Black magic, the occult, and pentagrams

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Daniel

If you’re in the mood for some dark, demonic horror and spell casting scares, you might find what you’re looking for in a couple of films in this foursome: Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, Pentagram, Black Magic, and Red Handed. Here’s what you can expect from each of them.

ANTRUM: THE DEADLIEST FILM EVER MADE (2019)

This one creates its own legend of infamy in the first few minutes, which plays out as a mockumentary delving into the mythology of the film Antrum—it was a film made in the 1970s, but was pulled from theaters because anyone who viewed it met a horrible fate.

At last it has been unearthed, and we are warned ahead of time that those releasing it refuse to take any responsibility for anything that happens to us after we view it.

Built in novelty paranoia aside, I found the film to be quite creepy and disturbingly relatable.

It’s about a boy whose dog is put to sleep, leading to him having nightmares about a horned beast.

He’s convinced his dog’s soul has gone to hell, so his older sister treks into the woods with him to do a ritual that involves digging a hole to release the dog’s soul.

While the film is a slow burn, the atmosphere is quite unnerving, with the pair experiencing frightening occurrences in the woods—like demons stalking them.

It really captures that occult eeriness of 1970s horror, feeling almost like a drug trip at times, and psyching us out with grainy footage of a devil just staring at the camera and pentagrams flashing on the screen periodically.

Most importantly, the little boy is very reminiscent of the unforgettable bowl cut boy from Euro horror flicks of the 80s like The House by the Cemetery and Manhattan Baby.

PENTAGRAM (2019)

Thieves hide out in a house where they become trapped in a pentagram. If they step out of the circle, an overlaid clip of a burning demon comes to slice them open with a scythe. This same scenario plays out twice in the movie and that’s the only horror we get.

Other than that, the four thieves spend their time using belts and clothes to fetch essential items outside the circle.

Remember when the Brady Bunch got stuck in an old prison cell and had to fish for the key on a peg across the room? Yeah, it’s that.

Shirtless guy aside, I would just advise skipping this one. It’s quite boring and rather annoying because every time someone is booted from the pentagram, they just wait for the demon to come get them. I simply don’t understand why they don’t just jump back into the damn pentagram.

BLACK MAGIC (2018)

If you like Asian horror like The Ring and contemporary haunting films like The Conjuring, this witchcraft movie is a tight blend of both.

A man takes his family to see his sick and delusional mother.

After some effective supernatural incidents with grandma terrifying the kids, she ends up in the hospital, and the wife begins having spells in which she sees or is attacked by a witchy ghost woman.

Soon the daughters are also experiencing the horror, and the family members begin turning on each other as the witchy ghost woman amps up her reign of terror.

It was all a little too basic tween horror for me, but it does have some great atmosphere and “scary” stuff to make those who are more jumpy…well…jump.

RED HANDED (2019)

Michael Biehn and Michael Madsen may get top billing, but this movie is about three hot brothers who come to a small town after their father’s death. The gym bunny brother even shows off his T&A within the first few minutes.

Hey, I could watch these hunky men for 90 minutes straight without a problem, but damn is this movie boring. Like….Midsommar boring.

There’s lots of talking and introductions to odd locals, including redneck dudes and women who like to wear flowing white dresses. We just wait and wait for something to happen. Finally, the young son of one of the brothers is kidnapped and the hunt is on at about 55 minutes into the film.

Naturally the hunt leads to a sacrificial occult ritual. I found nothing exciting or scary about this indie take on the Midsommar/Wicker Man concept.

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When nuns attack

Posted on May 18, 2020 by Daniel

I figured it was time to just go for it and check out a handful of the killer nun movies that have hit the market in the wake of Hollywood horror The Nun—which, not surprisingly, was a fricking mess. So are these indie alternatives any better?

A NUN’S CURSE (2020)

This is one of the latest killer nun offerings, but I’m covering it first because it’s sort of a warm-up to the other two films.

Two sisters, a geek, and a jerk (scream king Damian Maffei) are heading to a summer home. On the way they stop at a derelict prison where legend has it a nun killed a bunch of inmates before disappearing.

The setting is quite creepy, but with only four characters, they spend a good chunk of this short 73-minute movie just wandering around the prison discussing the legend and providing faux jump scares.

Some flashbacks to the nun doing the deed using communion wafers and wine make it clear why film treatments are usually used to distinguish past from present, while also creating ominous atmosphere. The flashbacks here are filter-free, blurring the lines because they feel just as current as the rest of the film. Felissa Rose plays the nun, and for me personally, her big horror queen presence somewhat softens the sinister mystique of the nun.

