cave of newtmonkey

Rats: Night of Terror (1984)

2011-12-05T23:28:00.003-05:00

After a devastating nuclear war humanity is split into two groups- those above ground and those below. A group of survivors come upon a deserted building and decide to make it their home. Little do they know that the building is already inhabited, and it may be no surprise to you that the inhabitants are rats.

There's not much to say about this movie, other than that it is awesome. I can't believe that this is from the same guy that gave us the hilarious (but terrible) Hell of the Living Dead. Rats is like Night of the Living Dead, with the the survivors replaced with nuclear holocaust survivors and zombies replaced with rats (Hell of the Living Dead, on the other hand, is Dawn of the Dead with the survivors replaced with insane Italian macho guys and the zombies replaced with zombies plus cannibals). I don't even think there was any stock footage awkwardly inserted into Rats!

Although on the surface it's your typical "bunch of people stuck in an increasingly dangerous small area" kind of survival picture, it's a pretty interesting entry in the genre due in no small part to the usual Italian exploitation movie lunacy (characters that only act sort of like people, unbelievable deaths, hilarious dubbed macho talk)... but more importantly, due to its unique combination of survival and a post-apocalyptic movie themes, topped off with a ridiculous twist at the end complete with ham-fisted social commentary.

Since it's a cheap exploitation movie, there are some things that don't work so well. The rats don't seem particularly blood thirsty, they kind of just wander around and even when someone off camera throws them at the actors, they kind of just fall to the ground and try to escape. At one point the rats start orchestrating pranks against the humans in order to terrorize them, such as moving dead bodies around or climbing into a dead guy and moving him around like some kind of giant robot for rats. And there is one woman in the group who is absolutely hysterical and at one point she just sees a spider and just loses it and you have to wonder how she even managed to survive a nuclear apocalypse.

All in all though it's one of the better Italian post-apocalyptic survival horror movies!

Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

2011-11-29T04:41:00.004-05:00

"You're all... doomed to ... be eaten up.
First, they'll kill you... then afterwards... you'll be eaten..."
-Terrorist Leader

With these wise and prophetic words, all Hell of the Living Dead breaks loose!

A mystery virus is released in a lab and soon spreads all over the world! Before you know it, zombies happen and it is up to a SWAT team of total madmen and a couple of reporters to get to the bottom of things!

There is only one word that can properly sum this movie up: delirious. This movie is absolutely insane. When it is not stealing the music from Dawn of the Dead, or stealing the costumes from Dawn of the Dead, or stealing scenes from Dawn of the Dead, it is stealing cannibal hijinx from cannibal movies. Nearly a fifth of the movie consists of totally inappropriate stock footage, such as the many scenes where our heroes are driving through a dense jungle surrounded by trees, talking about god knows what and they all look to the left and the movie switches to stock footage of some animal gracefully leaping about a lake in slow motion, or archive footage of tribal folks dancing in the middle of a village on a plain with no trees in sight. It is the funniest thing I've seen in my life.

Also funny- the tough guy macho man talk that's too outrageous even for an Italian exploitation movie! It's total nonsense. At one point they attempt to spice up "up a creek without a paddle" and it ends up coming out like, "Up your ass. Lieutenant Mike London, Shit Creek, the year is now" and then one other guy starts talking about his balls. All while making sexual jokes at the expense of all the corpses littering the island. It is at the apex of Italian exploitation macho talk.

Halfway through, the movie takes a detour into cannibal country for no reason other than to show the lead actress running around in leaf panties. You can't even call it a cannibal subplot, it's just there to pad the running time like all the stock footage inserts.

At this point I am in danger of just listing everything hilarious about the movie because I love it so much so I need to end this now. Watch this movie!

Paranormal Activity (2007)

2011-11-20T20:01:00.002-05:00

A young couple, Micah and Kate, have just moved into a house and some demon ghost is following Kate around.

There's not much to say about this one. It's done in the "found footage" style of The Blair Witch Project and while some of the scenes are spooky it's overall not nearly as good as the movie it took its inspiration from.

There are two huge problems with this movie. The first is that the character of Micah is such a horrible person and does such stupid things that you can't relate to him at all. At one point Kate is on the verge of losing her mind and by this point has told Micah over and over to not bring a Ouija Board into the house so of course he brings one in and is like, "dude ouija board brah! Sweet!" because his character was written as this sort of dumbass fratboy day trader.

So the demon who is in love with Kate is a better person than this guy and even when Kate was being dragged to her doom across the hallway floor I was thinking, "well, it's better than being stuck with Micah." If you told that demon to not bring a Oujia Board into the house he would look into your eyes, say, "listen, if you feel so strongly about it then I promise I won't" and he would mean it. Then he would drag you screaming to your death.

The other problem is that there's nothing unique about the stuff that happens in the movie. What made The Blair Witch interesting and terrifying was all the weird unexplainable stuff- the little stick figures, the bloody bundle of teeth outside the tent- and also the fact that you could never be sure if the culprit was the actual Blair Witch, or some pyschos, or what.

Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, just takes all the ghost stuff you read about as a kid and throws them into a movie. Oujia Boards, stomping noises, slamming doors. They even throw in an exorcism bit near the end just to be sure they covered all the bases. And they show obviously paranormal stuff on camera and so you never wonder if, say, Kate is faking it or Micah is trying to drive her crazy. And it's got a stupid twist ending just to make things worse.

There are a couple of creepy scenes that are almost worth watching the whole thing for, but any time you could watch Paranormal Activity, is ninety minutes you could spend watching The Blair Witch which is better in every way.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

2011-11-15T18:48:00.005-05:00

At the beginning of Cannibal Holocaust we are told that four young American filmmakers led by Alan Yates (and their guide) traveled to the Amazon... and never returned. The studio responsible for the project hires anthropologist Harold Monroe to track the kids down (if they are still alive) and recover the footage. After dealing with the tribes that inhabit the Amazon (who ominously speak of Yates' black magic and cower in fear upon seeing a white man), Monroe recovers the footage and things get really bad really fast.

Cannibal Holocaust is an absolutely amazing movie, easily the best of what was released during the wonderful Italian exploitation horror film boom of the late 70s through mid-80s. It's clever, very well-directed, and a total shock to the senses even today.

The very clever thing about this movie is that it's split into two separate but related movies. The first movie- where Monroe tracks down the lost footage- is shot like a typical movie, and by itself would have made an excellent adventure movie. The second movie is the actual lost footage, which Monroe watches and comments on. This movie is what you would expect of raw footage filmed by a bunch of kids running around in the jungle- shaky camerawork, lighting that changes from scene to scene, scenes without audio, etc.

You might think that it wouldn't work, that the switch from the first movie to the second would be too jarring, but it does work. The special effects are so convincing and the acting natural enough that I could understand how someone could believe that the Yates footage was real. If you do some research online you'll find that the actors playing the parts of the Americans were contractually obligated to lay low for a year after the movie was released. The director of the film was actually brought to trial for murder and had to call the actors out of hiding to prove they were not actually slaughtered on film.

But behind all the expertly crafted gore effects, and the clever framing device, the movie has a great story. Everything works so well that when in the final scene Monroe looks at the camera and wonders, "I wonder who the real cannibals are," instead of laughing at how ridiculous that is you find yourself thinking, "well that's a good question guy."

It's also got a wonderful soundtrack that is not only perfectly effective but well worth listening to on its own. One particular track plays whenever something really bad is going to happen, and it gets to the point where when you hear the synth effects that usher in the track, you'll think, "my god, what could possibly come next."

If you can stomach some really shocking scenes (including footage of real animals being really killed for real), it's an experience worth having. If you really want to be blown away, watch it after viewing the awful Cannibal Ferox.

The Devil's Rain (1975)

2011-11-14T19:26:00.003-05:00

Mark Preston (William Shatner!) and his family are terrorized by devil-worshiper John Corbis, who is trying to reclaim his Satan book the Prestons stole and have been hiding since ye olde witche tymes. Corbis gets fed up with playing games so he starts melting people and before you know it all hell is breaking loose.

So here is another awesome William Shatner horror film. It's a really creepy movie with an amazing beginning and with some really cool scenes...the best of which is when Preston challenges Corbis to a battle of faith. Both men shout prayers to their respective deities until Preston freaks out, pulls a gun, and Corbis, looking amused, asks, "Is that your faith?" And- oh what a twist- Preston loses and we switch to the real hero of the movie, his brother!

The other really awesome scene is when a church full of people melt, like devil tears in the devil's rain.

It's not all tests of faith and gooey melting people though. The flashback to colonial times is long and stupid and if they had not included it there would have been time for many more minutes of melting people. Corbis randomly changing into a devil is also awful. The makeup looks ridiculous and there isn't even any point to it. Sadly, a good quarter of the movie is made up of this terrible stuff.

But if you can put up with some dumb costumes for twenty minutes or so, the rest of a movie is a really unique entry in the genre and totally worth tracking down.

Slugs (1988)

2011-11-08T19:08:00.003-05:00

Slugs. The movie. Good God, let that sink in. Slugs was actually adapted from a novel. In other words, someone in the world read or otherwise heard of Slugs THE NOVEL and decided it would be worth turning it into a movie. And that guy is a hero because this movie is simply awesome.

Mike Brady, a health official who has just moved to some small town, discovers a new breed of man-eating slug and tries to warn everyone but he is dismissed as a madman. And then people start being eaten by slugs, but everyone still ignores him. So he takes matters into his own hands... but can he outwit a bunch of extremely slow, tiny, non-aggressive, stupid little mollusks?!

This is quite possibly the greatest American horror movie of the 80s. If you know your horror films, you know how bold a claim this is. But it's just that good. It's got unflinchingly gory effects (very rare in American horror films, especially from the late 80s), hilarious characters, and dialog that sounds like aliens wrote it. It's a dumb idea for a movie, but it works somehow. And I love the title. It's like naming your movie about a bunch of guys in room, Guys.

The best thing about this movie has to be the slugs though. These aren't giant slugs or anything. For all intents and purposes they look like normal slugs, except for in one scene where one guy tries to poke on with his finger and they show a close up of the slug opening his mouth, showing tiny little teeth.

Yeah, you're thinking, but these aren't your ordinary crawling-really-slowly-on-the-ground slugs. These slugs are probably super fast and can use their acid slime to burn through bank vaults. These monsters are doing back-flips off of refrigerators and burrowing into your skull. These bastards are hacking into the security system and turning it against you. Right?

Nope. In fact, unless you fall on them you are pretty much safe. It would be like if you made a Friday the 13th movie, except Jason broke his back and was in recovery, and so you were only in danger if you walked into his hospital room and sat on his bed. Luckily for us, this movie is ninety sweet minutes of ridiculously stupid people falling on (or eating) slugs!

Personally, I can't think of a better way to spend ninety minutes.

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)

2011-11-07T18:57:00.004-05:00

In the best opening to a movie I have ever seen (indeed, it is the Citizen Kane of movie openings), a scroll unfolds as we hear some of the best maniacal laughter ever put to film. "My vengeance needs blood!!" reads the scroll, a sentiment I can really get behind!

Some tawdry horror book publisher and his employees and models are driving around looking for locations wherein they can take sleazy photos of the girls to put in their books. They find a castle and, thinking it uninhabited, they just walk right on in. But little do they know that this castle is the very castle where ages ago the Crimson Executioner swore his revenge on all mankind! And there is a crazed muscleman just waiting for the chance to welcome them into the Bloody Pit of Horror!

This movie is pretty excellent. The hero is this middle-aged chubby guy with a double-chin and sweater vest that doesn't do enough to hide his beer gut. He's dubbed over with this ridiculously macho voice and he goes around karate chopping musclemen. It's nonsensical on many levels. The high point is when he has to crawl under a trap and he takes so long that the girl he is trying to save dies. I swear, it takes him like fifteen minutes to get over to her. This is easily the most heroic thing he does in the whole movie, and he fails. He is such a loser.

The girls are all goofy, complaining about having to show a little skin during their photo shoots with a sleazy fetish magazine in one scene, barely reacting when their friends start dying in the next. They exist solely to run around in skimpy outfits and get killed.

And then, the absolute best thing about the movie, is the master of the castle who goes crazy and believes himself to be the Crimson Executioner. This guy. This guy! When he is not walking around in his mom's nightgown he's ordering his muscly manservants (menservant?) around, and in his spare time he's oiling himself up and getting ready for the torturing. When he finally flips out and runs around in the Crimson Executioner garb, the movie goes into overdrive and hoo boy the things this guy says. I could just fill this entire post with quotes from the guy but the absolute best one is when he is employing the totally barbaric torture of pouring a little bit of cold water on a girl and cackles, "The Crimson Executioner invented the torture of icy water for creatures like you!" I simply can't say enough good things about this fella.

It all ends with one of those scenes where the heroine blathers on about what caused the guy to think he was the Crimson Executioner, like she would know. Bloody Pit of Horror, feel-good movie of the century!

The NeverEnding Story (1984)

2011-11-07T00:34:00.003-05:00

Bastian is having a rough time. His Mom died. His Dad nags him while he is enjoying a perfectly good bowl of cereal, telling him to throw away his dreams and become a man. On the way to school he is chased by bullies and forced to hide in a dumpster. Even the old guy at the book store sasses him, but he shows that bastard what's what by "borrowing" a copy of the book he was reading, The NeverEnding Story... which makes this the best title for a movie ever because it describes the movie and refers to an actual thing in the movie.

So Bastian breaks into the school attic and starts reading his stolen book, and instead of being caught and sent to juvenile hall, he finds himself an active participant in the story of Atreyu, a young hunter who must save the land of Fantasia from the evil Nothing.

This is one of many awesome kid movies that came out during the 80s. It's got an imaginative bunch of characters with some great costumes, and even as an adult you have to appreciate the work that must have gone into making this totally fantastic world seem real. One of the best scenes is when Atreyu is summoned to the Palace, and there are all these bizarre creatures hanging around. You just get glances of them but you can't help but wonder, for example, what the society the two faced men hail from is like. Unless you are a miserable wretch of a man with no soul, that is.

So this movie is still cool in a lot of ways, but there are issues with it. The melodrama is running pretty high, though it never reaches the point of ridiculousness that modern films for children are hovering around, like Harry Potter or whatever it is the kids these days are stealing to put on their iPads. It also has very little structure, with Atreyu wandering randomly from fantastic encounter to fantastic encounter, and then when he is about to give up due to having no information on which to go on, suddenly a monster falls from the sky and brings him to where he needs to go.

If you look up Deus Ex Machina in the dictionary you will see this movie mentioned. Actually that's a lie, you'll just see some letters combined to form words, those words combined to form sentences, that will actually explain the meaning of the phrase to you, assuming you know how to read. Draw a picture of Atreyu riding a dragon in the sky next to those words, so that next time this movie gets reviewed and the guy uses the same joke, it will be there and you can laugh.

However, all is forgiven for the totally reckless and subversive theme of the movie. Bastian refuses to let go of his dreams (and I don't mean dreams as in "lofty goals you struggle to achieve" I mean like "falling asleep and experiencing nonsensical hallucinations that have only a vague connection to reality"), skips class, and is on the road to juvenile delinquency and a short awful life on the wrong side of the tracks. But it's okay! Just keep reading trashy fantasy novels and a giant dragon will swoop from the sky and you can then take sadistic revenge on your tormentors!

And that is why this is still a great movie.

Jacob's Ladder (1990)

2011-11-01T21:30:00.003-04:00

Jacob's Ladder is a difficult movie for me to review. It certainly has faults- and the older I get and the more I watch horror films, the more I notice- but back when I was first getting into horror movies, Jacob's Ladder was the first one to convince me that you could have a great and effective horror film even without awesome gore effects and exploitative nudity. So it's very difficult to talk about this movie objectively.

Jacob Singer, a Vietnam War vet, has returned to civilian life. He's working as a mailman and living with his girlfriend Jezebel, but is haunted by bizarre and horrific visions, which are just getting worse and worse. Suddenly, people he knows start dying and it appears he's in the center of some kind of conspiracy. Or is he just crazy?

It's a classic horror movie. Though it can be very heavy-handed at times, Jacob's visions and hallucinations are done so well you can forgive the awkward ending and the clumsy father-son flashback scenes and unnatural "movie" dialog. Even the fact that Jacob himself is a very boring character doesn't really matter much to be honest.

Having said that, I find the movie less and less interesting the more I watch it. The twist at the end blew my mind as a young horror fan. Now it seems trite. I had always felt the script was very strong, but this last time I found much of the dialog artificial. The movie also feels disjointed- things just happen randomly for an hour or so, and then suddenly the movie wraps itself up with an ending that is trying too hard to be touching.

I still enjoy Jacob's Ladder. Just not as much as I did 15 years ago.

Cannibal Ferox (1981)

2011-11-01T20:44:00.004-04:00

Three friends head off to the Amazon. Their goal: to prove that cannibalism doesn't exist. With hardly any supplies, or knowledge, or much of anything really, they will just kind of mope around the jungle until they don't find cannibalism, prove their point, and head home.

Meanwhile, two other guys have coincidentally been exploring the same exact area of the massive and dense rain forest and they are less concerned with disproving cannibalism than they are in proving the existence of untold riches they could use for buying drugs.

Little do they all know, cannibals are real, and the cannibals are US!!!!

This movie is a shameless ripoff of Cannibal Holocaust, which, unlike Cannibal Ferox, is actually a good, clever movie filled with unforgettable scenes and memorable characters. Whereas Cannibal Holocaust is the Citizen Kane of cannibal horror films, Cannibal Ferox is the Bio-Dome of this awesome genre.

It's got all the stuff you remember from Cannibal Holocaust: footage of animals being killed, over the top gore, scenes of guys eating animal guts, sweeping aerial shots of the Amazon. It's all there, it's just not done nearly as well and the theme of civilized man as savage ends up being tedious instead of shocking.

The characters are all either totally boring (everyone), or irredeemably evil (Mike)... though Mike is so over the top with his unique mixture of cocaine-fueled sadism and vintage 80s Italian machismo that it's at least worth watching to catch his scenes. If you've exhausted the catalog of 1980s Italian exploitation cannibal horror gorefests, you might as well get it over with and watch this one too.

Fist of Fury (1972)

2011-08-09T01:30:00.004-04:00

Treacherous Japanese are giving grief to Chinese folks! Bruce Lee has had enough. He goes feral, dons crazy disguises, and fights back the only way he knows how- by fighting back!

Fist of Fury is a hugely entertaining movie and the mistreatment of the Chinese heroes is hilarious in how over the top it is. My favorite part is where Bruce Lee decides to go to a park for no reason and the obviously Chinese guy in the equivalent of Indian blackface tells him that Chinese and dogs are not allowed. And then on cue a woman walks up with a dog and he lets them pass. It's so ridiculous it crosses the line into parody.

There's a great character who is a Chinese guy that has sold his dignity in exchange for becoming a lackey of the Japanese devils. In a more serious movie you'd hate this guy, but here he's such a sniveling, wimpy, detestable character that you can't help but laugh and roll your eyes at how heavy-handed the entire movie is.

Also heavy-handed in this movie: Bruce Lee when he punches dastardly race-traitors in the stinking guts! He's not a great actor and his ability as an actual martial artist is shrouded in controversy but that guy is fast and knows how to do a good fight scene. Every battle he gets into is amazing and it's too bad there are only really a handful of fight scenes in the whole movie, with the rest of the running time taken up by repetitive scenes of heroic and humble Chinese people refusing to sink to the level of the Japanese, and- much more entertaining but just as repetitive- scenes of outrageous acts of evil committed by the unlawful Japanese guys.

If you can get through all the talky parts, or at least find them charmingly ridiculous, it's worth it just to see an action movie master at work.

Moutaintop Motel Massacre (1986)

2011-07-23T02:18:00.004-04:00

There is a movie- one that exists in real reality- with the title Mountaintop Motel Massacre. In it, crazy old Evelyn is released from captivity and returns to her motel. In a fit of witchcraft- and rabbit-induced rage she kills her daughter and then a bunch of people come to stay at her massacre motel for massacring! Massacring is a word!

Being a movie released in 1986 with "massacre" in the title you'd expect a violent slasher movie but you'd be wrong so don't think that. The movie is actually closer to the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which given the title makes some sense. An early scene takes place in a room decorated with animal bones which looks just like that one room in the 1974 horror classic. Mountaintop Motel Massacre even features a similar chaotic soundtrack!

Though it goes without saying this is nowhere near as good as that masterpiece, things do get awesome when Al shows up. This guy is sporting a mustache that just doesn't work with his boyish face and we are treated to a scene where he lounges around shirtless and it's not that he is in bad shape or anything, but he's no machoman that's for sure.

Making things even more awesome is that during this scene he is trying to trick two girls (who are cousins!) into coming to bed with him, by pretending to be a record executive. Which leads to one of the girls being brutally murdered. Ladies and gentlemen, our hero!

Sadly, Al's slimy magnificence only lasts for a few precious scenes and the rest of the movie is skulking around slowly, and people trying to figure out the mysterious secrets of Mountaintop Motel, which we the audience already know. Watch it for Al and then you can fast forward to the end.

8mm (1999)

2011-07-19T08:41:00.005-04:00

A very rich man has died and a suspicious film has been found in his secret vault. A film which, if genuine, would be the first snuff film ever in the world! However, the footage is murky and could be fake. It would require an investigator of the first order to crack this case.

If there is one thing Nicholas Cage is good at, it's beating up women on bee-infested islands. If there are two things he is good at, then investigating snuff films is probably number two. And so with Nicholas "a snuff's enough" Cage on the case, our movie begins.

The premise is cool- urban legends are scary and snuff films are possibly the greatest urban legend of them all (except for the hook murderer one). The only way to improve on that would be to get Nicholas Cage involved, and they've already done that. Unfortunately, they then went on to find the only thing that could ruin it and did that. So while the movie starts out pretty strong eventually it just becomes a string of increasingly unlikely coincidences until you get to the end (which features a dramatic battle in the rain, like most private investigations).

So this is what you are up against when you sit down to watch 8mm. It's one of those movies where the hero will watch a ten second clip and find a shadow of a guy in a single frame and then track that guy down and it just so happens that the first place he shows up at is behind the entire thing.

However, the cool premise and dark photography makes it worth putting up with that.

Weekend with the Babysitter (1970)

2011-01-29T22:16:00.004-05:00

A square middle-aged guy falls in love with the hippy babysitter and go on a romantic weekend getaway. Meanwhile, his wife gets kidnapped by drug dealers.

