Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Part I

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Part I

Metamorphosis (Filmirage, January 1990)

It’s that time again. I can sense casual Black Gate users getting complacent, so here is a new movie watch-a-thon project. This time, based on my recent experience with The Substance, I’m going to be unearthing flicks that deal with transformation; Jekyll and Hyde riffs, body horror, self-made monsters. Bear with me as it’s often difficult to find films I haven’t seen before, but with perseverance and nightly prayer I’m sure I can get to the finish line in a timely manner. With that said…

Metamorphosis (1990) – Tubi

Taking inspiration from the success of The Fly from four years prior, Italian director Luigi Montefiori (under the pseudonym G.L. Eastman) banged out this strange little film about a single-minded scientist and his doomed experimentation. There are plenty of similarities to Cronenberg’s classic: an ill-fated love affair, pseudoscience, baboons, slow body decay, and the dispatching of interfering busy-bodies, but its a bit of a slog due to some underwhelming performances, weird shot choices, and ropey effects.

The geneticist at the heart of the story, Peter Houseman, thinks he has cracked the code to reverse aging and achieve immortality. Little does he know, however, that his formula is wrong, and after he injects himself with the serum, he slowly mutates into… what?

At first it seems to be prematurely aging him, then he mutates into a strange, beak-faced thingy, before the final transformation at the climax, which results in him looking like a partly deflated T-rex costume from Party City. Good lord, the guffaw I blurted out.

It has the usual hangovers from late 80s films, a minimalist synth score, gratuitous nudity (in some rather unsavory assault scenes), and plenty of foam appliances. Not a great start to the project, but who knows what might transpire?

Patchwork (The Orchard, October 17, 2015)

Patchwork (2015) – Prime/Shudder

I do like a pleasant surprise.

Never heard of this film (although it made a splash on the festival circuits), so shoved it on with zero expectations. Let me assure you, gentle movie-lover, that it’s actually rather good if you love Frankenstein pastiches, body horror, and Stuart Gordon films. I’d go so far as to suggest it is an unofficial sequel to Re-Animator, with several similarities to that 80s classic. There’s humor embedded in the script too — not all of the gags land, but there were a enough moments that made me chuckle.

The story concerns three women who have been murdered and then stitched back together into the same body. The way that they (bear with me here) converse with each other while trying to remedy their situation is really well done, with their conflicting personalities often overriding themselves.

The actors, Tory Stolper as acerbic Jennifer (and subsequently the main creature), Tracy Fairaway as Ellie, a bubble-headed bar star, and Maria Blasucci as Madelaine, a pragmatic woman, are all brilliant, Stolper especially, and they are helped by a med student called Garrett, played by James (one of the older Weasleys) Phelps, who seems a bit out of place, but does his job well.

A similar Substance-type message about self-worth, and the lengths women go to to match their outside to their inside, underpins the story, while every male in this film is a misogynistic dick (even the gentle Garrett at one point), so it is quite fun to see Jen/Ellie/Maddie go on a bloody rampage — and rampage they do.

Plenty of excellent prosthetics and gore on show, a fun score, some terrific twists and reveals, and a perfect vibe. I had fun! Recommended.

Stolen Face (Hammer Film Productions, June 23, 1952)

Stolen Face (1952) – Tubi

Here’s a lean and somewhat mean British film from Terence Fisher, five years before he started his run as the granddaddy of Hammer horror.
Paul Henreid stars as Dr. Philip Ritter, a plastic surgeon with a rather dodgy moral compass. Sure, he starts off all saintly and beneficial to his disfigured (or rich) patients, but when he instantly falls for an American classical pianist (Lizabeth Scott) on a short vacation, he turns positively creepy.

Not the sort of stalkerish creepy we might expect in this day and age, but full-on obsessive. Alice Brent (Scott), has a cold, and is keeping the residents of the overnight inn awake with her sneezing, so Ritter forces himself on her as her ‘doctor’ with a bottle of scotch and his ear on her pointy bosom. Within two days he is smitten, but left heartbroken when she leaves in the night to return to her fiancé (André Quatermass Morell) and her concert tour.

