Youtube Film Club: Shaitani Dracula

A couple of years back, Keith Allison of Teleport City posted a review of an absolutely astounding discovery: ‘Shaitani Dracula’, directed by one Harinam Singh.

It’s a great review and a good example of why Keith is one of my favourite film writers - you should read it. Maybe you shouldn’t read it quite yet though – I guess I can’t help but feel that the justifiable hyperbole the review layers upon this singular cultural artefact might spoil the surprise that lies in store for the innocent viewer.

For yes, viewers we shall be. After a conversation with my brother last week in which the subject of insane third world horror movies was broached, we exchanged a bunch of youtube links that led me toward the discovery that, somewhat inevitably, some maniac has uploaded ‘Shaitani Dracula’.

What can I say – everything the Teleport City review claimed of it is true. I could drivel on at length about my picks for the most crazed/note-worthy/hilarious aspects of this… well, I hesitate to call it a ‘movie’ as such… but I’d basically just be treading ground already covered in Keith’s review.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the process whereby weird/’bad’ films can reach a certain critical mass of disjointed abnormality, a point at which they cease to be subject to kind of expectations and judgements we usually apply to narrative cinema, and in fact cease to really function as ‘films’ at all, instead taking on a new life as… something else - some nameless and fascinating form of outsider art that happens when strange people and movie cameras collide?

We may laugh when we see these ‘films’ – often we will laugh uproariously, laugh until we’re blue in the face – but it would be wrong to assume that we are laughing AT them. As someone (Nietzsche I believe, although I’m damned if I can find the quote online, so maybe it was someone else) once observed, laughter exists to fill the space left by an emotion that has died. Thus we laugh simply because we don’t know how else to react to the impossible reality of these things, the fact that not only did human beings create them, they actually placed them before us as prospective entertainments.

‘Troll 2’ is a good example of one of these un-films, ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ is another. ‘Roller Blade’ and its sequels, for sure. ‘Awakening of the Beast’. ‘Zombie Lake’ is borderline. I’d make the case for ‘Astro-Zombies’, though some might argue it’s a bit too self-conscious. ‘Future Hunters’ (another Teleport City discovery)! ‘Tales from the Quadead Zone’ anyone..?

Well you get the idea. So let’s just say that ‘Shaitani Dracula’, if not necessarily the most rewarding, is certainly the most extreme example of this kind of un-cinema I’ve ever seen. Either the absolute bottom of the barrel, or the shining peak of the mountain, depending on which way you look at it.

On a more prosaic level, it blows my mind that apparently ‘Shaitani Dracula’ was made in 2006. I dunno – 1986 or 1996 I could have handled, but 2006!? It just seems astounding that this level of naivety could still exist. Not that I’m suggesting that some quantum leap in cultural sophistication has taken place in the past fifteen year or anything, far from it, but, y’know…. we had the internet in 2006. Ok, so maybe people in rural India didn’t ‘have the internet’ as such, but Harinam Singh is evidently the owner of a few shiny 4x4 vehicles, and a movie camera, and whatever kind of resources it takes to get a seemingly endless number of attractive girls to hang out in the woods with him in revealing outfits – I’m sure he could have sorted himself out with a net connection. I’m sure he could have, I dunno… watched some films? Maybe read some Wiki pages on the basics of cinema? Perhaps he could have found a guidebook explaining how to set up his camera properly? But no – apparently he’s a busy man. Instead he just went for it. ‘Shaitani Dracula’ is the result.

So, the time has come. Let’s meet up on the other side, and we can talk about it.

Oh, and look out for the bit with the ducks.

Good luck!



(Purely by coincidence, whilst I was preparing this post earlier this week, I discovered that Todd Stadtman of the Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! blog posted a podcast in which he and an esteemed colleague discuss ‘Shaitani Dracula’ at length, alongside the similarly brain-breaking Thai film ‘King-ka Kayasit’ aka ‘Magic Lizard’. It’s a really entertaining and informative listen, throwing in a lot of background info on Harinam Singh, and the kind of culture that led to the creation of this extraordinary film, along with many additional chuckles.)

Some thoughts on ‘Troll 2’ (1990) and ‘Best Worst Movie’ (2010).

A couple of weekends ago, I attended a sold-out screening at the Prince Charles Cinema just off Leicester Square (the closest thing central London has to a real repository theatre/grindhouse I suppose, although sadly these days they tend to stick to about 99% recent Hollywood output and the kind of senior common room ‘cult classics’ anyone with a TV has already seen a hundred times… but that’s a rant for another day). The event in question was a double bill of ‘Troll 2’, and ‘Best Worst Movie’, a documentary about ‘Troll 2’.

I had not previously seen ‘Troll 2’ and, beyond reading a few reviews on horror blogs etc, I was largely unfamiliar with the kind of word of mouth cult following that has grown up around the film. I just went along because I was curious and bored and, y’know, because I just like this kinda crap, and wanted to support the ambitions of whoever decided it was a good idea to instigate a theatrical screening of something like ‘Troll 2’, as opposed to just showing ‘Bladerunner’ or ‘Goodfellas’ or whatever for the thousandth fucking time.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, I was unable to convince anyone to come with me (“hey, d’you wanna go and see this movie called ‘Troll 2’ with me tomorrow night? I hear it’s really terrible.. tickets are £10”), so decided to go it alone. I was expecting it to be a pretty, uh, ‘niche’ event I suppose. I was completely unprepared for either the size (large theatre = totally sold out, queue down the street, people being turned away etc.) or rabid, Rocky Horror style enthusiasm of the film’s fanbase, whose good-natured whoopin’ and hollerin’ often threatened to drown out the movie’s audio altogether. And, uh, that was cool I guess – I certainly didn’t mind it, but I was somewhat taken aback. I mean we don’t get that shit going to see Truffaut movies at the BFI, y’know. Just what kind of weird cult have I been missing out on here?

