Cast Jay Clark (Santa Claus), Shay Garner (Thumbelina), Pat Morrell (Mrs Mole), Bob O'Connell (Mr Digger)
Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the entrance to Hell, and it’s an amusement park in Florida. And it’s here we’re spending Boxing Day – and the end of the current season of Schlock Treatment – in the torturous sands of Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny (1972). You’d assume, in this season of giving, that we’ve saved the best of Schlock for last, right? Well, our film tonight is not so much a movie as a kind of wretched wrapping paper around a not-so-wretched short. In fact, Santa’s mulligan stew of school play, tacky home movie footage and amusement park advert, could be a new genre: the panto-mercial, of which its single entry Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny is clearly its outstanding example. To rub salt into our bleeding eyes, it displays a common trait amongst the kiddie matinee films, and that’s naked contempt for its audience, whom the filmmakers believe will watch any old horseshit, so long as there’s a candy cane parked in the top. [sound of crickets…]
But hey kids, it’s Santa Claus! Wait…oh no! He’s stranded in the sand dunes of Florida and his sleigh is stuck without his reindeer. The kids from the neighbourhood heed his distress call, and empty what seems like the entire menagerie of a petting zoo to help pull the sleigh. There’s a cow, and a frightened sheep, a guy in a gorilla suit – this is all filmed, by the way, in excruciating detail – and even a donkey, but Santa’s clearly no Baby Jesus. Meanwhile, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn just happen to be floating down the Mississippi River (cue “Old Man River” on kazoos), and offer their angry raccoon from the safety of some bushes. From what we can gather from his litany of clichés, Santa’s frustrated with his lot, but the world’s children need their toys, greedy little selfish bastards that they are . Never give up, Santa tells the wilting kids, have faith and BELIEVE. And, since Santa’s footage is almost an hour short of feature length, here’s a story to hammer the point home…
And so we arrive at our film-within-a-film, which comes with an interesting legacy. How did the director of A Good Time With A Bad Girl (1967) come to make kiddie horrors? Barry Mahon is one interesting cat. An American World War 2 fighter pilot shot down over Europe, his POW experience later inspired the Steve McQueen movie The Great Escape, but it’s his adventures in Filmland that most interest us here at Schlock HQ. By sheer twist of fate Mahon became Errol Flynn’s manager and directed his rancid swansong Assault Of The Cubal Rebel Girls (1959) which, along with the ill-fated Flynn vehicle William Tell, scuttled any chance at a serious career in Hollywood A-films. Instead, White Slavery (late 50s), a movie he shot in Tangiers while he and Flynn were laying low, sealed his fate, and he began a series of nudie cutie films, some with Playboy bunnies sourced by glamour photographer Bunny (“I shot Bettie Page”) Yeager. As the Sixties progressed, the benign nudie antics of PaganIsland(1960) and Girls On Tiger Reef (1965) gave way to notorious “roughies” like The Beast That Killed Women (1965) and The Sex Killer (1967), and then POOF! Like a third-rate magic act the pornographer disappeared, and Mahon the Kiddie Matinee King took his place: six shortish films in rapid succession around 1969 and 1970, and mostly shot at a doomed Florida amusement park called Pirate’s World, a place remembered more for its rowdy concerts by The Doors and Iron Butterfly than any of the buccaneer-themed rides.
Thumbelina (1970) was Mahon’s cardboard rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, a burnt-out fluro nightmare lit sparingly with dayglo splashes by a filmmaker who clearly didn’t have a clue what the word “psychedelic” meant. Its two inch heroine suffers all manner of ignomies – sleeping in a walnut, kidnapped by frogs, pimped by a widowed mole and railroaded into marrying her octogenarian neighbour – and all with customary good cheer and boundless optimism. Indeed, every human-sized creature, or man-sized anthropomorphic puppet with flapping yapping mouths, wants a piece of Thumbelina, or to at least feast on her innocence. That is, until a thawed out bird gives her a glimpse of freedom AND true happiness, prompting yet another ghastly unmusical musical number. It’s like the rock opera Hair before it hit puberty and was still high-pitched and hairless. Sure, Thumbelina is a step up in production values from the Santa footage, but when you’ve hit rock bottom, you’ve nowhere else to go. What ever you do, don’t drift off to sleep and let its hideous tune about “twelve pennies” soak into your brain-sponge.
