Ghostbox Cowboy (2018)

The dream for me is to read about a film on Letterbox that I’d never heard of before, and then immediately discover it’s been available to stream on Tubi this whole time. Ghostbox Cowboy (2018) is an example of that dream, which in a few reviews compared it to New Rose Hotel and Demonlover, the milieu of tech-thrillers in the time of globalisation. Airports, hotels, conference rooms. Corporate espionage and street level subterfuge. While Ghostbox Cowboy is more satire than thriller, it does invoke an atmosphere of dread towards the industrialized landscape.

David Zellner plays Jimmy Van Horn, a midwestern dude who arrives in China through some connections and invents himself as a cowboy entrepreneur. Completely out of his element in regards to business knowledge and even knowing Chinese language, his pitch of a “ghostbox,” a device that allows people to communicate with spirits is supported by other American business contacts, mainly middle-aged white guys who are excited by the prospect of young Chinese investors with lots of money. The film is a rise-and-fall narrative for the clueless cowboy, who finds himself feted and celebrated before becoming dumped on the street and scrambling to understand the way he’s been taken advantage of.

Shot guerilla style within China on digital cameras and phones through separate trips, director-writer John Maringouin has a background in documentary, and uses that for his first fictional narrative, responding to locations and personalities. The editing and performances really key into a strong sense of tone, never going over the top, always feeling authentic even as it devolves into strangeness and a sense of the surreal. The only other known actor is Robert Longstreet who is hilarious as Jimmy’s buddy, Bob, a garrulous gifter who is an unforgettable sight with his blonde wig and his dentures to appear younger than he is. Another white tech operator known as The Specialist (who is credited as playing himself, and was apparently a source of inspiration to Maringouin) is also amazing, and his reveries that are inserted as voice-over monologues are filled with disdain for other humans.

A funny movie (there’s a sequence involving a segue that had me laughing hard) and yet pulls off its switch into a weird capitalist dystopia, with the cowboy walking alone in an empty prefab city out in the desert, looking for a man named “Johnny Mai Thai.” The more I think about, the more I appreciate what it pulled off.

Recommended.

The Boys Next Door (1985)

“Everything looks like MTV.” Cruising down a main strip in Los Angeles, the two teenage boys – Roy (Maxwell Caulfield, off the box office disappointment of Grease 2) and Bo (Charlie Sheen, pre-Platoon) – take the street scene all in with glee, yelling at the punks and catcalling the ladies. Director Penelope Spheeris, and her cinematographer Arthur Albert, capture the authenticity of the streets in The Boys Next Door (1985), and the night-time LA depicted is accentuated by a sickly green glow of the street lights and the pink-reddish glare of the neon signs. Out-of-towners who have recently graduated from high school, Roy and Bo, seem like a pair of regular guys: jeans and white t-shirts, drinking beers and chasing girls. Their interest in pranks and their snotty vibe have made them toxic to the rest of their high school. Roy, in particular, has some “stuff inside him”, he confides to Bo, and eventually that “stuff” comes out when he beats a petrol station attendant half-to-death. Recent graduates and bound for factory work, their impulsive jaunt to Los Angeles eventually becomes a nihilistic killing spree.

I’ve always been keen to see The Boys Next Door, a halfway point between Spheeris documentary The Decline Of Western Civilization and the comedy hit Wayne’s World, but not being a huge true crime fan (which I assumed it was; it’s not, a fictional story scripted by future X-Files writers Glen Morgan and James Wong), and knowing the darkness of this movie, I was reluctant to seek it out right away. I’m glad I watched it finally. Distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and humming with a soundtrack of LA punk and proto-heavy metal, which often scores the disturbing violence, The Boys Next Door is a descent into meaningless murder and crime, with great lead performances from Caulfield and Sheen (his presence echoes his father’s film, Badlands). Kept tight to a 90 minute running time, and a slow escalation that is intercut with two detectives following the series of crimes (Hank Garrett and Christopher McDonald), it’s an unsettling movie that also captures 1980s L.A. nightlife. With Spheeris’ interest in punk rock and music, there’s a compelling theme where the boys find the punks weird and off-putting, and even a police detective rails against the way that punk girls are dressed, all part of the media panic about that subculture as violent and disturbed, when the real violence here is being perpetuated by a couple of good-looking “ordinary” boys. Available on Tubi. Recommended.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)

