Monday, July 29, 2013

Vampires on Skates

So, I've already covered Fright Night and declared it a minor masterpiece of the comedy-horror genre.  Today we're gonna cover the lesser known but still eminently enjoyable sequel, Fright Night Part II.  Because it has the most original title in the world and Aqua-Net encrusted vampires on roller skates and that makes it awesome just by itself.


Shortly after the events of Fright Night, Charley Brewster is away at college and going through some serious psychotherapy.  He's got school and his own dorm room and a girl that won't touch his no-no bits and a hefty case of self-doubt that's nagging at his ability to believe that Jerry Dadridge was anything but a particularly gruesome serial killer.  Why he's questioning this is not really discussed but I'm fairly certain it's because he's stupid because he was RIGHT THERE!  His shrink, though, is quite helpful and sets Charlie on the way to sanity and clean living.  Not that Charlie was doing anything bad.  Charlie just likes clean living.  Only not really because he's a college student and messy upheaval is S.O.P.

Now, since Charley doesn't believe in vampires any more, he and his new girlfriend go to visit Peter Vincent who is a burnt-out shell of a human being that KNOWS that the forces of darkness are out to murder us all in the face.  Charlie and Alex feel bad for poor Peter but on their way out, Charley sees four coffins being taken out to a car and four rather odd individuals stepping into an elevator.  Like any college boy, his penis yanks him firmly in the direction of the one woman in the ranks who's all mocha-skinned and exotic-looking.  Her name is Regine.

Full-on 80's hair, all of them.
Charlie and Alex drive back to the dorm and they start to make out but he pulls back and sees Regine's face.  Alex, like any other woman who finds out that her man is fantasizing about other women, understandably storms off not realizing that she's being tailed.  Alex gets into the dorm safely but another girl leaves so she gets to be the new prey.  And it's kind of hard to believe that she has no idea she's being followed because Belle (the big-haired queen above) is on fucking roller skates.  ROLLER SKATES!!

And, seriously, I can hear the hairspray cracking from 25 years in the future.
Alex still has problems, though, in the form of Louie, a balding, long-haired-hippie-fuck idiot werewolf who's just climbing into Alex's window when she, obliviously, shuts the window on his claws, snapping them off and sending him plummeting a story or two into the bushes below.

Charley, in the meantime, is having dreams about Regina biting him and his shrink tells him that occasional reversion is perfectly natural and recommends a hobby like bowling to take his mind off of things.  Of course, this only lasts as long as Charley doesn't see Regine so when he DOES, he stalks after her, climbing a fire escape and seeing his friend get munched on by Regine and Belle.  Charley, naturally, runs off to find Peter and the both of them crash Regine's party where they find his buddy unharmed and Regine slinks her way further into Charley's horny-monkey brain.

Large rack.  Check.  80's leather bustier.  Check.  Psychic powers.  Check.
She manages to convince Charley that she's a performance artist and that what he saw was an act.  Peter, of course, doesn't buy it and he survey's the scene with a mirror.  He huffs out and gets cornered by Regine who, in standard villain fashion, reveals herself as who she is, Jerry Dandridge's sister and she wants revenge.  Charley, in the midst of all of this returns home, blowing off a date with Alex, and goes to sleep.  Regine stops by for a quick bite.

Peter, stopping by the next morning, tries to warn him but Charley's in denial again.  Peter washes his hands of the situation and goes home to pack.  Charley, though, begins to show signs of conversion.  Aversion to sunlight, sensitivity to garlic... you know.  Allergies.  He then catches a news report that snaps him out of denial again.  His buddy is dead.  He tries to find Peter but he's gone.

Best date EVER!
Louie is still stalking Alex.  He manages to show Alex that he's a werewolf and chases Alex and Charley through the library.  Alex stuns Louie with a mouthful of wild roses (allergies again) and then they get arrested by campus police.  At the same time, Peter breaks into the set of Fright Night and tries to kill Regine on camera.  Oops.

Charley and Alex get bailed out by Regine and Charley's shrink respecitvely.  The shrink is now a vampire and tries to get a bite of co-ed.  Alex incapacitates him and assumes his identity to break out Peter.  Charley, though, is under the thrall of Regine.  Belle, Bozworth (Regine's Renfield.  He eats bugs but only after identifying them.  I think he's OCD.) and Louie all get appropriate deaths and the final confrontation begins.

