[Rumour] Geforce GTX 400 Boxes are empty
Pictures of a variety of GTX 470/480 packaging and boxes have beenleaked online since Cebit 2010. Curiously, all these boxes have beenpictured as closed. Fudzilla reports that while the boxes do exist, theyare, in fact, empty.If you’re a serious film geek, then you’ve played the “what if?” game on more than one occasion in your life. Seriously — whether you knew it or not, whether you called it that? (or even called it anything at all for that matter) or not, you’ve done it. Here’s how it works — you’re spacing out at work and your mind wanders onto the subject of movies. Or you’re spacing out in front of a movie and your mind wanders onto the subject of other movies. Or you’re spacing out while you’re supposed to be watching your kid and making sure he doesn’t put his head inside that plastic bag you’ve left laying on the floor and — you get the idea. Anyway, while your brain is occupied with cinematic side-thoughts at a time when you should be attending to your actual responsibilities in life, you start formulating hypotheticals that go something like this : “gosh, what if (insert name of a director who didn’t helm the movie your thinking of) had directed (insert name of the movie you’re thinking of) instead of (insert name of director who actually?did make the movie you’re thinking of). Wouldn’t that be a trip?” Really. You’ve done this. Admit it. You do it a lot. All the time, in fact. Or at least every once in awhile.
Or maybe it’s just me. In any case, once you’ve exhausted all the waaaaayyyy furthest-out non-possibilities, like “What if Abel Ferrara had directed The Wizard Of Oz?,” and “What if Billy Wilder had directed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?,” you move into the frankly-even-more-interesting realm of match-ups that actually could, at least in theory, have happened, like “What if Tobe Hooper had directed Halloween?’ and “What if George Romero had directed Zombieland?” The potential end results of these type of directorial swap-outs are admittedly less hilarious than the first ones I’d mentioned, but actually?quite intriguing to consider because you can sort of see these folks making these films and fantasize about how they might have been different in more subtle ways.
Or, again, maybe it’s just me. And maybe my use of the term “fantasize” tells you that I need a hell of a lot more interesting fantasy life. In any case, somewhere? in-between those earlier “no way this shit could ever happen” unrealities I mentioned at the outset and the “hey, ya know, I could sorta see this” choices presented afterwards is a murky middle ground — “what if?” directorial scenarios that, at least chronologically speaking,? could have taken place, but just don’t seem all that likely for any number of reasons —and somewhere in that “murky middle” might be “What if Don Dohler had directed The Last House On The Left?”Well, friends, I’m here to tell you that you needn’t wonder any longer, because in 1987 Baltimore’s backyard monster-movie king did, indeed, unleash upon an unsuspecting viewing public his own take on Wes Craven’s horror classic (which was itself a take-off on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, but we needn’t go too far down that particular road for the purposes of this review).? He called his typically no-budget opus Blood Massacre — and Don, if you’re looking down on us mere mortals from your lofty perch in wherever it is visionaries go to when they die, huge props for that title, since nobody buys a ticket (or in this case picks a copy up from the rental shelves since this was a DTV effort) for something called Blood Massacre expecting anything less than a movie that delivers the fucking goods. When you’re as upfront about your product as that, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner where you absolutely have to cater to our most base expectations, with no pretense whatsoever. Not that pretnese was ever a Dohler strong suit by any means.
I’m pleased to report that Blood Massacre does exactly that — if you can get over some shit that sounds seriously absrud on paper first, like baby-faced Dohler regular George Stover playing a shellshocked Viet Nam vet who leads his pals on a cross-state murder and robbery spree essentially for , near as I can tell, the hell of it and ends pretty much every sentence aimed at a member of the opposite sex with the word “bitch;” and “point-and-shoot” Don trying to adopt a Michael Mann-esque visul style (Miami Vice being pretty big at the time) with the film’s opening kill scene in a bar; and beheadings, sawblade-shooting improvised weapons, and slapdash, right-outta-the-Mekong-Delta homemade explosions all handled in Dohler’s signature “geez, that sure looks pretty phony but here’s an ‘A’ for effort” style. In other words, it’s bloody and gory — way bloodier and gorier than you’d expect a Don Dohler film to be — but it’s executed in such an ultra-cheap, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants manner that there’s still no doubt that only one man could be behind it all.
