Armitage III: Dual Matrix (2001)

Armitage III: Dual Matrix was released in 2001.

Something that needs to be clarified in regard to Armitage III: Dual Matrix right at the start is that this is not the third film in a series. It’s the second film in a two-movie series. It’s a sequel to Armitage III: Poly-Matrix. It’s called Armitage III because the heroine, Naomi Armitage, is a Third.

Armitage III: Poly-Matrix was in fact an OVA which was later edited into feature film format.

You need to have seen Armitage III: Poly-Matrix first, otherwise you won’t understand where the heroine is coming from and you won’t understand what she is. The background from the first film is that this is a world in which Mars has been colonised and has a large population of both humans and robots. Robots have become ubiquitous. The second-generation roots, known as Seconds, are useful for routine work. The Thirds, the third-generation robots, are a different matter. They are almost indistinguishable from humans, which makes many people uneasy.

Armitage was a cop working for the Martin PD, partnered with a human cop, Ross Sylibus.

Thirds have something very much akin to human emotions. Armitage knows she is a robot but she feels that she is also a woman.

As Armitage III: Dual Matrix opens Armitage is married (to Ross) and they have a daughter, Yoko. Yoko really is Armitage’s daughter. But Armitage is a robot. How can that be possible? It’s possible because Armitage is a Third. That’s the secret of the Thirds, the secret that has been closely guarded but now a sinister robotics tycoon is determined to get hold of that secret.

There’s also a move afoot to give robots legal rights. That has triggered a major political storm on both Earth and Mars.

There’s more to this struggle than is apparent on the surface. It has some connection to much earlier events, an apparently robot-inspired revolt known as the First Error.

It’s not just stubbornness that makes Armitage determined not to reveal the secret of the Thirds. It is vital that the secret remains a secret.

This is one of a number of cyberpunk movies (from Japan and elsewhere) dealing with the blurring of the line between humans and machines. In Blade Runner there’s Rachel who doesn’t know she’s a robot because she has her childhood memories (which are actually someone else’s memories). That’s her tragedy. In Ghost in the Shell Motoko has an entirely prosthetic body but she still has her (genuine) human memories. She still has her “ghost” - the essential human core of her consciousness - within the shell (the body). But she has to wonder if that’s enough to make fully human.

And here we have Armitage. She knows that she is a robot but she is a robot that may have crossed the threshold into consciousness. She feels things the way a woman feels things. But is she a woman?

One thing I love about the Armitage films is that Armitage is not a kickass action heroine who could just as easily have been a male character. Her femaleness is at the very core of the story. And being a mother is at the core of the story.

And although in the first movie Armitage and Ross start out having a kind of regular cop buddy movie relationship in this second film their relationship as husband and wife, and mother and father to Yoko, is crucial. This is what motivates all of their actions.

There is of course a vast amount of violent mayhem, done with energy and style.

By the mid-1980s anime dealing with complex grown-up subject matter was becoming a big thing. This was around the same time that cyberpunk was becoming the fashionable style of science fiction. In a way anime and cyberpunk grew up together. The Japanese took to cyberpunk like a duck to water. They loved the mood and the aesthetic.

By the time the first instalment of Armitage III came out in 1996 there had already been some great cyberpunk anime. Ghost in the Shell (1995) obviously but also Goku Midnight Eye (1989) and Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990). There’s also a slight cyberpunk flavour to the excellent Angel Cop (1989-94).

Armitage III: Dual Matrix is top-tier cyberpunk anime and it’s highly recommended.

I have the old Madman DVD which is sadly out of print.

Demon Witch Child (1975)

Demon Witch Child (La endemoniada) is a 1975 Exorcist rip-off written and directed by Amando de Ossorio. 

Amando de Ossorio made some fine creepy gothic horror such as the brilliant Blind Dead movies but he also made some wonderfully crazy tongue-in-cheek horror romps.

By 1975 everybody in Europe was making Exorcist rip-offs. This is a Spanish example.