Lee Press-on Nails are no one's friend...
As a continuation of the world created in the first movie, this is an extra-glam trip through Crazytown and it's DELICIOUS!  I mean, it's b-grade, at best, but it's still funny and moody and conceptual, all things that made the first Fright Night so wonderful.  It distinctly lacks all of the Hitchcockian undertones but they really aren't needed at this point.  This is about a kid's fight for sanity and the realization that he's not actually crazy.

Girl.  Moisturize.
But, on the other hand, this was an extension of the "vampire as social disease" theme that's so prevalent in movies that actually present vampires as monsters and the direct, almost anvilicious, "loose girls will give you crotch-cooties" message is abundantly clear what with the actual girlfriend being pure and chaste.  Regine, though, is an oiled snake, slithering through her scenes with the grace of a cheetah, her almost-whiskey-throated alto burrowing into your brain and seducing the audience as well as Charley.  I feel bad that Julie Carmen's career didn't really take off but we still see her around.  Of course, she's almost 60, now, so she's probably not doing that much slithering unless she's really in the mood to snap a hip.

I still think this was good film making, though and that this didn't get nearly as much press as it should have.  I know people that didn't know there WAS a sequel to Fright Night and it's always a pleasure to introduce them to it.  Yes, it's silly but it's fun.

Just remember.  You're supposed to bite her on the neck.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Building a Better Mousetrap

I know you're gonna think this is weird but I love rats.  Rats are as intelligent as a dog and they can be trained to do just about anything except not poop wherever they want to.  They come in a variety of shapes and sizes and they make fantastic pets for little ones because they're just so fuckin' chill.  They're not as nittery (nervous and jittery) or fragile as a lot of other rodents and they live longer than a hamster or gerbil, too.

That being said, the 2003 remake of Willard is kind of awesome in its own quirky little way.

Crispin Glover is the titular Willard Stiles, a socially inept nerd who lives with his terminally ill, utterly overbearing mother (Jackie Burroughs)... and when I say overbearing I mean "wants to look at his poop to make sure he's regular".  Eew.  He works at his father's old firm which, for some reason, he does not run.  Probably because his new boss (R. Lee Ermey) is cruel and vicious and steamrolled over Willard after his dad's death to gain control.  Frank (the boss) is not above humiliating and playing pranks on Willard in front of the entire office.

Ermey is the best jackhole boss, EVER!

Now, because he has no control over his own life, Willard becomes OBSESSED with the rather large rat colony that's infested his family home.  He adopts one of them as a personal friend and names him Socrates but he befriends the whole colony along with a HUGE rat that he names Big Ben (played by a Gambian pouched rat which is the size of your average house cat and has big ole cheek pouches like a hamster... they're adorable and I want one but, because of monkey pox, they're outlawed in Ohio).

Watching you... always watching...
Willard spends an inordinate amount of time training his new friends.  Training them to attack and shred on command.  His mother, hearing the rats, panics and falls down the stairs and Willard is alone and destitute since the payments have fallen far enough behind that the house is likely going to be foreclosed upon.

Well, if she hadn't fallen, the rats would have thought she was too stringy, anyway.
All the while, Cathryn, a co-worker, has a little crush on Willard (although, we're not sure why) and protects him when she can.  After his mother's death, she brings him a cat to keep him company.  The rats, who are suspicious of cats in general because... y'know... rats, kill the poor kitty to the strains of Michael Jackson's tune Ben which about the love between a boy and his rat.  Which isn't creepy at all.  And which is why I love the song.  Because it's creepy and inappropriate.

RUN, KITTY!
It's at this point when we realize that neither Ben nor Willard particularly trust one another.  This is probably because Willard has thrown Ben down the basement stairs once too often.  Ben and Socrates, though, get to go to work with Willard and they discover a note saying that Willard has been fired.  Socrates gets loose during Willard's confrontation with Frank and frightens a co-worker.  This leads Frank to beat Socrates to death which sends an already fragile Willard completely binkers.

Because keeping an army of rats is COMPLETELY sane.
This makes Willard depend on Ben.  Not optimal, but necessary.  Ben is more than willing to lead the horde of vermin toward the untimely demise of Willard's former boss.  Willard takes the lot of them to the office whereupon, on Willard's command, they swarm out of the antique elevator and murder Frank in the face.