Still, it is a bit of a trip to consider that the guy who gave us The Alien Factor could also give us this splatterfest. Sure, Dohler had wandered into sci-fi/horror hybrid territory before with flicks like Nightbeast and Fiend, but there’s no space aliens to be found here — just a carload of violent psychopaths who are on a tear and find themselves out of gas and subsequently?wander into a country home (the last one on the left side of the road, naturally) occupied by a family who are even crazier than they are — and happen to be cannibals, to boot.
Now, wait — before you cry foul and bitch at me for giving away too much, I should point out in my own defense that, Dohler being Dohler and subtlety and surprise being two words that don’t even come within sniffing distance of his vocabulary, this could-have-been-a-nifty-little-surprise is given away well before Krug — err, Stover and company arrive at the scene because Dohler has already taken the liberty of showing us the family’s patriarch, one Howard Parker (fellow Dohler regular Richard Ruxton — and for those who like to keep an eye out for other member’s of Don’s happy troupe,??look for a cameo from Don Leifert as a video store clerk early on) butchering up some dime-store simulated human remains in his shed about five minutes into the film. To his credit, when the first body (that they’re not responsible for) is found by a couple of our kill-happy interlopers in the trunk of one of the Parker family vehiles, a (very) slight frisson of dramatic tension pierces the hermetically-sealed Dohlerverse for the briefest of instances, but fear not — it dissipates quickly and we’re soon back in the familiar territory of knowing well in advance how all of this is going to play out, but still wanting to see how they manage to do it on such a miniscule budget and with such lovably crummy actors.
And that’s sort of the beauty of Blood Massacre in a nutshell — if you’re unfamiliar with previous Dohler efforts it’s really just going to come across as?an ultra-cheap, ultra-short?, subpar Last House rip-off with gore aplenty, none of it terribly well-realized, and an ending that comes out of left field and makes no fucking rational sense whatsoever yet still somehow feels utterly and hopelessly predictable. But if you’re already a veteran viewer of the somehow wholesomely-constructed and, dare I even say it, innocent little runarounds than our guy Don made with his friends, family, and neighbors, then it’s an almost surreal affair, as we watch him try his best to get his arms around a genre with which he’s clearly less than comfortable, but game enough to, pun fully intended, take a stab at. Whether it’s George Stover’s bloody “love” scene with the craziest of the Parker girls, or Richard Ruxton taking a sawblade to the guts, or the wannabe-trippy zombified ending that adds an element of the incongruously supernatural to a film that frankly has no place for it, you’re in a constant state of disbelief here — accentuated by the rotten film stock used and poorly-executed outdoor lighting at night that renders much of the flick well-nigh unwatchable — that the same guy we know and love from such damn-near-family-friendly Z-grade exploitation fare as The Galaxy Invader ever thought he could transfer his same basic filmmaking approach (namely keep it cheap no matter what and get it in the can in one take because we don’t have any more blasting caps/cow guts/red food coloring) to the realm of (at least wannabe) hard-core psycho ultraviolent horror. As with all things Dohler, only a guy blissfully unaware of, or unconcerned with, his own limitations would even attempt anything like this, which is why I’ve always said that, quiet and unassuming exterior appearances and mannerisms aside, Don Dohler had more balls? than just about any other filmmaker you’d care to mention.Unfortunately, the experience of making Blood Massacre wasn’t a happy one for Don, given that when he completed the film back in ’87? the guys who had “bankrolled” his effort were displeased with the initial print he delivered and demanded, for reasons I seriously can’t fathom, that he go back and re-shoot the whole thing on cheaper filmstock and with some filler material added in to pad out the runtime? —?which still only came?to a whopping 73 minutes. Dohler re-shot it as instructed but was displeased with final result, yanked his name off it, and never much gave it another thought until he learned in 1991 that his financial backers had gone ahead and inked a video distribution deal for it anyway, at which point he agreed to begrudingly give the effort his blessing by re-inserting his name on the credits since, as he said, at that point he was in no mood to shoot