Well, the film itself answered that question succinctly within its opening few minutes. For anyone who has yet to experience ‘Troll 2’ - and particularly those who may have been put off by it’s faintly obnoxious fanboy following - I would like to state my opinion that it is a genuinely extraordinary piece of work – an indescribably strange and misguided film whose appeal (for those of us who appreciate this-sort-of-thing) extends far beyond the realm of internet memes and horror-nerd injokes.

As is inevitably the case with films that attract that perennially misapplied “worst movie ever” label, ‘Troll 2’ is clearly not the ‘worst’ anything. Any dedicated fan of strange/low budget films will likely have more than a few joints on their shelves that sink far lower, whether judged in terms of technical prowess, enjoyment or coherence. As critic MJ Simpson sagely points out in ‘Best Worst Movie’, there are plenty of awful, tedious movies out there made by people who have no idea how to make a film. What is so remarkable about ‘Troll 2’ is rather the fact that it was made by people who clearly do know how to make a film – the framing, editing, cinematography etc, if not exactly world class, is at least fairly proficient. ‘Troll 2’s creators clearly had some degree of ability and common sense - and yet they still chose to put all of this shit in front of their cameras?! As Simpson puts it, it’s like a movie put together by professional filmmakers… after they suffered a severe blow to the head.

As with an Ed Wood or Ted V. Mikels movie, to laugh *at* a film like this, or to single out its moments of incompetence, is to completely miss the point - a reaction as mean-spirited and stupid as laughing at a musician because s/he ‘can’t play properly’. The delirious joy of watching something like ‘Troll 2’ arises rather from trying to put oneself in the headspace of the filmmakers, from trying to fathom the thought-processes that brought this breathtaking spectacle of otherness into being. And in the case of ‘Troll 2’, the fact that it is technically speaking quite good only serves to make this delicious feeling of bafflement all the more poignant.

(VHS Artwork via Lost Video Archive)

I won’t bother trying to summarise the many, many highlights of ‘Troll 2’ – there are other blogs you can go to for that, and besides, once I got started we’d be here all day. The whole thing is a highlight. Let’s just say that for the opening hour or so, I was utterly transfixed, convinced that, yes, this was the real deal. A genuine modern day Ed Wood movie; an earnest attempt to make a good, entertaining film in which every single element – every shot, every character, every line of dialogue – somehow ended up so cracked that it could have been beamed in from another planet.

The combinations of words, images and ideas thrown up by ‘Troll 2’ are of an order that a regularly functioning human brain will never have even considered before - a vision of purest anti-inspiration, rising from the lumbering carcass of a generic PG-13 horror quickie with such force that the result is near psychedelic. Quite what the horror schlubs and VHS hounds must have thought when they rented this thing for the first time back in 1990 expecting a bog-standard Full Moon Productions straight-to-video number (ala the entirely unconnected ‘Troll 1’), I can’t even begin to imagine. A psychotronic holy grail moment, for sure.

And furthermore, this industrial-strength cack-handed weirdness just seems to escalate as the film goes on, getting more and more over the top until it reaches a certain critical mass at about the sixty minute mark, after which my delight began to sour. Ok, I thought, it’s too late now - the filmmakers have shown their hand. I mean, this is just too fucking stupid for words. Those who have seen the film will know what I mean: the dragging-the-guy-in-the-plantpot escape scene; Grandpa Seth’s grinning reaction shots after poleaxing a goblin; the beef baloney sandwich; the whole ‘popcorn’ sequence. There is NO WAY this stuff could have been intended as anything other than total comedy. I figured that, much like Brian Trenchard Smith’s infamous ‘Turkey Shoot’, they must have watched the rushes at some point and realised what a bloody ridiculous movie they were making, then decided to just go with it, amping things up as far as they possibly could in the name of gross-out, LOL-worthy absurdity. It was still hugely enjoyable, no question, but what had begun as a beautifully mystifying piece of outsider art basically ended up turning into a Troma movie, and that made me sad.

But the brilliant thing is – I was wrong. From beginning to end, there was no self-conscious, good/bad movie irony involved in this film’s production. This shit is for real, and that is so wonderful I could cry. You see… well, this is gonna take a few paragraphs to explain…


‘Best Worst Movie’ is a slightly unconventional documentary. Not so much a ‘making of’, it’s more like an ‘aftermath’, catching up with ‘Troll 2’s cast and crew nearly twenty years later, and documenting the rise of the film’s internet-era cult following. ‘Troll 2’s cast was comprised of non-professionals and seemingly random passersby culled from the Salt Lake City shooting location, and as it turns out, at least half of them prove to be real “documentary gold” so to speak, running the gamut from lovable eccentrics to people clearly wrestling with severe psychological problems (the guy who plays the storekeeper somehow ended up appearing in the film on his days out from a mental hospital, and claims he had no idea what was going on and “was not acting” when laying down his brief but unforgettable performance).

Understandably perhaps, much of the screen-time is dedicated to these guys, but whilst it’s a remarkable bit of ‘real-people / real-lives’ filmmaking, personally I was hankering to find out about the Italian crew who actually MADE the movie. ‘Troll 2’s credited director, ‘Drake Floyd’, is clearly an anglicised pseudonym, so who in the hell was responsible, and will they want to take credit for their dubious masterwork..?

When I got my answer about forty minutes in, it was like the unmasking of a supervillian. Claudio Fragrasso?!? I fucking knew it! Now things start to make sense! Or rather, the overall lack of sense starts to make sense.