After that, though, Willard finds that he still doesn't trust Ben so he tries to get rid of him and, because Ben leads them, the other rats.  Ben, of course, LIKES converting oxygen to carbon dioxide and leads the army of rats against Willard.  Willard survives, but barely, and ends up institutionalized, befriending yet another white rat which would have shut down any other mental health facility.

She likes her men like she likes her porn.  Crazy and locked away from prying eyes.
Now, it's been a while since I've seen the original and that's gonna have to change because the remake, although not billed as one, was kind of amazing.  I mean, Crispin Glover is always delightfully creepy in that "get away from me and comb the crap out of your Alfalfa-do" sort of way and he was probably the most perfect pick for the title role.  The novel, The Ratman's Notebooks, on which the movies are based (and which cost me a pretty penny on Amazon when I bought it years ago because it's out of print), gives us a much clearer picture of the slow descent into madness (of which I am so fond) but even without that, Glover shows us a psychotic snappy-snap that's expected but still fun to watch.

I mean, you feel bad for Willard, you really do, and when he DOES get his chance at revenge you find yourself cheering a little.  Of course, this, ultimately, makes him into the villain he didn't want to be but watching him grow a pair and defend himself is a satisfying movie moment.

This one isn't for most folks.  It's a little cerebral, even considering the subject matter, and there's not a lot of gore so it might not meet gorehound specs but I think it's just peachy.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Simian Shenanigans

In 1988 I discovered many things about myself.  I was 15 and, although I was a horror hound, even then, I never really got into the psychological aspect until then.



As a happy coincidence, ALSO in 1988, Jason Beghe starred as possibly the hottest quadraplegic EVER in the psuedo-nature-gone-wild horror classic Monkey Shines, written and directed by the master of the gigantic glasses, George Romero.  And it's because of him that I am proud to admit that A) I like em muscle-y and fuzzy and B) I am an ass man.

Thank you, Uncle George.
The movie opens with a training montage which is kinda funny because normally those happen in the middle of the movie when the protagonist is in need of winning some kind of event or beating up bad guys or even defending one's self against a bully, but no.  We get this at the beginning because we have to show that we're dealing with a young man in the prime of his life taking care of his body because his body is a temple and I REEEEEAAAALLY want to worship at it because Jason Beghe was DELICIOUS!

*ahem*

So, after loading up a backpack with bricks, Alan Mann (who's name isn't symbolic or anything), goes jogging.  With bricks.  See, that's the part I don't get.  Running is hard enough without carrying the equivalent of a small person on their back.  Meh, to each their own.

Anyway, Alan, then gets hit by a car.  OH NOES!!!  Why would you do that to such a pretty, pretty man!?!  Bastard!

Waiting for mommy... which is totally disturbing.
So, yeah.  Because he doesn't want his mom touching his man-bits anymore, he lets his buddy, Geoffrey (character actor John Pankow) set him up with one of his test subjects, Ella.  A capuchin monkey that has had human brain tissue injected into her own itty-bitty-schnooky-wookums-extra-kyoot brain.

ADORABLENESS!!  Vicious, vicious adorableness.
Ella (played by Boo and voiced by Frank Welker, best known for his work on Scooby-Doo) is a helper animal and this is not outside the realm of possibility because helper monkeys are a real thing.  Maybe without the genetic modification but they do exist.  It almost makes me want to be quadraplegic.  Because then my husband would be forced to allow me to have a monkey.  I want a monkey.

But, I digress.

In the process of bonding with Ella, he also starts a relationship with her trainer, Melanie.  This bonding doesn't exactly work out that well because Ella, mistress of the kyoot, is Alex Forrest with a prehensile tail and she won't be IGNORED, Dan...

HANDS OFF, BITCH!  I'M the only one who does the ball shaving around here!
(For you young'uns who don't know who Alex Forrest is, go watch Fatal Attraction, lock up your bunnies and get back to me.  I'll wait.)

Ready?  Good.

