cinema history class: doctor butcher m.d. (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 2: Doctor Butcher M.D. (1980)
Directed by Marino Girolami

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:

A New York City hospital is rocked by a series of gruesome murders involving cannibalism and stolen body parts. Investigating the killings, a doctor and an anthropologist travel to a remote tropical island, where they discover a mad scientist conducting horrific experiments to bring the dead back to life.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

A New York City hospital is rocked by a series of gruesome murders involving cannibalism and stolen body parts. Investigating the killings, a doctor and an anthropologist travel to a remote tropical island, where they discover a mad scientist conducting horrific experiments to bring the dead back to life.

This is a movie that's mostly boredom punctuated by moments of creatively graphic gore. And when it comes to the gore, it can be a pretty good movie.

Unfortunately, there's all that other stuff in between.

The acting is bad. Really bad. And the movie doesn't do a particularly good job of connecting its New York City prologue to everything that follows. It's almost as if they started making one movie, got bored with it, and decided to make another one instead. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how I felt watching it.

And then there's the music. I assume the idea was to create an atmosphere of tension and unease. Well, it certainly made me uneasy, but mostly because I wanted someone to turn the damn thing off. Rather than enhancing the action, the score was frequently distracting and annoying.

But let's talk about what the movie gets right: the gore.

The makeup effects are excellent, particularly the zombies, whose decaying flesh is wonderfully disgusting. And the filmmakers certainly aren't shy about showing us the good stuff. An outboard motor to the face? Check. Cannibals enthusiastically munching on freshly harvested internal organs? Check. Yum!

And as the movie approaches its conclusion, things actually get better. The gruesome effects become more frequent, more imaginative, and more effective.

Two scenes in particular stand out. One involves a zombie wearing the hair of a murdered reporter, an image that's genuinely horrifying. The other involves an eye, and let's just say that anyone who's squeamish about eye injuries might want to look away. Or perhaps keep watching, because this is exactly the sort of thing the movie does well.

Which makes the whole experience rather frustrating. Clearly, the people responsible for the makeup and special effects knew what they were doing. If only the people responsible for the acting, pacing, music, and storytelling had been equally competent.

Ultimately, Doctor Butcher, M.D. is a movie that rewards patience with some spectacularly disgusting moments. The problem is how much patience it demands.

It's a pretty good gore movie trapped inside a pretty bad movie.

Joe gave it a 7. I'm not sure whether that says more about the movie or Joe.

they let me in the club! but...

A little bit ago I posted about my quest to get on IMDb. The reason for that post was that my acting career was making progress. Glacial progress, but progress nonetheless.

Well, it finally happened. I'm on IMDb.

Sort of.

Last night, Lindley Farley held a screening of Lost 9, the movie in which I have a small role -- the first speaking role of my career. Blair, Asher and I were on our way to the screening when Lindley sent texted  that the movie was now listed on IMDb. And, along with it, me!

At last! After all these years! After hours in snowy Connecticut listening to Lance Henriksen deliver a speech (over and over again) about God and fear! After hours one evening in a bar on the Upper East Side (or was it the Upper West Side?) trying and mostly failing to be visible!  After gawking in the subway as one man attacks another for an umbrella! After all my struggles to get IMDb to acknowledge my existence, I had finally broken through!

Naturally, I immediately looked it up.

There it was. Lost 9. And there I was, listed among the cast as "Internal Affairs Detective #2."

Okay, it's not exactly a starring role. Hell, I didn't even rate a character name. I'm not even "Lady Who Has Her Car Stolen by Ape." I'm just Internal Affairs Detective #2. But it's a speaking part, dammit! I have actual lines! And now I have an IMDb credit to prove it! Strictly speaking, in the credits in the movie I am listed as "Investigator Reevs" which sounds better.

I was delighted.

Of course, I wanted to make sure everything was correct. My first name was spelled with a C. Good. You'd be surprised how many people get that wrong. My last name had the H in it. Excellent. That's another thing people sometimes miss.

Everything looked good.

And then I noticed something.

The E.

My name was listed as Marc Whinsten.

Whinsten.

Not Whinston.

Whinsten.

FUCK!

After all these years of trying to get IMDb to acknowledge my existence, they finally did it. They finally admitted that I was in a movie. They finally gave me a credit.

And they gave it to somebody named Marc Whinsten.

I suppose I should be grateful that they got nine out of ten letters right. That's 90%. A solid A-minus in some grading systems. But somehow, when it comes to my own name, I expect a little better.

Anyway, we went to the screening. I got to see myself on the big screen, which was fun. A couple of my colleagues from work even came to see the movie, which I appreciated. It was a very enjoyable evening. Also, I tried "mushy peas" for the first time, since they came with the fish and chips. But that's a whole other story.

