PRIME TIME: infected vs. ghosts

Posted on February 12, 2021 by Daniel

Ravers get infected and robbers get ghosted. So which one of these two indie films showed me a better time?

RAVERS (2018)

 

Now this is how you do a tight little indie infected film. Ravers is smartly written and directed and deserves recognition for featuring a lesbian and a bearish guy as the heroes. On the flip side, at a rave full of white people, a Black guy is portrayed as the immoral drug dealer to the bitter end. Bummer.

Things start strong and sexy, with a 7′ 2″ tall muscle hunk going insane at a soda factory and attacking everyone with gory results. This scene literally made me want a Dr. Pepper and a man.

Then we meet our main girl, a germaphobic lesbian reporter forced to go on site to do a story about the factory murders. Her stocky buddy takes her to an illegal rave being thrown at the now defunct warehouse.

The drugs come out…and so do cases of old soda still tucked away in storage. Pretty soon the dance floor is filled with ravers with raging eyes.

The movie smartly uses techno that matches the moment as the pace picks up. The vibe starts off chill, becomes hypnotic as the ravers begin to feel the effect of the drug, and then intensifies in beats-per-minute as the drug takes hold and the infected become aggressive.

The concept is also cool. The infected don’t really attack as long as they’re getting some sort of stimulation: drugs, dancing, sex, etc. And the longer the infection inhabits their bodies, the more gnarly their eyes begin to look. Not to mention, there’s most definitely an understated commentary on toxic masculinity running throughout the film.

One of my favorite visual moments has the doped up club kids focusing on the allure of a catwalk above them, and deciding to climb up there to dance. The infected action ramps up as the crazies get even more fucked up in the face for the final act.

ARE WE DEAD YET (aka: The Living Dead) (2019)

In this horror comedy, a group of bumbling robbers screws up and then has to hide out in an old mansion.

Right away it feels like the actors are trying their best to deliver laughs, but they don’t often have the material to support their skills, so they overcompensate through their delivery and actions. Sometimes it works, other times it falls flat.

At first the robbers experience sightings of various ghosts, but before a genuine haunting plot can get off the ground, we are introduced to the ghosts, and things get silly.

There are at least a dozen ghosts from colonial times living in the mansion, all of them in the bloody state they were in when they died. They spend their time chatting and lamenting that they will be stuck in the mansion until someone finally buys it.

The dialogue of the dead and the conversations they have feel more like a play performance than a movie, but they do inject a little more humor that works.

In no way a scary film, this turns into a ghost adventure, with the robbers trying to help the ghosts escape the hold the mansion has on them. It’s…cute…but it didn’t work enough as a ghost comedy for me to truly hold my interest. On the bright side, there’s a zombie segment at the end that showed me a good time!

If you’re looking for the film, just know that it is under the title The Living Dead on Prime. Who the hell decided on that awful, generic name change?

 

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STREAM QUEEN: a croc, road kill, an electric girl, and a mind jumper

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Daniel

I hit up Hulu, Prime, and even Crackle for my latest movie marathon, so let’s get right into them.

BLACK WATER: ABYSS (2020)

The director of Black Water is back for the sequel—a Crackle exclusive.

The first time around it was a croc holding a group of people captive in a tree. This time the setting is an underground cavern pool.

You come to these types of movies for the cheap thrills, so don’t be surprised that every moment of this film, right down to the stupid mistakes made by characters as well as the plot twist, is completely predictable.

The main guy is hot, the croc is smartly shown very little beyond quick flashes, and the suspense and claustrophobia are suffocating. And the muddy underwater footage just makes it all the more unnerving.

ALONE (2020)

In the tradition of movies like The Hitcher and Road Games, this film has a young widow going on a road trip and quickly being shadowed by a guy in a black SUV.

From the very start, the film establishes a sense of dread as this guy pops up at every rest stop she hits, and once the chase starts, it doesn’t let up.

The actor playing the psycho gives a fantastically unnerving performance.

The fact that the main girl tries to always stay one step ahead of him, putting herself in precarious predicaments in the process, will definitely keep you on the edge of your seat. Even some seemingly cliché situations take unexpected turns.

Most importantly, the final battle to the death rox.

REBORN (2018)

The director of the film The Last Horror Movie, which is surprisingly never mentioned at all on horror social media, brings us a simple little sci-fi horror thriller with a familiar cast.

