Killer Condom

Long before I understood the usage of contraceptives, Killer Condom taunted me from afar. How could it not? Troma specializes in creating vivid and often ridiculous sleeve art for its many films. Bold and brilliant like a Trapper Keeper but fundamentally banal and childlike in design. Killer Condom struck me as a film I'd have to eventually watch, possibly upon maturity cause Heaven knows when mother would allow me to rent such a distinguished "exploitation" picture. Like few other children, I suffered from a rapidly declining and accelerating method of childhood restrictions which led to Wes Craven's New Nightmare one minute, then on to strict reruns of We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story. From this essence of relinquished motherhood authority is from where my standards of film constantly rise and fall. I approach every film, every movie, with intentions of giving my regards to the absurd, the serious, and the stoic with nary a spiritual interruption.

Flash forward 13 years later and I've finally gotten my hands on a copy of Killer Condom for honest consumption expecting not much from a film thats backbone structures around "creative consulting" of H.R. Giger's and the special effects of art-horror master Jörg Buttgereit. Whenever I encounter a specimen of filmmaking that relies on girth from foreign names and titles, it tends to alert me of an otherwise incompetent film and gladly, Killer Condom is not the case. Of the imperfectible horror/comedy genre, Killer Condom stands as the only one I've seen that has demonstrated courageous and biting satire while keeping the horror and absurd elements apart, careful not to spoil the mix. It can be argued that this films (few) shortcomings overpower the strong arm of Killer Condom but I dare you to find a more suitable paradigm of light appearing amongst darkness. Better yet, up the ante. Find me another murderous prophylactic film and we'll depart with even ends.


Encounter gay detective Luigi Mackeroni and experience his seedy, colorful world in New York City. But unlike most vantages of the Big Apple, this one is entirely Teutonic and representative of a cleaner scum that stalks the alleyways. To call his world perfect would be a homosexually charged lie but to call it safer would be a correct and logical assumption of a modern day world turned less ethnic. After all, the death of the west is upon us. Soon into the tale, we witness a key Hotel becoming home to a species of sentient condoms that sever a male's favorite appendage. As later uncovered, this manmade species requires no sleep, no food, and lives only to carry out orders from a strung-out religious sect also seen in Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse.


Soon into Killer Condom, it's revealed that the clockwork foundation of this film mainly mocks three things: homosexuals (while at the same time redeeming them), Sicilians, and least importantly, Christians. As every film before it in some way mocks Christ loving ways, the main humor is derived from making Wops look silly and culture crazed from something evidenced by the nonexistent. Entertainment at its finest. When Killer Condom's not lampooning goombahs it's focusing its targets on the homosexual, transsexual, and biasing out the heterosexual as being a balanced creature. All this and more makes Killer Condom a very dizzying experiment in politically incorrect humor that shines down some truth in the midst of a hypersexual drive that will leave room for many messy castrations and disgusting creatures that crave cock - and I'm not referring to the "killer condoms."


What has been created is a film that has reached the maximum height of memorability. People from all walks of life will discover this film in some way and always be tainted with its presence. Killer Condom is a film whose grasp you can never really escape from. It is performance art based in crude, vile, and vulgar entertainment. Whether or not you can manage to dismiss this film as trash, the theory of low quality cinema stands triumphant with a title - no, an image, that will never leave your mind. Be it years later when you're bedding down a local broad and that contraceptive on the tabletop casts a smug grin on your face when you recall a specific time when such low brow entertainment ignited a bonding effort on behalf of two people, Killer Condom is exactly what I go to the movies for. I want to laugh, I want to squirm, I want to feel. Being human isn't such a request and Killer Condom kindly fulfilled my wishes. One of the few classics that the Troma library has to offer. Don't miss Killer Condom.

