20. Regional Horror!
(Rewatch) The poster and video boxes WAY oversell this as a supposed gorefest. If all you saw was the poster, you’d think this was going to be New York Ripper or something. It is not. It is what happened when John Carpenter made Halloween and it was a huge hit and suddenly everyone with a camera thought “hey, I could do that.” This is no Halloween by any stretch, but it does have its charms in an “if you showed an AI 1000 slasher movies…” way. There are like 10 kills before we even meet our core group of "characters" and most of the characters who die are a seemingly random assortment of people (there are SO MANY people in these woods). The killer is an unidentified mud-smeared man with Mardi Gras beads on his face. And the score mostly sounds like someone bouncing a dodgeball. But I don't know, it's still pretty fun.
21. Jackie Chan!
This is a favorite among fans of Jackie Chan, and I can see why. It was directed by Yuen Woo-ping, who choreographed and/or advised on fight scenes in a lot of your favorite martial arts movies. This movie follows the time-honored martial arts tropes of both “abused weakling learns kung fu and becomes the Best Ever” and “who’s martial arts style is best; anyone who disagrees with me dies.” More significantly, it established Chan's comedic martial arts style, which was further developed in Drunken Master, which came out the same year and was my Jackie Chan pick for Junesploitation last year. Both movies have a plot structure that would be exploited by a lot of American martial arts films in the 1980s, notably Karate Kid and its sequels, but it's well-worn for a reason.
22. Lethal Ladies!
(Rewatch) I took “lethal” in the prompt to mean L.E.T.H.A.L., which is Andy Sidaris’s anagram for his fictional organization of hot, gun-toting, female agents who fight crime and take super-important meetings in hot tubs. Most of Sidaris’s movies have nearly identical tropes and conventions, but the formula hit its peak with Hard Ticket to Hawaii. After intercepting a delivery of stolen diamonds, agents Dona and Taryn have to defend themselves and protect the diamonds while also dealing with a big deadly snake that’s on the loose for no reason. Everyone in this movie knows exactly what movie they're in and there is no illusion that this is not purely exploitative on every level. It's hardly feminist, but I love that the women in this and other Sidaris movies are almost always more capable than the men. Everything about this movie rules.
23. Giallo!
This one was a little slow for my taste, but it’s interesting seeing Klaus Kinski playing a good guy (and giving the most restrained performance I’ve ever seen from him). The story follows a man whose wealthy wife dies in a car crash and, after mourning her, has some encounters with some suspicious characters and starts to suspect that she might not be dead after all. (Fulci's One on Top of the Other, which came out the same year, has a similar premise.) There are some interesting twists and turns, as well as threads that seemingly go nowhere – all part and parcel of the giallo experience. The dubbing was an issue, though perhaps only on the version I watched. It was out of sync with the closed captioning by a couple of seconds, which made it more work than it should have been to follow English-dubbed dialogue.
24. ‘90s Comedy!
Trailers: Zombie, Shaun of the Dead
Also known as Dellamorte Dellamore, this is another one from Michele Soavi (who also made Stage Fright from earlier in the month), and unfortunately it's a bit hard to find unless you want to buy a physical copy (which I was trying to avoid for this project). Very charming, especially as it stars Rupert Everett, who could be a cover model for romance novels. He plays a cemetery caretaker who frequently has to kill his tenants a second time when they come back as zombies. After falling in love with with a widow, who soon becomes another of his charges, he goes on a spiral into ever-increasing insanity and misery. This has a lot of the “tribulations of the working schmoe” feel of a lot of 90s comedy, but with more visual flair and fantasy than most of its peers.
25. Revenge!
Trailers: Ms. 45, House on the Edge of the Park
This is also known by its far better title, They Call Her One-Eye, and I liked it a *lot* more than I expected to. I’d been nervous about it, because it’s been lumped together with the likes of Cannibal Holocaust and I Spit on Your Grave. But this is nowhere near as upsetting as either of those movies. This is the movie I Spit on Your Grave thinks it is, and I much prefer it. Especially as it spends far less time wallowing in the woman’s suffering and more time building her up to take her revenge. Side note: I watched the Synapse DVD, which is supposed to be a full reconstruction of the film. But it’s still three minutes short of the original runtime, so I might be missing some stuff (I know it’s missing an eye-gouging shot that I read a gruesome description of). So maybe the true full version *is* more horrifying. But I liked the version I saw.
26. Free Space!
Trailers: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Mi Vida Loca
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