the thing a third time just to have a finished product he might have been marginally more pleased with. The whole thing left such a sour taste in his mouth that he swore off movies for a good number of years until starting up Timewarp Films in the late 1990s.Still, if you’re interested — and you should be — Blood Massacre is available on DVD as part of the six-movie, two-disc “Serial Psychos” set from Pendulum Pictures. Pendulum is a Mill Creek sub-label, so you know what to expect — a rotten-looking direct-from VHS picture transfer with no remastering done and a mono soundtrack that’s likewise untouched . And while the soundtrack in particular might have really stood to benefit from some tender lovin’ care of some sort, what with many of the murder scenes having been obviously recorded at a much higher?level than most of the “talky” scenes, somehow a jarringly-assembled audio track and a picture that makes you squint to make out just what the fuck is exactly happening in many instances only adds to the overall otherworldly “quality” of what this flick is all about. It’s only?fitting for a movie this awkward to look and sound awkward,? and given the bullshit that Dohler had to go through getting this thing in the can and out to the public in a form that he was far less than satisfied with,? it’s nice to see his one and only attempt at a more “straightforward” horror flick get some justice — ironically by getting none at all. Blood Massacre is best viewed, and appreciated, as what it is — a cheap, gory, unwatchable-to-all-but-the-most-masochistic-of- Dohler-diehards mess. No wonder I love it so.
This is one I’d been looking forward to. Maybe it’s just a “guy thing,” but apart from the rather limp “Ali” and the disappointing “Miami Vice,” I think Michael Mann’s movies are, as the kids would say, the bomb. One of the most technically accomplished filmmakers around, Mann has an eye for the visual, an ear for the streets, and an intuitive understanding of the psychological mindset of both lawman and criminal unparalleled among today’s A-list Hollywood directors. “Public Enemies” looked like a winner from the get-go, with a top-notch cast, great historical backdrop, and a talented team behind the camera lead by Mann and his gifted cinematrographer, Dante Spinotti.
The results were everything I’d been hoping for and then some. As with “Miami Vice,” Mann drops us right into the middle of the action in “Public Enemies” with some? very brief introductory exposition followed by an intense jailbreak sequence that puts the pedal to the metal right off the bat, and once Mann’s got his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator, he seldom lets up.
The movie focuses on just a brief period of legendary bank robber John Dillinger’s life, from his absolute pinnacle to his eventual end, and while Mann doesn’t give us much by way of detailed background involving any of his characters, he smartly trusts his actors to convey that information to us and for the most part they deliver the goods and reward his faith in them.
Johnny Depp is out of this world as Dillinger, the screen’s coolest outlaw since Clint Eastwood’s Josey Wales. He’s a man of thoughtful action who’s always two steps ahead of everyone else, sometimes even himself. It’s the most intense and charismatic performance of Depp’s career, and he effortlessly conveys the charm and nonchalance that made Dillinger a folk hero in his time while giving hints at a raging cauldron boiling underneath the surface at all times. Dillinger’s life was a tightrope act, and Depp reminds us of that with every word and action.
Marion Cotillard is a stunning beauty who took the film world by storm with her portrayal of Edith Piaf in “Ma Vie En Rose.” She’s terrifically believable as? Billie, a girl with a hard past and little to dream of in the future who’s suddenly whisked off into a world of dangerous excitement when she meets Dillinger. The chemistry between herself and Depp is palpable and even the most jaded audience member will feel that even though these two just met and hardly know each other, their love is a smoldering fire that threatens to burn them both, but that they can’t turn away from. While one can plausibly argue that Cotillard is, if anything, underutilized here (and leaving an audience wanting to see more of a compelling character is a constant undercurrent in Mann’s working going all the way back to Brian Cox’s superb, and agonizingly short, turn as Hannibal Lecter in “Manhunter), what cannot be denied is that her appearance in this film represents a? second consecutive major international casting coup for Mann, hot on the heels of his landing Gong Li in to play the nominal female lead in “Miami Vice.”