When we at last get to the slashing, the murders happen 1, 2, 3. Literally! Three characters are disposed of in about a two minute period (with practical effects. Yay!). There’s not even some poor sucker—a cop, security guard, thrill-seeking kids, horny couple, etc.—sneaking into the prison. Just a little of that in the first fifty minutes could have offered some organic scares and a body count.

However, we do get a good crotch shot.

Within the remaining 20 minutes the nun fun begins. The nun has possessed face and pops from around corners and out of shadows to offer genuine midnight movie scares as she terrorizes the final girl.

Although there’s a plot arc that develops around the main girl, I feel the slasher elements could have been beefed up earlier on.

CURSE OF THE NUN (2019)

I’m always thrilled when I begin an indie film and discover it is by the director of another movie I’ve already seen and liked. In this case it’s Aaron Mirtes, director of Clowntergeist.

Curse of the Nun does just what a nun horror flick needs to do. It’s non-stop action and thrills from start to finish.

A young woman moving out of a rental house begins to experience supernatural occurrences. The refreshing change here is that crazy shit happens in the house she’s leaving, not the one she’s moving into. Awesome!

Within a short time she’s being chased by a zombie-esque nun. She can’t escape the house, and the nun pursues her relentlessly for the entire film. It’s really like one full-length chase scene.

The two leads have great chemistry and deliver some humor as well. And the nun is nice and ghoulish and even fricking levitates. Eek!

Seasoned horror fans will definitely note a hint of The Sentinel in the film. Contemporary horror fans will notice a little Ouija board trick borrowed from the Ouija movies. I personally had a blast with this film and can’t wait to see what the director has in store for us next.

THE BAD NUN (2018)

The Bad Nun is like When A Stranger Calls Back meets The Strangers meets an all-time classic I can’t mention without giving away the movie. But the truth is, any horror fan who has seen it all should be able to predict every single thing that happens in this movie right from the start.

However, if you’re going to copy all the classics, copying them as perfectly as The Bad Nun does is the way to go. And if you’re a younger generation of horror fan, a lot of this will seem new to you.

Despite being a know-it-all, I was on the edge of my damn seat throughout this entire film. Plus, like any good horror movie, this one gives you numerous reasons to become furious with the main girl for making every dumb mistake in the book.

This is slow burn perfection. A young woman rents a room in a nice man’s house. Then he asks her to watch out for his sick child, closed away in a bedroom, while he goes out.

Once she’s alone, a nun comes knocking on the door, making up numerous excuses as to why she wants to come in. And she keeps coming back. I thought this perspective was going to be the death of me.

Every setup shot, every camera angle, and every bad decision by the main girl keep the tension sustained right up to the lengthy cat and mouse chase at the end. This was my kind of horror comfort food (especially when devoured with a side of popcorn and a cherry cola).

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PRIME TIME: 4 wacky witch movies

Posted on May 15, 2020 by Daniel

I feel like I may have inadvertently been pulled into a coven after watching these four unusual witch films loaded with flashing subliminal occult imagery. I preferred two of them, but they all had something interesting going on, including some serious gay stuff in one of them!

CHERRY TREE (2019)

This simple film doesn’t dawdle. It’s witchy goodness from start to finish, and probably the most satisfying witch movie I’ve seen since Witching & Bitching.

A young woman being raised by her dying father agrees to let her witch soccer coach perform a ritual on him to stop his death.

The actress playing the teacher is deliciously wicked, and the rituals to bring back the dead are nasty—spill blood into a bowl of cherries, then these great big nasty centipedes burrow into the body to work magic that saves the dying soul.

There is definitely a lot of cherry and centipede action, but the horror amplifies into hellish insanity eventually when the main girl discovers exactly what it is her coach and the coven really want from her.

The final act is a blast.

Plus, totally inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the film, the final frame is fantastically cheesy midnight movie nonsense that leaves me hoping for an equally cheesy sequel. As a bonus, the final scene takes place on Halloween! And no, that’s not Amber Benson of Buffy fame in the image below.

WITCH HUNTERS (2016)

Despite this indie being low budget with poor acting, I was hoping something interesting would come of it…if only it had ironed out the details of the plot. Of a plot. Any plot. It’s quite the mess.

What held so much promise for me was that it seemed like it was going to focus solely on the conflict between a gay priest and a gay sheriff in a small town.

