TYTD Reviews

‘Santa Clause Conquers the Martians’ has been a film that i’ve been on and off trying to watch now for years. In a way, its my own fault really, Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year, and with SO many ‘classic’ Christmas movies to choose from. I’d find myself hitting play, half watching 15-25 minutes before I’d have to turn it off to go and help do some Christmas shopping, cooking, wrapping or decorating. Its not so much that I wasnt interested in the film, more that with SO many other things going on, it was just…too easy to walk away from this one and forget I’d even started it to begin with.

Well, last year I grabbed AGFAs wonderful HD Bluray remaster of this film, and today, I finally decided to give it a spin, in some ways im SO glad I did…but in others, I kind of understand why its taken me so long to actually make it through this one in a single sitting. Additionally, to clarify. The AGFA release of this film contains two cuts of the movie, a ‘Showcase’ cut of the film preserved from a 16mm print that runs to 90 minutes and includes an intermision, advertisements and some removed scenes. And a ‘Drive in’ cut preserved from an S-VHS transfer from ‘Something Weird’ video, that trims the movie down to a pacey 60 mins or so. For the purposes of this review, im going to largely be talking about the 90 minute cut.

The plot? Well, this is a matinee film aimed at very young children in the 60s…so it really cant stand to overcomplicate things. We open with a newscaster hosting a television first, via Telstar, a live interview from the North pole, with Santa, in his workshop, its early December, and Santas hard at work with his elves developing all the toys needed for every boy and girl around the world.

This live newscast however, is picked up by two martian children, who are absolutely captivated by the idea of Christmas and Santa. Their father Kima picks up on the fact that they’ve slowly stopped eating as much, and that they need ‘sleep spray’ now to actually go to sleep, and…with concern; he summons the Martian Council and they head out to the ‘Thunder Forest’ to speak to their elder. Who informs the group that all the children of Mars are waking up to the idea of Santa and Christmas, and…as Martian culture dictates that all children undergo a rapid education programme, aimed at creating children with adult brains. Non of the kids have had time to just… be Kids..and that needs to change.

So! the council decide the logical choice on what to do is simple, they need to head to earth, kidnap Santa, and force him to give the Martian children Christmas. And there plan more or less goes without a hitch…except, on the trip, they accidentally kidnap two children called Billy and Betty…who through the power of childhood wonder, and with the magic power of Santa, Show all the martians, young and old, that Christmas is a state of mind…engaging most…but turning some of the Martians towards the most DEVIOUS of tactics to ensure the status quo isnt interrupted…

And, at its core…this is a very simplistic and quite surreal little movie. cheesy and campy enough that I FULLY understand why its a bit of a darling amongst the Rifftrax and MST3K crowds. But I feel like this is a movie probably best enjoyed in the ‘riff’ format above all else.

Watching it ‘unriffed’ its still fun and wild in an early 60s way, but it does somewhat expose the drier elements of the production. Particularly in the 3rd act where we spend a painful amount of time flicking back and forth between Santa and the kids, and the Martians who just want Santa gone by any means necessary. The pacing is a little bit pedestrian in the first two acts, but when the 3rd act swings around? the whole thing just crawls to a halt for the majority of the runtime.

Beyond that? its all very simple ‘by the numbers’ type stuff. the characters are all super blunted because the target audience for this film is kids aged 3-7. dialogue is kept overly simplistic and basic. the plot doesnt really have that many twists and turns, but I was amazed at just how long 87 minutes felt watching this. Its one of *those* kinds of movies…

Honestly? the main reason to check this out is the direction and visuals. I feel like the production values of this film get unfairly slated. While its very true that this films surreal ‘cheap and cheerful’ visuals are sometimes SO low quality as to be laughable. I do have to say, especially with the AGFA remaster, you do get to see SO much more detail in these set spaces, and its actually surprising to me how much thought was put into dressing the sets and making the best out of a very ‘cardboard’ situation…Only enhanced with some really quite decent camera work, tracks, dolly’s and pans are all out in full force, it feels smooth and sequences, for the time, are reletively solid. Again; its not exactly pushing any boundaries…But its a very sturdy, if not cheap looking effort. Also, bonus points for one of the greatest cardboard robot designs i’ve ever seen in ‘Torg’ the robot!

