The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

United States - 1978

Director - Ralph Bakshi

Republic Pictures, 1993, VHS

Run Time - 2 hours,  10 minutes

9 1/2 Ninjas

9 1/2 Ninjas

United States - 1990

Director - Aaron Barsky

Republic Pictures Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

This low budget ninja parody film neatly secures a place among the most irritating films of all time with a spectacularly grating performance from, everyone in the film. Granted, there are a number of brilliant double entendres and visual puns sprinkled throughout, the script is actually quite good, it's just the execution that's lacking. Not in the enthusiasm category mind you, but the subtlety category. I realize that subtlety is not the stock in trade of physical comedy, quite the opposite, but when all is said and done with a film like this, one almost feels emotionally abused rather than entertained. I'm not stupid, you don't need to punch me in the face with ham, just humiliate yourself and everything will be fine. Perhaps that's the problem. When the characters are so annoying that you can't empathize or identify with 'em, even when you're laughing, it's no longer funny.

Playroom

Playroom

United States - 1989

Director - Manny Coto

Republic Pictures Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 27 minutes

The Communist Bloc is the perfect place to set a psychological horror movie. Not only are the lush mountain landscapes of Yugoslavia wonderfully enchanting, but socially in the late 80's, it began to exhibit more and more the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder.  It is after all a land brimming with conflicting versions of history, and history is sortof like repressed memories right? In that case, archaeologists are basically psychologists who prefer pickaxes to fountain pens. Hey, a phallic symbol is a phallic symbol okay?

When Chris was a boy his father was an archaeologist working at an old monastery in the Western Balkans. In the midst of the dig, Chris's whole family was slaughtered, leaving only him alive to grow up as a repressed and neurotic adult. Having become a whiny, irritating man-child, Chris (Christopher McDonald) has followed in his fathers footsteps and become an archeologist in his own right. Seeking to pick up where his father's work was cut short, he returns to the monastery in Croatia. To keep things interesting, for this movie relies heavily on excessive display of "personality," he brings along his girlfriend/publisher, as well as an alcoholic photographer and a spoiled society brat. Each is more grating than the last, but this is a character driven horror film, and as we shall soon discover, our satisfaction is largely to be derived from the elimination of various sensory irritants, paramount among them our protagonist!

As the digging progresses through the brain-like labyrinth of the monastery to it's deepest hidden core, Chris's sanity also begins to deteriorate. Ranting sweatily and approvingly about the delight children take in torturing animals, Chris waxes nostalgic about the time he spent wandering the monastery's halls with his surly imaginary friend. Just as it becomes increasingly clear that his flashbacky visions of his family's demise are more first-person-narrative than we had thought, Chris breaks through the physical and metaphorical walls into the "playroom." In this secret torture-chamber Chris (re)discovers himself/his old friend; an animatronic mummy prince and a bunch of repressed childhood memories recreated in a deluge of implied violence.

Staffed by ample hyperbole and a former Miss Virginia, Playroom delivers a satisfying, moderately surprising conclusion, yet with few of the hoped-for thrills incumbent in psychological horror. The awesome sets and torture devices alluded to in the dialogue remain mostly unused, and the jerky mummy puppet is an entertaining disappointment. Nevertheless, Playroom is still a delightfully simple Freudian metaphor.

Malicious

Well it hardly seems like it, but it has been a whole month and I'm back in the States and back to watching old VHS tapes. I've got a lot of stuff that's been on hold for a long time before I left, we'll see how it goes. Thanks for sticking with me here at Lost Video Archive.

Malicious

United States - 1992

Director - Ian Corson

Republic Pictures, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 38 minutes

Malicious is one of those films that is often described as a "guilty pleasure", an elitist bourgeoisie term that doesn't really make much sense. I first saw it on late night TV when I was in my teens and of course was enthralled with the concept of a sexually charged and bare-breasted Molly Ringwald. It was something that contradicted all prior notions I'd had of her. The story is classically sexist in its vilification of the sexually aware and demanding woman. The ostensible protagonist, a college baseball jock named Doug, can't keep his dick in his pants when his girlfriend is out of town and after fooling around with Molly finds that she won't leave him alone. Of course she is embellished with a number of what can only be called "psycho bitch" stereotypes which are meant to paint her as unstable and dangerous; in effect to justify her vilification. But this assertion is hard to swallow considering its historically endemic nature.

What Malicious wants us to believe is that it's okay if a man sleeps with someone (even if he's already in a relationship) as long as it didn't "mean anything", in fact, it's practically expected. If the woman  thinks it means something more than casual sex, that's asking too much, surely it was her fault for tempting him in the first place. It's the same bullshit double standard we've heard since the patriarchs blamed Eve for getting Adam kicked out of the garden.