There are moments in de Ossorio’s movie that are lifted directly from The Exorcist (the levitation, the head spinning the wrong way, the different voice coming from the child) but there are plenty of differences and there are moments in Demon Witch Child which in my view are creepier than anything in The Exorcist.

A local witch, a very old woman known as Mother Gautière, has been sacrificing children to the Devil. Now she’s taken possession of a young girl, Susan Barnes (Marián Salgado).

What follows is the kind of mayhem you expect.

Susan is the daughter of the police chief. He’s already under pressure from the press after the unsolved murder of another child. Reporter William Grant (Daniel Martín) is really going after him but they later become allies.

The old witch is arrested and that has fateful consequences.

Susan begins acting very strangely and disturbingly. It’s like she’s become a different person.

William’s fiancée Anne (who seems to be Susan’s governess) suspects demonic possession.

Father Juan (Julián Mateos) gets involved. He’s reluctant to admit it’s a case of possession. He has his own problems. Before entering the priesthood he was engaged to marry a girl named Esther (María Kosty). She was so upset at being dumped that she became a whore. Father Juan seems strangely indifferent to her fate. This subplot makes Father Juan slightly less sympathetic but also slightly more complex. And Esther is not out of the picture yet.

Mother Gautière, now in possession of Susan, has very nasty plans in store for both William and Anne. This leads to one of the movie’s big shock scenes in which poor William loses a vital part of his anatomy.

This is a movie that relies mostly not on actual gore but on horrifying ideas. What we don’t see can still shock us.

And it has a slightly surprising but rather effective ending.

This was a very low budget movie, shot in eight days, but the cheap special effects work very well and the makeup effects are excellent. The makeup effects on the young girl (I don’t want to give way spoilers but it involves the way the possession manifests itself) are incredibly creepy and effective.

The crawling down the wall scene is also nicely scary and weird.

It’s worth mentioning that the lead actress in this film, Marián Salgado, dubbed Linda Blair’s voice in the Spanish release of The Exorcist. Salgado gives an amazing performance here.

Demon Witch Child is odd in being rather low-key but also quite disturbing at times. I’m quite a fan of European Exorcist rip-offs and this one is recommended.

This film is part of a three-movie Blu-Ray set from Vinegar Syndrome, along with The Vampires’ Night Orgy (1973) and Curse of the Devil (1973). Demon Witch Child gets a very nice transfer with a number of extras.

I’ve also reviewed de Ossorio’s wildly entertaining The Loreley’s Grasp (1974) and the even more delightfully crazy The Night of the Sorcerers (1973).

If you’re a connoisseur of Exorcist rip-offs you’ll also want to check out Alberto De Martino’s The Antichrist.

Guns (1990)

Guns is a 1990 Andy Sidaris movie so you know what to expect. And it delivers the goods. By this time he had the formula humming along very nicely indeed. 

As usual his wife Arlene was the producer.

The cast of this one includes no less than six Playboy Playmates.

Donna (Dona Speir) and Nicole (Roberta Vasquez) are undercover federal agents in Hawaii. They stumble onto something big when an innocent girl is the vicim of what was clearly a professional hit. The girl just happened to be wearing the exact same dress as Nicole. The girls figure that Nicole was the intended target.

The hit was ordered by a Juan Degas (Erik Estrada), who has a special grudge against Donna. He didn’t want Donna hit. He wants her to suffer first, before he takes care of her himself.

Degas is involved in gun-running, using Molokai as a staging point. But the girls are cleverly decoyed to Las Vegas.

Degas is obsessed by his quest for revenge, just as much as protecting his gun-running racket.

Donna doesn’t know who is out to get her since she thinks Degas is dead. She also hasn’t realised that her mother, who happens to be the Attorney-General of Nevada, is going to get mixed up in all this.