Performances are fine enough, the Martian cast are kind of phoning it in, but when the costumes are that rediculous, its hard to be surprised by that really…It definitely would have been nice to have seen them play it more ‘alien’ like…as it stands, occasional comments to ‘Food pills’ is about as ‘alien’ as it gets, with the vast majority of ‘otherworldly’ lifting seemingly just being done by the weird costume designs…

The actors playing Billy, Betty and Santa all pretty much fit the brief…It would have been nice to see them get a bit more complexity though as, as it stands, they’re basically just there to state the obvious and let everyone else carry the plot to the next point they can jump out to reiterate whats going on for the younger members of the audience.

I feel like everyone here brings at least SOME energy to proceedings…but I feel like the folks who really needed to go all out, just clearly wernt being paid enough to do that…and the ones who DO camp it up (Im looking at you ‘Dropo’) go WAY too far and end up almost insufferable as comic relief.

Throw in an absolutely barren soundtrack barring the absolute pop CLASSIC of an opening theme, and ‘Santa Clause Conquers the Martians’ finds itself as a bit of a bumpy ride of a movie. When its good, its fun, decently paced and absurd to the point of hilarious…When its bad? its dry, plodding and frankly, a bit boring. I think next time i’ll give the 60 minute cut a spin, as im hoping they’ll have dropped some of the more ‘filler’ oriented moments. But I can absolutely see why people love this, I think riffed it could only stand to be better still, and i’d recommend checking it out at least once.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/santa-claus-conquers-the-martians/

I’ve seen about 100 of these now, this may not be the most groundbreaking Stooges short. But it made me laugh WAY too much, and didn’t have a dry moment for the full runtime. Probably the one I’d recommend to someone who’d never seen the Stooges before, and wanted to check them out.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/an-ache-in-every-stake/

I put off watching this one for the longest time because, by all accounts it wasnt so much a movie more an audiobook with stock footage running over the top of it…and well, that IS basically all this is.

A 90 minute audio narration telling the stoy of a boy named Pip who escapes a smog addled city to go to the woods, where he learns he can transform into different woodland animals, and the adventures he gets into while hes out there. With almost 95% of the films visuals being either royalty free stock footage, with 5 beng a handful of rushed shots captured on the fly to fill in the gaps where stock was totally unavailable.

THe script for this reads like an ‘automatic writing’ experiment and comes across as pretentious, and the visuals range from unpleasent, to irritating, to just beyond surreal. Its trying to be whimsical and fun. But it all falls flat on its face.

Even Socks Whitmore cant save this one, shes the only narrator for the full movies runtime, and she has a small handful of good moments. But its clear this needed a full cast, rather than just one person doing the job of 5 people.

Boring, cheap and downright dire as a viewing OR Listening experience. The handful of good Socks line deliveries and a couple of genuinely surreal moments that grabbed my attention were the paper thin mercies that stopped this film from basically being totally unwatchable.

Not worth your time, its a painful thing to sit through, I wont be watching it again.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-once/

Every day I wake up and think to myself…’Yeahhh…today’s a ‘monster club’ day….’

And y’know? I’m never wrong when I do…

Also my 200th film of 2025.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-monster-club/6/

The final film in Melusines ‘Bob Chinn Peekarama triple feature set’ California Gigolo is about as straightforward as it comes. John Holmes plays ‘John’ (a stretch…I know.) a Gigolo based in California (I know, I was shocked too.) and the film basically just…follows him around as he sees to his various clients and seeks new work. We also follow a guy named Gomez on and off throughout the film as he too gets into Gigoloing briefly. Its essentially something in the way of a ‘Day in the life’ or ‘Weekend in the life’ of the exotic and erotic lifestyle John leads.

Its fine enough, the script once again is paper thin, but at least it isnt trying to convince the audience of its storytelling prowess…It knows what it is, and the audience know within the first 5 minutes or so that they’re going to get exactly what it says on the tin. the pacings pretty on the level, it slows a little bit in the middle…but thats kind of to be expected.

