Monday, September 30, 2013

Rant-y

No review today.

Today, I'm going to voice my displeasure over something.

Fuckin' Syfy.

OK, so they make vaguely amusing original movies that are so bad they should spell instant death for the careers of anyone who choose to star in them (except for Tiffany and Debbie Gibson who should be sharing more girl-fights because they're hilarious) and I heart Face-Off but I think we need to discuss their Friday the 13th marathon for a second because it disturbs me, greatly.

Fuck you, Syfy, for not respecting the R-rating.  How fucking dare you neuter Jason and his abhorrence of boobs.

How dare you put commercials in our favorites and disperse our gory reverie.

How dare you cut out the cutting and slash out the slashing.

How dare you remove the parts we like the best, boobs or no, making Friday the 13th acceptable for family audiences.

I suppose I could deal with the commercials if they just put a damn parental advisory warning on them but nooooooooo, they need to run the damn thing during the day on a Saturday where just anybody can watch it.

I refuse to watch horror movies that originally had an R-rating on Syfy and any good horror fan would, too, unless there was absolutely no other option.

Eat it, Syfy.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Side Effects May Include...

I'm not normally one for medical drama.  Hell, I'm, like, three seasons behind on Grey's Anatomy because I don't work at home anymore and Lifetime doesn't show the all-day marathons like they used to.  I have no life.

ANYWAY, that being said, I got a wild hair up my ass and picked up The Facility on On-Demand.


 You all have heard of those clinical trials that hobos and teenagers sign up for, right?  The one where they pay you a couple of hundred bucks to lock you in a hospital ward for a few days so they can monitor new drugs and see what kind of horrible things they can do to your body?  Well that's where this movie takes us.  Right into one of these trials.  I won't say the middle of it because you start at the beginning, with the subjects being taken in and having the ins and outs explained to them.

We get our standard characters.  The asshole jock, the nice girl, the outsider kid, the nerd, the creepy old dude, the goth-ish girl, and the too shy to survive in the real world, let alone a horror movie guy.  They're brought in to test a drug called PRO9.

You're gonna put what where?
As can be expected, they get one dose of the stuff before things start to go horribly wrong.  Because otherwise this movie would be really fucking boring.  (And, for realsies, it kind of is, anyway, but we'll get into that, later.)  In the meantime, we're talking about vomiting, sweats, some serious rosacea, swelling, fever, hallucinations, bleeding from the pores, loss of speech control, cutting your own damn face partially off, stalking hallways naked, homicidal and suicidal tendencies, attempted rape and anal leakage.

OK, I made that last one up.

No, I didn't.
The problem here is that's pretty much the story.  There's not much suspense other than "can they get in here" and "who's next" and "why the fuck did I do this again?"  We're not given a whole lot of information about the drug other than that it's supposedly an anti-depressant and that some of them got placebos (which, really, is standard operating procedure in scientific testing).  We don't even know that much about thecharacters as people.  There's no sympathy for them because we don't know whether or not they SHOULD survive.  Frankly, I was OK with an all-out bloodbath and I didn't even get that.

So, here's the deal, horror directors, there's a time and a place for subtle.  Having your characters turn into insane monsters?  Not the fucking time or place.  If you're gonna give me insano-drugs, give me over-the-top shenanigans.

I like shenanigans.

So do we.
So, there you have it.  Cold boogers on a paper plate.  I should totally ask for a refund but I don't think the cable company is gonna give me my 6 bucks back.  I should have expected it, really.  The director is the same guy that directed Monsters and I turned that shit off halfway through.

Fuckers.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

40 Whacks

So, in celebration of a few days of overtime, for which I profusely apologize, by the way, I finally hooked up my HD cable and sat down to big screen Netflix.  Because what's the use of having a big screen if you can't watch movies on it, right?

And then I picked my movie.  I thought I'd choose something I'd never seen and I saw this in the queue:






A movie about Lizzie Borden's ghost?  With Gary Busey in all of his Insano-Vision™ glory?  Count me in!  I mean, we all know I'm a glutton for punishment, right?  I watch bad movies on purpose because there are sometimes hidden gems.

This was not one of them.

Our story is about a girl who is in therapy because of something horrible in her childhood involving Dan Swayze who is an UGLY motherfucker.  Jesus.  How much work did Patrick have done to avoid looking like his brother, anyway?  Patrick's face must've cost a mint.