Billy Crudup has a small amount of screen time as J. Edgar hoover, but he makes the most of it, portraying the paranoia, desperation for acclaim, and quiet ruthlessness that would consume him in his later years in their earlier, nascent stages with subtlety and intelligence. There’s no doubt in the viewer’s mind that Hoover will develop into a monster as his power grows over time.
The only somewhat disappointing turn in Christian Bale as G-man Melvin Purvis. He’s a stereotypical straight-shooting flatfoot who displays little of anything beyond an Elliot Ness-type caricature—plus his accent isn’t too terribly believable. Not a rotten performance, but nothing special, either.
On the technical side, while I’m not too crazy about movies shot on high-def video and transferred to film (a technique Mann also used on “Collateral” and “Miami Vice”), I have to begrudgingly admit that it works here. This is a movie that drops you right into the middle of the action, and the crystal clarity of high-def combined with cinematographer Spinotti’s frequent use of hand-held and unconventional angles does a fantastic job of making the viewer a part of the action rather than just an observer. The muted color palette Mann uses throughout also captures the feel of popular psychological preconceptions of the Depression era and adds an extra layer of ambiance to the proceedings.
All in all, “Public Enemies” is one to put on your must-see list, and represents something of a return to form of an American cinematic archetype that has been sadly missing lately—the outlaw as folk hero. While Mann has always excelled at creating sympathetic and believable villains,? in the past the editorial viewpoint of his films has always favored the lawmn in the end. Not so here. This time there’s no doubt the good guys and vice versa, as we’ve got a man of the people bank robber who only wants the bank’s money, not yours, up against ruthless G-Men who will beat, torture, and kill anything in sight if it means getting their man. In an entertainment environment where film and TV cops are always good and any shortcuts or abuses they partake in are always shown as well-meaning and just, it’s both a refreshing—and necessary—change of pace. The heroic outlaw is as American as apple pie and on this July 4th, I’m glad to see it make its return after far too long an absence.
I respect any movie that can’t live up to its own self-generated hype. Not because short-changing customers at the box office by not giving us our hard-earned money’s worth is in any way admirable behavior, mind you, but because it usually means that the hype is soooooo good. And as far as hype goes, you really have to hand it to director William Crain’s 1976 blaxploitation “monster thriller” Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, because its promo lines are among the very best. “The Fear Of The Year Is Here!” “A Monster He Can’t Control — Has Taken Over His Very Soul!” “Don’t Give Him No Sass Or He’ll Kick Yo’ Ass!” Honestly, is it even right to expect any film to live up to the level of pure awesomeness such sensationalist pitches suggest?
Needless to say, Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (recently re-issued on DVD by VCI Entertainment in a so-called “35th Anniversary Special Edition” that doesn’t seem all that “special” at all because it contains no extras to speak of apart from a few weirdly-assembled promo trailers for other VCI titles — props on the film restoration though, the widescreen transfer, though still grainy in spots as you’d expect, looks great, and the mono soundtrack is serviceable-if-unspectacular) doesn’t even really come close. But it’s still a pretty decent little slice of cinematic nostalgia that wins a few extra points for positively reveling in setting a few tried-and-true Hollywood cliches on their rear ends.