Chaz Bono, notably good in the few small parts he’s given in movies, plays a mortician that witnesses a stillborn infant come back to life as a result of an electrical accident.

Sixteen years later, that baby is a young woman who can control electricity with her mind. She sets out to find her birth mother, using her powers to take down anyone who gets in her way.

Meanwhile, horror queen Barbara Crampton plays an actress struggling to overcome the loss of her child when she was younger. Uh-oh. So her agent, played by Rae Dawn Chong, sets her on a course to finding closure.

Michael Pare is the detective on the case when people start turning up dead and all (electrically charged) roads lead to Crampton.

There are some suspenseful moments, and the film moves at a good pace (with a running time of only 75 minutes), and the main girl playing the electrified daughter is freaky good as a lost soul with deadly powers. There are also some fun kills along the way. And quite honestly, despite being a sci-fi/horror b movie, the storyline is quite tragic.

My only real issue is a moment near the end of the film when the main girl seems to not only have the power to control electric with her mind, but suddenly has superpowers. It’s a nagging distraction during the denouement of the film.

POSSESSOR (2020)

Possessor makes me think David Cronenberg’s son watched nothing but his father’s films growing up and finally made one of his own. In other words, if you love Cronenberg, you’ll probably get into this wordy sci-fi drama from his son.

The story is about a female assassin whose mind can be harvested and implanted into ordinary, everyday people to commit murders. All she has to do when she’s done doing a hit job is commit suicide to return to herself.

Most of the focus is on her time as a gorgeous man (who shows wiener because naturally it’s the first thing she checks out), and his relationship with his fiancé—causing this film to dabble in gender identity exploration. While she’s waiting for the right moment to do her hit, she begins to experience distressing flashes of crossover between her reality and the time she spends in the heads of others.

It’s very much a character study, but the kill scenes are fantastically gory and brutal, and as her reality and those of the bodies she inhabits begin to blend and the lines blur, things get quite freaky and quite Cronenberg.

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Here piggy, piggy!

Posted on February 9, 2021 by Daniel

What are the chances there would be two movies about mutant pig people on Amazon Prime at the same time? They’re so slim I simply had to watch them both.

BARNEY BURMAN’S WILD BOAR (2020)

Think The Hills Have Eyes meets Planet of the Apes and you’ll know what you’re in for with this one.

After a weird stop motion intro, we meet a group of treasure hunters. They discuss a hot location that also happens to have a history of radiation, but they decide it’s safe these days…

They arrive at a derelict building in the middle of a desert area, they find a hole in the wall inside the building, one woman points out this would be a really bad idea in a horror movie…so they go in.

Within minutes, the pig people are hunting them down. This will be very familiar territory to horror veterans. It’s a commentary on how humans treat animals.

The focus is on one girl thrown into a cage full of mud, forced to watch as the others are handled like pigs at the slaughterhouse, and forced to eat against her will. Ugh. The “feeding” scene. Now that’s horror.

The film is quite gritty and grisly, and delivers on gore as the main girl attempts to make her escape, but it does start to lose steam in the second half, a problem that could have been rectified had the 109-minute runtime been trimmed down a bit. For a while the film stalls and I felt like I was watching a Star Wars spinoff about a family of Gamorrean Guards.

Refreshingly, there’s nothing predictable in the final act. However, it does get totally bizarre and a bit confusing as it heads for the good zinger ending.

BULLETS OF JUSTICE (2019)

I don’t even care that I once again didn’t understand what the hell was going on by the end of a mutant pig people movie, because the director of Re-Kill and Wrong Turn 6 gives us a gory grindhouse action horror flick that’s totally queer…I think. I just wish it had a better title. Hell, Sex Pigs would have been perfect.

Smartly running 79 minutes long (take note, Wild Boar), this film thrusts us right into the midst of the grindhouse zaniness. During World War 3, humans and pigs were mated for use as warriors…warriors that ended up being at the top of the food chain.

As our sexy main man and his mustached female sidekick try to find the location of the “mother” of the pig people, high-speed action sequences, dark humor, and surprisingly explicit sex scenes abound. Mmm…pig in a blanket.

Danny Trejo makes a fleeting, completely unnecessary cameo, and his appearance is completely forgotten by the time the good guys get to “the farm” where humans are harvested.

