Mad Monster Party (1967)

Looking for something ooky and spooky to watch this Halloween? Look no further than the kooky Mad Monster Party! Created by the same folks that brought you stop-motion animation Christmas specials like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Mad Monster Party is a howling good time for the whole freaky family!

After finding the secret of life, Baron Von Frankenstein (voiced by Boris Karloff) has finally discovered the secret of destruction (“I, Baron von Frankenstein, master of the secret of creation, have now mastered the secret of destruction”)and is inviting all his favorite monsters to his castle for a celebration! He also plans to announce that he is retiring and bequeathing all his secrets to his (gasp!) human heir, the clueless Felix Flanken (voiced by Allen Swift, who also voiced most of the monsters). The Baron’s assistant, lovely redheaded Francesca (voiced by Gale Garnett), doesn’t take too kindly to the news. She and the other monsters, including Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and his Mate (voiced by Phyllis Diller), The Wolf Man, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, The Hunchback, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and so on, plan on taking Felix out before he inherits the Baron’s secrets!

Mad Monster Party is a mad, mad, mad little movie that is a joy to watch around Halloween! With newly restored editions, I really think they should play this on television around Halloween just like they play all of the other stop-animation movies around Christmas! It’s got some spiffy musical numbers, lots of adult humor and overall just looks amazing!

The character design is amazing, especially considering how many monsters are running around. Besides those mentioned above, there is also the hilarious Chef Mafia Machiavelli (“Here we have the antipasto – black widows pickled in their own poison, smoked lizards and snakes, and marinated mice.”), Yetch, the creepy, Peter Lorre-inspired servant (Yetch: “It’s me, your Don Juan.” Francesca: “I Don Juan to look at you”.), a groovy skeleton band called Little Tibia and the Fibulas (“It’s the mummy!”) and, of course, the uninvited It that crashes the party later in the film!

The scope of the film is very ambitious, and seems much bigger than other Rankin/Bass productions like The Year Without Santa Claus or Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer. The setting of Baron Von Frankenstein’s towering castle, with its crocodile-filled lagoon and man-eating flora and fauna, is absolutely stunning and really invokes nostalgic feelings from childhood, especially when accompanied by the stop-motion animation! This is definitely one for the spooky kid in all of us!

If you are looking for some light-hearted fare this October, Mad Monster Party is one classic film to check out! Even though they slip some decidedly adult humor in there, it is still suitable for young tots, too! Anyone looking to regain some Halloween spirit should definitely watch Mad Monster Party – it never fails to put me in a kooky mood!

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Hard Rock Zombies (1985)

Where can you find horrible 80’s ballads, a rock star that is a pedophile, Nazis, deformed midgets, zombies, a grandma that transforms into a werewolf, bad 80’s metal hair, music video montages, Adolf Hitler and limber but evil groupies? Hard Rock Zombies, that’s where, one of the worst films ever made!

In the opening scene, a dirty-looking blond hitchhiker (Lisa Toothman), who looks like she’s wearing nothing but a scrap of shower curtain, gets picked up by two skeevy lamebrains. Two seconds later they’ve pulled off for a bit of skinny dipping in a scum-encrusted pond where Dirty Blond drowns both dudes. Who knew drowning produced so much blood? A weird guy who was taking pictures the whole time and his pet midgets (one with a patch over one eye and the other looking more like a creature from Ghoulies) join Dirty Blond in disposing of the bodies…but not before Dirty Blond cuts one of the victim’s hands off and croons, “I wanna hold your hand!”

After this preposterous opening scene we join “the band” onstage as they perform for their 12 groupies. After the long and drawn-out song, they head backstage, strip to their skivvies and pose for pics with more groupies! Lead singer and perv Jessie (E.J. Curcio) becomes enamored of the very young-looking Cassie (Jennifer Coe), who not only looks like she’s 12, but also looks like she’s got caterpillars glued over her already bushy Groucho Marx-like eyebrows. Cassie tries to warn Jessie that his band shouldn’t play their next gig in her podunk town, but Jessie is too smitten to pay attention.

On the way to Cassie’s town Jessie practices his newest song, which he’s borrowed from a medieval incantation that was used to raise the dead. Great idea, bonehead!

