The Wasteland

“Tilling my own grave to keep me level.”

~Maynard James Keenan

The Wasteland

By Freddy Funbuns

Kiyotaka Tsurisaki’s pursuit on the heels of death has taken him around the world.  In his documentary Orozco the Embalmer, Tsurisaki captured the sardonic Froilan Orozco in the bowls of a Columbian ghetto where he had been working as a mortician for more than 40 years.  In his death film collection titled Junk Films, Tsurisaki presents a vivid canvas of cultures around the world addressing their own mortality.  The Wasteland, recently released stateside by Massacre Video, has a similar approach to Junk Films by editing together footage shot all over the world, but setting the film the music of Japanese metal band Corrupted.  The outcome of The Wasteland is a powerful vision of humanity that is grim and violent but also beautiful and vulnerable.  

The Wasteland started off slow comparatively to Tsurisaki’s previous two films.  The film starts with shaky, low-fi video footage around a small indigenous town showing kids playing and fog rolling across the surrounding hills.  Once the music starts making itself known and the locations start changing The Wasteland takes on a life of its own.  The film ebbs and flows to the music of Corrupted, from slow dirge soundscapes to grinding riffs that churn your bowels as harshly as botulism tainted rat meat burritos from Chipotle.  The Wasteland’s theme appears to be how far from innocence we can get; beginning with children playing in a small underdeveloped village then transitioning to large scale military drills, self mutilations during the Vegetarian Festival in Thailand, and various depictions of death and dying from all over the world.  Footage from the aftermath of the tsunami in Thailand seems to be the equalizer in the film, showing no matter how strong we appear to be the planet can teach us a lesson about how weak and powerless we are from time to time.    

I loved The Wasteland and feel it’s a stronger film than Tsurisaki’s Junk Films.  It does start slow, and there is absolutely no narrative or dialogue, Tsurisaki lets the film segments and music speak for themselves and if you have this playing in the background while drilling lines of Adderall to stay up all night and write your music history thesis on the importance of the 7 String Nu Metal revolution of the mid to late 90’s, you might miss the entire message of The Wasteland.

True Gore

by jimmy sQuarejaw

www.facebook.com/yallaredead

Ahhh the death film: a smorgasbord of film and images of various aftermath scenes and actual death caught on film.  Usually produced by inept filmmakers trying to make some pseudo parable about life and death that only impresses teenagers stuck in a bong-fueled Friday night torpor.  However I love them, you love them and if anyone out there has two tits worth of sense in their head they know the death film True Gore, aka Super Junk, released by Wavelength Video in 1988 is close if not on top of the collecting cairn in regards to Death Films.  But before you steal some of your Mom’s tinfoil to freebase meth off of and rob the neighbor to try and afford this goddamn movie let me enlighten you on your potentially poor investment!   This movie kinda sucks.

Since the release and success of Faces of Death filmmakers have tried to create their own knock off movie complete with an enigmatic narrator similar to Faces of Death’s Dr. Gross who spouts off dumb bullshit about death and dying blah blah blah.  True Gore really set the bar low though, I mean really really low.  The narrator, who I will refer to as dude, is shrouded in the mysterious film editing technique known as ‘Low Contrast’ while he prattles on for a while about death.  Dude even states the absolute worst misconception about death that I loathe hearing, “hair continues to grow.”  After dumbing his audience down for a bit we are whisked away to a montage of death footage and pictures of the not so lucky.

The segment chapters in True Gore for the most part are old news in the land of death films and they include autopsy footage, AIDS the new plague clips, brutal animal death, S & M, and torture footage.  There is also staged bullshit like an interview with a necrophiliac and a serial killer that is almost unbearable to listen to. 

However all is not lost and a few scenes are a good watch.  First are the Jim Jones tapes. I’ve seen a few documentaries on our CIA agent buddy known as Pastor Jim Jones but I don’t remember these specific tapes and they are a grim listen.  The second worthwhile clip in True Gore, and my favorite, is the performance art video of robot engineer Mark Pauline attacking one of his raw meat monsters with a dentist drill set to the music of Factrix.  This footage is available online if you are interested and after you watch it you’ll be able to fuck with your gothic friends by saying you know more esoteric information about Industrial music than they do.  The last good clip worth mentioning is the final chapter in True Gore on the Atomic Age.  This chapter is more like a music video for the song, ‘A is for Atom’ by the Atom Smashers who is also known as Industrial Music pioneer Monte Cazazza.  The video is rife with neat animation, military clips of atom bombs, and people with radiation burns and mutations from said atom bombs.   

As I said in the intro True Gore for the most part sucks.  Sure there are a few things worthwhile but most of these clips can be found online somewhere and I couldn’t see shelling out the big bucks for a copy of this on VHS.  So if you see it on eBay don’t bid on it, let me bid on it you jerks!

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Violence/Gore:  3/5 – could be worse.

Rape: 0/5 but a chick does let a millipede crawl all over her vagina in one of the S&M scenes.

Animal Death: 5/5 yep, sucks, sad, and it’s the original source for the blowtorched pig scene in Traces of Death.