The Feds organise a team to take down Degas. Naturally it includes a member of the Abilene clan, in this case Shane Abilene (Michael J. Shane). Like all male members of the family Shane is a staggeringly bad shot, a running gag in the series which will be used very cleverly and wittily towards the end.

The team also includes professional magician (and Federal agent) Abe. He gets a delightful scene involving some very unusual interrogation methods.

There has to be a bad girl and this time around it’s Cash (Devin DeVasquez) and she’s a formidable and coldblooded hitwoman.

Typically for a Sidaris movie the bad guys all look like bad guys and the sexy bad girl looks like a sexy bad girl. The good guys look like good guys. It’s cartoonish but it’s part of the Sidaris style and it adds to the fun. You don’t watch Andy Sidaris movies for moral ambiguity.

Like all of Sidaris’s movies this one is technically very polished which helps to make it look more expensive than it is. Guns is beautifully shot.

Andy and Arlene Sidaris had a positive genius not just for finding good locations but for using them efficiently and economically, and for getting added production values from those locations. If you shoot scenes in a luxury hotel your movie will have the right aura of money and glamour even though you’ve spent hardly any money.

Since this is an Andy Sidaris movie there are action scenes involving motorcycles, aircraft, ultra-light aircraft, helicopters and boats. And there will be explosions. There’s a cool scene where Donna is under aerial attack. If only she had a shoulder-launched multiple rocket launcher with her. Then she remembers - she does have a shoulder-launched multiple rocket launcher in the back of the van. Sensible girls don’t go anywhere without a multiple rocket launcher.

Sidaris knew how to do impressive action set-pieces that are clever and imaginative as well as exciting. This movie has some fine examples.

Guns is just non-stop action and mayhem with lots of extraordinarily gorgeous women who manage to be frequently topless. This is such a fun movie and it’s highly recommended.

Andy and Arlene provide another of their delightful audio commentaries.

Guns is included in the Mill Creek Girls, Guns and G-Strings DVD boxed set. The 16:9 enhanced transfer are lovely are there’s an audio commentary for every movie. Most of thee movies are now on Blu-Ray as well.

Black Tight Killers (1966)

Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers was released in 1966 and it’s one of those movies that is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. The Swinging 60s were underway. London wasn’t the only place that was swinging. Tokyo was definitely swinging as well. Black Tight Killers is a wild crazy Pop Art-infused thriller that includes everything you could possibly desire in a 60s movie.

Daisuke Hondo (Akira Kobayashi) is a globe-trotting photojournalist who always manages to be in the thick of the action and the danger. On his return flight to Tokyo he meets a very pretty stewardess, Yoriko Sawanouchi (Chieko Matsubara). They’re hitting it off really well until Yoriko is kidnapped. There’s a gang led by a hoodlum named Lopez after her but the beautiful girl ninjas are after her as well. Of course you can never be sure if girl ninjas will turn out to be evil girl ninjas or good girl ninjas.

It all seems to have something to do with Yoriko’s father and the disappearance of a huge stash of gold during the war.

From this point on there’s non-stop mayhem. Fortunately Hondo can handle himself pretty well and he’s spent time at the Momoko Ninja Research Station so he knows a few ninja tricks himself. Although the ninja chewing gum bullet trick does come as a surprise to him.

Yoriko keeps falling into the hands of assorted bad guys. Hondo is still trying to figure out which side the girl ninjas are on. They do seem inclined to offer him at least a temporary alliance.

Yasuharu Hasebe has been an assistant to Seijun Suzuki and that’s significant. This was the very year in which Suzuki made his crazed masterpiece Tokyo Drifter. It’s clear that Suzuki and Hasebe were working along very similar lines, with plot coherence taking a back seat to energy, very cool visuals, Pop Art style, wild use of colour and major flirtations with surrealism. Black Tight Killers, like Tokyo Drifter, takes place in its own universe. Realism pretty much goes out the window. And both films display an obsessive interest in the use of colour to undermine realism. There’s an obvious comic-book influence. And there are hints of the psychedelic freak-out elements which were becoming increasing a feature of late 60s movie.

