TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN (1983) – The very memorable actor Bill Paxton passed away recently. I’ve been trying to decide which Paxton film appearance would fit in most with Balladeer’s Blog’s world of weirdness.
I considered the horror movie Mortuary (1983) in which Paxton portrayed a bizarre young mortician and slasher. The scene where he hops and skips among the graves is weird, but not quite WTF enough. I considered Brain Dead (1990) but Bill doesn’t have a big enough role. I almost went with The Dark Backward (1991), but that has (rightfully) become too well known over the years.
Finally, I decided on Taking Tiger Mountain. Not just because of how flat-out deranged that movie is but because of the novelty factor: Bill Paxton’s BODY stars in the film, but his dialogue was all overdubbed by a British man. That odd circumstance always made me want to see Paxton’s infamous “Game over, man … we’re dead, man” whine from Aliens overdubbed by that same British guy saying “I say, something of a sticky wicket we’re in now, eh, lads?”
Putting all that aside, Taking Tiger Mountain is an artsy black & white post-apocalypse movie which is more Born of Fire or A Boy and His Dog than Mad Max. In the aftermath of a nuclear war the world is in chaos with diseases running rampant, food riots breaking out regularly and the poles knocked off-kilter.
Mutant rats are on the loose, as are the expected roving gangs of marauders. The makeshift governmental forces are playing a “spinning plates” game of maintaining order through distribution of pleasure-inducing drugs and an “anything goes” prostitution-based economy. Men can be women and women can be men. It’s a mixed-up world, it’s a shook-up world except for Paxton. Will-eye-am “Bill” Paaxxx-ton. Continue reading
CHROME AND HOT LEATHER (1971) THE Marvin Gaye made his big-screen debut in this relentlessly absurd example of the bad biker films of the 1960s and 1970s. 
Director Shinya Tsukamoto hails from Japan and is noted for his surreal, nightmarish excursions into the darker side of transformative industrial technology … especially any technology that impacts the human anatomy. 
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) – From the early shots of a man removing one of his own bones and replacing it with a piece of metal viewers knew this was a work of true genius. Tetsuo becomes more and more relevant by the year, especially with the advent of nanotechnology and its potentially invasive effect on the human mind and body. 
HORROR HOUSE ON HIGHWAY 5 (1985) – And rest assured it’s the BEST little Horror House On Highway 5. This film was made during the 80s slasher craze when masked killers like Mike Myers and Jason Voorhees were all the rage. 
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