Necrophilia: 0/5 because the interview with a Necrophiliac was annoying as hell!

Torture: 1/5 there is some water torture stuff but it’s not too bad.

Overall Movie: 3/5 only for the aforementioned clips I thoroughly liked. 

Death File

By Jimmy Squarejaw

www.facebook.com/yallaredead
www.yallaredead.com


Our trusty narrator is back, dressed in his finest suit, sitting in a blue hued office with the Japanese logo lettering for the DEATH FILE series hanging on the wall behind him.  Looking at the lettering I'm guessing that probably cost more to make than the entire production of the video.  I'm no expert on the chronology of the DEATH FILE movies, but I'm guessing this might be an early entry in the series that acts as a greatest hits to the previous video releases, I just can't find a lot of information on it.  The only evidence for figuring out when this movie got released is after the narrator talks for a while he makes a pass over 6 other DEATH FILE videos that are numbered.  Comparatively to the other videos I've seen in this series the narrator appears untrained and keeps looking off camera clearly at the cue cards.  The intro is boring compared to the “cutting edge” or “artistic” intros seen later on DEATH FILE BLACK and RED.  All that shit aside we’re whisked away into the low-fi montage of death clips that begins DEATH FILE.

Up first is a nice slew of aftermath footage of random car wrecks.  The first is an upside down car on fire with people standing around probably saying, “what do we do now?” or “hey this car is upside down and on fire.”  The next clip stars Mr. Unkucky, who got mowed down by a car and is still wearing a surprised expression on his face-can’t fix that by gently pushing his eyelids down like on TV idiots.  These clips segue into a few Indy car races from the land of amber waves of grace, AMERICA!  Fiery explosions are seen and in the background you can hear the announcer for the televised race count off how many times one race car spins around on fire; I’m glad he had time to count for us in between his Bud Light intake and jumbo hotdog gorging.

In the other DEATH FILE films there seemed to be an effort to switch scenes a little better, following a common theme or SOMETHING that connected them but like I said before this entry must be an early film with a green production crew because from Indy Racing in America we go to Japanese police leading a handcuffed guy to a giant ceramic pot in the ground, after he looks in everyone reaches in and yanks out a dead person.  This is followed by more aftermath footage of a destroyed human laying on a street. The authorities were kind enough to only cover up their body minimally by a blanket so we can see their head that resembles a popped zit.  Naturally there is blood, brain, and other assorted human goo everywhere and it’s the dutiful job of the local police to pick up the person clumps with butcher paper and scoop his blood up with cupped, gloveless hands, makes sense.  DEATH FILE does a rapid fire scene dump of death before returning to the narrator in the blue room, now the enigmatic (kidding) narrator is standing next to a globe positioned to show South America.

In South America we watch a very large raid conducted by Policia Civil on a small shanty town constructed of garbage and dug out of the side of a hill.  In the streets during this chaos paparazzi swarm around everything taking pictures while the Policia clash with rioting locals.  I was waiting, and I’m sure the producers were too, for something interesting to happen but all of the rioters seemed to be okay with not interfering with the annoying paparazzi scum all over the place and no one died.  In South America, according what I can gather from the video montages, it’s all about drugs and huge guns and the camera crew make their way onto the property of a gang.  Unnoticed they walk across the property to a building and peek into the basement window where drug kingpins are making a deal of some type involving DRUGS and GUNS!  I’d can’t help but think this is staged because the fucking camera crew were not being inconspicuous at all.  The crew then takes it upon themselves to find the doorway to the underground room and try to film in it, the drug lords finally notice them and go, “HEY” and “WHOA” while putting up their hands to block the cameras almost politely.  Evidently the crew hit it off with the drug dealers because the South Americans brought the crew along to watch a few members molest women and have forcible intercourse with them, in TWO positions.  

Enough of South America, the Narrator has some shit to say in Japanese that I don’t understand while he twirls a letter opener in his hand.  This makes complete sense because clips of dogs in a shelter, people in a pool, and kids catching birds in nets are all show before jumping back to the narrator.  After some other shit he says that I don’t understand, we watch the worst scene in DEATH FILE, and in any other DEATH FILE MOVIE for that matter; A family takes their adolescent dog and ties him to the post holding up their DIY house, gives the dog a whack and then cut it’s head off so they can eat him.  Yep, it was fucking terrible but the family loved it and I’m guessing it was the first thing they ate in awhile other than recycled feces and bugs.

There is some HUGE segment about a town with a mine in it but that was boring to watch let alone write and read about.  The last clip in DEATH FILE was a long autopsy complete with sawing a head open with........a hand saw.  Then the “doctors” whip out the kitchen knife to open the thoracic cavity and abdomen and follow that by using a soup ladle to scoop out the succulent juices.  Hmmm, makes me glad to have the funding, even if quite minimal, to have adequate coroner and medical examiner facilities in the Ol’ United States.

DEATH FILE was an okay watch.  I think the filmmakers had the best intention to really get a global view on all things death and they seem to take the subject matter very seriously, but in this particular installment they didn’t accomplish making an interesting death film.  I would start with this one to get it out of the way, other than the dog scene DEATH FILE is pretty tame and from here DEATH FILE BLACK, http://www.sundaysnuff.blogspot.com/2013/07/death-file-black.html, and DEATH FILE RED, http://www.sundaysnuff.blogspot.com/2013/04/death-file-red.html, get better.  