The characters are all pretty lightly developed, but again, thats fine with films like these because its really just set dressing the audience and giving them a ‘type’ to work with.

The sex scenes themselves are consistent, and pretty well handled. With a good range of shot types and plenty of close up shots blended in. Theres a bit of an emphasis on Oral with this one. But I would say it was a ‘specialist’ film, just that…of all the sex acts featured in the movie, Oral is the most prominent.

The direction and cine are solid enough, though it is maybe a little basic on the lighting and experimentation front, its all fairly flat lit lighting, the sets are all pretty standard apartment or office spaces and the scenes are a little *too* clean structured. It maybe would have been nice to have seen them push the boat out a little more with this one.

Still! the performers all seem to be having a fun time on set, the soundtracks upbeat and fun enough and as a bit of escapism, its not half bad. I dont think this is an ‘essential’ watch, but I would say it’s in the upper half of Chinns filmography quality wise.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/california-gigolo/

The Second film in Melusines ‘Bob Chinn’ Peekarama triple pack is 1979’s ‘Hot Legs’ and…to be honest, there isnt really much to say on this one, other than its a bit ‘Middle of the road’.

The plot follows a media company trying to realise a new advertising campaign for ‘Hot Legs’ a stocking and garter company who are looking to shake up the world of fashion with a raunchy set of commercial advertisements and magazine spreads. The media companies top dog is ‘Mort’ a very stressed out Ad man who’s trying to juggle no show actresses, the egos of photographers and union staff in order to get the project over the line.

As you can imagine, a series of vignettes putting actresses in scantily clad outfits on erotically charged sets is bound to lead to all kinds of ‘encounters’ and through the films runtime we see several instances where business and pleasure get a little TOO intertwined…

Having seen a few of Bob Chinns films now, I was actually a little underwhelmed by this one. It didnt quite manage the charm of say ‘The Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls’ or ‘Lets Get Physical’. Usually, Chinns works have a bit of a cheeky sense of humour about themselves, and while this film is somewhat light hearted, it all seemed a bit thin on the ground in terms of what the scripts brought out of the cast.

The plotting element is fine enough, if not a little bit vague. It maybe would have been nice to have just focussed on the actresses moving through the ad campaign, or the photographer, rather than spreading the plot super thin to cover all aspects of the production.

The sex scenes here seemed a bit less focussed than Chinns other offerings, here they were a bit *too* focussed on close up oral scenes, and kept a lot of the actual sex scenes at a distance, it felt a bit ‘hands off’ and didnt quite have the same charge that a lot of Chinns films usually do have.

That being said, we trade some of that eroticism instead for some really decent set work, decent lighting with coloured gels and some nice experimentation with compositional choices…

The cast all seem pretty with it in the sex scenes, but seem a bit cool and uninterested in playing their parts in the story segments.

I dont think this is a bad adult movie really, but I just dont really think it did anything to really make it standout…its fine enough in giving eroticism and a decent (enough) plot to help it all tie together…but it starts to drag a bit around the middle, purely because there just isnt enough happening to keep the audience engaged…throw into the mix the tepid sex scenes, and this is a movie that isnt really anything special…Maybe worth your time if your into Chinns work specifically, but your milage will very much vary otherwise.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hot-legs-1979/

Well, that was a bit of a comedown. After riding high on the first film, I barrelled straight into ‘China O’Brien 2’ expecting…Hoping. That it would continue the momentum of the first film…It did not.

The plot picks up a few months to a year after the events of the first film and the focus this time is on a recently released from prison Drug lord, whos planning a major sale, while at the same time we’re reintroduced to China and the crew who are being awarded by the towns mayor for their turnaround of the local police department since China became Sheriff, we’re shown that China has kind of settled into a life of fairly mundane local crimes, but when she accidentally busts a key mechanism of this Drug lords plans for a major Drug deal, a bounty is placed on Chinas head her her friend Dekota and his friends are taken hostage. Leading China and Matt to try everything in their powers to bust Baskins drug dealing operations and rescue Dekota and crew unharmed.

The quality fall is palpable here, its clear they had even less money than the first film, and the cuts have run too deep to really salvage this piece. What we essentially have here are a handful of small budget set pieces that ARE fun…that get diluted away to pretty much nothing by the rolling gulfs of nothingness that happen when the fun things arnt happening.

