Fenomenal Is Fundamental!!

Ah, the simple pleasures of the superhero genre. Good guys, bad guys, ass-whuppings, cool trinkets, incredible costumes, mysterious women. All these things make superheroes and their kin interesting.

Someone should tell Phenomenal about all of that stuff, and then he'd be cool, too.

I grew up with superheroes. Batman and Spiderman were always my favorites because they seemed more human. One well-placed bullet, and they would be dead. Yet they escaped death on a regular basis and proceeded to save the day. It was always black and white when I was a kid, and these costumed heroes always knew what side to be on.

In Europe, they had grown bored with standard tales of good versus evil. What if the heroes weren't so sure what was right? What if we stopped rooting for the heroes and started rooting for the villains? These were questions too complex for a kid who could barely figure out how his favorite horror magazines made it to his local drugstore so he could buy them every month. Tales of these movies crossed my path, but how could you make a movie about a bad guy and make him the hero, I wondered.

Well, if you happen upon Danger: Diabolik, you can see that rooting for the bad guy can be fun. Master criminal showing up the people who think they are so moral and upstanding. Pure entertainment. Excitement, action, cool costumes, groovy chase scenes and alluring women. Yup, all the things the superheroes promised with the added thrill of being naughty. The stuff teen-aged boys dream of.

I'm not here to do a breakdown of all of the European anti-heroes who donned capes or costumes. I'll leave that to the folks who want to read far more into their movies than I do. I will go on record as saying Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen does to the European comic book anti-hero, or the fumetti genre, what Adam Sandler does to comedy. What would that be? you ask. Ruin it.


If you scan for other reviews of this film, you will find most of them like the first few minutes of the film. Phenomenal kicks the snot out of a boatload of guys while his turtleneck is pulled over his face. He laughs like a loony after every seaman falls. Hokey but fun. It turns out the boat was involved in a drug smuggling setup. Hooray, Phenomenal can kick ass AND he's a good guy.

Now you can forget about Phenomenal. You won't see him for at least 20 minutes or more, and then it is only for a second or two while he watches a bad guy steal something from a museum. But don't be alarmed. You'll be treated to inane dialogue that is poorly dubbed. You'll meet a bewildering array of characters. You'll watch as Paris grinds to a halt the second a bike-load of baguettes falls to the sidewalk, and a cop directing the insane traffic leaves his post to check on the condition of the bread. To hell with safety, there's baked goods on the ground! You'll watch crosses and double-crosses and triple-crosses until you don't give a flying fart because you just want to see Phenomenal kicking some more ass.

As Westley said in The Princess Bride, "Get used to disappointment." Oh, sure, the guy in the dopey all-black costume shows up, only to have people throw themselves at his fists until they get tired then they just fall down. And that cool laugh...eh, you hear it once, maybe twice. No cool trinkets. The women are okay. The whole thing is kind of like filming Superman with Woody Allen in the costume.

As for the secret identity of Phenomenal, forget it. If you can't pick out the guy who dons the black duds the second he hits the screen, you really should just stop the movie and go play with some Tinker Toys or something. Just don't get any splinters because you'll most likely let it abscess, and you'll die of blood poisoning.

I'll admit that I'm being a bit hard on this film. There is one delight within the whipped confection of pointlessness, and that is the music. Don't just trust me on this. Go to Moviegrooves.com and hear for yourself. In fact, I'd recommend buying the soundtrack and bypass the movie completely. Unless you just really have to watch the hero get outted by customs at the end of the film, as if we didn't already know who he was.

It would seem that Video Asia's Grindhouse Experience really did scrape the bottom of that Dumpster behind your local choke-n-puke joint to find these films. Better luck next time, we hope.

Psychotic Cycle Sluts Sell Silliness

Did you ever see something for sale that made you think, "I want half of that, but I don't know as though I want the other half."? I do that with marshmallow-coated popcorn. I want the packets of marshmallow yumminess, but I don't really care for the popcorn.