The band picks up Dirty Blond, who is out hitchhiking again (what a strange pastime…) and she tells them to stay at her family’s spacious Southern-style mansion. Once they arrive they meet with the creepy midgets and the rest of Dirty Blond’s strange family, including her grandparents who let the creepy midgets watch while they have geriatric sex, a hulking, bald man who is either her brother or the gardener (he’s quite handy with the weed whacker) and the paparazzo-in-training from the pond.

After they’ve stashed all their equipment, the band heads into town and we are forced to suffer another horrible musical number – and, hey, this one’s a montage complete with band members skateboarding, scaring kids by spraying them with shaken cans of beer, dancing like idiots, posing in a gigantic wood cut-out of themselves and hamming it up while disapproving townsfolk look on. The band gets thrown in jail for being so lame, but Dirty Blond bails them out.

After almost getting electrocuted while playing another horrible song in front of their hosts, the band eats it for real at the hands of Dirty Blond’s psycho family. Dirty Blond herself takes out a guy in the shower, while grandma turns into a werewolf(!) and mauls two other band members and Jessie is taken out by baldy with the weed whacker, but not before he gives Cassie his tape for his new dead-raising single!

After the funeral, it is revealed that the members of Dirty Blond’s family are all Nazis in hiding and that her grandpa is actually the Grand Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler! Hitler has a hidden bunker well-stocked with poisonous gas and plans to take out the entire U.S.!

Meanwhile, Cassie is visiting the band’s grave. She plays the tape Jessie left her and – sho ‘nuff – the band comes back to life as zombies – stiff, Robot-dancin’ zombies that look like a bad KISS cover band that is.

They kill Dirty Blond and her Nazi family (who return as zombies), then drive (yup, zombies can drive) across town so they can play a showcase and impress a record executive. While we are forced to listen to another god-awful song (the third time we hear it in the film), zombies are slowly overtaking the town. The remaining townsfolk think they can repel zombies by holding out huge posters of famous people…buuuut that idea doesn’t work too well and more people become the zombies’ lunch.

One old guy suggests offering the ghouls the town’s virgin, who just happens to be Cassie. Something about the zombies not attacking the town for another 100 years if they can screw and eat a virgin. Anywho, the townspeople haul Cassie up the mountain like a sacrificial lamb and offer her to the zombies.

It’s up to Jessie and the rest of the zombified band to save his jailbait lady love and to put a stop to the zombie nonsense once and for all…but not until we suffer through yet another musical number.

Whew! Apologies for such a long synopsis, but really I wanted you to get a complete gist of the insanity of this movie! And believe me, you haven’t heard anything yet! I have yet to mention the self-cannibalizing midget or the freaky dance montages that feature Dirty Blond. In case you haven’t noticed, this movie is all over the place and you’ll be asking yourself WTF did I just watch when you are through (if you can bear and get all the way to the end, that is).

First off, the puke-inducing music is not what anyone would call “hard rock.” It just sounds like the most generic, Monster Ballad-esque sap you’ve ever heard. And they just keep playing the same damn songs over and over. Plus, they’ve got the whole pedophile angle covered even in the lyrics, which actually say “I’m so in love, but you’re so young.” Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww! Totally groddy! Someone call Chris Hansen with To Catch a Predator!

Considering this was at one point just supposed to be a 20 minute short movie I understand all the padding used, but did they really have to keep showing such cheesy montages? First with the band “running wild” (errrr, if “wild” means consorting with a bunch of pudgy schoolkids, riding skateboards and doing a Beatle-esque type dance down the middle of a street) through the redneck town and later on with Jessie and Cassie running at each other in slow-mo both dressed in white! And who can forget Dirty Blond doing some kind of weird 80’s dancing, first randomly in the desert then as a slinky zombie minx (who knew zombies were so flexible?). You could fill 20 bottles of Cheez-Whiz with the cheesiness coming out of just these montage scenes alone!

Then there was the whole “what were they smoking?” plot addition of Nazis and werewolves! Seriously, did they think that a strictly zombie movie would be that boring and they needed a little extra Third Reich pizazz? I really don’t know what writer/director Krishna Shah and co-writer David Allen Ball (and no, they haven’t done all that much since this, ahem, “film”) were thinking when they unleashed this horribly bad movie on an unsuspecting audience, but if they were doing drugs while dreaming this film up then it would make for a perfect “this is your brain on drugs” PSA. Just say no, kids!

