The Cauldron: Baptism of Blood (2004) - 1.5/4

The sequel to Blood Orgy of the She-Devils is twice as boring, twice as redundant and nearly twice as long! I liked Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, despite the false advertising (no blood, no orgy, and the shes were scarcely devils). It had a certain primal force, what with its saturated, dark colours, castle setting, and bongo music. Cauldron is brighter, more pristine, lacking the primitivism that endeared me to the original.

Cauldron is to She Devils what Corpse Grinders II is to Corpse Grinders: it's a partial retread with some variations. Again, the coven of witches is introduced mid-ritual, killing an innocent man. Again, some utterly pointless subplots occur and are wrapped up in the first 30 minutes never to be referenced again, involving the killing of a man by magic. And again, a man and woman find themselves caught up in a ritual sacrifice.

The variation is that this time, the woman caught in the ritual is the winner of a talent competition. Seems one of the coven was in the competition as well and sang a soulful, but not very people-pleasing song. Whoops. So she uses a magical amulet to get revenge. And her boyfriend investigates her eventual disappearance.

I try to be generous to Ted Mikels' films, but Cauldron is the worst of his I've seen yet. It's not that it's lacking in ideas--Ted's always got lots of ideas--but that they're not well implemented. The runtime is well over minimum feature length, and yet it's still full of redundant shots. Every time someone drives somewhere, we have to see the person walk to the door, leave the house, walk to their car, get in and drive away. Sometimes we even get shots of them in the car for no good reason.

I mentioned the subplots at the beginning that are of no value to the main story. I believe the point of this is to show Mikels' research and fascination with the subject matter, just as in Bloody Orgy of the She Devils. I don't doubt Mikels did research. In that spirit, it's interesting. In fact, to be honest, I found these subplots the best part of the film. There's another moment in which two guests (one of whom is Mikels himself) on a talk show discuss the difference between 'paranormal' and 'psychic phenomena'; it's not useful, it just shows Mikels' research. It's actually my favourite part of the film.

The talent competition, which we actually get to watch on TV in-movie is quite remarkable. It's not hard to see why the character who wins does, because she's up against a witch who sings boring ballads, a ventriloquist who tells blond jokes (he's the male lead of the film!), and a female comedian who makes Kathy Griffin seem hilarious. Like watching The Office, you're torn between amusement and embarrassment. That's another fun moment.

The fun moments, alas, are too few and far between. The ritual scenes, which must take up a good twenty minutes of runtime alone, are interesting, albeit monotonous and lacking in the force of the original. They're also just as chaste as in She-Devils. Plus there's one blond girl whose skirt is on wrong and is showing only a single on of her butt cheeks. It looks silly and is very distracting, especially since the camera zooms in on it.

Another thing that really annoys me with this film is that almost no-one uses contractions. It's harsh to listen to and just makes already too-long scenes even longer.

So there you have it. Cauldron: Baptism of Blood is for Mikels fans alone--and I consider myself a fan. Mikels' attempt to fuse a damsel-in-distress plot with Haxan just doesn't work; I would have preferred something more like Haxan, in fact, since the plotless beginning of this film, with the coven performing tasks for random people, is certainly the strongest part--which isn't saying much. The padding, redundancies, and ugly dialogue just made Cauldron a very dulling experience, despite the many potentially fun ideas.

Bonus points for:
Pig demon with antlers shooting flames from its eyes!
A dummy in a horror movie that doesn't come to life
A museum full of men in Wal*Mart masks
The worst blond joke ever

Demon Haunt (2009) - 2/4

You've all heard me talk about it for the last year, you've seen me post this trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOiHMho6Muk countless times, and now the moment has finally arrived: I, like Moses, have ascended the mountain of Demon Haunt and I return to bring you, etched in stone tablets, my review.

Demon Haunt is about a woman (lovely blond, Olivia Dunkley), who just lost her husband in a car crash that also left her sister paralyzed from the waist down, moving into a house that happens to be haunted by a demon. No-one knows why the demon is there, not even Mikels, because we're never told. But I suspect a computer did it. After a particularly startling incident, blondie surfs the web and finds the name of a paranormal investigator (Sean Morelli) who specializes in 'house cleansing.' This investigator, Raymond LaCleur, is actually a down and out exorcist, which is a new concept to me; he just sits around the house and lives like a slob. A real disgrace to all exorcists. He has to find the courage and faith to take up his strange voodoo cylinder thing and fight the good fight against demon-kind once more.

With that plot in place, the film plays out exactly as you would imagine. There is quite a bit of focus on the reticence and emotional issues for LaCleur, his disputes with his exorcist father (who is a Catholic priest), and the love-hate banter with his eye-liner wearing pal. Of course he ultimately decides to help these women and there's a climactic show-down.

