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‘In Bed With Chris Needham’: Speed metal-obsessed teenager welcomes you to his Wayne’s world
03.14.2016
03:51 pm
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“Speed metal is just some of the most finest fantastic musicianship you’ll ever hear. I mean, to play an instrument that fast.”

No, In Bed With Chris Needham isn’t quite as laugh-out-loud funny as Heavy Metal Parking Lot—although it’s got several hilarious moments and loads of quotable lines—but it’s most certainly something that would go great on a double bill with it. The title is a play on In Bed with Madonna—which was what her Truth or Dare documentary was called outside of North America—and the film follows around a pimply-faced, speed metal-obsessed teenager with a greasy mullet shaped like a Cocker spaniel’s ears and an attempted moustache named—how’d you guess—Chris Needham.

When we meet the talkative Chris, who hails from the town of Loughborough, Leicestershire, in the East Midlands of England, he’s on the telephone trying to sweet talk a local music store into lending him and his mates some instruments because they haven’t got any of their own and they’ve got an upcoming gig.

You see, young Mr. Needham has been selected to appear on a BBC television series called Teenage Video Diaries. This program, which aired in 1993, long before anyone had heard the term “reality TV,” basically just gave cameras to British teens and had them turn the camera on themselves.

A two-part interview with Chris Needham on the LeftLion website states, convincingly, I might add:

If you’ve never seen In Bed With Chris Needham, I feel both sorry and jealous of you. The former because it is unquestionably the greatest TV programme ever, and the latter because one day you will see it with fresh eyes. It’s the kind of programme that makes you want to club yourself into amnesia so you can see it for the first time again and again.

I’ll have you know that I personally decided to watch it after reading the above paragraph, which is why I wanted to include it here. Aren’t you already feeling the urge to watch this thing yourself?

Of course you are.
 

 
Chris reminds me quite a bit of Mark Borchardt, the hapless hesher star of Chris Smith’s immortal classic American Movie. It continues:

The plot: Chris Needham, a 17-year-old Thrash Metal fan from Loughborough who has been absolutely lacerated by the puberty stick, is about to play his first gig with his band, Manslaughter. The problem is, they’re complete rammell. Between their first painful attempts to stand musically upright and their debut gig, Chris takes the time to defend Metal and Youth, unleashes torrents of adolescent venom upon the Green movement, ‘old bastards’, vegetarians, ‘Chart Music’, organised religion, teachers, and Neighbours, conducts a relationship with his girlfriend in excruciatingly painful silence, gets hassled by Mr Taggart and His Amazing Shirt, and goes fishing.

By the end, when a bare-chested Chris performs “I Don’t Want To Save The World” on a video that resembles something one could imitate in the Trocadero for a tenner, you realise that you have just witnessed the definitive statement on how rubbish it is to be an English teenager.

Oh man. This. Is. Good.

The credits indicate that “full editorial control” was given to Chris, who is seen drunk, stuffing his face with a hamburger, discussing some jointly-owned condoms sotto voce with his pal (I didn’t quite understand that part) and shouting “Feel sudden death from my guitar!” as he gets caught up in the music. There’s an awkward interlude with his girlfriend, an impressive head-banging demonstration, the worst, most inept rendition of the “Smoke On The Water” riff of all time, a recounted nightmare of his death foretold, and a depressed late night bedroom soliloquy. There is also a recurring interview with Chris’s seven-year-old brother who is his biggest fan, but even he realizes that Manslaughter’s drummer is shite and will just hold the band back, man…

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.14.2016
03:51 pm
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Uncovering and preserving the wildest and strangest films in the world
08.18.2015
10:28 am
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The films released by the Mondo Macabro label are certainly some of the most bizarre movies in existence. Many of these diverse horror, fantasy, and erotic films had never been screened outside of their home countries before being rescued and preserved by these cult curators. The label’s aesthetic, if there is one, seems to favor films with wild visual content resulting from either the film-makers’ budgetary constraints or the unconventional elements of story-telling specific to their various foreign cultures. There are few DVD companies as reliable as Mondo Macabro: even the “bad” films they release are fascinating for being so goddamn out there.

In 1994 Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs co-wrote the definitive guide to European exploitation and horror films, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984. This reference lead to Tombs becoming a producer, with Andrew Starke, of the BBC documentary series Eurotika!. Tombs followed up with the book Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around the World, which covered the fantastically strange films of Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Japan. This crucial tome inspired another BBC documentary series and eventually a DVD label of the same name. Tombs and Starke have been releasing DVDs on the Mondo Macabro label since 2003’s release of the 1978 Mexican horror film, Alucarda.
 

