| Product: |
Something Weird Collection (DVD) |
| Date: |
01.08.06 (266 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Some quite good extras
Disadvantages: Two absolutely dreadful old horror films
Something Weird is an American company that releases weird, trashy and bizarre exploitation movies. They’ve made some great films available to a wider audience (with region 1 DVD players). This double bill is one of the few things available in this country; unfortunately, the two films in it aren’t very good.
Released by a low-budget company called Siren, who’ve put out a few other dirt-cheap collections, these DVDs are not well constructed at all. The chapter selection is erratic at best, and the DVDs don’t tell you how long they’ve been running when you watch them, something that I’d previously only seen on pirates and dupes.
The first film, Meat is Meat, is a black comedy from 1971 (it’s also known as The Mad Butcher, and that’s what the DVD’s menu screen calls it, just to confuse everyone). A very fat butcher named Otto (the best in Vienna, as he repeatedly asserts) is released from a lunatic asylum. Returning to his shop, he goes about his meat-chopping business, getting his jollies from spying on the lady next door as she undresses. After an argument, the butcher strangles his wife. He disposes of the body by turning it into sausages (after all, meat is meat). Soon his bangers are the talk of the town, and he murders again and again. The police, incompetent even by the standards of the exploitation film, are baffled, but a plucky American journalist is on the case.
This really isn’t a good film. It’s unbelievably cheap – although there are a few location scenes filmed in Vienna, there are only about five sets in the entire film, and very few speaking parts. The producer, Dick Randall, was involved in plenty of cheap exploitation fodder (including the delirious midget James Bond spoof For Your Height Only), and certainly knew how to get his money’s worth. The same footage is used repeatedly (for instance, the young lady undressing in her window), and the dialogue has been very clumsily dubbed in post production.
The only cast member anyone’s going to have heard of is Victor Buono as Otto. He rose to some kind of fame in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (in which he was very good). He’s easily the best thing in Meat is Meat, although that isn’t saying much. It’s the kind of part Vincent Price could have carried off – the mad butcher with a chip on his shoulder about his sanity, killing for revenge, fun and profit, with a gleeful sense of humour. Unfortunately Vincent Price would have been way out of reach of this film’s budget, so we’re stuck with Buono. He’s not so bad, but he doesn’t have the manic charisma necessary to make this work. The rest of the cast are uniformly terrible.
The pacing of the film is awful. The plot is stunningly predictable – as soon as the heroic journalist’s girlfriend shows him her unusual ring (no sniggering at the back!) you can tell that at some point in the film he’ll be staring in horror as it falls out of a sausage. The comedy is unbearable, especially the incompetent cops, who would have shamed a Carry On film. The only good things are a jaunty soundtrack (which pastiches the Harry Lime Theme from The Third Man, a rather better film set in Vienna) and a very silly hat Otto wears.
It’s difficult to see who this film was aimed at. As a comedy it isn’t going to please anyone, and as a horror film it fails dismally. There’s also no gore of any kind (some mild strangulations are about the most you get; there are lots of close ups of the butcher chopping meat, so vegetarians might be unhappy, although I find that vegetarians are always unhappy). And there’s a bit of toplessness from the female cast, but not nearly enough to interest a committed sleaze-hound.
The picture quality is actually very good for a budget DVD, and the colours are nicely garish. There’s a trailer for the film (which gives away most of the best bits), and a rather nice gallery of posters for exploitation movies (including such delights as Caged Virgins and The Touchables – “A gentleman’s stag film”). This is accompanied by a radio ad for Mondo Mod, which sounds fun.
I rather hoped that the second film, Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks (1974), might be better – it does, after all, have a great title. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Dick Randall produces again, which I guess is why these two particular films were twinned, but given how many great films Something Weird have distributed, I do wonder why they chose these to try to make inroads into the UK market.
A Neanderthal man is killed by a very small mob of local villagers. Acquiring its corpse, Count Frankenstein reanimates it. He has a motley collection of assistants, including a hunchback *and* a dwarf, which if you ask me is overkill. His crumpet daughter comes to visit, with her rather sleazy looking fiancé and her also-crumpet friend, who pretty soon falls in love with the ageing count. After a certain amount of predictable business – graverobbing, ladies taking baths together etc – the dwarf is expelled from the castle for being a necrophile. Banished, our depressed little friend meets *another* Neanderthal, and plots a terrible revenge on the Count. Meanwhile, the local villagers (all eight of them) keep acting in a threatening fashion (burning torches and so forth) and the local police chief tries to figure out what’s going on.
All of which could have added up to a very entertaining film. But unfortunately not. Mostly filmed on location, it at least looks a bit more expensive than Meat is Meat, but it’s no better. The acting is terrible (although again, the voices are dubbed very badly). Michael Dunn is rather good as the dwarf (if you’re anything like me, you’ll remember him from the sleazoid classic The Mutations), but the rest of the cast are bad. Frankenstein is especially poor, seeming totally uninterested in the whole thing. His accent renders about half his dialogue completely incomprehensible. One of the cavemen is apparently played by someone called ‘Boris Lugosi’, a cheap bit of frippery that had me frowning sternly at the television. The ladies look appealing, and there’s a certain amount of (almost full-frontal) nudity, but that isn’t enough I’m afraid.
The direction and plot are totally inane, never managing to get any kind of urgency or suspense on screen. The incidental music isn’t so bad, I guess. There’s some hilarious dialogue, my favourite line being ‘I’d go with you if I wasn’t so crippled’, but again, not enough to make me want to revisit the film. It has some bad taste moments, as when a young lady suffers a fate worse than death at the hands of the dwarf and his caveman chum, but nothing bad is actually shown on screen, and even the corpses are tastefully covered up. I really can’t figure out how this collection has ended up as an 18 – there’s nothing in it that seems to warrant that.
The picture quality on this film is much worse than the previous one. We get a trailer which, again, gives away the best bits of the film. There are more posters and radio ads, too, which are very good (including some great titles like House on Bare Mountain, Professor Lust and Fanny Hill Meets Dr Erotico). It’s the extras that have earned this set two stars instead of one.
Sometimes I regret my compulsion to watch stuff like this. The kinds of films are always a hit-and-miss affair, with the misses generally outweighing the hits. So it proved this time. Never mind. The good stuff makes the bad stuff worthwhile, and if my never-ending trawl through 60s and 70s exploitation yields films like The Beast in Heat or The Horrors of Burke and Hare then I can live with the dross. I guess I watch this stuff so that you don’t have to – in this case, stay away.
Summary: A very cheap double-bill of rubbish horror films
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