Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001)

The Meat of Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001): There's not enough room in the city for both an Electric Dragon and a Thunderbolt Buddha! There can be only one! *CRACKLE* *ZAP* 


Lady Terminator's Special Guest: Author Jamie Grefe! All you have to do is take one look at the badass cover of Jamie's newest release to know you're in for a smutty slaughterfest!

Available Here!

I'm a huge exploitation fan and I absolute loved Domo ArigaDIE!!! You can check out more of my thoughts on it over on Goodreads.

If you're diggin' the vibe, be sure to head on over to Jamie's blog for 30 Days of Curated Domo ArigaDIE!!!
 

And now here's Jamie with 5 things he loves about Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001). As always, be forewarned. Mild spoilers may lurk ahead!

I blame my lack of inner stillness on those foreign films I used to rent from the library. I lived alone. That was when the library still carried VHS. Undusted shelves packed with plastic stories, mysteries to be pondered. Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels. Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. Fellini. Even Godard and his crashed cars. But Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust was the one film that seeped over: the needle pricks, packed trains of silence, the psychic powers, bodies, the horror within. It was all so quiet. And Angel Dust injected a seed in my cranium. Once I began my Japanese language studies, I suffered to decipher that foreign code without subtitles, each time more baffled than the last. Each time richer. And then I got lucky. 

I took a flight to Osaka in 2001 to stay with a friend. Eventually, we made our way up to Saitama, took the train to Tokyo to sightsee city lights. I had other, more "electric," plans in mind. Somehow, I had caught wind of an intimate movie theater called Uplink X in Shibuya. The day we were in Tokyo it happened to be playing a tremendous film called Electric Dragon 80,000V directed by the same mind-warper who did Angel Dust. Of course, we bought tickets and lived that film.  

My friend was pummeled by a wicked dizzy spell when the film finished. I had forgotten that a film could do that to a person. Films can overwhelm. She was nauseous from the voluminous roar. Electric Dragon 80,000V is no ordinary film. In my world, it is immense.  

This film is a heavy metal punch.

This film is string-scraping feedback.

This film is lightning lizards.

This film is skin turning reptile. 

This cinematic experience is a study in how to shiver with electric fever, wanting more. Whereas Ishii's Angel Dust is a study in restrained, quiet psychological horror, Electric Dragon plays out as a blast of violent intensity, volume, volume, smashingly loud reptilian volume. 

1. THE SOUND AND THE SQUEAL

Shibuya’s Uplink X had cranked the volume up to maximum level for this movie. The sound was as loud as a scrap metal concert melting your skull or the sound when you stick your head inside a tractor. I should have brought earplugs to squelch the blood. It hurt. I felt like I was being ear-drilled for an hour. And I paid money for that revelation. I’d like to think the barrage of volume was purposeful. It certainly accounted for my friend’s physical discomfort (an expulsion of the dragon) after the film. And the sound in this film is a gorgeous monster.

From the crackling power lines...

...to the squeal of “Dragon Eye” Morrison’s guitar...

...and how his pet dragon slurps up fresh bugs in juicy slurp swallows...

...crisply satisfying. 

Everything flows. Dub. Bass. Noise arcing. Jungle. Humming. City drone. And a punch to the jaw explodes a face. 

2. PSYCHOPHYSICAL TRAINING: “DRAGON EYE” MORRISON

They tried to control his rage. They tried to suppress the rumbling darkness of excess. Even as a boxer, Morrison was too much. This is a character with more psychophysical power than his soul knows how to handle. Tadanobu Asano, maestro thespian. He plays the part perfectly. He’s a poisonous cobra, an actor in possession of the powers of transfiguration. 

I idolized Asano for years, mainly due to his role in this film. I found myself searching to slay my own dragons across four countries. Maybe I’m still searching. Maybe my eyes haven’t yet clouded over, become fully human. 

Not that I haven’t tried to summon that great beast out of the breast of who I would like to be, but I don’t own a guitar anymore. I left my Dan Electro baritone in Shinjuku. I hope a dragon shreds it to bits, breaks it, stills the strings to sing, destroyed by concrete and neon. By electric death. 

3. VOLT CONTROL / NON-CONTROL: THUNDERBOLT BUDDHA 

I am frightened by characters who wear masks, but characters who wear half-masks are the best. And this mask, this Buddha (has to be golden, right? Silver, maybe?) is too good to not talk about. A ghost in daylight afloat on the streets. 





The listener. And that scene on the rooftop where Thunderbolt is spying on the yakuza's sleazy phone conversation, wearing his electrician’s uniform, electronic gear laid out, signals buzzing, static and crackles abound, that scene made me want to devote my wasted life to the allure of the current. 