The priest has come to terms with his sexuality while losing his faith, but the sheriff is a vile self-hater. He has sex with men and the kills them on a regular basis.

It’s such a compelling premise that gets lost in a whole lot of other stuff. Still, I’m going to file this one away on the homo horror page considering both leads are gay and it is a key plot point.

The witch hunter that comes to town looks like a combo between a cowboy and a biker, is a caricature, and has his goth sister along for the ride.

They’re hunting witches, they find some, there’s lots of sex with the witches, who are out to get revenge on Christians…damn, this all sounds so much like I should love it.

Unfortunately, the film doesn’t seem to ever tie anything together in any logical way, or bring anything to a satisfying conclusion.

666: SALEM CALLING (2008)

This film originally incorporated Poe’s “The Raven” into its title, and from the very start you’ll know why—lines from the poem are repeated incessantly in voice-overs throughout the movie.

This could have been a pretty basic witch/slasher movie. Although it takes place a week before Halloween, the holiday plays no part in the story. Instead it’s about a group of ghost hunter friends celebrating a birthday by going into the woods to research the disappearance of a horror writer and his family a few years before for their website.

A campfire story soon reveals that the land was once the location of witch burning.

Oh if only the story had stuck with that basic premise. It begins with a séance and some 1970s style horror music and trippy horror visuals—mood setting indie goodness that I welcome. The group hangs out in the dark, and one girl starts to act all witchy. It feels like it really has a direct trajectory…

And then we are bombarded by flashbacks of a separate story that takes place in the early 1900s.

This interference makes everything a confusing mess, with only a glimmer of gory slashing fun suddenly near the end of the film. Not that it clarifies anything. Bummer.

MARK OF THE WITCH (2014)

A bit artsy with signs of budget restraints (CGI blood and fire), Mark of the Witch takes a little while to get to its point, but there’s plenty of mysterious and even over-the-top witch action once it gets there. The only thing missing was some broom flying.

At a young woman’s eighteenth birthday party, her creepy aunt does the unthinkable. Immediately after, the young woman begins having nightmarish, satanic dreams and visions. She’s also stalked by a freaky witch woman.

The young woman’s life begins to unravel and she soon finds out why—there is an evil version of her out and about and wreaking havoc. Amazingly, the main girl’s performance vastly improves when she becomes an evil bitch from hell.

The battle between good and evil is almost campy, and it is definitely my favorite part of the film.

All the witchy woman in the cast totally deliver with their devilish performances.

Not to mention, one of the characters in the movie plays the Atari 2600 classic Breakout…plus we get a brief glimpse of his butt.

 

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Satanic Panic vs. Satanic Panic!

Posted on May 13, 2020 by Daniel

A decade before Satanic Panic hit Shudder, there was a very different movie with the same name, so I figured it was time to take on both of them.

SATANIC PANIC (2009)

It’s low budget and a messy mishmosh of subgenres, yet there are various aspects of the first Satanic Panic that kept me watching.

Naturally, the fact that it begins by focusing on the Satanism panic of the 1980s sparked my interest. Shot documentary style, it features clips of a camouflaged victim who lost her child to Satanists, and a flamboyant Satanist who rejects all the accusations aimed at Satanists.

Then there are some low budget murder scenes as robed cult members abduct random people.

One poor dude even falls victim to some non-graphic sodomy, forced to smoke the pipe from the wrong end.

Finally we meet a main group of friends heading into the woods, and there is some seriously boring filler—including the music.

55 minutes in it kicks into gear as a low budget indie, with lesbians, brutal impalement and stabbings, some fun Satanism scenes, a chase scene with body reveals, and a devilish, slight shift in subgenre again near the end. Really, this would be a better paced film if they had just taken out the middle section!

SATANIC PANIC (2019)

Why is it that all the horror comedies I watch lately are so inconsistent? This Shudder hit starts off quite good. Even my hubby was laughing along at the great jokes and comical performances.

A young pizza delivery girl meets some eccentric customers with an array of odd requests. When one dude stiffs her on a tip, she enters his house and walks right into a satanic cult looking for a virgin. Lucky her.

Rebecca Romijn is the head cultist and she’s a hoot in the film. her hubby Jerry O’Connell plays her husband in the movie. AJ Bowen shows up later in the film for a brief cameo. And the nurse roommate from Happy Death Day gets to shine in this film as another kidnap victim of the cult.