The Female Prisoner Scorpion series are a quartet of Japanese exploitation action thrillers centred around the explosive character of Nami Matsushima aka “Scorpion”, unforgettably portrayed by Meiko Kaji in an indomitable performance. Arrow Video remastered and released the movies in a box-set, and they are available to stream on Tubi – though bizarrely the second film (Jailhouse 41) is missing. Definitely falls in the category of “movies Quentin Tarantino paid homage to aka ripped off” with strong shades of Kill Bill Vol. 1 + 2. And warning, the series is sicko 1970s exploitation genre fare, with lots of ugly moments, so not for the faint of heart. What shines through is Kaji’s star presence, who is given little dialogue but speaks volumes with her eyes, and creates a mythical angel of vengeance. In Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973), Scorpion has broken out of prison (again) and rather than a women-in-prison movie, this entry follows her hiding out in the slums and experiencing the ways in which the criminal underworld and lower class areas have their own “prisons”. There is a brilliant pre-title opening sequence that shows Scorpion slipping the net from a detective (Mikio Narita) on her trail, and incidentally taking one of his arms as a parting gift. The other strength to the series is director Shunya Ito (who directed three out of the four movies) who provides a snappy sense of style, with certain sequences on the border of pop art and surrealism in their colour, composition and conception. The murder of a sloppy, mob-backed doctor, for example, is not witnessed, but the aftermath is rendered as blood splatters on white hospital curtains and Scorpion’s face obscured behind speckled glass of a door. Between different sub-plots and characters, Ito’s Scorpion works her way through a world of abused sex workers, rotten gangsters and brutal police. The main connection Scorpion has is with the kind sex worker Yuki (Yayoi Watanbe) who lives in a shack with her mentally ill brother who she is in an incestous relationship with (again, grubby exploitation genre stuff). Meanwhile, a villain from Scorpion’s past is Katsu (Reisen Ri) has a cage of ravens and is part of a criminal gang, and will inevitably cross paths with Scorpion. While not as strong as the first film, with its stop-start structure, Beast Stable is still very good; highlights being Scorpion’s revenge montage and the haunting imagery of lit matches dropped into a darkened sewer as Yuki calls out for “Scorpion” as our hero hides out in there from the cops. Recommended (if you have the stomach).

Future Kick (1991)

H Y P E R D R E A M

Objectively, Future Kick (1991) is one star direct-to-video trash. Yet this is right in the pocket of a low-rent cyberpunk vibe that I’m very much into. I love The Terminator, Robocop and Total Recall so much, that to see a cheap knock-off from the 1990s is a joy, for how they replicate moments on a lower budget. Usually there are practical sets and special effects, and if there’s any CGI, it’s going to be on the level of a CD-ROM video game.

In the “future” of Future Kick, wealthy people live on the moon while the Earth has become a Blade Runner type ruined metropolis, all overcrowded police stations, streets with fire drums, and illicit night clubs always cutting away to a stripper performing a dance. Meg Foster (They Live, Masters Of The Universe) is searching for her missing VRS programmer husband (VRS is “Virtual Reality Systems” as he helpfully explains to her) in the sprawl. Eventually she teams up with a sunglasses-at-night bounty-hunter cyborg played by Don “The Dragon” Wilson (his championship titles as a martial artist are given underneath his name in the opening credits). I loved how his opening narration explains that a new line of cyborgs were created to crack down on corporate crime, but they found out the corporations were responsible for too much crime, and a special task force of corporate police were created to hunt down and terminate the cyborgs (info given in the space of two minutes). There’s also a serial killer (who has a pouty Chris Sarandon Fright Night aura) with a three blade knife who rips out people’s hearts and sells them to a New Body rejuvenation corporate business on the body organ black market. And there’s also Chris Penn as a robot who does kickboxing, no doubt waiting for Reservoir Dogs to shift him out of the Best Of The Best era.

The great thing about Future Kick is that its 76 minutes long and moves at a clip, with ADR exposition papered over edits between scenes, and producer Roger Corman recycling sets and stars from other films, even footage (the space scenes I believe are from Battle Beyond The Stars) to make it to the finish line as a releasable movie. It still has enough William Gibson rip-off shit (there’s even an underground death game called Laser Blade) to make me love it, alongside other VHS cyberpunk knock-offs like Mutant Hunt, Cyber Tracker and Virtual Assassin.

Available to stream on Tubi (of course). Recommended (if you like your direct-to-video detritus).

Deadbeat By Dawn (1988)

Deadbeat By Dawn (1988) is a splatter-punk symphony on a beer can budget. Directed, written, and starring Jim Van Bebber, a film school drop-out who put everything into this low-budget action flick, even choreographing the fights and stunts. With gang members in ripped denim and head-bands, sporting switch-blades and nunchaka, this movie has been compared to Streets Of Rage, but rather than an 1980s neon arcade game, there’s something more grimy and grungy here; the synth score is crunchy, the blood is like red paint, and it’s clear that Bebber is putting his body on the line with each hectic stunt. That, and you can just feel that when they drive a car into a river for one scene, they don’t have any back-ups to spare; everything piece of action or violence has a consequence in this shoe-string production. Shot on the streets of Dayton, Ohio, there’s a primal reality to everything, even with it following a familiar exploitation plot. Bebber plays Goose, leader of the Ravens, who are in a gang war with the Spiders, led by the sadistic Danny (Paul Harper). When Goose’s girlfriend Christie (Megan Murphy), who dabbles in mysticism, and physic readings, asks him to leave the gang life behind for the straight-and-narrow, Goose obliges. After tragedy strikes due to Danny’s violent machinations, the scene will be eventually set for a showdown of revenge. Clearly feeding off the scuzzy punk vibes of The Warriors and Death Wish, there’s also a sense that Bebber is carrying off his own Taxi Driver intensity in certain scenes, like when he stays with his heroin-addicted father in a rundown apartment, or when he walks the streets with bloody soaked fists (clearly shooting on the fly to the gawking background passerbys). The violence hits hard and fast, even when the guns look like toys; Bebber gets enough visceral energy from his handling of nunchucks or the gory body blows. A triumph of cheap, passionate genre filmmaking, with energy coursing in the moving camera and editing in of the cityscape, all eventually escalating into a satisfyingly bloody fight across a train station platform. Marc Pitman is also a scene-stealer as the spaced-out nihilist gang member named Bonecrusher (it’s that type of flick!). Available to stream on Tubi. Recommended.