Admittedly, I’m only really familiar with Fragrasso thanks to his role as the writer and de-facto director of Zombie Flesh Eaters II and III (Zombie II & III if you live in the states), which genuinely ARE some of the worst films I’ve ever seen, but his reputation as one of the most staggeringly incompetent screen-writers in Italian exploitation cinema precedes him.

Yes, that’s right – even by the standards of Italian horror, where critically lauded, landmark films often exhibit about as much logic as a drunken shooting spree in a fairground, this guy is notorious for his sloppy, nonsensical scripting. Imagine that.

Between his work on the Zombi/Zombie/whatever films and his numerous collaborations with similarly ridiculed director Bruno Mattei, Fragrasso managed to carve out a prolific directorial career for himself through the ‘80s and ‘90s, making what I’d imagine must have been very low budget films, some of them filmed in America or featuring American ‘stars’, seemingly angling for the kind of US video release that ‘Troll 2’ eventually achieved in 1990. Apparently in 1986 he made something called ‘Monster Dog’, staring a career-low-point Alice Cooper. Be still my beating heart.

Anyway: when Fragrasso is introduced in ‘Best Worst Movie’, he wastes no time in letting us know that he takes his films very seriously. Like many of Italy’s daftest trash-auteurs, he claims straight-facedly that he wants his films to move people emotionally, and to inspire reflection on important issues. The audience here in London nearly fall off their seats when he stated in broken English that he wanted ‘Troll 2’ to address “life… and death… and the challenges that a family must overcome to stay together”, or something along those lines.

Fragrasso can’t take sole credit for the majesty of ‘Troll 2’ though. The original idea, and the surreal English-as-second-language script, are the work of his wife and frequent creative partner Rossella Drudi. Drudi seems a little more down to earth in her inspiration. “Some of my friends had recently become vegetarians,” she says, explaining the genesis of the film’s somewhat unique anti-vegan food-based horror conceit, “and this pissed me off.” Suddenly the path that led us to the deux-ex-beef baloney sandwich becomes a little clearer.


‘Best Worst Movie’ follows Fragrassi and Drudi as they travel to America to attend some cult circuit screenings of ‘Troll 2’. Initially Fragrassi seems somewhat awed to see people queuing up outside a theatre to see his movie, but after witnessing their reaction to the screening, he quickly becomes cagey. “They laugh at the parts that are funny,” he says suspiciously, “but also at the parts which are not meant to be funny?”

He seems to be pondering whether or not this is standard practice for American audiences, but slowly the penny begins to drop. “You understand nothing!” is his winningly concise response to a smirking fanboy who asks him in a Q&A session why there are no trolls in ‘Troll 2’, and by the time we get to a full-scale cast reunion/Troll 2 mini-convention at the original Utah shooting location, things have become outright uncomfortable.

The American cast members sit on a makeshift stage, sharing anecdotes about how none of the Italian crew spoke English, and how they were handed crudely rewritten script pages from day to day and forced to stick to the dialogue as written, rather than trying to adapt it into something slightly less ridiculous. Fragrasso meanwhile stalks the back of the hall, largely ignored and denied a microphone, heckling the actors. “Lies!”, he yells. “That is not true! Everyone had whole script”, “these actors, they are dogs”, “I know the way Americans speak better than they do”, and so on.

You get the impression that the director’s failure to ‘get’ his own film, or to adopt the kind of self-deprecating attitude that would be expected of an Anglo-American filmmaker in similar circumstances, cast rather a pall over the whole occasion.

(In fairness to Fragrasso, it is not only bad Italian directors who have experienced this sort of linguistic/cultural disconnection when filming in English – I was strongly reminded of the stories of Sergio Leone presenting Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef with pages of ham-fisted dialogue that they point-blank refused to say, or of his later insistence that ‘Duck, You Sucker’ was “a big phrase in America”, in spite of the legions of actual Americans desperately trying to convince him otherwise.)

Although Fragrasso comes across as a rather charmless individual, it’s hard not to feel a vast sympathy for him as he looks at the reels of the 35mm print of ‘Troll 2’ that has been made for the screenings, admitting that this is the first time he has ever seen an actual theatrical print of one of his films – “normally we just get the video”. What can he be feeling, as he reflects that after three decades of toil in the film industry, his only opportunity to see his work actually touch a projector comes because he made a movie that a bunch of Americans really like laughing at?

And the crux of the matter is of course that no matter how deluded his inflated view of his own work may seem, on some level HE IS RIGHT. Without Fragrasso’s earnest, unshakeable self-belief, ‘Troll 2’ would never have been anti-masterpiece that it is. For all its hilarious, ugly absurdity, there is something incredibly compelling about the film, something beyond mere mockery that has allowed it to strike a chord with a huge number of people.

I mean, I’ve seen a lot of objectively pretty good films in the past six months that I can barely remember at all, beyond a basic acknowledgement that they were pretty good. But I think about ‘Troll 2’ EVERY DAY. Seriously. There is something genuinely unsettling about its blunt, poorly realised imagery that makes you kinda shudder, even as you’re laughing; something unhealthily fascinating about the inhuman illogic of the script that can keep you up in the dark hours of the night, just sorta… trying to get an angle on it. After only one viewing, I feel like the whole film has lodged itself in my mind almost shot for shot, and how many movies can you say that about? Only a special few, whether for better or worse. And it is Claudio Fragrasso’s self-belief, his refusal to take the bait of cheap irony or self-parody, that has made that happen. God bless him for it.