-mAQ

Eastern Promises of White Slavery

David Cronenberg’s feature-length film Eastern Promises may be his greatest “mainstream” film yet. The film mixes a very bizarre love triangle (which many people seem to not notice), the “Russian Mafia,” and an orphaned child for a truly “thrilling” experience. I found David Cronenberg’s portrayal of the Russian Mafia to be very interesting as he did not glamorize these international criminals as most filmmakers seem to do. I also believe Eastern Promises to be the “best mafia film of the decade” as I have yet to see a mafia film of the 2000s come even close to the power and quality of the film. I also believe David Cronenberg to be a courageous director for intimately tackling Eastern Promises in the manner he did.

In the biography David Cronenberg: A Delicate Balance it is revealed that Cronenberg was an outsider in relation to his upper middleclass Jewish community located in Toronto, Canada. To this day, David Cronenberg still considers himself merely an “Atheist” and lives his life in such a way. One could even call David Cronenberg the “Sigmund Freud of cinema” as both men are atheist Hebrews obsessed with the Psycho-Sexual. In fact, the only time David Cronenberg has seemed to acknowledge his heritage is in the recent short At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World made for the film anthology To Each His Own Cinema. Cronenberg stated of the film, "I've never thought of myself as a Philip Roth whose subject was his Jewishness, but I've never denied it." Cronenberg was responding to a Hezbollah mission statement and he went further on to state, "It's pretty interesting to hear someone say our goal is to kill every Jew in the world wherever they are. That means me and my children. It does evoke a reaction."


I bring up David Cronenberg’s “Jewishness” as I found it interesting that he directed a film about the so called “Russian Mafia.” The only thing “Russian” about the “Russian” mafia is that many of it’s members are Jews from Russia. Anyone who has studied the Russian mafia knows this and I found it particularly interesting that David Cronenberg would direct a film about it. Former president of Russia and current prime minister of Russia Vladimir Putin flushed Russia’s toilets a couple years back when he expelled much of the “Russian” Mafia and the infamous Jewish Oligarchs (who bought Russia for pennies went the Soviet Union fell). Like in Eastern Promises, many members of the Russian Mafia with the Jewish oligarchs, moved to England. One very arrogant Jewish Oligarch exiled in England, Boris Berezovsky, claims he is going to run a “second Russian Revolution” against Putin. Due to Vladimir Putin actually caring about his country (he also apparently banned “EMO” and “South Park”) by kicking out parasitical criminals, the American and Western press have been giving Putin negative coverage.

Easter Promises exposes how the Jewish Russian Mafia have been using the Slavic women of eastern Europe as sex slaves. For some reason Hollywood doesn’t seem to care about contemporary international slavery of white women. In the Zionist propaganda film Taken, it is unsurprisingly Albanians that are running the slave trade of girls. Why does Hollywood need to lie about who is really behind stealing Slavic girls, getting them addicted to Heroin, and selling (and killing) them to people around the world? Jewish horror clown Eli Roth also did his part in portraying Slavic Eastern Europeans (and Europeans in general) as barbaric monsters that torture (in Neo-Death Camps) and kill Americans for profit in his soulless Hostel films.


Jewish author Robert I. Friedman released a book Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America about the Jewish Russian Mafia and their international crimes. Apparently, the American FBI won’t even keep files or go after the Jewish mafia because the Jewish “anti-hate” group The Anti-Defamation League persuaded the FBI not to as it would “foster Anti-Semitism.” Forget about an America (or England) that actually takes care of it’s own citizens against criminal alien elements. One has to wonder why David Cronenberg did not have Eastern Promises take place in the United States. Maybe the film’s material was a little bit “too close to home?” The Jewish Russian mafia members in America have certainly done their fair share of crime. For example, Jewish Mafia boss Semion Mogilevich, who had very profitable slave prostitution rings in Eastern Europe and Israel, masterminded a 7 billion dollar money laundering scheme (the largest at that time). Unsurprisingly, Mogilevich stole the money from the Bank of New York, one of the owners of the Federal Reserve. Of course, US congress met a “dead end” in their investigation against Mogilevich.