This movie is sort of a remake of the extremely entertaining The Babysitter. It gets confusing because the babysitter character has the same name but is played by a different actress, but the middle-aged guy is a different (but similar) character played by the same actor from the original movie. And instead of his wife being an intolerable boring old lady who's not interested in her husband at all, she's a heroin addict in this one. So there is a lot going on in this movie.

Unfortunately it lacks all of the charm of the original movie. It doesn't have the laugh-out-loud ending, and there just aren't enough scenes of the unhip middle-aged guy trying to fit in with hippies. The drug subplot, while funny in how exploitative it is, never becomes hilarious and is instead just tedious. Finally, you can't laugh at how wrong the babysitter exploitation aspect is because they try to make the relationship into more of a romance than a tawdry affair and so it loses points there.

But there is more to this movie than meets the eye! You can't help but notice that the middle aged guy is played by the same actor in both movies. "Wow," you think to yourself, "why does this guy keep getting this role? It just must be the role he was born to play, the role of a guy being suduced by the babysitter." All is well and good until you start doing some investigative work. Not only did this guy act in both movies, he wrote them! And then he helped to produce them. So you can imagine this guy writing his babysitter fantasy down and shopping it around Hollywood. And he has some trouble getting it made so he decides to pony up some of his money. And of course the only guy that can nail this role is him. And he makes the movie only it wasn't totally perfect- I mean, no junkie wife subplot, plus it was in black and white. And then he does it again... one year later!

So by now the story has taken a disturbing twist as you realize you are basically watching this guy's fantasy, which he thought everyone should watch and he paid good money to make sure of it. So I would recommend it as a case study of his descent into madness.

The Werewolf of Washington (1973)

2011-01-19T13:33:00.004-05:00

Jack, a young reporter who is having an "affair" with the President's (unmarried!) daughter has himself reassigned to Hungary, where he is bitten by a werewolf. He returns home where he is given a job as Assistant Press Secretary but soon his curse takes over and he is stalking Washington as a bloodthirsty werewolf!

This is possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. There is nothing sadder than a horror/comedy/political satire that fails on all three counts. The werewolf makeup is ridiculous and there is not a single suspenseful scene in the whole movie. The comedy is a disaster. This movie was obviously written by a guy who fancies himself a brilliant humorist and just to get him to shut up at parties everyone tells him "man you need to write this stuff down!"

The political satire is just as ineffective. I know you're looking at the theatrical poster to the right and thinking, "no way guy, look at that poster, that is Grade-A satire right there." Republicans and Democrats don't get along! Racist people blame blacks for werewolf crimes! Pentagram sounds like Pentagon! This is the mind-numbing humor and braindead satire that awaits you in The Werewolf of Washington.

I guess it doesn't help that this is a werewolf movie. Werewolves, zombies, vampires... what do they have in common? They are classics of course, and the original films- the ones movies even now copy all their little techniques from- are all great.

But that was then and this is now and unless you make some amazing change to the concept these have been done to death and there is not much you can say with these monsters. We have seen plenty of changes to the vampire (recently) and zombie (back in the 70s). What about werewolves? An American Werewolf in London added some comedy that worked pretty well but more importantly applied state of the art makeup effects to make werewolves scary again. The Werewolf of Washington adds... stale humor and lame political satire. The werewolf effect is no better than what we had in The Wolfman for god's sake.

The Werewolf of Washington fails as a horror movie. The humor doesn't work. The political satire is the kind of stuff a college kid would write for his college newspaper. But most importantly it's a boring film and it's no fun to watch.

Dungeon of Harrow (1962)

2011-01-19T12:46:00.004-05:00

A guy ends up shipwrecked with his captain on a mysterious island. Soon they will find themselves guests of Count de Sade and his tough guy servant.

The biggest problem with this movie is the acting. Sure, everyone is awful, especially some ghost guy that shows up during the movie who is apparently some kind of horror host. But beyond that, everyone talks so slowly. It's consistent enough that you wonder if the director was telling people to put spaces in between all their words so that he could hit his targeted running time. By the time people were finishing their sentences I was forgetting what they were talking about! On top of that you have to put up with the main character's constant narration. It's one of those things where he will just describe to you what is going on in the movie, like the most boring commentary track in the world.

It's not totally awful, just mostly. Outside of a great "toy ship in a bathtub" stormy sea effect at the beginning and the twist ending that is actually pretty clever there is not much going on in this one. There is some sudden violence involving a torch somewhere in the middle that is nearly effective but it is pretty much off screen so I guess it's barely worth mentioning. Just like this movie.

Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973)

2011-01-18T10:57:00.005-05:00

Back in Ye Witche Tymes a warlock and his wife are executed. Before he is decapitated he swears a curse and then they bury his head somewhere. Hundreds of years later his descendant and his pals decide to go look for the severed head, which is allegedly buried in his land.

It is difficult to review this movie because the version I watched was heavily censored, to the extent that the movie was nearly impossible to follow and also really dull. Apparently a horror/sex movie, the version I watched was more akin to a haunted house picture from the 1940s. There is a lot of slowly creeping down hallways, a lot of evil warlocks glaring menacingly at the camera, and way too much awful and totally ineffective organ music.

Having said this, the movie starts out very well. I'm a sucker for gritty, filthy medieval scenes in movies and Horror Rises from the Tomb begins with a great one, complete with guy reading aloud the warlock's crimes from a scroll. From there we get a seance scene that is pretty good but typical, and- the highlight of the movie- a great scene on a dark forest road featuring some great backwoods street justice.

Unfortunately once we get to the heart of the matter- digging up the head and then chaos in the castle- the movie sort of falls apart. Nothing much happens and pace slows to a crawl as characters that were never developed in the slightest are attacked, mind-controlled, and killed. And it is around this time that the organ music soundtrack starts to really get on your nerves.

The movie gets extra points for the semi-accurate title, what with the rising from the tomb and all. But I have a hard time calling what rises "horror," though I understand you'd have trouble selling tickets to the more accurately named Tedium Rises from the Tomb.

Double Exposure (1983)

2011-01-15T20:57:00.004-05:00

A men's magazine photographer has vivid nightmares where he kills his models in gruesome ways and when his models start getting killed for real he begins to doubt his sanity. His one-armed and one-legged stunt man brother, hilarious 1980s gay stereotype assistant, useless psychiatrist, and totally out of his league girlfriend all lend their support. Meanwhile, typically ineffective 1980s cops run around wasting time and padding the length of the movie.

From the title alone you would expect this to be an 80s cop action movie, maybe with Steven Seagal in it. However you would be wrong. Instead it's a sort of serial killer stalker movie, like a cleaned up version of Maniac or a (much) less bleak version of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. And while not nearly as good as either of those horror classics, Double Exposure is surprisingly good and except for a telegraphed and awful twist ending is actually a very effective thriller.

Much of the success of this movie can be attributed to the portrayal of the photographer character. He's very well-written and acted, making for a surprisingly interesting character. He's got an interesting relationship with his brother and his assistant, and his awkward flirtation with the woman who ends up becoming his girlfriend is not something you usually see in a movie like this. When you get to the first scene where he murders a model it is generally unexpected and shocking, even though the movie cleverly plays with the idea well beforehand. When the gruesome nightmares start to become too much for him to handle, his breakdown is done very well.

It's almost an excellent movie. That is, until the end where you get the twist ending you've seen coming for an hour but have been hoping you're wrong. It's stupid and suddenly the movie is no better than any gritty murder movie from the era. Cut that out (and while you're at it, the pointless cop scenes that are just there because in a movie like this you need them) and you'd have a horror classic. With that in there, it's just good.

Crucible of Horror (1971)

2011-01-15T17:06:00.004-05:00

A dysfunctional family goes about its business while patriarch Walter gets increasingly violent and creepy. After a vicious cane beating, crazy mom Edith and rebellious daughter Jane hatch a plot to take care of Walter forever OR SO THEY THINK!!!

It doesn't sound like much but there is a lot to like about Crucible of Horror. The way the film drops you into this messed up family is great. No setup, no scenes of police or psychiatrists or anyone explaining to you how crazy everyone is. It feels like you are just witnessing another day in the life of these folks and what is left unsaid and unseen speaks and shows more than a bunch of ridiculous exposition ever could.

Events occur and end with no real resolution or connection to anything else, just like in real life, which is a very effective way of giving you the impression that this family is real with an actual history.

Performances are all around excellent with father Walter radiating cold and quiet menace in every scene. The tension is incredible and he's so effective it is actually shocking when he goes over the edge and becomes violent. The icing on the cake is how everyone looks so normal, like people you would encounter in your neighborhood, assuming you were part of a wealthy British family.

Unfortunately there is a ridiculous ending in store for you. It's one of those endings that is a little vague, but it's either because of ghosts or it's just a dream or or whatever. It's a lazy way to end any movie, and that a movie as effective as this one would end with this kind of shock ending does nothing but cheapen the rest of it. Also, where is the crucible? I have to deduct points for the filthy lie that the title is. Still worth watching, but pretend you are crazy and the last ten minutes was all in your head.

The Babysitter (1969)

2011-01-15T14:40:00.004-05:00

Rising star prosecutor and totally square white guy George Maxwell is having an affair with Candy, the babysitter his totally uncool wife hired to watch their totally boring baby while they go and play bridge with a bunch of totally unhip old white people, like themselves. Before long a friend of his oldest daughter has snapped photos of his trysts but is willing to cut him a deal: let her psychopathic murderer biker boyfriend walk free and no one will find out about the pictures. However, the babysitter has some rough friends of her own and blackmailing Maxwell may not work out as planned in this fantasy movie land where having affairs with babysitters merits high-fives from your creepy boss.

Years from now, when mankind has been run underground and cockroach high technopriests send mercenary cockroaches to search the red desert wastelands for remnants of human civilization, they will find these DVD box sets and in their great libraries will be recorded that the high point of human home cinema was the rise and fall of DVD. Then they will send their cockroach cyborg slavemasters into the mines to hunt for more humans for technoconversion.

Never before in human civilization have we had this kind of access to these movies- the kind no one wants to watch- in stores which do not hand you your purchase in a nondescript paper bag. Sure there are plenty of movies that were released on VHS that have still not been converted to DVD, but the number of films- especially genre films (i.e. trash)- on DVD that cannot be had in any other format is mind-boggling. The rights to movies with no real audience can be cheaply bought (or not bought at all, since many of these kinds of movies are in rights-limbo) and released on DVD for pocket change, whereas the previous generation of home video required you release your movies on expensive VHS tapes.

Case in point, The Babysitter. I don't know if this was released on VHS tape. But I can assure you that this movie was not released in a box set with eleven other exploitation movies for $5.00 on VHS. I would also be welling to bet money (though not a lot) that you will not be able to buy The Babysitter along with eleven other movies on Blu-Ray for $5.00 a year from now. And while The Babysitter is a fine movie for ironic hipsters to enjoy for seventy-five minutes, I'm not sure I'd be willing to spend $25 on a special edition 3D Blu-Ray version.

On to the movie. It's got the best title ever because you read that title and you know pretty much exactly what the movie is gong to be about, thanks to the cultural baggage that babysitters carry. There are some surprises- the ending is ridiculous and laugh out loud funny and the relationship between Maxwell and the babysitter is developed far more than you think it would be- but you are basically getting your typical 60s exploitation flick that would have played second fiddle to some higher budget sex comedy or monster movie at the drive-in.

There are a bunch of hilarious things about the movie, including one of those awesome theme songs that features lyrics referring to the babysitter by name and telling you what she is all about, and tons of scenes of crazy 60s dancing that makes the stupid dancing of today look like dancing Shakespeare. And the acting ranges from professional to not-acting-just-talking, but more importantly it's a surprisingly entertaining watch. Not really my kind of movie but I'd rather watch this than some bloated 110 minute epic of the week we get in the theaters now.

Night of the Creeps (1986)

2011-01-13T17:07:00.004-05:00

An alien releases a bunch of slug-like creatures on Earth. These space slugs are able to burrow into corpses and ride them around like cars. Meanwhile some college kids are going around getting into mischief and before long they are on a collision course for wacky hijinx with the slugs!

This movie is somewhat infamous in the horror fandom because for the longest time it went without a DVD release. Just when it looked like it was going to be a lost classic, destined to be traded on shady bootlegs, it came out as a special edition. So what's all the fuss about?

There are a few things about this movie that have made it a cult hit. It's got great effects and plenty of gore. A script that is made entirely of snappy one-liners and comebacks. Monsters that are basically zombies for all intents and purposes. A hero that starts out a loser and by the end of the movie is jumping through windows and taking out zombies like some kind of expert monster hunter. Characters named after your favorite horror directors. In other words, this is your typical horror fan's dream movie.

On top of all of this it is an homage to old B-movies from the late 50s and early 60s. In fact, the first ten minutes or so takes place in the past and since back then the whole world was without color they shot this part in black in white. People go nuts over that kind of stuff, don't ask me why.

Unfortunately, while the effects are really awesome, the movie doesn't work so well. When you throw in all your favorite horror stuff it takes a really strong script or a hell of a concept at least to make it all work together. Night of the Creeps has none of that. As mentioned above the dialog is just a bunch of snappy back-and-forth nonsense that probably sounded cool on paper but when spoken aloud by human beings sounds intolerably lame. The constant in-jokes and stuff drove me nuts. Not a scene goes by where someone isn't going "Carpenter, get on that" or "Raimi, what's the latest." Raimi! He did Evil Dead! So clever! The layers! This film is like an onion- how deep does it go?!

The concept is beyond dull. Actually, this movie is ahead of its time in a way. It would fit in pretty well in the "needs something... I got it! Zombies!" horror swamp we are stuck in right now. You are walking in the horror swamp and you get stuck. The only way to escape is to leave your boots in the swamp and save yourself! Your good boots! (The boots represent your resolve to not put zombies in a movie just so the fans will watch it). But you need to survive so you leave your dignity boots behind where they are eaten by the swamp (the swamp represents the government I guess). The only possible way you could make this more boring, on a conceptual level, would be to replace the zombies with vampires. The slugs are pretty close to vampires actually.

It's a fun movie to watch I guess because the kills come fast and often and before you know it you are at the end. Watch it and get this little piece of horror cult history out of the way for something more substantial.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

2011-01-12T20:23:00.003-05:00

This is a movie that needs little introduction. Our heroes run around a city on the verge of paranoid insanity as one by one everyone but them is taken over by pod people. Can they turn the tide, or does the control wielded by the pod people reach higher than they could ever imagine.

Widely regarded as one of most successful (in every sense of the word) remakes ever filmed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a fantastic movie, moody paranoia choking every single frame. It hails from a time when film makers were not afraid to take their time in setting up beautiful shots and had no problem with their cameras lingering on those shots for as long as it took for you to appreciate them. Every character in this movie is interesting in one way or another and even nearly thirty years later they do not strike you as stereotypes or living cliches. Even Jeff Goldblum's character is only mildly annoying, which says a lot.

Although overly long, the pace is perfect and the movie zips by with a dark urgency. The invasion is slow to start but once it does the movie simply does not let up and you even get some really great slimy pod guy effects. The best part of the movie, however, is that is refuses to pander to the audience. Where lesser movies would stop the film for a second to let the gravity sink in, and then maybe play a soundtrack cue to tell you to feel anxious or upset, Invasion of the Body Snatchers just keeps moving. The characters react realistically and there is none of the melodrama that infects much of the genre when it tries to turn in a more dramatic direction.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a fantastic thriller. Why not make it a night and watch it with John Carpenter's The Thing to see two completely different approaches to remaking classic sci-fi/horror movies, both effective in their own way?

The Wicker Man (2006)

2011-01-11T21:49:00.004-05:00

A chain of unlikely events involving a random car accident and a letter from an ex-girlfriend brings a policeman to an island host to a matriarchal society, with bees on it. Everyone on the island is at very least weird, if not aggressively obnoxious and time is running out! Will he find the missing child before The Wicker Man happens?!

The Wicker Man is an Internet Darling and is nearly unreviewable. All the best parts are all over Youtube and lines from the film have already entered the lexicon of imaginary internet people everywhere. It is however well worth watching in full so you can understand the context within which all your most favorite Wicker Man lines are spoken.

This movie is a remake of the feel-good pagan horror musical from 1973 featuring Christopher Lee. Instead of Christopher Lee there is some lady and Nicholas Cage. They took out the songs and replaced them with more Nicholas Cage. Then they added some bees and thought they were done but the movie was still only like eighty minutes long, so they just spliced in ten minutes worth of flashbacks to the car accident at the beginning of the movie to fill things out. This was still not enough so they added some more bees.

This is a remake only in the loosest sense of the word. It has absolutely nothing to do with the original except for there being a Wicker Man at the end. But you really can't blame them because while The Wicker Man (1973) is a great movie, you show that to a bunch of 18-35 year olds now- with its musical numbers and quaint Christianity vs Paganism theme and man made of a hard woven fiber formed into a rigid material usually used for baskets or furniture- and they would laugh whilst texting on their cellphones and tweeting on their twitters. They would leave nasty comments on your precious Facebook page. Or shank you in the kidney on the way out. You never know with kids today.

Nicholas Cage really had no choice. They took all that outdated stuff out and instead you have him running around like a madman, karate kicking ladies into walls, screaming at children, and riding his bike furiously through the streets. And there is a giant conspiracy of course (in order to have a twist at the end) and it is the most ridiculous thing ever, relying on Nicholas Cage randomly coming upon things over a span of several years in order to arrive where he is. It's hilarious and the only thing keeping it together is Cage's madcap antics; played straight, this movie would have been impossible to watch.

So make it a movie night and watch the original and this remake back-to-back. You'll appreciate the class and excellent film making of the first movie, and then you'll appreciate how the remake doesn't even try to translate all that stuff into something modern man could relate to.

Planet Terror (2007)

2011-01-10T23:07:00.004-05:00

A lethal gas is released into the air, and once people start inhaling it they come down with zombie disease. Some people band together and fight the zombies.

There's not a lot to Planet Terror, but what is there is pretty entertaining. Unlike the other Grindhouse movie, Death Proof, Planet Terror moves at a breakneck pace and the only dialog you will encounter will either explain the plot to you (a couple lines) or tell you jokes (the rest). So it's definitely a more enjoyable movie. It is also definitely a much better exploitation/gore film, with the wettest zombie deaths ever filmed and constant gore effects once the movie gets going.

But it's almost too good. While it works as a great modern zombie flick, it fails as an emulation of "grindhouse" movies. The effects are unbelievable, with explosions all over the place and even a rocket launching peg leg. You simply didn't have this stuff back then, so the aging effect applied to the film to make it look like you are watching the movie in some hole in a wall theater ends up being confusing rather than clever... especially when you watch the movie at home. I don't think anyone who enjoys horror exploitation movies actually likes the poor quality we often had to put up with either on film or on VHS, so this whole thing really makes no sense to me. It would be like taking Silence of the Lambs, aging the film, and going, "See? Just like back in the 70s!" Movies have changed since then and adding some crummy film effects and even the immediately stupid "missing reel" nonsense isn't going to bring them back.

However, regardless of how this movie was unfortunately marketed, I am not going to review it as a "grindhouse" movie and instead will compare it to its peers. It's hilarious with a clever script and likable characters, and wickedly gory without being sadistic. If only horror movies had gone in this direction rather than in the direction of endless remakes, PG-13 ghost flicks, and mean-spirited but dumb Saw movies we'd be doing pretty well I think.

Death Proof (2007)

2011-01-08T13:07:00.004-05:00

A group of hip and sassy girls talk for hours about nothing in cars and diners or bars. Then, for a brief fifteen minutes or so they are hunted by a guy in a stuntman car. Then it happens AGAIN but this time the group of girls are all stuntwomen/extreme sports boxers/cheerleaders. Will the hunter become the hunted????

This movie is horrible. In trying to make all the girls be hip and realistic, they all come off as being the same character in different clothes. There is no point to 99% of the dialog in this movie! It's one thing to try to develop your characters in an exploitation murder movie, but there is no development here. Just a bunch of girls sitting in a car cackling at each other's lame insults and talking about whatever it is Quentin Tarantino thinks girls talk about when the guys are away (hint: constant sass-related topics).

Establishing suspense in a movie takes expert timing. It isn't just boring the audience for an hour with talking and then sudden awesome violence. Building suspense requires subtle foreshadowing, playing with the perceptions of your audience, and then the sudden awesome violence . If there is no suspense you are gonna have a hard time creating an effective horror movie.

So is Death Proof just a poor horror movie? Or is it something else? You could look back at the kinds of movies that the Grindhouse project was meant to emulate. These were movies where the whole point was to see some exploitative nudity and maybe some shocking violence. But then you had plenty of "grindhouse" movies that were cheap but effective, such as Basket Case or The Beyond or any number of Italian splatter horror films from the era. Why not emulate those movies?

Of course there has got to be a twist. You can't make a genre film these days without one, and the twist in this one is that the second group of girls are a bunch of badasses. But it's a lazy twist; the whole movie is spent objectifying girls, the camera creepily leering at them. The first girls are all curvy and gorgeous, the second group a little more plain looking. It's disturbing.

Overall the movie is a mess. Not once but twice someone mentions all of Quentin Tarantino's most favorite 70s car chase movies. Keep punching that grindhouse ticket. They even complain about CGI at one point and it comes off as pathetic pandering. Stuff like this pulls you out of the movie; it's one thing to have realistic dialog, it's another to insert wink-and-nudge stuff like this in there hoping all the hipsters in the audience will nod in approval.

The first car chase, which is the best part of the movie and almost approaches being suspenseful (but instead is merely extremely gory which is also okay), is ruined by a stupid instant replay from multiple angles effect. The second car chase, which should have been the best part of the movie, is ruined by focusing not on the cars but on the heroine's face as she utters some of the most ridiculous and unrealistic dialog in the whole movie. There are some good stunts in here but the timing is thrown off by her constant commentary. Think back to Mad Max and the amazing stunts in that. Very little dialog, and they show the drivers only enough to establish who is driving what car and how angry they are. As a result the car chases are thrilling and amazing.

No thrills, no point. That is Death Proof.

Hardware (1990)

2011-01-06T21:54:00.006-05:00

Wandering the red desert ruins of post-apocalypse Earth a man searches for junk to sell. Happening upon a marked off area he cuts his way through the barbed wire and finds a half-buried robot head. The robot head ends up in the hands of Mo, a fellow scavenger, who gives it to his crazy industrial sculptor girlfriend. Little do they know that the robot head is still functioning!

The first thing that will likely strike you about this movie is how amazing it looks: the sets are simple but very convincing and there is fantastic use of color and shadow in every scene. It takes place in that special sort of grimy but cool cyberpunk world we all thought we'd be living in by now, where everyone is covered in dirt and mutation but since everyone is in that situation together no one really is bothered by it. Everyone gets to wear awesome gas masks and coats while stomping down deadly looking alleyways in combat boots, but other than that there isn't much too look forward to. The nuclear apocalypse giveth, and it taketh away.

