aka The Big Catch

Director: Byron Mabe

Cast: Uschi Digard, Peggy Church, Jane Louise

Something Weird Video / NTSC Region 1 DVD-R / Unrated / 4:3 Fullscreen / Mono / Color / PURCHASE

I have loved horror films since I was a kid, but the last few years I have really gotten into exploitation/grindhouse cinema as a whole. That encompasses not only horror but action, comedy and adult films as well. With my inexperience with the more obscure titles, Christina Lindberg has stood out as my favorite exploitation babe with her relative “fame” in the last few years as well as her innocent face and killer body. But I may have to rethink my grindhouse hottie hierarchy. Uschi Digard is a name that has been on my radar but I have never seen a feature with her in a starring role. In case you don’t know, Uschi is a super-busty Swede (via Bismarck, North Dakota) who is best known for her roles in Russ Meyer and Ilsa movies as well as countless other soft and hardcore films. The softcore “roughie”, The Big Snatch, by exploitation veteran director Byron Mabe was my first full-feature film starring the big-titted titan and it was definitely something to behold.

Sadistic pervert Bart traveled around the town in broad daylight kidnapping five beautiful women and bringing them to his compound out in the middle of the desert. He introduces the girls to his giant henchman Momo and tells them that if they try to escape that the land is surrounded by packs of attack dogs. They are to call him “master” – he in turn calls them “pigs” – and they are to obey his every command without question. If they do not, he will have Momo beat them with his hose or worse, make one of the other girls punish them. After subjecting each of the girls to humiliation, sexual abuse and beatings, the captives devise a plan to escape. First they take out Momo, then Bart, and finally let the watch dogs starve to death in a few days and make their getaway. But their bloodlust gets the better of them and they decide to pass the time by literally fucking their kidnapper to death, but not before he gets really chafed. But once he is gone, will they really be free?

The first thing I noticed after pushing “PLAY” on the DVD player was the opening credits that featured cast members like “Barbara Que”, “Harry Chest” and my favorite “Rita Book”. Now I know that some actors used fake names in some of these movies, but holy shit those names are priceless and so obviously not real. That opening set the tone of the rest of the movie. The movie’s potentially disturbing premise is handled so ham-handedly that the material just turns into a fun, playful softcore romp with tons of tits, ass-loads of ass and a mess of steamed clams. Well, really only one steamed clam, but let me explain; in the most notorious scene of the movie “Bernice”, a virgin, is made to sit naked on the cap-less neck of the radiator of Bart’s truck while the heat “steams her tight clam” open. But I couldn’t even take that seriously because of the ridiculousness of the whole thing. Aside from that and a couple of lashings with a hose, there really isn’t much violence other than some pretty tame stuff like making the girls dance and exercise in the nude.

The five slave girls are all very nice looking. Uschi is magnificent to look at with her HUGE mammaries a-swingin’ in the breeze in half of her scenes, and in a tight sweater, short-shorts and knee-high boots in the other half. Her face isn’t as cute as Lindberg’s, but she more than makes up for it with the size of her bOObage and her predator-like sexuality. Even in the role of the “victim”, she was ferociously in charge when she was fucking Bart. Peggy Church (A Touch of Sweden, The Erotic Adventures of Zorro) take up the cute role as the naive virgin who is involved in a lesbian relationship with one of the other girls. She fits the bill nicely as do the other girls who are not afraid to take off their clothes and get a little naughty. I am very happy with my first Uschi feature and with Something Weird Video’s large library, I’m sure I can find lots more fun with Miss Digard’s ample talents.

Director: Stuart Urban

Cast: Guinevere Turner, Christien Anholt, Tom Bell, Julie Graham

Pathfinder Pictures / NTSC Region 1 / Unrated / 16×9 Anamorphic Widescreen / English / 100 minutes / PURCHASE

DVD Extras: New 10th Anniversary Audio Commentary by Guinevere Turner / Commentary by Director Stuart Urban / “Making of” documentary / Premiere Party Featurette / Tanya’s Toons: Interactive Comic Story Strip

Sometimes running a website like this can get a little monotonous. You see lots of horror of all kinds, retro “grindhouse” and various indie movies but after a while they start to run together and it can get a little ho-hum. I love the genre but I also love to be pleasantly surprised once in a while by a film that comes out of nowhere and hits me with something a little different and exciting. I’ve never been really into S&M or BDSM but I think it can be sexy if it isn’t too “hardcore”. Yeah, I’m pretty vanilla that way. Skin-tight latex on a curvy, beautiful woman is one of the most arousing images I can think of. So Pathfinder Pictures – a company I have only in the past month or so become aware of – sends me this movie with the header at the top of the DVD cover reading “Guinevere Turner Signature Collection”, which means nothing to me. But I show it to my wife and right away she says “I LOVE Guinevere Turner!”… well, that’s good enough for me to take interest and dive right in.

