#vhsisnotdead

Even without knowing the behind the scenes story of today’s film, 1981’s Bloody Moon, you can probably tell just by watching it that this was a money for hire job. Enticed by Wolf Hartwig and Erich Tomek, a pair of German producers with some lofty promises and bucketloads of cash — which were probably very enticing at the time, given the fact that he and his first wife, Nicole Guettard, had just divorced — Franco gave in to the zeitgeist, signing on to craft an American-style teen slasher film for the German marketplace, if you can imagine such a thing. However, it didn’t quite work out that way. To watch Bloody Moon is to watch an idiosyncratic auteur thumb his nose at a genre that he obviously sees as hopelessly formulaic, while also injecting a heaping dose of breathy Eurosleaze into the proceedings, almost as if he can’t help it. In other words, Franco gonna Franco.

We open on, what else, a disco dancing party. Miguel, a Klaus Kinski-looking creepoid with a huge facial scar that resembles fried chicken, is looking at his sister all weird. His sister, Manuela, is like, yo don’t look at me like that, I’m your sister, so yeah, the movie goes THERE immediately. Bummed out over being rejected by his sister, Miguel steals a Mickey Mouse mask and starts to mack on a lady who’s not a blood relative. She invites him back to her bungalow for some horizontal bedroom dancing, but when she takes off his Mickey Mouse mask, she’s, shall we say, less than enthused about Miguel’s fried chicken face. Oh, and she thought that he was her boyfriend, so this is basically how that gag (with like twelve quotation marks around the word gag) from Revenge of the Nerds would turn out in real life. Miguel is also, shall we say, less than enthused by this young lady’s screaming, so he stabs her a bunch of times with a pair of scissors. Glad to see we’ve come so far in terms of dealing with toxic masculinity!

Cut to: five years later. A doctor, played by Jess Franco himself, is like, hey Manuela, your brother is way less murder crazy now, so I’m going to release him into your care, just make sure he’s spared from any sort of excitement, like the constant temptation of having nubile young co-eds around to murder, anyway, byeeeee! Well, oopsies, because as it turns out, Miguel and Manuela live with their invalid billionaire aunt, who leases her land out to an organization called the International Youth Club Boarding School for Languages (you graduate when you’re able to say the name of the school without getting tripped up), which is crawling with gorgeous buh-buh-buh-baaaaaabes who are always dancing sexily and lounging topless around the pool when they’re not learning Spanish for like 5 minutes a day. Great. Things nearly go to hell immediately when, on the train home, Miguel becomes fixated on a young lady named Angela, and when Manuela sees a silk scarf stuck in the window, she somehow thinks that Miguel pushed her out of the train while her back was turned for two seconds. But then Angela gets up, and explains, to these two total strangers, that she had just dropped something on the floor and was bending down to pick it up. This is going somewhere. Cue the next paragraph!

Easily the biggest problem with this movie is the dialogue. This is the rare movie that manages to both show AND tell at the same time, as if we the audience were complete dummies. Characters are constantly talking about their relationships to one another, or narrating events that just happened seconds ago. And the dubbing in this movie…good gravy. Every character talks almost nonstop, no matter what the situation, whether they’re together or alone, in these breathless, dramatically overwrought monologues, delivered at a furious clip, full of the most flowery language. It sounds as though the movie was dubbed by some alien computer technology whose language database consisted of nothing but quotes from John Waters movies.

So as it turns out, Angela is heading to the language school to join her friends in sexy hijinks, but whoops, she has to live in the bungalow where Miguel went all scissor-happy back in the day. And gosh, wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as Miguel makes the scene at this school again, people start turning up dead. Good news, though: this movie delivers on the kills. We get to see the mean old invalid aunt get burned alive in her bed, one of Angela’s friends gets stabbed in the back and the knife pokes out through her nipple, another friend is choked by some sort of like bear trap thing, and then there’s the coup de grace, when yet another friend is beheaded by a giant circular saw. Hell yeah. On the other hand, there’s a really cruel, unnecessary scene in which a snake is beheaded by a pair of garden shears. Leave the critters alone!