So, yeah.  It's all vague and involves a hatchet.

And sometimes a bat.
 The girl inherits the house as an adult and is now living there with her boyfriend who, frankly, is the only eye-candy in the whole film and the director was OBVIOUSLY gay considering how much time he spent with the camera pointed at his boxer-brief ensconced crotch.  It's established early on that she's crazy, he KNOWS she's crazy, it's a wedge in their relationship and that his crotch needs to be set free more often than she lets it.

Even her shrink knows it.
Seriously, that's the most interesting part of the movie.

Yeah, there's the ghost of Lizzie Borden and a creepy neighbor that doesn't know how to fuckin' knock but neither they nor Corbin Bernsen nor Gary Busey make up for the utter lameness that is this film.  The director maybe needs to go back to directing porn.  Or maybe not since there wasn't a SHRED of nudity in this.  Oh, wait.  I lied.  There were boobs.  Big, round fakeys.  For about a second.  Whee.

Seriously?  THIS is Lizzie Borden's ghost?  Fuck off.
I was so bored after watching this, I watched Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters again because I needed something familiar and enjoyable to drag my ass out of the pits of boredom.

You can just pass right on by this one. 

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Diggin' Holes.

OK, so, as part of my misadventures in Indianapolis a couple of weeks ago (not the horrible ones, the ones at Horrorhound, which were awesome), I met the folks promoting Jug Face.  Nice folks.  Real easy to talk to.  Good people.  Plus I was totally hot and they gave me a fan.

Conventions are fuckin' sweaty.  Sometimes in the good way but that's for another blog entirely.  One I do not write.  Suffer.

ANYHOO!  So, since these guys were good people, I decided to give their little flick a look-see.  'Cause I'm cool that way.


First off, let me just say that I'm very happy to see horror movies returning to R-ratings.  Sorry, but unless it's written REALLY well and it's specifically aimed at a family-friendly market, I want my horror to be loaded with bare skin and blood.  Jug Face has both.  Not necessarily in spades, but they've certainly got a noticeable presence.

The story is simple but well-told.  A young girl in a secretive hill clan that doesn't talk, like, at ALL, to city folk except to sell them moonshine, has a tryst in the woods with a handsome young man.  A stupid and angry young man, but handsome, nonetheless.  At the same time, a lone potter is making a clay pot with a young woman's face on it.  The face of the girl who's getting nailed to a tree.

Not that any of you were looking at her face.  Or his.
The girl hikes up her drawers and heads homeward only to find that her family and neighbors are gathered around to announce that she's been engaged to the chubby neighbor kid.  Needless to say, she's not pleased.  Especially since her forest-folk family place great store in virginity before marriage and, oopsy, she done lost hers.  She keeps her mouth shut, though, and gets sent to gather everybody that wasn't there for the announcement for a barbecue. 

Because hillbillies equate love with sauteed roadkill.

For obvious reasons, when she goes to fetch the potter, she uses... paint?  To fake her period.  The potter declines to come to the party but on her way out, she stops to see the jug he created and is fairly shocked to see her own face on it.  So she takes it and hides it in the woods.  You'll find out why, later.

When people's eyes go ghostly-white, there's an issue.

The handsome idiot is visibly upset at the party.  Naturally.  Y'know... since he expected that he'd be able to get his dick wet on a regular basis and all.  Instead, he gets all whiny about it and tells our girl to keep her damn mouth shut.  In her bedroom.  That he shares with her.  Because he's her brother.

Put your sister to the test, indeed.

So, yeah.  Stealing that jug causes a backwoods brouhaha.  Turns out that the jug faces are images of the folks that their deity, a hole in the ground, demands for sacrifice.  Considering that it's fully capable of possessing people to get its wishes known, I would be OK with feeding its face.  When its face does NOT get fed, it finds its own meal in the form of the neighbors.

Now, on top of keeping her secret, our girl's mom is entirely too concerned about the state of her daughter's vagina.  I mean, she seriously just digs her face right up in there to make sure she's still all hymen-riffic.  Go, Sean Young.  We all wondered where you went after your trip to crazy-stalker-Catwoman-town.

OB-GY-MOM.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that our girl is pregnant?  With her brother's kid?  And proud of it?  But not proud enough to actually say it out loud?

And, just to add another wrinkle, there's a ghost kid around that warns our girl that the creature in the pit is PISSED because she hid the jug.  Seems her grampa did the same thing to protect his sweetheart and now grampa is an arthritic wreck who can't stand up from the bucket he shits in.  No, I am not kidding about that.