The scripts pacing has taken a hit right to the kneecaps it seems. The opening third of the movie barely even feature China and the crew and instead focusses on Baskin and his team settling old scores and setting up the framework that’ll dictate the rest of the movies direction. By the time the main crew DO show up in any meaningful sense, its already kind of too late. As we then have to follow them as they uncover what we’ve already been told up front AND THEN we have to sit with them while they figure out a plan.

The pacing is positively glacial, the act structuring seemingly stalls part way into the opening act and doesnt really recover until the final 10-15 minutes. The characters feel like they’ve undergone a degree of ‘flanderization’ with all the nuance and bumps that made the characters fun and cheesy in the first film being heavily sanded down because they need to push the plot forwards by any means necessary.

The dialogue isnt as playful, it feels much more scripted and less naturalistic, which really hobbles the film as that was the most endering quality of the first film. Essentially; there are maybe 3-5 scenes in this film that collectively run to maybe just shy of a quarter of the runtime, where they try something a bit silly, or weird, or they try to experiment a bit…and then the rest of the film is just overtly bland sequence building and plotting that doesnt try to rock the boat and doesnt really do anything other than trying to copy the stuff that worked in the first film…just with less money, less passion and lower energy.

The same impacts the direction too, the fight scenes are all massively scaled back in terms of choreography, they dont mask the connections as well as the first film, the scope to experiment seems to have been scaled back massively due to the budget cuts, which means we have many MANY more sequences of people just kind of sitting around talking idley to each other. Everything feels a lot flatter, a lot less colourful or interesting and a lot LOT safer, to the point of the films detriment.

Cast direction is about the same as the first film, which is a small mercy, it may not have a lot of money to do much. But they at least let the characters use props and improvise within the frame physically a little bit. Which did just about bring an element of a sparkle back to the production. But its still not really as good as the first film.

The cines been paired back, we have less creative lighting choices, less b-roll, less experimentation with shot compositions, less of a ‘vision’ for the film. It feels like a film that was shot on the cheap to try and cash in on the heat the first film gave off. Its not inherently badly shot…it just feels a bit bland, boring and played out. At a point where they really could and should have ramped up…they basically fizzled out to nothing.

Even the performances are significantly flatter, with Harlowe Marks as our villian Baskins just…being kind of drab. he doesnt have the right energy for this, he just comes across as a generic baddie from any low budget action film from the mid 80s onwards. Totally unremarkable. Cynthia Rothrock feels increasingly throughout this film like she wasnt taking this very seriously. Previously I thought she wasnt the best performer in terms of dialogue delivery or physical acting. But I commended her martial arts abilities and when the film did get ‘serious’ she more than rose to the occasion to match the energy required. In this film? she gets significantly less screen time, her acting is still flat, but not they’re scaling back the martial arts work too, meaning she gets even less interesting stuff to do, and the stuff that she DOES do well, they’re scaling back on.

Even the supporting cast feel lower quality/less engaged on the production. with Keith Cook getting a decent share of the screen time, but very little to say, and even less to do physically. and Richard Norton essentially being paired down to a sidekick role where he gets almost nothing to do until the finale.

adding to this the soundtrack, which feels recycled and doenst quite fit right to the tone of this film…and overall? this is a bit of a wash…its not inherently bad, its just kind of boring. Nowhere near as good as the first one. It desperately needed more money and….just…actual heart and soul putting into it. This film feels like it was being churned out for the sake of being made…I feel like if someone actually WANTED this thing to exist,it could have played out differently. Definitely one to give a wide birth, it reminded me a bit of the quality difference between ‘Day’ and ‘Strike’ of the panther….and much like that film series. I’ll probably just stick to watching ‘China O’Brien’ going forward.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/china-obrien-ii/

One thats been on my hit list for a while, i’d heard great things about ‘China O’Brien’ over the years, and with the UK being battered by fridgid tempratures and 80mph winds today, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to crack the seal on this one and give Vinegar Syndromes 4k Double feature release of this a whirl!

