From the category archives:
Now the truth can be known of the physical altercation that sidelined me for two weeks. It was a mighty battle that lasted for many days, and when the smoke cleared only a few retained their dignity.
Who emerged victorious? Find out! Watch the video!
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A crew of highly-organized thieves have hit the Du Plessis Diamond Wholesalers, but they made the unwise move of bringing along Mr. Blonde. Civilians are dead, the escape plan went tits-up, and now they’re barricaded inside. Worst of all, they’re heavily-armed, armored, and prepared for a prolonged standoff, complete with gas masks!
Can SWAT break the standoff and restore order? Someone call Michael Mann, there’s a movie in this!
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The planets are aligning, R’lyeh is in ascension, Halley’s comet is returning, and the Taronian Cult has gone stir crazy in preparation for the return of their unholy alien god emperor! They’re hoping to ring in the dawning of this new age with a titanic liquid fertilizer bomb that could destroy the entire block!
Will SWAT be able to thwart these mad cultists’ plans, or will they be able to complete their dark summoning ritual? Why couldn’t they just make my job easier by going out Heaven’s Gate style?
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You may think that if I ever got the chance to make this movie, I wouldn’t take it all that seriously, intentionally making a shitty-beyond-belief movie with no regard for tradecraft or continuity, intentionally choosing horrendous actors and looping all their dialogue myself, and basically emulating the exact same style that made the original “Manos” infamous. You’d be expecting some kind of lame, 70-minute session of grab-ass in the desert with my friends dressed up in bedsheets.
Not so.
I might be going for campy fun, sure, but my inspiration for this one is the same kind of gritty, ugly, uncomfortable violence that made sadistic gore horror movies of the 70s like I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left classics. Oh, you might not like those movies, and even I’ll admit that they’re not very good, but they’re definitely memorable, violent, boundary-pushing movies. Those movies are stark, shocking stuff, man. They’ll move you. That’s my inspiration for “Manos” 2: I want to get those chuckling MST3K nostalgia junkies into a theater and give them a good, solid twist of the nuts with a well-made, brutal revenge flick.
Just bear with me.
I had a lot of questions after watching “Manos:” The Hands of Fate, most of them involving The Master (the guy in the black robe), his wives, and of course Torgo, the caretaker of the Valley Lodge. The movie never really gives us an idea of what The Master does to fill his day (except maybe sleep), and yet he’s supposed to be this massively evil mastermind who communes with some Satanic power in order to…what, rule some rat’s armpit town in New Mexico? I don’t know, and I doubt Harold P. Warren did, either. But I hate an incomplete puzzle, and I feel a compulsive need to fill in the blanks.
We don’t really need to get too complicated here: for years, The Master has been subtly collecting wives and brainwashing worshippers, amassing power, and memorizing a series of long, intricate incantations sent to him in dream visions. It’s a long, painstaking process, and he often spends months at a time physically comatose, spiritually wandering the hellish dreamscape that imprisons the hell-god Manos. There, he engages in psychic commune with the dark deity, struggling to comprehend the alien thoughts of a consciousness that has seen the passing of untold eons. He hopes to open a portal to this hell and bring Manos into the world. The Master’s preparations are nearing completion, the celestial alignment for the final dark ritual to open the portal is nearing, and once that’s open, the end of the world is assured.
The Master’s had a lot on his mind, and he’s been driven mad with his imminent ascension as the prophet of Manos. Not to mention he’s a cackling, sadistic, chauvanistic, abusive bastard who enjoys his eeeeevil work far too much. He forgot just one thing: Torgo. He’s been slapping him around for the better part of a decade, warping him mentally and physically with his magic into some satyric freak, rewarding him with only pain and emotional abuse. When Michael and his family arrived at the house, Torgo had real human contact for the first time. No spooky hell-hounds, no fiendish cabals or black masses under the thousand-faced moon, just people and their cute puppy. He missed that kind of contact. He began to realize that there was a world out there, and it was about damn time that the Master came through on his promises or he’d quit and seek his own fortune. Or at least a boss that doesn’t beat him with a staff.
The Master didn’t take Torgo’s ultimatum well. In fact, he blew the poor bastard’s hand off and thought the matter settled. Torgo scurried off into the desert, and given his grievous injury and the fact that there’s nothing but desert around for miles in all directions, the Master chalked him up for dead and brainwashed Michael into becoming the new caretaker.
But Torgo isn’t dead. Not by a long shot. He’s taken worse beatings in his life; after all, why do you think he walks so funny? But now he knows that the Master never intended to keep his word. He was laughing at Torgo from the beginning, always planning to wring him out like a mop and throw him away when he was of no more use. He’s had enough. Now he lurks in the shadows around the lodge, burned, broken, crippled, half-mad with pain and dehydration with only one thought on his mind:
That motherfucker is going to pay.
He knows he can’t take the Master directly. Even if he were in his prime– and he most certainly is not– the Master is for all intents and purposes completely immortal. He’s infused with the infernal magics of Manos and virtually immune to physical attacks. At first he thought that the Master might be vulnerable in his sleep, but now he knows that even his wives retain some form of awareness even in their deepest slumber. There’s no way he can kill a guy that powerful. But he doesn’t need to kill him, he just needs to bring the wrath of Manos down upon him, and what better way than to disrupt his ultimate summoning spell that only comes once every 666 years?
