Number 41: The Wild World of Batwoman (1966)
Having watched this film I can’t say for sure what it is
about but one thing I do know is what it isn’t about: this film has no
connection to Batman.
But I would bet the makers of this film were relying a lot
on people thinking it might. DC Comics did actually try to sue for copyright
infringement. They were unsuccessful and probably helped the film make more
money than it should have.
What this film seems to be about is a cult-like all female
security force run by a masked lady known as the Batwoman. I don’t know what
skills exactly either she or her bat girls have as it’s never really shown.
They never show any martial arts abilities. They have guns but no demonstration
of them ever actually using them.
As an example of their effectiveness, in the first few
minutes of the film a man is shot by two random muggers and two of the bat
girls watch the whole thing and do nothing to prevent it. There’s no reason for
it. The incident has nothing to do with the rest of the film. Did the director
just want to show they’re incompetent?
The only thing the girls do seem to be good at is dancing. I say good, I mean absolutely suck at but they do a lot of it.
Despite being demonstrably useless Batwoman and her crew are
hired to protect an experimental atomic device. They fail obviously, because
they are rubbish at their jobs, when they are given happy pills that make them
dance hidden in cups of soup from three goons disguised in Groucho Marx masks.
Yeah, it is as silly as it sounds.
To recover the device, Batwoman enlists the help of the dead by
holding a séance to find out the location of the laboratory where the device
would have been taken. This is where the film takes a racist turn when the
ghost starts speaking in ‘Chinese’. Even not speaking the language, I can tell
that wasn’t really Chinese.
The really stupid thing about this was Batwoman was trying
to find the laboratory of the villain, Rat Fink, but SHE HAD ALREADY BEEN
THERE. Yeah, earlier in the film she’d had to rescue one of her girls from the
villain but she didn’t pay any attention to where it was she rescued her from. Oh it was dark? No, you're just incompetent. Did I mention how
rubbish she is at her job?
She does find it eventually and then the film turns from
silly to ridiculous. A spontaneous romance evolves between one of the Bat Girls
and one of Rat Fink’s goons. You have atomic monsters wondering around. There’s
a hunchback assistant for the crazy scientist. They have a Benny Hill sequence
with villains and batgirls running around after each other.
This all leads to the Scooby Doo ending where we find out
Rat Fink was really the stuffy old scientist who was trying to stop his
invention falling into military hands.
From what I’ve learned, director of The Wild World of the Batwoman, Jerry Warren was a notorious hack
director, so I shouldn’t have expected much from it really. It’s a cynical
attempt to cash in on the success of the Batman brand, despite having no
connection to it.
The film is only just over an hour long, so can’t complain
about that. But it’s not a film really, it’s just an excuse to have lots of
scantily clad young women dancing to 60’s beach music with a half-arsed attempt
at a story stuck in between. Make of that what you will.
It's cheesy as hell but somehow a little endearing.
Number 40: Zombie Nation (2005)
A Zombie Nation with not many zombies and what can hardly be
called a nation.
I’ve said before, one of the reasons horror movies are so
prolific is they are cheap to produce and require little to no effort. You just
need a handful of actors to play victims and one guy to play killer. Take five
minutes to think up the killers back story. Now just choose your location and congratulations,
you’ve just wrote your first horror film!
Of course, there are some original horror titles out there but
despite its title, Zombie Nation falls
very much into that traditional category.
The first 40 – 50 minutes focuses on a police officer called
Singer, who picks up young women for minor offences, brings them back to his
warehouse, kills them, puts their bodies in a duffel bag and dumps their
bodies. His new rookie partner thinks it is slightly strange this guy goes into
a warehouse with a girl but always comes out alone with a large bag in hand and
I wish to God I was making that up. But he tags out with another guy anyway, so…nice
meeting you!
The new rookie also thinks it’s strange he does this. They’re
clever ones, the cops in this city.
Officer Singer appears to have issues from his childhood to
do with his mother and growing up around a mental hospital. It’s alluded that
he also served in Iraq and Afghanistan too, though he looks a little too old
for active service to me.
Singer’s police buddies don’t seem entirely oblivious to
Singer’s lady murdering but they can’t keep covering for him and Internal
Affairs become involved. So he is suspended from the force.
He then has a psychiatric examination from director Ullrich
Lummel, who wants to recreate the dental torture scene from The Marathon Man, repeating the line ‘Is
it safe?’ over and over. I’ll reference all the better movies here, pal. He
leaves and we never see him again. Nice meeting you!
You may have noticed I haven’t said anything about zombies
yet, well you’ve waited long enough. And you’ll have to wait some more because
they come in at the 50 minute mark and they aren’t zombies anyway. At least not
in the way we’ve become accustomed to seeing them.
All those girls who have been killed by Singer are brought
back to life by some voodoo ladies. They aren’t the slow moving, brainless
monsters we are used to seeing in zombie movies though. They have the taste for
human flesh sure but they still have their memories and intelligence from when
they were alive. They can drive cars. Apart from some black eyes, they all look
pretty good. Overall, you’d say they are up on the whole deal. But five people
does not a nation make.
They kill Singer really unclimactically and for some reason
all take jobs as police officers afterwards. Being dead is not the career
handicap it used to be. End of film.
There are films that are cheap and then there’s this. You
might notice a lot of the sets look similar in Zombie Nation, that’s because they are all the same place. They
clearly just had one studio lot to work in so the warehouse Singer takes his
victims to also acts as his house, the house of one of his victims, the mental
hospital and the police station. The police car they drive in is clearly not a
police car (it’s red for a start), their uniforms were bought from the local
fancy dress store and they had to share.
Although to be fair, according to IMDB
this film only had a budget of $1500 so I guess I can cut it some slack.
Not good but I suppose for a film made for next to nothing,
I can give it a pass.
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