According to a 2004 “Where Are They Now” entry on IMDB, “..after writing and directing a series of cult classics, [Fragrasso] married his high school sweetheart and settled down to a quieter life. He currently operates a conch-fishing vessel off the coast of northern Italy.”

According to a none-more-LOLworthy announcement at the end of ‘Best Worst Movie’ on the other hand, he has come out of retirement to work on - wait for it - “Troll 2: Part 2”.

So far, that has no entry on IMDB, and I pray it never gets one, because frankly the 2004 option sounds about as close to a happy ending as poor ol’ Claudio is liable to get.

“Troll 2: Part 2” would make a great name for a band though, wouldn’t it?

Me n' Coffin Joe, Part # 1:Awakening Of The Beast (1970)

So, what did you all do this xmas? I watched Jose Mojica Marins’ “Awakening of the Beast”. In fairness, I also made time for “The Third Man”, “The Last Picture Show”, Corman’s “Tales of Terror”, “The League of Gentlemen” and “The Trouble With Harry” over the holiday period, all under more convivial circumstances than midnight on my laptop, but it is “Awakening..” that concerns us here.

Given the comparative rarity of weird/obscure cinema on DVD release in the UK, I was surprised and delighted to notice recently that some blessed souls (Anchor Bay in collaboration with Rue Morgue magazine if you must know) have seen fit to release a box set of no less than NINE of Marins’ movies, available for less than twenty quid at your local high street retailer. Nine! Man, I didn’t know he’d even MADE nine movies! So, needless to say, ‘The Coffin Joe Collection’ = my xmas list = under the tree. Thanks mum!

My introduction to the world of Coffin Joe came via a late night thread Channel 4 ran a few years back, dedicated to ‘The World’s Strangest Films’ or some such. And, god bless ‘em, they actually made pretty good on that boast. I should clarify that this was back in the good old days when C4 liked to play up their ‘edgy’ reputation by running a range of original programming in the early hours that seemed to be specifically tailored to the stoner/drunken student crowd, leading to such ever-green favourites as that video clips show with those two Welsh guys playing bits of review copies they’d been sent and that show where cute girls would review video games. I’d imagine this golden age came to an abrupt end when some more commercially savvy cat muscled into a production meeting with the sad truth that the young and inebriated crowd these shows were aimed at do not discriminate in their viewing AT ALL, and will just as happily watch sit-com repeats or CCTV footage of other losers sitting around. So: R.I.P. 90% of TV programming that someone like me could actually sit through, gone in one fell swoop.

But anyway, this was the era that gave us the ‘World’s Strangest Films’ season, and like I said, they done delivered! I particularly remember coming in late one night from a gig in London and sitting around with my student housemates of the time, flabbergasted as we turned on the box and ran headfirst into zero budget Pilipino horror classic ‘The Killing of Satan’. Between the crazy, camera trick kung-fu scenes, the cage full of naked girls and the sight of the Halloween costume & foam pitchfork clad Satan demonstrating his evil by doling out Chinese burns and kicking a fat man down a hill, I laughed so much I was actually dry-heaving by the end.

So, needless to say, I was ready and waiting a week later with my own little TV, drinking some coffee with dinner to see me through to whatever-the-hell-time the next feature presentation began – “Awakening of the Beast”. Now I was, I suppose, vaguely aware of Jose Marins, aka Ze Do Caixao, aka Coffin Joe, at this point. I mean: Brazilian stage actor wears a top hat and a cape, grows a beard and gnarly long finger nails, creates the ‘Coffin Joe’ character and directs/stars in a series of low budget horror films – this is a concept I can dig. I was expecting, I suppose, some kinda cut price, South American Vincent Price / William Castle rama-lama.


What I got, “Awakening of the Beast”, absolutely blindsided me. As a clean-living young man, I was more or less sober when it flickered across the screen, but I honestly thought someone had spiked my coffee with something. To this day, I’ve assumed that I must have exaggerated things in my memory over the years, and that this film can’t POSSIBLY be as fucked up as I remember it being.

So naturally it was first out of the Coffin Joe box at midnight Christmas day, just to check. And the word is: duck kid, it’s even more fucked up than you remember.

It should be noted that most of Marins’ other films, if not exactly ‘normal’, do at least sound like recognisable narrative horror films. “Awakening..” on the other hand bears no real comparison to any other motion picture ever made. It is, I suppose, one part surreal mondo/sexploitation flick, one part an 8 ½-style self-referential exploration of the director’s work, and one part psychedelic descent into hell.



I should have known something was up right from the opening credits, which are scrawled in marker pen on top of pages ripped from a horror comic (an official Coffin Joe comic book, it turns out if you look closely), and are accompanied not by a musical score, but by a thundering skree of distorted, echoing animal noises and screams. Intercut with this are shots of a young woman preparing to inject heroin into her foot. After the credits have concluded, we see close-ups of pornography tacked to the walls of a small, bare room, and panning out, we’re shown five furtive, be-suited men who sit on all-fours, watching the woman shoot up. While she proceeds to strip for them, they pass around a parcel and tear off the wrapping, to reveal a chamber-pot, upon which the woman squats, preparing to defecate.

Cut to a darkened room, where some serious men seem to be engaged in a discussion. One of them says something like, “Why, I would have expected such a disgusting fantasy from the mind of Ze Do Caixao, but not from a respected psychologist!”. What can I say when those are the FACTS, the respected psychologist responds, if you need further evidence, check this one out…

In the next sequence, we see a schoolgirl (she has a picture of the Beatles stuck on her school book) being picked up off the street by some love-bead swingin’ Sunset Strip hippies. They take her back to their apartment, where a whole bunch of hip Tropicalia type cats are busy smoking joints, playing rock n’ roll songs and generally acting crazy. They hypnotise the girl (by giving her a joint and repeatedly clicking their fingers in her face), and proceed to sexually assault her in a strange, highly stylised fashion. This unsavoury scene reaches its conclusion when a hairy, priest-type character wielding a long wooden staff that looks like it’s been torn straight off a tree turns up. He announces something about doing what the lord hath commanded him, and he takes his branch and… dear god, I don’t even want to tell you what happens next – imagine the worst, and give thanks that at least it’s only implied off-screen.




