Jason goes to Holehead--Day 4

Two more movies last Monday night, each with a short.

First up the short THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF MR HOLLOW, which I saw at Dead Channels last year. [CORRECTION: I saw it at Cinequest, it just felt a lot like a movie that should've played at Dead Channels. My apologies] A super-stylish look at what you can see if you look at a photograph very, very carefully.

Then a good ol' grindhouse piece of sleaze, SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR by Troma alum Chad Ferrin. The movie opens with a medical student alone in his dorm injecting a drug into his veins. Suddenly there's a knock on the door, he gets up and opens it to find a naked woman there. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, they start doing it, and then she turns into a hideous (and male) demon and rapes him to death. The coroner's report says he died of a ruptured colon after being penetrated by a phallus measuring approximately 4 inches in diameter and 14 inches long (If I remember those dimensions correctly. I do remember they don't explain how the coroner determined that). Paranoia and accusations fly among the small circle of medical students who were friends of the deceased. They're all a bit messed up--drug use, rampant sexuality, etc. And they all start getting picked off by the demon one by one. Turns out (we find out), that a few days ago they had gotten together in an old archive room in the hospital, taken this weird drug, and perused the file (and played a tape) of an old pair of patients from the hospital--John and Wilma Hopper. They were a psychotic couple who raped their victims to death, and the hospital psychiatrist had tried to treat them with hypnosis (of course it went poorly). Somehow something they did that night brough the Hoppers back as demons. There's tons of sleazy grindhouse goodness, but the ending kind of annoyed me. Actually, at the time I gave it more credit, but as I think about it more I get more annoyed. I won't give any spoilers, but it's a twist that's been done several times and after you've seen it once it just starts to feel like a cop-out every time.

SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR plays again Saturday June 13th at 11:45 pm.

Then the next show was all about Japanese American fusion, starting with the short SHOWDOWN OF THE GODZ. A man is so obsessed with Godzilla it's starting to ruin his marriage (although his little girl loves it). So when he's faced with either accepting the ultimate Godzilla trivia challenge or saving his marriage, it's a moment of destiny. Starring George Takei.

And then SAMURAI AVENGER: BLIND WOLF, the "Sushi Western" I saw at Cinequest and immediately recommended to Holehead. Here's what I said about it at the time:

Anyway, the final film was Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf. It was freakin' awesome. A low budget B-movie mashup of a spaghetti western and a samurai epic. Of course, these two genres naturally go together, just ask Akira Kurosawa (and that's the last time I'll compare this to a Kurosawa film). This "Sushi Western" is the desert quest of a blind man looking for vengeance. 8 years ago, a horrible criminal named Nathan Flesher raped and killed his wife, forced him to gouge his own eyes out, and then killed his daughter. He survived, trained, and is out for revenge. There are 7 assassins between him and his goal. Kill each one in turn, then kill Nathan Flesher. He gets some help from the mysterious Drifter (Jeffrey James Lippold,
who was in attendance and had girls in the audience swooning over him). Crazy fun with witches, samurai C-sections, zombie warriors, and hypno-boobies! Yeah, hypno-boobies!

Yeah, and it's still awesome, and it was so gratifying that the rest of the Holehead audience seemed to dig it, and I've gotten some compliments thanking me for it. All glory to the hypno-boobs!

SAMURAI AVENGER: BLIND WOLF plays again Thursday June 11 at 5 pm and Friday June 12 at 7:15 pm.

And by the way, if you liked SAMURAI AVENGER, my other recommendation to Holehead was the other wolf movie, AUDIE AND THE WOLF. It plays this Sunday at 7:15 and next Thursday at 5. The proper way to enjoy it is to grab a big piece of meat and Phucket.