So, yeah.  Ella is initially protective but when she overhears that Alan's condition may be reversible via surgery she goes apeshit.  Yes, yes, I know.  Awful pun.  It was intended.  Let's move on, shall we?  She kills Alan's former girlfriend AND his former doctor, who happen to be dating, by fire.  She electrocutes Alan's mom in the tub (I'm thinking Alan wasn't too upset about that one).  She kills Geoffrey with the shot that was meant for her (Sodium pentobarbitone, also known as Nembutal and, in humans, it's a relatively mild barbituate/sedative although it can be used for euthanasia in humans in sufficient doses.  To house pets, though, it's probably known by some kind of gloriously Lord of the Rings-like name along the lines of The Great Needle that Brings Endless Nappy-Time or The Angel of Post-Walkies).

And this is what you get for playing God.
She manages to take Melanie out of the action but doesn't kill her.  Alan stops her before Melanie discovers a new career as a human torch.  Also, that kept Marvel Comics off of Romero's back.

Fortunately, Alan knows how to calm her down and he convinces her to give him a cuddle before he RIPS OUT HER THROAT WITH HIS TEETH AND SHAKES HER LIKE A DAMN RAG DOLL!!!

The movie ends with a really bad dream.

Featuring the worst cyst in the WORLD!
This move did HORRIBLY in the box office and I thoroughly blame this on executive meddling.  They not only made Romero film a happy ending but they tacked on the shocker at the end, too.  If they'd have left him alone, KNOWING that the man knows what he's doing and is damn near one of the best there is at it, this movie would have made movie history.  As it is, I can forgive the ending because I enjoy the movie as a whole.

Because monkeys.  This one only throws tiny poops.
 No, really.  You've got intrigue, helplessness, obsession and real, legitimate fear.  Other than Ella having something approaching human intelligence, it's not like monkey attacks don't happen.  A chimpanzee can rip your arm off so I'm not at all suggesting that a capuchin with a straight razor is unbelievable and there are PARROTS that display this level of romantic obsession so a monkey?  Just put that little fucker in a curly blonde wig.

Watching... Always watching...
Seriously, though, aside from the man-candy and the monkey business, the script is tight, it's not confusing at ALL and it's just good, old-fashioned, thrill-a-minute horror.  I feel bad that this flopped for Romero because it really didn't need to.  It's a good movie and it's often overlooked.  The fact that it sent Romero back to indie horror isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, and I'm all about the fuck-you.

This is one of my favorites.  If you haven't seen it, I recommend that you do.

And then?  Never go to the zoo again.

Unless it's to procure me a monkey.








Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Extra-Long Sleeves. Invest.

Occasionally a horror film comes along that's a little outside the box and makes you think.  There's that little piece of humanity that peeks through that tugs at your heartstrings or there's a glimpse of insanity that makes you wonder how we survive as a species.

Occasionally, you get both and that usually makes for a wondrous experience.

Eddie the Sleepwalking Cannibal is one of those movies.

Officially billed as a horror-comedy, Eddie is much more than that.  It's a buddy comedy, it's a "mental illness drama", it's A Bucket of Blood and The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Nell all rolled into one.

Lars is a former big-shot painter that's moved to Canada to teach at a local art school.  The school is thrilled to have him because his name will give them some credibility and, hopefully, keep them afloat for a few years.  One of his teaching duties, though, is to keep Eddie entertained in class.  Eddie is a brawny, developmentally disabled mute who likes to eat Yummy-O's out of the box and paint in watercolors.  This is also his primary means of communication.

D'aaaaaaaaawwwww!

After the death of Eddie's primary caregiver, one of the stipulations of her will was that the school would find a means of taking care of Eddie so that they can still get an annual donation from her estate.  Lars, being the goody-two-shoes boy scout that he is, volunteers for the job.

I see you're at a bar.  You'll need to make friends with that.

So, Eddie moves in at his place and, the first night, Lars checks in on him just to find that he's missing.  He heads out into the snow and discovers Eddie, hovering around in his tighty-whiteys, covered in the blood of a rabbit.  As disturbing as this is, it inspires Lars to paint again.  We find out that Eddie's done this before in times of great stress and that once he gets acclimatized to new situations the behavior stops.

And he'll save money on white paint since most of the scene was snow.
After selling the painting and donating the money to the school, Lars enjoys a more localized sort of fame that makes him feel good about himself, again.  It's a little addicting so he, well, encourages Eddie to indulge in his nightly habits with the neighbors, with the out-of-towners who decided it was funny to pick on the less-advantaged and the town in general.  All of this inspires more and more fantastic art that sells for thousands of dollars.