Taken alone, this absurd and disturbing sequence makes for a perfect demonstration of the essential, incommunicable *strangeness* of Jose Marins’ direction in this film. Even if we are to accept that he has some reason for throwing us into this unhappy scenario, completely devoid of context or explanation, the execution of the whole thing is still just utterly off the wall. On one level, these scenes have both the same appearance and tone as an American ‘roughie’ sexploitation flick from earlier in the ‘60s, but then… why does the first shot we see of the hippie pad feature a guy balanced halfway up the wall playing a strange assemblage of drums? Why do the hippies circle around the girl with their index fingers extended, humming ‘Colonel Bogey’? Why do people keep jumping in and out of the window? Why the priest guy? – I suspect there are no answers, other than that Marins is just one of those directors, like Lynch or Wojcieck Has or John Boorman, who couldn’t do ‘normal’ if you put a gun to his head.



Assuming you don’t give up on the film at this point like a reasonable human being, it continues in this general vein for quite a while, cutting between increasingly surreal (although not quite so unpleasant) vignettes of sex/drug related ‘decadence’, and brief visits to the darkened room, where the highly respected psychologist and his friends continue to smoke up a storm whilst saying things like “such scenes are happening all the time in this world of violence!” and “this is concrete proof of the insidious nature of drugs and how they stimulate depravity and corruption!”.

By the time we’ve seen an angry man kicking three young girls in the ass after they offer him their underwear, some junkies shooting up whilst listening to a Coffin Joe radio broadcast, and a particularly curious scene in which a well-to-do lady watches a black servant ravage her daughter as her horse suggestively pokes its head through the doorway alongside her, one starts to get a sinking feeling, suspecting that the film is just going to go on like this indefinitely.




Thankfully though that’s not the case, and eventually the parade of lunatic titillation comes to a close, as we return to the psychologist’s discussion panel and notice for the first time that none other than Coffin Joe himself is present! Well, sort of. “I left Ze Do Caixao at the graveyard, gentlemen”, he clarifies, “you are speaking to Jose Mojica Marins”. Marins proceeds to state that he is fairly ambivalent about the psychologist’s ravings about the imminent collapse of civilised society, and doesn’t really understand why his presence has been requested by the group.

This prompts a rather elaborate flashback explanation from the psychologist, in the course of which we get to witness clips from a ‘TV court’ style Brazilian TV show in which Marins was put on ‘trial’ by some critics who reviled his horror movies and comics. When called upon to defend himself, Marins boasts that he is a self-taught artist who’s never had any help from anyone, and that he’s merely giving the people what they want to see. He then gets quite angry and begins ranting about the difficulties of making a film in South America and the expense of importing film stock, etc. Inexplicably, the TV jury acquit him.

Anyway, long story short (skipping over even more gratuitous mondo weirdo sequences featuring footage of an expressionistic avant garde stageplay and a wild looking Brazilian psychedelic band who do a variation of 'Milk Cow Blues' with lyrics like “in the tar mountain / we sing songs of emotion” and “Marmalade Mermaid / reproduce without thinking / smoking to the mounts of Korea”, accompanied by a wild light show, an air raid siren and naked frugging teenagers), the psychologist explains that after seeing the TV show he decided, for some reason I can’t quite fathom, to assemble four ‘drug addicts’ from different social backgrounds, and have them take acid as they stare at a Coffin Joe film poster.

At this point, the film lurches unexpectedly from black & white to lurid, blazing techicolor, as the experimental subjects’ joint acid trip unfolds before our eyes. This trip sequence goes on for about twenty five minutes and is utterly indescribable – one of the most intensely overpowering and uncomfortable car crashes of psychotronic imagery I’ve ever seen. Set to the accompaniment of deafening bursts of distortion and tormented screams, eye-straining oversaturated light and primitive trick photography, Marins here demonstrates a love of sadism and excess to rival that of Jodorowsky or Ken Russell, as our trippers descend to a sort of exploitation movie vision of hell where Ze Do Caixao lauds it over his victims like the devil tormenting the damned.




Where else in cinema have you seen a man in leather boots striding across a steaming chasm on a bridge built entirely from naked human flesh? Or a massed heap of women in their underwear being frenziedly whipped by a guy who looks like Leatherface? – well, ok, I’m prepared to believe there’s some other nutcase out there somewhere filming stuff like that, but when Marins comes to his piece de resistance, I’m betting your answer changes to NOWHERE. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: a line of actors, filmed from behind, at waist height, with demonic faces painted on their asses, stalking toward the camera, with other people waving their hands in between their buttocks to create the impression of an advancing rank of terrifying ass creatures.


So ingenious, so effective, so… utterly insane, it’s really one for the history books.

Assuming you have an hardy constitution and are somehow not already thoroughly disturbed by all this alarming imagery, Marins next drags us permanently across the invisible boundaries of weirdo cinema good taste into the realm of the genuinely upsetting, as Ze Do Caixao confronts the young female among the acid trippers and, in a violent explosion of cheap stop-motion photography, proceeds to tear off her clothes, cover her in magically inflicted wounds and scratch her all over with his sharpened fingernails, repeatedly slapping her across the face in a horrible parody of domestic violence.