Bullets of Justice delivers on the gross-out goodness. And the queer stuff?

Our main man is obsessed with his own ass and highly jealous of a flamboyantly queer, long-haired pretty boy in a G-string that plays a major role in the plot and eventually does a provocative dance. You can almost smell the sexual tension between them. This definitely earns an honorary spot on the complete homo horror movies page.

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The House of the Dead game I didn’t know existed

Posted on February 8, 2021 by Daniel

I’m not sure what made my mind stray to this series (okay, it was the lack of stimulation I was getting from one of the boring movies I recently blogged about), but I was shocked to discover that House of the Dead 4 was released for PS3 in 2012. I thought Overkill was the only HOTD released on the system, and I can’t believe it took 8 years for me to even learn about this game…or that the PS3 is already so old.

I quickly dug out my neglected PS3 system and hooked it up to download the game from the PlayStation Store. That’s right…no physical release. This is a 10 dollar download only. It took me quite some time to even remember how to use the PS3. Seriously, I forgot there was an on/off switch in back.

Once the game was installed, I realized I couldn’t remember how to use the Eye camera and Move controller. Once I got them working, I did remember just how fricking awful the calibration is on these damn Move controllers.

No worries, though, because HOTD 4 is a snap if you choose the settings as such: very easy, 9 lives, 9 credits.

The story…is the same old story. Two agents travel through a city killing zombies and other mutants to get to a final boss.

Other than the trigger for shooting, you can use the X, square, circle, or triangle buttons to throw grenades, and there are times when you need to shake the controller to do things like open doors or push baddies off when they grab you. There are also background items you can shoot to get special bullets, more grenades, extra lives, extra credits, etc., but as usual, they tend to pass by just long enough for you to shoot a canister or box open and then get tripped up by a “reload” warning before you can shoot the actually goodie inside.

Ugh. Reload. You go through bullets so fast you’re constantly reloading…or if you’re me, just totally tuning out the incessant “reload, reload, reload” verbal warning and then wondering why you can’t shoot. To reload you have to shake the controller vigorously, which I seriously believe causes you to shake the damn thing out of calibration. The calibration is so bad that even with all my wicked easy options in place, I still constantly ranked at C or below on each chapter, and was constantly told by the game that I suck on the results screen (not exactly in those words, but it still hurts).

Other than various types of zombies, there are the usual flying critters, annoying fast-moving monkey monsters, ghouls that throw weapons or explosives, and annoying little creepy-crawlies like slugs and spiders that jump at the screen and latch on to you…requiring you to once again shake the controller.

Most of the baddies aren’t too hard to take down, but they do come at you in hordes and tend to pop up just when you’re…you guessed it…out of bullets and have to reload, which leads to some cheap shots while you’re defenseless. It’s also quite annoying that you aren’t given the opportunity to get a jump on them. If you see them crawling out from under a table, hole in the wall, or sewer, don’t even bother shooting them. It doesn’t register until they are completely standing.

Then there are the bosses, like a cool giant spider and a big fat dude that fricking rolls over you. Most bosses are quite easy, giving you a diagram of their vulnerable spot before the fight begins and then circling that spot with a reticle during the battle. Of course there are those times where it doesn’t feel like you can actually hit the spot even though the reticle is blinking, such as a moment when a chainsaw wielding boss outside your train is passing by the windows. You shoot like crazy with no results then just have to suck it up and take the timed hit. I hate that crap.

And naturally there are those bosses that throw shit at you, almost ensuring a hit every time because there are numerous small objects flying across the screen that you need to shoot so they don’t hit you. But as I said at the beginning, it really doesn’t matter as long as you go very easy, 9 lives, 9 credits.

The game is short and can be completed in an hour, but you can play again and take different branches. There are several times when you get to choose the directions to go—left or right—so you can easily choose the left side every time through the first play then take the right side each time through the second play through to see what you missed. From what I can tell, the right side is always harder.

Most importantly, you unlock the HOTD 4 SP game once you complete all six chapters! You can finish this in fifteen minutes. It’s merely two chapters, and one of them repeats a boss from the full game. Aside from new locations, there are a few other new elements. For starters, you team up with G. from the original game (don’t come!). Yay!

Also, there are two weird challenge moments thrown in that you don’t even know are challenges until FAILED splashes across the screen. They come on so fast there’s no time to even register what you’re being told to do.