It’s like he can’t not be plugged in to something greater than himself. His obsession. The quest for Truth. For what's right. He’s the grid, embodied, the transient source, a villain of corrupt enlightenment, cloaked in Tokyo. 

4. WHEN IS IT TOKYO? 

Director Ishii's wonderland supreme. And it gets better once you’re there. Seeing this film (a film as much about the electric waves of Tokyo as it is about reptilian journeys) within the maze of that city, as, at that time, a traveler in the city, makes my memory of this film all the more sharpened. 




Yes, it’s a cinematized representation of the labyrinth, but what a wonderful representation it turned out to be. The prominence of the artificial, the convenient. The contrast between the city’s quiet nature and the harsh blasts of noise that rise up out of its depths (high above in a grungy apartment or a rooftop) and the music. At night. A violin on the street. Tokyo is a city of hidden music. I fell in love at an impressionable age with the music of the Japanese language, a music that blended into Japanese music and how a city itself is able to light ideas within a person. And how better to show that idea than through the gaze of a Thunderbolt Buddha and an Electric Dragon? Some have said that Tokyo is a wistful blend of traditional and modern, but this film escalates that idea to a mixture of the Ancient and the Transcendent. This film is not a moment of Zen. 



It’s an electric chair of passion. 

5. REPTILIAN ANTI-REPRESSION 101 

And repression building. And shards. The psychophysical sessions where “Dragon Eye” Morrison straps himself to that table and electrocutes himself, those sessions are the image of a man attempting to cure himself of his inner (or ancient) dragons. He channels the dragons through the harsh noise he makes on his guitar. 




The noise consumes him, diminishes his own monster. The only thing that keeps our warrior calm is gazing at his real-life pet dragons, his own inner dragons, externalized, perhaps? We can find him searching the city. As we all are. And Thunderbolt Buddha suffers greatly in the opposite direction, unable to control the surge of his own electric curse. Yes, at times, he is able to direct it, but ultimately, I think it is a tumult inside him surging to erupt. And when these two giants collide, it’s mayhem blossoming, the purest kind of violent becoming we can hope to experience. It scathes. It roars. It has the potential to heal.

What does Lady Terminator think?   

Oh, man. Electric Dragon 80.000 V wasn't even on my radar until Jamie chose it for this blog post. And boy is it a beauty! You'll probably dig this if you're a fan of Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989).



 The Final Tallies?

What we learned today:

1. Jamie Grefe has awesome taste in movies. He writes cool shit. You should keep an eye on his blog so you don't miss anything and be sure to check out some of his work!

2. Electric Dragon 80.000 V is more than just a film. It's an experience. One that starts in your eyes...your ears...and ends in your reptile brain. Lady T recommends it!


Until next time...

Electric Kisses,
Lady Terminator AKA Erika Instead

Six-String Samurai (1998)

The Meat of Six-String Samurai (1998): Buddy just wants to be king but an orphaned kid, roving gangs of the wasteland, and Death himself aren't going to make this easy.

Lady Terminator's Special Guest: Author and editor, John Bruni! This dude writes the shit out of strange fiction. 
 

Available on Amazon

And when he's not getting his own writing out there, he's editing pieces for StrangeHouse Books and their monster erotica imprint, MonstErection Publishing. Check out John's blog Tabard Inn: Tales of Questionable Taste to read some of his stories and to keep up with his projects!


And now here's John with 5 things he loves about Six-String Samurai. As always, be forewarned. Mild spoilers may lurk ahead!

Back when I was in college, I watched a lot of late night Skinemax. No, not for the purpose of seeing softcore porn, although I wouldn't turn away from it if I found it. No, occasionally they played oddball movies you wouldn't be able to find anywhere else. It's where I saw Cannibal: The Musical for the first time, and this was before South Park was a show. In fact, they played a lot of Troma movies back then, which is how I saw Terror Firmer for the first time. 

Howerever, the night I stumbled upon Six-String Samurai changed my life. I was consuming a lot of bizarro work back then, in ye olde days before they had a name for the genre, when guys like Joe R. Lansdale were putting out the weirdest stories available. Six-String Samurai was the king of all bizarro cinema back then, and it hit me in just the right part of my mind at just the right time. I have yet to see anything like it, and as a result, it is one of my favorite movies of all time. 

I know this blog is more about horror than bizarro, but rest assured: this movie contains enough horror elements to qualify, as one of the villains will attest. Also, there is a sequence that happens in Hell (or at least the afterlife). Here are a few things I truly enjoy about this movie.


1. The Setting




This movie is technically alternate reality science fiction. The point of divergence with our reality? In 1957, the USSR nuked the fuck out of the US and took over everything except for Lost Vegas, "the last bastion of freedom" where Elvis Presley reigns as king.