So by now, around the thirty minute mark or so, I was ready to proclaim this as the best cyberpunk film ever made. It is Blade Runner but even more depressing and hopeless, all filmed in the kind of primary colors that make you realize that this movie means business and you had better sit up and pay attention if you know what's good for you.

From here the script introduces a creepy stalker subplot and we start getting into horror movie territory. I admit, I was a little worried about this. I know my horror movies. There are a ton of mistakes you can make with a creepy stalker subplot and this seemed like just the kind of movie to make them. I had to get another slice of pizza to calm my nerves. And to my surprise (my delight even) the whole thing was handled amazingly. By this point I had decided I had found the chosen one of under-the-radar horror/scifi movies. I considered lying in my writeup and listing the movie as coming out in 1989 so that I could pretend that it came out in my favorite decade of movies, saving it from the attitude and baggy pants and edgy coolness of the hated 90s.

Unfortunately the movie sort of starts to fall apart once the robot starts killing people. People start lining up to be massacred by the robot (no complaints there) but it all takes place in this tiny dark little apartment and suspending your disbelief at that point is impossible. The only solution is for everyone to get together and support that suspension with the combined suspending power of all disbeliefs in the room. The heroine starts acting like an action hero, swearing at the robot who doesn't even understand human language, and then you have multiple climaxes and twists, climaxing and twisting one upon another until you aren't sure whether your twists are climaxing or your climaxes twisting. The gore effects are pretty cool though.

It's definitely worth watching though as the movie stays wonderful looking throughout, and you can get through the stupid stuff at the end if you keep in mind you are going to see some great effects.

Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)

2011-01-04T20:03:00.004-05:00

Brad, the little kid from Critters, is back in town. And so are the Crites, the little space monsters that eat everything in their path, and the space bounty hunters that like to hunt them. The Crites will attempt to eat everyone, while everyone will attempt to kill the Crites, for about nintey minutes. There is your movie.

Critters 2 starts out pretty strongly with the bounty hunters searching through some alien caves and being attacked by some gross alien monster. The alien cave set is great, full of smoky bubbling pools of water and tons of shadowy corners for the monsters to hide in. Shortly after that however we land on Earth and that is where the rest of the movie takes place.

Whereas the first movie had a pretty decent script with likable characters and some pretty good humor, Critters 2 is just a mess. The script is terrible. It feels like you are watching a made for TV family movie with some gore shots here and there (they are pretty good gore effects however) and the ending is ridiculous. They even tried to turn the chubby sheriff from the first movie into some kind of badass guy complete with one liners. It doesn't work at all.

The monsters are a lot worse this time around. They sit around eating like pigs and they crack jokes all the time. At this rate I expect them to be wearing sunglasses and surfing in Critters 3.

A big letdown after the amazingly good first movie. I can't believe there are two more of these left. What could they possibly be about?

Masters of the Universe (1987)

2011-01-03T18:01:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you are overcome with a fit of nostalgia and you hunt down a movie that you watched as a kid. It's always an exciting time when that DVD loads up and you are wondering how the movie has aged. Sometimes, you find the movie has aged extremely well and you can appreciate it just as much as you did the first time around. The Goonies or The Neverending Story for instance. Other times, the years that have gone by have changed you in ways that make you enjoy the movie even more. The Gate is a great example, where as a kid you were mesmerized by the little monsters running around your screen and as an adult you are amazed by the technical wizardry involved in getting those effects so lifelike. Unfortunately most movies end up being terrible when viewed as an adult, and Masters of the Universe is one of the worst.

He-Man was not a great show. Even as a kid I realized that it was merely a cynical attempt to sell more toys, like a lot of cartoons at the time. The animation is poor, the characters a bunch of gimmicky morons with goofy voices, and the world it takes place in is a lazy mixture of pulpy swords & sorcery and laser gun jetbikes. It's a bunch of "gonzo" crap thrown together with neither rhyme nor reason, and the problem is when everyone has some stupid gimmick or flies on a hoverscooter or shoots eye beams or rides around on a giant cat while shooting laser swords then no one is interesting at all. It's so soulless and dull and meaningless you might as well label it swordpunk and devote a short story anthology to it.

I think the people behind Masters of the Universe were well aware of this, because it has nothing to do with the show at all, other than the characters running around calling each other by their action figure names so you know which ones you should go buy your whining horrible child after the movie is over. He-Man takes place on a generic pulp fantasy planet with monsters and evil castles and stuff. Masters of the Universe takes place in some small town in the US. He-Man features sword & sorcery battles between a guy that looks like Conan and snake guys and werewolves. Masters of the Universe is largely a ninety-minute gunfight between He-Man and a bunch of Star Wars stormtroopers with black armor. Even the soundtrack is a Star Wars ripoff.

There are two special effects in the movie. Laser blasts drawn on the film post-production and laughable shots of vehicles flying in the air. There is a character that is meant as the lovable and hilarious comic relief monster but is just some hairy and gross looking space dwarf who looks like he wandered in from the set of Garbage Pail Kids. His jowls are disgusting and I couldn't stop staring every time he was on screen (i.e. every scene).

What were they thinking? Were they delusional enough to think that if they just changed the formula enough- just enough so that it is completely different in every way from the cartoon it is based on- that they would win over the crucial independents who are on the fence about He-Man? I just don't understand who this movie is for. Maybe no one.

Critters (1986)

2010-12-29T11:14:00.003-05:00

Critters, like all great monster movies, can be summed up in a few short lines. Crites- small alien monsters- steal a ship and escape to Earth. Two shape-shifting alien bounty hunters are hot on their trail. Meanwhile, the Brown family children are going around engaging in small town mischief. It's probably only a coincidence that this movie came out two years after Gremlins, with its small humorous monsters and PG-13 violence.

First of all, the Critters are much scarier overall than the Gremlins are. There is some pretty graphic violence here, pushing the PG-13 rating as far as it can go. Second of all, this movie is extremely funny. I hate little kids in movies but the kids in this one are great. Finally, there are some amazing effects going on here. The introduction, which takes place on a spaceship, features a great set and some fantastic alien costumes. Then there is a really outstanding effect at the end of the movie that was probably not too difficult to pull off but still ends up looking great.

As a sort of mash up of Gremlins and your typical monster movie such as The Blob or what have you, it's a mixture that works very well and it would definitely be a mistake to skip it over thinking it's a cynical cash-in on Gizmo-mania.

Above the Law (1988)

2010-12-28T19:57:00.004-05:00

Edgy cop/Aikido master/Special Forces guy/Mafia guy/Firearms Expert/Family Man Nico Toscani is investigating some drug goings-on in his neighborhood, along with his partner Jax. Jax is just about to retire from the force or something and Nico protects her the only way he knows how: by constantly putting her in danger by bringing her along on his illegal surveillance missions. I guess she finds that preferable to the constant sexual harassment she is subject to from the gross old fat guys she works with.

Soon, Nico finds mysterious connections between the drug pushers he is investigating and the CIA and he is put on leave and thus has no choice but to further endanger Jax by going on even more illegal reconnaissance missions.

Being as how I have an interest in Japanese martial arts, it was only a matter of time before it came to this: an investigation of Steven Seagal. I have chosen to do this the only way that makes sense; that is, by buying all his movies on DVD (except the direct-to-video ones), watching them, and passing judgment on them (and him).

As is clearly stated on the movie poster, Steven Seagal is a master of Aikido. Aikido is the martial art famous for being used by Steven Seagal in his movies. So we take that as exhibit A. Less importantly, Aikido is also the martial art created by Ueshiba Morihei, who was a badass guy who went around dojo storming until he found religion and decided that the key to victory was not badass fighting, but love. And then he died and so here we are. Exhibit B.

Above the Law begins confusingly, with made up nonsense about what an amazing guy Nico is, mixed with shots of actual authentic Steven Seagal photographs. Then we flashback to Nico being a hero back in some special ops mission in Cambodia and wouldn't it be totally weird and ironic if the bad guy in this movie- the one responsible for the drug dealing in Nico's hometown- and the bad CIA guy torturing some Cambodian guy were one and the same!

We finally finish our whirlwind tour of Steven Seagal- I mean Nico Toscani's life and now here we are in present day 1988 watching cop Nico busting up some guys with no warrant or anything. But it's okay because those guys were scumballs. They even give you some bizarre exposition in passing about one of them being a child molester so you don't feel uncomfortable in the slightest that Nico is just walking into bars and murdering guys for sassing him.

This basically sets the pace for this movie. The Aikido is pretty cool in that it's brutal and violent when in reality Aikido is the opposite of both brutal and violent. I am surprised Aikido didn't become the next Karate after this movie (instead, Tae Kwon Do became the next Karate).

So overall it's not bad as far as later 80s action films go, though not nearly as violent as true classics like Rambo and Commando. There is still hope though because there are like seven more of these to work my way through.

Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982)

2010-12-28T10:05:00.005-05:00

A bunch of kids go to a campsite for the express purpose of being stalked and killed by Jason until there is only one girl left who has special Jason killing abilities. I know this sounds like every other Friday the 13th movie, and that's true. When it comes to Jason movies, you have to put that aside and criticize them based on the ideas they contain. Or, failing that, you rate them by whether or not they have a bunch of scenes of people spinning yo-yos towards the camera in 3d.

The only way you can tell these movies apart- especially after the first two and before they started adding psychic girls and trips to Outer Space- is by the cast of characters who will be killed. This entry in the series does not disappoint. Besides the boring heroine and her equally boring boyfriend you've got:

a chubby guy that constantly plays annoying pranks
token "minority" girl
the guy that goes around walking on his hands all over the place and his girlfriend
the pot-smoking hippy couple that look a good 20 years older than everyone else
the multicultural street gang just hanging out in some small town grocery store

Historically this is an important film, because this is where Jason gets his iconic hockey mask. And it is also the only entry shot in 3d. The 3d effects are not great and you have to wear those red/blue glasses so god help you if you have to wear glasses or one of your eyes is stronger than the other. Luckily the latest disc has both the 2d and 3d versions of this movie and once you get tired of subjecting yourself to headache torture you can switch to the 2d version, and then the 3d effects go from painful to goofy.

Overall it's not a bad chapter in the Friday the 13th saga and even a bad Friday the 13th is better than most slashers.

Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

2010-12-27T08:43:00.002-05:00

Count Regula is tried for the torture and murder of twelve young virgin women. He is sentenced to be quartered but before he dies he curses the presiding judge. A generation later, a big beefy guy and some lady are looking for Count Regula's castle and they coincidentally happen upon each other. A totally insane priest who carries a pistol will be their guide.

When you hear the "quirky" dialog that sometimes doesn't match with what the lips are saying and see the surprisingly graphic violence you might think that this is an Italian horror movie. Close, but you are wrong. It's German, which is close so you get partial credit. Which is fine because going by my "movie title is a plot summary" review criteria this movie only gets partial credit since while there is a Torture Chamber in the film (several even) there is no character named Dr. Sadism.

This is a very stylish movie, like a cross between Bava's horror films and, I dunno, Bloody Pit of Horror and I guess some Hammer stuff since Christopher Lee is in it. The hero, Roger Mont Elise, is your typical tall and beefy guy who has the same facial expression throughout the entire picture (it's the one on the poster to the right). The heroine, Lillian von Brabant, does a lot of hysterical screaming. Christopher Lee hilariously refers to the both of them by their full names every single time so you will have no trouble remembering them by the time the movie is over.

The pace is great and the lengthy carriage ride to the castle is exciting with plenty of action and some great shots including one particularly beautiful shot at sundown. The sets are absolutely fantastic throughout, though I had trouble figuring out what time period this movie is supposed to occur in as the soldiers appeared to be dressed as British red coats and everything else suggested we were back in the 1600s or so. Other than that this is was a great movie.

The Devil's Sword (1984)

2010-12-13T08:06:00.005-05:00

1984 was a memorable year. Not only was it the year in which much of the West switched over to a hellish dystopia as prophesied by George Orwell back in 1949, but also this movie came out. In a lot of ways The Devil's Sword is a reaction to the founding of this nightmarish society and so in hindsight we can attribute the restoration of the Free West solely to stars Barry Prima, Advent "Advent" Bangun, and of course Belkies.

The movie begins like many others before it, and many others since. An old crazy man is relaxing in his mountain shack when a meteorite falls to earth. He does what anyone would do in such a situation- forges a sword with no real benefits but with the power to destroy all of humanity should it fall into the hands of absolutely anyone. And then his shack collapses.

Later on, the evil Crocodile Queen sends out her beefy man servant Banyujaga to steal some effeminate looking guy for her. But little does Banyujaga realize that his sworn enemy Mandala is in town searching for The Devil's Sword! Who will get the sword and what will he use it for?

The many parallels between 1984 and this movie are so obvious I won't even go into them. Instead I want to talk about how awesome everything in this movie is. You know how when you were little you'd catch these crazy movies on Kung Fu Theater or whatever on the weekends, and the perfect storm of hilarious dubbing and stupid wire effects converged over the tranquil sea that was society before the Matrix came out and overexposed wire kung fu to the point where it is a groanworthy punchline? And now you are grown up and you hunt down some of those movies in a fit of nostalgia and they just seem boring and tame with your sophisticated adult tastes, what with your iphone and your animes and your hospital dramas? What a disappointment!

Well I am telling you right now that if you watch this movie you will be transported- magically and without warning like in one of those "adult turns into a kid overnight and realizes that there is more to life than money and success and power" movies- back into the age of footie pajamas and sugary cereal on Sunday morning.

Because this movie is totally out of control and your ability to handle it is dubious at best. The violence comes suddenly and without mercy as limbs are shorn like wool from a sheep. Heads are severed and then the fight begins. Mandala is forced to crawl through a "spooky cave" that looks like something a bunch of kids put together under a sheet in the backyard for a Halloween project. I won't even get into Laser Crocodile.

I was going to wrap this up by saying this is by far the best movie to have come out this year, but I checked and a lot of really great movies came out in 1984. But since you've probably already seen all those, watch this one instead.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

2010-11-01T08:22:00.006-04:00

A mysterious guy gripping a Halloween mask and raving about how someone is going to kill everyone is admitted into a hospital. Shortly after that, some other guy comes in and pull his skull apart with his bare hands. From there he does the only thing one can do after doing something like that- he soaks himself in gasoline in his car and blows himself up.

The attending physician, Dr. Challis, decides to figure out what is going on, possibly because of natural curiosity (unlikely), possibly because the dead man's beautiful daughter is around (likely). They eventually track the single lead down and hilariously this leads them immediately and directly straight to the heart of an evil conspiracy involving magic Halloween masks.

This is the third of fourth time that I've watched this movie and my opinion keeps changing. I remember being disappointed the first time around because Michael Myers is not in the movie. Then after watching all the awful Halloween sequels that did have Michael in them, I thought Halloween III was a pretty decent change of pace. I liked it even more this time around; Halloween III is a pretty awesome 80s horror flick.

The absolute best thing about his movie is the character of Dr. Challis. This guy is totally sleazy, flirting with any woman who he comes into contact with. And he is a hilariously incompetent and uncaring father, blowing his visitation period with his kids to go investigate this spooky mystery like some kind of sleazy divorced version of the Scooby gang, except just one guy and no dog.

It's got a great synthesizer soundtrack by John Carpenter and it looks fantastoc, with plenty of wonderful shots (including the scene the totally awesome poster art was taken from). And the out-of-nowhere gore effects don't feel nearly as out of place as they did in Halloween II. One of the best Halloween movies, if not second best.

Incubus (1965)

2010-10-25T08:25:00.006-04:00

Marc and his younger sister Arndis are spending some time in the woods of Nomen Tuum, where Marc can recover from his war injuries by drinking from the convenient fountain of youth thereabouts. Unfortunately for them there is a couple of succubi around who spend all their time corrupting men and they are hungry for the challenge the incorruptible Marc presents to them. Also, Arndis really enjoys staring at eclipses to the point of blindness, which only makes things more difficult for the siblings.

You can't talk about this movie without mentioning that it was filmed in the imaginary moon language of Esperanto. This is a language that was developed to be a sort of second universal language, though the fact that it sounds pretty much like various European languages all stuck together would have made things difficult for 20% of the world population, who speak primarily Chinese which has absolutely nothing to do with Esperanto. So why come up with a whole new manufactured language? Just use Chinese or something and write it with the roman alphabet so people don't have to learn those squiggly characters. This way you would start with 20% coverage! Esperanto dreams of 20% population coverage.

So Esperanto is a miserable failure of an idea, but how is Incubus? It's better in a lot of ways. For one, it has the only successful international manufactured language in it- that is, William Shatner. Whether it's because it is in the totally nonsensical fever dream language of Esperanto, or because Shatner hasn't developed his style fully, we can watch a toned down Shatner, who calmly and assuredly delivers honeyed words of poetry for us for the entire duration of the movie.

It's not a particularly interesting story. It's basically a medieval morality play on film, but the atmosphere is other-wordly and the goat that shows up at the end is really creepy. Goats are scary, what can I say. The cinematography is really outstanding as well, with nice shadows and an overall moody presentation. Unlike junky 50s scifi flicks, movies like Incubus really play to the strengths of black and white film making.

If you watch this movie with a bunch of pals you are going to be making Star Trek jokes all throughout at poor Mr. Shatner's expense so I would recommend instead to watch it on a rainy, gloomy morning when you have nothing much going on. Take a trip to Nomen Tuum and you might be surprised at what you find.

Blood Feast (1963)

2010-10-23T10:49:00.002-04:00

Fuad Ramses, crackpot Egyptian caterer and occultist, is a man of many talents. Besides maintaining his catering business, he also has written a book about ancient weird religious rites ("Ancient Weird Religious Rites"), and runs a specialty beans and cans store. In his time off he mistakenly worships the goddess Ishtar, who is not Egyptian but Babylonian but hey close enough, right? He has a statue of her in the back of his store (it's a mannequin painted gold).

So this is what we are dealing with when we sit down to watch Blood Feast. It's only sixty-seven minutes long, but it is filled to the brim with awful acting, totally inept cinematography (most of the time the upper half of the screen is taken up by walls, with the actors down in the bottom half), and a script that was seemingly written by people who have never interacted with other people outside of hearing bits and pieces of conversations floating through the bars in the door of their padded cells.

Technically this movie should be absolutely unwatchable, but this is another one where every time I watch it I like it even more. It has a lot of things going for it. First of all, the gore shots are unbelievable considering the vintage of this movie. It's stuff you wouldn't expect to see until at least six years later. So this is an interesting mix of an early 60s thriller with the extreme gore that would become popular a decade later. Also, the colors are amazing: extremely saturated and lively the movie jumps off the screen at you. Finally, the soundtrack is awesome and sounds like a sixty-seven minutes jam session by the lady at the church on her organ.

So that's a recommendation I think.

The Revenge of Doctor X (1970)

2010-09-23T08:52:00.005-04:00

Dr. Bragan is working on some important research for NASA when he is stricken down due to stress. To recover, he takes a trip to Japan to work on his insane theory: that humans evolved not from monkeys but from plants. He will prove this by turning a plant into a man, because science tells us that if one thing can be turned into another thing then we must conclude that the second thing necessarily used to be the first thing! The math is solid and so our movie begins.

Helping out Dr. Bragan is his lovely assistant Noriko and her hunchback, and some dogs. Dr. Bragan is basically the worst person ever. In every scene he is either hitting on Noriko in that creepy old-guy-who-thinks-he's-hip way, or he is totally flying off the handle for absolutely no reason at all. The movie even opens with him completely tearing into these guys and I never understood why he was so angry about everything.

This is pretty much your typical 1950s monster movie, complete with mad science and a final confrontation with a guy in a rubber monster suit at the end. And much like 1950 monster movies, you have about one hour of boring talking with everything that happens in the movie occurring in the last thirty minutes. Really the only thing differentiating this from, say, The Wasp Woman, is that The Revenge of Doctor X has a couple scenes of exploitative nudity.

Also, this movie takes place in Japan and surprisingly it has actual Japanese people in it speaking actual Japanese, and not a bunch of white folks squinting their eyes going "ahhhh sooooo domo arigato."

Other than the (comparatively) exotic setting, however, there is not much to recommend about this movie. The acting is bad all around and the movie is pretty lifeless all around. Also of concern is the fact that the title is a filthy lie. I don't think you could come up with a more inaccurate title for this movie, a movie which has neither a character named Doctor X nor any kind of revenge whatsoever in it. So this movie is lying to you right out of the gate, before you have even started watching it. That's like showing up for a first date and the person has not only lied to you about their name and also she isn't a human but is actually a robot dog.

The monster is cool, but you have to wait until nearly the end for the inevitable rampage and even then it's too brief and you end up feeling like you wasted an evening on a movie that would have been pretty unremarkable back in the late 50s, never mind 1970.

Happy Birthday to Me (1981)

2010-08-09T07:13:00.006-04:00

1981. The world has run out of holidays on which to have murders on. The horror movie industry is on the brink of extinction... and then! A guy suggests that birthdays are technically, in a way, holidays too. Horror is saved! That is how this movie happened. Shortly after that the same guy realized horror movies can happen for any reason on any day, and then they all made zombie movies until the end of time.

I ordered this along with My Bloody Valentine and I enjoyed that movie quite a bit so it was a happy coincidence that, according to the DVD case, Happy Birthday to Me is "from the producers of My Bloody Valentine." Could it be? Another amazing Canadian horror movie from the 80s? Well, according to wikipedia, this is an "American slasher movie filmed in Canada" which I guess counts.

Ginny is a member of the Top 10 at Crawford Academy, which is a nasty group of elite jerk kids. How bad are they? They hassle old guys at the bar, they race over bridges... there is basically nothing these rotten to the core thrill-seekers won't do! Ginny seems like a nice girl, regardless of her vaguely unprofessional relationship with her psychiatrist, but I guess she is desperate to be seen as elite so there you go. Meanwhile there is a killer stalking everyone.

This movie is a little hard to follow. It keeps trying to throw you for a loop because much of the film is from Ginny's perspective and she is an unreliable narrator, since she is crazy. But instead of feeling awe at being expertly manipulated, you just feel kind of confused and then, at the end, let down. But at least they didn't just pull the old "the killer is this kid they picked on!" thing that so many other, weaker, slashers have.

I guess my problem with this movie is it isn't Canadian enough. Where is the insanity of something like The Pit, where you are constantly on the verge of losing your mind as you watch? Where are the macho low-key Canadian guys drinking beer and getting into polite brawls from My Bloody Valentine? The twist at the end that invalidates the entire movie like in Rock 'n Roll Nightmare? None of that stuff is in this movie and it suffers for it.