You’d think with such vivid imaginations some great gore would come out of all this, but sadly the only “gore” we get is blood that looks like it was squirted right out of a Heinz ketchup bottle. The kill scenes are pretty hysterical, though, especially when geysers of blood erupt during a drowning scene and that the zombiefied band kills Hitler by what looks like a ring-around-the-rosies game gone wrong.

The craziness of the Hard Rock Zombies makes some parts entertaining, but for the most part it’s a real snoozefest. The film looses what little momentum it had at about the one hour mark and all those musical numbers certainly make it seem much longer than it actually is. I might have even fallen asleep had the music not been so gratingly bad. Yet, this film is so bad that like Troll 2 it certainly deserves to be seen at least once…but once will definitely be enough. After that you’ll want to bury Hard Rock Zombies for good.

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Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008)

If it’s one thing I’ve learned about myself that surprised me is that I like musicals. I was never a My Fair Lady-type of girl, but with more horror films featuring song and dance numbers (Sweeney Todd, Repo!, Poultrygeist) I’ve discovered I’m a sucker for these kind of productions!

So you can imagine my delight when I watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a short film by creators Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly), Jed Whedon, Zack Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. Dr. Horrible was an internet sensation last summer, crashing the site on the release of the first installment after generating more than 1,000 hits per second. Well, I’m here to tell you it sure does live up to the hype and praise it has generated! It’s top-notch performances, quirky characters, catchy songs and overall fun atmosphere make this a must-see for all Whedon and musical fans alike.

Dr. Horrible is about a wannabe villain, Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) who is trying to get into the Evil League of Evil but not having very good luck, even though he claims he has a “Ph.D in horribleness!!” By day he is the mild-mannered Billy and hopelessly in love with Penny (Felicia Day) whom he admires every Wednesday and Saturday at the Laundromat. By night (or whenever he slips into his doctor’s coat and evil-scientist goggles and gloves) he’s Dr. Horrible, who has plans to use his freeze ray to re-structure what he sees as a crumbling, corrupt society and eventually rule the world. One thing that stands in his way is arrogant hero Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), who always swoops in to thwart his plans.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was conceived during the writer’s strike and financed entirely by Whedon’s own production company, Mutant Enemy. It’s a pretty low-key, low-budget affair, but this actually works in its favor and lets the performances from Harris, Fillion and Day and the writing from the Whedon’s and Tancharoen really stand out).

The film has a decidedly light-hearted tone, but it really shines when it delves into the darker themes of lost innocence and the villain-as-the-hero and the hero-as-the-villain motifs. The ending is also decidedly down-beat, but this being a Whedon project it is to be expected that the characters don’t exactly get all they wanted.

All of the actors do a fine job in their roles. Nathan Fillion really nails the cheesy yet cocksure Captain Hammer. His performance brings to mind his character from Firefly, just with a slightly more crooked moral compass. Neil Patrick Harris is a delight to watch as the bumbling Dr. Horrible as he grows more and more evil and determined to succeed every time he is undermined by Captain Hammer. Comedic relief is found in many places, one of those being Dr. Horrible’s useless sidekick Moist (Simon Helberg) who says, “At my most badass, I make people want to take a shower.” All characters are larger than life and played with bombast, with the exception of Penny, played by Felicia Day, who is just your everyday sweetheart. Surprisingly, all of the actors also sing (and quite well, I might add), belting out Broadway-worthy tunes.

The songs themselves are witty and extremely catchy, covering many different genres from rock to soul to just straight showtunes! I dare you not to get them stuck in your head…

If you’ve already seen the show online, you might be wondering what the draw of the DVD is. Well, let me tell you that the DVD is worth its price for the commentary alone!! One of the commentary tracks, called Commentary: The Musical! is just that – a commentary done completely as a musical! For the entire running time of the film, the movie’s dialogue is muted and there are entirely new songs that tell us about the making of the movie during the writer’s strike (“Strike!”), the price of fame (“$10 Dollar Solo”), how the cast got along (“Better Than Neil”) the actor’s process (“The Art”), writing the script (“Zack’s Rap”), how the cast passed the time on-set (“Ninja Ropes”), racial tension (“Nobody’s Asian in the Movies”) and much, much more! Of course, just like the movie these are all done very tongue-in-cheek, if you couldn’t guess that already! The special features also include a behind-the-scenes featurette and a more straightforward commentary that is spoken, not sung.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog yet, I highly recommend this whimsical and fun musical. Even if you don’t like musicals, give it a whirl – you might surprise yourself like I did.

