It’s a smorgasbord of horror comedy weirdness and wackiness! What you get out of these six films depends on your taste, or your love of bad taste.
GORY GORY HALLELUJAH (2003)
This one is just way too campy silly for my tastes. I struggled to keep it on in the background just so I could say I watched it all the way through.
A black guy, a bisexual dude, a chick, and a Jewish dude all lose out on playing the role of Jesus. So they band together, hop on motorcycles, stop at a bar, get into a fight with a bunch of Elvis impersonators, and end up on trial in a religious extremist town after the bisexual dude flashes his dick to an undercover deputy in a rest stop bathroom.
What follows is agonizing trippy sequences that I assume people with a certain sense of humor will adore. I’m just not one of those people.
In the final act, the town is overrun by zombies, and there’s even a zombie song and dance finale.
Just when I think I have the worst taste in movies, I watch something like this and realize I do actually draw the line every now and then.
CHOP (2011)
Chop is a dark horror comedy from Trent Haaga, who is best known as Killjoy in all but the first film!
For starters, I can say Chop is a much more succinct horror humor film than the mess the Killjoy franchise has become. But I can also say it is just mean. It’s not a movie I had fun with, and I wouldn’t revisit it (even though I revisited it to write this blog).
A dude’s car breaks down, he accepts a ride with a stranger, and the next thing you know, his life is a nightmare of repeatedly being drugged by a guy and waking up to find more and more of his extremities have been cut off. The motive of his captor is to keep cutting shit off until he remembers the horrible thing he did that ruined the captor’s life. So, yeah, the protagonist isn’t even a good guy.
That’s this whole horror comedy in a nutshell. One scene has a leather daddy come in to hack off a limb…which he intends to then fuck.
Yes, this leather daddy is about as perverse and repulsive as the stereotype can be, even having an obsession with Diff’rent Strokes, in particular the episode in which Arnold almost falls victim to a pedophile. Yeah, it had to go there. It couldn’t just stop at the leather daddy being a stump fucker.
THEY WILL OUTLIVE US ALL (2013)
Now this is how you make a compact little indie big bug horror comedy. This 73-minute film is contained to one apartment with a male/female roommate duo that carries the entire film…with the help of a giant cockroach!
So, this comic pair is totally chill and quirky, as we see in their early exchanges with each other and their neighbor about the recent deaths in their apartment building.
After a visit to the landlord, who is acting quite weird and creepy, the roommates try to relax during a terrible storm by watching a horror movie.
The lights go out temporarily, and when they come back on…giant cockroach!
The first hilarious battle with the bug plays out just how I suspect it would if most of us were confronted with the same scenario, and things just escalate from there. The pair deals with some old school 80s-style bug ickiness while attempting to defeat the big critters that are trying to invade their every orifice. Ew!
It’s fast fun when you’re in need of a quick bug fix.
6:66 PM (2017)
I couldn’t wait for this supernatural slasher spoof because it’s from the guys who brought us the hilarious Massacre on Aisle 12, including its stars: director Jim Klock, comedian/co-writer Chad Ridgely, and hottie Michael Buonomo (with bleached hair).
6:66 PM sees a bogus ghost hunting show team coming to a house to search for the ghost of a killer only to discover things are not as fake as they’d hoped! The spirit of an actual killer of midget transvestite clowns begins to possess them one by one to kill the others!
The plot of this one is more up my alley than Massacre on Aisle 12, yet ironically, I prefer that film over this one, which definitely has its charms, but just can’t live up to the nonstop comic pace of Aisle 12. The humor isn’t as smart here, and the movie loses a lot of steam before it finally gets to the actual plot of the ghost killer possessing each character.
That’s when things finally pick up again, bringing in more of the spirit of what made Aisle 12 such a winner with the bonus twist of it being more of a “ supernatural slasher.”
It’s just too late in the game for this one to reach that level of comic gold. The material itself isn’t even as strong or quick, giving the actors less to work with, which often leaves them relying on the unison scream gag, which begins to wear thin mighty fast.
Even the brilliant Chad Ridgely, who rocked in Aisle 12, has only a few standout moments here because there just isn’t enough material to work with to show off his talent.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE WOMB (2017)
This is some grating trash, so it doesn’t even matter to me how disgustingly exploitative it is. I just could not get into it.
Due to the title, portions of the movie are shot from the perspective of a va-jay-jay looking out during labor. Sigh.
A woman gives birth to a successful son and a crass little man she sort of shuns. When her favorite son goes out to meet his girlfriend in the woods, he has his head chopped off by a killer clown.
Meanwhile, another woman gives birth to…a head with no body. I think I’m following this right. Little does she know they take the head and sew it to the dead son’s body. Now, the two halves are a whole, dress like a clown, and come to kill her and the little man brother, who have struck up a relationship and are about to get married.
Their relationship consists of an agonizing philosophical talk about their “otherness” at a bar, then her proposing to him and his response being a repulsive celebratory “I’m getting some!
I don’t know why I kept watching.
The highlight for me is that after the clown kills the wife, the little man cuts her open to climb inside her and become one with her, where he meets all her organs—which are in human form. Her heart is a beefy dude in a diaper who says he loves the little man and makes his tits bounce for him.
Seriously, that’s the highlight for me.
THE MIDNIGHT MAN (2017)
The Midnight Man either should have run about 20 minutes shorter than 88 minutes, or the actual horror elements should have been introduced 20 minutes earlier. Somewhere in the middle of this horror comedy I thought I had been tricked into watching a black comedy.
In an attempt to repair their damaged marriage, a couple heads to a cabin in the woods. They spend a lot of time bickering, with plenty of quirky humor in the mix, while someone is watching them. They also try to kill time by playing one of those summoning games called “The Midnight Man.”
And then a masked figure invades the house.
Before long, they are at the mercy of none other than Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead 78 fame. He comes at just the right time to revive the slowing pace, but there’s only so much he can do to keep things moving due to the fact that he is given nothing but stretches of back and forth dialogue with the couple.
The film finally finds new footing right near the end. See, Foree himself is no fan of The Midnight Man game, so when there’s finally a knock on the door with only 15 minutes remaining in the film, we are treated to a mini Evil Dead-esque segment. But sadly, it’s too little too late.