The murders are not even bizarre enough to remember really, regardless of what the poster claims. I can come up with more bizarre murders just looking around the room! Eating a television to death! Buried alive in pens! A bunch of bookcases combine into a giant mummy and then roll you up like a tube of toothpaste, causing your brains to explode from the top of your head!

In conclusion, exhaust the library of Canadian horror movies until you tackle this one. It's a good way to cleanse the palate before watching some good old American slashers.

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

2010-07-31T10:33:00.004-04:00

Two miners go into a mine, one of them takes off her miner suit (surprise! she's a lady) and gets ready to get intimate with her coworker but he sees a heart tattoo on her chest, flies into a rage and kills her! Happy Valentine's Day!

Some time later, a bunch of manly men come back from the mine and are doing various manly things in a bar: playing that game where you put your hand on a table and stab the spaces between your fingers with a knife as fast as you can, drinking beer, sexually harassing waitresses, and planning Valentine's Day dances! The old bartender warns them not to, as there is a crazy miner that really hates Valentine's Day dances- or anything resembling a dance, like a party or a hoedown or a get-together- and if you have one, he is just gonna kill you. All the miners laugh off his advice and drink more beer and let's PAR-TAY!

Why does the miner hate Valentine's Day dances so much? Well, there was a dance and his supervisors left him and his crew out in the mines and there was an explosion and everyone died, except this miner!

This is probably the worst setup for a slasher movie ever. I mean, Jason was left to drown by uncaring camp counselors. Freddy was burned to death. The guy in the Burning... was also burned, but only really badly and not to death. The miner should probably be thankful really. He wasn't even hideously burned!

But you know, this is slasher and it's a really good one, so that is all the setup you really need. All the miners and their women seem to be in their late 20s at the very least, though that doesn't stop the sheriff from referring to them as "bunch of kids" a few times. The main character is extremely obnoxious- he apparently just left one day to try to make it out in the city or whatever and failed miserably and now is back doing backbreaking mine work and just expects the girl he abandoned to come back to him, regardless of the fact that she has moved on to some other manly guy. So the first guy spends most of the movie sulking and finally starts a fight with the new boyfriend and gets totally wrecked, which was surprising and awesome.

There are two things that separate this from any other slasher from the early 80s. First, it is extremely brutal! I got to watch the uncut version and I was a little shocked. There is even some totally out of nowhere and unlikely Italian exploitation eyeball violence! Second, the small mining town setting is really interesting. The last part of the movie was shot in an actual mine and it's a really great location for a slasher movie final chase.

Overall a really great horror flick and well worth seeing if you've seen all the Friday the 13th movies and are looking for something around the same time, but really violent and from Canada.

Country Blue (1973)

2010-07-19T08:43:00.003-04:00

Bobby Lee Dixon has just been released from prison and after doing some accounting he figures there is no way he can, on his meager auto mechanic salary, escape brutal Southern life with his girlfriend Ruthie, especially considering she is married to a rich guy. So he does the only thing you can do in that situation- he gets an education and becomes an astronaut. Just kidding, he robs a bank and things go from bad to worse. Can Bobby Lee and Ruthie escape the mind-rending terror of the Country Blue?

Sadly there is no monster in this movie, just a bunch of poor people and one monkey in a cage in the middle of nowhere for no reason at all. Maybe the people shooting the last movie on the set they used here forget their monkey when they cleaned up.

It's not a bad way to waste ninety minutes, but it is basically what you'd expect. You get some nice nature photography of swamps and stuff and the movie doesn't really pick up until nearly the end where is suddenly gets really exploitative really suddenly, filled with shootouts and corrupt sweaty cops and tough as nails ladies.

The ending totally comes out of nowhere, so that is something to look forward to depending on how you feel about sudden twist endings. When it comes to drive-in fare like this, it only makes the movie better so I was cheering the whole way.

I couldn't find a poster for this (was it even released in the theaters?) so I made my own. Judging from this drawing, you might think the movie looks a little bit like Southern E.T. in a convertible. If so, mission accomplished.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

2010-07-18T23:06:00.002-04:00

Two plumbers, Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, jump into a parallel dimension (The Mushroom Kingdom, where everyone has evolved from dinosaurs instead of monkeys) to save Luigi's girlfriend Daisy. But they will have to contend with King Koopa (Dennis Hopper!!), who rules the Mushroom Kingdom with an iron fist and has plans to merge his dimension with the human Earth, thus taking over the world!

There's not much that can be said about this movie. It's a dark movie for kids who like Mario and dinosaurs, so of course all the hip gamer adults hate this because Mario doesn't hit blocks for coins and doesn't jump on a flagpole at the end of each scene, his height on the pole determining how many points are added to his score. So yes, this movie has very little to to with the painstakingly detailed mythos of Super Mario Brothers and if you are looking for a 100 minute film about your memories of playing Super Mario Bros. when you were eight years old, you should probably watch the end of The Wizard instead.

But here in cave of newtmonkey I don't review movies based on how close they are to video games. I review movies based on how violent they are, or how much exploitative nudity there is. In other words, the ideas they contain and what they say about the human condition.

Super Mario Bros. is interesting because of how dark and crazy the dystopia ruled by Koopa is. There is mucous-like fungus growing over everything, and society is slowly being driven insane, possibly by genetic deterioration. There are no resources left so everything is dirty and awful and all the cars are hooked into some kind of electric grid. The entire planet except for one small city is a barren wasteland. People eat bug sandwiches. I could go on and on. It's a pretty well-developed world, much more developed anyway than any of the Super Mario Bros. games.

So this could have stood up there with Return to Oz and The Neverending Story and The Goonies as a classic dark fantasy for kids that we in our 30s would all be flipping out for all the time in fits of nostalgia, except for the fact that they paced it for the video game generation. Scenes last mere seconds, just long enough to build up a quip-worthy situation. Mario and Luigi's relationship is just a means to deliver groan worthy sarcastic one-liners back and forth. It's never funny, just distressing.

On top of that, the ending sets us up for a sequel. I found it a little arrogant but in hindsight I could laugh while seeing what they were trying to do. Yeah, good luck with that guys. This movie will surely be a hit! Maybe in the dinosaur dimension.

Shaolin Deadly Kicks (1977)

2010-07-15T08:51:00.005-04:00

Eight guys (the "Dragons") steal a "treasure map" that looks kind of like a novelty chocolate bar and then split it up among them and go their separate ways, vowing to come together again when the time is right to claim the treasure. Unfortunately for them, super-kicky policeman Fong Yee is on the case and he definitely does not want these guys to get their treasure! So in other words, this is your typical police movie, if your typical police movie was one where the cop went anonymously around kicking people utterly to death unless they give him some treasure map.

This seems like a pretty good kung fu flick, but I don't really have the depth of experience yet to say for sure. It was certainly technically a lot better than Kung Fu Arts (even though there is no Uncle Monkey in this one), and the fight scenes were pretty excellent although there were some cases of ridiculous looking wire work acted in reverse and several of the fights were way too stop-and-go and overly choreographed for my tastes. But man, can that one guy kick really well!

The version I watched was of course dubbed in English and that made much of the movie hilarious so it was hard to take parts of it seriously. All the women sound like Beaker from the Muppets, and most of the guys end up sounding like guys from black and white gangster flicks, since they have to often breathlessly fill out long stretches of dialog. There is one absolutely hilarious part where one of the Dragons, who is living a quiet life of retirement with his young daughter, is trying to assassinate Fong Yee, but every time he pulls out his assassinatin' knife, no matter where he is, you hear his daughter shout out "FONG YEE! OH FONG YEE!" and she runs over and he has to go hide.

So between all of that kicking and the funny voices there is a lot to recommend about Shaolin Deadly Kicks! One of the better cheapo dubbed kung fu flicks I have seen.

*poster downloaded from kungfucinema .com

Army of Darkness (1993)

2010-07-15T08:14:00.004-04:00

At the end of Evil Dead II the hero, Ash, was pulled into some kind of time portal along with the monster he was trying to banish. He ends up back in the 14th century, surrounded by men of King Arthur (obviously not the King Arthur, since that guy- if he existed- lived and died centuries before this), who mistake him for a soldier of their sworn enemy, Henry the Red. Ash and Henry's men are chained up and sent to their deaths in a pit where Arthur keeps some zombies, but since Ash has developed godlike battle skills thanks to his hour of training he got back in the cabin in the previous movie he is able to pretty easily destroy the zombies and escape. People begin to trust him and he is told that there is a formula in the Necronomicon, the book of the dead, that can send him home. Not really concerned with anything other than going home, Ash heads off to retrieve the book!

Army of Darkness is a very entertaining movie. It's funny and ridiculous and has some very charming old-fashioned special effects, like adorable stop motion skeleton warriors and trick photography.

But what kind of movie is it exactly? It is the third Evil Dead movie, but shares little in common with either of the previous films. If anything, it feels a lot like an adventure or sword & sorcery movie. And not a particularly brutal one at that. It's certainly not scary. In fact, cut some scenes a little short and you could show this movie to children, who would definitely find the skeletons cool rather than creepy.

Stylistically, you won't see any of the amazing camerawork from the first movie in this one. Honestly, the movie looks a little cheap overall, which is surprising considering the budget this movie had compared with Evil Dead. Between the lack of violence/gores/scares and the somewhat cheap look, watching this movie often feels like watching a really good made-for-TV feature, which is a huge letdown considering how epic Evil Dead II felt.

Bruce Campbell's Ash is an interesting character, but as a character he is turned up to 11 this time around, and although most of the time he's hilarious, sometimes you feel like they were trying way too hard to make him into this kind of sarcastic superhero. I think the best version of this character was definitely from Evil Dead II, where he was played more subtly. The subtle humor mixed with the gross-out gore scenes hit the mark exactly and worked so well, so it's a bit of a shame that they had to go so over the top with Army of Darkness.

Make no mistake, it is a worthy sequel. It's just quite a step down from two excellent films and I couldn't help but feel let down by it. Some of the jokes fall flat and without the edge provided by the suspense and absolute terror from the first film, or the gross out gore gags from the second, I was left kind of feeling a little awkward about the whole movie.

Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)

2010-07-12T11:00:00.005-04:00

I've been tricked! Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is basically the same movie as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet but with some added scenes of Venusian women swimming and sitting on rocks.

A bunch of astronauts go to Venus to look for some other astronauts. Along the way they run into lizard monsters and a plant monster, but their robot, John, helps them out when he can. Until the robot complains about having to carry their worthless hides across the lava river and then they disable his circuits. Later on, the guy that made the robot feels bad about it but not for long because this other guy won't shut up about this noise they keep hearing and he is positive that it is a beautiful Venusian woman. One of the other guys brings up the more likely scenario that it is a space monster, but nothing will kill this guy's fantasy!

These are the most carefree astronauts ever. When they are not droning on and on endlessly about imaginary space babes, they are laughing off killer plant attacks, or dressing up in alien costumes to scare each other.

Whereas Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet leaves the decision of whether or not there are girls on Venus to the viewer, Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women has a bunch of hokey scenes of women that look exactly like human women and it sort of ruins the scene where one of the astronauts finds a plate with a carving of a human looking face on it, which is probably one of the best parts of Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. They also added a completely unnecessary but constant voice-over, which is almost like listening to a really boring commentary track. The guy will describe what he is doing on the screen in the most boring way possible:

Guy is swimming
"While swimming I encounted something."
Sea monster swims out from behing rock
"But it was just a harmless octopus."
Sea monster looks dejected and swims back behind the rock

The only purpose this movie serves, other than providing the hilarious voice overs, is to make you realize that Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet in hindsight is not so bad. And that is my review, of both movies.

Evil Dead II (1987)

2010-07-10T23:01:00.003-04:00

Evil Dead II is a remake/continuation of the first Evil Dead. The first twenty minutes or so summarize the first movie, and then the rest of the movie takes place directly after the events of Evil Dead.

Ash and his girlfriend Linda drive out to a deserted cabin in the woods for some peace and relaxation. Meanwhile, the daughter of the couple that owns the (now abandoned) cabin is on her way, meaning to help her father translate the Book of the Dead (a common enough family activity back then). Her boyfriend and a hillbilly couple are along for the help. But before that can happen, Ash plays a recording of the father speaking aloud verses from the book and suddenly there are demons all over the place!

The effects in this film are pretty amazing, from the fantastic introduction with a great stop-motion effect of the Book of the Dead writing itself overlayed across an image of a roaring sea of blood to the final battle with a giant demon head in the woods.

Also amazing is Bruce Campbell as Ash. It's almost like it's a different person playing Ash this time around! Every scene without Ash suffers in comparison.

However, although Evil Dead II is a much better film when it comes to effects and acting, it's not really scary at all. On top of that, the movie has pacing issues. Once the other characters arrive at the shack, the movie kind of drags and there are a couple of scenes where Ash is possessed and it just really doesn't work well. And there are too many scenes of people creeping over to doors to check out some noise. In a straight horror movie those scenes work to build suspense, but since Evil Dead II is more of a slapstick gore comedy they feel out of place and just end up killing the momentum.

Regardless of its status as a horror movie, Evil Dead II is a fantastic way to spend ninety minutes, assuming you don't mind a little bit of red karo syrup with your slapstick.

Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)

2010-07-10T10:13:00.003-04:00

A bunch of guys land on Venus for exploration, with their awesome robot. Like most cheap scifi flicks, they are attacked by plant monsters and lizard monsters for about seventy minutes and then they escape. But before escaping they find proof that the Venusians are humanlike (or at least were at some time) when they find a plate with a creepy carving of a human face on it.

The problem with this movie is that it is so slow. When the astronauts get to Venus it is pretty awesome- the surface of the planet looks relatively like the real thing (rocky and volcanic) and the only thing that causes modern man's sense of disbelief to crumble is that, well, people are walking around on Venus in these flimsy space suits. One guy gets a tear in his suit after fighting with some lizard men but this just kind of leaves him winded. 400+ °C will tend to do that to you. Oh, also there are lizard men.

So after an awesome ride on their robot across a lake of lava our heroes go home, without even really trying to investigate the singing voice they hear that just might be a woman! Or a monster. We will never know thanks to these cowards.

The part where they find the disc or whatever with the image of a human looking face carved in it is actually done pretty well and is even a little chilling. Just be prepared to go through what seems like an hour of boring talk on the spaceship before anything cool happens.

The Creeper (1977)

2010-07-08T11:13:00.005-04:00

A bunch of doctors get together in the woods to do some manly camping and fishing but what they do not know is that someone or something is stalking them! First, their boots are taken from them! And then they get picked off one by one. It doesn't take many words to summarize this movie. You could summarize any number of slashers from the 1970s and 1980s thusly, but The Creeper is a very special slasher.

First of all, the characters, while not likable, are interesting and interact with one another in a realistic way. These guys don't like each other so much as they tolerate one another, and the burden of dealing with a psychotic killer or killers in the woods stalking them only irritates this.

Second, they are all doctors and it is interesting how they react to the attacks. They generally know how to deal with injuries, but in a way this can often make things worse because instead of leaving someone to die, they will treat his wound and carry him along, making everyone an even bigger target.

Finally, the attacks are really subtle. This isn't "harpoon to the groin" kind of stuff Jason from Friday the 13th might pull. This is, steal all the boots leaving people unable to cover much ground, or throw a beehive into camp. It's really clever how they do this, because every step of the way you can imagine yourself in a similar situation. "What would I do if my buddy were to be caught by a bear trap while we were trying to escape from a psycho in the woods?" This is the kind of movie The Creeper is.

I think a big part of how scary you will find this movie is, how comfortable are you in the woods? I went camping with a friend only once in my life and I remember very clearly waking up in the middle of the night having to go to the bathroom and once I left the safety of the tent I was positive that a gang of crazy bears was watching my every move, waiting for me to slip up. Needless to say I was able to survive, but that is only because I was able to intimidate the bears with my cocky high school swagger. The guys in The Creeper, several years past high school, sadly cannot say the same.

Look, you can either appreciate the difference between a good movie where a bunch of people are stalked to death in the woods, and a bad one, or you can't. Possibly, this depends on how many "stalked-to-death in the woods" movies you have seen. But I am telling you that The Creeper is fantastic and if you can trust me- a simple man who just really enjoys a good film where people are stalked in the woods until all of them but one dies- then you should watch it too.

The Evil Dead (1981)

2010-07-08T09:40:00.005-04:00

Ash and his friends decide to stay at a cabin in the woods. Therein they find a sinister recording and a book bound in human flesh. They decide it would be a great idea to play the tape one night, which is a sort of audio journal of some guy who had stayed in the cabin previously, who had been researching the history of the book and how it was used in resurrecting demons. Unfortunately for Ash and crew, the man is fluent in demon language and reads aloud the demon summoning ritual from the book. Soon, friends start being possessed by demons and all hell breaks loose.

The Evil Dead is an amazing horror masterpiece written and directed by horror virtuoso Sam Raimi, now famous as the director of the Spiderman movies. The quality of the direction is frankly unbelievable. This is basically the second movie the guy had ever done, if you include the low budget and rarely-seen Within the Woods. I usually don't like to get into histories of people involved in the movies I review, but you need to understand that Sam Raimi, on his second attempt, made a movie that outclasses nearly every horror movie of its time. It is that good.

It is absolutely packed with memorable shots and scenes. I especially like the scene where Ash attempts to escape with Cheryl and they find the bridge to the town to have been uprooted by some unknown force, steel girders curling up like the fingers of some demonic hand. The scene was shot with both the car and the camera on a slope. So when Ash exits the car and then passes between the car and the camera it appears that he is walking at a 45-degree angle to the ground. It's a simple but amazing effect, but when you see it it really makes you feel uneasy. And then when Ash discovers that the bridge is no longer an option, the scene is framed so that all you see is him and Cheryl in the headlights of the car, surrounded by total darkness. And the movie is filled with these kinds of amazing shots.

The sound effects are equally impressive, from the deep rumbling noise the demon presence makes as it glides through the woods, to the horrific voices the characters speak in when they are possessed.

Unlike its sequel, The Evil Dead is pretty much a total horror film, with very little (if nothing) to laugh at. It's a little amusing how much abuse Ash has to put up with, but even then it is more gross than funny. It's an extremely violent and gory film, but that is all part of the ride and as far as I am concerned this film is a perfect horror movie.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

2010-07-06T08:30:00.005-04:00

Oh God, Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis are back again. Years have passed since the events of the previous film, and little Jamie has grown up and is now pregnant. In fact, we open the film with her giving birth in some basement in a hospital, begging the doctors not to take her baby. But they do. And then a kind nurse manages to get Jamie her baby. Jamie thanks her by running away and leaving the nurse to a horrible fate at the hands of Michael Myers, who is really angry now that he has a baby to worry about.

Later on we meet a bunch of awful people living in Michael's house, and living across from them is grown up and crazy Tommy Doyle, who was one of the little kids Laurie was babysitting during the first Halloween movie. Tommy has been obsessively researching the whole Michael Myers phenomenon, and has connected Michael with ancient druid lore and he starts explaining something about how the druids would curse one of their children with the mark of Thorn, and then that kid would grow up and kill his or her next of kin, saving the tribe from Dracula or something. Look, Tommy Doyle is obviously insane so it's up to you if you buy this druid nonsense.

The Man in Black from The Revenge of Michael Myers is back and you can look forward to his identity being revealed. And while all this is happening, Loomis is still around though sadly not nearly as out of control as he was in Halloween 5. He's just a little crazy in this one.

The whole druid/Thorn thing is pretty interesting but it really takes away from what made Michael Myers scary in the first place- he was just a kid that snapped for no reason and killed his sister and then came back ten years later or whatever and killed again. It's just not as scary when he's being controlled by draculas or druids or space leprechauns or whatever. Although one thing that is done well with Michael this time around is that he doesn't really do a lot of slow stalking. He's just really angry and you can see that in how brutal he is this time around. Michael has trouble with feelings, so he must express himself through the universal language of killing you with whatever tools he has within reach at the time, no matter how unlikely they might be as weapons.

There are a ton of stupid things going on in this movie, but apparently the movie had a rough production so it's understandable (but not forgivable!!). At one point the plot depends on Tommy tracking the location of a phone call he has recorded to a bus station, then following a trail of blood left from the phone booth in the station into the bathroom where he finds a loud crying baby hidden in a little cabinet, all in broad daylight at least a day after the incident occurred there. You mean no one but crack detective Tommy noticed the massive pool of blood on the floor of the public telephone booth in the bus station? And no one heard the loud baby in the bathroom?

So this is what we are dealing with, when we sit down to watch The Curse of Michael Myers, but it's okay. It's got the worst cast of any of the movies (though Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle is pretty cool, especially his reaction when he first meets Michael face to face in a hallway), but it sure looks good with some excellent colored lighting straight out of 1970s horror Italy. This is also definitely the goriest of all the Halloween movies.

I thought about this really carefully and I am fine with that. Halloweens 2 and 4 tried so hard to do the same thing as the excellent first movie, but they just couldn't manage it and ended up being extremely boring. Halloween 5 threw its hands up in the air and just started cracking jokes. And The Curse of Michael Myers doesn't try any of that, instead it's just a really violent, weird, and pretty decent looking slasher movie with light occult elements. I'd rank it the third best Halloween.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

2010-07-05T08:29:00.005-04:00

Michael Myers is back again! Halloween 5 takes place directly after the end of that miserable failure of a movie, Halloween 4. Michael's little niece Jamie has been rendered speechless after Michael somehow made her kill her foster mother using Halloween magic. Dr. Loomis is still around, and Jamie's adoptive big sister Rachel is also (momentarily) around to help out. There are some new annoying kids played by thirty-year-olds who have existed up until now merely to act as fodder for Michael to massacre so we can get a ninety-minute movie. Complicating all of this, Jamie has developed some kind of psychic bond with her uncle and can sort of track where he is going. And also there is some guy in a black trenchcoat following Michael around!

This is an amazing movie. It is definitely the second best in the series, behind the first movie. That's not saying much since parts two and four are absolute garbage, but seriously this is a great addition to the series.

First of all, it is absolutely hilarious. This was obviously meant as a black comedy. Loomis is an absolute madman this time around. When he is not sneaking into Jamie's hospital room multiple times to terrify her into using her psychic link to track Michael ("Today someone dug up a coffin of a nine-year-old girl, Jamie. Jamie, you're nine years old. What do you think he's going to do with that when he finds you?"), he is treating the local cops as the buffoons they are.

It even pokes fun at the ridiculous scene in the second movie where one guy is killed because he just happens to be wearing the same exact costume as Michael Myers!