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Poultrygeist (2008)

Make sure you’ve got your seat belts fastened tightly, because Poultrygeist is one wild ride. Filled with puke, poop, killer poultry, putrescent gore and plenty of bad nudity, Poultrygeist shows Troma at its trashy (and socially-conscious) best!

Arbie (Jason Yachanin) and Wendy (Kate Graham) vowed they’d always be together…but a year after consummating their love in the Tromahawk Indian Burial Ground Wendy has come back to town a changed woman. She is in town protesting the bulldozing of the burial ground and the erection of fast food joint American Chicken Bunker in its place with her militant girlfriend Mickie (Allyson Sereboff). Yep, Wendy has turned into a lipstick lesbian much to the chagrin of lovesick Arbie. He vows to get her back and promptly takes a job at American Chicken Bunker. He joins the colorful group of employees, including high-strung manager Denny (Joshua Olatunde), backwoods dead chicken f*cker Carl Jr. (Caleb Emerson), gay Mexican Paco Bell (Khalid Rivera), and burka-clad Humus (Rose Ghavami) who has her own prayer mat in the kitchen to pray to Mecca every day.

Besides the angry protesters outside, Arbie and his co-workers must also deal with the angry spirits of displaced Native Americans as well as the souls of all the chickens American Chicken Bunker has slaughtered. Soon, people start ending up dead and/or start turning into horrific (and hungry) chicken-like zombies.

Can Arbie and his friends save the world? More importantly, can Arbie win Wendy back in the process?

Troma’s take-no-prisoners humor is readily apparent in this gloriously low-brow film and everyone from liberals to minorities to huge corporations get skewered. I especially liked how no group was left unscathed…as soon as fun was poked at big corporations, they’d switch it around and start making fun of the protestors standing against big business. Of course, this being a Troma film it’s also heavy on toilet humor…dick and fart jokes abound and this definitely isn’t a film for those easily offended!!

You expect the toilet humor (like a guy having massive diarrhea…from the point of view of the toilet bowl, someone adding his own “special sauce” to the fast food, chicken carcasses getting raped, etc.) from a Troma film, but what surprised me was the high quality of the special FX! The budget for Poultrygeist was pretty low, but they still managed to pull off some amazing effects. Highlights included a zombie hand going through someone’s ass and out their mouth, a meat grinder accident with a spectacular spray of blood, someone’s face getting cut into perfect deli slices in a meat slicer, dozens of people throwing up green puke and tons of other gross-out moments. The effects in the film were impressive and by far some of the best shown in any Troma film in the indie studio’s 35 year career!

Also a personal best for a Troma film was the acting in Poultrygeist. The actors gave it their all here, with very enthusiastic performances. Even though the characters were way over the top, you couldn’t help cheer for them anyway. In the wrong actors’ hands, the quirky characters could have quickly fallen flat…Luckily, we get a near-perfect cast that delivers and hams it up just enough without going too overboard in this over-the-top film! They even manage some fun musical numbers!

Yep, I said musical numbers! These will even be enjoyable to those that normally don’t like musicals (trust me, I watched this film with my musical-hating boyfriend and even he loved it). The lyrics, including songs about sex, bodily fluids, love, and more sex (usually of the anal variety), are just so damn offensive that they are plain hilarious. Plus, the audio is great and the actors can really sing! The songs even manage to propel the narrative along and aren’t just there for schlock value (though they do help!). We even get to see Uncle Lloyd (wearing a skirt, no less) join in on one of the musical numbers as he sings and dances!

Poultrygeist also tackles some socially conscious issues and though they are covered in poop and puke (and chicken feathers), the message still shines clear. The take jabs at big business, fickle and hypocritical protestors, consumerism, American’s fast-food addictions and so on. And through it all you’ll be laughing your ass off…unless you’re blowing chunks, that is!

