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CAPSULE: PINK LADY’S MOTION PICTURE (1978)

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Pinku redi no katsudo dai shashin

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DIRECTED BY: Tsugunobu Kotani

FEATURING: Keiko Masuda, Mie, Isamu Ago

PLOT: A director, a producer, and a folklorist seek the perfect idea for a movie to promote the pop band “The Pink Lady.”

Still from Pink Lady's Motion Picture (1978)

COMMENTS: How to promote a pop band cinematically? Through a musical, of course, but what kind? This movie takes this question as its starting point, exploring it through three distinct tales that traverse genres and styles.

The subject here is the iconic, albeit obscure, pop musical duo “The Pink Lady,” mad up of two girls singing as one. According to Wikipedia, they were a short-lived, briefly popular act from the late-70s and early-80s, featuring Mie and Keiko Masuda (formerly known as Kei). The movie makes clear from early on—especially through its exaggerated acting—that it will retain a lighthearted comic tone, while at the same time being self-conscious and self-referential.

This aspect of self-parody becomes apparent as we watch a film director, a folklorist, and a producer come together to brainstorm ideas for an upcoming movie about the duo. Each one of them has his own idea of what this movie should be, and chaos ensues. For viewers, this results in a fun romp, a mix of genres, each depicting a different take on the musical they want to create. We have an old-fashioned romantic melodrama, a cheesy sci-fi monster movie, and a western. Mie and Kei are always the protagonists, with playful musical numbers accompanying the story beats.

Pink Lady’s Motion Picture isn’t afraid to embrace absurdism. It doesn’t always makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t need to. But it’s not subversive or transgressive in any serious way; it’s harmless, mindless entertainment for mass consumption by a local, albeit westernized, Japanese audience. The flick is also of sociological interest, depicting, through the juxtaposition of disparate cinematic genres, a society divided between tradition and foreign influence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the production] consciously emulated the breezy stream-of-consciousness aesthetic of A HARD DAYS’ NIGHT (1964), and can also be viewed as a forerunner to SPICE WORLD… The film overall is colorful and energetic, but bears the marks of a hasty and ill thought-out production… fans of Mei and Kei will likely be satisfied.  Everyone else, however, is advised to turn their attention elsewhere.”–Adam Groves, The Bedlam Files

Capsules

CAPSULE: PHANTASMATAPES (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Annie Choi, Joseph A. Ziemba, Norman Earl Thompson (The Revenge of Dr. X), (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)

FEATURING: James Craig, Tota Kondo (Revenge of Dr. X); , (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)

PLOT: A double-feature of The Revenge of Dr. X and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, presented as if it was taped off of a local TV broadcast complete with VHS tracking errors, amateur commercials, and more surprises.

Still from Phantasmatapes (2025)

COMMENTS: OK, so TV stations used to broadcast cheapo horror films late at night (especially weekend nights), interrupted by badly acted commercials for local pizza parlors, shoe stores, and video rental joints. If you never experienced this phenomenon—or if, for some sick reason, you want to relive this insomniac entertainment—the retro-weirdos at Bleeding Skull have come to your rescue.

Thankfully, they don’t recreate the experience faithfully, but instead imagine the broadcast as it might have appeared if you were dead tired and fading in and out of consciousness, or if you had the flu and had taken a greater than recommended dose of Nyquil before tuning in. First off, the movies are heavily edited, to fit into a brisk 72 minute total runtime, including commercials, station IDs, and a few other intrusive surprises I won’t spoil. The ruthless edits are not a problem with the -scripted Dr. X, an extremely dull and padded Frankenstein variation about a NASA scientist who decides to spend his vacation in Japan engineering a giant, mobile Venus flytrap. In fact, this crap still drags a little when cut down to about 30 minutes. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die moves much faster, and is still relatively coherent in the edited form, but they unfortunately cut out one of the WTF-iest moments (the catfight scene). The nearly-coherent editing exaggerates the surreal elements of the originals, while jettisoning a lot of blah filler. (Watching Dr. X unedited is recommended to cinema masochists only.)

