It doesn’t get much more exciting than digging through my Prime watchlist and finding not one but three different films about men getting themselves into sexy scary (and even silly) situations. I was quite satisfied with this triple feature and added two of them to my personal movie collection, so let’s take a look.
DARK TOURIST (2012)
A couple of years before he showed up as the red bear of our wet dreams on The Walking Dead, Michael Cudlitz starred in this psychosexual horror movie/gay man’s meat-beating material.
However, once you look past all the scenes of Cudlitz showing off his shirt, his ass, and his delicious fire crotch, Dark Tourist could also be just as problematic to some queer horror fans as some horror films of the past are these days.
Cudlitz plays a man taking a trip to a small town to tour the scenes of a serial killer’s crimes and to visit the shack where the killer ended his life. He reads about the killer, he ponders the killer’s every move, he analyzes the killer’s sexual issues stemming from being gang raped as a child, and he talks about the killer to anyone who will listen, including a local waitress at a diner, played by Melanie Griffith.
Cudlitz also begins to become sexually stimulated by envisioning everything that the killer experienced, the killer becomes somewhat of a devil on his shoulder, and religion and the church are painted as the real devil.
Things get quite fucked up sexually, and without spoiling anything, I’ll just warn you—this film can very easily be interpreted as aligning serial killers with gay experiences, and transgender women are referred to as transsexuals.
CALL GIRL OF CTHULHU (2014)
Having no loyalty whatsoever to HP Lovecraft, I don’t care if this sleazy movie is a disgrace to the source material, because it is a perfectly nasty, gory, goofy, sexually perverse monster movie that reminded me of classic Frank Henenlotter films.
A weird, virginal artist living in a skanky apartment building hires a call girl to pose for one of his drawings. Little does he know she has the mark of Cthulhu on her body, and there’s a cult of weirdos hunting for her.
This is one of those sloppy films in which there are a bunch of branching situations filling the time. The cult, which wears funny cloth Cthulhu “masks”, has a mansion where prostitutes-turned-demons are kept in cages. A guy’s penis turns into a monster.
A girl’s boobs turn into monsters. There’s a militant group of women trying to stop the cult from its plan to end the world and release Cthulhu.
And at last, an awesome, practical effects Cthulhu monster is conjured.
This one really feels like an old school goodie from the direct-to-video days.
SCARY BRIDE (2020)
Damn, this was one dirty little triple feature and it left me so satisfied. Along with Call Girl of Cthulhu, Scary Bride is the second film in this post that I ordered for my collection of movies.
Running only 73 minutes long, this film comes from Russia. It is dubbed in English on Prime, and I am dumbfounded at how many negative reviews reference turning the movie off because of the bad dubbing. Sigh. Clearly these people are too young to have grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, when we lived for badly dubbed horror movies that we consider classics now.
In Scary Bride, a lonely young man is all bummed after being dumped by his wife. He can’t seem to attract any women, so his buddy suggests he go to Russia because there are loads of hot women there. What is this, a Russian horror comedy propaganda film to lure straight boys to Russia?
It works on this guy. He heads to Russia, he goes to a club, he meets a pretty girl there, she brings him home…and she turns into a nasty witch!
He escapes and spends much of the movie running away from her naked. Yay! However, all the hot spots on this cutie are strategically covered. Such a tease.
The film is raunchy and somewhat perverted with plenty of humor and a ghastly good witch, plus once the chase starts it doesn’t let up.