So, now that all of this is established, our girl, who loves the feeble-minded potter in a kind-hearted sort of way, decides she needs to take him and just fuckin' leave.  Being that she's po' white trash, she ain't got no money so she tries to sell some 'shine but the dude that she tries to sell it to calls her dad.

What happens, ain't pretty.

And neither is Sean Young.
Now, being that these are the same folks who were behind The Woman, there's a lot to live up to, here, and, really?  It does.  In terms of story, the ideas presented are not exactly new but the way they're presented is almost flawless.  The director, Chad Crawford Kinkle, doesn't shy away from taboo subjects or a downer ending and gives us a haunting look at cult activity.  On the other hand, we're still dealing with hicks and by the end, I wasn't sure I ever wanted to hear those accents ever again.

All in all, though, this piece is thoughtful, insightful and deep.  If you want horror that makes you think, this one's for you.  It's not great but it's good enough and sometimes, that's OK.

Check it out.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

And Demons Might Fly Out Of My Butt

I'm gonna be honest, here (like you expected anything different), and say that when I heard about Bad Milo, I expected a whole lot of "Children's Hospital-esque", Adult Swim shenanigans and, while I'm generally OK with that sort of thing, I don't usually appreciate it in my horror unless I'm actively looking for it.  I kind of had to watch it, though, so as to present it to you, and so it was with a shuffle in my step and trepidation in my heart that I ordered it On-Demand today.





So... yeah...  what can I say about Bad Milo?

We'll start, as we always do, with the story.

Our hero, Duncan (Ken Marino), is a stressed-out accountant.  His mom (Mary Kay Place) is dating a total creeper that's half her age and she wants grandkids, his boss (Patrick Warburton) is totally skeevy, his dad (Stephen Root) is a selfish asshole (HA!) and his wife (Gillian Jacobs) really wants a family.  None of these things are things that Duncan is at all prepared to deal with.  Like, at all.  Duncan is a whiny fucking dick.


As a side-effect of his stress, he spends a LOT of time in the bathroom.  The first thing we see is him getting an ultrasound and the proctologist telling him he has a polyp.  No big thing, right?  The doc also suggests therapy to get a handle on his stress and his wife is TOTALLY on board with that, as would anyone sane.  Seriously, if your stress is affecting your ability to poop normally, you have issues.

Dude has to bite down.  There's a fuckin' problem here.
He goes to the therapist and it turns out that the dude (Peter Stormare) is a total tree-huggin', new-age hippie.  Of course, Duncan balks at this so that just tells me that he doesn't want to take any control over his life and that makes me want to hit him.

Over the course of Duncan coming to grips with the fact that he needs therapy, people he hates start dying.  The news blames it on a rabid raccoon but we all know better, don't we?  When Duncan finally decides to go to therapy for real, we discover that he has a demon living in his ass.

Yes, you heard me.  Ass-demon.  Anal Imp.  Rectal Rawr.

Wait, seriously?
And Therapist dude's advice is to make friends with it.  Because he's an ass.

Jesus Christ.

So he tries to and kind of succeeds until he finds out that his dad has one, too.  Then it all goes to shit.

Eeeeeeew, you touched it!
And the really scary thing?  I actually kinda liked it.  I mean, I DO like horror comedy and this took things a little more seriously then a lot of others.  The LACK of slapstick actually made this movie enjoyable.  The acting was OK, the script was, obviously, kind of original and that was refreshing.

Of course, I had to deal with literal toilet humor and that detracted a little but if you're into that kind of sophmoric humor, more power to you.

I say that if you want a bit of nasty with your video nasty, go for it.

Monday, September 16, 2013

I'll Be There For Yooooouuuuuuu...

We all know Danielle Harris, right?  Cute kid.  Wore a kind of iconic clown costume in a few of the Halloween sequels?  Graduated to jailbait victim in the remake and its sequel?  The bane of Victor Crowley in the Hatchet moviesPregnant vampire hunter in Stake Land?  We love her, right?  Tiny, little horror pixie that she is?  We like to encourage her in her endeavors.  She's awesome and deserves to succeed.

Only, now we get to deal with some growing pains in her career because she finally got the chance to direct.

Kill me.

Good lord this was bland.