Is it wrong that I'm a little turned on?  It's probably because I like corn syrup.

All the while, Lars and Eddie develop something more than a friendship.  Lars and Eddie love each other.  It's almost romantic but not quite.  It's kind of sweet, in a disturbing sort of way.  I mean, there's no naked, sexy, fun time, which probably would have been more disturbing, but the bond between them is definitely more than brotherly.  This kinda gets in the way of the actual female love interest.

I have to say that Boris Rodriguez did a fantastic job with this and it's really no wonder that it won several awards on the festival circuit.  The satire of the art world is subtle but pervasive and the delicate care taken to explore the relationship between a disturbed man and his caretaker is sublime.  Plus, it's funny.  It's very light-hearted, as macabre as it is, and that keeps it from being TOO cerebral.  I highly recommend this movie.

Monday, July 22, 2013

KAIJUUUUUUUU!!

Guillermo Del Toro needs to be given a gigantic budget all the time, dammit.

OK, so yeah, I know that Pacific Rim is not a horror film in the classic sense but because it features kaiju heavily it is distinctly horror-adjacent.  So I'm covering it.  A lot.  Because it's super amazeballs awesome.





Our story begins with a retrospective on the history of the Kaiju on Earth.  They come from a vent in the ocean floor that has somehow become an opening into another dimension.  This other dimension leaks monsters and not just the kind that will terrorize a block or two like a vampire or werewolf.    We're talking beings that are a couple of miles long.  Things with built in weaponry whether it be blades, horns, acidic spit or tentacles, these things know how to kick puny human ass.  Bullies.  All of them.  Gigantic, Lovecraftian bullies.

Enter our heroes.  The pilots of the Jaegers, gigantic mecha that give us a fighting chance against the Kaiju.  The come in pairs of two because it's almost impossible for just one person to control the immense robot alone.  I'm thinking that someone had a lot of anise-flavored, cough syrup-like booze while writing the script to come up with that name but that's probably because I tend to imagine screenwriters as hooch-soaked starving artists.  I know this isn't true but it's nice to dream.


They HAD to go all The Right Stuff, didn't they?



Raleigh Becket and his brother, Yancy, pilots of Gipsy Danger and eminently "drift-compatible" (meaning that their minds can blend seamlessly so that they can act as a single unit because part of the machinery combines their brainwaves) are assigned a category 3 kaiju near Alaska and go off to give it a good old-fashioned beatdown.  In the process, because they don't like to waste life if they can help it, they rescue a fishing boat as well as the coastal city that's being threatened.  Unfortunately, Raleigh loses his brother and almost loses his own life in the process.  He does lose some functionality of his own left arm, though.  Not enough to be physically handicapped but enough to make sure that he never pilots the left side of a Jaeger ever again.  Plus he got some awesomely circuit-like burn scars.  Chicks dig scars.  Keep in mind though that because they were "in the drift" as they call it, Raleigh FELT Yancy die.

One can imagine that one would be depressed after this so Raleigh goes off to become a forgotten construction worker on the giant walls that coastal cities are building to fend off the Kaiju.  The Jaeger program is being shut down, y'see and people are just CERTAIN that these walls will withstand the attacks of the epically huge extra-dimensional forces.  Of course, Stacker Pentacost, the commander of the Jaeger forces, is not pleased and arranges to have his own Jaeger forces on standby.  He enlists Raleigh via the old "Do you want to die forgotten and alone in a construction accident or do you want to be a hero" gambit.

He chooses the Roy Scheider option.

He gets introduced to Mako Mori, a rookie pilot that scored perfectly in her simulations but has not, yet, actually been in a Jaeger, and a couple of scientists, Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottleib, who are studying the Kaiju and the Rift respectively in the hopes of learning how to more effectively stop them and close the Rift respectively.  He also gets introduced to the pilots of the other Jaegers, the bigshots being Herc and Chuck Hansen, pilots of Striker Eureka.  Chuck is kind of a douche despite being played by the eminently hot Robert Kazinsky.

Don't mind me.  I'm just chillin'.  Tryin' to mind-meld with a monster, that's all.