Rather shaken by all this, I could scarcely believe what the sub-titles were telling me as Ze mounts a sort of infernal lectern and begins ranting furiously at the audience, proclaiming stuff like “From the beginnings to the end of the centuries, man is the ruler of everything, and woman is his instrument, she is a willing slave before the power of man!”

I mean, my god… how are we supposed to respond to this? I suppose anyone who has actually been paying enough attention to follow the structure of this film, such as it is, can appreciate that the acid trippers are each seeing Ze Do Caixao as a nightmare creature expressing their worst fears and impulses, but what kind of misguided thinking led Marins to throw footage of himself making statements like this into a film where he has earlier been seen – out of character, but in the same costume – talking in a fairly reasonable, sympathetic fashion about himself and his work? You could ask “what was he THINKING?”, only that’s a question that’s been demanded by just about every shot from the opening credits onward. Ze Do Caixao proclaims plenty of other stuff in this sequence too, most of it hopelessly garbled, bombastic nonsense.


After the acid trip finally concludes, the psychologist’s companions accuse him of unethical research practices, until he reveals that he didn’t actually dose his subjects with LSD at all – “merely distilled water” – and produces lab reports (?!?) to prove it. Meaning…. well, what exactly? That these drug-addled individuals have such depraved imaginings hidden in their sub-conscious that the power of suggestion alone can send them off into hellish hallucinations? That Ze Do Caixao is such a powerful figure that merely staring at a picture of him can bring on such reveries? “My message is not to destroy all drugs, but to moderate their use, and to increase vigilance upon those who traffic in them”, the psychologist concludes reasonably enough, making you wonder what in the hell he’s been trying to prove by subjecting us all the outrages of the preceding ninety minutes.

The camera pans back, and the lights go up, revealing that this darkened discussion panel was in fact another TV show, which has just finished, and the participants go their separate ways. Outside the TV studio, the psychologist shakes hands with Marins and thanks him for his time. When he asks what the director has planned for the future, Marins says, oh, this and that, and brandishes a script he has apparently been scribbling down during the filming – “Awakening of the Beast” – ah, ha ha ha.

The film comes to a chillingly ambiguous conclusion as Marins stands alone and watches, in long shot, a car pulling up, and the driver hassling a young girl walking down the street until she gets in and drives off with him – a direct echo of the hippie rape sequence at the start of the film. We cut back to Marins’ face – he gives a “huh, those crazy kids” grin direct to camera, yells “cut!”, and…. FIN.

Aside from anything else, one has to admire Jose Marins’ sheer bravado in making such a daring and unconventional film to try to explore the controversy that his horror movie persona and apparent association with the drug culture had seemingly caused in Brazil. It’s just regrettable that his deeply confused and unstable approach to the material leads to a film that, whilst an unforgettable experience for connoisseurs of celluloid dementia, also resembles ninety five minutes spent inside the mind of a psychopath, making Marins seem like more of a danger to society than any number of gothic horror flicks.

VHS Purgatory:The Roller Blade Seven (Donald G. Jackson, 1991)

You’d better believe I was pretty stoked when I found ‘The Rollerblade Seven’ in a pile of videos on sale outside a second hand furniture shop on my walk to work one day.

For those familiar with this movie and its cultural context, I realise that’s a line about on a par with “I was curious as the heavy-breathing, bandaged man approached me with the gardening shears”, but for the rest of us, some background is probably in order here.

I’ve been fascinated by Donald Jackson and his dedication to the noble cause of making post-apocalyptic rollerskating nun movies ever since I read Keith’s memorable review of his pioneering ‘Roller Blade’(1986) over at Teleport City.

Done reading that? Good. Sounds GREAT doesn’t it? Sadly, a quick look at IMDB over breakfast (I know, I know – it was a quiet week) reveals that ‘..Seven’ is actually Jackson’s fourth rollerblade movie, dating from 1991, making it a suspiciously late entry in the canon of ‘80s post-apocalypse movies. Not that, as it transpires, Jackson’s films really have much to do with that canon, or indeed any other kind of cultural phenomena that exist in what we presumptuously call ‘the wider world’.

If IMDB user comments may be taken as any kind of yardstick, audience reaction to ‘The Roller Blade Seven’ has not been kind.

“A Real Brain Melter,” says Dom from Leicester, awarding the film a 1/10 rating:

“This is one of the hardest to watch films ever, There are scenes with silence that seems to last hours before somebody comes out with the next badly written, badly acted line. There are action sequences that keep repeating - and we're not talking the quickfire 1-2-3 action repeat on a particularly good kick that was made popular by eastern directors, we're talking many, many repeats of long, bad fight sequences. Any kind of plot or vision is lost within the confusing continuity, the only thing thats keeps this film in the videoplayer (apart from the bet from a friend that i couldn't watch it all the way through without begging for it to be turned off and disposed off safely so it may harm no-one else) is the fact that although painful, this film is unintentionally hilarious.”

“Second (or possibly third) worst movie EVER MADE!!”, comments somebody called ‘Infofreak’:

“About 15 minutes into 'The Roller Blade Seven' I nearly gave up, but decided (masochist that I am!) to go all the way, baby! Because this is one movie you just gotta see ONCE, if only as a yardstick of sheer crapness. This is without doubt one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. Now maybe you're thinking "goodie! I'm in for some 1990s version of 'Plan Nine From Outer Space', or 'The Incredibly Strange Creatures...' hilarious laugh-a-minute good times". NO!! When I say BAD I mean beyond entertainment. This movie is so awful in every way imaginable, and absolutely torturous to sit through, that you won't be able to think of ANY reason to continue watching it until the end.”