Among Friends, like many a horror tale before it, brings a bunch of asshole friends together for a party.  This party is special because it's all 80s Prom murder mystery themed.  This just means that coke is going to figure heavily into the evening.

I'm totally not kidding about that.

So, anyway, the kids get taken to their friend Bernadette's house in a limo.  Driven by a foul-mouthed Kane Hodder who seriously just needs to keep his fuckin' mouth shut.  I like Mr. Hodder, I really do but he's so much better when he's silent and menacing and, more often than not, carrying a damn machete covered in the blood of asshole teenagers.

Until you get naked on camera, Mr. Hodder, shut your face-hole.
So, yeah.  Decked out in their totally tubular finery, the kids make themselves comfortable until their hostess arrives and you KNOW that something is wrong when she shows up behind them like a goddamn ninja.

POOF, BITCHES!
Bernadette (don't call her Bernie) lays out the rules and has the friends search the house for clues, placing them in strategic teams.  Why they're strategic, I really don't know.  All I know is that two of them end up high on mushrooms and one of them is doing coke in the bathroom.

Then they break for dinner and they get presents!  YAY, PRESENTS!  They're all clues to the mystery they're supposed to be solving.

Hint:  This is the sexually generous two-faced cunt.
Somehow or other, they all end up paralyzed and taped up to the dining room chairs.  Pretty sure it was in the booze.  They're all "I can't feel my legs!  Oh, NOES!  Who could have done this?  Who was the only damn person in the house capable of movement all this time?"

Braintrusts, the lot of them.

So, yeah.  Bernadette is a psycho.  She also happens to be a psychologist.  Nobody seems to know the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist so I'm gonna lay this out right now.  A psychiatrist is the one that can dispense medication.  That just begs the question "Where the fuck did she get the paralytics?

And this is where the game gets nasty.  Her friends can ask her questions but she gets something in return.  In the case of one friend, she collects a piece of her scalp.  Another rule?  Every time someone says "please stop" someone loses a finger.

It occurs to me that many psych majors take that course load to figure out their own damn problems.

Wanna get hammered?  It's a total head trip.  No, seriously, her faboo 80's hair is fucked.
Oh, and, by the way, Bernadette has been secretly filming all of her friends whenever they're partying at her house.  Because, and I cannot stress this enough, she's CRAZY.  Only not really crazy in an entertaining kind of way.  Just in a "we need a villain, see if you can't gnaw your way through that wall" sort of way.

Those tapes are the reason behind this little shindig.

Stoned is quite possibly the only way this movie could be even halfway entertaining.
Now, I'm not saying that I don't like this movie.  I'm saying that I absolutely hated it.  I'm sorry, Miss Harris but this half-assed throwback to Happy Birthday to Me (BTW, Happy 300th Post to me!) needs a LOT of work.  I know it's your first shot and I know that you have to build your craft but I think you have to do a little homework in terms of subtlety and tension.  The bones are there but the flesh and blood is missing.

That said, the acting isn't bad.  It's not great by any stretch but it's watchable.  The cinematography isn't bad, either.  I really think that the badness just comes from script and direction.  That's a correctable thing if we can get Danielle to watch some Murnau, Craven, Hitchcock and Scott.

Do your homework, missy!  No TV until it's done.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Friday, September 13, 2013

I Wanna Axe You a Question.

What the everliving fuck did I just watch?

No, seriously.  What did I watch?  I'm not sure.  Was it a comedy?  Was it a horror film?  Was it a waste of digital space?  Was it a smorgasbord of cgi bullshit?  Yes.  All of it.  Yes.

Don't get me wrong, I knew what I was getting into but fuuuuuuuuuuck.  This was horrifically hilarious.  Once again, do NOT make this into a drinking game because you WILL keel the fuck over.

Our movie starts with a damn flashback and we all know that's never a good thing.  In this case, though, we get the return of Dan Haggerty.  Dan Haggerty who needs to fire his damn agent because his career is about as inspiring as Elizabeth Berkely's.

It still doesn't help.

So, yeah.  He's a late 19th century logging foreman.  He's all grinding his scary junk on this big cow that cookie is spit-roasting (only not really).  He goes to take a dump and returns to find his entire camp in chunks.  Then he gets manhandled by the Elephant Man and force-fed to a ripsaw.

Say hello to my little friend.
Fast forward to modern day where a bunch of idiot teenagers are being shuffled off to a "first offenders" camp to scare them straight.  They have an asshole police sergeant leading the way and a meek and mild counselor to help them work through their daddy issues.