Secondly, the two movies are not only edited, but manipulated. First off, synthy new 80s vintage soundtracks have been added— a pipe organ patch with a Casio keyboard beat underneath, that kind of thing. The digital doodling is more profound in the colorful Dr. X. Tracking errors and faded color are kept (and new ones are added), along with overlaid images: sometimes from other scenes from the original film, and sometimes from outside sources, so that suns and galaxies and landscapes and abstract dust storms occasionally play over the duller imagery. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is less altered than Dr. X—it plays straight for most of the time—but there are a few fun stylizations. One motif is that, in the more delirious second half, the mad doctor’s assistant is always shown in a different “film stock,” which looks like they played a battered VHS tape on a particularly staticky cathode tube TV set, filmed it with a cheap camcorder, and re-edited the new footage into the movie. Another cool idea is that when Jan’s severed head is monologizing, the “camera” does a slow zoom to focus directly on her mouth. Along with the soundtrack, these experiments supply the new reimagined content. I only wish they had pushed things even further. (The trailer is actually a little misleading, implying more video manipulation than actually shows up in the finished product.) The concept of using public domain B-movies as canvases for -type experiments is a thrilling one, and that potential is barely scratched here. Hopefully they will push the conceit further with the promised “Phantasmatapes 2.”

The Blu-ray includes uncut versions of both features, in VHS full-frame scans complete with lousy sound and picture quality. The Blu-ray wraps the whole package up with a commentary track from Choi and Ziemba and three nostalgia-themed shorts: a mini-documentary on the “Max Headroom” pirate signal broadcast from 1987, a supercut of “Casper the Friendly Ghost” scares, and another mini-doc on the early 80s moral panic around the Dungeons and Dragons game. All in all, this compilation will resonate strongly with a certain demographic—you probably have already decided if you’re in it—and is at least worthy of a gander for others.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other critics’ reviews located.

Phantasma Tapes: Volume One [Blu-ray]

Phantasma Tapes: Volume One [Blu-ray]
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975)

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DIRECTED BY: Peter Wechsberg

FEATURING: Peter Wechsberg (as Peter Wolf), Lee Darel, Dudley Hemstreet, James Randall

PLOT: In a universe where everyone communicates via American Sign Language (ASL), theology student Steve Adams discovers that he is the son of Dracula and has been leading a second life as a blood-thirsty vampire with a trail of bodies in his wake.

Still from deafula (1975)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even if it weren’t one of the first (and, to this day, one of the only) films made exclusively in ASL, Deafula’s imaginative presentation of a world where gestural speech is the lingua franca and its singular interpretation of the Dracula legend make it a movie that truly has no comparison.

COMMENTS: Let’s start with the remarkable durability of the Dracula myth. Vampires have lost none of their fascination even in our modern world (I’ve discussed this phenomenon before), and Dracula lords over them all, appearing in some form in more than 200 films. Unlike most of his classic horror brethren (werewolves, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein monsters, creatures from black lagoons and the like), Dracula is verbal, and even handsome, as likely to use seductive words as violent action to achieve his aims. So when an underrepresented community wants to tap into the mainstream, there’s probably no figure more iconic and adaptable and copyright-free than Dracula, standing by and ready to tell his tale once more. Blacula, anyone?

And so we come to Deafula, in which writer/director/star  Wechsberg endeavored to give the deaf community something they had never had: a popular entertainment of their very own. He conjured up a messily layered version of the story, with the fundamental vampire-kills-people plotline frequently taking a back seat to the hero’s fraught relationship with his father, a police procedural featuring a Van Helsing substitute whom everybody hates, and a substantial commitment to themes of religious devotion and divine punishment. We do get Dracula in this movie (as an appropriately imperious and condescending figure), but he’s not our star. Instead, our hero is a pretty average, milquetoast kind of guy who, when he transforms into a villain, looks less like a demonic force and more like a low-rent Svengoolie with a ridiculous fake nose.