There’s also go-go dancing.

I love the fact that some of the supposedly exterior shots were deliberately done in the studio and that in the frequent driving scenes the rear projection is obviously intended to look as artificial as possible.

The sets are cool but they’re made to look a lot cooler with very nifty lighting effects.

There are some odd tonal shifts. Mostly the emphasis is on super-charged hyper-kinetic action fun but then there are periodic dark tragic gut-punch moments.

There are also some cynical moments.

Akira Kobayashi is a serviceable action hero. Chieko Matsubara is cute and likeable.

The action scenes have plenty of energy.

The movie is as sexy as you could get away with in 1966, with some very brief glimpses of nudity.

Black Tight Killers was clearly much in tune with international trends in pop cinema. The Bond movies obviously, but it’s closer in feel to eurospy movies like the wonderful French Fantomas (1964) and the amazing Italian heist movie Seven Golden Men (1965), the thoroughly enjoyable Lightning Bolt (1966) and one of the best of all the eurospy films, Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966). And the German Kommissar X series kicked off in 1966 as well, with Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill.

And let’s face it - you can’t make a bad movie with beautiful girl ninjas.

Black Tight Killers has so much energy, so much fun and so much style. This is pure pop cinema. Highly recommended.

The Radiance Blu-Ray looks lovely. There are some decent extras.

Yasuharu Hasebe went on to direct several of the wonderful Stray Cat Rock movies - Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) and Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970). These three movies are all quite different in tone but they’re all very enjoyable.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens was Russ Meyer’s final feature film. It’s his most outrageous movie and that’s really saying something.

The script was credited by Meyer and Roger Ebert but according to Meyer it was mostly Ebert’s work. Ebert was involved in the writing of several of Meyer’s later films.

For me Peak Meyer is from 1964 to 1968, with Lorna, Mudhoney, Vixen and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! being his greatest movies. His final trio of movies, Supervixens, Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens push his vision beyond the limits of sanity and good taste.

Any Meyer movie is going to have insane amounts of inspired visual insanity and energy and this movie has plenty of both.

Meyer has some interesting things to say on the commentary track. This was his final film, not because his movies were no longer popular, but because it was no longer possible to get distribution. Multiplexes would not show his movies.

1979 was a time of flux as far as exploitation movies were concerned. Hardcore had destroyed the softcore grindhouse market. The mainstream market was off-limits. Home video had not yet emerged. Within a few years the direct-to-video market would have been perfect for Meyer’s purposes but by that time he had lost interest.

The setting for this movie is a small town called Smalltown. Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr) and his wife Lavonia (Kitten Natividad) are having marital problems. Lavonia is disgusted by Lamar’s obsession with anal sex. She looks for gratification elsewhere, in the arms of garbage collector Mr Peterbuilt. As does Lamar looks elsewhere as well. Lavinia also moonlights as stripper Lola Langusta.

Lamar and Lavonia seek help from a marriage counsellor, but he turns out to want to do to Lamar what Lamar wants to do with Lavonia.

Perhaps spiritual guidance can help. Local radio evangelist Eufaula Roop (Anne Marie) is sure she can teach Lamar to pleasure a woman the way Lavonia wants to be pleasured.

Insofar as there’s any semblance of a plot is that in their own mad ways Lamar and Lavonia are trying to save their marriage. But mostly the plot is just a succession of wild crazy vignettes.

The acting is what you expect in a Meyer film - exaggerated to the point of parody and then pushed even further.

The movie’s biggest asset is Kitten Natividad. Apart from her amazing body, her breathtaking lack of inhibition and her manic energy she’s also genuinely funny.

The key to appreciating Meyer’s films, especially his 70s films, is to see them as sexed-up ultra-violent riffs on the classic Looney Tunes cartoons. His films have the same self-awareness, the same tendency to self-consciously draw attention to their own artificiality and filmic-ness, the same wild absurdity, the same manic energy, they treat violence in the same way (exaggerating it to such absurd lengths that it becomes hilarious rather than disturbing), the same wild surreal touches and the same anarchic qualities.

