As usual, I can’t just feel a little pain and walk away. So after watching 2 urban horror flix from my collection, I decided to expand this blog to include an urban horror flick from each of the past 4 decades…
TALES FROM THE QUADEAD ZONE (1987)
From the director of Black Devil Doll from Hell comes this disastrous horror anthology, released almost a decade before Tales from the Hood. I imagine no one wanted to back another urban horror anthology for years after this one. Even the short 62-minute length can’t help it.
The wraparound, which also ends up being the third story, involves a woman reading the stories from a book to her ghost companion, which we can see is present based on a floating cup and ass impressions in a chair.
1st story – an urban horror flick with a white trash story? I think the point of this one is that there’s not enough food for the whole family, so whoever gets to the gun fast enough and kills the excess person allows for everyone else to live to see another day. All that matters about this one is the redneck bear in overalls…and his amazing nip slip. Who needs food when you got milk?
2nd story – guy dresses his dead brother’s body up as a clown and prepares to bury it, but the brother comes back from the dead.
3rd story – the wraparound girl has some sort of drama. My attention span didn’t have the patience to focus any longer.
This movie came in a boxed set with Black Devil Doll from Hell and this is the first time I bothered to watch it. I’m also getting rid of the DVD. If anyone’s interested, I’ll sell it to you for 500 dollars after it goes out of print.
URBAN MENACE (1999)
Albert Pyun is the director who brought us 80s and 90s classics like The Sword and the Sorcerer, Radioactive Dreams, Dangerously Close, Vicious Lips, Alien from L.A., Cyborg, Dollman, and Arcade.
I can only guess it’s his spiral downward into Nemesis 4 and Kickboxer 4 that led him to do Urban Menace by the end of the 90s. Or more likely, it’s probably just 90s horror that led to the downward spiral to Urban Menace.
A bunch of then relevant rappers – Snoop Dogg and Ice-T (now celebrities) and Big Pun and Fat Joe (I never realized they weren’t the same person until I just saw them in this movie together) – appear in the film.
Snoop is really the star, for he plays a murdered gang leader that comes back for revenge as a sort of demon.
It’s 72 minutes of overexposed footage for that “artsy” futuristic look as a bunch of guys run around a derelict city shooting at each other and saying the N word and the F word.
FUCK FACK: A man about to say fuck.
Eventually, Snoop sprouts wings momentarily in silhouette. This movie is agonizing.
URBAN MASSACRE (2002)
Hunky director Dale Resteghini
Oh shit. Sorry. As I was saying, hunky director Dale Resteghini, who brought us Da hip Hop Witch, takes on post-Scream era slashers in this urban horror flick, which is, not surprisingly, more like a promotional vehicle for hip hop acts built around a horror flick.To this day, the biggest name in the movie is La La, once a VJ on MTV. MTV was once a TV station that played videos—eh, fuck it. I did that shtick in another blog. Just look it up on Wiki.
A killer clown in a baseball cap is out killing wannabe rappers in this film, which mostly takes place in a club where the cast spends most of the time talking about the music business and the desire to get a record deal. They’re also dicked over by an asshole white record exec.
Sure, this is a bottom of the barrel slasher mess, but it has too many highlights for me not to like it.
My favorite kill, drenched in 80s neon lights, has La La in a bath towel and bra being chased by the killer (why not just have the towel up to her chest?).
The white dude amongst the rappers is obsessed with horror and regularly references movies, but my fave is when he points out that Tobe Hooper directed Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” video.
And New York City drag performer and recording artist Kevin Aviance makes a brief appearance as a reader on a “Psychic Network” style phone line.
Oh, and I can’t forget the sex scene with a brief shot of the gorgeous leading man’s hot butt.
Front view…
If you’re going to watch Urban Massacre, be prepared for the cliffhanger ending that doesn’t reveal the killer’s identity…but then sort of takes it back and does reveal it during closing credits.
URBAN CANNIBAL MASSACRE (2013)
Aaaaand…another okay indie hurt by an excessive run time. 100 minutes. Unacceptable. Cut this shit down to 75 minutes and we’ll talk.
Okay, I’ll talk anyway. Although the film is immediately hard to follow, some dudes, apparently homeless and in need of work, take jobs cleaning a derelict building and are so brutally slaughtered it promises a gory slasher that never happens.
Instead, we meet a bunch of forgettable friends on the hunt for their missing friend. More memorable is the cannibal family that is always looking for a good meal…as long as it’s all white meat.
This poses a problem when this group of friends comes around and it’s a mixed race group. Especially since one daughter in the family is already not a fan of the whole cannibal lifestyle and immediately falls in love with the black dude of the group.
While there’s some feasting and torture and murder, none of it lives up to the tone of the first kill scene. And while the family initially seems kind of campy, even that fades, leaving us with what feels like a cheap film shot in someone’s basement…for waaaaaaay too long.
The final act—beginning with a scene of a big black menace having his way with a white boy’s ass (I wish it were as sexy as it sounds, but it’s not at all…blech) improves greatly in pace and tone. Oh, if only 25 minutes could be gutted from everything that goes on between the first kill scene and the ass scene.
