Sunday, April 02, 2006

Wasted half an hour of my precious life


Elina was in a bar with some of her friends last Friday night and after Kauto had gone to sleep I was alone chewing away the salad they'd left behind and sipping some French cider and decided to watch a film. I had some tapes that a friend of mine had lent me, well, some four or five months back. They had some very old animated cartoons, which was the reason I was interested in them, but they also had some grade Z films.

I picked up a tape with such immortal classics as Jess Franco's Sadomania (1981) and Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake (1981). They are linked by the fact that Franco wrote Rollin's film (and started directing it). The latter one was a perfect embodiment of the era of watching Finnish-banned video nasties: the French film was dubbed in English and it had Greek titles! It was also credited in the opening titles as being directed by J.A. Laser.

But boy oh boy, was I bored! I wanted to kill myself watching these! Total waste of time! I actually watched them both with fast-forward - it took maybe some thirty minutes, but I felt I'd betrayed myself and my principles. Now, you know me as a connoisseur of bad literature, but even from the lowest of low I demand some consistency, vision, class, and, most of all, fast-moving delivery! What's with this these things, why are they always so slow? The chase scenes in Franco were boring to the extreme, not to mention anything about J.A. Laser.

You wanna know the plots of these? In Sadomania, a married couple travels up a forgotten road and end up in a castle which is kept by this sadist woman. She keeps half-naked women doing some chain-gang work and at times a moustached man comes along and wants to have some fun. The sadist picks up a girl and she's released and these two horrible human beings hunt her down and shoot her in cold blood. Not very surprisingly, the women start to revolt against their leaders.

Zombie Lake is just what it sounds: the resistance groups kill some Nazis during the war and throw the bodies to the lake. After the war the zombies are awakened and they attack a small village, of course eating all the good-looking girls in their way.

I said to myself after Friday night that I need to catch some real classic. Starting tonight.

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