STREAM QUEEN: Ouija board horror or Ouija bored horror?

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Daniel

Having knocked out all the doll, clown, and nun horrors cashing in on trendy subgenres lately on Prime, it was time to take on any Ouija movies I hadn’t seen. So let’s get into these four.

OUIJA DEATH TRAP (2014)

A Ouija board is used for about two minutes tops in this found footage film. I imagine the title was changed merely to cash in on the Ouija movie craze. It didn’t help any.

This is as badly basic as found footage gets. Kids go into a building with cameras because it’s supposedly haunted. They meet a creepy janitor.

They see a scary doll that seems to follow them around the place. They use the board. And then…

They run around shrieking endlessly at things we never see because it’s all dark, spastic footage. Near the end, the final girl gives her big Heather “I’m sorry” speech to the camera. You’ve seen it all before, done better.

OUIJA ROOM (2019)

The director of Babysitter Massacre, Amityville: No Escape, and Scarewaves takes on adult autism and agoraphobia in one character and wraps it in a Ouija bow.

In a sense it reminds me of the awesome film The Evil Within, but this has a quirky, low budget feel.

An autistic young woman lives with her brother, who brings home board games for them to play…including a Ouija board. The sister uses it on her own and unleashes a variety of “friendly” spirit buddies that act as the devil on her shoulder in a mostly goofy and campy way.

It’s an odd choice of tone when taking on rather serious subjects, and it’s not a “scary” movie, but I actually liked the genuine feel of the camaraderie between the brother and the sister he cares for. A visitation by their well-meaning deceased mother proves to be the creepiest part of the film!

OUIJA EXORCISM (2015)

I’d say the opener is the most compelling part of this film, with kids using a Ouija board in a tent during an indoor sleepover.

Flash ahead thirty years, one of the kids is now grown, it’s his father’s funeral, and he can’t remember what happened that night with the Ouija board. But he’s invited to a weekend getaway with friends at a cabin.

Although this film is slow, it’s oddly compelling. The actors are quirky and bring a subtle dry humor to the situation. Situation being…a sexy bear is cheating on his woman with a female shaman, and his woman has the hots for the main guy.

What’s most notable here is that the main man is Jewish, which plays a part in the supernatural story. There’s also minor mention of the gender-bending aspects of shamanism.

Meanwhile, it’s not until almost an hour in that someone uses the Ouija board. This becomes a fairly typical film about the evil spirit jumping from person to person, and the final exorcism is quite tame.

OUIJA SEANCE: THE FINAL GAME (2018)

This one just falls completely flat. A young woman inherits a home and goes there with her friends.

After the obligatory warning from a creepy caretaker not to go in the attic…they go in the attic.

They use a Ouija board, and the main girl pushes the caretaker to tell her more about what really happened to her deceased mother.

Eventually someone becomes sort of possessed, the caretaker runs around with an axe, there are flashbacks about the main girl’s mother, and I really had no idea what was happening at all, because I wasn’t entertained enough to stay focused.

 

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I’ll take the 80s triple feature with extra cheese on a Blu-ray

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Daniel

The 80s hits (and misses) just keep going Blu thanks to all the indie companies digging them out of the vaults, so it’s time to take on three I just added to my collection: a giallo, a giant snake film, and a zom-mom flick.

DELIRIUM (1987)

Lamberto Bava approaches horror in the same way his father and other Italian greats did in the 80s, so if you’re a fan of giallos and Euro horror of the era and haven’t seen this one yet, it will give you a little fix even if it isn’t a masterpiece.

A former model who owns a magazine is regularly spied on by her crazy, wheelchair-bound neighbor. She’s also in a bitch battle of Melrose Place proportions with a woman who wants to buy the magazine from her. And those are just two of the numerous possible killers in this whodunit.

It all revolves around the modeling world, for as female victims are killed in various ways (pitchfork, bee attack, etc.), the killer takes photos of the disfigured bodies in front of old modeling pics of the leading lady and sends them her way.

As a result, her magazine starts selling better!

There are plenty of neon-drenched 80s horror moments, chases, body reveals, T & A, and even a disembodied, childish voice terrorizing the leading lady, but the film is rather slow nonetheless. The very first kill has a completely inexplicable killer POV seeing the victim with the cyclops face on the cover art of the Blu-ray. I have no idea what it means, but it promises something bigger and freakier than what we get.