As Thumbelina draws to its depressing conclusion, it’s back to The Suck, and a sand-bound Santa still cursing his existential funk via a stream-of-consciousness gibberish issuing forth from his sweat-stained beard. I have absolutely no doubt there won’t be one single viewer left sitting by the end of the film, so I can safely give away the ending – Santa’s sleigh is saved by the Ice Cream Bunny, a pathetic seven foot threadbare creature even Jimmy Stewart in a percodin haze couldn’t have conjured. I can only assume it was the park’s mascot, as it drives the kids for a victory lap in a vintage fire engine past its numerous rides and attractions. It can perform only two functions, driving and winking like a dead, rotting, reanimated and fur-covered Marilyn Monroe. I swear, if anything screams Christmas more than the Ice Cream Bunny, I’ll happily choke on a homeless man’s sick, with the film’s “Jingle Bells” for kazoo playing as my funeral dirge. Happy Christmas everybody, and see you sometime in 2011 for the next season on Schlock Treatment as we leave you with the 1972 Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny.
The Ice Cream Bunny winks out in Morse Code "Happy Christmas, Schlockateers!"
aka Rome Against Rome, Roma Contro Roma, Night Star: Goddess Of Elektra
Director Giuseppe Vari Writers Ferruccio de Martino, Massimo de Rita, Piero Pierotti, Marcello Sartarelli
Cast John Drew Barrymore (Aderbad), Susy Andersen (Tullia), Ettore Manni (Gaius), Ida Galli (Rhama), Mino Doro (Lutetius), Ivano Staccioli (Sirion), Philippe Hersent (Azer)
“Unconquerable warriors of the damned!” screams the US poster for War Of The Zombies. “SEE the undead cross swords with the living! SEE the goddess of the night whose gaze mummifies men!” Sounds to me like the premise for one of the most incredible horror films ever. Imagine then your reaction when the film unspools and it’s YET ANOTHER ITALIAN SWORD AND SANDAL MOVIE! As if American theatre screens and televisions weren’t inundated enough in the early to mid Sixties with peplum-themed product, the films’ distributors – in War Of The Zombies’ instance, American International Pictures – were forced, as the peplum cycle was grinding towards its demise, to primp up or flat-out lie about their content.
Luckily War Of The Zombies from 1964 is not just another Sons of Hercules muscle-fest, but an ambitious fantasy-horror ranking comfortably near Mario Bava’s Hercules In The Haunted World and Riccardo Freda’s The Witches Curse. In War Of The Zombies, however, there’s no Hercules, Samson or Ursus as the beefcake-flavoured focal point. Instead the film’s hero is Roman centurion Gaius, sent without his troops to the troubled Salmacia province to investigate Rome’s missing tribute. In the opening sequence Roman troops carrying treasure from Salmacia back to Rome are butchered by barbarians, stripped of their armour and their bodies stolen by deformed scavengers. It appears the entire province, including its weak Roman pretern Letitius and his double-crossing snake of a wife Tullia, is under the spell of a devilish cult dedicated to the Moon Goddess and “daughter of Isis”, whose Oath of Blood is performed under the blazing high beam of its enormous stone bust’s single Third Eye. Through Letitius’ slave girl Rhama, held in a trance by the cult’s high priest Aderbad, Gaius learns of its plan to revive the spirits of the dead Roman soldiers and lead them into an ultimate showdown against their own living comrades.
