Really Awful Movies

In horror, you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel. Especially if you’ve got a good wheel already.

The Furies (see, podcast review) takes a well-worn and inherently exciting idea in the horror genre for a spin: dystopian prey hunting of the two-legged variety, see Hard Target, Battle Royale, The Most Dangerous Game. And it adds a bit of gimmicky fun to ratchet up the interest level.

Two recent high school grads (Kayla and Maddie) have a spat under a Sydney (we’re guessing) bridge about who is or isn’t going to succeed in life. But little to do they know, they’ll have bigger fish than whether they’ll get a thin, or thick university application response.

After storming off, the the duo is kidnapped.

And we’re reintroduced to Kayla from the inside of a coffin. She wrests herself free, only to find herself in a desolate abandoned mining town hellscape in New South Wales. It’s replete with a very eerie strand of trees, which give the remote area (an area, best known for its remoteness, har har – thanks, and RIP Norm MacDonald) a very uniform and utterly surreal look.

Kayla soon stumbles upon another woman in the woods and it turns out, they are UNWILLING PARTICIPANTS IN A DEADLY GAME!

Billed, wholly inaccurately, as Halloween meets The Hunger Games, The Furies benefits from being shot entirely in daylight, which is kinda neat. Not to compare them, but it’s always interesting, stylistically, to see films lensed in daylight. These include classics like Tenebrae (ironically titled, as the word means darkness and yet Argento dazzled us with Roman sunshine) and of course, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Furies, like TCM, incorporates some of the more obvious tropes of the hicksploitation genre: Kayla and company coming upon ramshackle accommodations that offer…not exactly the latest modcons, this as they’re hunted by mysterious, animal mask- wearing bumpkin brutes.

That said, The Furies takes a different, um, road from a typical Wrong Turn conceit, by introducing a snuff conspiracy ring to the proceedings and some interesting backstory to the ladies. What’s more, the movie bubbles along at a quick pace, bursting out of the gates with a pretty fun first act.

*** (out of 5)

Kumite! Kumite!

Fight to the death round robin tournaments have been action film fodder for decades.

And what’s odd, is that these spectacles always attract huge crowds, but never the authorities. And they’re also lucrative, even though as we’ve seen with certain MMA organizations nowadays, the purses aren’t exactly enough so that combatants can quit their daytime jobs loading trucks.

What Kumite flicks have in common is a brooding antihero who is compelled to participate through some fakakta plot device. These scenarios can be very weird (Gymkata, where there are geopolitical implications to who enters/wins the tourney – the establishment of a missile base), straight-ahead revenge plots, or the best kind: a media mogul or criminal mastermind who forces men to fight for the masses.

No Exit / Fatal Combat, combines the latter two, and carries on the fine dystopian fight-to-the-death cinematic tradition we’ve seen from Rollerball and Battle Royale, up to today’s The Hunger Games and The Condemned. Some of these flicks are undoubtedly finer than others.

Capable Canadian martial artist Jeff Wincott (The Perfect Weapon) portrays Professor Stoneman, one tough hombre and hardly a tweedy elbow patch publish-or-perish egghead. Rather, he’s a bona fide butt whupper, despite being a pacifist.

When a bunch of lead pipe-swinging thugs attack Stoneman’s wife in a parking garage, killing the baby she’d been carrying, Stoneman tries to intervene. (In the 90s it was a requirement that every action movie had a fight scene in a parking garage, and the Foley work sounds never exactly matched when the pipes clanged clanged off the asphalt)

However, the goons eventually get the better of him, and shove him into a limo, and preventing this film from basically being Death Wish.

Suddenly Stoneman finds himself on No Exit, a proto-UFC show, beamed out over the airwaves from some studio in the high Arctic.

As an unwitting participant, his philosophy toward nonviolence is put to the test. Suffice it to say, Stoneman fails miserably, and he doles out a plethora of highly entertaining beatings.

No Exit is Canadian, which makes it an intriguing watch as the Great White North is better known as the source for some of the finest horror films ever made: The Changeling, The Fly, Rabid, Possessor, Rituals, etc. etc.

*** (out of 5)

If you’re an action fan, pick up a copy of the book, Mine’s Bigger than Yours! The 100 Wackiest Action Movies (foreword, Aussie genre legend Brian Trenchard-Smith).