Normally, I am not interested in horror films that exist solely to make fun of how all us losers like horror movies. Scream, for instance. Luckily, Halloween 5 is way better than that. First of all, it is a lot more subtle. The guy who wrote Scream felt like he had to include a character to actually explain to you how stupid horror movies are, since you are so dumb. And on top of that, it was no better than some garbage 80s slasher movie! In other words, they made a piece of trash 80s slasher, threw in a guy saying "you guys if you go in the basement alone you're gonna get killed," sat back with a cigar and called it a day. Little did they know that we had subtler, more intelligent slasher parodies like the masterful Halloween 5 or the seminal Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI.

And not only is Halloween 5 a hilarious masterwork of unrelenting comedy hijinx, it's also a really good horror flick! Instead of trying to stupidly ape the slow suspense of Halloween, like all the others did, Halloween 5 is quick and stylish, with plenty of attention paid to gorgeous shots and excellent use of color. It looks a lot like the beautiful Italian horror movies of the late 70s and early 80s, but manages to be compelling with very little blood or gore.

You really can't go wrong with this one. It certainly doesn't deserve the poor reputation it has.

Deep Red (1975)

2010-07-05T03:20:00.006-04:00

Music teacher Mark witnesses the murder of psychic Helga and decides that he needs to investigate this case on his own. Meanwhile, the killer goes around killing people. A character introduced out of nowhere ends up being the killer and there is an epic struggle at the end.

This movie is awful. I watched the censored American version, which omits twenty minutes of the most brutal violence, but even so is way too long with a running time of 100 minutes. Nothing happens in this movie! All I can remember about this movie is nearly 100 minutes straight of footage of Mark slowly walking in houses looking at things, punctuated with completely over the top and convoluted murder scenes.

There is simply nothing in this movie to merit a recommendation. The characters are dull, the dialog pointless, the pacing so slow that any attempt at suspense results in boredom. It doesn't even have the wonderful sense of color that Argento's Suspiria boasts. I really can't see how this movie is seen as a classic, when horror masterpieces like Martin and A Bell from Hell were being released around the same time (give or take a few years). Even trash like Scream Bloody Murder or Blood Freak is more entertaining than this poorly-paced film. And the title is dumb! Deep Red... you know, like blood and also like strawberries. And putting a doll on your poster isn't scary! Even if it is transcending the boundary between posters and reality and cutting the title on the poster to death. And also I hate your dog, movie, and your face is stupid!

A Bell from Hell (1973)

2010-07-05T00:44:00.005-04:00

A young man named John is released from a mental hospital, his doctor ordering him to report back every week or so for a check up. John burns his documents first chance he gets and heads home, where his vaguely sinister aunt Marta and three beautiful cousins are waiting. Apparently Aunt Marta had John committed to the mental hospital and it is up in the air whether or not he was actually crazy enough to merit this treatment, especially considering the fact that by doing so Aunt Marta has taken control of the family fortune that John was meant to inherit. Complicating things further, John has had some kind of intimate relationship with at least two of the cousins, and there is still some kind of lingering tension between them.

This is an amazing movie. First of all, although the title does not act as a concise plot summary ("John vs. his Aunt and Cousins" would have been a pretty cool title I think), it does show up on the screen with an image of said bell, and that is always worth bonus points in my book. If Halloween 4 opened with a shot of four calenders, all with October 31st circled in red... well, I'm not saying that would have made the movie any good, but it certainly wouldn't have hurt.

Second, this is an amazingly paced thriller that doesn't insult you by explaining everything and takes its time in developing the story it wants to tell. Roughly an hour goes by before you really even realize anything is going on, but the characters and atmosphere are all so captivating you won't care. You reach a certain point where you start to piece together what is going on and from that point on you are glued to the screen.

There is no black-and-white morality presented here. The script is very vague about whether or not John is really crazy. It is also vague regarding whether or not Aunt Marta was acting in John's best interests in having him committed. So basically it is up to you to figure out who to believe, and depending upon which side you choose this movie will turn into either a "crazy guy menacing a houseful of women" story or a "wronged guy getting his revenge" movie.

A Bell from Hell is really indicative of the very best that European horror from the 1970s had to offer. The atmosphere is phenomenal, the direction skilled, and the script clever and intelligent. Finding treasures like this is what watching horror movies is all about.

Scream Bloody Murder (1973)

2010-07-04T06:42:00.006-04:00

A young boy named Matthew watches his father doing some generic purposeless farm work. The boy slowly gets onto a tractor and- just when the timing is right!- he purposefully runs his dad over, leaving a broken, bloody ruin of a man that looks a lot like a mannequin. Then Matthew leaps off the tractor and seemingly against the laws of physics he manages to run over his own hand! In other words this kid is a psycho and also incompetent, and if that is not a recipe for hilarity I don't know what is.

Matthew is sent to a mental hospital, his hand replaced by a hook! Then one day adult Matthew receives a letter from his mother. Turns out she has met some guy named Mr. Parsons and is getting married! Matthew looks at the paper with hatred in his eyes. "...Mr. Parsons!"

Mr. Parsons is a great guy and is trying his hardest to bond with Matthew but Matthew will have none of that and the only bonding Parsons will be doing in the near future is the very special kind between his chest and an axe. Mom finds out and in the ensuing struggle she falls and hits her head on a rock, dying instantly. Matthew runs away, killing people as he goes, until he meets Vera who is a part time painter and part time prostitute... and who Matthew decides he must protect from all the men who want to touch her.

Scream Bloody Murder is a fine little exploitation shocker. Matthew is annoying as hell and every time he tries to talk to someone you just want him to shut up. This is a slasher from before the 80s, so not all the victims are instantly detestable which means you do feel bad for them when Matthew flips out on them. This is really a key point if you are trying to make a slasher but don't have the budget of a Friday the 13th or an A Nightmare on Elm Street. The latter Nightmare on Elm Street films can get away with annoying characters because they are primarily special effects flicks. Scream Bloody Murder was made for less than I spent on my dinner last night, so having sympathetic characters helps a lot.

Scream Bloody Murder is unfortunately not an Italian gore movie from the 70s, so it doesn't really have any really crazy stuff in it. Though at one point towards the end Matthew develops teleportation powers! He corners a woman in a room upstairs and she escapes, makes a mad dash for the front door, but when she opens it Matthew is there waiting for her outside the house. I guess coming from the guy who managed to fall backwards off a tractor, landing in front of the tractor so his arm could get run over, this is not too surprising. If only you had used your powers and your claw for good, Matthew!

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

2010-07-04T03:06:00.002-04:00

Michael Myers is back, and with Laurie Strode mysteriously out of the picture you have to wonder what he is going to do for the next ninety minutes.

Well, Halloween II explained to us that Michael was after Laurie because she was his sister and this movie expands that to Michael being after all his relatives and it turns out Laurie had a little girl, so Michael knows what he has to do.

While being transferred from one mental hospital to another Michael overhears a doctor mentioning that Michael has got a niece somewhere out there and upon hearing this immediately kills that guy. It's really hilarious, I am talking immediately as in the second the guy says "blah blah niece" Michael flexes his hand and then before you know it his is driving his thumb into the guy's forehead! I guess Michael just really hates his family.

Michael heads back to Haddonfield to take out his little niece Jamie, and while he is expertly tracking her everywhere (regardless of the fact that in Halloween II he was shot in both eyes, then exploded, and then left to burn to death) it just so happens that there are a bunch of people around for him to murder graphically. Following Michael around is Dr. Loomis again, who survived the same gas-filled room explosion Michael lived through. Loomis is definitely feeling the effects of living through a massive fiery explosion- he sort of limps sometimes, and has a little patch of scar tissue on his right cheek.

As much as Halloween II was a huge step down from Halloween, Halloween 4 is even more a step down down the ladder of Halloween movies. There's just nothing much you can say about Michael Myers, and every time they try to fill in his background a little or give him a clearer reason to kill people it just ends up taking away from what made him an interesting villain in the first place (and consequently what made the first movie so good).

In the first movie, you cared about Laurie and her friends because they all seemed like good kids. Nearly every character in this movie is annoying and the dialog sounds like it was written by adults who have forgotten how they acted and talked when they were kids. At one point Jamie is bullied by some other little kids and she runs outside, rests against a tree and tells herself, "you're gonna be alright, you're gonna be alright." I don't think I've ever seen an adult say this, never mind an eleven-year-old kid. That's because people don't speak like this! It's movie dialog nonsense.

There is really nothing to recommend about this movie. Like Halloween II it trades the suspense and wonderful direction of the first movie with gory deaths and pointless background information. Just even more so.

Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators (1964)

2010-07-01T03:21:00.003-04:00

A bunch of gladiators, led by Rocca, are kicked out of the arena for arguing with their boss when some other troupe of gladiators is forced to kill each other even though they are all friends! Wandering around, they come upon a young lady being threatened by some goons and Rocca leaps into battle to save her. It turns out she (Deliah) is the daughter of Senator Varro, who welcomes the gladiators into his home in return for saving Deliah.

Shortly after, Varro mentions that his slave, Spartacus, has escaped and is preparing some kind of slave revolt and wonders if Rocca and his men might take care of things for them. They do, and of course they end up befriending Spartacus and his crew once they are told how irredeemably evil Varro is.

This turned out to be a pretty entertaining gladiator flick. Like most movies of this kind, the good guys are totally good in every way and the bad guys are totally despicable human beings. For an obviously low budget movie some of the battle scenes are pretty epic in size and the choreography is nice.

I think the most interesting thing about this movie is that while it deals with a bunch of guys who have no rights whatsoever and are forced to kill each other in battle in order to entertain a bunch of monsters, this movie is really lighthearted. While watching it, there were plenty of times that I forgot I was watching a movie about the cruelty of humanity, and instead it was about a bunch of beefy guys in short shorts horsing around. These are your new breed of fun-loving happy-go-lucky slave gladiators. Instead of screaming a lot and delivering dramatic speeches about how they will never fall to the combined might of all of Rome, these are the kinds of guys that will punch a soldier on the side of the head (doesn't matter that he is wearing a helmet), and then place his body on a pile of other soldiers and just laugh and laugh. If this movie came out in the 80s, I think they would then exchange high-fives.

So if you are in the mood to watch a movie about a bunch of gladiators who are just so happy they gotta smile, I think you could do no better than Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators!

Halloween II (1981)

2010-07-01T02:41:00.004-04:00

Michael Myers, Laurie Strode, and Dr. Loomis are back in this gory but boring followup to the amazing Halloween. The film picks up right where the first ended, complete with a quick recap of that last few moments of the first film. Loomis shoots Michael a bunch of times, causing Michael to plummet from a balcony, seemingly to his death. Loomis runs outside to investigate but by the time he gets to the spot where Michael fell, the body is nowhere in sight! Laurie is taken to a local hospital so she can recover. Pretty soon, Michael shows up to finish what he started.

This is really a movie that should never have been made. It tries to have it both ways- it apes the style of the first movie, but there are a bunch of gory death scenes throughout, possibly inserted in order to compete with the increasingly gory horror movies released since Halloween. Surprisingly, the movie was written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill (who wrote the first movie) but this film is so lifeless and dull that it definitely came as a shock to me to find this out. Rumor has it that the gore scenes were shot and inserted by Carpenter himself after filming had finished. If this is true, it's very disappointing. Luckily, Carpenter went on to do some fantastic movies after this unfortunate debacle.

The suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy this movie is probably impossible or at least dangerous to maintain throughout the running time. There is one part where you see Michael kind of just walking around doing his thing and then Loomis sees him and starts waving his gun around wildly, which cause Michael to go stand in the street, patiently waiting for a speeding cop car to come out of nowhere, slam into him, drag him into an ambulance that is just kind of parked in the middle of the street, causing the ambulance to explode! It's only a few minutes into the movie so you know something is up and sure enough it turns out it was just some kid dressed exactly as Michael Myers.

This was meant as the end of the whole Michael Myers/Laurie Strode saga, and maybe with that in mind the ending could have at the time seemed triumphant and awesome, but in hindsight, you realize that both Michael and Loomis have survived their final battle- wherein Michael is shot point black in both eyes blinding him and then Loomis fills a room with gas and lights the room up exploding everything in it, Michael completely engulfed in flames to the point where you can see that his head is burning through his mask!- to go on to do multiple sequels. And that is just ridiculous, no one could have survived that explosion! And Michael is obviously blinded, he does that thing blinded people do in movies, where he is blindly swinging his scalpel in front on him even though no one is there. And yet in the next movie, he is going around hunting people like the Predator.

It's hard to recommend this movie considering how it compares with the previous one, but it is still better than your typical slasher.

Hercules and the Masker Rider (1963)

2010-07-01T00:42:00.003-04:00

Don Juan comes back home a war hero only to find that his girlfriend/cousin Blanca is to marry the evil Don Ramiro in order to stop a war between Ramiro and her father, Don Francisco. Juan and Blanca decide to elope and are caught and Juan is banished from the land! He ends up getting mixed up with some crazy gypsies, and among the gypsies walks Hercules!

The best thing about this movie is that they don't explain why Hercules is there. Did he travel forward through time, arriving in 16th century Spain? Is he just some guy named Hercules (a very common name in Spain, back then)? The film doesn't tell you and you are left to decide on your own; the hallmark of a good film.

So I thought Don Juan would become Zorro or something, but he looks as much like Zorro as he does the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet or any guy whose costume is just whatever he was wearing that day with a tiny mask over his eyes. But he does ride around and get into a lot of sword fights and even cuts one guys pants, causing them to fall down, comically exposing his hilarious olde tyme underwear.

This is pretty much your typical Italian Hercules muscleman movie. The bad guy is totally evil and cowardly and the good guys are so good they won't even kill guys that are trying to kill them. The problem is there isn't much of anything going on in this movie and even the constant fight scenes are pretty boring and do nothing to keep your interest.

This is the first movie in the Warriors 50-movie set and I am hoping it is just a poor choice because I don't think I can take forty-nine more of these!

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973)

2010-06-30T04:46:00.007-04:00

As far as I am concerned, this movie started out with two strikes against it. First, it's a vampire movie and I hate vampire movies (with one exception). Especially Dracula vampire movies. Second, this is a movie from famous British studio Hammer Film Productions, and I am not a fan of their movies at all.

A bunch of old guys have set up some kind of Dracula cult, of which most of the members are young 70s guys in fur jackets, riding motorcycles. We begin the movie with this one guy waking up in the cult headquarters and he makes a daring escape, winding up back at some kind of 1970s British X-Files organization, where he has just enough time to pass over his information before dying.

It turns out that a bunch of VIPs, ranging from politicians to rich guys, are trying to revive Dracula so they will have even more power. It is up to a bunch of secret agents and also Professor Van Helsing to fix all of this!

Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride was originally titled The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but you know how we Americans are with our intense fear of satanic rites. It's too bad, because there are a lot of satanic rites in this film(the vampire bride is kind of an afterthought at the end of the movie) and I'm a big fan of movie titles that are honest, and also serve as concise plot summaries. They should have called this Dracula 1974... this would have been awesome because this movie is the sequel to a movie called Dracula AD 1972!

Sadly, this is not the Dracula movie that is going to win me over. It's boring and filled with your typical hissing vampires and even the cult aspect is not interesting. I will hand it to Hammer though, they are really good at making excellent looking films on low budgets. But then again, what kind of budget do you need for a vampire picture? Just throw a cape on a guy and tell him to hiss at everything. Most of your money is going to go towards getting those blood capsules so your vampire can bite people and syrupy blood can trickle out.

I've heard that Dracula AD 1972 is pretty excellent in how ridiculous it is, but this movie has none of that (maybe they decided to rein it in a bit this time), so I really can't recommend it unless you just really are in love with the concept of Dracula being resurrected and glaring at people.

Halloween (1978)

2010-06-30T02:49:00.005-04:00

Halloween opens with a point of view sequence, where we follow a young woman up into her bedroom and then stab her to death. We run outside and there are the girl's parents, who unmask us... the camera pulls away and the murderer is a little kid, named Michael Myers! The murder victim: his big sister, Judith!

Years later we find that the kid has been institutionalized, under supervision of Dr. Loomis, who is desperate to not let Michael out onto the streets. According to Loomis Michael has spent the last fifteen years in a catatonic state so I don't even understand why he is concerned... do they routinely let psycho killers out who have spent the last fifteen years staring at a wall ("looking past the wall" as Loomis dramatically explains to anyone who will listen)? Anyway, Michael obviously manages to escape, or there wouldn't really be a movie would there? So Michael goes home on Halloween night, as prophesied in the movie poster, and he just really has this urge to kill a bunch of babysitters.

Everyone who knows anything about horror movies knows about this movie and realizes that this is a classic of the genre. I've watched it many times, and this last time I decided to try to figure out why this movie in particular is lauded, while something like Friday the 13th or Nailgun Massacre is seen as exploitative trash.

It's a difficult question to answer. Halloween is a formulaic slasher, but it basically created the sub genre so we can't hold that against it. But the fact of the matter is I have probably seen Halloween six times in my life, and the sixth time I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time, perhaps even more. Whereas with something like A Nightmare on Elm Street, every time I watch it I hate it a little more.

Slashers are generally slow movies, with lots of suspense building, jump scares, false starts, red herrings, and what have you. The suspense works because you don't know what to expect... so your second time through the movie, the suspense building is just kind of annoying. But Halloween works because it has so much to show you. The photography is fantastic and whereas with lesser slashers you would be fast forwarding through all the slow parts, with Halloween no matter how many times you watch this thing the wonderful photography, the masterful direction, it all draws your interest. The sixth time I watched this movie I had a book with me assuming that I would want something to do during the slow parts, but I could not tear my eyes away from the screen.

The characters are all interesting and likable, and the dialog (for the most part) sounds natural and you have to wonder how much of it was written beforehand (apparently all of it), and how much was made up on the spot (apparently none of it). The girls all give you the impression that they are friends, and it almost doesn't matter that they are all 20 year olds pretending to be high school girls. Unfortunately there aren't just 20 year old high school girls in this movie. Dr. Loomis and the sheriff have some outrageously corny lines to deliver, and no matter how talented they are there is no way to say, "DEATH... has come to your little town, sheriff" and not sound ridiculous.

But the good overwhelmingly outweighs the bad, and I would happily watch this movie a seventh time.

Martin (1977)

2010-06-29T10:13:00.005-04:00

I hate vampire movies. They aren't scary, they aren't cool, and the whole concept is boring. Vampires are like sexy zombies that aren't gross and violent. I just can't get behind that. I want my monsters to be hideous. Lacking that, I want my villains to be extremely violent, leaving hallways full of gore behind them as they pursue that one last girl.

However, every time I watch Martin, I can't help but to be impressed with it. This was George Romero's first horror movie after the classic The Night of the Living Dead, and it is absolutely amazing.

We open with a train speeding through the night. A young boy sneaks into some woman's cabin, holding a kit complete with syringes and other things. He bursts in to find her in the restroom. Waiting patiently by the door, he strikes the minute she steps into the room, injecting her with something. "I won't hurt you. It's so you'll fall asleep. So you won't feel anything!" he explains, though she is of course panicking. They struggle and she eventually succumbs to the drug, whereupon the young man slits her wrists with a razor and starts drinking her blood. This young man is Martin and he may be a vampire.

Martin has been sent to Philadelphia to live with his insane cousin Cuda, who upon meeting the young boy tells him, "I will save your soul. Then I will destroy you." Interestingly, while Cuda is an old man Martin appears to be extremely young- under twenty definitely. At first you will think, "that makes no sense" but trust me, it will be explained to you later.

Cuda escorts Martin from the train, hissing "nosferatu" at him. When they arrive home, Martin meets cousin Christina, who is in some kind of unhappy relationship with Arthur, who due to the poor economy in the area is unable to pursue his dream of becoming an auto mechanic. Cuda has set up his house with all the traditional anti-vampire stuff: crosses, garlic, what have you. None of it has any effect of Martin, who at one point corners a cowering Cuda in his bedroom, takes a dramatic bite of garlic and spits out, "There is no magic."

Cuda continues to antagonize Martin, while Martin is content to adjust to his new neighborhood. He works in Cuda's shop delivering groceries, and eventually meets up with lonely housewife Ms. Santini, who is really lonely. It turns out there are a lot of lonely housewives in this neighborhood, and the interesting thing is that this is not just a means to provide Martin with victims. A decent portion of the script concerns how the economy has ruined the neighborhood and sometimes it feels like all the vampire stuff is secondary to this. In fact, Romero spends a lot of his time behind the camera showing us slow shots of various run down buildings. The town is as much a character in this as Martin or Cuda is.

So this is a really fascinating movie. I find it a little hard to review, first of all because it is so good, and second of all because in my reviews if I mention the name of a movie I bold it and this is really strenuous since the title of the movie is also the name of the main character. There aren't any stupid lines to make fun of, and there aren't really any plot holes to point out. If I really want to be mean I could mention how the flashbacks that Martin experiences seem pretty cheesy, but they have their reason for being in the movie.

Martin is a fantastic horror film that is not afraid of taking its time to show you what it wants you to see, and on top of that you get an amazing ending that comes at you suddenly, but you definitely won't feel cheated or tricked. The best vampire movie I have ever seen.

Werewolf Woman (1976)

2010-06-27T21:03:00.006-04:00

A young woman, driven crazy by being molested as a child (described in this movie as "an unfortunate incident"), thinks she is a werewolf and goes around, guys trying to force themselves on her absolutely everywhere, and then she bites those guys to death. You read this summary and immediately you think, "this must be an Italian movie from the 70s" and you would be right.

This movie starts out pretty interesting, with that fantastic overacting and poor dubbing and fountains of blood you'd expect from a movie of this caliber, but then all the sadistic sexual stuff enters the picture and you basically just have a totally sleazy exploitation movie for the rest of the running time. It's really bad. And, being an exploitation movie, the intent is not to explore the effects of sexual violence, the intent is to show it all in a way to excite the audience. So if you think a woman being attacked by literally every man (and one woman!) she runs across is exciting, this is the movie for you.

Medusa (1973)

2010-06-27T20:42:00.005-04:00

We begin Medusa with Jeff (played by George Hamilton), playboy heir to a massive fortune, laying dead on a bed in a boat with some lady. In disembodied voice form, he tells us he died three days ago and now he is going to review the mistakes he made in his life. Any movie that starts like this is pretty much destined to be terrible.

