Meatball Machine (2005)

An antisocial factory worker falls in love with a woman working in the neighboring factory. Too timid to do anything about it he basically just does nothing for much of the movie until he encounters this little alien bug looking thing. These aliens come to earth so they can inject themselves (graphically) into humans, which they use as vehicles to fight each other. It's like a fleshy version of Robot Jox!

This movie wears its inspiration clearly on its sleeve. This is basically Tetsuo: The Iron Man in color with more blood. But it lacks a lot of the charm of that movie.

Whereas Tetsuo is very vague and offers no explanations for anything, Meatball Machine is one of those movies where you have characters explaining everything to you at length. And it's also one of those movies where they will repeat dialog and key scenes for you in case you've forgotten what was just told to you 20 minutes ago. I guess what I mean to say is that there is a lot of padding in this movie. As a result, even at only 90 minutes this movie seems to run too long. It drags at times which is a huge problem in a movie that is supposed to be chaotic and violent and crazy.

On top of the poor pacing, I couldn't find a single character I cared about. The "hero" sits there and is reduced to a sputtering blinking mess at the sight of any danger or conflict. There is a transvestite character in the movie who is pretty awesome though. I don't want to ruin it for you! But it's the best scene in the whole movie.

So besides the transvestite, what is good about this movie? Well, I'll tell you. The special effects are pretty interesting, though they aren't as good as the (very) similar effects in Tetsuo (1988!). I don't remember a single CG effect, so if you appreciate good practical effects you might get a kick out of this.

I really don't have a lot to say about this one. It was kind of boring.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

The Dunwich Horror is based on a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft, a horror writer who was active in the early 20th century. His stories tended to be about alien monster gods and how they screw with humanity.

The Dunwich Horror kicks off with a great animated introduction and a catchy theme song.

Dean Stockwell stars as Wilbur Whately, weirdo white guy with an afro who, like most occultists, is just in it for the girls. Wilbur desperately wants to borrow Dr. Armitage's copy of a famous occult book for his nefarious purposes. At first he tries charm. That doesn't work, so then he has to get his hands dirty. As opposed to the Short Story Wilbur (who is killed humiliatingly by a mere dog), Movie Wilbur kills a security guard by impaling him on a spear! AWESOME. Movie Wilbur is hardcore.

I prefer this character as he is written in the movie over the short story version. In the short story Wilbur is a weird looking giant genius kid that no one takes seriously. That's fine, but this Wilbur is awesome. He's like Dracula- menacing and charming.

Let's draw up a little comparative chart to help clear up any doubts about how great Movie Wilbur is:

Clearly, Movie Wilbur comes out on top. 'NUFF SAID.

Everyone else in the movie is pretty good, I guess. Compared to Dean Stockwell's Wilbur Whately they all come up short, but this is understandable.

The special effects are awesome. I don't want to ruin anything, but let's just say that the whole monster thing was handled very well considering the budget and leave it at that. Most of the other special effects are weird psychedelic things and camera filters, which work well.

I think this movie could have been better though. It was a great idea to make Wilbur a charming and effective nemesis. But I would have liked if they had taken the ending from the short story and just attached it to the ending of the movie. This is all they had to do and it would have been perfect!

I seriously recommend this movie to absolutely everyone in the world. Every time I watch it I like it even more.

Metamorphosis (1990)

I'm slowly working my way through the Chilling Classics 50 Movies set. It's like an adventure or a safari but instead of being out in the wild fighting for my life to accomplish something meaningful, I am sitting at home watching some bad movies and eating chips.

The other night I watched Metamorphosis. I'm not going to bore you with cast and crew trivia (if you care about that stuff look it up at IMDB), but it was released in 1990 and is basically a really low budget Italian The Fly. But with dinosaurs instead of flies.

I don't want to ruin this for anyone, but I don't think I'm giving too much away when I tell you that a brilliant scientist is forced to use himself as a guinea pig in his crazy experiment.

Metamorphosis must have had a really low budget (right?) so wisely 99% of the movie is pretty subtle. You get a few gore effects here and there and some kind of creepy makeup work on the scientist guy.

Sure the ending to Metamorphosis was terrible. Heck, the rest of the movie wasn't great. But I was certainly entertained for 90 minutes.