That's pretty mainstream, much more mainstream than I'm accustomed to from Mikels. In the meanwhile, some Mikels-esque things happen that don't affect the plot at all. Like scenes at a mannequin-filled museum involving his long-time wife Shanti as some sort of keynote speaker who needs a gaudy costume and Mikels himself as a tourist snapping photos in the museum. There's also a weird neighbour, Hank, equal part Archie Bunker and Hank Hill, who is sure the girls next door are satanists. He provides comic relief, by saying things like, "I don't throw around no suppositories." Malapropisms are always worth a laugh. I was more than a little surprised to find this comic relief actually comic. I found myself laughing quite a bit at Hank and his shrewish wife (Beverly Washburn, from Spider Baby!).

The demons are, of course, CGI. Particularly primitive CGI. As we all know, Mikels has a low budget and uses what scant resources he has. These demons were created on a home computer. They're kind of goofy-looking. As we also know, Mikels has never allowed a low budget to stop him from doing things even major studios would find intimidating. He doesn't shy away from having his exorcists shoot psychic beams from their hands, demons crash through (CGI) floors, skeletal spirits, hordes of demon imps, tentacled masses, portals to hell, hellish landscapes, and all that good stuff. I have to admire his ambition, even if the resulting images are sometimes wonky (see the car crash in the trailer above).

So that's the long-anticipated Demon Haunt. It wasn't as strange and ridiculous as the trailer led me to believe. If anything, it's too normal. The Corpse Grinders 2, for which I've been developing a delayed affection, was thoroughly odd. With Demon Haunt, Mikels chose to focus on his characters, particularly Raymond, and his development as a person, which doesn't work so well in a film of this sort. It's hard to have CGI imps shooting CGI lightening in one scene, then a heartfelt father-son argument in the next. I would have preferred more epic battles with the CGI.

Bonus points for:
Gratuitous duck-feeding
Calling a paraplegic a 'cripple'
Gratuitous eye-liner on two men
Utterly camp fashion designer
Dubbed "Oof" and "Ouch" when a girl flies from the window in a car crash
Pointless opening shots of old ladies at a graveyard
Demons soaring over the seaside in broad daylight like gulls

The Corpse Grinders II (2000) - 2/4

This review has since become outdated. Some reviewers, like Roger Ebert, refuse to reconsider their old opinions. I'm different. A reappraisal can be found here:


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Unbelievable is the word that first comes to mind. I couldn't believe what I was seeing most of the time. The plot is more or less The Corpse Grinders all over again, with some bonkers subplots involving Cat People from planet Ceta who desperately need food, the Men in Black who have been charged with finding the best catfood for planet Ceta in the interest of diplomacy, and Ted V Mikels as an astronomy professor who owns a share in Lotus Cat Foods and is in the know on alien visitations.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2615/4095271374_07b59c0817.jpg - Some cat people. Yeah, that's not embarrassing.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2643/4095271430_ffdf5f653e.jpg - Here's another one. Ted's wife. Smelling a fish.

Oh yeah, there are Dog People from Planet Traxis. They show up briefly at the beginning to make you laugh.
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The runtime of The Corpse Grinders II is 1 hour and 42 minutes. Over an hour of that is spent on the minutia of running a cat food business. The Corpse Grinders II: Cat Food Tycoon. You get board meetings about whether to sell cat food wholesale to the cat people and see all the board members, slowly, each giving their explanations for their vote, saying "Nope." Then the President of the USA says, "Give them cat food." So the board meeting scene was for nothing. We see Landau and Maltby (the owners of Lotus Cat Foods) hiring employees, discussing business plans, buying the vans they need.

In the meantime, the mysterious professor Mikels arranges to get a grant for some scholarship on cannibalism. And two doctors are attacked by their Lotus-eating cat and try to buy some catfood--successfully, without incident; it's just a red herring. Oh, and a Grey alien appears out of nowhere, causes a 74-year-old Liz Renay wearing only negligee to shriek and flail about in bed until she dies, then disappears and is never seen or heard from again.
BEFORE: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2426/4095271312_30c76d18c6.jpg
AFTER: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2751/4094511411_acf8a4f7c2.jpg

Almost everything in this film is a red herring, except for the business planning stuff. The whole film is basically about how to run a pet food company. Nothing happens. A big shipment for cat food comes in from planet Ceta; Landau and Maltby have to scramble to make the order in time; they do; end of movie.