Sounds incredible, and to a certain extent it is. This IS a peplum, let’s not forget, and as such there are dry patches of wooden dialogue and stiff-as-corpses emoting to suffer. Once we wade through the regulation courtships and betrayals, however, we’re presented with the payoff: a magnificent low-rent but surprisingly effective battle between the living and the dead, smothered with superimposed colour swirls of saturated reds and blues (Mario Bava’s favourite palette for supernatural effects). Rather than rotting corpses, the Moon Goddess’ army is presented as ghostly figures, their otherworldliness underscored by slow motion cameras and an eerie echo-laden soundtrack. Just as impressive is the over-the-top performance of their leader, high priest Aderbad, played by John Drew Barrymore (son of John Barrymore, father of Drew Barrymore) in one of his numerous Italian film appearances between numerous cocktails in the early Sixties. Quasi-psychedelic, and several notches above your ordinary Italian sword and sandal, is the zombie-themed peplum chiller Rome Against Rome, or War Of The Zombies.
Director “Steve Sekely”/Istvan Szekely Writers Edmond Kelso, Van Norcross
Cast John Carradine (Dr Max Heinrich Von Altermann), Gale Storm (Jennifer Rand), Robert Lowery (Larry Adams), Bob Steele (Sheriff), Mantan Moreland (Jeff), Veda Ann Borg (Lila), Mauritz Hugo (Scott Warrington, Lila’s brother), Sybil Lewis (Rosella), Madame Sul-Te-Wan (Mammy Beulah)
I’m sure many of our viewers are familiar with the old Universal terrors of the Thirties and Forties, the domain of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine and many other classic Hollywood boogeymen. Those old guys didn’t just survive on big studio meals, however, and were just as busy in the lower strata of the film business, the much more threadbare B programmers of rattier studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram. Dismissed by many as mere el-cheapo crowd pleasers, I find the B pictures enjoyably cheap and formulaic, relatively fat-free quickies with a charm all of their own.
Monogram Pictures’ Revenge Of The Zombies begins deeeep in the fog-shrouded Louisiana swamps, to the call of the zombies (“Ar-Wooooooooooooooooooooo!”). Dead bodies are rising from their coffins and crawling around the estate of the insane scientist Dr Max Von Altermann (a low-key but still menacing John Carradine). His wife’s brother has learnt of her sudden and inexplicable “heart attack”, and he and his police buddy arrive to investigate, only to discover Von Altermann’s experiments are in creating an army of unstoppable, unkillable undead ubermentsch for his Nazi overlords. You can even hear him train them in his basement – “Ein, schwei…” – and yet his ultimate enemy may be the steel will of his own dead wife…
Intended as a sequel to the 1941 King Of The Zombies, Revenge… is more of a revamp utilizing some of the cast, and its adherence to elements already poached from Bela Lugosi’s White Zombie from 1933. Returning is Mantan Moreland, comedian from all-black vaudeville known as the Chitlin’ Circuit; as in King Of The Zombies and his long-running stint as Charlie Chan’s chauffeur, Moreland essays his driver role as the bug-eyed, superstitious and terrified comic relief, and like his contemporary Step’n’Fetchit, a wholly un-PC example of pre-Civil Rights Hollywood. Conversely the film’s most interesting character is Von Altermann’s old African-American servant Mammy Beulah, played by Madame Sul-Te-Wah (also from King…), a D.W. Griffiths stalwart from such early epics as Intolerance (1916) and that grand ol’ ole to the KKK, Birth Of A Nation (1915). Unlike the “lordy lord” antics of the exasperating Moreland, there’s depth and a quiet dignity in Madame Sul-Te-Wah, not easy to maintain amidst the chorus of massas and sho ‘nuffs. The anti-Nazi propaganda may seem forced, but Revenge Of The Dead was after all released in the opening phases of America’s involvement in World War 2, and is infinitely more subtle than Hungarian-born director Istvan Szekely’s other film from the period, Hitler’s Women (also 1943).