After you defeat the final boss, there’s one more thing to do…hit a box in his hand. I played through twice and thought I totally shot the box, but both times the word “bad end” splashed across the screen. Argh! I then watched the good end on YouTube and it turns out I totally wasn’t paying attention to the fleeting onscreen instructions because I was too busy panicking due to a timer counting down. What you’re supposed to do is throw a grenade at the boss box. Ugh.

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AFTER DARK ORIGINALS PART 1

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Daniel

Now that I’ve finished covering all the film festival titles I’d missed, I’m checking out the last of the After Dark Originals that I had yet to see, starting with Bedlam, Sanatorium, and Ritual.

BEDLAM (2015)

If watching helpless, mentally ill people being raped and tortured by equally mentally ill people in power is your idea of a horror movie, then you’ll love Bedlam.

Seeing these horrors play out on screen with no substantial plot serves no purpose—it’s not entertainment and it’s not effectively communicating awareness of the mental health and treatment problems that plague the world.

A combination of seeing how these people are treated and I guess tripping us out with chaotic abstractions of what it must be like in the mind of a mentally ill person (not to mention satirical clips of profiting off mental illness in advertising), the film focuses on a main guy who has all kinds of mental illnesses and puts all his faith in the same doctor that treated his late, mentally ill mother.

Every cliché in the mental illness and abuse book is thrown at us, most prominently being themes of homosexuality and pedophilia. It seems to be implying that the leading man is gay and his father used his orientation as an excuse to sexually abuse him.

My verdict? A tedious 102 minutes of torture porn.

SANATORIUM (2013)

What would compel filmmakers to keep making found footage movies about ghost hunting teams exploring old asylums that turn out to be haunted because doctors experimented on patients?

Oops! Did I spoil the plot? If so, you clearly don’t watch many horror movies.

They visit the asylum. They learn its history. They take a flashlight tour. They cheap scare each other. They find a doll. Then everything goes green as they switch to night vision.

There are noises. Things move. Doors slam. They run around a lot, shouting into walkie-talkies, screaming, and saying the same shit that has been said in dozens of other found footage films. Chaos ensues (finally) in the last act. Someone gets dragged away on camera.

Some cool scary and gory stuff happens at the very end, I’ll give it that much. I just don’t know that it’s ever worth sitting through the same old shit to get to it. (Hint…fast forward to the last ten minutes for the only thrills you’ll get).

RITUAL (2013)

An hysterical woman calls her estranged husband to a hotel, where he finds that she has a dead man in her room.

They spend a majority of the movie talking…how and why did she kill him and what are they going to do about it?

There’s a scary clown doll tossed in just for the hell of it…

They finally just leave the hotel, but have to go back because the husband left something behind. And then, finally, a cult in masks comes knocking.

It is astonishing that a script for a 90-minute movie that has over an hour of repetitive, boring dialogue with only a glimmer of tame suspense in the last fifteen minutes or so would be green-lit, but here it is. This movie fails to even live up to its name.

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Four 90s disappointments to add to the never-ending pile…

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Daniel

This mess of movies from the 1990s makes me wonder how the hell the video store I worked in lasted through the decade. Oh…that’s right. People kept re-renting 80s horror movies…

CTHULHU MANSION (1992)

I had high hopes for this film from the director of Pieces based on the setup—after committing a crime at a carnival, a group of thugs in leather jackets hides out in the creepy old house of the carnival magician and his sidekick daughter, holding them hostage.

Naturally the lights go out, which is when we learn the magician and daughter are have secrets locked away in the basement.

And then…the kids just hang around, listen to music, play darts, dance, have sex…. There are a couple of horror moments, like giant monster hands coming from a refrigerator and a guy drowning in a blood shower and showing of a whole lot of bush in the process, but it’s not enough horror to keep the pace going.

I’m a huge fan of horror flicks in which a bunch of kids invades a creepy house and ends up experiencing all kinds of weird shit, but I can’t believe how boring this film is.

A few things happen in the last half hour, the most thrilling being that one of the leather boys starts mutating, which is the catalyst for the final, disappointing act.

NIGHT TERRORS (1993)

With Tobe Hooper directing Robert Englund as Marquis de Sade, I would expect the horror of my lifetime. What I got was another cheesy, 1990s direct-to-video erotic thriller.