The plot follows the titular ‘China O’Brien’ (played by Cynthia Rothrock) A big city cop who, when she isnt booking criminals by day, is teaching mixed martial arts to folks by night. Chinas got life pretty good, but when one of her students disrespects her and accuses the her of teaching fake self defense, she agrees to prove her ability by taking on 5 street thugs in a back ally later that night. Only, on arriving, it turns out that the gang arnt the folks her student planned for her to fight, and are instead ACTUAL thugs who beat up her student and are now turning their attention to her.

China takes strong action against the gang, dispatching them with relative ease, but when one of the gang dies as a result of his injuries…and when that gang member turns out to be underrage. China is bereft that she let her ego get the better of her, and resigns her post at the police station, vowing never to weild a gun again, and to return back to her small town, back water home to regain her bearings with the support of her family.

However; on returning back to her home town, she finds it in the grips of despicable corruption. A local businessman has seemingly tied up all major law and business within the town and is using it to essentially do whatever he wants, however he wants without any confrontation. China finds this out first hand when, on returning to her local club, she finds it overrun with goons working for him.

China bumps into her old high school flame, and between her, him and her father, the local sheriff. the gang decide to look into the shady dealings and to try and restore honour to the town once more, but when the hire goons hit a little too close to home, in a devestating way. China will be forced to run as Sheriff of the town on her own, to defeat the corruption once and for all.

And, pretty much everything I had been told going into this film was very much the case for me, I was promised a great little 90 minute action movie thats all killer and no filler, and thats exactly what this is really. The plot isnt the most original in the world (by the time this film came out in 1990, the ‘single person tries to overthrow the corrupt leaders of a small town’ genre had well and truely been mined) but what it does here it does well, offering some genuinely poigniant moments contrasted by a vibrant and light sense of humour that helps keep things quite well balanced throughout.

The characters are engaging, almost all of them get solid character development arcs across the films runtime, the dialogue is thick on cheese, but handled very well in terms of delivery for the most part the pacing is on a dime with a near perfect 30/30/30 split on runtimes between the acts and a near seamless transition between the three. the pacing is pretty breakneck, though I do think the front half of the 3rd act slows down maybe just a tad more than I personally would have likes, and also I feel like the ending is a little underwhelming. I mean, they resolve most of the key plotlines…But it doesnt really end on a satisfying note. It ends kind of fizzling out with the audience being left to assume that everything worked out great and that there wont be any problems anymore (not likely of course, given theres a sequel to this film that came out the same year as this one)

Direction here is a bit of a game of two halves, while theres definitely a degree of professionalism around this production. I found that the more grounded, conversational scenes were a little ‘by the numbers’ Not inherently bad by any stretch, but not exactly pushing any boundaries…’Safe’ for the genre is probably the best way to frame it. The action scenes by contrast are exceptional, with vivid and colourful fight sequences, featuring weapon play, gun play, masked contact shots, soft contact play and as many explosions as you can shake a stick at. its over the top, not afraid to experiment and the fight sequences themselves are fast paced and incredibly well choreographed. I thought itw was handled superbly, and even at the dryest points of the dialogue…and given the cheese level, there isnt much of that, I was keen to stick around to see what kind of madcap stunts would come next!

Direction of the cast too is solid, they get seemingly good instruction on moving around the frame of their location, they get decent prop play and have been allowed to really bring their physicality out on film. I was very pleasently surprised given the genre usually only really bothers to direct the cast on fight scenes, it helped add an extra layer of drama to the performances and made the hard hitting moments hit that much harder.

The cine is superb as well, Vinegar Syndromes 4k remaster of this film really brings the deep colours and detail from the grain out to front and center, and their bluray copy is pretty unrivalled on that front too. shots have a great sense of depth, the sequences are well structured with good amounts of b-roll. The line and compositional rules are largely followed throughout, with only a few attempts at experimentation falling a bit flat for me. its a pretty sharp edit, especially around the fight scenes, though it maybe would have been nice in some of the more action oriented scenes to give the wider shots just a little more playtime to help things breath a bit. but thats really more of a nitpick than anything else.

