This upcoming Friday the Kingsway Theatre will be showing a b-movie classic, some love it, most hate it. Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure the Kingsway will be playing Frank Henenlotter’s, Frankenhooker.

The film features former Penthouse Pet, Patty Mullen as Elizbeth (The Monster) and is loosely (very) based on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

During a BBQ cookout Elizabeth is accidentally killed in a freak lawnmower accident in which her body is cut to pieces. Heartbroken, her boyfriend Jeffery, who is a med-school dropout, begins to use the body parts of New York’s ladies of the night (wink). He lures said ladies of the night back to a party where they ingest a form of super crack and explode.

Jeffery uses the exploded hooker parts to rebuild his girlfriend piece by piece and with the help of a convenient lightening storm manages to re-animate her. There’s just one slight problem, her mind isn’t quite all it once was. Jeffery’s creation escapes and begins “working” the streets of New York (muscle memory, I guess…) where, after enlisting her services, Elizabeth’s clients explode as a residual result of the super crack. Meanwhile, things get a bit more complicated for Jeffery as Zorro, the missing prostitute’s pimp, comes around looking for his employees.

This movie is absolutely batshit!! The fondness that Henenlotter has for the genre clearly shines through. Frankenhooker is quite clearly a tribute to the old grindhouse/exploitation movies and inadvertently a farewell to a bygone time.

The film was made at a time when central New York was going through a major cleanup and two eras kinda clashed. 42^nd street, for example, which was infamously known for its sex shops, porn theatres, drug dealers and sex workers was slowly changing into a more tourist friendly area with camera shops and fast food restaurants. This is captured a few times in the film as Frankenhooker is coming out of a subway to camera flashes from tourists carrying shopping bags.

Frankenhooker opened in April of 1990 at the Houston International Film Festival. The film was delayed from it’s intended release date as there was some difficulty in obtaining a proper rating. Although it opened to relatively positive reviews, Bill Murry was quoted as saying “if you only see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker”, the film only managed to recoup $205, 000 of it’s $2.5M budget.

Some other films by the same director/writer which are equally as insane and worth a viewing are: the Basket Case trilogy in which a relatively normal looking guy seeks revenge against the people who separated his freakishly deformed, conjoined brother from him. Also, worth checking out is Brain Damage, rather than spoil it with any sort of synopsis, I suggest you go into this one blindly. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

This past weekend I had the distinct pleasure of re-watching a movie that I first saw when I was very young. The Royal Cinema has a monthly feature that’s sponsored by the Toronto publication Rue Morgue magazine. The film in question? One Dellamorte Dellamore or better known by its north American title, Cemetery Man. Originally based on a book of the same name and later turned into a comic book named Dylan Dog.

Rupert Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, a cemetery caretaker in a small Italian town named Buffalora. Together with his faithful, albeit a little slow, assistant Gnaghi they return the recently resurrected (read zombies) back to their eternal resting place.

It’s business as usual until one day, during a funeral Francesco meets the recently deceased’s much younger widow where he falls instantly in love. Unfortunately, she doesn’t share the same sentiment until mention of an ossuary stirs her interest. She returns one night to spend some time with our protagonist (wink) and while near a grave she is bitten by her late husband who has returned from the grave and abruptly succumbs to her injuries. Convinced that she will return, Francesco stays by her side in order to do what must be done. Sufficed to say, she returns and I’m sure you can figure the rest.

This flick kinda goes a bit batshit from this point on… Gnaghi falls in love with the mayors daughter whom shortly after dies in a motorcycle accident. Of course, she’s buried in the same cemetery, and she returns but Gnaghi severs her head and makes friends with it, keeping it in an old broken television.

Francesco on the other hand keeps meeting different incarnations of his lady love (all played by the same actress Anna Falchi) and all sorts of zany scenarios ensue.

I won’t tell you anymore of the plot, love it or hate it you should at least see it once.

The movie was shot on a $4M budget and opened in Italy, France and Germany March 25 1994 as Dellamorte Dellamore and unfortunately I’m unable to find the foreign box office earnings. It opened in the US in April of 1996 but the American distributer felt the film would do better with an English title and renamed it to Cemetery Man. Unfortunately it only grossed $253,959 domestically.

I realize that it’s a train wreck of a movie, but I guess that I just see it through my 12 year old self’s eyes and my opinion is tainted by nostalgia. Sure, it’s a bit disconnected and has a weird dreamlike quality to it but it’s a good bit of fun.

If you really want to expand on this movie after watching, google some fan theories about what’s really going on. There’s a few doosies, to be sure.  