For whatever reason, no one believes Angela when she’s like yo all of my friends are being murdered, because she, uh, is reading a murder mystery novel, so it must be all in her imagination? It makes no sense, but then again Angela doesn’t exactly endear herself to us by running around all over creation having a nervous breakdown. I know they can’t all be Ellen Ripley, but cheese and crackers, cut the damsel in distress act, woman! Along the way, we hit all of the major slasher plot moments: the killer POV shots, the jumping cat fakeout scare, the last girl stumbling upon the intricately posed corpses of her friends, etc. You can practically feel Franco smirking each time a scene like this happens. This leads to a final act straight out of a giallo movie, full of crazy twists and double crosses and escalating violence.

And then there is the soundtrack. One lofty promise made by Hartwig & Tomek to Franco was that Pink Floyd were slated to provide the film’s soundtrack. Yes, THAT Pink Floyd. Why Franco would believe that these German snake oil salesmen had corralled the biggest rock band in the world at the time to do a soundtrack for their no-budget horror flick I honestly don’t know. The music was eventually done by an Austrian gentleman named Gerhard Heinz, and Franco has gone on record saying it is his least favorite part of the film. However, I quite enjoy it. There is a great variety of motifs and sounds, from lounge exotica to demonic strings to Stockhausen style bleeps and bloops. And then of course, there is the film’s main theme, which does indeed sound like something that could’ve conceivably been an outtake from the Wish You Were Here sessions.

To wrap up my take on Bloody Moon, I wanna cede the floor to the master himself. Click here to watch an excellent, highly entertaining interview with Franco, shot in his home for Severin’s DVD release of the film from 2007. Beginning in charming fashion with second wife and collaborative muse Lina Romay grabbing her purse and leaving for the afternoon, Franco chain smokes about a thousand cigarettes and regals us with many an entertaining anecdote from behind the scenes of Bloody Moon, including the one promise the producers did keep to him (casting Olivia Pascal as Angela), the true identity of mysterious screenwriter “Rayo Casablanca” (co-producer Erich Tomek), the fact that he indeed did treat the film as more of a tongue-in-cheek venture (much to the producers’ chagrin), and the horrifying and inaccurate title the film was saddled with for its release in Spain (get ready for it…Raped College Girls. Yikes!) It’s sad to watch the interview knowing that Franco would only be with us for another five years. But that’s the thing with artists as prolific and driven as he was: it will take a lifetime to digest the twisted feast that is his body of work. We may have covered an outlier today, but perhaps it’s enough to get you started on exploring the sumptuous, problematic, bizarre, and wonderful world of Jess Franco.

Before this month’s Video Vortex, I had only seen one other Godfrey Ho film, 1993’s Undefeatable, starring Cynthia Rothrock. While that film has its quirks, most notably the batshit insane death of its lead villain, it is mostly a fairly by the numbers kung-fu revenge movie, featuring some very impressive stunt work. Little did I know the history and filmmaking style of Godfrey Ho, which I will recount here very quickly, because it is important to understand why Ninja Terminator is such a lysergic cinematic experience.

Godfrey Ho got his start as a first assistant director for Hong Kong’s legendary Shaw Brothers productions. Eventually, he realized that there was a thirst for Hong Kong cinema in the international film market, so he decided to take advantage of that in a very, shall we say, idiosyncratic way. After forming IFD Films & Arts with producer Joseph Lai and a mysterious figure named Tomas Tang (who allegedly died in a fire in the mid-90s, but some believe was secretly Godfrey Ho himself), Ho set about flooding the international film market with no-budget action films, most of which included the word “ninja” in the title. In a ten year period, Ho made roughly 115 films, making him perhaps the most prolific director in all of weirdo cinema. How did he do this? Well, he kinda cheated.

Here’s how a typical Godfrey Ho ninja film came together: Ho would shoot a few minutes of footage featuring caucasian actors in ninja outfits, because caucasian actors meant bigger box office. He would then take an entirely different movie that had been bought by IFD Films & Arts, usually of Korean or Filipino origin, and edit in footage from that film to go alongside his caucasian ninjas, overdub all of the dialogue in English, and try to construct a coherent narrative out of all of these disparate parts. The same footage would get reused over and over again in different iterations for different films, an actor could work with Godfrey Ho once, and end up appearing in twenty of his films. Ho also loved to use unlicensed music; in Ninja Terminator, you can hear snippets of tunes from Pink Floyd and the Star Wars soundtrack, amongst others. The effect of this audacious Frankenstein cinema on your brain is like looking at one of those optical illusion paintings from the nineties: you know that there’s an image in there somewhere, but your brain has to adjust to it.