Performance wise, Cynthia Rothrock absolutely delights here as China, Is she the best at line delivery? in my opinion no. I find her deliveries to be a bit dry and flat, with even her more emotive moments seeming a bit lacklustre. To that end, her physical acting is also a little stunted when its not in an actual fight scene. BUT! mercifully, when she does flip into action mode she totally nails the brief, being able to deliver dry and withering putdowns with tremendous ease and physically bringing a real sense of ‘dont mess with me’ to the film. Shes fantastic in that regard, and the two contrasting character performances, I felt played nice off each other given the overall cheese factor of the production.

RIchard Norton and Keith Cook are both excellent (if not slightly dry) supports for Rothrock as her love interest Matt, and local boy with a grudge against the system ‘Dakota’ they help to really kind of ‘grease the wheels’ on rothrocks performance, introducing some of the lighter and darker elements in such a way that Rothrock can play more easily off of, they’re fun to watch and while they maybe arnt quite as impressive in terms of physical performances…their delivery work is just the right tone that this movie needed. Same also goes for our villain of the piece, Stephen Kerby as ‘Sommers’ who brings a quite malevolence to the film, which again, acts as a perfect foil to the more explosive performances and moments in this film.

As for the soundtrack? Its a power packed hard rock and soft metal score that packs almost as powerful a punch as the movies star! cracking stuff that really does the job on tying the whole production together!

This was one of my first dalliances with Rothrocks work, and I was really taken aback by just how fun and hyper the whole thing was. I really wish i’d gotten around to this one sooner, and Its really made me want to check out more of her movies in future! Definitely recommended if your in any way an action fan (Though, I assume you’ll likely have seen this one by this point) or if your still feeling out the genre, this is a great one to track down, and more than worth your time!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/china-obrien/

‘Cycle: The Bloody Summer of 1999’ is…an intense short film…I think thats a fair measure for it. its a 2004, 20 minute assault on the senses, and im still not entirely sure what I just sat through.

The basic plot is that, in the summer of 1999, a mental hospital undertook one of the most savage incidents in post war german history, when a man in a mask invaded the hospital and essentially turned it into an experimental torturing ground, over several days, fuelled by violent movies. He would subject the entire hospital, staff and patients to horrendous torture techniques. to the extent that the hospital was abandoned and anyone who went anywhere NEAR it, was usually never seen or heard from again.

Cut to the present day of 2004, and a journalist and his camera man have decided to undertake a tour of the hospital unsupervised to see if they can piece together any of the depravity…and from there the film kind of jumps around in time, mainly focussed on the ‘Summer of 1999’ but also jumping to various dates between 2000 and 2004 showing us what happened after the incident to anyone who dared try to get close to the hospital…

And its there really where the film kind of lost me, because directionally, the films suffering heavily from that weird blip in early/mid 2000s culture, where editing was treated less like an art and more like an assault on the senses. its a non stop frantic piece thats aiming not to waste a single second on anything other than trying to hit you with everything the director can muster.

The actual plot isnt really anything to write home about, its your standard haunted house movie, just set in a hospital instead of a house…but the actual plotting of that story is a mess because we keep getting flung backwards and forwards. I think the intention was that, as the news crew wander from room to room, we flash back to that room in 1999 as the torture was happening, but because of how fast the footage moves, both in terms of whip pans and cutting combined with how close the camera is getting to the subject. I really struggled to make sense of what I was looking at.

The characters arnt that fleshed out, which you can either see as problematic because it means why should we as the audience care what happens about them, or you can see it as a plus, adding mystery to who the killer actually is or what their motives are…I personally fell into the former camp, because I, as a viewer, need at least a little bit of context as to why I should care about any of this…and the tone is seemingly just ‘be as unpleasent and intense as possible’. Which again, didnt exactly endere me to the production.

The direction yields some interesting and trippy camera effects, but theres an overeliance on plug ins that really put me off, an overeliance on ‘fish eye’ lens shots, again, a victim of its time…that AGAIN…really put me off this thing, sequences feel like they were assembled via smoothie maker, and the whole thing feels totally mashed up. I also feel I should mention at this point that theres also a weird overeliance on penises across this films runtime, with an extended mutilation sequence and an extended (simulated) ejaculation scene leaving me just kind of struggling to hang on to the production for dear life.