Valley Of The Zombies
USA 1946 b&w
Director Philip Ford Writers Dorrel McGowan, Stuart McGown
Cast Robert Livingstone (Dr Terry Evans), Lorna Gray (Nurse Susan Drake), Ian Keith (Ormond Murks), Thomas Jackson (Detective Blair)
Both King and Revenge Of The Zombies must have made enough cashola for rival company Republic Pictures to release the exploitatively-titled Valley Of The Zombies in 1946. The film certainly wastes no time in plunging straight into the guts of the story: a tall figure in a top hat and cloak breaks into a doctor’s office at the hospital’s morgue and demands a supply of his rare blood type, only to reveal himself as Ormond Murks, the insane criminal mind the doctor had committed several years before for claiming to have found the secret of eternal life. Murks was later pronounced dead and interred in his family crypt, but has since existed somewhere between the living and the dead by stealing packaged supplies of his precious life fluid…until now, he decides, that fresher really IS better. Thus begins a string of murders throughout the city, all strangled, drained of blood and then meticulously embalmed. Chief suspects are the morgue’s resident couple Dr Terry Evans and Nurse Susan Drake, a wise-cracking pair of amateur sleuths equally at home prowling around mausoleums at midnight or napping on the morgue’s slab. Naturally they’re two steps ahead of the bumbling Irish-American cops, which means the ditzy Nurse Susan is a sitting target for Murks’ dastardly plans.
If ever there was a film screaming out for a name actor to carry it, it’s Valley Of The Zombies. The role of Murks would have usually been reserved for Boris Karloff; instead we’re given Ian Keith, a salted plum of a stage actor who was once in the running for Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Here he’s more Tod Slaughter than Lugosi, an adequate by-the-numbers villain who sadly only ever hints at the evocative Valley in the title, its voodoo rituals and Devil’s potions the source of his secrets. Thus we’re treated to one zombie-like scientist, and one hypnotized broad who acts like the living dead. Thanks, Republic, you suckered us alright. Still, Valley Of The Zombies is brisk, ghoulish fun, in the tradition of many B detective serials of the era, and a throwback to a pre-George Romera era when the word “zombie” had an air of mystery about it.
aka El Ataque De Los Meurtos Sin Ojos/“Attack Of The Eyeless Dead”, Return Of The Blind Dead, Revenge Of The Evil Dead
Director/Writer Amando de Ossorio
Cast “Tony Kendall”/Luciano Stella (Jack Marlowe), Fernando Sancho (Mayor Duncan), “Esther”/Esperenza Roy (Vivian), “Frank Blake”/Franco Brana (Dacosta)
Just as George Romero changed the face of zombie cinema with his groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead (1968), Spanish director Amando de Ossorio gave them a distinctly European neo-gothic makeover in a series offour films from 1971 to 1975. Known as the Blind Dead Quartet, the films feature the reanimated skeletal remains of the Knights Templar, keepers of the secrets of eternal life and now unstoppable killing machines on undead horses and clad in their Templar garb. Their skull features blazing empty eye sockets require them to find their victims entirely by sound...the trick is to not scream their lungs out at their ghastly appearance!
Tonight's film Return Of The Evil Dead is the second in the Quartet, following on the bony heels of Tombs Of The Blind Dead (1971), while completely reinventing its Templar back story, as the whimsical de Ossorio did with each entry. This time the blood-drinking, human sacrificing Templars are holed up in an Abbey in the Spanish town of Berzanzo, their eyes burnt out by angry villagers and set on fire – but not before a curse falls upon their descendants. Five hundred years later and the townsfolk of Berzanzo are happily celebrating the anniversary of scouring the Templar devils from the face of the Earth. Night falls, dry ice oozes from the ruined Abbey, and skeletal hands covered in rotting cowls slowly emerge from their tombs...
Back in Berzanzo, it's certainly no Fourth of July Picnic. The town's corrupt Mayor is busy ordering his goons to beat up Jack Marlowe, the American fireworks technician and ex-lover of local sexpot Vivian, whom the Mayor and at least one of his goons have their greasy eyes on. As the Templar's mummified army reaches the town square and hacks its way through the festivities, the core survivors seek sanctuary in a church, and then turn on each other one by one. It's like Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) – the tight confines bringing out the characters' latent jealousy, greed, selfishness and inhumanity – if zombies were clutching at the side of the raft. Particularly repellent is the Mayor, who thinks nothing of using his constituents as Templar bait. Vindication is the Templars, and the world finds itself a few assholes fewer.