Alucarda
 
Tombs scours the planet for the rarest and weirdest exploitation and horror films. In some cases, these films are literally being saved from the garbage dump, with Tombs tracking down the only surviving elements, which are cleaned up as much as possible and supplemented with bonus archival and documentary materials. Mondo Macabro’s DVD releases are an evident labor of love.

We recently caught up with Pete Tombs to talk about his work:

Dangerous Minds: I’d like to start by going back to 1994 and your Immoral Tales book. This book became one of the definitive guides for film buffs with an interest in unusual films in those pre-Internet and DVD days. It had a spot on my bookshelf right next to Incredibly Strange Films and The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. How difficult was it to research your subject matter at that time?

Pete Tombs: It was REALLY difficult! Obviously I’d been watching films for a long time before starting work on the book and so there were my memories and occasionally notes made years before to fall back on, but generally finding copies of the more obscure films was… well, let’s say “challenging”! Most of the research for Immoral Tales was done in a period prior to the existence of the world wide web as it exists today so we relied almost entirely on personal contacts and snail mail to exchange information and tapes. There were also a few books, mostly in languages other than English, and a lot of journals and fanzines that dealt with our areas of interest. In the back pages of zines like Pyschotronic you used to find full page ads from tape traders or sellers, usually pages filled with film titles in tiny typeface that you had to pore over using a magnifying glass. You then had to cross reference the titles to find out what was actually on offer as different releases of the same films often had alternate titles, particularly if they were foreign films. But gradually you got to see things and patterns started to emerge.

DM: How did Immoral Tales lead to the Mondo Macabro book, and subsequently the Eurotika TV series, followed by the Mondo Macabro TV series?

PT: Cathal Tohill and myself put Immoral Tales together, originally for publisher Paul Woods. We ended up publishing it ourselves. After it came out Paul suggested to me that a similar book on Asian cinema might be of interest. I thought about it and realized very quickly that my knowledge of that area of film was limited but I reckoned that by taking a more global approach and intending the book to be a brief introduction to exploitation industries outside Europe and the US, I might be able to put something together.

Andy Starke and myself had already made the Eurotika! Series for UK Channel 4, so we made a video pitch to them of the Mondo series backed up by the book and it went on from there. It was quite an adventure going to all those countries and trying to track down people to film, some of whom had never been interviewed before but I’m glad we did it. Some of those interviews – like the one we did with Barry Prima in Jakarta were kind of surreal. He didn’t seem to be at all interested and could barely come up with answers to most of the questions. Finally he admitted that he thought his films were all shit and that he’d only turned up so he could see who these idiots were who’d come all the way from the UK to ask him about them. What a guy! I still love his films though, despite his best efforts to persuade me otherwise.
 

Barry Prima in The Devil’s Sword.
 
DM: At what point did it seem a logical next step to create a label to release the films you were researching and reporting on?

PT: I’d been running video companies for a few years by the time we started the Mondo label. We’d built up a lot of contacts over the years, so we knew who to talk to and (more importantly!) how much to spend. We started in the UK and it was Andy Starke’s idea to set up a US operation.
 
More after the jump…
 

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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08.18.2015
10:28 am
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‘The Phynx’: A rock group of spies is sent undercover to Albania to rescue Hollywood has-beens, 1970
06.18.2015
11:03 am
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The Phynx (pronounced like “The Finks,” as in stool pigeons) is a mind-bending 1970 comedy about a Monkees-like prefab rock group, who are also trained as spies. The Phynx are sent undercover to communist Albania in order to spring political prisoners who you might mistake for aging showbiz folks found in a Hollywood unemployment line of the era. It’s a jaw-dropping, eye-popping camp spectacle as you watch one paycheck collecting Hollywood has-been after another shuffle before you in an unfunny film that can probably only be compared to or categorized alongside of Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, with its star-studded cast and general “counter culture as seen by Hollywood” tone.