The first establishing act is quite funny with some over the top gore. Things begin to fall apart in the middle of the film—my hubby tuned out and began playing his Soduko games on his iPad.

Things slow way down to the point that none of the characters do anything of any significance. Even the addition of a few evil creature attacks doesn’t help to get the blood flowing again.

The final act ramps up to a big satanic ritual climax, the most entertaining part of it being the orgy. I’m all about the orgy.

Beyond that, I really had no idea what the plot was trying to accomplish, and the cast didn’t seem to either.

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It’s double the porno horror comedy, but does it double your pleasure?

Posted on May 12, 2020 by Daniel

I’m always up for some sex-filled horror comedies revolving around the porno industry. But did slasher Deep Murder and demon flick Porno tickle and tug on my funny bone?

DEEP MURDER (2019)

I’ve been waiting to see this porno slasher comedy with Jerry O’Connell for quite a while. The opportunities for sex and humor abound, but this film missed just about every one of them.

The pacing is off, the delivery of funny lines is off, the humor is painfully weak most of the time, and it relies heavily on viewers whose sense of humor gives them the urge to laugh every time a character name with the word clit in it is mentioned.

It’s like the creators tried to go for Airplane era humor but failed. I would argue that maybe I’m just too sophisticated for this kind of humor, but I’m not. At all.

The plot itself is also a headache. Characters in an actual porn suddenly find themselves being killed by a crazed killer. All these characters know is their porn existence fucking in a mansion owned by Goose from Grease 2, so they struggle to function in a world with a killer.

Even when characters like a detective or pizza boy show up, they are more prepared to dive into a sex scene than a horror movie. I know, it sounds like it should be clever. It’s just not.

Oh, and although he shows off his bare ass immediately, Jerry O’Connell is also barely in the film. Are you shocked?

On the bright side, there are some fun and raunchy kill scenes (some of which feel like they were stolen right from my gay slasher novella Scream, Queen!), we get to see full man wiener, and there’s a gay character. He’s also black (Chris Redd of SNL), so you can guess how long he lasts…

PORNO (2019)

Argh! Porno should have been everything I want in a sexy satanic horror comedy, but it somehow misses the mark more than hitting the bull’s eye—beginning with dragging on too long at nearly an hour and 40 minutes.

All that is good about this film is virtually packed into the last 20 minutes, which deliver everything I was waiting for all along.

it starts off promising, with two guys peeping through a window as a couple has sex. Then the guys bicycle off to work at a movie theater, where it quickly becomes clear this film takes place in the 1990s. Awesome.

Then we learn what’s really going on here. The small staff of kids working the theater consists of a bunch of purity virgin religious freaks. They pray for a good work night, but what they get instead is a pornographic take on Demons.

The kids discover a hidden reel of film in the depths of the theater, and when they watch the pornographic, occult footage on it they unleash a succubus into the theater. She can transform from woman to man at her discretion, so these religious kids are really about to be mind-fucked…when they get fucked.

I wish it was as good as it sounds, but a long stretch of the film just isn’t funny enough or scary, and it lacks all the demon action and sex we’d hope for. Things finally pick up when one of the kids is forced to face his sexuality (yay! gay stuff!) right before the kids witness one of their religious tribe participating in some seriously sinful perversion with the succubus.

That’s when the film at last goes more for a Demons vibe, with some funny demonic possession, satanic S&M, and the gay kid serving as the bait for the succubus…who appears to him as a hunky, hairy-chested stud.

Sadly, while this film goes for it with its presentation of straight sexy times, the gay sex is virtually non-existent, with the hunky man seen only briefly and shrouded in lights and smoke, and the gay boy’s sex scene nothing more than his reaction from the chest up to the stimulation. Blah.

While I wanted a little something more from both of these films, I am thrilled that they each feature some man goods and some gay stuff, which lands them both on my stud stalking page and my does the gay guy die? page.

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Everything you didn’t want to know about The Human Centipede trilogy

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Daniel

As you can tell by the title of this blog, it’s all about the spoilers—and spoiling your dinner. Also, considering the subject matter, there will probably be bad buns puns up the wahzoo.