Ritter returns to London, and helps Lily, a career criminal locked up in Holloway, who was disfigured during the blitz. He helps her by turning her into Alice Brent, and then marries her!

It all goes horribly wrong, however, when Lily returns to her thieving ways, and draws Ritter into her seedy world of gangsters and ne’er-do-wells. When Alice has a change of heart, and returns to London to find Ritter, things get messy very quickly.

This one licks along at a terrific pace (71 mins) despite a couple of obligatory montages (falling in love, facial reconstruction), but really leaves a bit of a sour taste in your mouth at the ‘happy’ ending. Check it out — let me know what you think!

*Bonus early Arnold Ridley appearance for any Dad’s Army fans out there.

Starry Eyes (Snowfort Pictures, March 8, 2014)

Starry Eyes (2014) – Plex

This is a film that will resonate with fans of the Hollywood elite conspiracy theories, the idea that the biggest movers and shakers, producers, actors, et al, live in an Eyes Wide Shut world.

Vampires, baby-eaters, reptiles, the lot of ’em!

The more rational among us will see this film for what it is; an allegory for the desperate pursuit of fame at any cost, and the lengths that someone will go to to achieve their dream.

Sarah (Alex Essoe — brilliant), is an aspiring young actor looking for her first big break. Even though her circle of friends are willing to involve her in their own independent production, her sights are set on immediate stardom, and when opportunity knocks via an audition for a film called The Silver Scream, she goes all out for the part.

At first, the audition demands are too much, and she rightly balks at the final hurdle (a sexual favor for the insidious studio head), but her ambition sees her reevaluating her self worth, and she succumbs. Immediately, her moral and spiritual decay is made manifest, and she plummets down a rabbit hole of body horror and murder in a perverse attempt at immortality.

The film is well made, with a slow burning 50 minutes leading into a bloody assault on the senses. Everyone is good in this, and the effects are shockingly gory. It’s a timely tale in this current clime of everyone and their hamster longing for their 15 minutes, and even though Sarah is ultimately a monster, you can’t help but understand her motivation if you look at what some Tik-Tokkers are prepared to do these days. Worth a look.

Gun Woman (Maxam, May 29, 2014)

Gun Woman (2014) – Tubi

When I read the description — ‘scientist surgically implants gun parts into a woman to exact revenge on the man who murdered his wife’ — I was expecting an over-the-top gonzo body horror-fest in the vein of Tokyo Gore Police or Meatball Machine, full of horror and gags. However, things turned out a bit differently.

There’s no humor to be found in this distressing tale. A Japanese gangster, exiled to the States by his own organization for being too extreme, violates and murders a surgeon’s wife before him as a punishment for a failed surgery. The surgeon is then crippled and turfed onto the streets. Fueled by a maddening vengeance, the surgeon (called ‘Mastermind’) buys a young, meth-addicted woman from an unscrupulous source, and proceeds to turn her into an assassin through a brutal training regime.

The problem is getting her close enough to the gangster, and this is where the story starts to go off the rails in the best possible way. The gangster is a frequent guest of an organisation that provides corpses for necrophiles — and the plan is to simulate the young assassin’s death, and get her inside so that she can shoot him.

With a gun that she has to assemble after removing the parts from her own body.

Before she bleeds to death in 20 minutes.

The training scenes are graphic and disturbing, and Mastermind goes to many extreme lengths, including demonstrating exactly how one would bleed to death from the wounds he will inflict.

When you think the envelope has been pushed as far as it can, the director, Kurando Mitsutake, takes that envelope, sets it on fire, and pushes it into the path of a corn thresher. The final act of the film features the assassin on a supremely bloody rampage, all while completely nude and dying from blood loss.

Gun Woman is an astonishing exploitation film, one that took me by surprise. The story is told in a narrative flashback by an American hitman to his partner as they drive across the desert after a hit. This is by far the weakest element of the film, as the direction and acting is sub-par, but there are some crucial tie-in elements to this wraparound, so you just have to put up with it.