Meyer takes this stylistic approach and adds the machine-gun editing style he first perfected in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And by this time he was utilising an onscreen narrator (in this case Stuart Lancaster) to provide a running commentary, adding even more to the artificiality. Offhand I can’t think of another American filmmakers whose embrace of deliberate artificiality was so total and so radical.

This is softcore but Meyer is pushing the limits of softcore quite a bit here. The nudity is very explicit and the sex scenes get quite graphic.

No matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum you will be able to find something here to shock and offend you. But if you do get offended just remember that Meyer has set you up for it - he is yanking your chain. He is baiting you. If you take the bait then that’s on you.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens is a bizarre roller-coaster ride of sex and silliness. They don’t make movies like this any more. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray release is an enormous improvement on the old out-of-print DVD release.

Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

Shiver of the Vampires (Le frisson des vampires) was Jean Rollin’s third feature film. By this time he had definitely found his voice as a filmmaker.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rollin it’s as well to know that there is nothing conventional about his movies. If you’ve heard that he was a maker of erotic gothic horror movies or erotic vampire movies you will find that this is somewhat true but his movies are not like other people’s erotic vampire movies. Shiver of the Vampires is a very very different beast compared to Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers or Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness or even José Larraz’s Vampyres or Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire. Those are all excellent movies that in various ways redefined the vampire movie but Shiver of the Vampires is much stranger.

It is an erotic vampire movie and it is an exploitation movie but it’s also an art film and an exercise in cinematic surrealism. The term surrealist is ludicrously overused but Rollin was the real deal. He was a full-blown surrealist, hugely influenced by surrealist painters such as Paul Delvaux and Clovis Trouille.

Shiver of the Vampires is uncompromisingly surrealist and uncompromisingly arty and it’s uncompromisingly a commercially oriented exploitation movie. Rollin wanted his movies to be commercially successful.

Isle (Sandra Julien) and Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) are a young newly married couple. They’re heading to a semi-ruined chateau to visit Isle’s two male cousins who are her only living relatives. They arrive to discover that the cousins died a couple of days earlier.

The principal location used was the keep of the 14th century Château de Septmonts in Aisne. The keep is all that remains of the chateau. It’s an extraordinary location and Rollin wanted the chateau itself to be a character in the movie. It is in a sense alive. It influences all the characters. Although Isle and Antoine are madly in love and this is their wedding night (she is still wearing her bridal gown) she does not want to make love with her bridegroom. At this early stage of the story the chateau is already exerting its influence on Isle. It is claiming her.

The cousins reappear. They are not dead after all. Isle and Antoine are surprised but of course we, the viewers, are now suspecting that they are vampires. Perhaps they are, although later we discover that they were at one time vampire hunters. And another vampire, Isolde (Dominique) will soon make her appearance in one of the many dazzling minor visual set-pieces of the film. Isolde takes a keen interest in Isle.

Like many of Rollin’s films this is often regarded as a lesbian vampire story but that is slightly misleading. In Rollin’s films there are links and bonds and attractions between female characters but it is an over-simplification to see these in terms of lesbianism. Rollin describes this movie as a magical love story and the eroticism is indeed more magical than physical. There may be a physical side to it but it’s not physical desire that drives the story.

The connections between the characters between Isolde and the two cousins and between Isolde and Isle are inherently mysterious. The family history is complex. And the vampires here have mysterious origins. The cousins talk about ancient religious cults and conflicts between those cults and the Catholic Church.

There is also no clear-cut good vs evil conflict. Rollin’s vampires were rarely evil in any straightforward way.

