A real jumbled mess of a movie! This Hong Kong horror flick starts out as some kinda love-triangle romance story, then it becomes a supernatural horror tale with a few pretty explicit sex scenes thrown in and finally ends with a gross secene of a bunch snakes, rats, worms and other unidentifiable creepy crawly things exploding out of a melting guy! Oh and along the way there's a tribe of cannibal midgest led by an evil sorcerer. It does movie along at a fast pace despite it being fairly incomprehensible. AKA CANNIBAL CURSE
A great example of 70s British horror. You get a naughty dwarf, a car that lops heads right off, a slimy, burned-up monster running amuck and of course an insane doctor(Michael Gough) who runs a horrific hospital(where he lobotomizes people to make them happy to be his personal army?). There's obviously some social message about the generation gap with all the young long-hairs being menaced by the old weirdos as was a popular concern at the time. There are a slew of AKA's including COMPUTER KILLERS, DEATH WARD #13 and EASTWORLD(to no doubt confuse people into thinking they were seeing the sequel to WESTWORLD which also came out this same year).
Released on video under the lurid title of DOCTOR BLOODBATH!:
As a big fan of the weirdo 1930s film FREAKS it's hard not to also love this 1960s re-interpretation. The great David Friedman, who stopped collaborating with the great director HG Lewis a couple of years before this, wrote, produced, and even appears in, this tale of a poor desperate waitress who gets employed with the traveling(although they seem to only travel around one area of Florida where this was filmed) carnival/sideshow. The only problem is that she vehemently hates all the freaks who comprise the "freak show". You get a midget, snake-fondling, some burlesk(yes, they spell it that way!) strip-teasing, blood, a whole gaggle of monstrous-looking folks and, if you've seen FREAKS before, you know it all has to end with some good old-fashioned revenge and a quote from the bible about "vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord".
While this movie is generously filled with padded/boring scenes of amusement park rides being assembled/disassembled that might put you to sleep the rest of the runtime is engaging enough for lovers of the weird side of cinema and for what's basically a remake they make it different enough from the original that it's not pointless unlike almost every remake made in the last 25 years.
AKA ALLEY OF NIGHTMARES and FREAKS! There's also a recut version titled ASYLUM OF THE INSANE which apparently had some 3-D scenes added to it which sounds like a pretty awesome idea to me!
This might be the only western that has a gang of ninjas in it. It might also be the only western where Mexican banditos are played by Filipino gentleman with big Mexican hats and I'm certain it's the only western where the Indians(aka Native Americans for you sensitive types)are played by midgets(aka little people for you PC-robots). The story involves our 3 foot tall hero Weng Weng, his very tall buddy Gordon(who looks like the Philippines version of George Eastman) and their mute pal(who's mute because he had his tongue cut out) Lupo, who take on a vicious gang of girl-snatching bandits and ninjas. I would probably rate this Weng Weng adventure slightly under his two James Bond-rip-offs (FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY and THE IMPOSSIBLE KID) simply because you don't get as many insane stunts from Mr. Weng but he does get into the expected kung-fu and gun-fu and any Weng is still good Weng!
As with many of these Filipino "Blood Island" movies (this isn't officially part of the "Blood Island" series but it has the same feel as those) this one has quite a few slow bits to get through. Produced by infamous bad-movie director Cirio H. Santiago they at least throw some colorful monsters into this, which are usually the best parts of these movies anyway, that is unless they also throw in some naked ladies which they don't do here. Our main creature is a bald-headed vampire fellow who looks a bit like Marlon Brando in APOCALYPSE NOW. He has the power to turn invisible at whim, which makes him pretty much unbeatable. His sidekicks consist of a hairy-faced humpback, who's also a vampire, a vampire-lady, a big fake-looking, shaky, rubber bat(who originally only had one appearance but in the English cut they liked his performance so much they put him in a bunch of scenes) and a midget who might be a vampire also, I'm not too sure. One weird aspect of this film is that they shot some scenes in color and others in black and white and tinted them blue or red which gives the movie a strange look at times. While this might not be my favorite of these Philippines flicks(I think the official Blood Island movies are a little more fun) this is worth a look for monster fans who want to see something weird. AKA BLOOD IS THE COLOR OF NIGHT, COLOR OF NIGHT and THE VAMPIRE PEOPLE.
"Goddamned midget! He's beginning to get my goat."
If you enjoyed the exploits of Filipino midget star Weng Weng in FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY then you have to catch this sequel for more wacky adventures of secret agent 00. More insane stunts from our little guy including some death-defying tight-rope walking, using a bedsheet as a parachute and a crazy mini-motorbike jumping over a cliff bit as well as all kinds of kung-fu/chop-socky antics. One thing that did get on my nerves with this one is the repetitive use of the Pink-Panther theme as well as a couple of other musical cues that show up over and over again until you want to stick chopsticks in your ear-holes. But if you can overlook that you will get to see the amazing spectacle of a 3 foot tall man beating the living shit out of full-grown bad-guy terrorists. Speaking of our terrorists their leader wears a nifty hood like a true super-criminal and they're not above sneaking around in awful drag get-ups so that's something. Other highlights include our little hero getting stuck in a birdcage after being captured, Weng getting all the chicks he can handle and the action-packed finale where Weng gets his hands on a machine-gun that's bigger than him and runs around killing mother-fuckers.
A sequel titled LICENSE EXPIRED is promised in the end credits but I'm pretty sure that one was never made and that's a damn shame.
If you are looking to see an all midget movie this might be you're only chance. Jed Buell's midgets star in what would be a pretty typical 30's style western and probably unwatchable if not for the novelty aspect. If you can get past the terrible musical bits sprinkled throughout, this is an amusing 60 minutes or so of weirdness. You get midget-fu, midget gun-fightin' and lots of awful midget acting. Along with REEFER MADNESS this used to play on USA's Night Flight show all the time, which is were I first laid eyes on it. For a similar experience look for HARLEM RIDES THE RANGE an early all-black western.
Here's a movie I'm sorta mixed about. I love midgets. I hate Chevy Chase. See my dilemma? This movie is packed full of midgets, dwarfs and assorted little people of all types up to no good shenanigans. The plot is pretty silly. It's supposed to take place during the shooting of THE WIZARD OF OZ and there's assassins and secret-agents and even a nazi-midget. All of the little people that played the munchkins are drinking and partying throughout most of the movie. Tons of ridiculously offensive stereotypical scenes follow with midgets hanging off chandeliers falling drunkenly down steps and every Japanese person in the movie getting inadvertently killed. Overall it's a good brainless watch as long as you don't let Chevy Chase bring you down. Oh yeah and Princess Leia is the leading actress looking as good in her undies as she did in that gold bikini.
