Alucarda (1978) is a very unusual Mexican Independent film from director Juan López Moctezuma that is made somewhat in the Italian/Spanish horror tradition, but yet very much his own. It has variously been known as Innocents from Hell, Mark of the Devil, Sisters of Satan and Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas. Moctezuma realized that this non-union production, with nudity and anti-church elements had little or no chance of a decent release in Mexico, shot it in English.

As the film opens, a dying woman gives birth to Alucarda, and sends her to be raised in a convent. Cut to 16 years in the future, when Justine, after the death of her parents, is sent to live in the same convent/orphanage, and ends up with Alucarda as a roommate. The two become great friends, and are inseparable. One day while they are out wandering, they encounter a gypsy hunchback and a female fortune teller, but are frightened by them, then enter a tomb, and become scared. Later, the hunchback appears in their room, and performs a ritual if blood binding Justine to Alucarda, then both to him. Later, they join a devil and his followers in an orgy.

They fall afoul of the nuns and the priest when they spout Satanic worship in class. The film is full of unusual imagery and unique scenes. For instance, the nuns' habits look more like a mummy, the sets look more organic than something built by man, and, in possibly the strangest scene, Justine is found naked in a coffin of boiling blood, and climbs out, although she was dead. They kill her with holy water, but not before she bites the throat out of the nun that liked her most. Both Tuna Romero as Alucarda and Susana Kamini as Justine show everything in several scenes, including some lesbian action. Several unknowns, both male and female, also show full frontal in the Satanic orgy scene.

IMDB readers have this at 5.8 of 10. There are no major reviews, and the specialty sites that have reviewed it did it out of a labor of love. IMDB comments are mainly positive. The pace is slow, and the plot a little hard to follow, but the imagery is very unusual, there is plenty of blood, and great nudity. This is a must see for genre fans, the DVD transfer is fair, and there are several interviews also on the DVD. C+

Movies:

Straw Dogs (1971)

Dustin Hoffman and Susan George play a husband and wife. Hoffman is a Casper Milquetoast mathematician from America, George is his simple wife from a working class family in a small town in rural England. They return to George's childhood home to allow Hoffman solitude and time to work on a new theory. George is soon bored by her life. Every time she asks for her husband's company, he is too busy and tells her to entertain herself. Soon they are engaged in a battle of wills. George goes into his work area and changes some of his mathematical formulas. Hoffman berates her and condescends to her.

The battle escalates. George is upset with Hoffman for not having the guts to stand up to the local thugs who are working on their garage. One of those thugs is George's girlhood boyfriend. Hoffman is filled with wimpy responses that imply George is creating her own problems by not wearing a bra. George is so incensed that she resolves to strike back at her husband, and parades around an open window topless, in full view of her ex boyfriend and the other perennially drunken local roughnecks.

The workers are inflamed by the site of George staring at them in her naked glory. They concoct a plan to take Hoffman on a "snipe hunt" one day, so that the ex-boyfriend can sneak into the house and get the woman alone. The former boyfriend has sex with her, then another local rapes her violently, with the boyfriend's co-operation. George never tells Hoffman about the rapes.

Not much later, Hoffman happens to run over a mentally incompetent local, so he takes the wounded man home with him and George. The mental incompetent has been linked to a missing local girl, so the girl's father and a group of local thugs, essentially the same guys who have been working on the garage, besiege Hoffman's home, demanding that the wounded man be turned over to them. Hoffman refuses. George disagrees with his refusal. She doesn't want the dangerous man in her home, she doesn't want her house destroyed by the drunken lunatics, and maybe she'd rather be with her ex-boyfriend than with Dustin Hoffman.

The final act is played out as the drunks try to break in, the murderer creates havoc within, Hoffman tries to defend himself and his home, and George demonstrates conflicting loyalties. There is lots of violence and crazy behavior from the drunken louts.

------------

People have complained because George was raped and seemed to enjoy it. I'm not sure that criticism is valid. She had sex with two of the local guys. The first one was not rape, and she did enjoy it. The second one was rape, and she hated it.

Let's look at them one at a time. The first "rape" was with her ex-boyfriend, Charlie. Was it rape? Here are the facts.