A young woman comes to visit her religious father in Egypt, where he’s doing an archaeological dig. He warns her to stay away from an alluring vixen she meets, so…she goes and parties with her. Of course there are lesbian undertones, but there’s also fleeting attention paid to some gender fluid partygoers.

The main girl also hooks up with a sexy as hell rich dude and has dreamy sex with him. In fact, most of this film is carried by dreamy sequences.

Caption: gives a whole new meaning to the term bareback…oh..wait…

The main girl is basically drawn into a drug-induced world of erotic pleasures where snake symbolism abounds. The visually titillating sequences are quite reminiscent of The Lair of the White Worm…without the subversion. This film that combines de Sade with religion fails to push the boundaries into the realm of offensive as much as Lair of the White Worm does. What a letdown.

Robert Englund finally hogs the screen in the final act, when he just drones on and on telling the main girl the awful things he’s going to do to her. Really, it’s hard for me to even consider this a horror film. It’s mostly sex with very little sadism.

CRUEL JAWS (1995)

This film is infamous for inserting footage from Jaws, Jaws 2, and a couple of other shark films that followed, so part of the fun is watching the chaotic editing during attack scenes to see if you recognize any of the clips. The other part of the fun is how hilariously bad the main actors’ reactions are when faced with the shark…that’s not actually there because it’s in another movie.

In this film, Great Whites are out and a Tiger Shark is king. Other than that, the movie follows all the shark movie rules.

  • opening scene with divers attacked
  • Couple gets it when they take a dip at dusk
  • There’s an aquarium and dolphins
  • A gory discovery is made on the beach

  • The mayor refuses to close the beach
  • A major beach event turns into a blood bath (best scene)
  • In a panic, a girl on a boat spills a gasoline can and someone else shoots a flare gun at the same time. Kaboom!

  • A helicopter gets dragged down by the shark
  • Helicopter pilot says “We need a bigger helicopter”

As bad as this damn movie is, I can’t deny it has its charms…particularly the fact that the spliced in footage from shark movies made up to 20 years before this one is totally different quality film. And if you’ve seen the 1981 film The Last Shark (which I just blogged about here), you’ll be shocked to see that not just fleeting clips, but full sequences are used, to the point that Cruel Jaws could just be considered a “different director’s cut” of The Last Shark. For this film, prolific horror director Bruno Mattei literally did shot for shot remakes of parts of The Last Shark with his own actors and edited the new scenes around all the original shark footage from The Last Shark.

NAKED FEAR (1999)

Hard to believe the director of icky 80s trash Slime City made this shot on video film, but one thing is clear—he failed to catch up with the nineties even with the whole decade behind him. This looks worse than an 80s direct-to-video movie, and all the actors look like burnouts from 1989 even though it’s a 1999 film.

The plot is about an agoraphobic dude named Camden who places an ad for a roommate and ends up with a weirdo named Randy. They get along well, but Camden eventually figures out Randy is a serial killer, and has to find the emotional strength to escape his own home.

The move is really awful, and feels like a home video. Endless montages of Camden doing nothing are set to power pop songs. There are a few random gay guys thrown in—one a queen that sends a videotaped interview in hopes of being Camden’s new roommate, the other a couple that walks in on a Randy in a public bathroom.

Camden watches a lot of phone sex commercials…that look exactly like the quality of the movie, which tells you just how low budget this movie looks. Meanwhile, Randy plays pimp to get Camden laid, and also targets various people who come to the apartment and do Camden wrong.

In a failed effort to introduce some suspense into the plot, Camden does get away and is tracked down by Randy. Chances are you will burst out laughing during the final battle to the death between them.

 

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Early 80s vs. late 80s horror

Posted on February 2, 2021 by Daniel

I went deep diving for my 80s fix with four in a variety of subgenres. So let’s get right to them.

THE LAST SHARK (1981)

Falling between Jaws 2 and Jaws 3, The Last Shark put in the effort to make a mechanical shark…at least half a shark. All shots of the fake shark are the same; the opened-mouthed head rising out of the water like something off the original Jaws poster. As limited in function as the shark is, this is a fairly fun and silly rip-off.

It stars the gorgeous leading man from Beneath the Planet of the Apes (left).

After a wind surfer disappears (the first kill), the leading man helps his daughter and her friends search for the guy, at which point he concludes there may be a shark in the waters.

