Vafthrudnir

"When the moon turns red the dead shall rise..." - and apparently the first thing that newly-risen, lifeless corpses do is act for Fulci. And, for that matter, it's the best he deserves. My roommate had this movie sitting around; someone gave it to him because he bought them a beer. Well, at least he didn't over-pay for the movie. A priest hangs himself; a seance; a medium falls over and sees the hanged priest, plus a zombie ripping its way out of the ground. At this point, I'm not sure whether I was blinking more at the crass lack of subtlety or the sheer incoherency of the whole thing, but wait, it redeems itself in just a minute. A cop shows up and begins a random interrogation because the medium died (lucky her, she gets to leave). And here it comes - a burst of flame, accompanied by a monstrous roar, leaps out of the ground for no clear reason - but it immediately sinks back into the ground. And this was when I knew I was in for a treat, because, yes, kids, all they did to get it to sink back down was to play it again, backwards. You even see the abrupt cut when it runs backwards - amateur editing of the worst variety. I think it does it twice, but I must have seen it some fifty times. For about a half-hour I rewound and replayed to watch the flame cut and run backwards again. And again. My appalled eyes simply could not credit the ineptitude. So I watched it over and over, crying hysterically with laughter, until I finally had to call a friend over and enjoy the train-wreck with company. We laughed ourselves hoarse, but even the worst edit-job in the world eventually runs out of humor, so we watched the rest. And yes, it *is* so bad it's a riot, but the rest does not compare to that descending fire. A few days ago, I went back to pop it in again; it was a weekend night, I was pretty drunk and I wanted to laugh at the backwards flame again. To my disappointment, my roommate had gotten rid of it - he traded it to someone else in exchange for a beer. Oh, well; at least he didn't over-pay for the beer.

Ah, Cataclysm, The Nightmare Never Ends... a turkey by any other name, Romeo, would gobble just as loudly. And this one's a Thanksgiving feast of epic proportions. It suffers from production values so low you have to go digging in the dirt to find them, from the sound (awful) to picture quality (atrocious) to the acting (Faith Clift saves the rest of the cast; by giving the single worst performance I have ever seen on screen, she almost makes the rest look merely mediocre by comparison). Entire scenes are washed out in a black muddle by some truly godforsaken camera-work, the dialogue is laughable... and so on, runneth the litany of complaints. But, I kinda liked it, and part of the reason I criticize so harshly is to prevent accusations of bad taste. That said, the most startling thing about this movie is that the committed horror fan (you know who you are) will find some truly unsettling moments, some real, honest-to-God creeps. They're few and far between, but they are there, and make the rest of the movie -- let's not say "good", that's a little overboard, but at least *fun*. It's quirky and surreal enough at times to see where a little talent and a vastly reworked script might have resulted in a rare gem. It had the potential to be more Session 9 than Plan 9, and if it failed, it will at least make you nostalgic for the good old days when terrible horror movies had miniscule budgets, rather than unforgivably large ones. (Anyone here see Ghost Ship? My condolences.) Part train wreck and part cubic zirconia in the rough, bad enough to hurt but not without its occasional spark, this is one that every fan of obscure horror needs to hunt down for that late-night viewing with a bag of chips and a six-pack.