Killer Condom (1996)

“You speak of a god who will judge all of mankind, I say god will protect all lovers. He doesn't care if it's two men or a man and a woman. He doesn't care if a man dresses like a woman and sings in a bar. It's possible that these people haven't always done the right thing, but we're all human beings.”

That quote was spoken by Luigi Mackeroni in the movie Killer Condom.  It brings up the idea of equality and how people should not be prosecuted for being different.  Specifically, the movie dealt with the world of gay men, but it took other minorities into consideration during Mackeroni’s climactic speech.  Everyone is human.  Everyone should have equal chance at living a good life.  It doesn’t matter where they’re from, how old they are, what gender they are, or what their sexual orientation and gender preference.  Everyone should be treated equally, until they do something to hurt other people.

I don’t want to get too into equality with this week’s movie, though.  That is a subject that I’m not the most fit to write about.  I’ve had a fairly easy life as a straight white male.  The closest you could consider me to being a minority is that I’m Canadian, so I’m on the receiving end of American jokes in much of the media that contains Canadian characters.  That’s not tough to endure, and not even really a minority.

What this is going to be about is Killer Condom.  It’s an interesting little horror comedy from Germany about a gay New York detective investigating violent attacks at the Hotel Quickie.  Detective Mackeroni (Udo Samel) was called in by his captain to look into a man who had his penis removed in one of the hotel’s rooms.  While investigating, a love blossomed between Mackeroni and a male prostitute named Billy (Marc Richter).  Also working at the hotel was a bar singer and former fling of Mackeroni’s, Babette (Leonard Lansink).  Things got more serious when a condom bit off Mackeroni’s right testicle.  He spent time convincing his police partner Sam (Peter Lohmeyer) that condoms were attacking people, and together they worked to stop the evil creatures from hurting anyone else.

There is a lot to talk about when it comes to Killer Condom.  There are many interesting tidbits of information that bring what was already an entertaining and fun movie to a new level.  The movie is enlightened the more you read into it and it’s a formidable force in itself.  So, without any more of my fumbling over my own words, I present you a bunch more words about the movie I watched.  There will be a mixture of onscreen stuff and other bits of trivia.

Killer Condom Was Based on a Comic

People tend to immediately think about superheroes whenever the topic of comic book movies comes up.  The majority of superhero movies are based on comic books.  I’ve covered many for this blog, from the 1990 Captain America, to Batman and Robin, to Catwoman, to the 2015 Fant4stic.  Superheroes are all the rage and people tend to interchangeably use the terms “superhero movie” and “comic book movie.”

As there are superhero movies that aren’t based on comic book characters (Metal Man), there have also been comic book movies that don’t involve superheroes in any way.  The Road to Perdition always comes to mind as a movie that most people wouldn’t realize was based on a graphic novel.  The comic book and graphic novel mediums, which to me are the same, aren’t only about superheroes.  They’re about telling stories through drawn still images.  Anything could be told through comic style storytelling.

Killer Condom was based on a German Queer comic that I know very little about.  I have not read it.  I didn’t even know about it until after watching the movie.  From what I can tell, it’s even more interesting than the movie was in terms of story.  Maybe if I read it sometime, I’ll write about it too.

 The Attack that Starts Things Off

Like most horror movies made after Jaws, the movie began with an opening attack.  It is a way to bring the viewers in with a jolt before beginning the actual story.  The attack is still part of the story, but it does not involve the main character.  The real story with the characters that will be followed throughout the story happens as a result of this initial event.  It is a formula that works.  That is why it continues to happen.

Killer Condom needed to open with someone’s penis being attacked by a condom.  That’s what the movie would be about, so that is what needed to be shown.  The attack happened at the Hotel Quickie, a location frequented throughout the rest of the movie.  A man asked for a room while a woman waited.  When they got to the room, he said he was going to have sex with her.  She refused.  He then mentioned that her marks were too low to pass and he, the principal, was the only person who could get her through her classes.  She then agreed to have sex with him, crying the entire time because it was blackmail and rape.  Luckily, nothing happened to her but a horrifying visual.  As he put on the condom, it bit his penis off, and she was drenched in his blood.

The opening scene set up what the movie would be.  The name Hotel Quickie let the audience know that the movie wasn’t going to take itself seriously.  The propositioning let the audience in on the fact that the movie was going to push boundaries.  The killer condom… Well, that spells out horror comedy right there.  How could you take a movie about condoms that attack penises seriously?  The opening scene was a perfect introduction into the movie’s universe.