As a film, Return Of The Evil Dead is much more suspenseful than a skeleton army in sackcloth should engender. The very appearance of the undead Templars and their modus operandi (blind but not deaf, my sweet pointed coccyx!) require a very serious leap of faith on the part of its audience, and yet, with those iconic soiled hoods and grinning skulls, they can't help but disturb. De Ossorio recycles many of the first Blind Dead's aural and visual tricks, such as the jarring slow-motion shots of the Templars on zombie horseback reinforcing their otherworldliness, and the soundtrack dripping with low moans and pitch-shifted bells. The set pieces are nothing short of fantastic: the village square massacre, the fate of hunchbacked cripple Murdo, and in an obvious nod to another Hitchcock film The Birds (1963), the young girl's heartstopping walk through the zombie sentinels (ALWAYS remember that in the case of an undead Armageddon, children are the weakest link). There are moments of intentional humour – the scenes with the governor and his saucy maid are nicely handled – but overall the tone is grim to the point of apocalyptic, and like other Spanish horrors of the early Seventies, equal parts gothic atmosphere and modern gore-soaked shock tactics.
“You have to be quiet!” yells one character, and I hope you do the same. Sit very still, and don't utter a sound until the end of Return Of The Evil Dead.
Six months ago we screened our first ever Egyptian cult movie on Schlock Treatment called The Kuwait Connection from 1973. Those who saw it will have to admit it was baffling attempt to stitch together the horror, sexploitation, art film and political thriller into one strange mutant monster. It was one of two films which book-ended Egypt's brief flirtation with erotic cinema, a two year period of relaxed censorship restrictions between 1971 and 1973 during which Egyptian filmmakers made the country's most scandalous and salacious movies. The Lady Of The Black Moons was the first, filmed in Lebanon and directed by The Kuwait Connection's Samir A. Khouri, and featuring gorgeous and talented (not to mention adventurous) actress and superstar of Egyptian cinema, Nahed Yousri, as its lead.
Hussein Fahmy today
It's one of those films that throws you in the deep end of a pool after midnight, turns off the lights and watches your death throes while sipping a warm martini. The opening fractured montage eventually pieces together a disconcerting tableaux of a bored, well-to-do housewife in feathered mask bedding strangers in a house of ill-repute during a full moon; the woman, the film reveals in excruciatingly slow flashback, is Aida, married to successful, cold and cruel businessman Sami Bey, but tortured by memories of her lost love, their chauffeur Omar. Unable to embrace a man after her stepfather raped her at age ten, it takes a drunken Omar to open her rosebud; regardless, she chooses wealth and position over desire, and despite her valiant efforts to keep the affair alive, Omar ultimately rejects her, sending her into a downward spiral of depression and self-destruction. Her illicit attempts to recreate her beloved Omar out of strangers always end in castration – symbolically, the film suggests, despite the metaphor being hammered home several times with disturbing realism.
Nahed Yousri
The Lady Of The Black Moons is mostly early Seventies melodrama peppered with tease, violence, sexy smoking, ape-hair chests and the kind of flaming arch-pretentiousness that filmmakers managed to hold in reserve until the start of the Seventies. Symbolism abounds in its ragged, overt imagery and faux-poetry-as-dialogue, and even if at times our director isn't being deliberately oblique, it's tempting to look for meaning, however cracked, where no meaning can possibly exist. In key scenes the stench of pretension is impossible to miss: Sami's father, a wily trickster with a grotesquely over-developed sense of irony, gives Sami and Aida a distorted mirror as a wedding present. “Ugliness,” he reasons, “is but the mirror of the soul” - this nugget of wisdom coming from the chap who plays happy tunes under blown-up polaroids of the Hiroshima and Nagisaki blasts. Then there's the portrait mounted above Aida's bed of a white horse flanked by two brown horses; Aida later rides a white horse down the beach in her underwear, is met by Omar, and are filmed making sweet filthy love through the shimmering heat of three fish (that's THREE fish, remember) poaching over a fire. The horse, I'm certain, represents Aida's freshly unbridled sexuality, but what about the fish? Are THEY symbolic, and could they possibly be cyphers in an Islamic reinvention of the crucifixion triptych? Is it ALL, for that matter, just a load of symbolics? Has Meaning finally skewered itself in a bizarre piscine version of hari-kiri and now stares us down through parboiled eyes?