After a series of tests to determine who is best suited to partner with Raleigh, he is insistent on Mako.  Pentecost refuses initially because it basically turn out that she's his adopted daughter and he's going all Papa Bear with a porn stache.  Eventually, he relents because he knows she's good at what she does.  The initial test, though, almost ends in disaster because she gets caught up in her memory of the attack that introduced her to Pentecost.  She gets over it when a couple of category 4s attack and incapacitate the other 3 Jaegers available.  
Daddy, you never let me do anything cool...

Newton, in the meantime, having drifted with part of a Kaiju brain (destroying it in the process) is trying to get his hands on another and has to get help from Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman in pretty gold-plated shoes).  They initially don't get along and Chau sends him into a trap because the drift experiment left Day's mental image in every Kaiju's mind.  Oh, did I forget to mention that the Kaiju have a hive mind because they're all clones?  Because they do.

Oh, shit!  Some of them FLY!

They do eventually find him but Gipsy Danger saves the day and Newton and Hermann, who basically hate each other, drift into the alien brain together and figure out that the plan to blow a nuke over the rift won't work because the rift won't let anything that doesn't have Kaiju DNA through it.  In a most awesome undersea battle where Pentecost takes the place of Herc due to an injury in the previous battle, Gipsy Danger and her crew are brought into the rift... and I probably shouldn't say any more.

I mean it's kind of formula and you can figure out the end but I've said too much already.

Now, I'm sure most of you grew up watching the Godzilla movies and you know that there are good and bad Kaiju but this isn't those movies.  In this movie we deal with the monsters as monsters and I'm totally grateful for that.  The LAST thing we needed was a little kid stepping out with a kaiju pet/buddy fighting for the good side.  I mean, that has it's place and all but I went to this glorious piece of brainless fluff to watch giant robots fight giant monsters and I got my wish.  I didn't see it in 3D because my husband gets headaches but I'm OK with that.
But this would have been SO COOL in IMAX.
On the other hand, I got a little bit of meaning, too.  It wasn't ALL brainless.  The two pilots of each mecha HAVE to be able to join their minds and get past any differences they have.  It's a tiny microcosm representative of the outside world.  If we're going to survive, we have to get past our differences and get along.  We're all human and we each live our own truth.  Getting past it means accepting another's truth and being OK with that.
And Del Toro is quoted as saying, "I avoided making any kind of message that says war is good. We have enough firepower in the world."  As an avowed pacifist myself, I have to give the man props for that.

But really, it's all about the giant monsters.  Because the 8-year-old in me went SQUEEEEEE!!  Nobody really cares about the plot, do they?  I didn't and you KNOW that normally I'm a stickler for that shit.  Frankly, the script for Pacific Rim could be screenwriter feces on scraps of construction paper as long as I have colossal robots fighting immense monsters.

SQUEE!

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Stranger Danger!! STRANGER DANGER!!

As a happy coincidence, my Adventures in Netflix brought me to yet another "killer car" story.

Not a GOOD one, but there you have it.





Campbell Jackson is a dude in Detroit without a life, without a girl and without a car.  Once he gets the car, he can get the other two but getting the car is a bitch when you keep losing jobs left and right and this slack-tastic individual seems to not have the best of luck in that department.  The car won't fix the awful dominatrix roommate situation, though. 

When he finally DOES get a job he can keep and that he's good at (his boss often sending him into management-like situations), he runs into problems with just not having a car.  Late because of the bus schedule.  No carrying capacity.  I mean, seriously.  Little old ladies in third world countries can carry more on their heads than this guy.  So, yeah.  He finds an awesome white van and wants to buy it but there's a problem.


Well, a problem beyond the two fuckwits on either side of this picture.

Yeah... the van he wants to buy?  Totally belongs to a serial killer and it's booby-trapped to Hell and back.

Who DOES that?!?  

And it's not like the current owner is subtle about it.  He starts out with hitchhikers and such but really, the dude has no sense of propriety when choosing places to slice and dice.  The driver murders one woman in a grocery store parking lot in broad daylight when she asks for a test drive.  Of course, this happens AS Campbell is calling about the van himself so he's a little taken aback by the screams.
 Well, that's overly gooey.
The driver smashes a girl against the side of a building AND goes after the mechanic that was trying to rip her off.