Fast forward forty years, and Elvis has died. Now, every guitar-slinging swordsman wants the crown. Let the competition begin!

2. The Hero

The Six-String Samurai in question is a guy named Buddy, who looks suspiciously like Buddy Holly. 

Hell, they even call him Buddy, although a last name is never mentioned. He is the Clint Eastwood-ish anti-hero of our story. He's a warrior guitarist who has a habit of saying "swell" whenever something happens that he doesn't like. (That's more of a Dirty Harry thing than a Man with No Name thing, but still.)




He would have been at home in a Sergio Leone western or any number of kung fu classics. All he wants to do is get to Vegas and win the crown, but when he unintentionally rescues a kid from Death, he finds himself learning how to care for others, a necessary quality for a good king to have. 



3. The Tone

This movie is shot like a spaghetti western, which makes sense since the first such western, A Fistful of Dollars, was inspired by a Japanese samurai movie called Yojimbo. 




Except here, the Ennio Morricone score has been replaced by rock 'n' roll tunes. 

Plus, there's a reference to Clint early in the movie when a character who looks and sounds a lot like him shows up at a gas station/bar and accidentally sets himself on fire. 

4. The Villain

You can't get any better than Death himself. He's a contender for the throne, and he spends most of the movie killing other guitarist warriors. The fact that he looks like Slash is even more awesome, and you never see his face...

  

...except for in brief moments when all you can see is a skull.





5. Buddy's Encounters

To describe the things Buddy and the kid have to go through to get to Lost Vegas would be an act of madness. It's all so over the top, it's insane. It's bizarro. 

The first group of bad guys is made up of bowling enthusiasts. They dress in bowling shirts and carry around ball-bags; inside of each is a mace and a bowling pin dagger.






In the background, you can see the Red Elvises, a rock 'n' roll group of Elvis impersonating Russians who want Buddy's guitar (and, of course, the throne). 

You'll also see quite a few Mad Max-esque headbangers who catapult gumballs at their enemies. 

And then there are the Windmill People who dress in astronaut suits and worship an underground machine gone mad. 

The Red Army puts in a slightly racist appearance, as they fill in the role of the Native American in this insane western/kung fu extravaganza. 

But none of these villains can hold a candle to the cannibal family who live their lives as if they were the Cleavers from Leave It to Beaver. 





This family alone is worth the price of admission. Although I'm pretty sure I did a good job of enticing you. If you like bizarro, you should not miss this movie.  



What does Lady Terminator think?

Oh, man. This movie is fantastic. It's just my kind of strange, it has a great soundtrack and the visuals are gorgeous. They really milked these desolate locations for some tasty eye candy. I'm just going to let these amazing images do the talking...

The Final Tallies?

What we learned today:

1. Six-String Samurai is a beautifully bizarre film and totally worth your time. 

2. John Bruni is also beautifully bizarre and his books are totally worth your time.  (You can pick some up here.)


Until next time...

Stay Swell,
Lady Terminator AKA Erika Instead

Ghost Shark (2013)

Eyeball Treat: Ghost Shark (2013)

First Time View? Yup! It was also a virgin viewing for my special guest, speculative fiction writer, Douglas Hackle! I struggled to come up with the perfect combination of adjectives to describe Douglas to the folks who are unfamiliar with him and his work. In the end, I decided his bio from Tall Tales with Short Cocks IV says everything you could possibly need to know.

Photo Credit: Amy Seymour Photography

There. Now I'm sure you and Douglas feel like old chums.


The Meat of Ghost Shark: Ghost Shark just wants to get his munch on and now that he can appear wherever there's a drop of water, the whole world is his buffet. 

Let's see what Douglas has to say about his experience with Ghost Shark.

As always, be forewarned. Spoilers lurk ahead.


Hmm. Though this piece-of-shit movie almost falls into the it's-so-bad-it's-good category, I don't think it quite earns that honor. It's sort of just plain 'ol bad, IMHO. The only thing that redeems it (ever so slightly) is watching the eponymous, cheaply CGI-rendered Ghost Shark kill people. So, if you do intend on watching Ghost Shark, I highly recommend doing so in the following manner:

A) When you begin watching the movie, IMMEDIATELY press fast forward (speed: x2 or even x4).

B) As you sit there watching the blessedly silent, sped-up film (thereby sparing yourself the moronic story, the horrific acting, etc.), always be on the lookout for a glowing blue-white light. When you see that light, Ghost Shark is either on the screen or will appear momentarily. At that point, by all means, press play and then watch as Ghost Shark fucks somebody's day up.

C) When the scene ends and Ghost Shark slips off-camera for the moment, press fast forward again (x2 or x4--shit maybe even x6, x8 or x16) and wait for the next appearance of that glowing blue-white light.

