A bad alien sequel, a “based on a true story” gay cannibal movie, and a movie I really liked….
ALIEN 3000 (aka: Unseen Evil 2) (2004)
No, you don’t need to see the first Unseen Evil from 2001 to watch this one. Hell, they changed the title of the movie to completely deny that it even is a sequel. Having not seen the first film, I don’t know which movie’s reputation that title change benefits more….
Granted, this is a direct sequel to the first, but it doesn’t matter. There’s this cave in the desert. In the first movie, a group of hikers came upon a cave with a treasure guarded by an invisible alien. Only one girl survived, no one believed her story, and she was locked up in a mental institution.
Now, that girl is being set free—as a different actress! A military crew brings her to find the cave so they can capture the alien for Priscilla Barnes and Lorenzo Lamas. Sadly, the pair is barely in the movie—although Priscilla’s death by alien is fucking awesome. Also, Scott Schwartz, who got his tongue stuck on a pole in A Christmas Story before putting it to better use in porn, makes an even briefer appearance.
The military crew shoots the alien with like a paintball rocket launcher or something so that it is visible for most of the movie. It’s a fun rubber monster and the kills are SyFy CGI goofy gory, plus there are boobs. The best part of this disaster is the scene near the end when a CGI alien is chasing a jeep. I’ve seen Atari 2600 games with better graphics.
GRIMM LOVE (2006)
In 2006, the film Cannibal was released, based on the true story of a German man who posted an ad on the Internet for someone to kill and eat, got an answer from a young man, and then, you know, had dinner. I can’t bring myself to ever watch that film. But since Grimm Love, the “fictionalized” account of the story (which came out the same year), showed on Chiller TV, I knew it couldn’t possibly be as gruesome. It was just about as much as I could handle.
With nothing better to do after Felicity was canceled, Keri Russell plays a virtually pointless role in the film as a college student researching the gay cannibal story. We get flashbacks of the two men as children. The killer’s mother was unnaturally close and clingy with him. The victim was caught with another boy as a child and was then rejected by his mother. The moral of the story is, moms will fuck you up if they don’t give you just the right amount of love, making you either a gay cannibal sex party top or a gay cannibal sex party bottom.
There are some cringe-worthy and disturbing scenes of the killer’s twisted sexual needs. He has a lover bite him, and insists the guy bite his penis off, but the guy can’t do it. He finds a victim who agrees to his flesh for food fantasy, but once bound in Saran wrap, the dude backs out (actually, he can’t even move, so he just begs to back out). Wanting to hold out for someone who longs to be eaten, the killer never finds out if the dude tastes like chicken or just is a chicken.
Finally, the killer meets the man who wants to be eaten, and the bizarrely intimate relationship they have leading up to dinnertime is tragic and terrifying. It’s almost as if they look right past the fact that they just might be the right men to heal each other’s souls if they would stop all the soul food nonsense. But they don’t, and the meal scene, while not particularly graphic, is devastating enough in its suggestion that it makes me quite glad I never watched the supposedly heinous Cannibal.
SEVENTH MOON (2008)
While Amy Smart became a pretty mainstream actress for a while there, she’s no stranger to the horror genre—Strangeland, Campfire Tales, The Butterfly Effect—but Seventh Moon is her most kick ass horror flick for me.
I pretty much went into this one with no expectations. What I got was something along the lines of The Descent…above ground. A couple visiting China makes a wrong turn into an isolated village and discovers they are on the menu in a ritual that requires people to leave something outside at night for spirits to feed on. Eek!
Much of the movie has the couple trapped in their car on a deserted road as ghostly white, demon-like creatures terrorize them, and it is freaky scary fun. And just when you think the movie isn’t going to go anywhere else—It pretty much enters total The Descent mode, heading underground into water-filled caverns, with only a fricking cellphone as illumination.
Speaking of being able to see, the majority of Seventh Moon is ridiculously dark with very little lighting—you need to really watch it in a dark room with a big TV to best appreciate it. On top of that, it relies completely on fast, tight, choppy editing, and frantic shaky cam—all of which get to be taxing but definitely enhance the fear effect. This one just might end up in my DVD collection one of these days.
