Take a gander at this here ridiculously extensive screening schedule for ten days of cranium-cleavingly diverse cinema at the at the 12th Puchon International Film Festival. Watchables on offer include Yoshihiro Nishimura’s completely bananas-looking Tokyo Gore Police (do yourself a favour and watch the trailer here; it’s NSFW unless you’re in a very open-minded workplace), a Gregg Araki retrospective, buckets and buckets of Asian genre movies, and a screening of Al Adamson’s obscure kung fu/secret agent potboiler Death Dimension starring Jim “Black Belt Jones” Kelly, Harold “Odd Job” Sakata, and George “That one James Bond movie that no one ever seems to have seen” Lazenby.
(Almost in the vicinity of ironic, then, that Death Dimension was originally advertised with the tagline “The One Movie James Bond Himself Would Go See!” Somehow I picture ol’JB sipping vodka martinis in Monaco while responding to some lusty femme fatale’s question, “Tell me, Mr. Bond, do you enjoy the cinema?” with a terse, “Not at all - I’ve got much better things to do in the dark,” and not “Cinema? My dear, there is no cinema! There is only the Death Dimension!)”
Apparently Death Dimension (1977) is a different movie from Black Samurai (1978), even though both star Kelly and both apparently involve some sort of freeze bomb. I wouldn’t be surprised if one reused at least a little bit of footage from the other; director Al Adamson, who foisted upon the world such multi-title stock footage purees as Horror of the Blood Monsters (aka Vampire Men of the Lost Planet), Blood of Ghastly Horror (aka Fiend with the Electronic Brain), and Dracula vs Frankenstein (aka Satan’s Bloody Freaks), was notorious for such environmentally responsible filmmaking techniques. The admittedly none-too-reliable imdb has The Freeze Bomb listed as an alternate title for both Death Dimension and Black Samurai!
In David Konow’s amusing Schlock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson, the director’s associates recall with some confusion the fact that he always acted as if he were ‘getting away with something.’ The only thing that confuses me is why they were confused - after all, the guy made a good living recycling the same footage over and over and not only managed to con people (like me) into shelling out perfectly good money for utter schlock, but into doing so several times since the stuff was listed under so many different titles! (Konow himself acknowledges this in an amusing introduction in which he recalls going to see Horror of the Blood Monsters at a drive-in unaware that he’d recently seen the exact same movie on TV under a different title.) Currently out of print, Schlock-O-Rama is worth tracking down, as are Adamson’s Vampire Men of the Lost Planet and Dracula vs. Frankenstein if you’re in the right mood.
Wandering back to the point, Legend of the Seven Bloody Torturers is screening as part of the Fantastic Short Film 5 program. The only non-Korean movie of the pack, Torturers screens alongside several shorts including the 20 minute comedy (I assume) called The Obese Family. Sounds pretty amusing: “Bong-ja’s family goes to their father’s funeral. Her father’s coffin doesn’t close because of his huge belly,” but I’m slightly disappointed that the family doesn’t appear to be all that obese, at least not by North American standards. They’re definitely going to have to beef things up for the inevitable American remake. I should note that this is one of those festivals where they put the director’s picture up with the summary and the guy looks fairly intense, so I’m going to stop right now and keep my gentle ribbing of TOF to a minimum.
Anyway, Legend of the Seven Bloody Torturers screens Mon July 21 and Thu July 24 at 11am at the Primus Cinema Sopoooong 8. More info here.
Conall Pendergast
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