And in a really odd turn…

**SPOILER** the killer wears a wig at the very end when finally revealed, but swears he’s not a transvestite.

SPASMS (1983)

The director of Killer Party brings us a giant snake flick years before Anaconda spawned a franchise.

This silly movie features Oliver Reed as a hunter who was bitten by the giant snake in the jungle and is now telepathically connected to it. So he has it captured and brought to a college where Peter Fonda studies ESP.

Meanwhile, there’s a cult that wants possession of the snake to worship as their god, so they send their men to the lab to steal it.

Nothing too exciting happens for much of this film, and snake attacks are relegated to blue-tinted snake POV, then all of a sudden the snake escapes…and heads right to a sorority house to give us a good look at it….and a naked chick in the shower.

It’s as if the movie realized it’s the fricking 80s and shit needs to be fun, gory, and cheesy. Best sequence in the whole film, seconded only by a scene of a guy’s face mutating after he gets bit.

Ah, practical effects. Those were the days.

FLESH-EATING MOTHERS (1988)

This is my kind of 80s direct-to-video horror. It doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is—a low budget, campy flick about teens being terrified by their mothers, who have become raving mad cannibals. Mombies! EEK!

This is one of those productions that feels like it could have cast kids and parents you went to school with in the 1980s then filmed right in your town. No Hollywood “middle class” houses in this one. Just classic white trash suburbia.

The kids are fun enough, but the women playing the mad mothers absolutely steal the show. They totally go for it, and with the bonus of the psychotic looking makeup, they are as freaky as they are funny.

The music, both score and pop tunes, is totally 80s, the gore is great, the lighting is as 80s as it get, and the cheese factor is top-notch. Or should I say top-nacho?

As goofy as it all is, it actually takes on themes of sleazy husbands and the bond between children and their mothers. Just be warned, there’s an over-the-top scene of two moms having a cat fight. As in…they fight for a cat. It doesn’t turn out well for the cat.

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STREAM QUEEN: these killer creatures bit, but not in the good way

Posted on July 24, 2020 by Daniel

There are pterodactyls, a croc, and dogs, but this wasn’t one of my best moments selecting movies for a themed triple feature, so let’s just get this over with.

TERRORDACTYL (2016)

It shocks me that Terrordactyl never found its way on to Sy-Fy. If you’re missing the bad monster movies of a decade ago that played on the channel regularly, this should give you a good fix.

The pterodactyls are actually way cooler looking than the CGI crap that slithers and flies across screen in Sy-Fy originals.

Basically this is like the pterodactyl cage scene from Jurassic Park 3 extended into a full-length buddy movie with a dose of Q: The Winged Serpent thrown in for good measure.

When comets streak to earth, a cute landscaping duo finds a small rock in a crater, and of course…it’s a pterodactyl egg! As the pterodactyls from outer space start overtaking their city, the guys team up with a couple of girls and a drunk hunter to battle them, because there’s literally no one else around. No civilians, no cops, no military.

There are plenty of fun action sequences with the pterodactyls, some unique and humorous situations, and the cast is quite likable.

The only downside is that the comedy writing is so generic that there’s really nothing the cast can do to make it funnier, no matter how much they try. It barely made the hubby and me laugh at all.

THE POOL (2018)

I’ll start off by saying this entire movie about a couple trapped in a drained pool with a crocodile is metaphorically and blatantly an anti-choice propaganda film.

Visual symbolism of birth canals, eggs, and babies abound. Meanwhile, I didn’t add these captions; this is the dialogue.

Having said that, it’s also so ridiculous from start to finish that I couldn’t believe I kept watching it, especially since it wasn’t even vaguely suspenseful or scary. And as usual, keeping the CGI croc moments in proportion was a big fail, so the croc regularly looks like it changes size.


Now where did I put that tape?

Things begin with numerous perfectly timed coincidences that blow the couple’s opportunities to get out of the pool right away.

It’s astounding how little the croc, trapped in there with them, bothers to go after its only food source…them. And wait until you see the dude pick the croc up by its tail and throw it across the pool.

Yes, what I’m saying is you have to see this movie. You just have to see it to believe it. The bonus is that the leading man is super sexy and super shirtless.

Just be warned—there is a totally unnecessary occurrence involving a dog at the very end of the film.

THE BREED (2006)

Speaking of awful treatment of dogs, I’m only covering this one because it’s on a double feature Blu-ray set I bought for the other movie. I had seen parts of this on cable years ago, and it’s just not my thing.