Disrespect is the new black.
Of course, the felons in training bond on the bus to camp.

Hi.  I'm Douche-y McDrug-Dealer.
They get harassed by the local madman around the campfire and then, in standard prison film fashion, some of the inmates try to have sex and get caught and are forced to go on a hike.  Actually, all of them are forced on a hike but whattayagonna do?

On this hike, Douche-y picks up a gigantic cow horn.  Actually... an OX horn.  You get where we're going with this, right?

I got you, Babe.
Yes, kids, they just graverobbed Babe the Big Blue Ox.

Really?  Seriously?

Fuck me.

Yeah.  That cow from the beginning was Babe.  Loggers ate Babe the Big Blue Ox.  I'd say he looked tasty but HE was fucking CGI, too.

Anyway!  This, of course, pisses the still living and fucking immense PAUL GODDAMN BUNYON off, so he chases the team through the forest, hacking and slashing willy-nilly, actually stomping on Sergeant Tightpants because he was an ass.

Yes, those are CGI intestines.
They get back to the cabin and lock themselves in with a fucking hook-and-eye catch.

A hook-and-eye catch to stop a two-story tall dude with a gigantic fucking axe that he sharpens on a cave wall.

These people are stupid and deserve to die.

Shake that bitch like a fresh glow-stick!
My fucking brain hurts.

I don't know why I do this to myself.  Yes, this film is completely laughable and that makes it kind of worth it but I really think we need to stop handing money to cheap CGI houses.  Those bitches ruin everything.  Practical may not be cheap but FUCKING USE IT!  CGI should only be used to ENHANCE effects, not replace them.

Do your fucking job, effects folks.

Don't make me come get you.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Penicillin is Your Friend

As I've mentioned before, David Cronenberg is the MASTER of body horror.  His examination of the human body and its limits in conjunction with social horrors is intense and visceral and that vision has been his since the beginning.  And with that, we're gonna talk about Shivers.





The movie starts with an ad for an upscale Canadian apartment complex.  By "upscale", I'm assuming they mean "moose-free".  A young couple, the Swedens, pop in to take a gander at the digs completely unaware that directly above them, Old Dude McCreepypants is in the process of murdering a young woman.  Also, there's a dude that gets weird stomach pains and doesn't want his wife calling him at the office.  Turns out the murdered girl is the mistress of stomach dude. 

It ALSO turns out that a Dr. Emil Hobbes was the guy renting the apartment in which the girl was murdered.  We get the explanation that Hobbes was also working on getting parasites to replace human organs but he was also kind of sick of the over-rationality of humanity and the fact that we were losing touch with our own bodies so he developed a parasite that combines an aphrodisiac and a venereal disease.  Who does that?  Crazy people, that's who.  Hobbes kills himself after killing the girl.

Of course, it can't just end there, right? 

Hobbes had the mistress implanted with the parasites listed above and she just spread them all over the place.  The dude with the stomach pains leaves work early and goes to the bathroom where he coughs up something nasty along with a lot of blood.  He goes out for some fresh air and freaks out some old broads by puking up a parasite in front of them.  Of course, they think it's a dead bird. Because they're blind, apparently.  The parasite hangs out in the laundry room which every 70s bachelor knows is the best place to pick up chicks.

Another old dude gets checked out by the doctor which makes him question what's going on.  Seems Teenage Dream was an equal opportunity lay.

Stomach guy's wife comes home to find him passed out in front of the fridge.  She gets him into bed where he has a conversation with the things living in his gut and then gets checked out by the local doctor after spitting out a few more bugs who are working on infecting the whole building.

 
Take two of these and call me in the morning.
So, yeah.  This is CLASSIC Cronenberg and it should be part of a Horror 101 class.  Sorry this is so short but that's really all there is to say.  Cronenberg was about as subtle as a brick, here and that's perfectly OK. 

If you've never seen it, the whole movie is on YouTube.  Go.  Watch Barbara Steele in all her glory.  It's fucking required.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Over the Edge

Can we talk for a minute about Event Horizon?

Great Zombie Cthulhu, this movie was fucked up!

Following the intrepid crew of the Lewis and Clark, Event Horizon, despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews, is just fucking horrifying and I am not ashamed to admit that I was very close to covering my eyes with my hands and shrieking like a little girl.

