MICROBUDGET MASSACRE 9:
Hysteric Eric checks out
Four More from the Indy Front!

A successful collaboration of several directors, Summer School is a fun, fast-moving movie that should appeal to horror fans. The gimmick is that horror film-obsessed Charlie has stayed up watching horror movies for days, and keeps falling asleep in class and having lurid dreams where the characters in school engage in things out of his horror films. But is he awake or asleep?
If you don’t like one dream, keep watching, there will be another along in a few minutes. Every character gets a chance to shine in this anthology type movie. My favorites would probably be the Vampire segment (convenient to have a hall pass that’s a wedge of wood) and the one where the janitor is a closet Nazi who kills the kids. The stories are all ridiculous, if course, but maintain the truthiness of the dream state, which is more important than making sense. .
Other stories involve spider people, killer rednecks, a slasher, and satanic sacrifice.
Features an excellent use of the full frame in several of the segments, like when two characters are hiding around a corner and you see the hallway on one side, with someone threatening approaching way down the hallway slowly growing nearer. I have to say that the composition was really involving (watch for the corners of the shot for details like monsters briefly appearing). The editing is also excellent.
Even though the segments are directed by different directors, I gather they’re all used to working with each other, as they all do many other jobs on-set, - like sound, cinematography and make-up. This means the lighting and look of the film don’t have jarring changes from segment to segment (for the most part). This and the fact that the same school settings and actors are re-used throughout, give it cohesion absent in most anthology type movies. The team’s technical talents result in maximum use of production dollar, and it’s well-lit, too, which is one of my big bugaboos with no-budget films, and the acting is enjoyable, especially the fat guy.
Good gore, although they are smart enough not to overdo it, and good attention to detail. It’s a throwaway shot, but I loved it when one of the vampires dies, and gives the finger to his killer before he ashes off! And I like how the characters may change with each story, but ring true to the characters. They may be immortal vampires, for example, but they remain snotty adolescents.
Summer School is a strong entry from the folks at www.randomcreatureface.com/. Buy it today!

American Punks is a 1997 crime movie previously released as Generation X-tinct, released here for the first time by Bloody Earth, yet another division of Camp. It’s a story of Detroit low-life slackers, sad-sack losers and no-hopers vividly personified by the lead actor Mike Passion, who plays Bobby, leader of such a cluster of rejects and wanna-bes.
Bobby’s friend Nail gets roughed up in the beginning by gangster Chachi, who threatens his life - over $800 worth of weed! It’s supposed to communicate what a loser the character is, but seemed to me to be a unsound business decision on the gangster’s part. Two cussing stoner lowlife ne’er-do-wells, spouting “all over you like a cheap suit” clichés, fuck up a yuppie at a party store by throwing soup in his face, then driving off. Nail gets stabbed to death by Chachi in a diner when waitress is in the back and Bobby’s in the bathroom. Bobby gets picked up by cops, or rather cop, as he seems to be the only cop in the office. A ridiculous lengthy cliché-ridden scene follows, full of “Be watchin yo ass punk”, “are you gonna charge me or what” and “I want to confess…you suck big dicks.” It stretches credulity, as does any scene with the cop (Detective John Holmes!) in it. Not buying his threadbare office, either.
The wanna-be tough guys characters smoke a lot of ganga and talk a lot of shit (at least Bobby does), and portrayals are broad and stereotypical but not broad enough to be camp, just slightly more realistic. A psychic at party tries to figure out who killed their friend Naomi, a story thread that went nowhere. Actors are of varying skills but dialogue is not terribly interesting. Bobby and his gang of unemployed slackers harass an old drunk in bar who calls them “the lost boys”. He’ll get his revenge later on with a car cigarette lighter. Bobby thinks the yuppie (improbably named Thunder Goldberg) killed their friend, so they attack him at his home - but he knows how to fight, kicks all their asses, and kills one, scattering the rest. Bobby and friend get left behind as their loser buddy drives off without them.
I could tell long before it happened that Bobby was going to try to buy a gun from Chachi. There’s only one gangster in town, at least that we’ve met, so it’s inevitable Bobby is going to end up scrapping with him.
Rambles on with some bits that don’t pay off, like the psychic, and a stupid dice game showdown with the old man. Bobby repeatedly gets the shit end of life, and while I appreciate the attempt at character development, it does seem to run a bit long, and a few cuts may have helped the pacing.
Lead actor Mike Passion is irritating, as his overpowering character is supposed to be (he does egg his friend on to suicide). He’s an amateur actor, but he has a manic camera presence lacking in rest of the cast. He’s a blur of intoxicated enthusiasm, as if everyone else were moving in slow motion. He’s in almost the whole thing, so you’d do best just to give in and enjoy his total commitment to the angry portrayal. It’s not by any means an understated or restrained performance, but burns with a righteous sarcasm and frenzied energy and holds your attention when the story or other performances may fail to do so. OK, monkey?
Features a fairly decent rock soundtrack by Itchy and Shock Therapy, and hilarious commentary track with the director giving a nakedly candid appraisal of the film and his own talents.
Investigate further at: http://www.campmotionpictures.com/.