Basically it’s Night of the Living Dead with wild dogs. Michelle Rodriguez and a bunch of her friends come to stay at a house on a deserted island and are soon being hunted down by a pack of dogs that is as smart as the sharks in Deep Blue Sea.

The group boards up windows and tries to figure out a way off the island…because the dogs have managed to make their sea plane float away from the dock.

While there’s action, gore, and suspense, being a dog person, I’m just not into watching people killing one dog after another to the strains of that awful dog yelp sound. No thanks.

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It’s Hanukkah vs. Dead Dicks

Posted on July 22, 2020 by Daniel

I’m always excited when new Blu-rays land in my lap, so let’s see how I felt after I moved Hanukkah and Dead Dicks from my lap to my Blu-ray player.

Hanukkah (2019)

I can’t believe I waited so long for my pre-order Blu-ray of this film to arrive (nearly a year at this point)…and this is the movie I got.

Here are the bright sides: a) it’s the first major Hanukkah horror movie for my holiday horror page, b) it features appearances by the likes of the late Sid Haig, the late Dick Miller, PJ Soles, and Caroline Williams, and c) occasionally there’s some funny banter that actually works (mostly gay banter between straight guys).

Other than that, this film has no clear trajectory, no tangible characterization, and a weird dichotomy between goreless, off-screen slasher kills vs. bloody torture scenes back at the killer’s lair (which taught me that peeling Nazi tattoos off skinheads is one of the best ways to celebrate the holiday).

After a sleazy scene involving Sid Haig, Caroline Williams in a tub, and a little boy, there’s a fun opening kill featuring funny indie horror director James Balsamo making anal quips then muff-diving, so I had high hopes for this as a slasher.

The proper setup is established. A bunch of friends goes to party at a house and have sex (mostly lesbian sex).

Funny horror girl Sadie Katz (Blood Feast remake, Party Bus to Hell, Wrong Turn 6) is totally underutilized, and should have been the main girl, but the film fails to even have a final girl—or any other clear signs of slasher structure. It doesn’t help that she’s a bitch; she sent her boyfriend to go have dinner with her mother so she could go party and cheat on him.

Her mother is played by PJ Soles, whose “Sole” purpose in the film seems to be so she can deliver some of her classic lines from Halloween. Totally.

Meanwhile, the killer tortures people at the lair and also shows up at the house to kill off the kids. Once in a while a dreidel is the calling card, but not even that remains consistent.

It is rather fun when the killer has a run-in with Santa…

Over an hour in, a rabbi character shows up to act like Dr. Loomis in Halloween, finally offering up some sort of backstory. The social and religious commentary feels a bit forced at times even though it tries to deliver it with humor, and the actors don’t even seem to know what to do with it.

It all culminates in a big mess of unfinished business, with a rambling rabbi giving a long sermon dripping with loose ends.

And finally, this way too long, 105-minute movie suffers from excessive padding and awkwardly delivered dialogue with way too many pauses in between exchanges, which drags it down even more. I simply don’t understand how filmmakers don’t watch the final cut of their film and realize that it needs to be cut even more.

It’s a lot of responsibility to take on, but if you’re planning on making the definitive “Hanukkah” horror film, title and all, it simply has to live up to all the great holiday horror films that have come before it, and this one doesn’t. Here’s hoping someone can rectify that with a film called 8 Killer Nights or Menorah.

DEAD DICKS (2019)

There are too many jokes I could drop here, so I’ll just say one thing to make your dick rise from the dead…there are two dicks on display in this dark comedy horror film. They’re also on display in the images below.

This is a trippy film about a dude trying to commit suicide in his apartment but failing miserably. There’s a reason why, which he discovers when he calls his sister to come over…

There’s a huge vagina in the wall over his bed. Every time he attempts to kill himself, he wakes up to find he did succeed in killing a version of himself, but he’s still alive. The bodies are piling up, and he needs his sister’s help in doing something about it.

She unwillingly gets sucked into his dilemma, and as they try to work it out in macabre ways, the film becomes a character study about them and their relationship. Even so, it never gets so heavy that it loses sight of the humor and horror of the predicament.

Great performances, a couple of surprises, and some twisted visuals make Dead Dicks hard to take your eyes off.

 

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SHUDDER AND SHRIEK: bad things happening at isolated houses

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Daniel

Chipping away at my current “Shudder originals” list, so here are my thoughts on four films set in houses and cabins.