The Phynx plays like a substandard (but big budget) Get Smart episode meets (a low budget) Around the World in 80 Days with a succession of (once) famous faces like Dorothy Lamour, Georgie Jessel, Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate Colonel Harlan Sanders, Butterfly McQueen, Xavier Cugat (sans Charo, who you’d expect to see in a film like this), Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, an Andrews Sister, Johnny “Tarzan” Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan (who played “Jane”), Busby Berkeley, Ruby Keeler, Rudy Vallée, Louis Hayward, Guy Lombardo, Andy Devine, Clint Walker, Cass Daley, Pat McCormick, boxer Joe Louis, Pat O’Brien (who quips about how if he’d played his cards differently, it would have been Ronald Reagan in this thing and not him), the Bowery Boys’ Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall (grandfather of DM’s own Oliver Hall), out lesbian actress Patsy Kelly, Larry Hankin (playing “Philbaby” a barely fictionalized version of Phil Spector, who declined to participate), Trini Lopez, Sally Struthers, Susan Bernard (from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), Martha Raye, gossip columnist Rona Barrett, George Tobias (henpecked Abner Kravitz from Bewitched), Joan Blondell and even the fucking Lone Ranger and Tonto.
 

 
Human punch lines? Oh, The Phynx has got ‘em. It practically invented the concept!

And did I mention that Richard Pryor (as the band’s sort of “soul consultant”) and James Brown (as the ambassador from the reord industry) do their thangs in The Phynx? I didn’t? Well they do! And the dude who played “Oddjob” in Goldfinger is in there, too. And Dick Clark and Ed Sullivan play themselves. Rich Little (who else) plays Richard Nixon. Warhol superstar Ultra Violet is present, too.

A picture is starting to emerge here, is it not? Even if this movie is shit—which it basically is—how can you possibly go wrong with a cast like this one? (You have to give them credit, though, they tried...)

The Phynx is unique. So much so that it’s never really been that easy to see. The studio knew they had a bomb on their hands. I don’t think it was ever properly released in theaters, at least not in America. Until a few years ago, when Warner Brothers finally put it out via their Warner Archive bespoke DVD service (for movies so unknown and culty that producing even a small batch of them is probably more than the public is willing to absorb) it had never come out before on home video either and the bootlegs you could find on eBay were always super crappy.

Below you can see the trailer for The Phynx that was made by Cinefamily when a 35mm print of the film was screened for the first time in decades during 2013’s Everything Is Festival (and hosted by Patton Oswalt):
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.18.2015
11:03 am
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Peter Sellers is sinister and pathetic in the divisive 1970 obscurity, ‘Hoffman’
07.22.2014
02:41 pm
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Hoffman is one of the most obscure films in the career of Peter Sellers, who hated the 1970 comedy-drama so much that he asked to buy up all of the prints and start over again from scratch. He needn’t have bothered, as the strange little movie was barely released in UK theatres at all and had its debut American screening in 1982 after he was already dead. I caught it on a low rent UHF channel that ran old B&W TV shows, wrestling, Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, Marx Brothers and WC Fields movies, Australian women in prison soap operas, and flop films like this one in the late 70s or I probably would never have heard of it myself. Hoffman is a cult film with a very small cult.

Some people say it’s Sellers’ “best” performance” but I think that’s a contrarian film snob taking it way too far. Having said that, it is, for sure, one of his most interesting roles and a fascinating film that is basically just two very, very fine actors at work. Most of the film takes place in the same rooms. (The somewhat play-like material had been done before on television by director Alvin Rakoff with Donald Pleasance.)
 

 
Sellers’ intense dislike of Hoffman apparently stemmed from what he regarded as this being the closest he got to his revealing his true self onscreen. When not hiding behind an accent or make-up, the actor often claimed that he had no identity whatsoever outside the roles that he played. If, in fact, the odd, manipulative, somewhat psycho aging businessman Sellers played in Hoffman is close to how he saw himself, well, that’s… well… it’s very interesting.
 

 
Dull, creepy—even sinister-seeming—Benjamin Hoffman has an unrequited crush on his pretty secretary, Miss Smith, played by a young Sinéad Cusack at the very beginning of her career. When he discovers that her fiance is involved in a criminal activity, he blackmails her into spending a week with him, with just three weeks to go before their wedding when he will lose her forever. She reluctantly agrees and Hoffman behaves cruelly, playing mindgames with her until revealing himself to be a very lonely and pathetic soul. If Sellers saw a too-close for comfort version of himself onscreen in Hoffman, it would speak volumes about his legendary pathologies! What must the man have been like in private if THIS performance disturbed him so much? Yikes! (It’s worth noting that Sellers’ former writing and performing partner Spike Milligan sent Britt Ekland a congratulatory telegram when her divorce from Sellers became final in 1968!)