Predictable scenes abound, from divers getting attacked to couples going out for evening swims. And when a wind surfing competition isn’t canceled (shocker), all hell breaks loose. There’s even a helicopter scene that—it kills me to say it—blows the helicopter scene from Jaws 2 out of the water.

Stay tuned for my upcoming 90s blog that covers a movie that was literally structured around scenes from this film and marketed as a new film…

BLOOD LINK (1982)

Not gory or scary, this psychological thriller reminds me of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers…with a touch of De Palma’s Sisters as well. Quirky 80s horror king Michael Moriarty playing a dual role as Siamese twins is reason enough to watch, even if the pacing is slow.

When good twin begins having visions of killing people, he decides to hunt down estranged bad twin…

It’s not until fifty minutes in that the brothers finally meet and things actually start happening. Moriarty plays bad twin wonderfully with subtle flamboyance.

Basically, bad twin swaps himself out for good twin in order to continue killing while good twin gets pinned for the crimes. A series of murders comes in the last half hour, but it’s nothing shocking or memorable.

The real haunting part of this film is what takes place right as we approach the final frame.

THE HOUSE OF USHER (1989)

Considering movies named after Poe tales are rarely adaptations by any stretch of the imagination, I won’t even address the issue here.

This is simply a woman held against her will movie. The lead actress from The Howling IV travels with her man to his uncle’s mansion. Before they can get there, they crash their car while avoiding ghost children on the road—ghost children that appear several times throughout the film but add nothing to it.

This movie is a mess. Following the accident, the leading lady wakes up inside the mansion. She’s told her man is at the hospital. Oliver Reed is the uncle, who has many rules and regulations she must follow, and his servants are nuts.

The main girl explores the gothic mansion at night and discovers the body of her man. Reed says they’ll have a funeral for him, but signs point to the possibility that he’s not dead. She also comes upon Reed’s brother, played by Donald Pleasence.

He wants her help in escaping the mad house, but she can’t even get away herself, because Reed and his mad doctor have plans for her.

It’s not much in the way of a horror film, with the only freaky part being when a starving rat is used to deprive a man of his manhood…

 

DARK TOWER (1989)

This film is oddly similar to the killer elevator flick The Lift. Michael Moriarty (he really was a horror king in the 80s) plays a clairvoyant investigator on the case when a window washer takes a huge dive from a newly constructed building.

The love interest from An American Werewolf in London stars as the building’s architect, and she seems to be haunted by a presence outside her office window…the window the washer was cleaning when he plunged to his death.

Moriarty has visions of her being killed. A security guard is killed. A shooter comes in and blows away a bunch of people. Moriarty calls in a parapsychologist who has a long conversation with the ghost. Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the douche congressman) joins the investigative team near the end for no apparent reason.

It’s soooooo boring.

Only the final scene, in which American Werewolf woman is chased by a corpse, delivers any kind of worthwhile horror. Even Moriarty doesn’t seem to have the motivation to deliver his usual unusual performance.

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Bruce Campbell’s mind and moon

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Daniel

It’s not as sexy as it sounds, although Bruce always is. My incomplete Bruce Campbell collection finally caught up with me and determined I was missing two of his sci-fi/horror flicks, so I swiftly added them to my movie shelves. So let’s get into Moontrap and Mindwarp.

MOONTRAP (1989)

I’ll say it up front; this is the lesser of these two movies.

Bruce and Chekov from Star Trek are astronauts that discover the corpse of an ancient astronaut, not realizing they’ve brought an alien robot life form home with it.

After a major gun battle with what turns out to be a pretty damn big robot on their ship, they hit up a strip club for the most 80s scene of the film with a stripper that looks like Frida from ABBA with the best bad 80s horror you could imagine.

Then they head to the moon, where we get a mixture of cool visuals and bad model space vehicles and astronaut dolls.

The guys find a human woman in the aliens’ base, and finally do some battling with the aliens on the moon.

There’s some silly fun to be had, but this is mostly a disappointing, cheesy sci-fi movie with just one cool moment featuring a freaky Bruce face.

MINDWARP (1991)

This is the 1990s doing predictive sci-fi/horror right. A young woman hates that life is all A.I. controlled virtual reality in her world.

Humans simply eat and go to the bathroom in between connecting to a VR system that lets them experience a wonderful life.