I avoided The Human Centipede for a decade, but I kept getting a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach; what kind of horror fanatic would I be if I didn’t just bear down and dig deep into the trilogy at least once in my life? And so I’ve finally loosened my sphincter long enough to sit down and take in all of them…in the unrated editions. Since I’m so late to the centipede orgy, I’ll bet there are many who have still refused to ever show up…and yet they kind of want to know what horrors await in the series. Well, I’m here to get it all out in the opening. I promise to go easy on you with the images. There aren’t any really graphic stills from the movies to make you sick. Instead, I’m going to describe every single disgusting scene in each film for you. So let’s get cracking.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (First Sequence) (2009)

The dread I felt about sitting down to watch this film rivals only the fear I had of watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first time back when I was a teen in the 80s. That’s a good thing, because I miss the days when I feared horror as much as I relished it.

I was surprised to discover that The Human Centipede is actually a great horror movie at its core, because as heinous as the concept is, it’s done very…um…tastefully. The late Dieter Laser, who plays the doctor, delivers all the horror with his performance.

The film gets right to it with the most basic, ever-effective formula. Two girls head for a club while on vacation. They get a flat on a deserted road, they go looking for a phone, they find the doctor’s house. He lets them in and doesn’t even try to pretend he’s normal. He’s fucking terrifying. And yet the girls make the stupid move of drinking the water he offers them…

They wake up in his basement lab strapped to hospital beds. Alongside them is another victim, an Asian guy who can’t speak English. Good thing the doctor has a chart on the wall to visually depict exactly what he’s going to do to this trio.

His only explanation for his diabolical plan is that he had a successful career separating Siamese twins and now wants to do the opposite. He goes into explicit detail about how it’s all going to go down, including taking out tendons and ligaments in their knees so they can’t stand up, cutting flaps of skin on their asses and mouths to attach them together, and removing all their front teeth. Not sure why that part is necessary. It’s not like anyone is going to fucking bite down on someone else’s asshole (at least, not in the nonsexual context of the situation they’re in…).

One stubborn girl is not into butt stuff, so she breaks free and bolts, making for a really good chase scene. When the doctor catches her he informs her of her punishment—she gets to be the middle segment of his centipede, so she’ll have to get it from both ends. Damn, he’s evil (again, since this is a nonsexual context).

There’s some icky gore during the operation, but we don’t see anything beyond skin being cut. When the trio awakes, the ass-to-mouth marriages are hidden by bandages for the rest of the movie.

The doctor makes the centipede stand, dances gloriously around it to celebrate his success, and even holds up a hand mirror to show each segment how good they look kissing ass.

The Asian guy is the lucky bastard that scored the head spot, so when the doctor finally drops a bowl of food in front of him, he looks back at the girls, fleetingly realizing what the repercussions will be if he eats. I guess he feels guilty about not feeding them if he starves himself to death, because he chows down!

When the food finally makes its way to the end of his GI tract, the doctor shouts “feed her!’ then gets all in the middle girl’s face and shouts things like, “Swallow it, bitch!” No disgusting fecal matter flies, but we so clearly get the picture, and it’s enough to make us hurl. Hm…if she hurls, is that like a puke enema for the guy?

Next thing we know, the two girls are becoming very sick because, well, you know, they’re eating feces. The doctor squeezes the incision of the middle girl’s mouth and puss oozes out. But before he can figure out a plan to make them better, two detectives start poking around due to reports of missing people in the area…

When it turns out the detectives don’t even stand a chance against the doctor, the centipede has to come up with a plan. The Asian guy loses his shit (not literally), and manages to bite a chunk out of the doctor’s neck. The centipede tries to escape, which requires climbing stairs. This is pretty gnarly. It’s a spiral staircase, and the twists, turns, and gravity put a whole lot of strain on the stitches. The links begin separating and bleeding, the doctor starts crawling after them since he’s hurt so badly, and he fucking licks up the blood as he goes.

So how does it all come out in the end? The poor middle girl gets the ultimate punishment. The detectives, the doctor, and both the front and back of the centipede die, leaving her trapped and attached to two corpses.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE II (Full Sequence) (2011)

I’m guessing that because the shocking subject matter of even the director’s cut of the first film felt very rated R, creator Tom Six decided he needed to give an audience sick enough to watch the film what they really craved—more ass and shit. Part 2 is (un)pure assploitation.

This repulsive film is so graphic that Tom Six was forced to release it in black and white. The Blu-ray does include the color version, however, it is the rated version, which is 3 minutes shorter than the black and white cut.

Just like Dieter Laser, star Laurence R. Harvey gives a chilling performance…in a completely different way. He plays a slovenly man with an intellectual disability who lives with his verbally abusive mother and was sexually abused by his father. But most importantly, he has a pet centipede, is obsessed with The Human Centipede movie and one of its main actresses, and wants to make a 12-person centipede of his own. So he rents warehouse space and starts collecting segments.