Much like that dilemma, a number of years back, I found a Goodtimes VHS that had Alice, Sweet Alice on it. I had wanted to see that film for years as it was supposed to be a classic slasher flick (and it is better than classic, so go buy the DVD--NOW!!). But, on the same tape was what looked like a biker film called Psychomania. I like weird stuff as much as the rest, but I have never had a soft spot for biker films. I've watched a fair share of them, and some I even enjoyed more than the Doritos I ate while watching, but they leave me cold for the most part. So I debated buying this double-feature tape. But images of Paula Sheppard kept dancing through my head (go find Liquid Sky to understand my mania), so I bought the thing.


The first copy proved to be too weird even for my tastes, though I wish I still had it. There was an alternate audio track that played alongside the regular track and the distorted second track made the tape sound like it was possessed. Once swapped, everything worked fine.



I saw leather-clad Brits on Triumph motorbikes raising hell. I saw seances and frogs. I saw contracts with The Devil. I saw a guy from Doctor Who. The whole thing left me thinking, "Alice? Alice who?"




A delight in utter insanity from the opening shots of motorbikes weaving through a Stonehenge type locale. The basic story? A rough cycle gang called The Living Dead learn that they can kill themselves and return from the dead, just so they can be delinquents who can't die. The baffled police, who can't find their lily-white English arses, attempt to put an end of all the tomfoolery.



The tone is over the top, and if you take any of it serious for a second, go watch your Grey's Anatomy box set and leave the crap films to the real fans. My personal point of interest, other than the gleeful weirdness, is (you can see what's coming) the main female love interest in the film. I admit to an almost fetish-like interest in British women. It isn't the accent so much as how they can be quite plain looking yet come off as utterly sexy. So I carried away from this film, on my first viewing, the image of Mary Larkin, the poor girl known as Abby in this film. Almost looking like a boy, but still being attractive to the point of distracting me from the film's finer lunacies. As you can see from the included photos, she has aged into a very handsome woman.



Drooling aside, let's get down to business on the bargain end of this little number. A few years ago, there was, as part of the Euro-Shock Collection, a release of this film. I'm sure it was a very nice release, but I couldn't tell you because the thing sells for 50 bucks. Oh yeah, it has gone out of print and the greedy folks are out to milk that for all it is worth. But, my cheap friends, this is hope. Geneon, an offshoot of Pioneer, has been releasing some seriously weird films in bargain editions the last few years, and they have Psychomania in their catalog. The print is very clear. The sound is decent. But if you saw this through the Goodtimes edition, you will be thinking you are missing something, and you would be right. The Geneon edition is missing a seance sequence near the beginning that sets the tone for the supernatural storyline that follows. Frankly, I thought the scene slowed the film down when I originally saw the movie. Still, I would have liked to have bought a complete version, but it in no way takes anything away from this $6 little gem. Go forth and buy it.





And hands off Mary Larkin, mates, she's mine. Just don't tell me girlfriend.

Back From The Dead

Damn, it's been along time. Amazing how time zips along. But, enough of my feeble excuses.

No film reviews this time around. Just an announcement that the blog is NOT dead. Films have been stockpiled. Information sniffed out. And money spent. God knows how much money has been spent!

Okay, recent titles salvaged from the bargain bins:

Psychomania -- A strange British film with motorcycles, black magic and undead bikers. In other words, a must watch.

Mansion Of The Doomed -- A sickie with some big names. Well, big names if you are at least 35 years old or are a diehard fan of films made before Quentin Tarentino. A doctor, eye surgeries and people in cages!

House Of Seven Corpses -- Nathaniel Hawthrone is spinning in his grave over this title. Another horror film from the 70s with fading film stars playing fading film stars making a horror film. Kinda like standing between two mirrors and watching your reflection repeat itself into infinity, which is how long this film seems to last. But you get a cat ripped in half, so it gets a thumbs up from the folks at PETA.

Okay, that's enough. We'll cover these and others in more depth. Plus, check out the good folks over at Badmovies.org. Yeah, yeah, I'm promoting a crap film site on my crap film site. The gent who runs this site has done wonders with it. You'll spend hours just reading the forum postings. Which is more time than you'll spend here. Just go. Like your insecure girlfriend, I'll still be here, if you decide to come back.