But she wants more. She rebels against the system, and as punishment for trying to break her mother free from the same kind of existence, she is thrust into the real world…post-apocalyptic life in a desert land where she is immediately attacked by deformed cannibals.

Luckily, gorgeous Bruce Campbell, a loner living out in the desert alone, saves her…temporarily.

After they quickly have sex (ah, the 90s…or in this case, 2037), they are kidnapped by the cannibal tribe and taken to a nasty underground lair where men are made to do forced labor and women are forced to carry offspring.


Bitch, Bruce was just a warmup. Come to papa.

Not to mention, there’s incest, gross water filled with leeches, and a bloodthirsty leader (literally) played by Phantasm icon Angus Scrimm.

Bruce is a serious hero for a change as he battles to rescue his new woman, the cannibals are gnarly looking, and there’s plenty of brutality and gore, making this a worthy addition to my complete collection of Bruce Campbell sci-fi/horror movies.

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A trio of horror flicks based on classic fairy tales

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Daniel

One is a dark adaptation, one is a fantastical supernatural take, and the final one embeds elements from a fairy tale into a typical slasher. Let’s take quick looks at Gretel & Hansel, The Curse of Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White: Deadly Summer.

GRETEL & HANSEL (2020)

Sophia Lillis of Stephen King’s It plays a maturing Gretel in this sinister adaptation of the classic fairy tale, while horror queen Alice Krige is perfect (as always) as the witch.

But the real star just might be the visual presentation of this narrowly cropped film (an aspect ratio of 1:55:1 rather than standard 1:85:1 widescreen). It perfectly captures the claustrophobia of the witch’s little house in the woods. Not to mention, the sets and settings are stunningly captured on camera.

The story is a fresh take on the plot as well. Gretel and Hansel run away, and by the time they get to the witch’s place, they decide to accept her invitation to stay a while.

As the tale unfolds, we get a backstory for the witch and nightmarish flashbacks to the kiddie food factory her little house really is. At the same time, the focus is on Gretel navigating her way into womanhood and her role as guardian of Hansel…which makes the twists that come at the end all that more delicious. Hell, there’s even a nod to the Wicked Witch of the West.

THE CURSE OF SLEEPING BEAUTY (2016)

The leading hottie in this film is reason enough to watch it, plus it has plenty of spooky horror scenes with a Silent Hill vibe. But damn, it is so hard to follow.

Pretty boy keeps having dreams of sleeping beauty…and a monster under his blanket. Metaphor much?

Anyway, he inherits a mansion from his uncle, with explicit orders to never unseal the rooms in the basement. I sense a guardian of the gates plot…

Pretty soon, he’s teaming up with his pretty real estate agent and opening up the basement.

The majority of the film has them being terrorized by mannequins that come to life. The creeps and the atmosphere are excellent, but the plot just spins out of control when Bruce Davison and some young dude show up to lend a hand because they have experience with the paranormal.

I continued to watch for the cool monsters, but I was disappointed that horror hottie Zack Ward is only in the film for about ten seconds. What a waste of a good man.

SNOW WHITE: A DEADLY SUMMER (2012)

David DeCoteau manages to keep it in his pants, giving us a backwoods slasher free of boys running around in tighty-whities. And I couldn’t quibble over the loose references to Snow White, because this one has fricking Marcia Brady as the wicked stepmother.

Indeed, Maureen McCormick talks to herself in a mirror and plots to send her stepdaughter Snow to boot camp. While she only appears at the beginning and end of the film, Maureen rules when she’s evil.

Snow has to contend with seven fellow dwarfs—I mean—boot campers, and a hard ass boot camp leader. There are tales of murders at the camp 25 years ago, and supposedly the killer was never caught.

Snow keeps catching glimpses of a dark, shadowy figure in the woods and having nightmares of each of the others being murdered, and then the bodies start turning up.

Is it a good slasher? No. Is there any gore? No. But fricking evil Marcia Brady. That’s all that matters.

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Nothing like a gay demon and gay vampire double feature

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Daniel

I was finally able to hunt down two gay horror films from the complete homo horror movies list on my site, one an exorcism horror comedy, the other a dark and moody vampire film. So let’s get right to them.

ECHORSIS (2016)

There’s a lot to unpack in this Filipino gay exorcism comedy, which isn’t as straightforward as you’d think it would be. If you want to check it out, at the time of this post it is available in HD with subtitles on YouTube.