• She stood in front of the window naked, so he could see her. She stared at him while she was standing there.
• She showed her body to the ex-boyfriend because she was mad at her husband.
• When the boyfriend came to the door, he asked if he should leave. She asked him to come in, and offered him a drink.
• As he was undressing her, she did say "no" a few times. She also kissed him, and stroked his face gently, and made sounds of pleasure.
• She never told her husband about the incident.
• Later, during the siege and after the "rape", as she was being attacked by another guy, instead of calling for her husband for help, she called out for Charlie.

Obviously, she was provoking a sex act with Charlie as an act of revenge upon her husband because Dustin continually ignored her and condescended to her. She offered only token resistance as a matter of balm for her conscience.

The second "rape" was the other worker, Charlie's colleague. In this case, George did not want him there, and she was clearly raped brutally. Just as clearly, she derived no pleasure from this act, and was not a willing participant in any fashion. She was further humiliated because Charlie held her down while the other man violated her.

According to Gordon Williams, the author of the novel, "The Siege of Trencher's Farm":

"The rape scene was included because Peckinpah 'liked to abuse women in his films. He was a bit mad really. But there was no sex in the book at all -- I can't write sex scenes like that, I'm always mindful of my mother reading them. My mother had even organised a church social group to go and see the film -- she was just so pleased I'd written a book with no effing and blinding in it. But they all loved it!"

Here is the complete recent (Feb 20, 2003) interview with Williams. 

To me, the film is most interesting for its moral ambiguity, its ability to prompt debate which continues to this day. People still debate the "rape" sequence, as I just did above. They debate whether Hoffman should have risked his life and the life of his wife for a retarded murderer. They debate whether Hoffman's character is the hero of the film or the villain, whether he was trying to avoid violence or to provoke it. The film must have something special going for it, because people still argue about it 30 years later. That seems to prove that the film engages the brain, and there is no denying the visceral thrill of the last third.

Is it a good movie? Maybe not as good as people say, but the last 25 minutes should keep you biting your nails, as the powerful, drunken, armed men keep trying to enter the house, the unarmed Hoffman tries to defend himself, and the wife seems to be an unwilling ally.

And I love the ending.

SPOILERS COMING

After he has defended his house, Hoffman is triumphant, but also defeated. He was fighting with Charlie downstairs while his wife was being assaulted upstairs. His wife called out for help not from him, but from the man he was fighting! After the ordeal, realizing that his marriage is finished, Hoffman offers the retarded guy a ride home. As they drive through the rural countryside, the lummox says "I don't know my way home." Hoffman thinks about this, and starts laughing. "Neither do I", he responds, and they drive off into the credits.

Pretty cool!

• Susan George (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
• Here is what Susan George looks like today. Rare among professional actresses, she steadfastly maintained her original teeth. She not only avoided caps, but she never even had orthodontics.

Willard (2003)

In the past, I have nattered on interminably about actors who were "born" or "destined" to play certain roles. Katharine Hepburn was descended from both sides of Eleanor of Aquitaine's family, French and English. When she was cast as her remote ancestor in The Lion in Winter, Hepburn was exactly the same age that Eleanor was supposed to be. The voice of fate doesn't get any more specific than that.

Other good examples include Greg Kinnear ("the hardest-smirking man in show business") as his spiritual ancestor, the paterfamilias of the smirking clan, Bob Crane. And then there's Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, for other reasons which I really don't want to think about.

Add another one to the list. Crispin Hellion Glover, the oddest character actor in Hollywood, a man who makes Christopher Walken seem as white bread normal as Tom Hanks, was born to play Willard, a socially awkward man who has a special relationship with rats. In 1989, the supremely eccentric actor recorded an album called "The Big Problem?". Pat Reeder, the supreme expert on eccentric albums,  wrote the following in his hilarious "Hollywood Hi-Fi":

Large portions consist of Glover reading excerpts from Rat Catching, a dreary 19th century book he republished after altering passages at random and adding his own bizarre illustrations of dead rats.

Mind you, this was an album Glover released in 1989, more than a decade before he was cast as rat-obsessed Willard. You think DeNiro researched his role in Raging Bull? Glover has been researching this role  ... well, maybe all his life.