It is impossible to divorce Deafula from the circumstances of its creation. A drama student at Gallaudet University, Wechsberg was drawn to the power of film, and after getting into some production work, he scraped enough money to make a movie his way, with the deaf audience in mind. (He also aspired to give deaf creators their due; the closing credits specifically distinguish the hearing-impaired performers from their hearing colleagues.) His inexperience shows, especially when it comes to action. He crafts a clever introduction to reveal his hero emerging from the vampire state, but afterward gets caught up in disjointed edits and inconsistent pacing. Deafula’s savage mind-control of a would-be robber should be evidence of his Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: “FROM HOLLYWOOD TO HEAVEN: THE LOST AND SAVED FILMS OF THE ORMOND FAMILY”

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Indicator’s expansive Blu-ray box set “From Hollywood to Heaven: The Lost and Saved Films of the Ormond Family,” released in conjunction with ‘s “byNWR” project, collects a remarkable 13 films produced by the incredible Ormond family, split about halfway between their secular and their Christian exploitation films. When I first learned of the existence of this set, I wished that the late 366 collaborator Alfred Eaker had lived to see it. After all, he had endured at least one of Ormond’s proselytizing scare films projected on the wall of a basement of a Pentecostal church as an impressionable child in the 1980s; the experience scarred him emotionally, and was part of an abusive evangelical upbringing that led him to a lifelong crusade against Christian fundamentalism. Alfred reviewed several of ‘s films for this site, a job absolutely no one else volunteered for, and clearly relished trashing this godly man’s reputation (not that Ormond had much of a reputation as a filmmaker to tarnish). I can’t help but believe that Alfred would be tickled by this hi-def testament to his old nemesis’ film legacy, and would have been the first to volunteer to cover it in all its icky, gooey, sanctimonious glory. I imagine he would have been far more gleefully savage in his assessment than my level-headed remarks, but that was always his role as the 366 gadfly.

Historically speaking, the Ormond empire rightfully begins with June Carr, a lovely and talented vaudevillian comic foil who appeared onscreen with Bob Hope, among other luminaries, and who even headlined at the London Palladium for a short time. For some reason, June was smitten with a handsome but unsuccessful stage magician named Ron Ormond. Per June, they tied the knot two weeks after she first laid eyes on him onstage in 1935 and declared she would marry him one day. Thus began a dynasty. It’s difficult to watch June Carr’s early performances without concluding that she married beneath her Hollywood standing, but the couple remained hitched for four decades, through better and (usually) worse films, and richer and (usually) poorer receipts. By all accounts, it was a happy union.

The first stage in the Ormond film saga consists of the eleven B-westerns Ron directed (with June handling the distribution) starring bullwhip expert Lash Larue. To anyone who’s not a fan of the Lash, these are generally considered competent and uninteresting pictures, and are not included in the set before us. Also not appearing in this collection is one early “classic” bad movie co-directed by Ormond, Mesa of Lost Women (1952), about a mad scientist seeking to create a race of superwomen by injecting them with spider venom.

Ron and June continued to make undistinguished exploitation movies. But let us fast-forward to 1955, when the Ormonds set out on their own as independent producers, and where this set begins its comprehensive coverage. Our journey begins with Untamed Mistress. Three men travel into the jungle on a “safairy” (as they insist on calling their safari), accompanied by a woman raised by gorillas; when they get into gorilla country, the apes want her back—carnally. It’s a badly stitched together story with some padded narrative added to flesh out stock footage and parts of a Sabu movie Ron had directed-for-hire. “National Geographic”-style nudity in the form of home movie footage (taken by Mickey Rooney’s doctor!) of topless African women performing authentic tribal dances, alongside newly-shot scenes of half-naked “native” dancers entertaining men wearing gorilla suits, explains why this was made. Despite the salacious material, rife with bestiality and racism, the film crawls at a snail’s pace, but it is more tolerable than some of the Ormond’s hicksploitation programmers to follow. It made money, and the Ormond’s homegrown business (eventually dubbed “the Ormond Organization”) was off.