Tonya Kay is awesome.  She needs bigger parts.  Not THOSE parts, ya pervs.

So, yeah.  I'm sure the word "surreptitious" never even entered this guy's vocabulary.

You know.  I kinda like this one but not really.  I mean, it's not great or anything and there are parts of it that just don't make any sense at all but b-grade schlock isn't really meant to be intelligent.  The fact that they gave Creature from "Who Wants To Be a Superhero" a speaking part (that would be Ms. Kay, above) means that they weren't particularly going for an Oscar.  The fact that the aforementioned cameo was the best part of the movie, on the other hand, just tells me that tiny, be-dreadlocked, vegan burlesque dancers need to be on film more often.

The problem with this film is that there's not enough horror to be really scary and not enough humor to be really funny and the two never actually meet.  If you're going to make a horror-comedy, you should try to amp up both parts and make them work WITH each other and not as two separate things.

I do appreciate the use of practical effects, though, and it shows they were trying to make a good piece.  It just wasn't good enough.


Thursday, July 18, 2013

Death Boots Badonkadonk Mix

Note to self:  DO NOT get on Netflix whilst in the throes of insomnia.  It makes you make bad life choices.

Bad life choices like watching Sweatshop.


The story for this one is simple.  Tooooooo simple.

A bunch of young adults break into an old factory to hold a rave.  Because raves are still popular.  As they're setting up, they're hunted by the freaky-ass mutants that live there.  The first to die?  The lesbian who's apparently not as lesbian as she'd like people to think.  Her name is Lolly.  Because she's got an oral fixation on top of her most goth haircut, her gothapotamus outfit and her "OMG, I shouldn't be able to run in these boots" boots.

 All that sugar will rot your teeth, there, les-faux.

And the rest aren't really killed right away but they totally should be.  We've got the slimy redneck who's somehow financing a part of this, the jealous bitch, the stupid flitter-fairy perky-goth in her skankenstein-wear and her yarn falls, the redneck's punk-rock brother with the serious mohawk who suffered from a mysterious "snowballing" incident (if you need me to explain "snowballing" let me know but you should probably check urbandictionary.com first), the DJ, the smart girl who SHOULD have been the one to survive but didn't and the final girl who is, in actuality, a pimp.  The other girls there are her hoes.

Actual hoes.  Hoes are a real thing.  People pay to have Skankenstein get their dick wet.

(The management would like to alert you to the fact that sex work is actual work and no one should be shamed for it.  My choice of the word "skankenstein" is purely for humorous reasons and in no way represents my actual feelings towards sex-positive individuals whose affections are negotiable.)

Where's mah MONEY?!

I know the director was trying to be all subversive and shit but, damn, really?  There's only so far you can invert the final girl before it looks like you're trying too hard.

They're all being chased and murder-fied by a dude with an anvil on a stick and his creepy family.  And that's all we'll ever know about them.

Please die, Skankenstein.

And it ends in a glow-stick bloodbath.  A badly acted and filmed glow stick bloodbath.

This happens.  No, really.

Suffice it to say that I'm blaming my watching this on insufficient sleep.  I think this could have been great if they had moderated the volume levels, written a better script, left out all of the macho, homophobic bullshit and, you know, acted well.  I do give it props for using practical over digital effects but it's still awful.

Skip it.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Update...

Sorry, kids.  Life has gotten in the way a bit so posts will be in the evenings for a while.

But you can always wait and read them in the morning if you want.

I don't mind.

Love,

Uncle Bob

Monday, July 15, 2013

Minimally Malicious.

I'm gonna apologize ahead of time, kids, because there are NO good pictures for this movie except the poster.

You may thank me for saving your eyesight later.

So.  Anyway.  Full Moon Entertainment has put out a LOT of hideous crap over the years and Unlucky Charms is just the latest in their badly-scripted, worse-acted line of Z-Grade uber-trash.





So, yeah.  4 Irish bugaboos, Banshee, Phouka, Bloody Bones and Far Darrig (It's supposed to be FIR Darrig and none of them are supposed to be proper names but what do you expect from a script that's probably 90 percent improv) are after 4 ancient Lucky Charms that are part of some ancient magic doohickey because their power is being wasted on selfish crap.  They're the GOOD guys, even though Bloody Bones is a total perv and the others are being forced to kill people.