In addition to weird CD's and books, Glover now makes his own weird films as well. "What Is It?" stars, and was written, produced, and directed by Mr. Glover, and is enigmatically described by Glover himself as "being the adventure of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home...as told through the eye of an hubristic, racist, monarchy..." As Pat Reeder wrote in Hollywood Hi-Fi, "If there is a thin line between genius and insanity, Crispin Glover completely erases it."

His personality has more irregularities than Dick Cheney's EKG. Glover may indeed be insane if one accepts the definition of that word as "completely out of touch with reality". How nuts is he? I'll let Time Magazine pick up the ball on that one:

And his immersion in character, he says, explains his reclusiveness on the Willard set, his darkened trailer and the way that before his first rat scene, after much discussion with his director on how to handle it, he screamed, "I didn't expect there to be any rats!"

He took the lead in Willard, but he didn't expect there would be any rats.

We have to credit director Glen Morgan for perhaps the best stroke of casting genius since Sir Tony Hopkins was hired to play Hannibal Lecter.  Morgan actively pursued Crispin although some Hollywood types told the fledgling director not to hire the offbeat actor. It worked out fine. After you see Glover in the part, you'll swear he wasn't acting at all and, says Morgan:

Crispin was wonderful to work with. I had been subjected to all the rumors before shooting. High powered people told me we would never get the movie done because he's so crazy. He is… different… but I like him a great deal. He certainly knows his cinema. It's a good thing I am versed in Kubrick and foreign films or he would have run circles around me. Yes, I had heard his CD. His cover of "Those Boots are Made for Walking" is a work of genius. He sings "Ben" over the end credits of "Willard." And he directed the music video that can be found on the willardmovie.com site.

Aside from the universally acknowledged offbeat genius of Glover, opinions about this movie were strongly polarized.

• Film Threat gave it a rare 5/5, it received better than 60% positive reviews, and it is rated a solid, near-classic 6.8 at IMDb. Dark genre films, and this is one of the darkest, don't get up too much higher than that in the IMDb scores.
• On the other hand, the box office has been limp, and the CinemaScore exit interviews were poor. (F's from people under 21 and over 34).

What is the explanation for the wide range of reactions? Why did it bomb so badly at the box office if the critics liked it? Don't audiences often like genre pictures better than critics do? Why were the audience "exit scores" so unfavorable?

The last question is the easiest. CinemaScore measures the reactions of people relative to their expectations. If you go to Willard expecting a tone like "Scream", you will be in for a grave disappointment. Expect a tone more like "A Touch of Evil", or the last two thirds of "Blue Velvet", invariably ominous and dripping with malice. Expect to see an old woman deformed by age and decrepitude, a cat beset by an army of rats, Glover's nose dripping with snot when he cries. Don't expect any light moments, hope, or redemption.

The set design reinforces the ugliness of the tone. It looks like what the world might look like today if Charles Dickens had been sane. Think about the world of Tim Burton's films or The City of Lost Children. Willard occupies a Dickensian nightmare of an office, decrepit and old-fashioned, with rusting cage-style elevators. Willard's boss is an overbearing ogre who berates Willard and everyone else in public, as if he were a drill sergeant with a platoon. (Not coincidentally, the role is played by the guy who played the vicious drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket). Willard's home is no more inviting, a paneled, underlit Edwardian with squeaky iron gates and barred windows, cobwebbed and crawling with rats, covered with rat shit, dominated by a mother who seems to have lived 120 years, during the last 100 of which she has gone unbathed. Those two locations represent the entire Willard universe. There is no place where Willard or the audience can go for sanctuary. To borrow a term, there is no clean, well-lighted place.

This is actually quite a good movie if you view it objectively. Critics look for whether a film is good or not, so many of them praised it, and justly so. Willard is clever, consistent in tone, dripping with atmosphere, and totally creepy. It is unrelentingly intense, sometimes disgusting, and sometimes blackly funny. (Products seen on screen included Tora Bora Rat Poison, Numm Nuts, and Amish Oats).