The first mistake Jeff feels like reviewing is crashing his sister Sarah's wedding (by the way, it turns out the woman he was laying in bed with was his sister). He's dressed as Elvis and is drunk and this is basically the start of Hamilton's embarrassing mugging and hammy acting. Jeff is supposed to be crazy and carefree and so Hamilton portrays this by basically doing totally random things mixed with horrible impersonations of celebrities, delivering lines of dialogue that completely fall flat. Every single thing this guys says and does is gonna make you want to punch him.

It turns out that Jeff and Sarah may or may have not been cut out from the latest will of their dead father, and since they need that money, something has to be done. Sarah is just used to living the high life, but Jeff owes money to a mobster, Angelo, who borrowed the money from the mob. Meanwhile, there is a hilarious and creepy police detective piecing this all together. He's this really hairy balding Greek guy with the kind of mustache that only grew back in the 70s. And he says things like, "I am like a spider, or a flame. I wait for my prey to come to me." And then he walks backwards, disappearing into the darkness. I think he might be Dracula.

So all this is happening and it's a little hard to follow along because first of all the film is so dark and it's hard to see who people are or what they are doing, and second of all you have the constant distraction of Jeff all over Greece for the entirety of the movie. At one point tries to pick up a girl by introducing his dog to her with this unbearably hot pickup line gem: "It's Part Cocker Spaniel and Part Poodle. Some Call It a Cockerpoo...I Call It a Spadoodle." It works.

Anyway, as it turns out, Jeff and Sarah have had or are having some kind of intimate relationship but the movie would be exactly the same if she was just some girl he used to date but then she got married to some guy, yet they are still in love. So obviously that was just thrown in to give the movie some kind of sleazy edge, which I guess works. But you already know how it ends (they die), since the movie opens with them dead, so what's the point?

Don't Go in the Woods (1980)

2010-06-24T21:41:00.005-04:00

I have a quest. I must see all the horror movies that begin with "Don't..." What can I say, I like being told what not to do. Don't Go in the Woods. Don't Go in the House. Don't Look Now. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Is there anything I can do, horror movies?

A bunch of people ignore the helpful advice the movie has given them, and they go into the woods. Then, a lot of them are savagely murdered by a maniac. End credits. Unlike Memorial Valley Massacre, the characters in this movie are not outrageous personifications of all that is awful about mankind. This is both a blessing and a curse. Since they aren't particularly awful, you feel bad about them getting killed which I guess is the point of the horror film. On the other hand, watching nasty people getting killed by maniacs is so fun. So while Don't Go in the Woods is definitely creepier than Memorial Valley Massacre, I can barely remember any of the characters since they are so bland and normal. Some characters are introduced solely to have them murdered seconds later. It is madness.

The murders are brutal and actually pretty scary. There is one scene with a girl trapped in a sleeping bag hanging from a tree and she just has this tiny hole in the sleeping bag through which she can see and then the maniac shows up to attack! It's filmed very well. There is also an awesome trap out of nowhere that gets sprung and I was cheering.

There are quite a few things that set Don't Go in the Woods apart from other slashers. First of all is the soundtrack. It's really effective and creepy and is kind reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange (really). The music is all synthesizer stuff but goes well with the dreamlike atmosphere of the movie.

That's the second interesting thing about this movie. It's so dreamlike and even for a slasher it has so little story. Totally unrelated things just happen to a bunch of people and yeah there are some police around and of course we've got a fat sheriff but the police do absolutely nothing. They don't even try! They just show up in one scene, play some pinball at the bar, and you don't see them until the end of the movie when everything has been already taken care of.

Finally, the nature photography in this film is wonderful. I couldn't get enough of it. If you check out the director online, it turns out he did some work for National Geographic, and it shows.

Unfortunately, while the first forty minutes of this movie are amazing, you get a dry spell for another half an hour and that thirty-minute dry part is really boring. It's definitely worth fighting to stay awake though, because it picks up again during that last ten minutes. Besides what else have you got going on in your life?

Memorial Valley Massacre (1988)

2010-06-24T21:15:00.003-04:00

A bunch of annoying people gather to go camping at a site in Memorial Valley, which has just opened. Unfortunately, the construction is way behind schedule and there is no running water and a bunch of other problems so it is not a fit site for camping, but the slimy owner of the site forces George, the head ranger, to open the camp up regardless because he has a lot of money riding on this project! And then the owner's son shows up for work and George is not happy at all. And...little do they know... there is a caveman, too!

So basically what we have here is Jaws, on a campsite, with a caveman. In other words, a high concept movie. When the writers of this script sold the idea to the producer or whatever, they probably used this exact phrasing to describe it. The poster even rips off the tag line from the Jaws 2 poster!

It takes a little while for the caveman to start killing people. Until then we have to put up with a bunch of awful people:

Bikers: Three bikers and their women, all of whom are totally uncool and past their prime. At one point the head biker is like "I'm just no fit to lead this pack anymore man" and all the rest of the gang gather around him and are like "no, don't say that!" I guess this is the new breed of sensitive biker, the kind that fishes for compliments and enjoys the loving support of his pack.

Awful Family: This family is just nasty all around and it takes way too long for them to die. The kid is this fat manboy who is into petty crime and really enjoys riding his ATV. Cavemen don't like ATVs by the way. They think they are dragons or something.

Teenagers: Two guys and their girlfriend. They are nasty to everyone for no reason and totally out of control! There is a part where they all have a huge party in the rain under a tarp and she just really has to dance! And she does a laughable sexy dance in the rain in her tight T-shirt and oh man the late 80s.

The Couple in the RV: Their plan is to sit in their RV all weekend and watch VHS tapes while drinking whiskey and eating steak. These are my kind of campers.

Love Interest: She's not pure evil like every other character, and only kind of nasty to people being nice to her. So you know she's gonna be okay.

Like most slashers in the 80s, you are watching this to see awful, nasty people getting butchered by a maniac. The characters in this movie are indeed horrible people, but the maniac is pretty lame. He's not even the good kind of caveman (the kind that thaws out after millions of years and looks like a gorilla)! Actually, he's not even a caveman at all! He turns out to just be some kid that got left in the woods and grew up feral and lives in a cave. Hm. So I guess that does technically make him a caveman.

But regardless of his status as a caveman, he just isn't very brutal. Most of the time he just breaks necks. Come on. He does set a bunch of traps all over the place, most of which are awesome spike pits, but nothing like the amazing trap masterpiece in slasher Don't Go in the Woods! However, I wouldn't expect a mere caveman to engineer such a trap, so I'll let it pass.

The Beyond (1981)

2010-06-24T04:29:00.007-04:00

Widely seen as Lucio Fulci's horror masterpiece, The Beyond begins long ago- so long ago the video is sepia-toned- with a man named Schweick staying in a hotel in Lousiana, painting some weird painting. A mob of people storm the hotel and before you know it they murder him. And I mean, murder him. It's almost ridiculous. They beat him nearly to death with giant chains. Then nail him to the wall. Then dump acid all over him. Why didn't they then cremate the remains and then dump the ashes in the ocean and then blow up the ocean, just to make sure? Well, I guess they just aren't that mean.

We then travel through time to the present day, and here we meet Liza, who has inherited this hotel. Having failed to settle into a comfortable career back in NYC, this hotel is basically her last chance, she tells us, regardless of the fact that she is young and healthy and could go work in an office or go back to school or anything really. But when life hands you old hotels, you turn them into renovated hotels and hopefully get rich. And if not, I guess you just give up because there's nothing you can do.

One by one all the people she has helping her out start dying increasingly hideous deaths. One guy falls off the roof. The next guy has his face torn apart by a zombie. Another guy gets slowly eaten to death by tarantulas. I felt like there should have been a death a little less out there between the roof and the zombie, because the vast gulf of horror between "roof" and "zombie" is a little too much. You gotta do these things more gradually.

In the meantime Liza meets the ruggedly handsome John, who is a doctor at the town hospital. Nothing really happens with them. He's just there to run around shooting the zombies that are destined to appear in a movie like this, since you know, Liza is a girl and also this is an Italian movie, so she is just going to be grabbing her head and shrieking once all hell breaks loose. His secondary function is to tell Liza over and over how crazy she is when she tries to tell him all the weird stuff that is happening. Italian guys in the 80s, those kooks.

The Beyond has very little of what might be called a plot. It's more of a bunch of special effect extravaganza death scenes linked with spooky haunted house stuff. What sets this film apart from, say, A Nightmare of Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, is that The Beyond is gorgeously shot. There are so many scenes where the composition of the screen is so striking you will never forget them, like the scene where Liza meets the creepy blind girl Emily and her dog for the first time.

Another great thing about this movie is that from the minute bad things start happening until the end, it does not let up. There aren't really any jump scares or drawn out suspense scenes. The pacing is so quick that you have no time to breathe and it's like an hour long nightmare. I can't think of higher praise.

Death Rage (1976)

2010-06-23T20:54:00.002-04:00

"Keep your mind on what you're doing. Not on what you've done."
-Peter Marciani

This is a quote from Italian crime thriller Death Rage. It is a quote that I retroactively have lived by, except I also don't keep my mind on what I will be doing in the future. Lots of times I also don't worry too much about what I am doing currently. So this movie really resonated with me.

Death Rage opens with scene after scene of guys getting assassinated. Your hear a shot, a guy's hand leaps to his gut, his face scrunches up, and he falls. One of these assassinations takes place at a horse racing track, and the guy that was killed had a deal to split his winnings with Angelo, a young guy who desperately wants to get involved with organized crime. He sneaks into police headquarters. He hangs out with strippers. Then he ends up meeting with Marciani, retired hit man for the mob played by legendary original bald badass guy, Yul Brynner.

Marciani is having bloody visions of his brother getting murdered, rendered with a cool overlay effect of blood running down the screen over a still image of his brother's face. I probably don't have to tell you that Marciani will have to come out of retirement just this one last time.

Angelo is trying everything he can to convince Marciani to be his buddy, but Marciani isn't interested. He fixes a horse race in Marciani's favor. He tries to convince his stripper friend Anny to sleep with Marciani, but she is having none of that. Then she meets Marciani at the strip club and falls in love and ends up sleeping with him anyway. And then Marciani allows Angelo to be his assistant hitman, so I guess it all works out.

The direction is not particularly stylish or anything, but it gets the job done. At its heart, Death Rage is a movie about a kid who wants to be a toughguy hitman, gets a taste, is appalled, but then ends up getting into it anyway. I love how carefree and irresponsible the messages are in this movie. Crime life may seem glamorous and awesome but it's really awful and killing people is a horrible thing, but god damn it hitmen are awesome!! And whatever you do, don't think about what you've done, only about what you're doing!

Of course Yul Brynner is awesome. He's old but awesome and all the best quotes come from him, the best of which is his reaction to Angelo's pathetic whining about how killing guys is horrifying: "You don't hate it. You don't even kill it, because it's been dead ever since you took the contract." That Yul Brynner, so crazy.

Overall this is a very entertaining movie, but what is it doing in my Chilling Classics set? There is nothing chilling about this movie.

Sweet Home (1989)

2010-06-23T06:09:00.008-04:00

Sweet Home is a long-lost Japanese splatter horror masterpiece released in 1989, with amazing special effects by Dick Smith, who is the guy that did the makeup for The Exorcist.

A bunch of people go to an old deserted mansion in the woods to film a documentary about some paintings the previous owner of the mansion made:

Kazuo: The producer of the documentary. He has brought his daughter Emi with him. He kind of looks like Japanese Jackie Gleason but sadly does not threaten to punch any people to the moon. His wife is dead and while he isn't looking for a new one, Emi is desperate for a new mom.
Akiko: The director. She has feelings for Kazuo but can't admit it.
Emi: Kazuo's awful daughter, tagging along with her dad on her summer vacation. She spends most of her time fawning over Akiko and asking her to become her mom. She is supposed to be a young schoolgirl, but in real life the actress playing her is 26 years old and looks like it, which makes her scenes with Akiko sort of creepy. It would be like me walking up to some 45 year old guy and begging him to be my daddy.
Ryo: The cameraman. He's annoying enough that you don't mind when he dies horribly.
Asuka: The "reporter" who will be presenting the documentary. She goes around acting like a prima donna, so you can probably tell ahead of time what is gonna happen to her.

They all arrive at the mansion, find the paintings and start filming but pretty soon Asuka goes crazy and digs up some old dead baby from out in the yard. Everyone knows that when you find one of those, well, you treasure it like the... er... treasure that it is. And so she does, which makes everyone else pretty uncomfortable.

This crazy old guy down at the gas station ends up telling Akiko that the spirit of Madam Mamiya, who lost her baby to a fire, is haunting the mansion so they should all get out of there. Of course they don't, and before you know it Emi is running around going, "Mom... is that you?" at every shadow she sees, like girls do in these kinds of movies.

I can't describe how much this bothers me when it happens in horror movies. Some lady will be exploring a hidden cave underneath the ocean and then the sea monster will take the form of her favorite uncle who died in a freak accident where he fell into a vat of acid and then the acid vat exploded and then the building the vat was in burned down in flames thirty years ago and she will be like, "Uncle Bob! Is that you???"

But the good thing is that after this Emi is pretty much gone until the end of the movie, so we can get on with watching people getting dissolved to death by evil ghost shadows which is where this movie excels.

So the special effects are amazing, it's genuinely scary, the acting (with the exception of Emi) is fine, and at just over 90 minutes the pacing is perfect. So why is this movie so rare? It is because it is a cursed movie and if you watch it you will die in seven days! Just kidding. It's because immediately after it was released on VHS and LD the director sued the studio and so now the rights are all over the place and I guess the movie will never be officially released again. Now we have to watch bootlegs, so thanks a lot, guy that directed this movie.

Kung Fu Arts (1980)

2010-06-22T09:15:00.004-04:00

Sadly the picture is cropped and this masterpiece of Chinese cinema loses a lot of its impact. Curse you $20 50 Martial Arts Movies DVD set!!!

King Chi, loyal General of the Emperor of China, seemingly attempts to assassinate the Emperor, but in the confusion ends up throwing a poison dart at the Princess, who he was in love with! She only has three days to live and none of the imperial doctors have a cure, so the call goes out: anyone who can cure the Princess can have her hand in marriage!

And then this chimpanzee shows up and everyone is chasing him, and the chimp is holding some medicine and it dawns on me: the chimp is gonna save the princess and marry her! The monkey does indeed cure her, so she has to marry him and she makes a big scene, but the Emperor is a man of his word and soon they are making preparations for the ceremony. Of course, the Emperor is grief-striken and cannot bear the the thought of his daughter being married to a monkey so he does the only thing he can. He decides to put her and the monkey adrift in a boat, where they will surely be eaten to death by sharks.

Commander Pai is made successor to the throne, Commander-in-Chief of all China, and then what a coincidence, the Emperor is killed. Pai blames King Chi, and if King Chi were not already in big trouble for the whole Princess thing, he surely would be now! Some time later, we find that the Princess and her monkey made it safely to an island, where they are living a happily married life together, and Princess is even pregnant!

So the movie could go pretty much anywhere from here. King Chi is still alive, but on the lam. Emperor Pai is really suspicious. Princess is surely about to give birth to a half-human, half-monkey monstrosity. And there is gonna be Kung Fu in this movie, trust me! It just takes a while to get to it.

This is one entertaining Kung Fu movie. You can take nearly any movie, add a chimpanzee to it, and it will end up hilarious. But the combination of poor dubbing, Kung Fu, and a chimpanzee is probably as good as it gets when it comes to simian cinema. If that's not a recommendation I don't know what is.

The New Barbarians (1982)

2010-06-21T09:08:00.008-04:00

It is the year 2019. The world is a wasteland, with warriors... barbarian warriors the likes of which you've never seen, since they are so new.

The entire world has been reduced to a couple of groups of people and some guys that are just kind of wandering around. On the one side you have some religious settlers. On the other: the Templars, a gang of fanatics ruled by One (that's his name!) who believe that humanity was fated to die off during the nuclear apocalypse but somehow this group of worthless settlers (and the Templars) cheated death and so it is up to the Templars to kill them (the settlers).

You also have Scorpion, a former Templar who gave up his fanatic ways to spend more time with his awesome car; Nadir, a madman with a bow that shoots explosive arrows; and some annoying kid to fix all their stuff.

Scorpion ends up crossing paths with the Templars and One is really unhappy about that and when they finally get Scorpion in their dirty little fanatic hands, let's just say that the punishment he receives is probably the last thing you would think it would be.

So I probably don't have to say any more than this to convince you of the absolute quality of this film. It is not only compelling but also mesmerizing and fascinating and amazing. The best parts of this movie will leave you with your mouth wide open, as all your cinematic expectations are broken down, dragged across the wasteland behind a future car, left bleeding on the ground only to be saved by Nadir and his wonderful arrows and born anew, stronger and better and wearing see-through body armor!

The slow parts- the slow parts!- are still filled with guys on motorcycles jumping off of things, and guys having their heads exploded by Nadir's arrows, or at the very least totally awkward 1980s Italian movie sexy talk between Nadir and the only black girl left in the whole world which he fortunately just happens to find (you see, Nadir is black and this movie was made in 1982...)

If I have to complain about something, I guess it would be that Nadir's arrows only sometimes directly explode people. Other times, there is just an explosion behind a couple guys and they go flipping in the air. That is just unacceptable. And if I have to nitpick, Fred Williamson as Nadir is pretty awful in this. I don't know what was going on with him in this movie because he was good in some other Italian ripoff movies I had seen before. And man what is up with that annoying kid? I hate that guy.

Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)

2010-06-21T07:45:00.004-04:00

Freddy is back, and his power has grown so much that he has rendered Springfield childless, and all the adults of that town are suffering some kind of mass psychosis.

So that is what Freddy has done. What is his plan going forward? To use the power of his child, who was taken from him back when it was discovered he was a child murderer, to breach into other towns. This works because every town has an Elm Street, as Freddy dramatically tells us, though he doesn't really get into why that matters or how having a kid to help out changes the rules set in the previous movies.

But it's okay, because this is an excellent entry in the series so no matter how stupid and nonsensical the premise is I love it. This movie is barely a horror movie. It's like a live action Warner Brothers cartoon (watch for the part where Freddy pushes a bed of nails into place so a falling kid will land right on them) and there were several scenes where I actually chuckled.

Not is all wonderful, however, in the land of Freddy's Dead. The dialog is embarrassing and nearly every character is absolutely detestable. They argue and bicker like old people constantly. They couldn't die fast enough!

I really don't have a lot to say about this movie. It's not nearly as good a movie as Freddy's Revenge, but it's hilarious and a ton of fun, which is more than I can say for the first and fifth movies.

Blood Freak (1972)

2010-06-19T11:17:00.006-04:00

This movie is fascinating. It is the only anti-drug Christian splatter slasher movie that exists (I think). I think I could probably watch this movie any day, any time and I would sit there, unable to look away. Truly a compelling film.

Herschell, a big hunk of a guy on a motorcycle, is just kind of riding around when he encounters Angel, whose car has broken down. He fixes things up for her and in return she invites him to her gorgeous sister Anne's drug party full of filthy hippies.

Neither Angel nor Herschell are interested in drugs, and Angel just sits there lecturing people about how awesome Jesus is. Herschell is totally spellbound, so no matter how many times Anne tries to seduce him, he is just not interested. After a little bit of this, they leave. What they were trying to accomplish, I don't know.

Herschell gets a job helping around the house and then one fateful day Anne is just sitting there in her swimsuit and Herschell has had just about enough of her pestering so he gives in and smokes a joint and is immediately and hilariously addicted, complete with a scene where he goes a couple of days without a joint and is on the ground shaking, demanding a hit, man.

But that is the least of Herschell's troubles! A lethal mixture of pot and experimental turkey meat turns his head into a chicken head and now he has an incredible urge to drink human blood! Like a chicken does! And when he kills, the same three second audio clip of a lady screaming is played over and over and over and oh my god it is so funny.

So needless to say there is a lot going on in this movie. Can Herschell turn back to normal? Will Anne get over the fact that her boyfriend has a chicken head (she doesn't seem to mind so much once she gets used to it)? What happened to Angel?

Every once in a while the director of the movie shows up onscreen to tell you about how bad drugs are stuff, all while smoking like a chimney. At one point he starts coughing so badly he cannot finish his sentence and you just sit there watching, hoping he doesn't die right there on camera.

So that's that and you should watch this any chance you get.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

2010-06-19T04:31:00.004-04:00

Alice and her boyfriend Dan are back! One year later, everyone has graduated from high school and Alice has even managed to make a whole new group of quirky friends: Greta, who is being forced by her mother to become a supermodel; Yvonne, who is good at diving; and Mark, token awkward weird 80s kid who really like comics.

Freddy is back too, and of course you know you are gonna be watching Alice trying to convince everyone of this for at least the first half of the movie. It gets pretty annoying. She will wake up from a dream or whatever and go, "OH MY GOD IT'S FREDDY WE HAVE TO STOP HIM!!! HE'S BACK!!" You would think after the fifth time she gets the evil eye from whoever she is babbling at she would wise up and be a little less hysterical. Luckily for her, all her friends are killed by Freddy and so eventually people start listening to her. Who's laughing now you jerks?!

As you may recall from the previous entry in the series, Freddy needs to use Alice to get to other kids because he can only kill the original Elm Street kids. Alice isn't an original Elm Street kid, but her friend Kristen, who was, gave Alice the Dream Master power before being killed. You may recall that the Dream Master power allows you to bring your friends to Freddy to be killed, regardless of what street they are from.

But wait! Alice doesn't sleep ever so how is this happening? Well, the Dream Master power is apparently hereditary and it has passed down to Alice's ugly unborn baby. And since babies are useless and all they do is sleep all day that gives Freddy plenty of chances to kill Alice's new friends in fitting and ironic ways. Well Mr. Comic Guy, I hear you like the comics. How much would you like comics if you were killed by them??

This is the general level of creativity that goes into this film. You like ____? Well I'm gonna kill you with ____!

This is possibly the worst movies in the series. The characters are all pretty annoying, though it's not quite at the level where you hate them all instantly. The direction and colors and pretty much everything are such a huge step down from The Dream Master, which is the best looking film in the series. There was only one way to go from here, and that was the way of ridiculousness. But that is a story for another day.

The Witches Mountain (1972)

2010-06-18T09:10:00.005-04:00

I had so much trouble following this movie and it terrified me for a brief moment at the end. More about that later.

Some lady comes home and finds a wig with a knife in it on the ground. And there's her cat under the covers of her bed, dead and bloody. And then some little girl shows up and they quarrel. And the the garage bursts into flames and we get the title screen!

Suddenly we get two totally unrelated people. Mario the photographer, with his amazing mustache, and his girlfriend or something. She wants to patch things up and Mario does what people do in that kind of situation and right in front of her face gets on the phone and furiously demands his boss to send him on some photo shoot. Take that, commitment! You'd only get in the way of my roaming photographer lifestyle baby!

