COCAINE BEAR – A parachute laden with coke gets hoovered by a national park resident; sylvan antics involving park rangers, babes in the woods and a drug cartel soon follow. I’ve heard a few moans about how it doesn’t really live up to the sheer zap promised by the grabby title, but you know, it’s a film and not a small pile of narcotics. Even though I found the gag-related aspect hit and miss, I quite enjoyed its weird mixture of mawkishness and gore.
UNDEFEATABLE – This impeccable travesty of cinema comes from Godfrey Ho. It is well known that many of his films consist of bits of other movies clumsily welded together, but ‘Undefeatable’ seems instead to apply the same process to the most deeply stupid bits of Ho’s own psyche. The result is a mountain of trash that shines like gold. Cynthia Rothrock pulverises goons in denim whilst dark mullet god Don Niam murders anyone who reminds him of his ex-wife... everything else is just the sound of your brain melting. Behold and be blinded by the light that spills from its eye popping, shirt ripping majesty.
NIGHT SCREAMS – Since we’re on the subject of Godfrey Ho, ‘Night Screams’ also has a bit of welding going on with it. The edit put out in cinemas, also the main feature on this newish VS blu ray, includes inserts lifted from ‘Graduation Day’ and a couple of random porn flicks. None of said tinkering is as egregious as the handywork a Ho or a Mattei, but it all adds an extra layer of ‘huh?’ to what’s at base a fairly generic slasher; ironically enough, the film’s other eccentricities, from a Nietzsche quoting con-on-the-run to numerous narrative discontinuities and distortions, are already enough to push it somewhere weird. Which is why I liked it. It’s mostly just one long college party garnished with the odd killing, but somehow it tickled me.
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