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Violence/Gore: 4 out of 5, yeah I said it was tame, but death is death and it’s still pretty gross.
Rape: 2 out of 5, the South American’s didn’t seem to have very willing partners.
Animal Death: 3 out of 5, only one little doggy died but that was hard to watch!
Necrophilia: 0 out of 0, not here.
Torture: 0 out of 0, nuh uh.
Overall Movie: 2 out of 5, I’d watch it again but not anytime soon.  This isn’t even a good one to put on the background of a party.

Junk Films

By Jimmy Squarejaw
www.facebook.com/yallaredead

When FACES OF DEATH was released in 1978, it was originally produced for the death hungry population of Japan by an Italian documentarian who wanted to up the ante a little in the mondo/bizarro/documentary genre.  In the land of the rising sun it was originally titled JUNK, and according to the commentary on the FACES OF DEATH 30^th ANNIVERSARY release it eventually grossed more than STAR WARS at the box office in 1977.  (Why the FUCK do I live in America?)  In the tradition of the JUNK movie series Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, director of OROZCO THE EMBALMER, compiled a collection of his psychotic short films and titled it JUNK FILMS which was released in the states a little while ago by Massacre Video.  Shall we?

JUNK FILMS opens in India (I think) with a few nice shots of an incredibly overcrowded tent town full of cripples, the impoverished, and amputees; it really sets a nice theme of “hey, life can be total shit.”  Scenes from Tsurisaki’s ambulance chasing days follow including first hand aftermath footage of, amongst others: a guy who got into a motor scooter accident and looks like a skin chalupa crammed full of guts, a lady stabbed to death with an eerie ceiling fan lingering above her, and a guy with his head split open displaying a plethora of webbed meninges everywhere.  One scene in this grouping of shorts I particularly like is a scene in an apartment above an alley where a guy has passed away by what seems to be natural causes while surrounded by his family and a lot of confused emergency service crew looking at each other trying figure out how to get this dude out of the apartment two stories up.  Take note kids, a lot of people don’t realize when you die you have to be transported to either a funeral home or morgue before you turn into a heap of jellied human jambalaya hosting a maggot orgy.  So the next time you think about shooting up and jerking off with a bag around your head, don’t fucking do it in your attic unless you weigh 80 pounds!  Moving along.  

One of Tsurisaki’s more elaborate shorts included in JUNK FILMS is of the Vegetarian Festival on Phuket Island, Thailand.  If you haven’t partied at the vegetarian festival you ain’t livin.’  These guys wail the fuck out of themselves on the back with blades until they split open like a hyman being ripped apart by a Los Angeles Laker.  After that stunt they stick guns, bars, and swords through their faces and follow in procession through the city.  I predict in 30 years this shall replace the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and we can all kill ourselves at any point before that happens.  Really, all we are missing is keg stands, twerking, and high fives and we got one hell of a vegetarian party!  But seriously this stuff is fucked up to watch and these people must have balls the size of skulls! Too bad that’s probably the reason smite was delivered to Phuket shortly after these films were shot in the form of a tsunami created by the righteous Pat Robertson and Jesus. 

The last scene in JUNK FILMS drove me fucking crazy and I really wish I didn’t ever have to watch it again.  Taking place in a nicer than nice looking crematorium, a group of Japanese people in their 30’s surrounds an urn containing the cremated remains of their buddy.  Instead of their brain using a two second buffer to restrain some of their idiotic comments, this group of hip folks just spout out the fucking stupidest shit for twenty minutes about death, and dying, and bones, and blah fuckin’ blah fuckin’ blah!  I cannot believe no one has ever pointed out to them how ANNOYING they sound as they try to weigh out life’s ultimate mysteries!  I bet Mr. Cremated Remains committed suicide because listening to these introspective morons for a short amount of time made me want to swallow a bee hive and ask a bear to fuck it out of me!

Other than that scene, I enjoyed JUNK FILMS quite a bit.  Tsurisaki did a good job making every segment interesting; whether it was with editing, camera effects, spooky music, or the subject matter itself, JUNK FILMS stands apart from the otherwise distended corpse known as the death film genre. There are a lot of scenes in this film I didn’t chat about so don’t let my brief synopsis throw you, it’s well worth picking up!

For Purchasing go to 

http://massacrevideo.com/site/shop/junk-films-standard-dvd/

Blake and Jimmy’s Extreme-O-Gauge!

Violence/Gore: 5 out of 5, it’s a death film for real.

Rape: 0 out of 0

Animal Death: 0 out of 0, a nice reprieve from the usual animal massacre in death vids.

Necrophilia: 0 out of 0.

Torture: 0 out of 0, no one is seen tortured but I bet the family of the dead guy in an urn surrounded by his fucking moron friends at the funeral home were slightly tortured listening to those fucking idiots.

Overall Movie: 4 out of 5, very nice, very good, very well!