Mario meets a girl on a beach, takes her photo without asking but is way too manly and cool to lie about it when she confronts him. He makes up for it by asking her out on a date, which she accepts. Then we get about sixty minutes of them driving around, getting their car stolen, staying at an old castle with some crazy old lady, etc.

Mario is the kind of guy who doesn't take none of that hocus-pocus superstition bullshit. When weird stuff happens, he always tries to rationalize it. As he says, "everything has a rational explanation." Everything.

This is the kind of movie where the protagonists are constantly splitting up for no reason. Every time either one of them needs to go do something they completely insist on doing it alone. And every time either of them go alone to do something, it always ends up with someone having hallucinations or something and passing out in the wilderness for hours. They keep doing this over and over! I know that sounds awesome but trust me... the whole middle sixty minutes is like a blur to me.

Look, I can't explain this movie to you. There is no plot per se and nothing happens, except for the very beginning (which has nothing to do with the movie) and very end (which is just something suddenly happening to our heroes involving witches on a mountain). There is a part where the camera lingers on this thing like it's some big revealing twist or something but damn it I couldn't even recognize what it was, but it was really scary!

I think that is a good way to describe this whole movie. The intro made absolutely no sense to me until I watched it again in hilarious fast forward mode so that everyone sounded like chipmunks. Even then, I'm not sure what causes the garage to explode, but it was really funny. I looked it up and people are saying that the woman douses the whole place in gasoline but when?

The Wasp Woman (1959)

2010-06-17T23:56:00.004-04:00

Oh man, it's the 1950s so here comes another black and white horror film where the first hour of the movie is a bunch of talking and theorizing and then someone turns into a monster and there's a fight.

I could just cut and paste that intro into any number of horror and scifi flicks from the 50s. I probably will from now on. But for now, let's talk about The Wasp Woman.

Dr. Zinthrop has discovered a way to reverse the aging process through his work on wasps. Upon telling his boss that he has discovered the greatest scientific breakthrough of the 20th century which will change all of humanity forever, his boss chews him out for spending, like, $1000 last month man and besides they aren't paying him to change the course of human development, they are paying him to get royal jelly from wasps.

So Zinthrop gets hired by a cosmetic company in deep trouble because the founder, Janice Starlin, is way too old at 32 to be considered attractive anymore so people have stopped buying their makeup. Janice decides to be Zinthrop's guinea pig, and within weeks she looks like she's 23 (i.e. she looks exactly the same but has taken off her old lady glasses).

I don't think it's spoiling much to tell you that Janice overdoses and turns into a hideous monster, half-woman and half-wasp. Note that the movie poster is nothing but a filthy lie: Wasp Woman has a wasp head and a human body. Before you know it Wasp Woman is sucking the blood of out people. You know, like wasps do.

The biggest problem with this movie is the pacing. There are multiple boardroom meetings where they just talk about how old Janice is. I wanted to protect her, but Janice and I are fated to be star-crossed lovers since she is in movieland fifty years ago and I am an realland now. Everything takes forever. Walking, driving, looking at things. The first scene, where Zinthrop is talking to his boss about wasps is excruciating and it took all of my Dream Powers to get through it. And that is pretty much a high point bursting with excitement and high-fives in comparison to the middle part of this movie. It doesn't pick up until the lame fight at the end, which is your typical 1950s zero-choreography grappling in a shadowy lab/office kind of fight.

They should definitely remake this though, now that all the Japanese horror movies and classic 1970s and 80s slashers have all been done. If they do it, they should make the Wasp Woman like the one in the poster. That would be creepy.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

2010-06-17T08:04:00.005-04:00

Kristen is back (though played by a different actress), along with Kincaid and Joey, both of whom somehow survived the previous movie regardless of their general uselessness. Out of the crazy house, they are living normal lives, going to school with all their awkward late 80s classmates, the most awkward of which is Kristen's boyfriend who also happens to be the brother of Kristen's new friend Alice. Kristen has made some other friends too, so don't worry! When Freddy is resurrected there will be plenty of kids to kill in grotesque and ironic and/or fitting ways.

Freddy kills the remaining Dream Warriors very quickly and that would have been the end of things, but Kristen calls Alice into her dream, apologizes, shoots some magic ball of light at Alice and yells "I GIVE YOU MY POWER." The power to call other people into her dreams. To be killed by Freddy. Thanks Kristen, what a pal.

So like I mentioned above there is a lot of the 80s in this movie, right down to the cool but weird outsider who wears a trenchcoat and sneakers to school (he ends up fighting Freddy with karate!). The script is really bad, and there is some nonsense about Alice inheriting the abilities and mannerisms of her friends as they die.

However, the script is not bad enough to take away from the awesome direction, particularly the scene where Kristen is drugged with sleeping pills and the camera, swooping all around in one single amazing take, follows her as she runs to her bedroom, eventually falling asleep.

By now, A Nightmare of Elm Street is basically an effects film because there is absolutely nothing scary about this one, but the effects are amazing. Freddy turns one girl into a cockroach and squishes her; a far cry from the horrific death of Tina in the first movie, where she is dragged screaming and bloody across the walls and ceiling of her room in front of her horrified boyfriend, but the cockroach transformation is sufficiently gross and impressive.

Overall, not as good as the second film, but a definite close second. Starting with the next movie the series becomes an absolute joke, with Freddy on a skateboard, Super Freddy, Freddy playing video games, and more.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

2010-06-16T08:47:00.005-04:00

Like most kids in Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Kristen starts having dreams about Freddy. She is the last of the children of the people who burned Freddy alive, so you can understand that he's still angry about that and so that is why he wants to kill her. And so our movie begins.

The first Nightmare on Elm Street buries its excellent concept under a heap of poor dialog and hammy acting. But it gave us Freddy so I will forgive it. The second Nightmare movie is just a great movie, and as far as I am concerned is what an Elm Street movie should be. It's scary and the script is surprisingly good.

So what does Dream Warriors bring to the table? Well, it brings Dream Warriors. Nancy, from the first movie, comes back as a dream doctor or some nonsense like that, and teaches the kids to use their Dream Powers.

Kristen has the ability to bring other people into her dreams (and can also jump around), and luckily for her she is in a mental asylum, surrounded by quirky misfit kids who all have amazing powers:

-Kincaid: Power of Strength!
-Taryn: Power of Beautiful... and Bad!
-Phillip: Power of Getting Killed First!
-Jennifer: Power of Jumping Headfirst Into Wall-Mounted TV To Death!
-Will: Power of Dungeons & Dragons!
-Joey: Ultra-Specific Power of Screaming To Break Mirrors Freddy Has Pulled Your Friends Into!

Somehow, half the kids manage to make it through the movie and anyway the extremely awkward and embarrassing scene where they all explain their new found powers to each other is wonderful.

This is the Elm Street movie where they started not only tailoring the death scenes to each character, but also telegraphing those scenes constantly up until they happen. So the girl that used to be a junkie on the streets and has scars all over her arms from needles... you can be sure that Freddy is gonna use that in some way to kill her.

So in other words, this is where the series turned off horror street, and took detours down groanworthy oneliner avenue, grotesque death scene boulevard, and awesome special effect lane. The special effects are amazing! I will never trust CGI effects: the minute you trust them, bam, there goes your wallet and now your fish are dead. But you can trust puppets and matte paintings and guys covered in slime. You can trust them forever!

So is this movie any good or what? Well, as I mentioned before Nancy is back and Wes Craven from the first movie is involved, so it has more in common with that than it does with the awesome second movie. So for every amazing scene of some guy being controlled like a puppet with his own veins torn from his limbs, you get a scene of Nancy empowering the kids with her crazy dream logic. Oh Nancy, all your friends died in the first movie and you didn't even manage to kill Freddy with your laughable Home Alone booby traps. Why should we listen to you?

The War of the Robots (1978)

2010-06-14T10:05:00.006-04:00

This movie is TERRIBLE.

It starts out fine. You've got your future guys in miniskirts and civilization sufficiently advanced to build robots that look just like people and can walk and fight, but not sufficiently advanced enough for those robots to not talk like "PLEASE.COME.WITH.ME.HUMANOID."

All the characters call each other by their first names, which is hilarious. Captain John will be like "I need to stop you Lois! For Julie's sake!" Speaking of Captain John, he is basically Italian Captain Kirk. He is sent to chase some aliens (really robots!) who have kidnapped a genetics scientist, because only that one scientist has the code that apparently stops the nuclear reactor back home from randomly melting down on some schedule. (Little do they know that the code was always with them.. in their hearts.)

So this is an Italian ripoff of Star Trek, with some lightsabers thrown in just in case. Like Star Trek there are tons of scenes of people sitting at starship controls talking on and on about coordinates and vectors and stuff. And there are horribly choreographed alien (actually robot) fistfights. That would all be great, but this movie suffers from reused footage and filler. I can't tell you how many times they show this one scene where they are trying to pretend an alien spaceship is approaching, but all they do is zoom in slowly on the spaceship toy with their camera. There is a thrilling space dogfight, but instead of showing awesome scale models shooting lasers all over the place, 95% of the footage is of Captain John's big head in a space helmet looking at you and telling you about how overwhelmed he is.

When they fight the robots the first time, it takes FOREVER. They shoot the same three guys over and over but shoot it from different angles to make it seem like there is an army of robots. It gets stupid the first time. By the third time they are fighting these robots, you've just about had enough.

Man, what is this movie doing in my Chilling Classics collection? It's on the same disc as Oasis of the Zombies, and while that movie may not be great, you can at least make the argument- on a theoretical level- that, if you were to plot them out far enough on a graph, zombies and general chillingness interact at some point. There is nothing chilling about The War of the Robots. It is just bad.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985)

2010-06-14T08:21:00.007-04:00

All aboard the Freddy Express! Next stop, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge.

Unlike the first movie, NoES2 is generally seen as one of the poorer attempts at a Freddy movie. This is unfortunate, because not only is this film the best of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, it's just a great horror film overall.

Jesse Walsh and his family are having a rough time. Jesse can't sleep without having shriek-inducing nightmares, the air conditioning doesn't work, their pet bird explodes, and then it is revealed that they are living in the house Nancy, the heroine from the first movie, went crazy in. Eventually Freddy starts telling Jesse to kill his friends for him, and it just so happens that Freddy's glove is still in the basement so it's not like Freddy is even asking him to do anything particularly inconvenient.

But for whatever reason, Jesse has a problem with this and it's up to him, his rich girlfriend Lisa, and his best friend Ron to figure things out.

Nightmare Part 2 avoids all the awful stuff from Nightmare the first. The script is much better and I found myself ashamed to like horror movies only a couple of times the whole ninety minutes. The acting is good all around, and Jesse's descent into madness is handled very well (though pretty sudden). This is the third or fourth time I've watched this movie, and I was glued to the screen the entire time.

If there is one thing people will not shut up about when it comes to this movie, like it or hate it, it is the gay subtext. Even the wikipedia article has a section about it, and the font size is the same as that of Cast and Production, which means according to wikipedia the gay undercurrent of this movie is just as important as everything else about it. So I can't avoid it.

Jesse spends most of his time shirtless with his pal Ron, and avoids talking to, looking at, or touching his girlfriend throughout the movie. Then there is the part where he goes to the gay S&M bar, meets his gym teacher, and then they go back to the gym for pushups and showers (this actually happens). So rather than referring to this movie as "that Freddy movie with the gay subtext" it's almost better to call it "that gay movie with the Freddy subtext."

But maybe that is why this is such a good movie. The other movies in the series are unquestionably about Freddy and the kids he kills, and when it comes to that kind of movie you are going to have a hard time outdoing a Friday 13th or a Halloween. This movie, Freddy is just kind of around. And I think it's better off that way.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

2010-06-13T11:14:00.007-04:00

A Nightmare on Elm Street is pretty much seen as a horror classic. I guess if you compare it with something like Sister of Death or Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory it is indeed an amazing movie. However, beyond an amazing concept and the solid introduction, where you watch Freddy making his gloves, I have a lot of problems with this movie.

I almost feel like I am insulting your intelligence for having to sum up the plot for this movie, but I'm gonna do it. Nancy and her boyfriend Johnny Depp, and Tina and her boyfriend Rod are having nightmares about a guy with knives for fingers in an old beat up sweater, which is of course the famous Freddy Krueger. All is fun and games until Tina gets killed in her dream. Of course all the adults won't believe anything their kids say no matter how much evidence there is. At one point Nancy brings back Freddy's hat from a dream while in a controlled environment (a lab!!!) and her mom is wondering where she really got that hat from. Yeah, great thinking mom. Nancy probably ate the hat and then regurgitated it while you guys were watching her sleep but you forgot or something. That makes sense.

On top of that, all the adults know all about Freddy and his scissor hands and whatnot but of course they don't say anything about it until the end of the movie. In fact, they pretty much leave all the kids to die, even though each kid is killed in a more and more fantastic way. Even after one kid is reduced to a fountain of bloody giblets shooting all over the ceiling of his room.

But this is not the only frustrating thing about A Nightmare on Elm Street. Oh no, it also relies way too much on jump scares, and the sound effects that accompany the jump scares are just laughable. I know this was the whole point, you'd go to the theater with your girlfriend/boyfriend and Freddy would jump out and go "RARRR" and you'd have your popcorn and then after the movie you'd go stick baseball cards in the spokes of your bicycle and race your buddies and play marbles, or whatever it is kids did back in 1984 before we had video games or DVD players or cars or civilization. But I'm not in a theater and Freddy jumping out and growling just doesn't cut it when you have films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of even Friday the 13th.

But I guess you need the jump scares because while all the kids (even that psychopath Rod) are likable and Nancy is cute, the script is terrible. I mean, italics terrible. I can't blame the actors. We all know Johnny Depp is great, but with this awful script, what can you do? At one point Nancy is talking to her mom about how bright it is outside and her mom says some nonsense about, "It's gonna burn off soon or it wouldn't be so bright." What does this even mean?!?! Is she talking about the sun? Is this something anyone would ever say about anything? The script is filled with this kind of embarrassing nonsense. Watching A Nightmare on Elm Street makes me pine for the nearly Shakespearean-in-comparison Friday the 13th, which has a script mostly consisting of laughable sex talk, macho posturing, screaming, or all of these at once.

Sisters of Death (1977)

2010-06-13T10:59:00.008-04:00

Six sorority sisters hold some kind of secret ritual which involves firing an unloaded gun at the new sister (!). Of course, the gun is loaded and the new girl dies. Thus we have the aptly named Sisters of Death.

I have pretty much nothing to say about this movie. It was apparently a made for TV movie or something, or maybe the version I watched is extremely censored, because nothing cool happens at all. Sure, some guy gets electrocuted by the fence regardless of the helpful warning sign the evil insane killer has put up. And I think one girl gets killed by spiders? I might have hallucinated that.

There's one part where these two girls get into a huge fight over whether or not to take a shower. One of the girls decides if she doesn't take a shower, right in the middle of this situation where they are all trapped in a compound being picked off one by one, she will go crazy, so of course she takes a shower and gets killed. Whether or not she would have been killed regardless is an interesting thought experiment for a philosopher of the highest order, but we don't have time for that right now.

Except for that high point, I really have nothing to talk about. The Chilling Classics set has been so good to me up until this past week! What happened?

The Snake People (1971)

2010-06-13T10:29:00.005-04:00

Boris Karloff as a Voodoo priest. Midget guy acting weird. Lady dancing with snakes. A guy that brings his dead girlfriend back as a zombie, leading to plenty of jokes about how she is better as a zombie because she can't sass him.

All this and more is to be discovered in The Snake People (aka "Isle of the Snake People," aka "La Muerte Vivente")!

Some guy goes somewhere to investigate some zombie and voodoo stuff or something. Some other guy's niece shows up to try to drum up support for her little temperance movement, which goes as well as you would expect that to go on Voodoo Island. Of course she falls in love with the alcoholic police guy who, in reaction to all the voodoo troubles relaxes shirtless on a hammock and drinks rum all day.

So that is The Snake People in a nutshell. It's an entertaining movie, don't get me wrong, but there is not a lot to say about it. It's not bad enough to laugh at, but not good enough to go and tell everyone about. But check out the movie poster, which has the best Jeopardy answer ever.

Horror Express (1973)

2010-04-09T09:22:00.006-04:00

Horror Express, or as my pals in Spain call it, Pánico en el Transiberiano, is one of those slow old horror movies you always figure all old horror movies are like. It's not written particularly well and pretty much every character is detestable or at best boring. It is also really tame as far as monster effects and gore go. So generally, the slow part (which is the first fifty minutes of the movie) is nearly unwatchable by modern man.

There is a monster stalking a bunch of awful people on a train, picking them off one-by-one. By the time the third person gets killed everyone starts to panic and the heroes start getting serious, first by having many leisurely meals in the dinner train, then by waiting for more people to die. Eventually they have no choice but to act when the monster attacks them, but even after killing it the murders continue! What on train could be happening??!?!?

And then the movie suddenly and without warning picks up when Telly Savalas aka Kojak shows up, playing the part of a crazy Cossack. I couldn't stop watching the movie every time this guy showed up. His dialog is nonsensical but is delivered so well you can't help but enjoy it. I personally was rooting for him to kill everyone on the train, including the monster and the train itself, but sadly the script writers and I were not on the same page and before you know it the movie becomes a zombie flick for about thirty seconds and then the ending happens and you get an image of the planet Earth. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, meddling scientists!

So besides Siberian Kojak what else is there to like in this movie. I am particularly fond of the scene where the scientists look at goo from the monster's eyeball in a microscope and are shocked that the monster stores it's memories not in it's brain but in it's eyes. They know this because looking at the eyeball goo under microscope reveals clear as days images of everything the monster has ever seen: the last guy it killed, a brontosaurus, and the planet Earth.

So although this movie has got the goods when it comes to thought-provoking scientific issues ("just what would a race of creatures whose eyeball goo is like an icky ViewMaster be like?"), it comes up short in the Horror (and honestly, the Express) categories.

Horrors of Spider Island (1967)

2009-09-02T10:21:00.006-04:00

A bunch of dancers and their possibly sleazy manager, Gary, are on their way to Singapore (to dance I guess) when a toy plane is violently torn asunder and they find themselves drifting on the open sea. The good news is they are saved when they happen upon an island. The bad news is the island is filled with spiders (just a couple actually) and horrors (actually just one). Thus the title, Horrors of Spider Island!

Later on, a couple of researchers also show up and the movie momentarily becomes some crazy teenagers dancing on the beach in the darkness movie. Not for long though, because there is a monster- a hideous half man, half spider beast (a veritable Spider-Man!)- stalking everyone. Plus the spiders (though they are not much of a problem after the first half of the movie).

I have not seen a lot of these 1950s/1960s black and white pop horror/scifi movies, so I cannot compare it to others and I apologize for that. I can tell you that this movie was surprisingly entertaining for about the first half, but then it dragged on for the second half. Like seemingly a lot of pop horror/sci fi movies from this period, the film is short at under 90 minutes but you wouldn't realize it for the pacing.

It's almost like two movies were smooshed together. The first half is a decent "bunch of people who don't like each other stuck in an awful situation" movie, but then the scientist hunks show up and the girls are basically just making out on the beach or screaming and fainting all over the place. Too bad, if they had maintained the tension from the first half of the movie this would have been a great little thriller.

My sources ("the internet") tell me this was originally a nudie flick from Germany. Of course the version I saw was the US release, which has all the good stuff cut out, though you do still get a catfights between girls in skirts and even some stripping down to bathing suits, which I imagine must have just caused massive swooning in the aisles back in puritanical 1967 USA.

The Driller Killer (1979)

2009-09-01T10:29:00.008-04:00

The Driller Killer is the story of Reno, a starving artist, his girlfriend Carol, and her girlfriend Pamela. The three are on the verge of being kicked out of their grimy, dark Manhattan apartment since they are behind in their rent. In order to make some money, Reno has been working on a painting for an art dealer named Dalton.

Shortly after our story begins, Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters, a punk rock band, move in to the same building. Thanks to their constant practicing Reno is unable to concentrate on his work and thus we arrive at the actual drilling killing.

It's probably no great surprise that The Driller Killer is in fact Reno (the movie sure doesn't try to hide this). So this is not your typical mystery slasher movie. It's a lot more like Combat Shock or maybe American Psycho, where rather than trying to figure out who the killer is, you just spend the whole movie watching the the lead character going insane. Less Nailgun Massacre and more Naked Massacre. In this movie the change is pretty sudden. In one scene Reno is working on his painting of the majestic buffalo, in the next he is drilling hobos to death in alleyways.

This movie actually has a lot in common with Combat Shock. You've got your absolutely filthy New York, swarming with gangs and violence and crazy homeless people. Was New York ever this awful? Who knows? Probably. But I do know this depiction makes for some skin-crawling gritty viewing and is extremely effective. NY is a character in this movie, just as much as Reno is or anyone else. In fact, it is probably the main character as I can't see this movie being pulled off anywhere else. Just like how Troll 2 could not take place in any other town other than Nilbog, kingdom of the Goblins. Well, I guess it probably could have taken place in Llort, kingdom of the trolls. That probably would have been more accurate.

So while The Driller Killer does not take place in Rellik Rellird, the kingdom of the Driller Killers, Manhattan is a good choice I guess. This is all helped by the dialog which is often terrible, but in a realistic way. I have read that it was all improvised, which explains a lot.

But you really have to be able to appreciate this gritty "NY as a character" thing, or you will probably not get much out of this movie. It is surprisingly not explicit, especially considering how it was banned in the UK back in the 80s. Sure, there is drilling (and killing), and yeah blood goes all over the place, but it could have been much worse. So I have to admit that The Driller Killer shows a lot of restraint, surprising considering the lurid title. Regardless of the sudden and unexplained lesbian shower scene, it is almost classy.

Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory (1962)

2009-08-30T08:53:00.006-04:00

A new science teacher is hired by the titular dormitory, and then girls start being murdered by wolves, or something. Coincidence? I can't even pretend to maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary for that, mostly due to physics and stuff.

God this movie is so boring. I watched it three months ago and at the end of it I sat down to write something but couldn't muster up the motivation. I still can't, but I want to watch a movie tonight and there was the Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory DVD just sitting there, reminding me to review it and I feel like if I don't review it I can't watch something else.

Well, I decided not to review it, I will just post the title image and then talk a little bit about how I don't want to review this. I mean, Driller Killer is next in the series. What sane man would look at a Driller Killer DVD and think, "well instead I will review Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory." Not me that's for sure.