Apparently Ninja Terminator is one of Ho’s more successful efforts in splicing together what could be called a linear story, which, holy shit, if THIS is an example of a SUCCESSFUL attempt, I can’t wait to see what an abject failure looks like.

So at this point you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been stalling a bit. That’s because, once again, this movie is almost impossible to describe. But I’ll try: there are these three ninjas, two are honkeys, one is “Japanese.” Their master is like, yo, check it out, I’ve got the golden ninja warrior statue, which makes me impervious to harm. The ninjas decide that the statue turns people corrupt and evil, for some reason, so they each escape from the dojo with a piece: each honkey gets an arm, and the “Japanese” guy gets the body, I believe. Some other ninjas try to fight them, but they manage to beat them. Suddenly there’s a two year time jump. The evil ninjas find the “Japanese” ninja and kill him. This leads our head honkey, played by Ho mainstay Richard Harrison, to bring in his right hand man, Jaguar Wong, to protect the dead ninja’s sister, and make sure that the golden ninja warrior doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Of course, Richard Harrison and Jaguar Wong never meet in person, because Jaguar Wong’s scenes were taken from a Korean drama called The Uninvited Guest.

Now is a good time to discuss some of the film’s…peculiarities. Apparently Ho heard that Garfield (yes, the cat) was very popular in America, so he decided to have Richard Harrison’s character, a middle aged man, discuss business on a Garfield telephone. Needless to say, the entire audience cheered in delighted disbelief the first time this phone appeared. Also, for some reason, whenever Richard Harrison and the other honkey are in their ninja outfits, they also have on a bunch of eyeliner, as if it’s 2004 and they’re going to a My Chemical Romance concert. Then there is the main villain of the film, Tiger Shen. There’s really no easy way to put this, so I’ll just say it. For most of the movie, for no discernible reason, this dude wears a woman’s blonde wig. Like a Gidget, beach blanket bingo wig. It’s hypnotically bizarre. And don’t even get me started on the toy robots that deliver ransom notes and hostage video tapes, because then we’d be here all day.

Basically, the entire film from hereon in is fight scenes. There is a new fight scene roughly every minute or so, which is so over the top and ill-advised, but somehow kinda works. Like, a horror movie with a fresh kill every minute would become tedious, but for some reason, Ho’s unapologetically maximalist take on the kung-fu movie is fascinating to me. Jaguar Wong cannot go anywhere in this movie without a bunch of dudes challenging him to a fight for no reason. And surprise surprise, he always wipes the floor with them. The fight scenes also feature a ton of weird stylistic flourishes, including instant repeats and freeze frames. Oh, and if you zoned out during a fight the first time around, don’t worry, odds are it will get repeated later on in the movie.

Along the way, Richard Harrison chops up a watermelon with a katana, we learn that ninjas can teleport…somehow, some crabs attack Richard Harrison’s wife, who works as a fashion designer of some sort and wants to combine swimwear and exercise clothing, there are two surprisingly graphic sex scenes involving a gangster moll who used to be Jaguar Wong’s sweetheart, a Korean pawn shop owner speaks with a Texas accent, and there are more double crosses than the goddamn VOID logo.

Eventually, Jaguar Wong and Tiger Shen have an amazing battle that totally ignores the physics of how sand works, and Richard Harrison gets back all the pieces of the golden ninja warrior. The bad ninja master from the beginning commits seppuku by blowing himself up. Freeze frame. End of movie. End of life as you knew it before you watched Ninja Terminator.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough. You almost HAVE to watch it in order to fully understand it, I did my best, but words fail when confronted with the likes of Ninja Terminator. Mad props to Annie Choi of Bleeding Skull for gifting us with this experience, and it was especially neat to finally meet her and chat for a bit after the show. All I can say is, next month’s Video Vortex looks and sounds amazing. For now, though, I must continue my journey into the wild, weird world of Godfrey Ho. There’s Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Destroyer, Ninja Dragon, Full Metal Ninja, Ultimate Ninja, Ninja in the Killing Fields…