REVENGE (2017)

I finally got around to watching this one, and I did only because it caught my attention several years ago when it was being promoted with pix of the hot lead guy naked and covered in blood. No, it’s not Zack Ward.

Personally, rape/revenge flicks aren’t my thing, and this is just an update of the I Spit On Your Grave concept…which has already been updated in an unneeded franchise of films in recent years.

A married hottie is banging a babe in his isolated home in a desert that apparently can only be reached by helicopter. His two sleazy buddies show up to up hunt, although I don’t know what they’re hunting in a fricking lifeless desert.

Following some metaphorical imagery covering toxic masculinity and female temptation, the babe sexy dances with them, and then gets raped. Sigh. Where’s Jodie Foster when you need her?

Facing the conundrum of what to do with her, the guys make things simple; they push her off a cliff and go hunting.

This is where the movie falls apart for me. The way in which they think she should have died…should have killed her. But no, she’s still alive and manages to escape…in a way that should have killed her. And yet she’s strong enough to start kicking man ass. And it all might be because of the power of the magical land on which she died. How lucky can a raped and murdered girl get?

I shouldn’t have to say this, but with the film running 110 minutes long and there being only three guys, this shit starts to drag. Just when I was wondering how the filmmakers didn’t see how boring it was getting with nothing happening, they seemed to realize It, so they threw in an obligatory, super long horror nightmare sequence of a dream within a dream within a dream to keep us interested. And a hot guy shower scene…

At least the last 20 minutes or so are filled with chase scenes, violence, gore, and the naked guy.

INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND (2018)

The director of the original Martyrs manages to bring us another disturbing film about two bonded young women, this time sisters.

They move with their mom into a house they inherited and are quite quickly victims of a violent and terrifying home invasion by a big bald goon and a creepy looking woman.

Years later, one sister, played by Crystal Reed of Teen Wolf, is a lover of a Lovecraft and a horror author herself. She returns home to help her mother deal with the sister, who has essentially lost her mind and is convinced the goon and woman are still after her.

And then, Crystal begins to experience weird shit, too.

The film breaks into a horrific game of cat and mouse as the girls are once again terrorized by the baddies, who dress them up like dolls to add to their collection of freaky as fuck dolls.

But what’s most disturbing about the film is its dark, brutal, emotional portrayal of PTSD and the different ways in which people cope with the same experience. The number of gut-wrenching screams and sobs of the two sisters went right through me.

As for the horror, the film is like a much grittier version of standard films in which the characters are terrorized and tortured by weirdos, but with a much more in depth (and more realistic) focus on the impact it has on the characters.

The only other thing I’ll mention, and don’t read on if you haven’t seen it yet, ***SPOILERS*** is that the woman, whose face is mostly obscured through the film, is played by a man, which I detected right away. For the entire film I wasn’t sure if we were meant to figure that out, but his wig comes off at the very last second in the film to let us know it was a man. However it is never addressed. We don’t get inside the heads of the baddies, so there isn’t a Dressed to Kill or Norman Bates explanation for it. Was he a gay drag queen? A heterosexual transvestite? Trans? We’ll never know, and we’ll never know if his gender identity is what pushed him to be a psycho.

LAKE OF DEATH (2019)

This Norwegian film is a whodunit (or whatdunit) at a cabin by the lake. Thing is, I can’t imagine anyone not guessing exactly what’s going on right from the start.

A young woman’s brother disappeared in the woods and she blames herself for his death.

Sooooo…she goes back to the cabin with her friends to get closure.

There’s lots of talk about myths and legends, one guy prank scaring everyone, cheap faux scares, weird things happening, like the sister sleepwalking and having visions of her friends drooling black goo from their mouths.

The group also makes plenty of references to horror movies, like when they find a trap door to a basement in which there is a mysterious book. See, it’s okay to rip-off Evil Dead if a character says “it’s just like Evil Dead!”

Things finally pick up a little in the final act, but don’t expect a body count. This is mostly a film about a girl being haunted by the ghost of her grief.

THE BEACH HOUSE (2020)

This one was getting so much pre-hype I just knew it was going to totally disappoint me. It’s one of those films that drags even when something is finally happening. For me, the attempt at building a slow burning sense of dread just didn’t work at all. I wasn’t scared or on edge.

I was thrilled that it stars Liana Liberato of the Hulu show Light as a Feather, who is teamed with a James Le Gros’s very pretty son.

They’re at a beach house alone when an older couple shows up thinking they have the house for the weekend. So the four decide to just hang together.