Troma

If you’re reading this Sunday “Bad” Movies post, you likely already know about Troma.  I’ve covered some of their movies in the past.  It’s a company run by Lloyd Kaufman that both produces and distributes some of the most insane movies.  They released Chopper Chicks in Zombietown about a gang of women bikers who run into a zombie outbreak.  The company made The Toxic Avenger and its sequels.  The movies aren’t masterpieces in any way, but they tend to be creative and/or interesting.

Killer Condom was distributed by Troma in 1999 to North American markets.  Everything about it seems perfect for a Troma release.  The story being told didn’t seem like something that the average studio would want to have in their filmography.  Condoms that kill people?  No way.  But Troma loves that kind of humour.  The gay side of the story also seems like something Troma would want to put forward.  As much as their movies might be seen as silly, low-budget horror garbage, the company has an eye for movies with messages.  Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, a movie they produced, had some scathing material about the fast food industry.  Likewise, the Troma distributed Honky Holocaust dealt with racial issues in an entertaining way that isn’t seen in most movies.  Killer Condom was not only an entertaining horror comedy, but as I said at the top of the post, it was also about equality.  The story dealt with gay people being taken as equals to straight people, instead of the persecution they tended to get in mainstream culture.  Troma was the perfect place for someone to give that message in an insane method.

It is German

There are many American produced movies set in other countries where the characters from those countries speak English.  This happens so that audiences with be more likely to see the movies.  Many people do not like subtitles because they don’t want to read when they’re watching something.  Others don’t like dubbing because it doesn’t feel right to see lips moving to words while the sound is that of different words  The best workaround is to have characters speak English.  Schindler’s List did it.  So did Valkyrie.  North American audiences would rather hear Germans speak English than they would listen to the German language and read English.

The same thing was done with Killer Condom, but in the opposite direction.  The movie was German produced.  It was set in New York City.  The characters didn’t speak English.  They spoke German.  That’s because it was produced for German audiences.  Much like English speaking audiences, they’d probably rather hear and see their own language spoken than hear a foreign language and read their own.  It makes sense.  When Troma released it three years after its European release, they kept the German in there and added the subtitles.  That is better than dubbing over what is there, since not hearing Samel’s vocal performance would take away from the movie.

That is going to bring this week’s post to a close.  It’s not because there isn’t more that I could write.  I could go on about the scene where Detective Mackaroni tricked his straight detective partner into getting urinated on at a gay bar.  There could be a section about what the condoms were (synthetic living creatures created in a laboratory).  I could have spent a moment discussing the whole speech that I took a quote from for the beginning of this post.  Or I could make note of how the title is singular, but there are multiple killer condoms in the movie.  The problem is that I’m running out of time.  It’s 11:25pm on the Saturday night before this post goes up.  I was having trouble beginning it, though when I began writing it was fairly easy to bang this whole thing out in a couple hours.  There was also the added factor of school assignments beginning to build up.  They made it tough for me to focus on this.

Anyway, with the few points that I was able to elaborate on, you can see that Killer Condom was a crazy, yet entertaining movie.  It took a serious issue in equality and slathered it in B-level movie cheese.  It took a gritty cop story and set it in a world where condoms were biting off penises.  Everything about it seemed like a bad idea going in, but it ended up being the best movie I watched for the blog in October.  It was a great way to end another month of horror movies.  Check it out, if you’re into this kind of thing.  It’s worth the watch.

Now for some notes:

• I mentioned a bunch of movies in this post.  Here are links to the posts for Captain America, Batman and Robin, Catwoman, Fant4stic, Metal Man, Chopper Chicks in Zombietown, The Toxic Avenger, and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.
• Have you seen Killer Condom?  What did you think of it?  Did you enjoy it as much as I did?  You can discuss anything related to this movie or post in the comments below.
• I’m always looking for suggestions about what to watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  You can leave any suggestions in the comments or find me on Twitter and let me know there.
• I have a snapchat account that I sometimes use to share clips of the bad movies I watch.  Find me: jurassicgriffin.
• Next week’s movie is going to be a little something called Hell Comes to Frogtown.  That’s right.  Roddy Piper will be joining the Sunday “Bad” Movies list of actors.  It’s been a long time coming.  I haven’t seen it before, but I’m excited to finally sit down and watch the thing.  I’ll see you next week with my thoughts on the movie or some subject related to it.

Octaman (1971) and Dark Movies

It can be easy for a viewer to lose interest in a poorly made movie.  The story may not be gripping.  There might not be enough action, or the characters are not interesting.  There may be poor editing.  The audio or the video quality can be so bad that things cannot be heard or seen.  It all comes down to the effort that people put in, and how much attention they pay to what they are doing.