D) Repeat steps A through C until the end of the shitty movie.

Anyhow, I'm supposed to think of a few things I "loved" about Ghost Shark. So here goes:



1. The Slip'N Slide Attack

See, the ocean cannot contain the fury of Ghost Shark. In fact, Ghost Shark can get you anywhere there is even a little bit of water, which is basically everywhere. A wet Slip'N Slide? Forget about it. Probably my favorite kill scene in the movie.






2. The Water Cooler Attack

Here a dude gets a drink from the water cooler in the Sheriff's office. Little does he know that he's also imbibing Ghost Shark! (See, apparently Ghost Shark has the ability to shrink itself down small enough to fit into a cup of water. After all, it is a goddamn ghost, so I guess it can do whatever the hell it wants. Plus it's not just any ghost--it's GHOST SHARK!!!)  Anyhow, dude starts spitting up blood and going into convulsions whereupon he splits in half as Ghost Shark emerges from his body and returns to its original size. Shit's bonkers.






3. Kitchen Sink Plumbing Attack

Some other unlucky guy is trying to fix the leak underneath his kitchen sink when Ghost Shark literally pulls him kicking and screaming into the pipes. Then the dude is completely gone! How is that even possible. Who cares? Shit's totes cray-cray.






4. Sprinkler System Goes Off Scene

There's a moment in the movie when the sprinkler system in a maritime museum goes off. A whole three seconds after the sprinklers are activated, the water on the floor--which, if you recall, was bone-dry just three fucking seconds ago-- is now six inches deep! Call me easily entertained but I love stupid stuff like that.





5. Finally, This Movie Has "Bull" From Night Court In It!

Yes, that's right. A drunken, hermitic, lighthouse keeper who knows more about Ghost Shark's origins than anyone else in the film is played by none other than Richard Moll, probably best known for his role as the bald bailiff  "Bull"  in the 80s sit-com Night Court.






But, like, isn't that actor dead? I think he is. Yeah, he must be. Which makes it that much cooler that they somehow got Bull's ghost to act in this movie--a ghost acting in a movie about a ghost. That's pretty rad.

Wait, I used to watch Night Court when it was a new show. Alas, that means I'm old! Hey, what if I'm dead too? Dead like Richard Moll. Shit, what if I'm a fucking ghost myself! Oh no! I just thought of something else, too. What if... what if I am....
GHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOST SHARRRRRRRRRRK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, my. What an unfortunate realization for my dear guest, Douglas Hackle. On the plus side, just think of all the traveling he'll be able to do now that he is able to instantly pop up wherever there's a bit of water!

And now, here are five things I (Lady Terminator) love about Ghost Shark.



1. The Ghost Shark

I know. I know. That's a pretty obvious choice. But it had to be said. Every single scene in which Ghost Shark makes an appearance is awesome. The effects are amusingly terrible and the kills are hilariously nonsensical. I can't get enough of Ghost Shark.






2. The Complicated Rules of Being a Ghost Shark

These rules are so complex I can't even wrap my brain around them. Here's Ghost Shark trying to gobble up some delicious teens. He can't quite reach though. Why is that? Is he stuck on something? Is there not enough water present?





But wait a minute. Ghost Shark is a muthafuckin' ghost! Solid objects don't hold him back! Neither does a lack of water!




I'm so confused. I'd make a terrible ghost shark.



3. Rednecks Torturing a Shark with Hot Sauce

Seriously. This is a thing that happens. No wonder Ghost Shark is in such a bad mood. 






4. The Chic Who Gets Her Leg Chomped By a Great White Ghost Shark and Pretty Much Walks It Off Like it Ain't No Thang

Who needs stitches or surgery when a few pretty belts will do the trick!

See. Walk it off. Barely a limp.






5. This Kid Showin' Off His Guns
 

He doesn't like being told what he can and can not do. If he wants to play in the water gushing from the fire hydrant, he goddamn will. He doesn't give two shits about some Ghost Shark.

And he will not hesitate to wreck you with a wrench.






So folks, where does that leave us? It looks like I enjoyed Ghost Shark a bit more than Douglas. Here are the final tallies...

What we learned today:

1. Ghost Shark is a ridiculous movie and has some highly amusing scenes. As far as the film as a whole goes though, it's probably not going to be appreciated by the majority of viewers. It takes a special kind of love of bad cinema to really get into Ghost Shark. Proceed with caution.

2. Douglas Hackle is a talented writer with a unique sense of humor. He may also be a ghost shark. Regardless, if you're looking for a read outside of the mainstream, you might want to pick up a copy of Clown Tear Junkies or check out some of Douglas' fiction available online.



Until next time...

Stay Dry,
Lady Terminator AKA Erika Instead