It all seems fishy, but…nothing ever comes of that.

Then comes the big red flag for me. They eat edibles and get high, which told me that in the end we’re not going to know if anything that transpires is real and it’s not going to make sense because they’re all tripping

Anyway, after 52 minutes of talking, things finally start happening down by the water.

It almost seems like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing, only coming from the water, but we’ll never know because we don’t know if any of it really happened.

There are some cool, gross special effects and the second half of the film at least delivers some entertaining horror moments, but even the continuous chase scene in the final act didn’t have me biting my nails.

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When the classic movie monsters went ape shit

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Daniel

Up next from my late brother’s collection are five flicks from a boxed set called Sons of Kong. The packaging is so cool I just have to share a pic.

Of course the prints on the discs are not so cool, but they were still watchable.

Not related to Kong at all, the ten films in the set are simply about killer gorillas. Okay, like half of them are apes, but I really wanted to say killer gorilla. I also had to blog about five of the films because they each star either Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, or Lon Chaney Jr. Awesome.

THE APE (1940)

Boris Karloff seems like a very nice evil doctor in this simplistic flick. He is trying to cure a young woman of polio with the spinal fluid of other people, which could be a challenge. What I want to know is…why is she wearing the Roseanne quilt?

Conveniently, the circus is in town, and a big ape escapes and begins terrorizing locals. Now is Karloff’s chance to tap into some spine!

But it’s not what you think. Ape scenes are disappointingly minimal, making this not much of a killer gorilla movie at all. And the surprise twist is rather absurd, mostly because it’s not presented in graphic detail as it would be in a modern day horror movie.

THE APE MAN (1943)

This is how you start an ape horror movie. Bela Lugosi is a mad scientist whose assistant brings Bela’s sister down to see what he’s been up to in the lab…he’s made himself half ape!

Meanwhile, a nosy reporter and his female photographer pal start sniffing around Bela’s house.

I don’t know what it was about spinal fluid back then, but Bela needs fresh spinal fluid to cure him of his problem. He also happens to have a gorilla, which he puts to good use killing people for their fluid!

This is a much more satisfying spinal fluid hunting killer ape flick than The Ape, and an odd character that appears throughout the film proves to be a crazy early example of meta movie humor at the very end.

BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA (1952)

Brooklyn Gorilla? These days we just call them gorilla juiceheads. Anyway, Bela Lugosi once again plays a mad scientist, and this time he wants to make humans into apes. See? Horror movies have always been unoriginal and ripped each other off.

Actually, this is mostly a comedy, and a very funny one at that thanks to lead Sammy Petrillo, who made a career out of impersonating Jerry Lewis. He had me laughing nonstop in this film about him and his singing buddy accidentally landing on a jungle island. The singer falls for a pretty female native…and sings to her twice. Meanwhile, an overweight female native is hot for Sammy, so her size is used repeatedly as the punch line of jokes.

Bela Lugosi’s monkey also has eyes for Sammy. The comedian becomes even funnier when he starts interacting with the monkey. And in a hilarious meta move, Sammy calls out Bela Lugosi constantly for being just like Dracula. This is definitely my favorite flick in this bunch.

Eventually, Bela succeeds in making man into ape, and that’s when the guys know they have to get off the island. Through all this madness, what’s most shocking is…there’s no other away to put it…it has a Wizard of Oz ending.

THE GORILLA (1939)

The Gorilla is sort of a comic reimagining of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, starring the comic trio The Ritz Brothers, whose shtick is very much in the same comic vein as Abbott & Costello.

With news of a serial killer known as “The Gorilla” running around town, a rich man hires detectives to protect his visiting niece and her boyfriend from the killer.

Bela Lugosi plays the butler, and while he speaks just like Dracula again, his role is underplayed, and the funny maid overshadows him. There are a good number of goofballs here, with very few actors in the straight man role to balance it out, so there’s plenty of slapstick comedy to go around.

As thunder and lightning crash outside and the Ritz Brothers are busy doing a comical investigation, secret passages and hairy arms reaching out from dark shadows abound…because there’s an actual gorilla on the loose in the house!


Hey, weren’t you in Creepshow?

And if you think twists upon twists are a new thing, think again. This playful little film is loaded with them.

BRIDE OF THE GORILLA (1951)

This one establishes a plot that could have been remade as an episode of Tales from the Crypt. It wouldn’t even need to be condensed much since the movie is only 65 minutes long (as is virtually every movie I covered in this blog).