The characters arnt well fleshed out, are again…very intense, when they really didnt need to be and dont really get anything in the way of a character arc, and the soundtrack is just drone and noise that made me feel a bit ill honestly.

I didnt really get on with this one. If your a fan of films that are ‘gore and not much else’ then this’ll definitely be your party…but for me? there just wasnt enough story, and the visuals were so unpleasently handled, that I dont think i’ll ever really want to watch this one again.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/cycle-the-bloody-summer-of-1999/

‘Splotsch: Ordnung Muss Sein!’ (Rough translation ‘Splotch: Order Must Be!’ is a 1994 German SOV comedy horror short thats essentially a special effects tech demo thats had a vague plot built around it to help make it something a little extra.

The story is simple enough, a company called Secure-Grau Corp have recieved news that, as a result of them illegally dumping nuclear waste into a local nature spot (Lake Senser) they’ve created a bit of an ecological problem…and by ‘A bit of an ecological problem’ I mean that the wildlife is mutating into horrendous gooey abominations, and that any people who go anywhere NEAR the lake, either end up with all their skin burned off, or they transform into horrendous mutant zombies.

The science team at Secure-Grau are horrified. and after a LOT of deep thinking (2 minutes) they decide to do what any scientist should do in this situation…NOTHING!

we then head down to the lake itself, where a group of ecologists are studying the flora and fauna of Lake Senser, when they stumble across an abomination of an animal, which they quickly dissect, they deduce…pretty much immediately, that Secure-Grau must have been dumping toxic waste into the lake, and they set about trying to locate any more abominations for their studies…at which point they find and kill a mutant…realise they have MUCH bigger fish to fry, and decide to upgrade themselves from ‘ecologists’ to ‘nuclear clean up crewmembers’ which here means they load up on guns and machetes and jump into the woods for a 15 minute mutant on scientist hoe-down showdown. with blood guts and gore aplenty!

Its clear where the inspirations for this film have come from, a lot of the pacing and direction have clearly come from Sam Reimi and ‘Bad Taste’ era Peter Jackson. Its absolutely not taking itself seriously story wise, with an almost Pythonesq level of comedy timing and narrative tropes. In short, its a small silly zombie movie. and I quite enjoyed it.

I felt like the humour was much more on the ‘zany’ side than anything else, but I think they got the balance right of being over the top and crazy, but not SO over the top and crazy that it became grating. I enjoyed the character pieces which were incredibly tongue in cheek. the pacing was pretty breakneck. I think my only complaint here is that they spend a good half of the movies runtime setting up WHY the zombies are at the lake…and then the second half just kind of…throws it all away in favour of comedic vignettes where the scientists hunt down the mutants…which is what led me to believe that Ulrich Fleischer and Markus Metzler (the director, writer and special effects guy respectively) were making this film more as a collaborative effort to show off their directing skills and effects work, rather than the other way around.

The direction and cine, for SOV is actually pretty solid, and the effects work is particularly noteworthy for how well it handled (for this genre) and how genuinely grizzly it gets at times. It is still quite rough around the edges…but given this came out in 1994, when learning about the craft of film making was still fairly localised to ‘whatever your film teacher/mentor told you + whatever you could scrape out of your local library’ I think its handled quite well, its maybe a little washed out, and they could have benefitted from using the tripod a bit more…But the edits tight, the sequence work is solid. Its quite well handled realy…

The performances are solid as well, they mix dry deliveries with zany high energy physicalities here creating something thats positively loony tunes in places. There are a few puns and one liners that I do feel maybe get a bit lost in translation, but on the whole. Its a fine enough work…is it believable? no. But I dont think that was their brief really…

And the soundtrack is cheap whomping synths…which again, given this feels more like a tech demo than a fully fleshed out movie, doesnt surprise me. For SOV, its fine enough…i’ve heard better…but i’ve DEFINITELY heard worse.

On the whole? this was fun! I liked it! I’d say its definitely worth seeing at least once if your into SOV, its wacky, gory and would probably play really well when paired as a palette cleanser ahead of something like ‘Brain Dead’ or ‘Evil Dead 2’

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/splotsch-ordnung-muss-sein/