‘Mds131313’ ups the ante, reflecting:

“This has to be the greatest practical joke ever. I'm amazed that all the other actors kept a straight face. […] If by some chance they weren't kidding and they legitimately tried to make a real movie then I feel sorry for everyone involved in the creation. I've had quite a love affair with cheesy movies, but this movie is so bad I can hardly watch it. They repeat pointless "special effects" so many times that it's obvious they were just trying to cover up the fact that they only shot 30 minutes of footage. If I were forced to watch this movie on repeat I would bludgeon myself unconscious with my own hands after about one and a half times through.”

‘Mystery Biscuit’ meanwhile weighs in with:

“I watched this film with a group of Nazis, a French Archaeologist and my ex-girlfriend on a small island in the Mediterranean.

When the tape was started, myself and my girlfriend were tied to a wooden stake at the far end of this cave like area. I told her to close her eyes and no matter what happened not to open them. The Nazi's and the archaeologist didn't close their eyes and after a few seconds started screaming. The Nazi's faces melted and the archaeologist's head exploded.

After a few seconds the video tape popped out of the VCR and landed back in it's box and the top snapped shut. Myself and my girlfriend were left unharmed.

Consequent to this experience, the video cassette was put in a wooden crate and stored in a huge warehouse of identical wooden crates, never to be see again.”

Such a card, that ‘Mystery Biscuit’.

Now the above comments didn’t really phase that much, simply because it is inevitable that any moderately strange low budget movie will attract its fair share of this sort of scorn (although it must be said that even by those standards, the sheer number of “Worst Film Ever!!!”s racked up by ‘Roller Blade Seven’ is remarkable). As you scroll down the page, it is equally inevitable that these entries will be tempered by a smaller number of 10/10 reviews by trash true believers, proclaiming the movie to be a wonderful/hilarious/awesome masterpiece of action-packed enjoyment, and denouncing the 1/10ers as schmucks who don’t get it.

And sure enough, ‘Roller Blade Seven’ has its supporters. And it’s when I read their comments that I really began to get frightened.

First we find somebody going by the name ‘fellinijunky’, who says:

“This is really a Rock n' Roll Great Film! It is like Fellini on Acid and I love Fellini!

I mean, there are so many twists and turns in this film, that it really keeps you guessing. This film is really different than any other action-adventure film I have ever seen, if you can call it an action-adventure. Yeah, it has martial arts and swordplay but this film is really not about that. This film is like somebody went out there, did what ever they wanted to do, and put it on film.

As an Art School Geek, this is the kind of film I would like to make if I had the money.

This film really has created a new and better genera of film-making and "It Rocks!"”

Uh… ok.

Moving on, Cammie Kim says:

“First of all, I am grad film student at U.S.C. In one of my classes we went through the three films associated with the project, THE ROLLER BLADE SEVEN, RETURN OF THE ROLLER BLADE SEVEN, and LEGEND OF THE ROLLER BLADE SEVEN, frame by frame. So, I believe I know these films as well as anyone, expect maybe the filmmaker, could know them. And, 'Yes,' I have gone to both Scott Shaw's and Donald G. Jackson's websites and have read what they have had to say about these films. What I have to say is that they accomplished exactly what they set out to do; to make a completely nontraditional, art based, film.

Now, I am not saying this is the greatest film every. What I am saying, however, is that the filmmakers used every element at their disposable to, as they put it, 'Push the envelope,' of film-making.”

Right. By this stage, it is safe to say that I have NO idea what to expect from ‘Roller Blade Seven’. Trying to reconcile these two perspectives, I can only believe I’m about to experience something very special indeed. Whether that’s ‘special’ in the sense that it needs its food cut up for it, only time will tell.

It’s clear that Donald Jackson’s films were somewhat, uh, ‘wacky’ from the word go. But by the time he got around to this one, dude was off on some other shit entirely. You see, In between churning out self-financed ‘Roller Blade’ sequels, spin-offs from his other sort-of success “Hell Comes To Frogtown” and other must-see oddities like “Mimes: Silent but Deadly” and “I Like To Hurt People”, Jackson gradually came under the influence of a guy named Scott Shaw.

Shaw initially began to work on Jackson’s films as a general collaborator/ideas man, but his contributions were gradually pushed to the fore, so that by the time ‘Roller Blade Seven’ rolls around, he has become the film’s star (rocking a distinctive blonde mullet, shades, trenchcoat and army boots combo), co-director and central conceptualist. Apparently what little dialogue the film contains is also lifted directly from some books he wrote (and there is no shortage of those).

You see, as well as being a martial artist, actor, stuntman, composer, author and self-publicist extraordinaire, Scott Shaw is also a deeply mystical sort of dude, a follower of ‘spiritual paths’, and a self-professed zen master. The credits to ‘Roller Blade Seven’ make copious reference to something called the “Masters of Light Institute”, which led me to suppose he might be a full-blown cult leader, but his current website makes no mention of such an organisation, so we’ll let it slide.

More pertinent to this review, Scott Shaw is also the sole inventor (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, you hear) of something called Zen Filmmaking. What is Zen Filmmaking, you ask? Well, in the words of the man himself:

“In Zen Filmmaking no scripts are used. There are no rules and no definitions. The spontaneous creative energy of the filmmaker is the only defining factor - this allows for a spiritually pure source of immediate inspiration to be the only guide in the filmmaking process.”

Yep, you got it. Zen Filmmaking. Further to the whole “making shit up as you go along” aspect of the zen method, this enlightening article by Shaw includes such other useful advice as “if the cops bust you for filming at a location, go film somewhere else”, and, staggeringly, “if your footage looks crap, use it anyway”.