You have to go into Echorsis realizing there are culture differences in the way gays are perceived and presented in Eastern countries vs. Western countries. It’s very easy to interpret what’s presented here as negative stereotypes about gay men. For instance, almost all queers are on a spectrum from extremely effeminate to virtually or literally trans, and all major gay characters are randomly in drag in several scenes with no benefit to the plot, solidifying the idea that gay men all want to be or act like women, and straight guys are all beautiful, muscled, masculine temptations.

The film tackles another sensitive issue in a way that may trigger some. Our main gay man—effeminate, out of shape, plain, closeted, lonely—doesn’t realize that he’s fallen in love with a hustler who’s taking him for a ride after he’s disowned by his parents for being gay. When the hustler takes off with his money, the gay man tries to kill himself in various ways, always through pop song montages and with comical overtones. Yes, the suicide attempts of a sad, unhappy gay man are used as a punch line various times.

Even his group of gay friends—bitchy, heartless queens—are extremely flippant about his predicament, even having a dance party with a bunch of muscle boys in the yard while he’s inside attempting to kill himself. It’s quite a statement about the gay community. Is humor used to soften the blow of a harsh truth? Maybe.

Some viewers may be quite turned off by all this. This “campy” segment unnecessarily takes up half the running time. Personally, I think all that time taken to establish the point of the story could have and should have been trimmed by about twenty minutes (down from over 50 minutes to about 30).

Once we get to the exorcism stuff, it’s all as fun as you’d hope, and the campy, queer, flamboyant tone poking fun at gay stereotypes feels naturally satirical and meant for a gay audience.

The gay man has put a curse on the pretty hustler, who becomes possessed…by homosexuality. He acts as gay as can be, and it’s mixed in a blender with plenty of homages to The Exorcist.

Plenty of it is funny, while some of it again may hit a nerve, like the hustler wanting to dry hump all his friends and even his own uncle now that he has uncontrollable gay urges.

There is also some balance struck. For instance, just when it feels like homosexuality is being treated as a sinful demon that gets inside you, a witchy woman comes along and points out that gay isn’t an illness that can be cured. And the young priest that ends up coming to perform the exorcism is struggling with his faith—both because of the awful way the church treats gays and due to the fact that a hot muscle devil keeps coming to him and tempting him to explore homosexuality.

The second half of the film is definitely a load of fun and negates the questionable comic choices of the first half. It’s all I could have hoped from a campy gay exorcism movie.

SCAB (2005)

I’m shocked that this gay vampire film isn’t more readily available, because it deserves to be better known than many of the poor quality gay vampire movies that are still in circulation on DVD and streaming services (I scored a non-U.S. DVD release).

The performances alone are much stronger than the amateur to bad acting we get in many sexy gay horror films, not to mention the writing and directing are tighter.

Taking a cue from dramatic, gritty, character-driven vampire films like Near Dark and The Forsaken and bringing that style to an urban setting, Scab looks at a night in the life of three buddies—one straight, two gay—after one of the gay guys is raped.

The opening scene starts off sexy as a pretty boy bottom gets into it with a muscle hunk. But things quickly turn violent, resulting in the pretty boy becoming a vampire.

Meanwhile, the other gay buddy is inexperienced and in love with the straight buddy, who tends to use that to his advantage. When the vamp friend reveals he was assaulted, they take a road trip to get away from it all and end up at a seedy motel.

There are plenty of other pretty young people around to flirt, fuck, party, and deal with relationship drama, but the real focus is on the breakdown of trust between the trio of buddies. It feels like a nineties film about twenty-somethings with no goals beyond the present. Interesting at first, but it does wear thin and pads the film to an unnecessary 103 minutes long.

That’s the biggest disappointment, because the sleazy, sexual, and nasty horror scenes in the film really satisfy. Less focus on the extraneous characters could have tightened up the pacing and brought the horror elements closer together.

There’s a disgusting toilet scene right after the main guy is raped, there’s a vicious scene with a prostitute, porn star turned actor and director Dylan Vox delivers a highly erotic moment in a video store, and there are intense predatory and feeding scenes.

On top of that, all the characters are so flawed you struggle to not like them and not hate them, because they’re all lost and alone even as they seem to have each other. Also of note is that the script refreshingly acknowledges sexual fluidity rather than going the black and white orientation and identity route.

 

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