Adel Adham in action
I, for one, get high on misguided art cinema, particularly if the “art” is nothing more than tarted-up sleaze. One one level it's the work of a filmmaker in a repressive regime given permission by authorities to test the limits of control – and he certainly does, although his The Kuwait Connection from 1973 helped slam the window of opportunity shut again. On another level, it's a morality play from the Muslim world in which wickedness is ultimately punished (“I'm a slut dirty!” Aida's subtitle proclaims) but not after the privileged audience cops one steaming eyeful of said wickedness after the other. On final scrutiny, The Lady Of The Black Moons is like many of its European contemporaries, a simple soap opera gussied up with tits and art; to his credit, Khouri indulges in the same highbrow pulp as prolific Spanish cinemaniac Jess Franco, with only a whiff of Franco's customary surrealism and deranged psychedelic visuals that go full-tilt in Khouri's next film The Kuwait Connection. It's imaginatively photographed, sadly nowhere near as sleazy, violent or weird as its follow-up, and at times threatens to collapse under the weight of such turgid lines as Omar's when driving past a cemetery: “Can they keep loving each other after death?” Not only that, you have to admit that Nahed Yousri makes a fantastic slut dirty. Time to cover the windows with cardboard and take out the lightbulbs with hammers as we visit The Lady Of The Black Moons.
Cast Emeka Ani, Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo (Pastor Chucks), Clems Ohameze (Pastor Ken), Fred Arico
Greetings, Schlock Fiends, as we take you kicking and screaming back to Nigeria for a second dose of Nigerian or “Nollywood” Godsploitation. Last Christmas we showed you 666: The End Is At Hand, a delirious take on The Omen series by foaming-at-the-mouth evangelists; in the sequel, we're pleased to tell you that the midget Antichrist from 666... is alive, well, still under four foot tall, and drinking, smoking Guinness and whoring his way across Lagos.
Did I say midget Antichrist? You'll remember the Son of Satan from the first film, an angry little “kid” in a David Beckham jersey who spends much of his screen time glowering under a polystyrene horn with CGI eyes. It turns out the junior Antichrist is played by Musa Ibrahim, popularly known as Ibro, a popular midget actor in his early twenties who shot to fame several years ago in a film called Baby Police. While nowhere near the giddying heights of fame reserved for Nollywood midget celebrities Aki and Paw-Paw, this feisty Gary Coleman-in-training has all the hallmarks of a bona fide superstar. Seriously, this little guy has chops: within fifteen minutes he has already garrotted a priest, and at the thirty minute mark he's just sprayed “666” on some comely wench's forehead and is lying back on the bed literally with The Horn. Praise Ibro!
You'll also remember Pastor Lazarus from the first film, the preacher trawling through the poorest parts of Lagos preaching de Word of God. In the sequel, he passes the torch to New Preacher On The Block, Pastor Chucks, played by the franchise's producer Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo, who clearly felt the series needed some Ken Power. Pastor Chucks thus spends much screen time on endless sermonizin' (read: pointless padding) at the expense of some much-needed religious weirdness. Trust me, however, the Weird is still with with us... Satan, that rolly-polly Louis Armstrong, remains in his gymnasium surrounded by his she-demons, dragging down one soul at a time to increase his kingdom – ONE AT A TIME. Once again, the actor playing Satan is given free rein on his dialogue, which here is less than inspired, and reduced to an emphatic “I am Lucifer. I AM LUCIFER! ..... ahahahahahahahaha!!!!”
