a silent art film created as a mousetrap to try to play on the felonious filmmaker’s sense of guilt. In between those two highlights are some interesting, mildly absurd touches—for example, a “suicide” by harpoon and a minor character who sets army men on fire—and a lot of deliberately unconvincing, campy gore effects (though the scene where Abel extracts eyeballs with a box cutter delivers a significant cringe factor). The acting is inconsistent, which is not necessarily a problem in the overall spoofy enterprise, but Continue reading CAPSULE: SMASH CUT (2009) →

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CAPSULE: SUBLIME (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Tony Krantz

FEATURING: Tom Cavanagh, Kathleen York, Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs

PLOT: The day after his 40th birthday, George Grieves enters Mt. Abaddon Hospital for a routine colonoscopy.  Waking after the procedure it rapidly becomes apparent that something has gone seriously wrong.  George and his only ally, a nurse called Zoe, attempt to discover the truth in an increasingly nightmarish hospital of horrors.

Still from Sublime (2007)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It really isn’t weird enough.  Certainly there are periods of scary oddness, but none that haven’t been depicted before in other, better films.  I hesitate to call the plot twist a “twist” as any regular weird film fan will see it coming over the hill a mile away, waving its hands to attract your attention (Zoe the stripper-gram nurse, I’m looking at you love!)  It has some serious and troubling points to make about fear, prejudice, white middle class guilt and health care systems in general, but it makes them in a long-winded, repetitive way.

COMMENTS: I practically leapt at the chance to review this film, having heard nothing about it, and being fond of “weird hospital” movies. About half way in I began to regret my decision, and this was the first film that I nearly pulled out of reviewing.  This is not because it’s a bad movie—though it is long-winded and really could have used the editor’s hand clipping away twenty minutes or so—but because the uncomfortable issues the movie raises hit close to home.

I’ve grown up in the occasionally stony but generally reliable bosom of the British National Health Service and felt I should perhaps have watched this with my wife who, as an American, has now experienced heath care on both sides of the Atlantic.  Procedures occurred in Sublime which seemed odd to me, even taking into account the national differences.  I mean, that was an awful lot of laxative!  Are American colons so different?

Protagonist George is an upper middle class, able-bodied (at least initially), straight, white male and his attitudes, prejudices and fears were in many respects different from mine.  But even if the specifics are different, fear, prejudice and guilt are common to everyone.  When Continue reading CAPSULE: SUBLIME (2007) →

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CAPSULE: VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL [Kyûketsu Shôjo tai Shôjo Furanken] (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Yoshihiro Nishimura, Naoyuki Tomomatsu

FEATURING: Yukie Kawamura, Takumi Saito, Eri Otoguro

PLOT: Two Japanese high school girls compete for the affections of a fellow student. One of

Still from Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl

them is a vampire, the other becomes a “Frankenstein girl” built of composite parts with the help of her mad scientist father.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It certainly has its share of weird and outrageous moments, but on the whole Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl is too slick, too self-aware, and too ho-hum to warrant a place on the List.  Splatterpunk has its place there, but this is not the best representative of the genre.

COMMENTS: Narrated by Jyugon, a spineless but attractive high school boy, the film attempts to parody several high school subcultures while the paranormal plot thickens.  Though Jyugon is forced to date Keiko, a bossy Lolita, he soon finds himself the object of the affections of quiet transfer student Monami.  She feeds him a chocolate with her blood in it and turns him into a vampire, and inadvertently kills the jealous Keiko.  The latter’s father is the unassuming vice principal to the naked eye, but with the help of the sexy school nurse he secretly kills students so he can attempt to reanimate them in his basement lab.  He has a breakthrough with a magical drop of Monami’s blood and is able to assemble a new body for Keiko so she can wreak havoc on Jyugon and Monami’s tepidly developing romance.  There doesn’t seem to be much at stake, really, since Jyugon isn’t actually interested in either of the girls who are fighting over him.

Shooting a good portion of the movie as if it were a music video, directors Yoshihiro Nishimura and Naoyuki Tomomatsu don’t lack for visual ideas.  The kabuki costumed mad scientist, wide-jawed vampire, acid-trip hallucinations, non sequitur demon fight opening, wacky Bride of Re-Animator-esque composite creatures, and of course showers upon showers of blood tie well into the quick cuts, fluorescent lighting, and spontaneous musical numbers.  Scuffles with a feisty drop of blood and all-out duels between a crazed re-animated nurse and a manservant wielding human bones as weapons are sure to amuse any fan of weird Japanese grindhouse flicks, with a number of solid blood-based tools adding that vampiric flavor.  The model-attractive high school students and mini-skirts bring an appeal to various other viewer types.

With about an hour of build-up and 20 minutes of reward, Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl tests the audience’s patience.  The scenes involving the wrist-cutting club and Ganguro club are meant to be satirical but feel haphazard and irrelevant, while Jyugon’s narration is over-obvious and not as funny as it was probably intended.  Of course one wouldn’t expect well-developed characters or an especially clever script based on the title alone, but it just isn’t as fun as it could have been.  Everything is very slick, choreographed, and over-digital, making it less loose and enjoyable than many other films of this ilk.  Its interesting battle scenes and goofy gore don’t quite make up for lackluster humor, poorly thought-out characters, and an unsatisfying climax.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Japan has never really been shy of weird and crazy horror flicks… Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl is the latest to join the cult… [this entry is] a more comedy-oriented film that still bears all the typical treats of its predecessors, but adds a layer of silly comedy not quite unlike Cromartie High. The result is mighty strange, as you might have expected.”–Niels Matthijs, Twitchfilm (DVD)