Dear naive virgin Peter has just been hired by the British House of Commons to do menial tasks around Parliament. They are currently in the midst of investigating Mistress Tanya Cheex and her roving S&M show “The House of Thwax” for indecency and laws against “inflicting bodily harm” on another person. So they send him on a mission to go undercover and infiltrate her inner sanctum to get video proof, first hand accounts and names of all involved in the debaucherous shows and lifestyle of the whole sadomasochism community. When he gets in he is taken in and handled with kid gloves by Mistress Tanya herself after she realizes that he is so inexperienced with everything sexual. She takes him under her wing and this ruffles the feathers (wow, two bird analogies in one sentence, beat that!) of her slave/assistant/lesbian lover Eugenie. So Eugenie starts some investigating of her own and figures out that he is working for the House of Commons and with a little more prodding, finds out that her Master and the whole community are being investigated. It’s too late for Peter to stop the legal proceedings after he turns in the proof and he realizes that he is in love with Tanya.

This is a serious sounding premise but British writer/director/producer Stuart Urban took this material and stood it on its head. It’s filled with that wonderfully dry British sense of humor, likable and believable characters as well as amazing visuals. Guinevere Turner drips sex as the seemingly detached yet very sensitive “Mistress Tanya Cheex”. The sweet Christian boy “Peter” is played amazingly straight by Christien Anholt. Julie Graham is also sex made flesh as the subservient and fiercely loyal “Eugenie”. Honestly I could go on and on naming every character and actor/actress because they were all that good. I thought the material was handled with knowledge of the S&M scene and its players and the story even went a little bit into the psychology and emotional attachments of why people get into it. As I said before, the visuals are amazing. The performances of Tanya and Co. are shown as well as the behind the scenes of the Mistress’ life and the people that serve her. All of it is very striking and sometimes shocking. But that’s another thing I liked about this movie, it wasn’t unnecessarily graphic and vulgar but it definitely got the point across. It was an edgy, beautiful, stimulating and very funny movie that should be checked out by any “fringe” cinema fan.

aka Batoru gâru: Tokyo crisis wars
aka Battle Girl: Tokyo Crisis Wars

Director: Kazuo ‘Gaira’ Komizu

Cast: Cutie Suzuki, Kenji Otsuki, Kera Keiko Hayase

Synapse Films / NTSC Region 0 / Unrated / 1.33:1 Full Screen / Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo / Japanese with English Subtitles / 74 minutes / PURCHASE

DVD Extras: New digital transfer from original vault materials / Japanese Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo sound / Newly translated, removable English subtitles / All-new video interview with director Kazuo “Gaira” Komizu (53 mins.)

Japanese horror-gore director Kazuo “Gaira” Komizu is probably best known for his infamous sleaze-splatter films Entrails of a Virgin (1986) and Entrails of a Beautiful Woman (also 1986). These movies fused over-the-top gore with incredibly sleazy scenes of women being raped by HUGE demon dicks – yeah, my kind of movie too. Both of these movies made him pretty well known in the U.S. in the underground horror community. But he was already known in Japan for writing more than 20 movies, starting with Go, Go Second Time Virgin in 1969. As a director he has eight films under his belt including the sci-fi action gore flick Battle Girl: The Living Dead in Tokyo recently released by Synapse Films on DVD.

After a meteor unexpectedly hits Tokyo Bay, the whole of Tokyo is engulfed in a cloud of poisonous gas that shields any light from reaching the city. The Army declares Martial Law when panic erupts in the streets and the gases surrounding the city begin to raise the dead. Colonel Kirihara sets out to find a way to get the remaining survivors off of the island to safety. But the maniacal General Hugioka has other ideas; like keeping everyone trapped in Tokyo so the rest of the world doesn’t find out the shame the country has endured with the horrible state it is in. To do that, he has devised a plan to bottle the poison gas and shoot up still living people to make them his human/zombie soldiers. But K-Ko, the Colonel’s daughter, has been called upon to don a black leather armored suit by her father to fight the zombie hordes and help save Tokyo.

Does that premise sound ridiculous? Ludicrous? Preposterous? Well, it is. And I actually simmered it down and pulled out the parts that made sense. This movie is questionable in so many ways. The story jumps around from scene to scene with hardly a thought in mind to where it’s going. The special effects are on par with Ed Wood and very early Peter Jackson, just not as good. The production values are in the shitter too. In one scene you can clearly see the lighting guy sitting in a chair chilling out behind a plastic tarp for a good three or four seconds. But surprisingly, or maybe not to cheesy movie fans, this was a quick, fun movie coming in at around 70 minutes. The story could have held together a little better, the gore could have been amped up and they could have thrown in a titty or two. I mean the female lead is a well-known wrestler in Japan. I’m sure she has a smokin’ little body. But it somehow manages to entertain.

Speaking of which, they used her grappling experience pretty well in her fight scenes where she basically has wrestling matches with zombies and rival government agents. It was pretty badass to see the evil chick pile-driving the heroine of the movie into the ground. But I am a little curious about K-Ko’s battle suit. What can it really do? We saw it do a couple of things like the visor comes down and lets her see in the dark and tells her if the people in front of her are zombies or not, but give me some damn background on the sexy weapon suit! Oh, and why does her Uzi only shoot one bullet at a time? As far as I – and the interwebs – know, Uzi’s are fucking machine guns. They fire multiple rounds mutha-fuckas! You could cut a Japanese gas zombie in half with one of those bitches. Anywhoo, some other things like the crazy ’80s-style synth score and oddly ambiguous and nonsensical ending were fantastic. It added a lot of cheesiness and fun to an already cheesy and fun movie.