This is one of those bad black and white horror/scifi movies, the kind where nothing interesting happens, instead you have a bunch of scenes of two people in an office talking about the movie, like it's even worth discussing.

God I hated this movie.

Ninja Terminator (1985)

2008-07-01T09:59:00.007-04:00

Ninja Terminator concerns three rogue ninjas who have defected from the Ninja Empire for various reasons. Each has stolen a piece of the Golden Ninja Warrior- a relic which, when combined, allows one to summon the Supreme Ninja Spirit through practicing the Supreme Ninja Technique before it. Of course the Ninja Empire will have nothing to do with that so they try to kill these guys for roughly 90 minutes.

It only takes a few minutes to kill the first rogue ninja, the actual Japanese one. He is killed mid-Supreme Ninja Technique and his piece of the Golden Ninja Warrior is recovered. As for the other two, both of whom are white in the best tradition of 1980s ninja movies, one guy is evil I think and the other stole the relic piece because the, "NINJER EMPIRE IS EVIL!" He's the guy with the mustache that looks sort of like Chuck Norris, I guess.

I suspect that two movies were smooshed together because while the Ninja Empire is busy sending toy robot messengers to deliver threatening demands to the rogue ninjas , there's this guy named Jaguar Wong basically walking around getting into fights for no reason. At one point he is looking for a particular restaurant and so he asks three dudes playing catch but is told that, "you're lookin' in the wrong place.... around here... there ain't no restaurants buddy!"

This is the kind of 80s action film where every character is basically trying to out-macho each other. It's not as balls-focused as the more macho Italian movies from the 70s and 80s but Ninja Terminator is pretty damned macho. This is the kind of movie where the following conversation can take place:

"I heard Tomashi's brother was killed earlier this morning."
"Oh, that's too bad."
"Well, ciao!"

So a lot of the movie is unfortunately boring kicky fights. I'd say for every awesome ninja scene you probably get 2.5 scenes of Jaguar kicking people over and over. For a movie called "Ninja Terminator" there is just not enough ninja terminator in this! I wanted more ninjas flipping for no reason and disappearing and climbing stuff. More of the toy robot messenger, even though it does show up twice, once interrupting a perfectly fine watermelon eating session! More Supreme Ninja Techniques and maybe even a second Golden Ninja Warrior for everyone to fight over! But less kicky scenes, and definitely less really gross sex scenes between the mustached Chinese guy and his girlfriend.

The fighting and such is pretty decent for a 1980s ninja movie and the acting is thankfully both over the top and strangely laid back. The version of this movie I watched was dubbed fantastically in English and I recommend seeing it this way. Otherwise you would miss the fascinating droning speech one lady gives to her friend about how swimsuits are useful for not only swimming but also aerobics!

Okay, this review is beginning to turn into one of those "list everything that you loved in this movie scene-by-scene" reviews so I need to stop. You can basically watch this movie for free online, so if you have 90 minutes and appreciate the 80s ninja sensation, please give this movie a watch!

Watch Ninja Terminator Now!

As for me, I don't want to go so far as to say that this movie changed my life, but I will definitely think twice about asking for directions to restaurants in the future.

Haunts (1977)

2008-06-30T09:59:00.003-04:00

A maniac is on the loose in your typical American small town. He is running around town in a ski mask, scissors in hand, raping (possibly) and killing (definitely) any woman he can get his hands on. Could it be the creepy new guy? Or the creepy butcher? Or the creepy uncle? Or how about that priest?

Meanwhile, Ingrid is on her inherited and completely isolated family farm, having bizarre cow milking-induced flashbacks while imagining that every man she sees is a psychotic murderer.

So in a way, Ingrid is sort of symbolic of how I felt watching this movie (right down to the bizarre flashbacks). You don't really know who to trust and at any given point in the movie you're pretty certain the killer could be pretty much any of the characters.

Part of this is because the town has no real infrastructure in place for dealing with murderers. Sure, you've got your small town sheriff and your wise doctor and some incompetent deputies and the town floozy. But everyone basically goes about their business like there isn't an insane murdered running around. Standard procedure here boils down to, "face all possible evidence with stoic denial." Even Ingrid's uncle knows this. When Ingrid comes home after narrowly escaping an attack, her clothes torn and bloody, her uncle uses the old, "it was probably a rabbit or a deer" explanation. At first I was confused and a little scared. "Is he discounting what she says happened, just because that's what you do in these kinds of movies?" Then I thought, "or.... is he suggesting that the killer is a rabbit and/or a deer?" and instead of being confused I was delighted. I chuckled a little bit but as the movie continued on I realized my first guess was right so I was a little disappointed.

I was pretty happy to find out that even after you are sure you've figured out who the killer is... well, you're probably right, but there is another little twist at the end you won't be able to predict unless you are really good at predicting things that are totally out of nowhere.

So, how about the more technical aspects of this movie. The sets, lighting, acting, effects, everything really are all roughly on the same level as a decent made-for-TV movie. The dialog is pretty natural sounding I guess, other than the "probably a rabbit or a deer" part I mentioned above.

Haunts has a pretty interesting atmosphere however. It's slow and deliberately paced and dare I say even a little boring. But it's also kind of moody and there are plenty of weird things to look out for. A lot of plot points get thrown at you and never really go anywhere. It could be an example of throwing it all at the wall to see what sticks, or it could be an expert method of making the audience (me) feel a little uneasy and unsure of things. I feel it worked pretty well.

Not as great as some of the other movies in the Chilling Classics set, but not as awful as the worst of the Sci-Fi Classics set, Haunts is a decent thriller with a great atmosphere.

The Atomic Brain (1964)

2008-06-19T10:59:00.007-04:00

The little description on the sleeve for this DVD is pretty hilarious. "Somehow, atomic power is harnessed to transplant brains." There's another sentence or two on there, but the rest isn't as funny. That doesn't really explain much so I will try my best to help you out.

A miserable old wealthy woman hires a live-in brain surgeon to experiment with brain transplants. You see, she wants to have her brain put into the body of a beautiful young woman so she can continue to be rich and alive. However! There is a chance she could become a vampire or something, as our helpful narrator warns us at the beginning of the movie:

"Is the next step the transplantation of the human brain? Many scientists answer, 'yes.' But they pause and add a grim warning. For in the ancient folk legends tales are told of blood-sucking vampires, crawling out of graves to live on the bodies of helpless victims. Is man now doomed to produce a race of ever-living monstrosities?"

That's quite a leap to make but I'm no scientist so what do I know?

Other important characters include Victor (some guy that has become involved with the old woman so that he can get her money) and a few buxom ladies who are told they are being hired as servants but in reality are just being sized up for possible brain transplantation. As a result you get some pretty hilarious scenes of this old lady totally checking these babes out, even rejecting one because she has a birthmark on her shoulder! Most of the girls are pretty bothered by this though one of them doesn't seem to care and I swear to god actually says at one point, "I have the same measurements as Marilyn Monroe! *giggle*"

Meanwhile, there are some monsters hanging around. They are failed experiments of the doctor and they basically run around acting like animals (because they have animal brains). One monster hilariously has animal-like features, as though transplanting an animal brain into a human body would do that.

So I don't want to give away the ending but you know there are going to be some monsters attacking women, some harebrained science, and some exploitative violence. I was pretty pleased to see a little bit of shocking gore in this one... it was certainly unexpected. I won't give it away but let's just say that EYE didn't expect it. hahaha

What can I say? It's a scifi monster flick. It's not boring and talky like a lot of scifi movies from this era, and it's not a bad way to spend 64 minutes.

This movie was released under the alternate title of Monstrosity. I have to admit that I am partial to the title given on the DVD, The Atomic Brain. My rule of thumb has always been, "if given the option, go with the choice that is more atomic." So there you go. However, isn't that poster great (poster image downloaded from scificlassics)? BODIES FOR SALE! If I was around in 1964 I would definitely be buying tickets for this movie. Having watched it just now, I think I would have been satisfied.

Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)

2008-06-18T09:08:00.006-04:00

A bandit on the run, Joseph Langdon, is about to meet his end in the sweaty jungles of Southeast Asia when he is approached by Satan in the form of a jolly chubby Fillipino guy and offered his life for his soul. He agrees, Satan empties a sack of meat on the ground and our movie begins!

Joseph's soul is funneled into the body of some asshole rich guy who was supposed to have died horribly. He has a gorgeous wife and all the money he needs but unfortunately for him he is basically an agent of Satan. He cannot be killed and basically runs around spreading wickedness and evil wherever he goes. Because Satan thinks mankind is too slow at that stuff (haha). Also, Joseph turns into a werewolf or something sort of randomly (mostly when his wife tries to seduce him) and he then has to go on murder sprees. So obviously this is a movie that works on multiple levels. You've got the "werewolf tearing up things" parts, the philosophic parts where Satan and Joseph have little discussions on whether or not Joseph is still a man (he is), and then the lame parts where Joseph is engaging in subtle duels of wit with his wife and his brother (not the same person).

Oh, you also have a lot of padding in the form of police detectives sitting at desks and endlessly discussing who or what could be killing all these people (I don't think it's giving much away to tell you that it's Joseph... you know... THE WEREWOLF GUY... who is committing the murders).

Overall I'd have to say that this movie is entertaining but could have been even better. As mentioned above there is a lot of padding. Sometimes the dialog is too clever for its own good (so much philosophizing!!) and thus sounds artificial. It's also kind of hard to follow the plot, mostly because two of the three most important characters have somewhat thick accents; a situation that is not helped by the audio quality on the disc I viewed.

But it's also just sort of hard to understand the motives of all these characters. Joseph is tired of his immortal existence and does some weird things, like vaguely suggesting to his brother that Mrs. Joseph secretly loves him and that he (the brother) should go find out what she thinks. It turns out that this is all a lie, but for what? To test the brother? To test the wife? Why does this guy care so much about a couple of people that he just met? Could it be just a game to him? Who cares? Not I!

Since this movie can be found in all those cheap public domain sets there's no reason not to check it out! Is that a recommendation? Probably.

Troll 2 (1990)

2008-06-17T09:37:00.004-04:00

A young boy named Joshua and his kind of crazy family take a trip to the country to partake in some old-fashioned country livin'. Of all the places in the country they decided to go to the small town of Nilbog, population 26. Little do they know that Nilbog is not your typical hospitable small country town... as Joshua's dead Grandpa warns him, Nilbog is the kingdom of the GOBLINS!!

I almost don't have to review this movie. It's got its own little (actually sort of massive) cult following. People have described it as The Rocky Horror Picture Show of the 21st century. And there are in fact sold out show where people get up in front of the screen and act out the best parts of this movie. So there you go, pretty similar.

So I could review this movie like every other person on the planet and tell you how bad the acting is, how cheesy and unintentionally hilarious the whole thing is. But I won't do that because I legitimately enjoy this movie on many levels and yes, I even respect the work everyone put into it.

Troll 2 was meant to be a horror film for kids, like Gremlins or (for slightly older kids) Ghoulies. It's one of the few PG-13 horror films I can stand. Let me tell you this, if the current crop of PG-13 horror flicks were more like Troll 2 and less like The Grudge or what have you I would be going to the movies all the time.

So, when you watch Troll 2 as an adult you have to sort of force yourself into the mindset of a little kid (not hard for me). Sort of like when you are watching The Neverending Story or Return to Oz. From the point of view of a little kid, I think Troll 2 is pretty terrifying. There are parts that are even a little creepy for an adult.

Troll 2 is pretty competent on most levels. I'd go so far to say that the direction is tight and the lighting is great. The acting... okay, the acting is bad. But again, look at it from the point of view of a kid. Kids are stunted emotionally and haven't had time to fully mature their feelings. The only things they understand are extremes... people yelling, people being scared, people laughing. The audience this movie was meant for simply wouldn't even appreciate excellent acting. So why spend the money on pros? Having said all that, the acting is not so bad that it actually detracts from the movie. For an example of that watch any Japanese movie made in the last 10 years or so.

Troll 2 also has a really cool script. There! I said it (actually, I wrote it, but saying "There! I wrote it!" sounds awkward)! I don't care what anyone says, there are some cool things going on in this movie. The goblins are vegetarians so before they can eat you they have to trick you into eating magic goo which turns you into a plant. The goblins even have their own little religion, and some kind of hierarchy, with a priest goblin near the top and a queen over all the other goblins. If you stop and think about it, a lot of thought was put into this kingdom of Nilbog.

Now, I could do the thing where I list off a bunch of hilarious moments from this movie but I won't do that either. Like Story of Ricky, Troll 2 is sort of a set piece movie and I would hate to ruin any of the fun by giving away my favorite parts. This is a great comparison, now that I think of it, because both movies are also the kinds of films where every minute seems to top the previous minute in terms of sheer wackiness. Troll 2 seriously never lets up. It's an awesome ride from T2-0 (the beginning of the movie) to T2-95 (the ending).

I will discuss, however, some things that people don't seem to go into in their reviews.

For example, we know that Troll 2 was meant for kids. Why then are there so many blatant sexual jokes? Why is there a scene where someone is seduced by an evil witch provocatively wielding a corn-on-the-cob?

We know that the script was written by Italians (always an extremely good sign, if you are familiar with Italian exploitation movies). How much of the awkward dialog is a result of this, and how much is a result of having a bunch of amateur American actors being directed by an Italian guy?

So, I suggest you give this movie a watch. Unlike most "good bad movies" it's not only fun if you are drunk. I've probably seen it about six times and I never get sick of it.

Day of the Panther (1988)

2008-06-16T09:16:00.004-04:00

Jason Blade, expert martial artist and all-around tough guy, travels to Perth, Australia to avenge the murder of his partner. There are plenty of people in Perth for him to fight along the way and of course a nubile young lady to seduce. It takes about 90 minutes for him to resolve this situation to his liking, which is just perfect.

Now, before any of this can happen we get to watch his partner being killed in the line of duty. She basically is working undercover and gets attacked by some thugs wearing various festive Halloween masks. I didn't understand this part. She's trying to get away from these thugs but she also keeps jumping through walls screaming "HIIIIIII-YAAAAAH" at them. Finally she meets some guy that doesn't just stand there waiting for her to kick him so she just gives up and that's that.

Back to Blade. Jason Blade is an interesting character, mostly because his name is "Blade." You get a lot of scenes of people calling him this. The police chief tells him, "I want you out of this Blade!" and when Blade goes undercover the crime boss tells him, "You're sharp, Blade!" That last one is pretty clever, actually.

Of course there's got to be a love interest and she is awkwardly inserted into the movie. She's, like, the niece of, er, the other white guy that learned kung fu from the Chinese people. During one awesome scene she does a ridiculous "sexy dance" that only people in movies do. She does the sexy dance again later in the movie, but no one is around so it is ineffective.

While I was watching this movie I began to feel nostalgic for the late 80s. Sure there were guns, but this was a time when the gun was used not so much as a means for firing a high velocity projectile into another person's body, but more as something you'd use to make people move around where you want them to go. Like a potentially deadly baton. True to history, Day of the Panther has lots of guns in it (okay, two) but they're used to just add a bit of urgency to the command, "Come with me, Blade."

There's a pretty awesome part at the end of the movie where someone gets thrown off of a cliff onto barbed wire. Just when I thought nothing could top that the cameraman helpfully (and very visibly) extends his hand to help the guy that just fell.

All in all Day of the Panther is an extremely enjoyable movie. It's fun in the "haw haw the music is so funny" way but it's also legitimately entertaining, even if it is just a bunch of kicky nonsense.

Twister's Revenge (1987)

2008-06-13T11:35:00.005-04:00

Three retarded rednecks plot to steal a robot truck that they claim is worth a million dollars. When that doesn't work, they kidnap the woman who made the truck. So now it's up to the robot truck and the woman's husband to rescue her.

Have I found the perfect movie? Twister's Revenge is close. It's like a buddy movie mixed with LOVE DOES NOT COMPUTE robot hijinx and the Dukes of Hazzard. Here is a (partial!) list of things you will find in this movie:

- evil redneck getting kicked in the balls
- a robot truck
- people running around in fast forward mode while silly sped-up music plays
- a girl "computer expert" who says things like "the logarithmic AI subsystem is state of art" that completely and utterly stun her cowboy boyfriend, forcing him to admit "now honey, I'm just a cowboy"
- JAWS ripoff music
- crazy man hungry woman who says "man" like "MAY-AN" (you know, like in the cartoons... "It's a MAY-AN!!")
- a part where the robot truck chases one of the evil hillbillies into an outhouse, helpfully labeled "SHIT HOUSE!" in big block letters. Of course, robotruck crashes into the outhouse, forcing the hillbilly to jump into the cesspool under the structure.
- two shotgun fights

This movie is like a cornucopia of awful movie pleasure. The script is awful but not awful in the way that something like Alien Species is. Whereas that movie seemed like it was trying hard to be edgy and cool, Twister's Revenge is trying really hard to make you laugh and it just isn't working.

The acting runs the gamut from "hick with a New York accent" to the guy who says "...my caaaarrrr...." when his car is destroyed by robot truck.

Robot truck, conceptually, is pretty stupid. It drives around on his own, navigating obstacles and cracking robot jokes with his cowboy buddy and all the while I'm thinking, "why a monster truck?" I mean, obviously the draw of the movie is that there is a monster truck and there are obstacles for the monster truck to drive over in slow motion. But the AI aspect of the storyline never really blossoms into anything. I mean, sure, the robot/cowboy banter is legendary but other than that you could have a guy driving the truck and it would be pretty much the same movie. And this woman develops some kind of revolutionary AI and the first thing she thinks of is, "I should put this on a monster truck! Think of all the things it could drive over using SCIENCE!" Why not make a robot person or dog or something?

If I were to remake this movie, I would have it so that the cowboy would be driving the robot truck but they would crash into a (flaming) outhouse (because it's funnier that way). After making a sufficient number of comments about how stinky it is, robot truck would catch on fire and then explode! Of course the first person on the scene would be the woman that made robot truck so instead of notifying the police or whatever she would take both her boyfriend and the truck back to the lab and would have no choice but to put the man's brain into the truck!!! Then it would totally be like a buddy movie mixed with Robocop!!!

The Devil With Seven Faces (1971)

2008-06-11T11:29:00.005-04:00

Some detective guy or something is hired sort of by this lady to do something or other and she has a twin sister who is identical in every way but hair color but she keeps saying things like "we are identical only physically" and she's being harassed by some mobsters that want her diamond and then there's this other guy who charms all the ladies and all of a sudden he's revealed to be a race car driver and the diamond is fake no wait it's real no wait here it is.

This is the impression I am left with after watching this movie. The Devil With Seven Faces is one of those movies where nothing really happens for 80 minutes and then there's some crazy plot twist and the movie is over.

It's not especially violent, though there are plenty of people getting shot and and scrunching their faces up while their hand shoots up to where the bullet hit them and staggering around for a few seconds before turning and falling on their backs.

It's also not particularly suspenseful. I admit I was bored with the movie and had trouble paying attention to it but it's the kind of suspense movie where basically everyone is secretly on the same side and yet want to kill each other so any suspense is ruined because it's just a bunch of secret backstabbing.

I'd like to say that the dialog was natural sounding but it really wasn't. You had the smooth guy flirting with the ladies with such classic lines as, "It's my job to save beautiful women" or whatever. Maybe back in 1971 that was pretty hot but nowadays that would just get you pepper sprayed or tasered, even if you did save the woman's life.

At one point my attention span collapsed into itself under the sheer mass of the boringness that is The Devil With Seven Faces, creating a black hole of apathy which was, speaking from a physics standpoint, impossible to get out of. Impossible I tell you! I had resigned myself to my fate, floating around in that black hole, my body reduced to it's most basic elements when I was saved by the sudden appearance of the heroine in some kind of Japanese cartoon wig?!?!?!

If there is an explanation for this in the movie I missed it. I assume it was to remain inconspicuous? You know, "Well, I know you said she'd be at the beach, but all I saw was this one woman in a giant blue wig just sitting there in the middle of everything. It seemed suspicious but the woman we're looking for is blond so obviously that wasn't her."

So I guess I really can't recommend this movie. The only good part is the wig and I took that picture up there for you so you really have no reason to watch the movie. You could just look at that picture for 90 minutes, or maybe look at the title screen first for the full effect.

Naked Massacre (1976)

2008-06-10T09:29:00.010-04:00

Amidst the turmoil of civil war, an American Vietnam War veteran arrives in Ireland after being discharged from service. Things start out badly as a church he is sort of hanging out in gets blown up. Everyone knows that Vietnam War veterans are typically psychos, at least in exploitation movies. And with a title like Naked Massacre you know this isn't going to end well.

It just so happens that there is some kind of shared living arrangement with the nurses in this town. So you've got a house of young nurses just waiting to be massacred (the nurses not the house). Plus the crazy Vietnam war vet.

Now, I'm a simple man. I like when movie titles double as plot summaries. So that's a plus right away. It helps when I am trying to remember some obscure trashy movie I watched. "Which was the one where, like, there was a massacre? A massacre of naked ladies? A Naked Massacre, you might say?"

Like a lot of exploitation movies from the mid 70s Naked Massacre is gritty as hell and pulls no punches. The dialog is very natural and the performances are pretty realistic, which definitely helps create the hopeless atmosphere.

So I find it a little hard to be flippant when discussing this film. But I'll try, god help me I'll try.

On the one hand, Naked Massacre delivers the exploitation goods. The sheer amount of nudity is impressive and yes, there is quite a massacre.

On the other hand, as I watched this movie I found myself thinking, "oh, this kind of naked massacre." This is not your typical sleazy naked massacre, the kind where after watching it you want to go outside and enjoy life and get some project you've been working on for the longest time done. It's not the kind of naked massacre that would, say, make you want to go bake a cake or visit your folks or whatever. This is the kind of naked massacre where after watching the movie you sort of just want to sit in your dark room thinking about how much everything sucks and how people are so awful and wouldn't the world be better off if humans never existed and other such things.

There's no humor whatsoever, not even the kind of black humor they usually insert into movies like this to sort of lighten the mood a bit. Everything is bleak, from the pretty shocking church attack at the beginning, to the titular massacre, to the powerful ending.

There's even some kind of anti-violence message at the end where they sort of compare the random and senseless violence of the movie with the random and senseless violence of the war in Ireland.

Having said that, this is an excellent movie. Not only is it effectively brutal but you can watch it with other people and right after the movie is over and they all turn to you and look at you thinking you're some kind of pervert or psycho you can tell them, "don't you see? It's not about sleaze and misogynistic violence. It's really about how people who enjoy sleazy and violent movies are no better than the psychos who perpetrate these crimes in real life!" It helps if the people you are saying this to have a few drinks in them.