We start with Lewis and Clark getting dispatched to check out a distress signal from the Event Horizon.  Of course, the ship's been missing for a while so people are all "What the fuck, man?"  Since they're going to have to get the ship back, preferably in one piece, the crew, led by Lawrence Fishburne, have to drag along Event Horizon's designing engineer.

See, the engine he designed creates its own black hole to bridge the distance between to points in space which reduces interstellar travel time.

Why space gotta be so fuckin' dark?
The ship is traveling in a decaying orbit, time is of the essence so they bust right in once they find it and find a bloodbath.  Adding to the strangeness, the gravity drive initializes on its own and sucks an ensign into it and spits him out all catatonic-like but awake enough to attempt suicide, after which he's put into stasis. And on top of THAT, the drive activation damages the Lewis and Clark so they all have to get on board the Event Horizon.  

With this guy.  And where the hell did the maggots come from?
 Now that they have to spend time on the abandoned ship, the crew starts to suffer hallucinations that are specifically keyed into their fears and regrets.  The worst of all being the engineer's wife's death.

She angry.
Miller (Fishburne) has to deal with this guy:

Ooooooooh, burn.
Of course, it's only THEN that they find video of the previous crew in a friggin' blood orgy because they were all driven crazy since not only did the drive WORK, it worked TOO WELL and dragged them into another dimension.  I'm assuming this dimension was what the religious folks would call "Hell".  This trip also managed to give the ship itself life and made the fucker psychic.  Because everybody needs an evil spaceship.

So, yeah.  Miller decides that the ship needs killin' and the engineer decides that everybody else needs killin'.  It gets trippy as fuck.

Whoa, man.  These colors are AWESOME!
Now, I don't know why people hated this movie.  Yeah, it takes a couple of viewings to get a handle on it but fuck if that's not a brilliant strategy in film making.  This is MEANT to be trippy and confusing and make you feel as if you're going insane.  Paul W. S. Anderson may have gotten a ton of heat for this flick but I think it's rad.





Thursday, September 5, 2013

Bill Cosby Can Eat a Dick.

As an avid fan of 50s creature features and monster movies, my 15 year old self was THRILLED in 1988 to discover that Chuck Russell was remaking The Blob because fuck if it didn't need dusting off and parading around like an inexpensive sex-worker with the rent due (and, seriously, needs it again because I loves me some killer Jell-o™).

Don't get me wrong.  The Steve McQueen version was fuckin' awesomesauce but there's something about the 88 update that is near and dear to my heart.  It could be that it was one of many things that I could share with my mom (who is totally a gorehound) or it could be that violent pudding is just fuckin' cool.  I don't know and I don't particularly care.  The 1988 Blob is the shit and I'll cut anybody that says otherwise.

Or feed them to the sink.  I haven't made up my mind, yet.
This is not to say that the movie doesn't have flaws but I'll get to them, later.

So, like with any movie that has to do with gruesome goo (and I think The Blob started that trope, for realsies), some asshole has to go poking meteors with sticks.  Seriously?  Really, Billy Bob the Hobo?  We step down from the trees and gain the ability to use tools and you want to revert to prodding the scorching hot rock from the sky KNOWING, after a few decades of b-grade horror cinema, that the minute you poke it you're going to die horribly?  Step away from the Sterno, dude.  It's fucking up your head.

You asshole.
So, yeah.  Hobo McGrimypants ends up with a handful of space goo and manages to get picked up by three high school students who give him a lift to the hospital.  How nice of them.  Good Samaritans all.  Small-town America at its finest.  Well, except for Brian (Kevin Dillon, complete with a radical 80s mullet and motorcycle-jumping action).  He's a dick.  Meg (Shawnee Smith), though, is America's fucking sweetheart.  All cheerleader-y and dating the nice boy and coming home on time and watching out for her baby brother and she makes my pancreas want to shrivel up and die she's so damn sweet.  Her steady, Paul, is Mr. Football Hero and you expect him to totally save the day but this is The Blob and it totally lives up to its "bad boy makes good" roots.  Wait for it.

Anyway, the doc gets a little busy and Paul checks in on the homeless dude and finds this:

This is what you get for being stupid.
And, then, after being suitably spooked, poor Paul gets a face full of space goo.  Thanks to the joys of 1980s Hollywood special effects, Meg gets to watch Paul get partially digested and, because she's our heroine, she tries to pull him out of the gelatinous mass but she misjudges the power of the Blob and Paul's arm comes out of the mess all by its lonesome and Meg knocks herself unconscious as the goo slips off into the night finally worming its way into the back seat of the local Lothario's date.  No, really.  Bitch gets hollowed out like a fuckin' piñata.