Apparently, ‘The Roller Blade Seven’ was one of the first pure examples of this game-changing approach to the cinematic arts. Oh boy. Forewarned is forearmed, but it is still with a feeling of heavy apprehension that I press ‘play’ on ‘The Roller Blade Seven’.

The verdict?

My god, I don’t know what to tell you. I was stunned. Actually stunned. However weird and cheap and ludicrous and bad I was expecting ‘Roller Blade Seven’ to be, it beat me at every turn.

There is no way I can review ‘Roller Blade Seven’ in the conventional manner. It is simply beyond notions of good and bad, existing on another plain entirely. It is, as one of the reviews I quoted above sagely puts it, “beyond entertainment”.

It’s more like a dream. The kind of dream where you wake thinking “where the hell did all THAT come from?”, and feeling thoroughly unsatisfied. More specifically, it’s like a dream in which a guy with a late ‘80s camcorder decides to make his own fusion of Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Holy Mountain, utilising several out of work porn actresses and props found in the trash outside an abandoned skating rink.

When its detractors complained that the film has “no plot”, they weren’t exaggerating. There’s this… nun, I suppose, who is a psychic, apparently. She wears a robe and shades and a cardboard hat. A bad guy who lives inside "The Wheel Zone", whatever that is, sends some men kidnap her, and they march endlessly across a sunlit beach throughout the rest of the film. A man who looks like a cheap televangelist going on safari (Donald Jackson himself, I think) sits in a tent full of hanging smiley badges and talks a load of bollocks with Scott Shaw, who then sets out, presumably to go and get the nun, and after that… all vestige of sanity is lost. It’s a bit like watching Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasuredome on rollerskates. Only, y’know, not as good.

A succession of ridiculously garbed characters who are never introduced nor explained drift on and off the screen seemingly at random. Stuff happens, for no reason. Well, when I say ‘stuff’, I mean, people move from one side of the screen to the other, and sometimes they stop, and throw kung fu poses. Occasionally someone makes some ponderous pronouncement about “the Wheel Zone” and aside from that nobody really says anything much. A wide variety of terrible hippie music, like a mix CD you’d hear in an Amsterdam headshop, plays incessantly.

About halfway through, a woman turns up who seems to be some sort of protagonist. She wears an uncomfortably tight pink latex swimsuit. There are lots of shots of her ass. There’s a man with a bandaged face and a stovepipe hat who plays a banjo. His appearances are signalled by extremely loud banjo music. I think this is ‘humour’, of a sort. In the film’s only nod to post-apocalyptic traditions of yore, there’s a baseball bat wielding clown. Then there’s this man wearing swimshorts and kneepads and sitting on a sorta lifeguard chair in the middle of the desert, and at one point some kind of teddyboy shows up and starts talking to him about how he’s trying to find Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. I’m pretty sure that happens anyway – I may have passed out. And hey, look out everybody - here comes some sort of rollerblading minotaur beast! He can only wobble along slowly - looks like he’s having trouble staying upright. There are slow, stoned “fight” sequences wherein a variety of these strange characters are “defeated” by means of repeated footage of Scott Shaw swinging his sword around. Frank Stallone plays this grouchy military guy in a wheelchair - I'm not sure what he's all about. For about two minutes somewhere in the middle, there are boobs.

The film finishes up at an arbitrary point, when Donald Jackson performs a wedding ceremony in which Scott Shaw marries a woman who may be the pink latex girl, but may equally be somebody else entirely. They drive off from a desert beauty-spot carpark on Shaw’s Harley, and are pursued by some other people in a car. The people in the car shoot the happy couple (by pointing a gun out of the window and mouthing ‘bang’), and they lie dead at the side of the road. This whole sequence is repeated THREE TIMES, with seemingly identical footage and edits, as an epic southern rock song called ‘The Pride of the Yankee’ plays out in its extremely long entirety. The end.

Like I said earlier, there is nothing that can possibly be said as regards trying to pass critical judgement on this film. It’s just too much.

I can’t believe Karen Black is in it though! I mean, she’s been in proper movies – good ones even. I almost forgot to mention that here she plays a psychic who Scott Shaw goes to see at one point. They eat some mushrooms (which look like regular cooking mushrooms, rather than the psychotropic kind), and wonder about in the desert frenchkissing statues for a while. For her sake, I’ll imagine she must have been tripping already when Jackson and Shaw blundered in unexpectedly for a bit of Zen Filmmaking.

Subsequent to ‘The Roller Blade Seven’ and its two sequels, Donald Jackson directed over twenty more films in collaboration with Scott Shaw, including “Shotgun Boulevard”, “Ghost Taxi”, “Frogtown Warriors”, “Lingerie Kickboxer” and “Rollergator” (ROLLERGATOR!), prior to his untimely death from Leukaemia in 2003.

Since then, Scott Shaw has taken on the rights to Jackson’s ‘Frogtown’ and ‘Roller Blade’ series, and has furthered the art of Zen Filmmaking with a steady stream of films bearing titles like “Rock n Roll Cops 2: The Adventure Begins”, “Naked Avenger”, “Frogtown News”, “Blood on the Guitar”, “Hawk: Warrior of the Wheelzone” and “Samurai Johnny Frankenstein”, perhaps taking his ‘film whatever / use it’ philosophy to its natural conclusion with the release of self-explanatory ‘documentaries’ such as “Dinner & Drinks” and “A Ride With Linnea and Donald”.

It’s a strange and frightening world out there, and, like a Lovecraft protagonist spying a severed tentacle, the truly terrifying thing is that ‘Roller Blade Seven’ has only given me the merest glimpse of it.

Behold.