I left the film feeling creeped-out and a bit nauseated, and I didn't want to walk down any dark, empty corridors. That indicates that the film was quite effective, and I suppose that is exactly the effect that the director intended to produce. He succeeded, but perhaps there aren't that many people who crave that particular movie-going experience. Audiences don't care much about the genius of filmmaking. They only care about their visceral response to the final product. There is nothing wrong with the film at all. Many people loved it, but it is a niche film, and its bleak vision simply didn't appeal to a large enough niche. Simple as that.

Laura Harring (the dark-haired beauty from Mulholland Drive) was in this film as a co-worker who was sympathetic to Willard, and somewhat attracted to his awkward sensitivity.

I think I may be related to Laura Harring. It's a long story, but when I was in Norway I was fascinated by the Norwegian obsession with herring. I mean they eat it for breakfast the way Americans eat eggs. They eat it in vinegar, in mustard, in tomato sauce, in curry, in so many different forms that it seems to be ubiquitous, like their version of ketchup. I think each Norwegian carries it around in his ryggsekk. When they go to the ballpark to watch their favorite soccer team, they don't buy French fries. Instead they just quietly reach into their backpacks for some cheese, some knekkebrřd (those extra dry and crispy crackers they eat), some herring, and maybe a good, depressing book. Anyway, I made so many herring jokes that the locals called me Sildekongen. Literally meaning "the king of herring", the Sildekongen is a character in a Scandinavian fairy tale. I was, for my brief stay in Scandinavia, the Herring King.

I've pointed it out before, but in case you missed it, Laura Harring's birth name is Laura Herring. She was married to Count von Bismarck. She is, therefore, the Countess von Bismarck Herring.

The Countess of Herring, the King of Herring ... can it just be a coincidence? Actually, she may be from a different royal family of food fish. She is the Countess of Bismarck Herring, and I think I am actually the King of Maatjes Herring. And maybe Numm  Nuts.

• Sorry, no nudity.

Updates:

• updated volumes: Heather Graham, Jenny Agutter
• Honte's Swedish and International celebrity site is updated

Other crap:

• Razzies announced. Swept Away sweeps away the competition. It was Madonna's fifth "Worst Actress" award. She was also named worst actress of the previous century, so she now has a chance at two centuries in a row.
• Lara Flynn Boyle joins alcoholics anonymous
• What the world needs now  ... A company in Peru is developing a sweet made out of a mixture of caramel and cocaine.

What're the odds?

Pitcher to record the most wins

Which pitcher will record the most wins in the 2003 MLB regular season. Pre and postseason games do not count.
 

• Italian mega-babe Monica Bellucci, topless and rear nudity in "Brotherhood of the Wolf".

Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

Day two of a visit to 1991's 'Do or Die".

First up is veteran b-babe Julie Strain showing her tits to Director Andy Sidaris in a promo for the movie which Julie was not in.

• Julie Strain (1, 2)

On to Ava Cadell who shows off her ample assets and then scenes of dancing and lovemaking by Cynthia Brimhall.

• Ava Cadell (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Cynthia Brimhall (1, 2)

We wrap it up with Dona Speir & Roberta Vasquez being restrained by the bad guys, so there are kind of my "Babes in Peril" for the day.

• Dona Speir & Roberta Vasquez (1, 2)

Mónica Dionne
(1, 2)

Susana Zabaleta
(1, 2, 3, 4)

Shannyn Sossamon

Theresa Wayman

The goods:
Biel in seen in a bra and boxers. In here collage there are also several topless unknowns.

Shannyn Sossamon doesn't show anythin, but we do see Eric Stoltz copping a feel.

Theresa Wayman is topless.

A mini review by Dann.

Well for starters, the begining of this movie is the end. The end of the movie is also the end, and oh, yeah, the end credits start and run backwards to the begining (of the end credits).

Confused? Here's more. There's split screen all over the place and in many spots a scene or sequence of scenes runs, then it runs backwards, then it runs again from a different character's perspective.

Some of this is pretty neat, but it's WAY overdone, and makes following the movie really difficult. It gets in the way of the story, although there's one terrific scene where two characters on split screen are talking to each other and the shots for each is head on, then the split dissolves and pans until you see a wide shot of them looking at one another and talking. It's a GREAT effect that I've never seen before.

The story itself tells of several central characters in college, and the problems they have with their relationships, and how their problems intertwine. It's not a bad story, but all the filmmaker's craziness really obscures things.