And this is what you get for serving roofie-coladas.  Date rape is never funny.
Now, because cops are fucking useless and they, apparently, hate all teenagers, ever, Meg meets up with Brian to discuss the Blob which they totally both saw and nobody believes them because they're idiot teenagers and they know nothing about how the world works, silly children.  And, of course, it's during that time that the kitchen help gets sucked into the drain.

I heart green screen... only not...
 Meg and Brian escape into the walk-in freezer where they discover that the space goo is vulnerable to the cold.  After the Blob moves on, they meet up with a federal team of scientists that have come out to investigate.  Oh, and they've quarantined the town.  Brian, of course, runs off but Meg is taken to her parents

In the meantime, Meg's little brother gets a wild hair up his ass and sneaks out with his buddy to see the new horror show down at the local theater.  I like this kid.  Of course, the theater is has a big old target on it and gets attacked mid-showing.  The kid's friend gets dissolved.  Suffice it to say that people end up in the sewers and that's just never pleasant.

And you thought YOUR movie theater's floors were sticky.
So, it turns out that The Blob (in this version) is a mutated virus that was meant to be used as biological warfare.  BAD GOVERNMENT!  BAD!  No cookie for you.  You're in time out, mister.  Now you go to your room and think about what you've done.

Do government agents ever survive?
 And that's where we stop, kids.  You know how this goes.  The first taste's free.  You want to know how this ends you have to watch it yourself.  Far be it from me to ruin the cheesy adorableness that is The Blob.  Go on.  You have time.  If you don't have time, MAKE time.  This is one of those movie's that's awesomely bad.  But it's not even bad.  It's... awesomely mediocre.  I mean, you KNOW this isn't going to be winning any Oscars but for the time it was AMAZING!  I mean, everybody knew that blue/green screen was used because, frankly, everybody was using it.  What it gave us, though, was deft use of latex, silicone, and strawberry yogurt alongside some strong acting from some undersung actors.

On the other hand, I had to look at Kevin Dillon's ugly mug for an hour and a half and that made me sad on the inside.  Seriously, he has a bat nose and it disturbs me.

But, no, really.  If you've never seen this, this is one of those movies that makes a positive case for remakes.  No, I don't expect a remake to ever replace the original and this one did not.  I DO, however, expect that remakes will enhance the original in ways we often don't expect and THAT was definitely achieved, here.

Now, go get yourself a pudding pop and poke meteors with sticks.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

THANK YOU!

FINALLY!  A director that understands that vampires are fucking monsters!


It took me a while to get to this one but I'm kind of glad I did. Stake Land is a 2010 vampire film with a twist.

It plays a little like Zombieland but that's OK because this one is much darker.  Older guy takes younger orphan under his wing and teaches him the way of the vampire hunter after the vamps cause Armageddon.  Pretty simple, right?

'Cause the vamps are pretty fuckin' ugly.
Yeah.  Pretty simple.

Along the way, they rescue a nun from the local religious crazies.  They get CAPTURED by said religious crazies, they escape from the religious crazies and the religious crazies spend the rest of the movie getting all revenge-y.  Well, one of them does.

They also join up with a pregnant woman (Danielle Harris of Halloween fame) and the token black dude who, you guessed it, dies first.

But he got to help these guys look badass for a bit.
This is almost brilliant film-making and it really does bring something new-ish to the table.  Mostly in treating the vampires like zombies.  They're brainless and they only live to feed.  The fact that they evolve is interesting, too.  You see a bit of a progression with them.  The fact that the true horror is religion, though is a little anvilicious.  

As for the acting, it was enjoyable.  There weren't any cast members that could be mistaken for lumber, in any case.  Except for one but she was dead.

All in all?  Thumbs up.  Not too high, but it makes for a good watch.



Monday, September 2, 2013

Buying the Farm

So, this weekend I got a little downtime, finally, and decided to try and play catch-up with Netflix which is a fucking daunting task, let me tell you.

Anyway, during that process I came across a title with Brad Dourif that I'd not seen before called "Last Kind Words" and I settled in to watch because my husband was taking a nap and I figured I shouldn't watch anything with a lot of screaming.