The Master can’t be everywhere at once, and all Torgo needs to do before he gets caught is cause enough damage to make the ritual impossible. He’s going to start with the Master’s wives, those snickering bitches. They’re awake now, preparing spell components and fetching materials for the Master. And luckily for Torgo, they tend to stay as far away from each other as possible because they can’t stand one another. They’re sitting ducks. They laughed at him behind his back when he did nothing but faithfully serve them. They used him, tormented him, mocked him, and now they’re going to suffer for it. He’s gonna fuck ‘em, and he’s gonna kill ‘em. At this point, he doesn’t even care if it’s in that order.
Oh no, the Master will not approve. But he’s not going to be able to do anything about it before it’s too late.
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I’m sorry for my prolonged absence from the site, and it will be a little longer before I’ll be able to update. I was involved in a pretty significant physical altercation about a week ago and it’s taken me a while to recover. But before you ask, don’t worry, I’m completely fine. It’s just been pretty complicated lately getting everything sorted out; hopefully everything will be clearer soon. It’s all coming back to normal, and I can safely say that I’ve seen and done things in the past few days that will give me stories (and nightmares) for the rest of my life.
And now for something completely different.
Before all of this madness swung into high gear, I attended a gala screening of Rampage, the latest release by Dark Maze Studios, creators of the hilarious and fantastically original gamer movie Press Start*– a film full of old-school gaming references from the Nintendo era that an old gamin’ salt like me always finds irresistible. And no, Rampage has nothing to do with the adventures of giant city-destroying monsters. You may be more familiar with its bastardized American ur-name: Turkish Rambo.
Oh yeah.
Dark Maze acquired the rights to this classic and released it in the United States on DVD for the first time since its creation over 23 years ago, and has even gone the extra mile by commissioning a faithful, English dubbing track and an all-original score by Jake Kaufman, the composer for Press Start and Contra 4. Until now, you could only catch snippets of movies like this on YouTube, but now you can watch it raw and uncut! And if you’re not completely sold on this already, it’s directed by the same guy responsible for Turkish Star Wars, the movie that nearly broke my mind and sent me gibbering “Everybody in the pooooo-o-o-o-ol” in a nuthouse somewhere.
The movie, patterned loosely after Rambo: First Blood Part II, follows action hero Serdar as he is freed from military prison to infiltrate and put down a band of anti-government guerillas. At least, I think that’s the gist of it. It’s hard to tell because often times it feels like the movie was edited with a pair of hedge trimmers. At some point, he rescues a sleepy-eyed blond woman whose only contribution to the story seem to be whining and wordless sniveling (like most movies of this genre). And the Vincent-Price looking villain (whose ubiquitous scowl makes him look like a permanent =[ frowny face) blows Serdar’s cover almost immediately and buries him in sand, where he proceeds to shout at him for about fifteen minutes demanding to know who he works for (because, y’know, it could be anybody).
The riffing here was coming too furiously to adequately understand the nuances of this rich, subtle, sweeping epic, so you’ll have to excuse me if the whole plot sounds a little sketchy. After some time he escapes and embarks on a punishingly long, Cormanesque rock-climbing sequence, interspersed with footage of other people we don’t know, doing things we don’t understand in places with no seeming spatial relation to the action at hand.
I don’t want to spoil everything for you, but my personal highlights of the night were of Serdar slitting a man’s throat twice (who was still able to phone up his boss and gurgle a warning), and of course, the thrilling climax where Serdar goes apeshit on the villain’s entire compound with a stolen rocket launcher. The effect used to simulate a real rocket launcher’s firing mechanism involves a grip just off-screen tying a string to the rocket and pulling it away as fast as he can. This is accompanied with a “thoomp!” sound not unlike dropping a long cardboard tube on the ground. Then, of course, there’s the plethora of cartwheeling, flying stuntmen falling ass-over-teakettle (in many cases, jumping toward the blast), and Serdar’s amazing good fortune in finding spare rockets just lying around behind oil drums.
It’s a veritable orgy of nonsense violence (y’know, sort of like the latest Rambo movie), and if you’re looking to start a movie-riffing night at your parties, there’s no movie better to start with than Rampage. The DVD is also loaded with special features, an audio commentary, and a mini poster destined for a spot of honor on my wall. Fantastic stuff, especially since the English dubbing is played completely straight-faced, without a hint of ham or parody, just as it should be. Ed Glaser himself said that they took every effort to perfectly replicate the spirit and sound of all of the dialogue and effects, complete with the slain soldier’s Ahnuld-like “nyaaaauuuugh” death throes.
If you want to catch a great action flick…well, you might want to rent Die Hard. But if you want some serious, balls-to-the-wall action, get some life back into your parties, or to put a frigging awesome movie on your shelf that few people but hardcore riffers would ever own, you’ve got to check out Rampage. Give it a shot.
Or Serdar will cut your goddamn throat. Twice.
* To my shame, Ed Glaser, the creator of Press Start was good enough to send me a completely free copy of the movie in the hopes that I would review it. When I recorded my half-hour long review, I realized just as I was turning the camera off that I had forgotten to turn on the battery pack of my lavalier microphone, and I didn’t get a single syllable of sound. Instead of re-recording it like I should have, I got angry and moved on to something else, which was a true disservice to Mr. Glaser and all the people who worked very hard on a one-of-a-kind, entertaining movie about video game heroes. I’ll see if I can’t make it up to him.
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