Poultrygeist is the most fun you’ll have with chicken-zombies, Native American spirits (the ghostly kind, not the alcoholic kind), lesbians, skirt-wearing men and fast food this year! This is a fowl, gross-out movie that super-sizes the fun and comes with an extra side of AWESOME!

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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1982)

The horror and film communities are all a-twitter over the eagerly awaited, Tim Burton-helmed Sweeney Todd movie. With director like Tim Burton and a cast that is lead by Johnny Depp, who wouldn’t be excited over this new Demon Barber of Fleet Street? I, too, have high hopes for this film, wishing it is something akin to a mix of music from Nightmare Before Christmas and visuals ala Sleepy Hollow.

Before watching Burton’s take on the famous tale, I decided to get a sneak peak by watching Stephen Sondheim’s televised Los Angeles production of the Broadway play. For the uninitiated, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is set in the grimy streets of 1846 London. Benjamin Barker (George Hearn) was shipped off to prison by Judge Turpin (Edmund Lyndeck) 15 years ago on a trumped up charge. You see, the Judge has nefarious plans for Barker’s beautiful wife and infant daughter. Now, Barker has returned to what he sings is: “…a hole in the world/Like a great black pit/And the vermin of the world/Inhabit it/And its morals aren’t worth/What a pig can spit/And it goes by the name of London.” He has changed his name to Sweeney Todd and plans on reuniting with his wife and child. All seems lost when he runs into the jovial Mrs. Lovett (Angela Lansbury), who runs a meat pie eatery below his long-abandoned barber shop. Mrs. Lovett tells him that his wife poisoned herself and that his daughter Johanna (Betsy Joslyn) is now under the guardianship of the nefarious judge. With this tragic news, Sweeney Todd snaps and vows revenge on all who have wronged him. He re-opens his barber shop, and when his enemies come knocking for “the closest shave” that’s what they get! To dispose of the bodies, Mrs. Lovett starts using them in her pies, which start selling like hot cakes! The Judge continues to elude Todd’s vengeful plans, but not for long…

Sondheim’s play is one of the most celebrated on Broadway and it’s not hard to see why it won eight Tony Awards. The powerful story, strong characterizations, the grimy and sinister mood, the themes of revenge and double-cross, not to mention the macabre material all make for a thoroughly entertaining musical. Sondheim avoids the gimmicky pop of certain musicals, instead choosing very dark lyrics and songs tailor-made for characters. The razor-sharp and lurid lyrics will most certainly be a treat for any horror fan! The musical is almost operatic, because there is sparse dialogue and it is mostly all sung. Those horror fans that do not appreciate a good stage musical are most certainly missing out, as Sweeney Todd delivers marvelous musical mayhem.

This is a stage play, so the set is one stage very sparsely decorated with a few movable set pieces. There are a few scaffolds that are wheeled about, along with Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie shop and, upstairs, Sweeney Todd’s barber shop. There are no grand, lavish sets in this play, but the sets are enough to convey the mood of a bleak, grimy, post-industrial London.

The acting is also wonderful. Those only familiar with Angela Lansbury through her television show Murder, She Wrote will be quite surprised and satisfied by her performance here. Her Mrs. Lovett is a perfect mix of caring, comedic and crazy! George Hearn (replacing Broadway’s Len Cariou) plays the tragic, bitter and determined Sweeney Todd. His vindictive resolve is made plain upon his first appearance on stage. He really makes the audience really feel and sympathize with his character, despite the heinous acts he is committing. The rest of the cast do a wondrous job as well, from Ken Jennings playing ragamuffin Tobias Ragg to the Judge’s henchman The Beadle, played by Calvin Remsberg. My only dissatisfaction came from Betsy Joslyn’s performance as Johanna, which made me cringe more than clap. Thank goodness we didn’t have to hear her sing more than she did, because her screechy vocals grated my nerves more than chalk on a blackboard!

Despite the one awkward performance, the stage version of Sweeney Todd holds up after all these years. It’s a timeless tale of rabid revenge and murderous mayhem that horror fans should love. If you can get past the “musical” aspect of it (we horror fans can be a pretty persnickety bunch!), Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd does have much to offer, especially a shocking and surprising ending, one I’m not sure they’ll keep for Burton’s version.