Rapturious is a fairly decent urban horror movie about a white rapper who may be possessed by an evil spirit. It starts with a long 12-minute prologue showing an old west outlaw in jail expressing no remorse for his crimes, and then he’s finally hung. Cue credits. Gratuitous Indian with painted face; I was disappointed he didn’t show up later, like in an Oliver Stone movie. Written and directed by Kamal Ahmed, one of the Jerky Boys, but don’t expect a comedy, it’s very straightforward, sober even, and has little humor but offers some real old-fashioned scares.
In the 20th century, white rapper Rapturious is a trainwreck. As well as selling him his glass (speed), his drug dealer turns him on to a new drug called Afterlife (first one’s free) and weird shit starts to happen. Violent hallucinations result from taking the dope. In hallucinations he hears “we found you dead man”, and his increasingly intrusive hallucinations point to the fact that he is the reincarnation of the evil soul of the cowboy murderer, who somehow escaped from hell and is hiding in his body.
Rap (thought I heard it pronounced both raptorious and rap-shur-eous) is relatively soft-spoken for a rapper. In one scene, a rival crew disses his honky ass at a club with some freestyle. But his style is more of a spoken word thing as he raps about his tortured past (parents dead, abused by foster parents); at the same time his agent wishes he would not be so sensitive to media’s questions about his past. He seems an unlikely star, but at a contract negotiation for a film they want him to star in (script shown is this movie’s), someone mentions he’s supposedly moving 50,000 units a week!
The high points are the gory and sexy dreams Rap experiences. Genre queen Debbie Rochon still looks very nice (maybe even better with some hips on her) and is quite capable in her role as Rap’s put-upon manager. And yes, she finds reason to let off a good scream or two. Drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs swings in with a subtly sinister portrayal of a psychiatrist Rap’s not sure whether to trust. He really makes a big contribution (shot from every creepy angle), with his gentlemanly threatening doctor, who regresses Rap to figure out his past life. His character is professional and polite, but with a promise of menace bubbling under the surface. Joe Bob does a great job! Eric says check it out.
Good production values, and I’d expect it to show up late night on cable TV. Overall, it’s not bad, and actually pretty watchable, kind of a throwback with an 80s feel. Its urban setting and subjective reality theme remind me of other films with similar themes and settings, like Jacob’s Ladder and maybe even Q! It sustains a creepy vibe, with a slow burn and effective mood music (not much rap). The urban settings are used well, and it has professional acting. Ahmed obviously had slightly more money than a no-budget filmmaker and had access to good quality locations, and has made an effective horror thriller.
This movie is distributed by http://www.tlareleasing.com/.

Fat Cat, a division of Tempe, distributes foreign ghost story anthology Wingrave. It has the honor of being the first English-language film shot in Egypt. Too bad it’s a disappointing action-less drag that few will enjoy.
Ghost chaser Wingrave waits in a haunted room waiting for something to happen (just like the viewer) and eventually gets around to telling us a few tales of his paranormal adventures. It’s a good enough concept, but never really fully developed beyond him taking notes on notebook and looking under furniture for ectoplasm. Most offensive is an extraneous use of intertitles (dialogue taking up the entire screen, like a silent movie) making me wonder if they lost the sound. Later I figured out that it was just precious arty crap and wanted to strangle the filmmaker for using this gimmick for more than 2 minutes, in fact using it throughout the entire film.
The incredibly awkward device of using intertitles serves to further remove the viewer from the artistic illusion, and perhaps for a non-English speaker it might be better tolerated – no, no, that just means that a foreign edition would have even more words – subtitles for the intertitles. How ridiculous! I found myself rejoicing, when halfway through the picture, Ahmed put the printed dialogue on-screen at the same time as the actors! Woo-hoo! Very little dialogue is used; maybe it’s made for people who can read English better than they can understand the spoken word. The segments that don’t have intertitles rely on heavy-handed narration. Wingrave’s ponderously slow pace put me to sleep. Suffers from sameness of video look, and a lack of action and dramatic high points. Assuming it was meant to be more of a TV movie class of spookiness, I can expect no gore, that’s all right. Especially as it’s the first English-language movie shot in Egypt (Cairo in ten days –yes, sometimes I DO watch the extra features so you don’t have to). But what I can’t forgive is the slowness and lack of excitement, and I can’t imagine a foreign audience really liking it much, either. The lack of tension is crippling to the viewer’s attention to this film.
The intertitles eventually become maddeningly distracting. I suppose it’s an awkward attempt at stylization, but it doesn’t really work. The shot on video look is too bright and clear to really be scary. The sameness of the video is reinforced by the setting- most of the film takes place in same apartment, or what looks like the same apartment. You’d think Cairo, hey, great city for locations, but no, the film seldom leaves the same apartment, so they might as well have shot this static stinker in Sacramento for all the bounce the location gave their production value. Initially I liked the slow eerie one-man-band synth music, but it eventually grated as well, without a dramatic crescendo to limp towards.
Seems like a trust-funder’s vanity project. Has no business representing itself as a horror movie. Certainly is not a suspense thriller, either. Some experiments lead to more innovation, others blow up in your face. This one threatened to do something, then just slowly fizzled out.
Wingrave can be ordered from Fat Cat at: http://www.tempevideo.com/