Raymond Burr puts the bur in burly as a sexy man working for a rich guy on a jungle plantation…and wooing the rich guy’s wife. The rich guy’s witchy servant witnesses an altercation between the two men that results in the rich guy dying, so she puts a spell on Burr.

This time around, Lon Chaney Jr. is not the man turned monster, but a detective investigating the case.

With the rich dude out of the way, Burr’s life with the widow starts to look up…until the curse kicks in and he begins to think he’s transforming into a gorilla at night.

But is he, or is it all in his head? We will never know because the movie leaves it up in the air, and unfortunately it falls apart as a result, lacking any kind of suspense or scares.

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Exorcising that big gay demon

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a gay exorcism horror flick for the homo horror movies list!

If little sexy/sadistic religion-hates-gays indie A Closer Walk With Thee could have afforded some nasty demonic possession special effects, it would have upped its horror cred, because it definitely scores the homoerotic cred.

In fact, the sexual moments are the only thing that clarify that this is not a religious propaganda film about gays being possessed by the devil, because you know religious folk would loathe that they secretly loved sitting through such perverse visuals to get to the justification of their hatred.

The film doesn’t really clarify the circumstances (or the religion), but there’s this little cult of young people living in a rustic building in the city. Everything they do is so not structured to avoid sin. For starters, the guys and girls all live communally in the same building. And even worse (or better), the guys sleep in the same bed together in their underwear!

The focus is on a gay preacher who is perfectly hot, and his very queer assistant/buddy, who is perfectly closeted. His performance is actually excellent—you can feel his desire for the preacher and his fear of being discovered.

There’s lots of praying and singing of hymns, and to let us know this is a horror film, there’s a quick exorcism of a young woman.

This preacher sure is confident in his battles against the devil. He could practically run his exorcism business at a drive-thru window.

The film then gives us plenty of erotic moments of the gay boy lusting after the preacher. Now we can almost taste his desire. Yum.

Naturally, fricking girls get in the way, the gay boy is outed, and then he’s strapped down for an exorcism. The stark setting and the cold, emotionless, brainwashed performances of the other kids is unsettling when you realize there are people that are actually like this and actually do things like this to young gay people, so be warned if you have triggers.

The exorcism itself is kind of dirty, with the gay boy in his undies and the preacher saying filthy things to him about the perversions of gay sex with the devil. Again, if only there were some actual exorcism special effects, this would have delivered more horror, but I assume the notion is not that this is horror movie “devil possession”, but more realistically about the young boy being convinced that the devil is inside him.

Even without Linda Blair makeup, the young actor once again proves himself by getting super fricking creepy as he turns the tables on his exorcists and does some brutal damage.

As I said, if you took out the homoerotic moments, the conclusion of this film would have religious freaks screaming, “See? The gays really are evil and possessed by the devil!” As for a gay audience, you know we’re all screaming, “Yes! Whip out your demon and rip those motherfucking straighties a new one!”

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1970s Black horror double feature: Blackenstein vs. Devil’s Express

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a double feature of Black horror from the 1970s! Is it everything we expect from the Blaxploitation era?

DEVIL’S EXPRESS (1976)

I swear Devil’s Express is like The Last Dragon meets Raw Meat…with the vibe of 1970s cop shows like Baretta and SWAT, from the soooooo 1976 disco soul music to the city street action.

After an opening scene of men being sacrificed with a katana in 200 BC China, we meet our main cop/karate teacher and his student…who pack up and head to Hong Kong.

The scenes of them learning from martial arts experts are quite boring.

But then the student goes down into a creepy cave, which unleashes a demon…

…that hops into a guy on a boat back to The US, giving him possession bug eyes in the process.

He’s quite freaky, and eventually the demon busts out of him (awesome), but as bodies begin piling up in the subway system and detectives investigate, there’s no sign of an onscreen kill involving the demon. Bummer.

Instead we get one big montage of the leading man living and loving in the city for a majority of the film…when he’s not busy getting into martial arts fights with baddies on the street.

It’s a long time to wait to see the demon. We finally do when the main man dons a gold spandex outfit right out of Dance Fever to go underground and fight it.

The final battle rocked (or discoed), but I was a little disappointed with this one overall, which had a lot of horror promise that didn’t come to fruition.

BLACKENSTEIN (1973)

Blackenstein does a great job of bringing the vibe of Hammer horror to a Black horror film.