The always-reliable Bernie Casey stars as Dr. Henry Pryde, a UCLA biochemist driven to develop a serum to reverse the effects of cirrhosis of the liver because it killed his mama, a hard-working maid at a whorehouse who died from the disease (oh, and none of the “ladies of the evening” would help her out in her death throes, thus engendering a psychotic hatred of prostitutes in young Hank, not that we learn any of this until about halfway through the film, by which point he’s already killed a couple of them — but whoops, I’ve gotten a little bit ahead of myself, haven’t I?) and left him a broken-hearted, and apparently quite determined, young man. Dr. Pryde is assisted in his researches by his faithful colleague, and part-time lover, Dr. Billie Worth (Rosalind Cash), and it’s a good thing he’s got some help because he seems to take a few hours off from the lab every day to go? down and help out at the — I’m not kidding here, folks — Watts Free Clinic and Thrift Shop (he’s apparently a good old-fashioned regular MD as well as a big-shot biochemist), where he befriends a rather striking-looking young(ish) hooker named Linda (Marie O’Henry — funny, she doesn’t look Irish) and is soon wining her, dining her, taking her for spins around Watts in his Rolls Royce, and generally treating her a lot better than most of her back-alley johns probably (okay, certainly) do. What’s our guy Henry got in mind —?just a piece of action on the side, or is he after something more?If you said “something more,” award yourself exactly no bonus points on our movie trivia scale (that doesn’t even exist anyway) because, of course. that’s the way this shit always works. He wants her to try his new test serum out, to be a “human guinea pig,” if you will, and he desperately needs one because the real guinea pigs (and rats, and mice) that he’s been trying his miracle-liver-cure on in the lab have turned into ferocious beasts that rip apart and devour all their fellow caged creatures. Oh, and he tried it on some old dying woman at the free clinic and it killed her, too. Not that he has the decency to inform Linda of this.
She’ll do it, but there’s a catch — he’s gotta try it on himself to first to prove to her that it’s safe. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Doc Pryde plays along — and you can probably guess the rest: he becomes a vicious albino killing machine who can’t be stopped. She back-tracks, quite wisely, on her previous offer to give the serum a go, runs off into the night, he gives chase for awhile, and then, when he can’t find her, goes on a killing spree through Watts, specifically targeting practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.
Come daytime, though, it’s back to normal for the not-so-good doctor, and he’s blissfully unaware of his nocturnal activities — although little things like blood on the headlights of his Rolls clue him in that something nasty must have happened. Still, might as well keep pumping the serum into your arm every night, because you’ve got no specific memories of anything bad going down. And so the nightly rampages continue apace for a few evenings, until Linda finally confronts Henry during the day and threatens to go to the cops herself if he won’t turn himself in. Naturally, getting anyone down at the precinct to believe her story about a black doctor who turns white and evil at night and kills hookers is a pretty tough sell, but for reasons that are never even attempted to be justified by the script, one Lieutenant Jackson (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) buys her tale and sets about tracking Dr. Pryde’s nighttime alter-ego down.
If you don’t know where all this is headed, give me back those points you didn’t earn anyway in our trivia game that doesn’t exist. Pryde’s a dead albino duck by the time it’s all over. Nothing unusual about that. What is weird, though, is how director Crain seems to waver in his feelings toward his protagonist (Casey, for his part, keeps his performance pretty consistent throughout depending on what the script calls for — affable by day, enraged zombie by night). At first, we’re quite clearly supposed to like the guy. Then, we’re supposed to be shocked by his amorality in roping unwilling test subjects into his web of human experimentation. Then, we’re supposed to be suspicious of his anti-hooker motives. Then, we’re supposed to be appalled at his cold-blooded murder spree. And finally, when the cops gun him down, we’re supposed to feel sorry for the guy. That kind of directorial schizophrenia is a rare thing, and frankly, while it doesn’t make for good filmmaking according to any generally-accepted definition? of the term, it’s certainly an interesting thing to see play itself out, and combined with the completely unsubtle upturning of the old (and nauseating) “white is good (even down to hats and costumes, but especially when it comes to skin color), black is bad (even down to hats and costumes, but especially when it comes to skin color)” silver screen cliche, it ensures that Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde is a more memorable — and, frankly, fun — viewing experience than its strictly by-the-numbers script would suggest.
The final crime report from the desk of Lieutenant Jackson reads : Robert Louis Stevenson literary classic makes a trip to the ghetto and, for the most part, emerges unscathed.