And, to be clear, I'm not actually upset about the misspelling. I think it's pretty funny. After everything I wrote in my previous post about trying to get onto IMDb, there's something almost poetic about finally succeeding, only to discover that they got my name wrong.

I did get a chance to mention it to Lindley, who assured me that he could get it corrected. Hopefully, he will. And if he doesn't, well, I've had bigger frustrations in life.

Oh, and there's one other thing. I also received an Associate Producer credit on the movie. That's pretty cool, too. Unfortunately, my name is misspelled there as well. And IMDb doesn't list that credit at all.

So, to recap: I'm an actor with an IMDb credit under somebody else's name, and an Associate Producer whose producer credit isn't on IMDb.

Still, I'm making progress.

Maybe someday IMDb will acknowledge that Marc Whinston exists.

In the meantime, congratulations to Marc Whinsten on his motion picture debut. I hear he was pretty good.

cinema history class: hell of the living dead (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)
Directed by Bruno Mattei

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
When an accident at a chemical research facility in Papua New Guinea releases a mysterious toxic gas, the dead begin returning to life as flesh-eating zombies. A television news crew investigating the outbreak joins forces with a team of commandos sent to the region. Together, they travel through the jungle, encountering increasingly gruesome scenes of carnage as the infection spreads. As they struggle to survive, they discover that the disaster may be connected to a sinister international effort to address overpopulation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
There's a lot wrong with this movie. A LOT.

The plot is bizarre, the storytelling is messy, and some of the proceedings are downright silly. There are moments when the movie is ugly, and not necessarily in the way a horror movie is supposed to be ugly. And the whole thing feels like it was cobbled together from pieces of other movies.

The influences are pretty obvious. There's more than a little Cannibal Holocaust in here, along with a generous helping of Apocalypse Now. And, of course, the obligatory George Romero zombie influences. It's almost as though the filmmakers watched a bunch of movies they liked and decided to make all of them at once.

And then there's the stock footage. Lots and lots of stock footage. I understand the desire to establish an exotic jungle setting without actually having to film everything in an exotic jungle. But did we really need all those shots of birds? What was the point? Were the birds somehow involved in the zombie outbreak? Were they conducting surveillance? Did somebody get a terrific deal on a reel of bird footage and decide they were damn well going to use every frame?

Another problem is the storytelling. It reminded me of something that bothers me about a lot of modern action movies. Within any given scene, it's usually perfectly clear what's happening. You know who the characters are, what they're trying to accomplish, and what's standing in their way. But how one scene connects to the next, or how all the scenes fit together into a coherent story, is another matter entirely. The individual pieces make sense. The movie doesn't always.

And the ending? Let's just say I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised by how things turn out.

So why did I give this movie a relatively high rating?

Because somewhere in the second half, I noticed something strange.

I was watching another scene in which a group of living people was desperately trying to escape a bunch of zombies. I was still bothered by the movie's incoherence, its silliness, and its general messiness. But I was also completely absorbed in what was happening. I wanted to know how these people were going to get out of this particular predicament. I was on edge. I was genuinely interested in what happened next.

Somehow, despite everything the movie was doing wrong, it had grabbed me.

And that's not nothing.

I should also give credit to the makeup effects, which are excellent. The zombies look appropriately revolting, and there's some genuinely impressive gruesomeness on display.

Ultimately, Hell of the Living Dead is a badly assembled, frequently ridiculous, sometimes irritating movie. But it's also a movie that managed to hold my attention and generate real suspense, even while I was mentally cataloging its many shortcomings.

I can't call it a good movie. But I can't dismiss it as a bad one, either.

Sometimes a movie doesn't have to make much sense to work. Sometimes it just has to make you want to see what happens next.

And, against considerable odds, this one did.

And the strangest thing of all? Joe...Joe, of all people, gave it a 5!

imdb can't keep me out forever

My acting career continues to advance at a breathtaking pace.

On October 13, I’ll finally get to see Lost 9, a new short film by Lindley Farley in which I have a small role. We’ll be screening it at a bar in the East Village. Lindley tells me the finished film will run about 15–20 minutes. If you’re interested in coming, DM me for details.

I don’t want to give away much of the plot, other than to say that it’s about a New York cop who loses his gun.

Lindley has made a bunch of shorts, as well as the feature The Bulls’ Night Out and The Fez Belcher Show, a web series. I was also an extra in his short Infer Red last year. I was officially listed in the credits as one of two "subway gawkers." 

This is only the latest chapter in my distinguished screen career.

My film debut came in the 1999 indie film Auditions, where I was credited as “Man in Bar.” I was indeed a man in a bar. I was also barely visible. If you knew exactly when and where to look, and squinted, you could see me. Despite receiving an actual credit, I did not make it onto IMDb.