At the half-way point the Antichrist upgrades to an adult's body, and the series bids adieu to Ibro while wishing him all the success in his proposed Hollywood career. Antichrist Mark 2 takes on the guise of Pastor Ken, referred to by his congregation as “our Lord”. Part of his ecumenical duties is to dress like a pimp, and to impregnate bored rich housewives (“Praise be to Jesus!”), his Demon Seed thus ensuring a part 3 and 4 - or more accurately, The Signs Of End Time1 and 2. Are we really that sadistic to play two more of these Nollywood Godsploiters? See you at Easter time, sinners!
If this all looks and feels like a home movie or student film, do not be deceived: Nigeria is one of the largest film industries in the world, generating billions from its staggering output of 1000 to 2000 features per year, mostly shot on digital cameras and edited on home computers. Nollywood has its own pantheon of stars, its own international distribution networks, and its own mutant genres (of which the “juju” or religious horror film is just one), all of which operate as if Hollywood doesn't even exist; in Africa they pirate their own movies, and snub the cultural hegemony of Angelina Jolie and company. It's a brazen revolutionary stance, a “DIY Or Die” to the Western Monolith of Media Mediocrity, which Schlock Treatment salutes. I assure you it will take a while to adjust your filmic sensibilities to the Nigerian aesthetic – the accent for one, the shouting of improvised lines, the primitive video production, the computer-generated effects and soundtracks – but like evangelical Christianity, once hooked you're snared forever. We hope you see the Nollywood Light with 666: The End Is At Hand 2.
aka Salamangkero: The Magician, Monster Of The Universe
Director Tata Esteban Writers Tata Esteban, Grace Hill Serrano
Cast Michael De Mesa (Lolo Omar/Professor Jamir), Tanya Gomez (Lovina), Tom Tom (Bojok), Sunshine (Freza), Armida Siguion-Reyna (Mikula)
What is known of Filipino director Tata Esteban (real name Steve Regala) has been coloured by his own much-publicised personal narrative, carefully constructed following his conversion to revivalist Christianity as an almost cartoon-like fall from Grace and subsequent redemption and salvation. A “hardcore womanizer, flesh trader and shabu addict”, he is described on a Christian ministry's website, “promiscuous since he was 13, and constantly wallowing in money as he traded and bedded women, and showed off their wares in his hit nightclubs and movies...” A stroke, several heart attacks and his two year-old son asking for a hit of daddy's Shibu, reportedly turned his life around in 2000, before a final heart attack in 2003 claimed Esteban for good; friends and colleagues remember him prior to his conversion as a talented if troubled artist whose personal demons no doubt got the better of him.
It's tempting to draw parallels between Esteban's turbulent private life and his skewed filmic fantasies. Starting with the demented sex-horror Alapaap (aka Clouds) in 1984, his work tended toward the erotic, and is most notorious for the samurai sword-in-vagina sequence from Hubo Sa Dilim (aka Naked In The Dark, 1985). In context, Esteban's startling filmography makes his 'kids' fantasy Magic Of The Universe that little bit disconcerting.
Esteban cast two of the leads from Alapaap, Michael de Mesa (son of Rosemarie Gil, brother of Cherie Gil) and bold star Tania Gomez, as Jamir the Magician and his wife Lovina. The film opens at a circus with Jamir's vanishing act going horribly wrong – their daughter Freza (Sunshine) has truly disappeared without trace. The couple venture deep into the jungle with their tubby child assistant Bojak (played by Tom-Tom – and no-one properly explains where HIS parents have vanished to) to consult a shaman. He proceeds to carve up one of his monkey companions with a machete, and invites the party to scoff fresh steaming brains out of the convenient monkey-skull desert bowl for divine inspiration. The child, it appears, has slipped into another more magical realm, and Lovina soon vanishes too, leaving Jamir and Bojak wondering what to do with their ever-diminishing family act.