Enter our victims.  5 beautiful women, none of them smaller than a B-cup (because, in direct contrast with my post last week about the Final Girl, this movie IS utterly misogynistic), who are on an America's Next Top Model-like reality show competing to be the spokesmodel for Dee Dee DeVille who proves that "black don't crack" is entirely incorrect.  She's the one with the charms and she's using them to stay young by sucking the souls out of the contestants and who's evil can only get better.  No.  It can really only get better because she's the lamest excuse for a villain, ever.  I was hoping she was making a model-skin coat but no such fucking luck.

Also included are the super-gay Pirl, who does nothing but bitch and complain through the whole movie and a skeevy producer whose name I can't even remember who specifically set up his bedroom in the house to have no cameras so that he can fuck around with at least one of the contestants

Only two of the girls die.  (The body count in this one is intensely disappointing.)  The third would-be victim is utterly pure and innocent (shock) and is immune to the charm's powers.  The remaining two (whom you'd THINK Cruella would try and go after when this failed) are the ultra-bitch with the sick brother which is why she needs the money and the funniest character, the vaguely Asian girl played by Mitsuimi Max who, despite her obvious plastic surgery, looks awesome.  Who knew tight-lacing and DDD sweater-puppies would look good on an Asian girl.  She's a little hilarious, though, and should be the next Carmen Electra.  She'd certainly do a better job at it than the current Carmen Electra.

Suffice it to say that this movie does its job.  And that job is to kill time during a bout of insomnia and slow your brain down enough to sleep.  It's bland with tons of T&A but there's not a lot of gore which is weird because we expect that from Full Moon.  Step up the game, kids.  We want awesome shit like Subspecies and Puppet Master back.

Gingerdead Man can go the hell away, by the way.  Just sayin'.

Friday, July 12, 2013

*static*

No post today, kids. 

Gotta help the hubby's mom move.

Be back Monday.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Man, Detention Sucks!

Oh, The Breakfast Club.  Defining movie of the 80's generation.  John Hughes' teenage magnum opus.  Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson in all their glory. 

Not that kind of glory, pervs.

Anyway, that was the basis for today's movie.  And now that that image is in your head, you can just forget all about it.

Y'see, this is a horror film, duh, and while the initial premise says "Five Very Different Kids Serve a Saturday Detention" that's about where the similarity ends.  YES, they got Judd Nelson to play the principal but does he even count as an actor, anymore?  Seems to me he hung that shit up after Suddenly Susan, his career just a-flappin' in the wind ever since.

Your Just For Men™ is showing.

But, I digress.

So, yeah.  These kids all have serious issues.  One is in detention for stripping in Study Hall.  No, seriously.  Boobs everywhere.  And she's the nerd.  Asthmatics can be sexy too, I guess.  And, hey.  A healthy c-cup will get you anywhere.

Sexy Librarian fetish.

The Awkward Nerd steals shit.  The Princess is a cokehead.  The Jock is a practical jokester (there's a Carrie-esque thing in there), the Goth Girl wears her remote control vibrator everywhere along with just... y'know... being strange and the New Guy... well, the New Guy wasn't supposed to be there because he's being expelled.  He convinces the school psychiatrist (because this is a rich kid school they kind of bypassed the whole "Guidance Counselor" thing, I guess) to let him attend the detention.  
 
 
This gets pointed out at multiple points during the movie.
 
I'm suspicious...

The rest of the movie is all about uncovering secrets, trying to dispel hauntings and escape attempts that go hilariously wrong.  Since they're given an assignment to write the school history (which none of them actually try to work on, they're left alone for the day and locked in with no cell phones except for New Guy because he's a dirty, dirty liar).

Seriously?  There's not a lot to do here.  It's kind of Scooby-Doo-Esque.  Yeah, I know they were going for Breakfast Club meets Heathers and it kind of works but it kind of doesn't.  There are gigantic plot holes and there are things that no one could (or should) understand and the end just shows that the ones with the money win, anyway, so why did we bother with this?
 
Oh, yeah.  Nail gun.

Ultimately, it's OK.  It's a decent time-waster but don't expect anything big out of it.  

From what I understand, the comic is better.

This is still getting a sequel, though.

Meh.