The one person who figures out that they're putting people in the cat food decides to become a cannibal and flies off to planet Ceta. Sorry to ruin the film for you if you haven't seen it, but in all fairness, I think Mikels ruined it for you himself.

As drive-in moviemakers of the '60s had a certain revival of interest in the '80s and some became known as drive-in classics, a lot of them stopped worrying about the Hollywood success they probably knew they'd never get and just began making movies for their fanbase. This allowed them ample time to get weirder and weirder, because fans of such movies will eat up just about anything. This is the case with Mikels. He's been making movies since the '50s. He has his fanbase and they like what he does. This is a movie made for Mikels fans and partially by Mikels fans I bet. So there you go.

One thing I especially liked in the movie is her:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2677/4094511469_a7eb2e4760.jpg
I think she's really pretty, and not in that assembly-line-beauty way.

And some of the lines: "On planet earth, they don't fight dinosaurs and yet they fight each other." Excuse me?
And about the Dog People: "They fight like dogs."

I'll leave it up to you the reader to figure out if this is a positive or negative review.

Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (1972)

Well, there isn't much blood and there are no orgies. There are, I suppose, she-devils. This is a coven of witches lead by Mara. She has some neat powers, like necromancy, turning into cats and bats, and giving long and boring seances. She's hired by an Indian gentleman to kill the ambassador to Rhodesia without evidence. Then he tries to have her killed instead of paying her. So she kills him. It sounds like I've ruined the plot, but actually this section has nothing to do with anything, really, except to show Mara is an evil witch. Apparently the ritual murder of the first five minutes wasn't a strong enough hint. Or maybe it was to show her powers.

At any rate, from that point on, there's still quite a bit of runtime, so something has to happen. Well, a supposedly college-aged couple (who are both in their thirties at the time) are checking out Mara's seances. The man is a skeptic and is fascinated by what Mara is able to do. So he consults his parapsychologist friend who also has psychic powers to learn the truth about Mara.

It's clear Mikels has done a lot of research for this film, because Mara mentions stuff like "the 72 demonic intelligences," "the Tetragrammaton," and "the 32 spirits of Belphegor." This may sound goofy, but it's exactly how occultists like Crowley and Mathers spoke. Oh yeah, and "so mote it be." Apparently 'mote' is a verb to witches.

It's also clear Mikels is eager to show us how much he's learned, because after the subplot with the assassinations, the film turns into Haxan. The parapsychologist gives lengthy dialogue explanations about the history of magic and witchcraft, with a salacious reenactment involving the burning of a witch. Mikels himself shows up and sticks some pins in her, then they beat her little boy in front of her while she burns. Points for gratuitous child-beating! The camera also lingers over meticulous rituals, lest we miss a move and not be able to perform our own blood orgies.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2610/4090943306_15f90ec430.jpg - Why are they shirtless?

Finally, as the new blood orgy is being conducted with the college guy as ritual sacrifice, a the ghostbusters show up to save the day! I'm only sort of kidding. Four parapsychologists do show up with the intent of exorcising the evil demons. They're just nowhere as cool as the Ghostbusters. And instead of rushing to save the college guy, Ol Doc naturally stands around talking about witchcraft for an inordinately long time. Could he be too late? If so, I wonder why?!

I can see why Mikels is the cult figure he is. He certainly has style. The music, costumes, and choreography of the she-devil sequences have this great primitivistic quality that contrasts with the glimpses of society we get. The murky lighting and gaudy colours add to the other-worldliness, like a glimpse into the deep, dark, primitive history of mankind hidden in our subconscious. There are also some cool visual effects using greenish clouds that I found set the mood quite well.
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That's not to say it's a good film. There's lots of filler in the form of historical reenactments, totally irrelevant flashbacks to past lives, and lengthy dialogue scenes. If Steckler is very visual and includes more images than he has dialogue for, Mikels has the opposite problem. The seance scene in particular manages to be both hilariously racist and difficult to get through. For about fifteen minutes, Mara reads the fortunes of people we will never see again in the film. She also does it as the spirit of a Native American man named Tokawana. Tokawana is nearly omniscient about the past and future; his one weak-spot is English grammar and vocabulary. He says cringe-inducing stuff like, "Me warn you white squaw not take giant metal bird across big water."

Mikels does find some nice-looking ladies, though. Check out these curves: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2673/4090176555_cacdd8346a.jpg

So there you have it, Blood Orgy of the She Devils, an epic of primitivism and spiritism in modern day society and the inspiration for the Ghostbusters. Who ya gonna call? http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2656/4090176385_be3db83b1e.jpg
Look out, guys, one's getting away! http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2739/4090943200_5a4a5e1d43.jpg