Jamir is visited by the spectre of his great grandfather Lolo Omar (also played under a landslide of latex by Michael de Mesa). He tells Jamir of the family's mystical lineage, and how Omar's black-hearted acolyte Mikula - the Root of All Evil - is holding the Magical Realm hostage. The audience's descent is sudden, plunged head-first into a universe resembling a Duran Duran filmclip by Russell Mulcahy (but in fact co-designed by Magic's AD and future auteur Brillante Mendoza), populated with slobbering pig-people, monkey-men and dwarves in white-face, and presided over by the demented Mikula, she with the domed skull pulsing so wildly it threatens to send her headdress into orbit. “I am an animal, it's true,” Mikula declares to her court's menagerie, “but I RULE!”
It's a strange amalgam of influences at work in Magic Of The Universe. From Hollywood comes the sinister, otherworldly nightmares of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, with more than a nod to the title of He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe. Closer to home is the reinvigorated horror and fantasy industry courtesy of Peque Gallage and Lore Reyes (Shake Rattle And Roll, Once Upon A Time), following on from such successful fantasy franchises as Carlo J. Caparas' Ang Panday series (1980-1983), Ramon Revilla's anting-anting films, the Seventies revival of Darna and company, and if one follows the trail far enough back, to the original Darna (1950) and Djesebel (1953).
There are serious pacing issues, not to mention large fissures in the film's internal logic which prevent it from straying too far from the mundane. Its 1986 Metro Manila Film Festival slot, and the economic imperatives that come with such a responsibility, also tend to dampen Esteban's darker impulses, which are naturally given full rein in his more adult features. There's also a regulation stream of superfluous name stars who serve little more than marquee value: Dick Israel as forest dweller Arbutus with his stone wife Madera (Odette Khan), Liza Lorena as Kleriga, Mikula's wildly painted nemesis, and Gina Alajar as Siddha, the grail keeper of the Regalia, a wand designed to defeat Mikula and thus restore the balance of Goodness and Justice in the Magical Realm.
The film has moments of intentional absurdity: Mikula's court suddenly drops everything for an Oingo Boingo-styled musical number, the singer in snake dreads gargling San Miguel beer for vocals, and guitars made from human bones. For the most part, however, it's a grim affair, and far too grim to be considered 'light entertainment'; poor eight-year old Sunshine looks genuinely terrified for her entire performance, and I'm certain she's not that intuitive an actress. Severed heads are boiled for Mikula to absorb their strength – and let's not forget brains slurped out of monkey skulls! Then there's the goofy muppet Gondo, a jibbering flap-eared vision from my own personal Hell draped around a black and white TV, which I assume is both his torso and narrative function. For a tittering gargoyle it's given a fair amount of screen time, and presumably Esteban didn't want to waste a single inch of his Satanic-inspired rubber creation.
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Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the entrance to Hell, and it’s an amusement park in 
But hey kids, it’s Santa Claus! Wait…oh no! He’s stranded in the sand dunes of 
And so we arrive at our film-within-a-film, which comes with an interesting legacy. How did the director of A Good Time With A Bad Girl (1967) come to make kiddie horrors? Barry Mahon is one interesting cat. An American World War 2 fighter pilot shot down over 
Thumbelina (1970) was 
As Thumbelina draws to its depressing conclusion, it’s back to The Suck, and a sand-bound Santa still cursing his existential funk via a stream-of-consciousness gibberish issuing forth from his sweat-stained beard. I have absolutely no doubt there won’t be one single viewer left sitting by the end of the film, so I can safely give away the ending – Santa’s sleigh is saved by the Ice Cream Bunny, a pathetic seven foot threadbare creature even Jimmy Stewart in a percodin haze couldn’t have conjured. I can only assume it was the park’s mascot, as it drives the kids for a victory lap in a vintage fire engine past its numerous rides and attractions. It can perform only two functions, driving and winking like a dead, rotting, reanimated and fur-covered Marilyn Monroe. I swear, if anything screams Christmas more than the Ice Cream Bunny, I’ll happily choke on a homeless man’s sick, with the film’s “Jingle Bells” for kazoo playing as my funeral dirge. Happy Christmas everybody, and see you sometime in 2011 for the next season on Schlock Treatment as we leave you with the 1972 Santa And The Ice Cream Bunny.
The Ice Cream Bunny winks out in Morse Code "Happy Christmas, Schlockateers!"