Here’s the thing — I want to like director Christopher Lewis’ 1985 shot-on-video slasher Blood Cult so much more than I actually do. That’s largely due to its place in movie — or, more specifically, home video — history. Ya see, Blood Cult is the first ever SOV direct-to-home-video flick, and anyone who’s followed this blog for any any period of time knows that my love for this genre knows no bounds. For reasons either too complex, or entirely too simple, to figure out, dime-store backyard horrors have always resonated with this armchair critic and always will, and this is where it all began.
Perhaps a bit of history is in order here — with the major Hollywood studios figuring out in the mid-80s that releasing their own back catalogues on VHS was going to be both cheaper and more profitable than licensing them out to the numerous video labels that were popping up all over the place, outfits like?Tulsa, Oklahoma-based United Home Video suddenly realized they had to either adapt or die. Most of their contemporaries did, indeed, peter out in relatively short order, but United survived (and carries on to this day under the VCI Entertainment label) by hitting on the rather ingenious idea of just making their own fucking movies. Simple, right? And they also figured (wisely, as it turns out) that by slapping some fancily lurid cover art on their straight-to-VHS wares, that they could hoodwink potential renters out there into thinking they were taking home the next great slasher flick (note the “In the tradition of Halloween” tag-line on the box art courtesy of the fine folks at VHSCollector.com) instead of some essentially homemade quickie.
In theory that all sounds good, and frankly in practice a lot of these subsequent efforts (think Video Violence and its sequel, Video Violence 2, Woodchipper Massacre, Captives, Killing Spree (okay, that was shot on film, but it’s still roughly of a piece with the other flicks we’re talking about here) and The Basement (alright, that was film, too — sue me), to name just a small handful) proved to be good, solid, admittedly cheesy fun. But the first steps out of the gate for the SOV-DTV genre were pretty tepid indeed.
That’s because Blood Cult, sadly, is pretty much nothing more than a crushing bore. I’m more or less genetically hardwired to love any shot-on-a-camcorder slasher made in and around Tulsa for $27,000 featuring less-than-basement-level production values, but damn if I didn’t find this flick to be one tough slog. I’m sorry, but the story of grizzled police detective (or maybe he’s a sheriff, it’s never all that clear) Ron Wilbois (Charles Ellis) attempting to solve a string of bloody sorority-house murders on a local college campus with the help of his intrepid librarian daughter, Tina (Juli Andelman) just isn’t nearly as intriguing as its admittedly by-the-numbers-but-that’s kinda-why-we-love-these-things premise would indicate.
The only clue left at the murder scenes is a medallion emblazoned with a dog’s head, and it’s Tina’s five-minute-long occult research that clues her old man into the fact that this is the symbol of an ancient satanic cult that’s into collecting body parts for (obviously) nefarious purposes. Throw in the requisite half-assed “acting,” poor gore effects, minimal editing resulting is some painfully lengthy takes, etc. that would all become de riguer in the SOV world and we would definitely seem to have a winner on our hands here. Yet as I’ve mentioned more than once already, Blood Cult never really manages to find its groove, frankly because it doesn’t even seem to be trying to. It’s almost as if Lewis and company were more concerned with just getting the damn thing made and out there than actually producing something remotely worth watching. Once they had your three or four dollar rental fee in their pockets, you were on your own, sucker — their job was done.
If you must, Blood Cult is available on DVD from VCI (naturally) — the full-frame picture has been remastered and looks reasonably good, the sound is mono but decent enough, and as you might guess being that they own the damn thing extras are plentiful, including cast and crew interviews, a trailer, a promo reel-even-though-it’s-not-on-a-reel-per-se, and a reasonably interesting feature-length director’s commentary. All in all a more than adequate package for a less than adequate movie.
United would go on to crank out a few more of these, most notably The Ripper and the? direct Blood Cult sequel Revenge, neither of which are exactly classics in the SOV world themselves, but they did get a little better, or at least more interested in what they were doing, as they went along. Unfortunately their first (hell, anyone’s first) foray into the field is too lackluster to be interesting without being actively bad enough to be fascinating. It just sort of happens.
If you’re wise, you’ll ignore its place in both horror and home video history and let it happen to someone else.
