APPREHENSIVE FILMS DOUBLE FEATURE

Special to PollyStaffle.com

Watch out for the DVD company Apprehensive Films. I just dug up two oddities from their catalogue - Bad Girls Go To Hell, the 1965 grindhouse film by Doris Wishman and Tom Berna’s 1995 film Colony. If these films represent at all what the company is capable of in the future, I’m sold on them as a force to reckon with.

It would be very easy, reading these reviews, to dismiss me as being very narrow minded. There’s some of that arrogance at work. That’s sort of a misleading way to understand what it is that I do with these reviews. I recently tweeted on FB that new bands are out of their mind, and rock critics are out of their minds, the real zenith points in the history of rock and roll were early oi, NWOBHM, and that stuff on Cleopatra gothic rock type compilations from the early-to-mid 90s. I’ve also said its best to grab the compilations on those things. The thing is that’s actually a huge number of bands. When I say here that I am primarily focused on grindhouse era films and straight-to-VHS horror, it’s the same. That’s a huge number of films, I’ll never get through them all.

The next obvious criticism is that I have a closed mind about more recent bands and films. That it’s all completely retrospective. That it is all backward looking. When I go on my tangents about internet right wing extremist radio like Alex Jones or Derek Black, that’s all current, when I go off about private investigator blogs and PI trade publications that’s also all current material. That also discounts the element of me - that I believe in myself in the present tense serving important functions of picking out films worth writing about and then building interpretations of them to trigger debate and reflection. It’s only a fraction of films I see that I review here. I lift weights frequently, and I can either get my fix of some grindhouse or horror cinema or get a little right wing fringe radio going while I do that. I have to really dig it to bring you the real grindhouse/horror cinema movie mayhem. That’s why I bring you…Bad Girls Go To Hell!

BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL

Doris Wishman was a female low budget grindhouse director who used hot Betty Page looking burlesque type actresses. Bad Girls Go To Hell would be pretty tame by today’s standards in terms of graphic violence, but well, it’s campy grindhouse stuff with hot actresses in it. It’s also mercifully short, only a little over an hour.

The storyline follows a woman who calls herself Ellen for most of the film. One morning her husband leaves for work, she gets sexually assaulted by her neighbor, kills him in the attack, and after she wanders through a series of misadventures, a bunch of which involve her getting raped or beaten. She gets help from a seemingly kind man in New York, but she makes the mistake of serving him a drink. He’s a struggling alcoholic. He beats her until she passes out, then she takes off. Next she moves in briefly with this other woman and they have a little lesbian encounter, but she knows she can’t stay- she’s a woman on the run! She boards with a couple- husband rapes her. She gets a job with a handicapped woman, but then the woman’s son shows up, and he’s a detective investigating the murder of her neighbor. He recognizes her, and then she wakes up. It was all a dream, but as she gets her slippers on, she goes outside, and her neighbor sexually assaults her again. It’s like Lost Highway, the movie ends at the start - the character is trapped in a hellish viscous circle.

What have I been writing in these reviews about people that go on about the genius of David Lynch? Bad Girls Go To Hell is the same device, the same ending. An earlier review I commented on the need for people to let 80s art student culture to die. I am caught in a slight contradiction because those bands on the Cleopatra Records compilations, some of them where 80s and might be construed to be of the whole art school thing. However, since most of those bands like Skeletal Family have remained pretty obscure, they are not tired out in the way The Cure, Blue Velvet, and Videodrome are. So my statement remains - it would be best to just let Blue Velvet go. I digress.

Bad Girls Go To Hell is pretty intriguing. There’s an element of sadistic fantasy and rape and violence to it, the actresses in it are pretty hot, except for the one that’s supposed to be the handicapped woman. The soundtrack is mostly jazz, except for the one part where there’s a bunch of early psychedelic 60s rock in there.

Campy? Doris Wishman is sometimes called “the female Ed Wood” – that’s not a fair assessment. In Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space there are continuity mistakes as to whether or not its day or night during one particular scene. In Bad Girls Go to Hell it never gets nearly that stupid (and Ed Wood, incidentally, was not the worst director of his time because his films move relatively quickly compared to a film like Attack of the Giant Leeches). However, the dialogue is pretty cheesy and the situations are not the most fully plausible in the history of cinema. The heroine is a little on the vapid side. She keeps getting the shit raped out of her. She gets sexually assaulted or raped four times in this movie. The one drunk character beats her with a belt. While not graphically violent or filled with gore, the film comes off more as an S&M fantasy then a serious portrait of violence and sexual abuse. The grindhouse era has a tendency to be a little perverse like that. However, nowadays, more audiences probably laugh at this film, it’s become retro-camp. That’s an intriguing little juxtaposition. It does have sexual content that would likely register as a little bit twisted and perverted at close examination, but at the same time its also fairly silly.

COLONY

From a trailer at the end of Bad Girls Go To Hell, I found another film oddity, Colony, also released by Apprehensive Films, from a different era, but no less camp or perverted. This one comes out of the utterly obscure file. This film was made at some point in the 90s for direct to VHS release under the title Colony Mutation (the copyright date is listed as 1995) but feels much older. It has very grainy film footage (shot on 8mm) and an electronic music in the background that sounds like it’s from the eighties, like a Psychic TV outtake maybe. The film is much in the vein of 70s David Cronenberg such as the Brood. It is within the realm of “body horror” generally associated with early Cronenberg or that film Society. It’s actually even more so a low budget grade B horror style then Cronenebrg ever was though, in my estimation.

Love the gothic electronic soundtrack that pops up even in the softcore type sections, though! Sweet. Anyway, the general plotline is that a guy who works at a genetic company is cheating on his wife, the wife hires a private investigator to do the infidelity surveillance and he’s sleeping with one of their co-workers at the genetics company.

Wait a minute, is that a private investigator in a film doing things that real private investigators do? Amazing! How often does this happen. I’ve heard many investigators and former investigators talk about how much they hate doing the infidelity beat, but still, how often do I see that in a film? Not often…

His wife throws some nasty shit on him, and then he starts killing, because monsters grow out of his body, and he has to keep killing to feed the weird ass creatures that are his own limbs which detach and kill people. This is a very embarrassing and awkward considering his tangled relationship problems with a co-worker even after he kills his wife to feed his detachable limbs. Perhaps if you have a problem like that, say an STD or limbs that come alive and you’re involved in a relationship, it may be best to be up front with your lover, instead of sneaking off and finding homeless people to feed to his detachable organs. He’s pretty good at picking up chicks to feed his limbs.

Dig that old school gothic/industrial sounding incidental music! There is one song by some weird chick metal band or something, but most of the soundtrack sounds like outtakes from the Psychic TV album Pagan Day which is largely synthesizers. The song during the credits is a more metal influenced gothic sounding tune. Dig those drum machines and power chords at the end. This song is apparently performed by a guy named Patrick Nettesheim. It doesn’t say who did the incidental music. I think there’s a good chance it was this Patrick Nettesheim character. That means its time for me to Google this dude and see if he did anything else that anybody cares about… found his webpage, he’s on social networking sites too. Looks like a cross between a goth dude and a studio musician, which is probably exactly what he is. Its very goth music in the background on this one.

Back to the film, the guy’s mistress has a sister who is a championship shooter (the shooting shown in the film that she does is relatively simple though) and whips out her gun on the detachable organs with the tentacles and eyes. At the end his penis has bat wings and a big eye and starts attacking the sister with the gun. The penis with the big eye and batwings was done with very early CGI from the looks of it. It’s likely to crack you up.

- William Wheaton, June 2010

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