Suffice it to say I didn't expect much.

The film starts, like all good films should, with a kid shooting his father.  Totally accidental, of course, but you know how these things go.  Kid gets separated from his father during a hunting trip, kid finds corpse hanging from a tree that, seeing as how it was from the civil war, should have tumbled to the ground DECADES ago.  Kid goes to cut it down and a magical negro (turns out he was an escaping slave on the Underground Railroad) appears to stop him.  Kid gets spooked and tries to shoot the magical dude but magical dude is a ghost so he really shoots his dad.  Right in the heart, too.  No comin' back from that one.  Kid returns to the farm to report to his sister.

No tact.  None.  At all.
So, here we are, years later, and a family pulls up to the farm and the father has apparently been hired by Weyland (Brad Dourif) to do, well, farm stuff.  Farm stuff that I will never understand because I don't like physical labor.  This is why I sit at a desk and talk to silly people who break their computers all day and write this blog for you.  I don't even like camping because it smacks of work.  Who wants to build their own shelter and sit around a fire with mosquitoes sucking out your life force one milliliter at a time?  Seriously.

But I digress.

So, while dad hammers out the details (such as "you get to live in the trailer in the back yard"), the kid, Eli, goes tromping around the back yard because he's a sullen, moody boy who hates being there as much as any young man, who has basically been grounded for life simply by dint of moving to a backwater farm in the middle of nowhere, would be.  Hell, I'd be pissed, myself.

Angsty McWhiney-Face
He picks up an apple and goes to take a bit when a young woman comes out of the woods and tells him not to eat it because it's full of bugs.  Good call.  Too bad his dad comes back and gets all cranky-pants about a fuckin' apple.

That's right.  Eat that apple.  Eat it gooooood.
Eli makes friends with this girl who has given him no more information than her name, Amanda, and her location, "around".  Because he's a teenage boy and can get off on a handy ball of twine, he gets all twitterpated and a budding romance emerges.  We all know this won't end pretty, right?

On top of all of this we've got his dad who, naturally, is an abusive drunk and his mom who, seriously, is the Clueless Wonder.  Not quite an example of battered woman syndrome, because she's still got some fight in her, but enough to make her annoying.

So, yeah.  Long story short, kid falls in love with the girl, girl is a ghost, ghost happens to be Weyland's sister.  Weyland is a possessive creeper.  Girl USED to be the love of kid's DAD'S life and dad's a-pinin' because his life's gone to shit ever since he lost her thinking she ran away on him.  Weyland hung her in the backwoods which is where the majority of this story takes place because filming in the woods is cheap.  Oh, look.  A pre-fabricated set. 

Somewhere along the way, dad and Weyland get in a fight and dad ends up dead.  And that's when the creeper in Weyland REALLY comes out.

Plus he ends up selling museum quality antiques to pay back a loan-shark deal.
Oh, and we've got a minor sub-plot with Eli's pseudo-ex-girlfriend that either needed to be amped up or left out completely.

Now, the ending to this is relatively predictable but I'm still not going to go any further.  You know me and spoilers.

So, let's talk about this for a bit, shall we?

This is almost a textbook example of the Southern Gothic genre.  We've got love and hate and abuse and incest and a big rotting "mansion" in the deep south.  We've got people who are resentful of "city folk" and a blatant connection to the Civil War.  There's intrigue, there's, for lack of a better word, passion.  About the only thing we're missing is the crazy grandma in the attic.

All of that being said, I didn't hate this movie but I didn't like it, either.  This is probably because I don't have a single romantic bone in my body.  Actually, that's a lie but I'm not big on the gooey-mushy stuff in my horror movies (fuck you, Stephenie Meyer).  I know it has it's place and I know that romance is a large part of ghost movies, particularly in the case of Southern Gothic films, but there comes a point where the romance overcomes the creepy and this movie crossed that line.  It wasn't a feel-good movie by any stretch but it wasn't dark enough to overcome the lovey-dovey.

I can't say it was a bad movie, though, either.  Yeah, it was shoestring and, yes, there are scenes that feel forced and over-acted but it wasn't bad from a film-making standpoint for a B-Grade plotline, either.  I also give it props for sticking with the downer ending.

I give this one a thumb's sideways because I can't really make up my mind as to whether or not I hate it.  This is definitely a case of "Your Mileage May Vary".