Octaman suffered from poor filmmaking.  The 1971 movie involved a bunch of scientific researchers who found a new species.  They noticed that it was a hybrid mutation of a man and octopus.  Their research would lead to one of the octopus men, or octamen, to attack them.  People died.  The monster tried to kidnap a woman.  It was your standard animal attack movie with a monster animal.

That doesn’t sound like the greatest movie ever.  The story is not good, the acting is just as bad, and it isn’t remembered by anyone outside of bad movie watchers.  The reason for that lack of remembrance is that the cinematography was terrible.  When they shot the movie at nighttime, everything was so dark that the action was incomprehensible.  Characters were attacked and killed, yet nothing could be seen to show that.  There was no way to tell how or where the attack happened.

Cinematography is one of the most important parts of making a movie.  Half of cinematic storytelling is visual, and that is where cinematography comes in.  Much like how a photographer composes a still image, a cinematographer creates the look of a movie.  They decide where everything is placed in the shot to make it look the best.  They choose how the colours pop.  If there is an old style tint, it is up to the cinematographer to ensure that the cameras are set up to make the scenery fit that choice.  The imagery of a movie comes through the cinematography.

Working hand-in-hand with the cinematography is the lighting.  Light can make a big difference in how scenery looks.  Take a movie like Barry Lyndon, which used natural light.  It gave the movie an earthier feel, which complemented the time in which it took place.  Compare that to a movie like New Year’s Eve, where the artificial lighting of New York built the big city romance that the movie tried to present.  Lighting and cinematography are visual cues that give audiences an emotional connection to a movie.  It may be a subconscious emotion, but it’s there all the same.

The two aspects must work together to provide the best product possible.  That is where Octaman failed.  With a lack of proper lighting, the movie fell short in imagery.  There was no effort put in to make the movie look special.  It looked like someone plopped down the camera and said “Let’s shoot here.”  That’s first year film school methods, and even then, some students put out better looking stuff.  It looked simple, which isn’t what you want with a monster movie.  You want a slight sense of wonder, a large sense of terror, and the looming image of the creature.  You don’t want wide shots of the creature emerging from a trailer to walk over and strangle people.  Close ups, low angle shots… Anything to make the action more exciting.

If any of that stuff was there, it was ruined by the poor lighting.  Scenes set at night were too dark.  It was like looking at a black screen and just hearing noises.  In certain situations, that can work to a filmmaker’s advantage.  If the movie is set in a first person point of view, it might be good to have the camera black with only sound.  It helps the audience sympathise with the character behind the camera.  Octaman was not one of those cases.  Octaman was a monster movie.  Audiences wanted to see the kills.  Seeing is the most important part of that.  With the screen being black, it was impossible to see the monster doing its thing.  It was impossible to see the look of terror on the characters’ faces.  It was impossible to see anything.

An easy way to solve this issue would be to give a slight amount of light to the location.  Whether it was moonlight or a lamp was filtered to look like moonlight, it would have made edges stand out.  There would have been outlines.  Motion would have been seen, allowing any audience members to understand how the struggles played out.  A flashlight or a campfire near the action could have been a light source.  There needed to be a way to see an outline of the monster and the people.  Even better would be the use of shadows to show textures.  The problem was that nothing could be seen, so any imagery would have been an improvement.  Use of shadows in a dim light to allow the contours of bodies to be shown would have been a giant leap forward.

This is one of the shortest recent posts in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  It’s not because there isn’t a lot to write about when it comes to Octaman.  The reason the post isn’t long is that there was an important topic to cover and that topic didn’t necessitate an extended length.  Darkness in film still needs a source of light, however faint, in order for audiences to distinguish the action.  Unless there is a specific reason to have a pure black screen, a movie should never feature it.  There should always be imagery on the screen since half of a movie is visuals.  A lack of visual material takes away from how much someone can enjoy a movie, and we’re all interested in movies for the entertainment value.  Let us see what you want to entertain us with.  Light up your movies.

Here are some notes that should be better than the movie:

• Octaman was suggested by @T_Lawson, who also suggested Sextette.
• I mentioned New Year’s Eve in this post.
• Buck Kartalian was in Octaman.  He was also in Gymkata.
• Have you seen Octaman?  Have you seen movies that you couldn’t understand what was happening since you couldn’t see it?  You can ask any questions you want in the comments below.
• In the comments, you can also put your suggestions for future installments of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If you want to see me watch and cover a movie, let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• Sometimes I put up clips of the bad movies I watch on snapchat.  Add me: jurassicgriffin.
• Next week’s movie is going to be Killer Condom, which is probably one of those movies where the title sounds better than the movie is.  I’ve known about this movie for years but haven’t actually sat down and watched it.  Next week is the week.  I hope you’re as excited as me.  See you then.