Today, submitted for your enjoyment… and mine, is one of my top 3 favorite movies of all time and the place from whence the inspiration for this very blog’s title comes from. John Carpenters cult classic Big Trouble in Little China

The year was 1985 and what was originally intended to be shot as a western in old san Francisco was rewritten into a more modern-day, action adventure feature and began shooting in October.

Jack Burton played by Kurt Russel is a long-haul trucker and after delivering his payload spends some time at the market, catching up with an old buddy over cards. When the morning sun rises, he’s several thousand dollars richer. There’s just one problem… his friend Wang Chi(Played by Dennis Dun), whom he’s won the money from doesn’t keep that kinda cash on him. Rather than take an IOU Jack volunteers to drive Wang to the airport where Wang plans to pick up his wife to be before heading back to his restaurant to pay Jack. At the airport Wang’s wife is kidnapped by a Chinese street gang with the intention of selling her into the sex trade. Naturally, the two give chase and wind up in the middle of a china-town gang war. Watching from the cab of Jack’s truck as the two rival gangs cut each other to shreds our hero’s witness something other worldly, in the midst of the chaos, three spirits descend from the heavens and join in the melee. Deciding that they’d rather live to fight another day Jack throws his truck into gear and floors the pedal only to run over a strangely dressed figure… and all this is just the first twenty minutes!!!

I think what’s most appealing and draws most people in is the sheer silliness of the whole affair. The main protagonist is quite clearly not the hero while the sidekick or what the viewer initially perceives to be the sidekick is really the hero. Jack is just a bumbling idiot full of false bravado while Wang is the competent paladin.

Initial test screenings of the film were overwhelmingly positive and both Russel and Carpenter thought they had a box office hit on their hands. Unfortunately, the studio put very little into marketing and promotion and as a result, it flew under most people’s radar. In their defense, 20^th Century Fox just didn’t know how to market this sort of film.

The movie opened in July of 1986 on one thousand and fifty three screens and grossed $2.7m on it’s opening weekend. The total gross was $11m however, the estimated budget was between $18-25m. As a result of such poor performance John Carpenter swore off big studio productions and returned to his independent film roots.  

Give it a watch if your looking for a well put together, campy thrill ride. Carpenter didn’t make any bad movies and the stuff he did in this period was just great. Some honourable mentions for 80’s Carpenter are Escape from New York (81), The Thing(82), Prince of Darkness(87) and They Live(88).

In the late 70’s and early 80’s Disney seemed to take a strange path and began producing slightly darker type films in an effort to capture the young adult audience (read teenagers). At the time their films aimed at children were not being received with the typical critical acclaim of years past so in an effort to regain some lost sales the journey into the horror genre began.

While there had been previous attempts at inserting darker components into an otherwise kid friendly movie like Escape to Witch Mountain, the movies still remained relatively light and whimsical. Watcher in the Woods on the other hand was just as bizarre as the book on which it was based, complete with pentagrams, ghosts, demons, and a whacked out looking Bette Davis.

The movie begins with the Curtis family, whom are American, starting a new life in England. They purchase a suspiciously low-priced home from Mrs. Aylwood (played by the striking Bette Davis) who claims that the house contains too many bad memories and currently resides in the accompanying guest house.

As the movie progresses, we learn that Mrs. Aylwood’s daughter suddenly disappeared some thirty years ago without a trace. Jan, the family’s eldest daughter catches glimpses of a blindfolded girl in mirrors and glass that looks remarkably similar to her. As more characters from the town are introduced you begin to realise that they know more than they’re letting on.

I don’t want to spoil any more for you dear reader as, for all it’s flaws this movie is still totally watchable and you should really give it a chance.

It was shot with a budget of nine million dollars. The initial release date was in April of 1980 and the studio planned to expand the release to 600-800 screens however, the crowd and critical reception was so poor that the film was pulled after just 10 days. Disney spent another million on a reshoot and re-cut eliminating some critical story developing scenes including a fairly integral opening scene and the film was released some eighteen months later. The re-release earned considerably better reviews than the initial release however, the film still failed to perform at the box office earning only five million domestically and was largely considered a flop.

It’s hard to believe that a moody, dark rich story performed so poorly, especially with several horror veterans such as John Hough, a director of several of the Hammer Horror films and Bette Davis in her later years when she began to get really creepy. Furthermore, the location scout in what can only be described as a stroke of genius selected what is probably the most famous haunted house ever, the mansion from 1963’s The Haunting. The score was also written by well known genre composer Stanley Myers.

So… if you’re looking for something to watch on a dark and stormy night… or just this Friday night, give ‘er a whirl, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Honourable mention from the Disney, horror genre comes just three years after this, Something Wicked This Way Comes was a brilliantly crafted masterpiece that will absolutely not disappoint.