To see Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street come alive on stage was quite a treat. Until Burton’s version, make sure to “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. His skin was pale and his eye was odd. He shaved the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard of again. He trod a path that few have trod, Did Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

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Mad Cowgirl (2006)

 Meat is murder


Mad Cowgirl is a daring and experimental film from Gary Hatanka that challenges perspectives on religion, sex, Mad Cow Disease, red meat and even kung fu.

Therese (Sarah Lassez) is a health inspector that inspects slaughterhouses and meat packing plants for tainted and spoiled meat. She’s had a messy divorce from her ex-husband Charlie (Vic Chao) and is just trying to get on with her life. She enjoys bloody cuts of beef that she heartily eats on a daily basis, almost with orgasmic pleasure, and a kung fu show called “Girl With the Thunderbolt Kick.” She becomes entangled with older and wrinkly televangelist Pastor Dylan (Walter Koenig, of Star Trek fame), but Therese quickly turns obsessive when he won’t see her anymore. It turns out her health is in question and her doctor thinks she may have a brain tumor.

Meanwhile, Therese is also carrying on an incestuous relationship with her brother, Thierry (James Duval). He works in a packing plant and has become dangerously lax on meat guidelines while Therese looks the other way. Mad Cow Disease has come down hard on the industry, though, and Therese begs him to be more careful and dispose of spoiled meat. Thierry tells Therese that he probably gave her some diseased meat and she slowly starts to descend into madness.

Therese has casual sex with a great number of men, but she still is obsessed with Pastor Dylan. She begins going to confession at church, but is terrified to enter the booth which she likens to an executioner’s chamber. Therese begins hearing voices and having hallucinations as the disease attacks her brain.

Finally, she receives a message to kill the Ten Tigers of Kwangtung! She begins working out and training to be just like the Girl with the Thunderbolt Kick so she can kill the bad guys. One by one, she begins killing the Ten Tigers, who have clever little codenames that are subtitled in English and Chinese at the bottom of the screen. Eye-gougings, stabbings, a flying guillotine, and a buzz saw are just some of the tools of the trade Therese uses to kill her opponents. Is Therese really killing people or has she slipped completely into madness?

Man, what a strange but powerful film this is! Images of slobbering cows, rancid meat, cows bloody and sick from the disease, religious iconography, kung fu, slobbering men, bloody murder and the like held me rapt and enthralled through the film. Mad Cowgirl has very strong and unique visuals that are equal parts exploitation, grindhouse, kung fu and horror. Its tone is very socially aware, but writer and director Gregory Hatanaka leaves it wide open for interpretation. The mood ranges from funny to horrifying to repulsive to erotic, many times within the same scene.

There are quirky little bits all throughout this film that add to the surreal and weird atmosphere. For example, many characters speak in different languages but Therese understands them and answers back in English, which in turn they understand. Her doctor appears to be Indian, but speaks to her in a completely different language. Also, her mother is Vietnamese (which Therese obviously isn’t) but speaks French! The music and score throughout the film are a multi-cultural mish-mash of styles as well. In one scene there might be hip hop, in another there might be a big Bollywood musical number, in still another there is mariachi music, and on and on. These little oddities of Therese’s everyday experiences all point to her fragmented psyche…or not. Perhaps Hatanaka was trying to say something else or nothing at all and only wanted the strangeness of these encounters to stand out and to keep the viewer always on their toes.

The actors all do a fine job in the film, especially lead Sarah Lassez who encompasses grace and madness simultaneously. Walter Koenig is wonderfully sleazy as the sinful Pastor Dylan and James Duval as Thierry manages to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. Come to think of it, most of the characters in the film seem to have dual and conflicting personas. One, they have the persona that they present in public (Pastor Dylan is a pious preacher who tries to help people, for example). Second, they have their private personas that smash or otherwise ignore taboos (Pastor Dylan sins by sleeping with Therese, Thierry has an incestuous relationship with his sister). Conflict, whether within the characters themselves or in their actions, plays a large part in the film, which all the actors portray effortlessly.

Hatanaka has created a very daring and original film with Mad Cowgirl, fusing it all together with an eclectic visual style. Most people will other love or hate it, but it is definitely a film that will get you thinking. Come to think of it, Mad Cowgirl is kinda like your first time…you’re a little nervous beforehand and don’t quite know what to do during, but by the end you’re ready for another ride!

Available on Amazon!