The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas is something of a Mecca for movie geeks. In addition to first-run theatrical fare, the Drafthouse regularly showcases cult, foreign, and classic films. Not only that, but they bring you food and beer during the film; satiating each one of your senses. Every Tuesday for the last four years, Alamo programmer Zack Carlson has hosted a late-night horror movie celebration called Terror Tuesday. If you are a lover of horror, both esoterically brilliantly and obscurely awful, Terror Tuesday was invented just for you. So I decided, since I am already a fixture at the Drafthouse, despite their best efforts to get rid of me, why not provide coverage for this weekly treat? The Terror Tuesday Report will dissect the movie shown as well as provide a barometer for the audience reaction to the film; as many of these films demand to be seen with an audience, this proves a vital component to the evening. This week's film: Devil Fetus.

The Film
I'm going to attempt to describe the plot of Devil Fetus. And when I say attempt, I mean that I am fully anticipating failure. It's set in China and starts at a massive, open-air market. A woman is attending an auction where she feels compelled to buy a vase. She loves this vase...no, I mean really loves it. While lying in bed she removes it from the box and we all giggled at its phallic shape thinking it was coincidence...until she put it near her lap and began writhing around. She becomes obsessed with the vase, and the green creature that apparently lives in it, to the point that her husband becomes jealous and breaks it. Mistake! He immediately develops boils and falls out the window. Oh, we're just getting started folks. The next day, the wife with the antique fetish dies when a cat jumps out and startles her into falling over the railing of her home's second story.

Jump ahead 20 or so years to the home of the woman's sister. She lives with her husband and two children who all previously resided with the family matriarch in the home of the aforementioned railing death. While visiting the grandmother, and paying his respects at the shrine of his late aunt, one of the boys accidentally sets in motion events that release a terrible curse. The curse travels through a series of unsuspecting hosts until it ends up inhabiting the boy himself. From there, it's a mere matter of feasting on dead dogs, eagle blood, wizard battles, and zombie-induced break-dancing until we reach the end credits.

This is the most insane film I have ever seen at Terror Tuesday. There are no words that would paint an adequate portrait of this abomination. It is reminiscent of a pair of Shaw Brothers horror films I have seen (Curse of Evil & Boxer's Omen) in its reliance on ghosts, magic, and non sequitur weirdness. The movie is just plain wacky. The mystical elements and the items designed to illicit scares are so unsystematic that, were it in the hands of more talented filmmakers, it could be mistaken for experimental. But with these guys, it's really just another classic case of exploitation at its finest. The wizard battle with the demon-possessed boy is trademark bizarre but also features effects I used to pull off filming home movies at the tender age of 9. And I wish I could say this was the first Chinese horror film I've seen that has featured rape by a toad monster, but again, I've seen Curse of Evil.

The best part of this film was the atrociously bad subtitling. As is often the case with low-budget foreign films, the subtitles were scribed by someone who clearly does not count English as their primary language. But what is exponentially worse about the subtitles in Devil Fetus is that the person already struggling with translations is also not the best typist. So in addition to phrasing that makes about as much sense as reading a Steven Hawking book backwards, we get strange punctuation and words that are not actually words in any language. I think my favorite was the wizard saying that the woman had been, "beaitched by an evil spirit." I believe he meant bewitched, but I suppose a strong case could be made that perhaps he is a founding member of the Wu Tang Clan. Either way, I nearly had a pint of fine Texas beer shooting out of my nose upon reading this.

The film is not completely without worth. There are a few great kills in the film that in a more traditionally bad horror film would seem par for the course, but were all the more rewarding in this particular cinematic chore. At one point a ghost forces a man into a sauna and the room begins to collapse in on itself. It's not a great effect, but it gets the point across that the room is in fact getting smaller. But when the man is inevitably pressed against the door, the makeup and practical effects used to show his insides being pressed out like some sort of human tube of toothpaste were fantastic. I also enjoyed the husband who breaks the vase and immediately is afflicted with boils and face paint. At first it looked goofy, but as the discoloration progressed it made for an impressive demonstration of makeup. I do find it funny that he ended up looking a little like one of those creepy cat people from Avatar.

The Reaction
Tonight marked the triumphant return of Zack after his absence last week. He definitely got us in the right mindset for this film when he called it, "a crushing blow to art and film." He also stated that the film was so nonsensical that the script must have been written using "elbows on a very small typewriter." I could not agree more. The audience was in great spirits tonight and the vibe was infectious. The auditorium shook with laughter at some of the more ridiculous subtitling and inexplicable story elements. A majority of the regulars absent last week had returned so hopefully the siren song of Lost has not bewitched everyone (or even beaitched them). The Alamo always puts together an amazing preshow featuring cult film trailers and YouTube gems and tonight's was great. They are usually related to the film presented and the pres how for Devil Fetus featured trailers for films about killer children; sinfully entertaining.