Poster for please don't touch me (1963)After this, Ron did about four other (now lost?) low budget movies before the box set picks up again in 1963 with the unusual Please Don’t Touch Me, starring one Vicki Caron, a pneumatic redhead who would have immediately been the headliner at any burlesque joint she walked into. Caron was never seen or heard from again, but her frequent lingerie changes and a brief Continue reading CAPSULE: “FROM HOLLYWOOD TO HEAVEN: THE LOST AND SAVED FILMS OF THE ORMOND FAMILY” →

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CAPSULE: INTERNATIONAL GUERILLAS (1990)

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International Gorillay

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DIRECTED BY: Jan Mohammad

FEATURING: Ghulam Mohjuddin, Mustafa Qureshi, Saeed Khan Rangeela

PLOT: Salman Rushdie (portrayed here as a Bond-style supervillain) plots to destroy Islam by building casinos, nightclubs, and brothels to spread vice and corruption; three brothers band together to avenge their faith and kill Rushdie, who is hiding in the Philippines under the guard of the Israeli secret services.

Still from International Guerillas (2024)

COMMENTS: The publication of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in 1988 sparked a wave of intense debate and controversy that led to bans, riots, assassination attempts, and other violence. The affair, which became one of the major cultural events of the latter half of the 20th century, culminated in a fatwa issued by Iran’s then Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. International Guerillas starts from this context, but the plot summary above should tell you everything about the tone of the film. It’s safe to assume that the filmmakers were not passionate ideologues looking to contribute a propaganda piece in the fight against Rushdie, but rather businessmen who saw the recent controversy as an opportunity to cash in on the ongoing issue by slapping it on a generic spy/action flick plot. The producer would go on to admit that the film was a purely commercial, rather than artistic (or, shall we say, ideological) affair. Regardless, it should be noted that BBC originally intended to ban the film upon its release, a decision opposed by Rushdie himself, who appealed to the principle of unconditional artistic freedom (even if applied to works that portray him as a cartoonish villain) and feared that a ban would only increase the film’s popularity.

The register is not far from a typical B-movie, with some kinship to older Bollywood cinema (over the top caricatures, cheesy dramatics, sensationalist camerawork and score); nevertheless, the combination of general silliness, the inherent oddity of the backstory, and a fair share of eccentric choices along the way makes for a strange viewing experience, especially for the western viewer.

The bloated runtime of nearly three hours (!) allows for plenty of funny (or, depending on the viewer, tedious) moments, including a surprisingly detailed set-up (the main credits only appear past the 40-minute mark) where we witness the murder of the protagonist’s sister at an anti-Rushdie protest, and his gang’s subsequent vow of revenge. What follows is a more or less continuous flow of senseless action interrupted by long (5+ minutes) dance numbers and seemingly random narrative detours. At some point along their quest, our heroes show up donning Batman costumes for some reason (or, more likely, none at all). We’re treated to the activities of “Rushdie” in his Philippine resort where, of course, he lives a hedonistic lifestyle. Besides torturing and executing Muslims by hanging, beheading, crucifying, or dropping them off a helicopter (Pinochet-style), another method of torture appears to be reciting excerpts from his blasphemous book. He also turns out to have an interminable host of clones, guaranteeing a lot of additional screentime and endless fighting scenes. And, of course, there’s the famous ending where “Rushdie” is destroyed by three flying Korans that inexplicably appear in the sky, a quite literal deus ex machina.

The basic premise of Muslim fundamentalists (undisputed heroes in the comic book morals at play here) hunting down “Rushdie” (even if he bears no resemblance at all to his real-life counterpart, physically or otherwise) might make some viewers understandably uneasy. This may be even more pronounced in today’s uber-politicized world, especially since Islamist terrorism has become more common. The obvious cheekiness of the presentation, however, means most will struggle to take it seriously as a piece of propaganda. In any case, this cult curiosity is likely to please or at least entertain viewers familiar with “Turksploitation” movies, with which Guerillas shares similarities—mainly, the idea of appropriating a popular western filmmaking template while giving it a gloriously over-the-top “national” spin for a cheap and quick cash-grab that proves funny in some intended ways and in all unintended ones. Although it might prove taxing for some, anyone who had fun with the likes of 3 Dev Adam or the Turkish Star Wars should have a guaranteed good time with International Guerillas.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a hallucinogenically awful mish-mash of music, action, crude comedy, continuity screw-ups, and dreadful production values… One of the weirdest scenes has the trio dressing in baggy Batman costumes and tracking down a bunch of identical Rushdie impostors…”–Steven Puchalski, Shock Cinema