Twenty years later, I appeared in the straight-to-video film Being. I was not credited, but this time I was clearly visible, as one of a group of frightened townspeople gathered to hear what the preacher, played by Lance Henriksen, had to say.

I didn’t make IMDb for that one either.

There is a much better story about how I wound up in Being. After my father-in-law died, we were selling his kitchen table. The guy who bought it turned out to be one of the producers of the movie, who was running around acquiring props and other things they needed for the shoot. One thing led to another, and I wound up as an extra. In fact, I wrote about that experience here.

The table made the movie too. A couple has sex against it. But, sadly, the table also did not make IMDb.

Last year came Infer Red, and now Lost 9, where I have finally achieved the next great milestone in my acting career: Lines.

Only a couple of them, near the end of the movie, but actual lines.

Filming my little scene was also an education. There are three of us talking, and the finished scene will probably last only a couple of minutes. I naively figured we would go in, have the conversation in front of the camera, and that would pretty much be that.

Nope.

We did the conversation over and over and over again while Lindley shot it from different angles: close-ups of each of us, wider shots, different perspectives and everything in between. I assume the finished scene will be assembled from bits and pieces of all those takes.

Which, of course, is how movies are made. I knew that intellectually. It was something different to actually participate in it and see how much filming goes into producing a couple of minutes of finished conversation.

I was also around for the filming of a bar scene early in the movie. The very top of my head is visible in that scene if you know where to look. Fortunately, it is not recognizable as the top of my head, because having me visibly appear as two different people in the same 15-minute movie would probably raise questions that the plot isn't prepared to answer.

But the most fun I had on Lost 9 may have been helping Lindley shoot a car-chase sequence.

I’m not in the chase, but I did a surprising amount to help make it happen. I scouted around looking for a dumpster that Lindley needed in one sequence. I drove with a camera mounted on the hood of my car. I drove while Lindley filmed out the back. I rode in Lindley’s car shining a light on the driver. I drove parallel to other cars involved in the chase.

At first, Lindley would explain five shots we were going to do and how they would all fit together.

I would listen carefully.

Then I would have absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

Eventually we developed a much better system. Lindley would tell me one thing we needed to do. We would do it. Then he would tell me the next thing. We would do that.

That worked much better.

And afterward, it was fascinating to see the edited footage and realize how all these little pieces — which often didn't make much sense to me while we were shooting them — came together into something that actually looked like a car chase. Lindley had a vision, but I couldn't see it (until I could).

That may have been the most interesting part of the whole experience: getting a tiny glimpse of how a movie gets constructed. You shoot little fragments from different angles, sometimes in an order that doesn't mean much to anyone except the filmmaker, and eventually those fragments become a scene.

Lindley has also told me he’s going to give me an associate producer credit for my contributions to the film.

So, after 27 years in show business, my résumé now includes Man in Bar, and uncredited ccared townsperson, subway gawker, a character who actually speaks, and Associate Producer.

IMDb cannot hold out forever.

cinema history class: dracula vs. frankenstein (1971)

The session: Freaky Frankenstein's
Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)
Directed by Al Adamson

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A descendant of Dr. Frankenstein runs a creepy seaside attraction while secretly conducting experiments with the help of his grotesque assistant. When Dracula brings him the original Frankenstein monster and proposes an alliance, the monster is revived—eventually leading to the promised showdown between Dracula and Frankenstein’s creation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Dracula vs. Frankenstein is an incoherent mess.

And apparently, there was a good reason for that. This feels like a movie made by people who weren’t entirely sure what movie they were making while they were making it. The whole production has that cobbled-together quality: scenes and ideas thrown at the screen in the hope that eventually they might add up to a movie. They don’t.

The dialogue is terrible. The acting is very bad. The story wanders around seemingly at random. Even Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster—the two guys whose names are right there in the title—sometimes seem like they wandered in from some other movie.

I did get a kick out of the cop, who struck me as some weird low-budget version of Harry Morgan in Naked City. And I have to admit that the midget landing on the axe was funny. I’m not entirely convinced it was supposed to be as funny as I found it, but at this point you take your entertainment where you can get it.

Which brings me to the only circumstances under which I can really recommend Dracula vs. Frankenstein: get together with a bunch of friends, get drunk, and make fun of it. Under those conditions, this could actually be a pretty good time. As a movie, though? No.

And then there was Joe.

Joe gave this piece of shit a 10.

I don't understand it.

This was much worse than the last two things we watched, neither of which Joe gave a 10. So apparently those movies somehow failed to meet the exacting standards that Dracula vs. Frankenstein satisfied.

I have spent some time trying to understand Joe's rating system. I shall spend no more.