Viggo Mortensen’s character in Eastern Promises has a Jesus tattoo, but Mortensen mentions on the film’s DVD release that the tattoo’s meaning has nothing to do with Christianity. Of course, the average viewer watching Eastern Promises will interpret Mortensen’s tattoo in a way that will lead them to believe that the Russian Mafia is full of criminal Christians. Although disgusting and inhumane, the international sex slave trade of Slavic women seems to be unimportant to Hollywood and the Media. After all, it is only white women in slavery and they would rather talk about Darfur or pathetic Somalian pirates (who should be shot on the spot like white pirates used to be). Steven Spielberg also brought us the wretched and lie of a film Amistad. One doesn’t have to look far to find out that the Jewish community (mainly from Holland, Spain, and Portugal) also dominated the slave trade of Africans which only whites get the blame for. The book The Secret Relationship of Blacks and Jews provides more than a plentiful amount of evidence as to who should carry the majority of the blame for Slavery of Blacks.


After forty years of filmmaking, David Cronenberg has maintained his ability to direct both original and quality films. Eastern Promises is one of Cronenberg’s many mainstream films and probably his best. Although at first glance, Eastern promises may not seem like a film full of risk taking, it no doubt is. What outrage it would spark if the typical American and Englishman were to be completely enlightened to the true problem of the “Russian” Mafia and how our governments have been tolerating these criminals. As shown in Eastern Promises, the Russian Security Services (FSB which was formerly the KBG), has taken it upon themselves to stop these international criminals. Stopping the “Russian” Mafia is a true promise of the FSB from the East.

-Ty E

Wild Zero

Wild Zero is known to me solely for the very similar traits to that of Versus and in part of the Lightning Bolt/Guitar Wolf 7" Split that I jubilantly indulged in during the height of my musical adolescence. I discovered many questionable traits to distinguish appeasement from guilty pleasure and on this quest for the ultimate thrill I weakened my standards to include, not up to glorious entertainment with an ethnic propagandic twist seen only in Japanese trash cinema. Stereotypes of Italy leading in as the full purveyor of trash are dutifully ill-informed and in this preposterous lie the truth comes to light: all Japanese films excluding a few are trash. Trash meaning of a trashy aesthetic, cheese, and B-habits such exhibited in Wild Zero.


The Japs courageously stepped upon unstable ground and have managed to mold a market out of second-rate zombie films and low-budget J-horror films that have no elements of terror other than vanishing, stoic figures with jet black hair. In many pieces of eccentric Pan-Asian video experiments, the Japanese will also stroll through their native city limits, come across an electric guitar, pick it up and be instantly transformed into an egomaniacal slant-eyed badass with enough attitude to slick his hair into a quiff. This acute extension of pride has had many recent offenders? Detroit Metal City, Electric Dragon 80000v, the hit video game Gitaroo Man, and yours truly, Wild Zero.


In regards to the previous statement of instrument phallicism, Detroit Metal City hangs weight as a stark example. Soichi-san has dreams of creating Swedish pop music but upon his failing talent at such, he picks up an electric guitar and is transformed into the formidable Johannes Krauser II. Acoustic guitar: homosexual, Electric guitar: heterosexual badass - See the manifestation of transferring sexual orientation? It's all too clear to just be a stroke of accidental recurring themes in the midst of Asian rock. Their attempts to create an Eastern rockabilly fashion in Wild Zero is laughable at best and that's the kick that lies in the taste of this scintillating query of oddball antics that eventually spirals into sexual confusion as our "lovable" hero, Ace, who doesn't play guitar, turns into a homosexual by films end. Pushed to beliefs that "love knows no genders" by Guitar Wolf himself, Ace drops his own perception of targeted affection in order to snootily follow a beeline placed before him by a band of Japanese noise-punk musicians. Let it be known that I'd first eat my own shoe than take relationship advice from someone from Japan.