Our scientist, Dr. Stein, is a white dude experimenting with DNA when a former female student comes to him for help; her military man has been badly damaged in war. She wants the doctor to try to fix him.

Unfortunately, as she begins to work with the doctor, his other assistant starts having feelings for her. When she rejects his advances, he sabotages the doctor’s work.

Pretty soon, a monster has been created…Blackenstein! He looks like a traditional Frankenstein, and he seems to have it out for horny couples.

I had my concerns when the first kill was done fricking shadow puppet style.

But after that, Blackenstein hits the town and kills for the camera.

After an unnecessary club scene complete with stand-up comedy and a singing performance, Blackenstein gets a gander at a girl’s tits in an alley (that’s as exploitative as it gets), and then goes home to take care of those who made him a monster.

Aside from a flash of guts, this isn’t a gory film. There are classic horror shadows and dramatic lighting, but the kills are 1970s tame. It’s entertaining enough, but this is no Blacula. For a more campy Black Frankenstein tale, check out this SNL sequel…

 

 

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You don’t seem like yourself lately…

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Daniel

It’s a smorgasbord blog of four flicks about infected people and human hungry creatures.

THE DUSTWALKER (2019)

The Crazies meets It Follows with a dash of Under the Dome in this melancholy Australian film, which definitely delivers some chills, thrills, and surprises. However, there is an odd clash of melodramatic tone and underacting that brings down the energy level, as well as some wonky editing that effects the flow of events at times.

In a small desert town, something crashes to the earth, and then locals become infected by a red dust that causes half their face to get slightly deformed. At first they just stand outside houses and buildings staring blankly, but then they start chasing after and killing people. There are some very cool scenes of the crazies swiftly moving, crawling, and jumping.

The sheriff, her deputy, and a female scientist (best character in the film) try to make sense of it all, while also attempting to capture and lock up the crazies instead of killing them in case there’s a cure. But as they become outnumbered, they hole up in the precinct with a handful of survivors…right about the time that something comes crawling up from the ground. WHAT?

Yes, this one has an unexpected sci-fi creature feature twist, but be warned—absolutely nothing is explained at the end, leaving us with one big string of dangling plot points. I can’t imagine what was going on in the minds of the creators, because they sure didn’t tell us.

DON’T SPEAK (2020)

I have unintentionally gravitated towards films by director Scott Jeffrey in the past years (The Bad Nun, ClownDoll, Cupid), so imagine my surprise when yet another one landed in my watchlist only days after I watched ClownDoll.

I think Don’t Speak might be this prolific horror director’s tightest film yet. Reminiscent of classic creature features of the 80s and 90s, it features a traditional man in a monster costume that is much more terrifying than CGI. It also explains why we get the full monster Monty in the very first scene, because it’s that cool.

When a woman’s father falls ill, she, her husband, and their kids travel to her parents’ home to see him. But when they get there, something is very wrong.

And they soon find out in an amazing, chilling scene when the daughter first encounters the creature. From that moment on it is nonstop horror action as they are terrorized and torn apart by the creature.

Somehow the dad figures out in an instant that the creature is using sound to hunt them…which makes it that much more annoying how much the women scream when being chased! Shut the fuck up, be-otches!

There’s a vague reference to military experiments nearby to explain the creature’s existence, but the backstory is really not expounded upon. This is a movie that focuses totally on a nuclear family fighting a monster to the bitter end. There’s just one tiny detail that could have been added as to what the monster was, and I’m kind of shocked it wasn’t used as a plot twist…unless we were meant to think it anyway and the director just didn’t feel the need to spell it out.

PROJECT ITHACA (2019)

It’s…Saw on a spaceship with emotion harvesting aliens?

Project Ithaca is set mostly in a confined space where a group of random people wakes up trapped in goo and wrapped in tentacles, with no memories of how they got there. As they slowly talk it out, their individual pasts are revealed in flashbacks, and they begin to realize that the alien tentacles come out to suck on their energy when they feel emotions. Eek!

A couple of surprises are thrown in to keep things interesting, but there’s not much more to the plot than that. It’s sort of slow and struggles to unfold, but it does start to come together as it reaches its conclusion. Not to mention, the effects are excellent.

DON’T GROW UP (2015)

This infected film is more of a coming of age character study with the infected as a background element.

A small band of “delinquent” kids is suddenly faced with the horrific reality that all the adult have become violent crazies.