I’ve read Hoffman described as an “offbeat” love story, but I don’t know how many would agree with that, especially women.

Hoffman‘s moody music was composed by Ron Grainer, he of the Doctor Who theme fame.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.22.2014
02:41 pm
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‘Crazy Fat Ethel’: Not quite a classic cult film
10.18.2013
02:32 pm
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It’s 1987. You are confronted with a VHS tape of a movie called Crazy Fat Ethel (AKA Criminally Insane). With a title like that, a $3 price tag and a blurb that reads “300 pounds of maniacal fury!”—well, what do you do?

I’ll bet many of you would have done the same thing I did, buy it. But if you think is this the part where I tell you what an amazing, overlooked cinematic gem Crazy Fat Ethel is, you would be mistaken. It’s a pretty terrible film, although if you’re a fan of really, really bad movies it does have a few things to recommend it in an “Ed Wood” kind of way, i.e. cinematic ineptitude, bad writing and over the top performances. It compares to a particularly bloody Troma release.

DVD Drive-In had this to say about Crazy Fat Ethel:

Ethel Janowski, a 300-pound mental patient, is released to the care of her uptight grandmother, who lives in a vintage townhouse in San Francisco (yep, lots of great location footage in this one). Ethel bitches about the meager meals she was given at the asylum (“two softboiled eggs and dry toast for breakfast!”) and devours mammoth meals whenever she feels like it, at all hours of the day. When Granny locks all the food in the house in the pantry and hides the key, Ethel grabs a butcher knife and stabs it through her chest, then keeps stabbing the corpse’s hand to steal the key away! Immediately after she stabs a delivery boy to death with a broken bottle (“I don’t have $80! I’ve only got $4.50!”), her prostitute sister Rosalee arrives to stay for a while. In-between making out and snorting cocaine with her sleazy make-up wearing boyfriend John and turning tricks with desperate immigrants in the house, Rosalee begins to smell the rotting corpses Ethel has hid inside Granny’s room… It’s not long before Ethel has to use her trusty meat cleaver to ensure that no one discovers her secret!

The actress playing CFE,  Priscilla Alden, eats so much food in this movie (pounds and pounds of bacon, entire cartons of eggs) that her prodigious gluttony almost makes CFE a profound, one-woman metaphor for late-stage Capitalism and the American way of life (although I seriously doubt that this is what the director had in mind, I hasten to add). Her performance is the best thing about the film. (Attention perverts: There are numerous long takes of her staring blankly into space eating massive bowls of ice cream, if you’re into that kinda thing…)

Crazy Fat Ethel was shot in 1973, but not released until 1975. Believe it or not, they actually made a sequel, Crazy Fat Ethel II (or Criminally Insane 2, if you prefer) in the late 1980s. The same crew, again with Alden, also made a related film called Death Nurse. Apparently someone intends to do a remake?
 


 

 

Watch Crazy Fat Ethel after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.18.2013
02:32 pm
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World Gone Wild: Now that elections are over, post-apocalyptic movies are fun again!
11.07.2012
07:50 am
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With a poster like this, I shouldn’t even have to try and convince you to watch it!
 
Since the election is now in the rear-view miror (and I have yet to hear riots in the streets), we can all go back to enjoying the dystopic visions of the future that felt all-too-prescient a few weeks ago. Might I suggest the 1988 classic World Gone Wild? First of all, Adam Ant is a major character, and he gives a performance that makes his acting in the “Goody Two Shoes” music video look positively understated. This is, of course, all a part of the charm, since the appeal of the movie is pure grandiosity.

The synopsis says it all:

After the colossal nuclear wipeout, who inherits the earth? Adam Ant’s crazed band of Charles Manson worshipers, or hippie-magician Bruce Dern’s flower children who follow the great teachings of Emily Post? Finding out is all the fun in this tongue-in-cheek- sci fi adventure with action that makes Mad Max look like a tea party.

I’d argue that it makes Mad Max look like an Oscar-winner, but I understand making comparisons when you’re trying to ride the coattails of what is frankly, a much higher quality product. Sadly, because we live in a cruel and unfeeling world, you can’t find World Gone Wild on DVD, but VHS copies are still floating around, and this outdated format really feels like the appropriate vessel for such a product of its time. I don’t know about you, but I like my post-apocalyptic flicks like I like my New Wave musicians: over-the-top and short on shelf life!
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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11.07.2012
07:50 am
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