Apart from the amount of sheer complacency, Wild Zero soon matures into a prime piece of zombie cinema that had a rough start without the help of Guitar Wolf to even the ties. With Guitar Wolf's absence, Wild Zero would have been just another Tokyo Zombie. All play and no work makes zombie films sour to the core and in this statement I'd like to approve Wild Zero's cause of non-stop play to have something of a productive nature in building a semi-serious film - serious as in the way it was created, not marketed. Wild Zero is basically pure immature adrenaline in personified film form. With aliens, rock shows, and zombies, the odds were against Wild Zero for succeeding with so much inclination for the absurd and for the better, it did. To top off this piece of brilliantly sub-par cinema, a scene with a topless femme fatale is included, shower and all.


Wild Zero is the apotheosis of a hypothesis : an intellectually scarred vision of how modern Japanese absurdity should be confined into a single shell casing that features everything one could hope to achieve with the promise of "over the top." If you can manage to look past the homosexual force fed flair (trust me, I did,) then you might come out of this film in grand working condition. Don't let my stoicism get to your inner workings. I am merely a jaded cynic with a fiery temper to boot. Wild Zero offered me everything I needed to cool down and in the end I found this film to be an utmost necessity to the Japanese cult movement. Any tag line that reads "Jet rock 'n' roll" must boast a swift undercurrent of zany entertainment that can only be extinguished by the saddening (old) news that Bass Wolf died of natural causes in 2005.

-mAQ

The Wraith

The Wraith: a film that has been following my shadowed memories since I began indulging in cinema at an incredibly early age. Upon my initial obscured viewing of The Wraith, traces of this film stuck like tacks to my every film experience. The black figure reminded me of Robocop and in turn the revenge plot took me right back to The Wraith. The lone enigma provoked thoughts of Grease 2 and that 80s byproduct of hairspray and motorcycles refreshed my memory of the spunk that The Wraith accounted for. It wasn't very long until I realized that every route in my cerebral channel will inadvertently wind back to the original slave & master relationship that The Wraith created and damaged with its vicious familiarity attack on my senses. In short: fuck my life.


This is simply one of those films that are relishable to those who appreciate the era. Mocking the harmless, self-contained 80s cheese is that of complaining about the over-abundance of black and white pictures in the 50s. For a sci-fi revenge film, The Wraith isn't grossly disappointing. When it comes down for the retribution, you'll find a lot of irritating cats being iced by methods of a kamikaze parked car in which they crash into at full speed, only to have the car reassemble itself and drive off. For the impact solely based on The Wraith's universe, it's a bit on the ridiculous side. Having an anti-hero to root for is always a welcome tiding but to have a completely indestructible being that jumps from one greaser to the next is just an inevitable countdown that you are now apart of, willingly or not.


In this top billing role, Charlie Sheen shares about 10 minutes screen time tops while the prototype Dodge "Turbo Interceptor" steals the shows and the applause with a futuristic look that, still to this day, creates a forcefield of timeless antiquity. At it's core though, The Wraith is nothing but vehicular fetishism. It's what The Wizard did for Nintendo and at times, the product placement of this blisteringly "cybernetic" automobile seems gratuitous and unresourceful with the many changes that the script could have used. What's worse is the implementing of an "innocent young woman." Most women in revenge fare involve betrayal, deceit, or a slew of virtue-smashing pseudo-dyke whores, for the most part. To see a woman beat to the ground and haven't cracked yet is Hollywood fabrication at its best.


Along with the mocking of the feminine spirit, it seems that The Wraith also indulges in several scenes that follow a contradictory homosexual/homophobic script writing trend with young males, fast cars, and enough euphemisms to temporarily stuff fill the crater that is Jennifer Garner's slutty face - nonsensical at best. To be true to my own developed senses, yes, The Wraith is an absolute travesty on film. But alas, somewhere in the visioning of this masturbatory 80s explosion exhibitionism lies charm, not your normal everyday charm but a festering pocket of immense joy that can only be delivered by a ghost/robot Charlie Sheen. The Wraith isn't scared of making mistakes, rather it chooses to deliver smash bang entertainment with an awkward Lego warrior and an extremely fast car that delivers an enigmatic atmosphere with a droning engine noise that blazes down the roads with such neglect that could only be filmed by a teenager himself.