As the kids cope with the trauma of their troubled pasts and the unknown possibilities in their futures, they begin to bond, lean on each other for support, and explore their feelings for each other. See the irony? Don’t Grow Up is a movie about kids that don’t want to grow up because they will become monsters, yet they begin to mature as the movie progresses. Talk about a conundrum.

While there aren’t many infected in the film, and they don’t get much screen time, the attack scenes are suspenseful and violent. The limited number of infected actually creates more tension than having constant hordes of them coming at the kids, and leaves us feeling the sense of isolation and abandonment the kids must be experiencing with no adult guidance.

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STREAM QUEEN: clown killer overkill

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Daniel

I watched these four because a) one was from a director whose work I follow, b) one was a sequel from a director whose work I follow, and c) the other two were a film and its sequel. Does any of that matter, or was this more clown horror than I needed all at once?

CLOWNDOLL (2019)

Scott Jeffrey, director of The Bad Nun and Cupid, never fails to keep my interest with his brand of indie horror.

ClownDoll may not have the most original plot, but there’s a fresh twist in this killer clown/killer doll hybrid that makes it stand out among the numerous clown/doll indies.

Generally using the Chucky formula as the reason for the doll coming to life, the film focuses on a young woman carrying a baby for her brother and sister-in-law. She’s compelled to buy a freaky looking clown doll in a store and sits it in a rocking chair in her awesome home, which is a converted church.

She begins getting calls from a guy who dialed a wrong number, and his voice is perfectly creepy. Meanwhile, the clown begins to move and kill people.

The death scenes are fun, and the common kill techniques are elevated by MJ Dixon’s style and visual presentation. On top of that, the main girl is very likable and quite good in her role, so I was quite satisfied with this one. But perhaps the freakiest part of this film was some Three Men and a Baby horror. During a scene in which a woman is supposed to be alone with the clown in front of her, she stands up quickly, and both the hubby and I noticed a flash of what appears to be a person behind her! I’ve freeze-framed and brightened the moment in the pic below.

CLEAVERS: KILLER CLOWNS (2019)

MJ Dixon’s sequel to Cleaver begins with the clown escaping with a young girl and a sheriff on Halloween 1995, and then jumps ahead five years.

The sheriff’s deputy is still hunting the clown. The film takes place right before and on Halloween, but the holiday isn’t the focus. Instead this feels more like a backwoods family horror flick, with a family on a road trip getting lured to the house of the clown and his clan.

Meanwhile, the deputy captures and interrogates a young woman hoping to find out more info on the clown’s whereabouts.

This goes on for fifty minutes before there are finally a few kills in a row. The clown has a young woman in training helping him take care of business, so the deputy has her work cut out for her. And she better brace herself, because she’s going to stumble upon some surprises.

Definitely not as good as the first film and mostly very slow, this one promises a third film at the end. Of course I’m going to check it out…

LOON (2015)

Loon is clearly a low budget killer clown movie right from the start, from the acting to unnecessary dead space filler that slows the pace.

After a creepy opening scene of a brother and sister being chased by a clown in an abandoned haunted house attraction in the woods, we jump ten years ahead. The siblings are now older, but their friends still don’t believe they encountered a clown. So…they all head to the derelict haunted attraction.

Surprisingly, this segment of the kids being beaten to death with a bat one by one isn’t the meat of the movie. It comes to a quick conclusion and then this turns into an amateurish detective story as a detective hunts down the clown killer and uncovers a not so riveting backstory.

Only at the end does the detective finally head into the woods to battle it out with the clown….who really just wants back a picture of his dog. The thrill for me was when the detective gets some help from a shirtless pretty boy.

LOONS (2016)

2 hours and 1 minute long is inexcusable for a low budget indie sequel to a low budget indie—especially when most of your movie has nothing to say.

 

Loons makes the first film look like an okay slasher. In this one the detective is back and has become somewhat of a recluse (and is played by a different actor).

Meanwhile, two street gangs are battling it out for the haunted house property in the woods where the clown died. WTF?

One gang deserves the property just for their dedication—they wear clown masks, throw a clown party celebrating the anniversary of the clown’s death, and plan to resurrect the clown!

After that I don’t even know what’s going on. It’s sooooo boring with loads of talk and a gun battle at the end. There might be a pretty interesting supernatural resurrection story buried in here, but I simply stopped digging for it after about an hour. I don’t even know why I’m still bothering to write about this one. Okay, I’ll stop.

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