The Japanese cast is outstanding; Kairi Narita as Mastermind is obsessive and unhinged, Noriaki Kamata as the gangster, ‘Hamazaki’s Son’, is terrifying, awful to look at, and so, so disturbing during his depraved sexual acts. However, the star of the show is undoubtably Asami as the young woman tasked with killing the gangster. We talk about Demi Moore being brave in her role as Elizabeth Sparkle in The Substance, but Asami puts herself through so much degradation, fully nude and covered in blood for the entire third act, and is even willing to cut off her own hair with a hunting knife (for real). She is incredible in the over-the-top action scenes, and you can’t help but cheer her on as she slaughters her way through the grotesque organisation.

I do recommend it to fans of this sort of thing, but that recommendation comes with a hefty warning for pretty much everything.

Victim (Pierce/Williams Entertainment, November 17, 2010)

Victim (2010) – Prime

A short (75 min) shocker that had a decent idea, but ruined it with a decision from the start.

The film begins with some grimy camcorder footage showing a young woman being led into a hotel room under the pretense of a film audition, and then being brutally murdered. So far, so late-2000s. We are next in a bar, watching a good-looking rogue chat up various women, all the while being watched by a hooded figure straight out of any horror/torture flick. Unsurprisingly, the man is bonked on the head before he can drive off in his Porsche, and wakes up in a cell. Then begins the slow transformation of the man (unnamed) through psychological and physical torture, into a facsimile of the woman we previously saw being killed.

It turns out his captor is the the murder victim’s father, a famous surgeon, and with help from his brutish assistant, he is turning the young man into his daughter. Butterflies litter the scenes, reminding us that this is a film about transformation, and extended scenes of reprogramming, HRT, and surgical procedures commence, all put together with choppy editing, and drenched in yellow sodium lighting. Saw was still a huge influence on everything back then.

The film attempts some twists and turns, but I can’t help feeling that it would have been much more interesting without that prologue. The direction and acting are fine, Bob Bancroft as the softly-spoken surgeon is great, and the bloody effects work well, but on the whole the film didn’t offer up anything new, which is a shame because its central theme is quite relevant in this current age of transphobia and fear.

Circus of Horrors (American International Pictures, April 8, 1960)

Circus of Horrors (1960) – Tubi

A brilliant, but deranged, plastic surgeon, Rossiter (Anton Diffring), has messed up a surgery on a wealthy socialite, and has to flee Britain. He winds up in France with his assistants, Martin (Kenneth Griffith) and Martin’s sister, Angela (Jane Hylton), who is besotted with Rossiter. They come across a run down circus owned by Vanet (Donald Pleasance chewing the scenery wonderfully, complete with hair and dodgy accent), and after Rossiter performs a scar removal on Vanet’s daughter, he ends up becoming a partner of the circus, which is a useful front for his continued experiments.

That same night, Rossiter allows Vanet to be killed by a bear, so now the circus is all his. Over the next ten years, Rossiter recruits thieves and prostitutes, surgically altering them into visions of beauty, and turning the circus into a triumph. Naturally, he wants to shag everyone he has ‘rebuilt’, and this leads to problems, as every performer who wants to leave the circus ends up dying in tragic ‘accidents’. This soon catches the attention of the police, and a wild cat and mouse chase concludes the story.

I really enjoyed this one; beautiful colors and production design, hokey animal costumes, and so many beautiful actors (Diffring, Erika Remberg, Yvonne Monlaur, and Curse of the Werewolf‘s Yvonne Romain). Lots of bright red blood, a cracking score, and some decent makeup. Fun!

Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

Monster Mayhem
It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos
You Can’t Handle the Tooth
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?
Fan of the Cave Bear
There, Wolves
What a Croc
Prehistrionics
Jumping the Shark
Alien Overlords
Biggus Footus
I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie
The Weird, Weird West
Warrior Women Watch-a-thon


Neil Baker’s last article for us was Part III of Monster Mayhem. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits. (AprilMoonBooks.com).

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Eugene R.

I have a soft spot for Circus of Horrors, as it was the movie used in Joel Hodgson’s final Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live tour, which I attended in March 2020, the last public movie viewing I went to, pre-COVID.

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