-mAQ

Taxi Driver

If there is a director that American cinephiles and film students all unanimously have a hard-on for, it is NYC “sometimes" auteur Martin Scorsese. Martin Scorsese has had a long and, for the most part, consistent career for over four decades. Fans of Scorsese have to admit that they love early artsy fartsy films like Who’s That Knocking at My Door just like they enjoy fun mafia wopfest Goodfellas. Without a doubt, Taxi Driver is one of Scorsese’s most popular and critically acclaimed films. I personally believe Taxi Driver to be both Scorsese’s greatest and most important film. Martin Scorsese maybe a NYC WOP, but that doesn’t mean the films he directed about the mafia are his greatest.


With Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese was able to achieve creating a film that was a cinematic attack to viewer’s eyes and ears. Although I have never been a fan (and never will be) of degenerate Jazz, the score in Taxi Driver by Bernard Herrmann is one of the best musical accompaniment to a film in cinema history. Herrmann is also known for providing the scores to Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films such as Psycho, Vertigo, North By Northwest, and a variety of others. Despite creating a score for a completely different type of film, Bernard Herrmann was able to resonate the dreary tone of Taxi Driver and anti-hero Travis Bickle’s undeniably pathetic life. Martin Scorsese is now often known for using pop music(which he borrowed from Kenneth Anger) in his films, but with Taxi Driver I believe he was most successful in creating a cinematic assault of both sight and sound.


Despite the film’s simple title, Taxi Driver is quite the fitting title. The film’s anti-hero Travis Bickle, is pathetic as they come. Despite being pretty much a loser, he works nights 60 hours or so a week and is assumed to be a Vietnam veteran. For someone who has fought for his country, Travis has yet to receive any real thanks for heroics. Instead, he drives around the DARK urban jungle streets like at a city that looks like it’s on the verge of an apocalypse. Travis Bickle has odd relationships with other human beings and has no friends. I must admit that Taxi Driver successfully captures loneliness and an anti-social existence better than any other film I have yet to see. The emotions and themes found in Taxi Driver are very rare for an American film, especially a mainstream film. One could say that Taxi Driver is one of the few truly American films that has a genuinely anti-Hollywood feel to it. For that alone, Martin Scorsese should be commended.


In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle decides to take the law in his own hands. Bickle’s actions in the film, although virtuous and righteous, seem to be more a form of venting than merely to “do the right thing.” Bickle does the right thing when he decides to target the pathetic pimp Matthew (aka sport). Pimps are easily one of the most lowly scum and parasitical creatures out there. The real man is supposed to provide and take care of a woman. The pimp does the opposite and lives off women by putting their lives in danger merely for financial gain. In contemporary society, “pimp” has turned into a word associated with a “cool” and “badass” dude. With an assortment of self-loathing white Wiggers and criminally inclined blacks, tons of impotent American males want to be thought of as the truly anti-manly “pimp.” Travis Bickle, by confronting a pimp and saving a 12 year olds life, shows what a real (although unconventional) man is.


The only flaw with the Taxi Driver is that the film should have ended after Travis Bickle’s “shootout session.” The high angle shot in slow motion featuring Travis bloody on the couch with police breaking in should have been where the film ended. What happened to Travis after his trigger happy mission is irrelevant. I feel that Martin Scorsese settled for a more “Hollywood” ending so that the typical infantile minded American viewer doesn’t get confused or felt “cheated.” I almost felt that “happy” ending added on to be a little silly and in conflict with the overall film.


Chronic insomnia, porn addiction, irrational urges, and alienation are symptoms of our contemporary apocalyptic world. Travis Bickle was a man that went the next step and attempted to transcend the world for something more real. In a world that seems to be only getting worse as the years pass, America needs more films about people like Travis Bickle and the dystopian nightmare before him that he constantly contemplates about. Films like Taxi Driver are rare in the mainstream, and the opposite of what Hollywood wants to present. Hollywood wants to train preteen girls to be sluts, train white boys to want to be black criminals, and influence black men to sell crack. The real question is, why hasn’t a Travis Bickle type taken a trip to Sunset Boulevard?

-Ty E