And of course in a Rollin movie there is always a point at which we become aware that we are no longer in the world of reality in the sense that we usually understand reality. We may be in the world of myth or the world of dream. Perhaps those worlds are just different realities. In his late vampire movies, the superb Two Orphan Vampires (1997) and Dracula's Fiancee (2002), Rollin creates elaborate alternative mythologies. And in Two Orphan Vampires we are in a storybook world the reality of which is incredibly ambiguous.

Rollin had an overwhelming love for the pop culture of the past and his strange cinematic worlds draw heavily on such influences. In this case he is very deliberately homaging the amazing silent serials of Louis Feuillade, in particular Les Vampires (1915). For Rollin fictional worlds had their own reality.

Shiver of the Vampires is unusual among Rollin’s films for its fascination with hippie culture and the counter-culture in general. It was shot in 1970, a year after Woodstock. This was the high tide of hippiedom.

Rollin tells us in his audio commentary that he wanted to have something bizarre in every single shot. Trying to find a straightforward meaning in his films is a fool’s errand. It’s like trying to find a single coherent meaning in dream or a myth.

When Rollin is discussed it’s perhaps surprising that David Lynch doesn’t get mentioned. Very different filmmakers but with a few striking affinities. Those “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” moments in Lynch movies such as Blue Velvet serve the same purpose as similar moments in Rollin’s movies - opening a portal between everyday reality and another world in which reality has been subtly distorted.

Shiver of the Vampires is one of Rollin’s best and most characteristic movies. Very highly recommended.

Mr Vampire (1985)

Mr Vampire is a 1985 horror comedy released by Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest studio.

I have to be upfront here - I really dislike horror comedies in general. This is a very crazy movie, which is a good thing, but for my tastes it’s just too silly. I enjoy silliness, but this is too much silliness for me. 

And the comedy is mainly slapstick, my least favourite form of comedy.

It begins with the reburial of the father of a prominent citizen, Master Yam. The family had buried the father after taking advice from a feng shui master but the advice was bad and has caused the family twenty years of bad luck.

The corpse is dug up and taken to the mortuary where it is discovered that the old man is turning into a vampire.

The priest and his two hapless assistants take what they hope are the necessary steps to prevent the transformation from being completed.

Their efforts are in vain. And one of the assistants is bitten by the vampire.

The other assistants is waylaid by a pretty female ghost. They have a nice time in bed together but the young man is now bewitched.

So the priest has to save one of his assistants from being turned into a vampire and save the other from the attentions of a very horny lady ghost.

At one stage the priest is locked up on suspicion of murder by Master Yam’s unbelievably stupid policeman nephew.

All of which gives rise to countless comedic kung fu action scenes.

The humour is mostly lame. One of the few genuinely funny moments is the misunderstanding in the shop where one of the priest’s assistants is employed - he thinks Master Yam’s very respectable daughter works in the brothel across the road. This is witty verbal humour and it works.

What makes the movie worth seeing is the fascinating wealth of vampire and ghost lore, much of it based at least to some degree on actual Chinese folklore. Chinese ghosts are corporeal and actually can and do have sex and lady ghosts do seduce men. And Chinese ghosts are not necessarily evil. Having sex with a ghost can lead to unfortunate consequences but this is not always the case.

And then there are the hopping vampires, and vampire-like hopping undead creatures do figure in Chinese folklore. They add a very bizarre touch.

The steps that need to be taken to combat vampires are insanely complicated. If you’re up against vampires you will need a great deal of glutinous rice, plenty of black ink and a lot of string. You’ll need advanced martial arts skills.

You’ll also need a good deal of luck. These vampires are near-unstoppable. You cannot afford mistakes.

Mr Vampire has its attractions and it’s certainly different. It was a huge commercial success and kicked off an entire genre.

The performances and the comedy are very very broad. Your enjoyment of the movie will depend very heavily on how much you like ultra-zany goofy slapstick humour.

If you do enjoy this type of comedy you’ll enjoy the movie much more than I did.

The Eureka Blu-Ray offers a very nice transfer with some extras.