Harvey doesn’t speak at all and tends to just stare with bug eyes and an emotionless expression, which makes him so creepy. He’s also gross. He jerks off while watching The Human Centipede, and his penis is on full display. When his mother discovers his stash of Human Centipede jerk off material, he gets his centipede to bite her than bashes the fuck out of her skull.

When he finds his predatory doctor getting a blowjob from a whore in a car while saying he’d rather be fucking “the retard” up the ass, he shoots the doc in the balls.

He lures one of the actresses from the first movie to his lair by promising her an audition with Quenton Tarantino. When he picks her up to drive her to the “audition space,” she makes meta jokes about being in the first film.

With all twelve segments writhing on the floor, Harvey gets to work. Instead of anesthesia, he knocks them all out. It wears off fast once he begins bashing out their teeth with a hammer. He cuts open their knees and rips out the tendons and ligaments with his fingers, and finally cuts their butts into flaps then connects them together with a staple gun.

He chooses the main girl as the head of the centipede, but when she refuses to eat he forces a tube down her throat and feeds her. When she screams, he rips out her tongue.

He goes to work massaging everyone’s stomachs so a fart will travel all the way to the tail of the centipede. Then he injects them with a laxative and laughs when they all start foaming at the mouth…with shit. To make things artsy, all the shit splatters are colored brown on the black and white cut of the film.

Think it can’t get worse? Harvey wraps razor wire around his dick and rapes the rear of the centipede in the ass. It’s a good thing the damage done is shown in black and white.

One pregnant girl he didn’t attach to the centipede gets away when she feels her baby coming out. Blood gushes from between her legs as she runs, she gets in a car, the baby pops out onto the floor, and in her haste to drive away she steps on its head.

Meanwhile, one guy inside loses his shit and tears his mouth free from the ass in front of him, so now two shorter centipedes are crawling around the floor.

Harvey comes in and begins shooting each segment in the head. He runs out of bullets so switches over to sawing away at their heads with a knife.

However, the girl from the first movie gets the ultimate revenge. She sticks the feeding tube up his ass and sends his centipede to do a colonoscopy.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE III (Final Sequence) (2015)

After making it through the second film, I figured the third film would be a piece of ass. I mean…a piece of cake.

Since Tom Six took the ass play as far as he could in the second film, it would just be repetitive to do it again, even if this film does feature a centipede made up of all the men in a prison. Honestly, any still shots you’ve seen of the centipede from this film are about all you really see of it in the entire film. Instead the film focuses on the exploitative torture the prisoners are first subjected to at the hands of the prison’s crazy warden.

Going totally meta, this movie brings back Dieter Laser as the warden and Laurence R. Harvey as his assistant. Laser is absolutely insane. I’d like to scoff and say that in real life no one around him would just sit by and let a lunatic run the show, but, you know…Trump.

The warden is about to lose his job because his prisoners are out of control, no matter how much he tries to torture them into submission. Harvey shows him The Human Centipede, suggesting it would be a brilliant deterrent for anyone thinking of committing a crime while also saving on food costs. The warden doesn’t buy the idea at first. Instead, he relishes torturing everyone he can, starting with finger-fucking his secretary and then smelling his fingers.

He snaps the masturbation arm of one prisoner, uses boiling water to waterboard another, and cuts the testicles out of one’s scrotum then eats them for lunch. He makes his secretary blow him and swallow while his assistant is in the room. He has a nightmare that the prisoners take revenge on him by cutting a hole in the side of his body and fucking it.

Despite all this insanity and gruesome gore, the film is oddly boring. It doesn’t help that Laser’s over-the-top performance is hindered by terrible audio. You can barely understand a thing he’s saying. Not to mention, aside from featuring the longest centipede of the series, this is also the longest film. It isn’t until 55 minutes in that the warden finally agrees to taking the centipede route. He shows the previous films to the inmates so they know what they’re in for. Sticking to meta territory, the film brings back the Asian guy from the first film as one of the inmates, and the warden uses a line on him that the doctor used in the first film.

The prisoners try to revolt, leading to a bunch of violence that lands the secretary in a coma. Sooooo…the doctor goes and fucks her unmoving body.

Then the operation begins. There’s some nasty gore as we see close-ups of mouths and anuses being sewn together.

Finally it’s time to reveal the centipede to the governor—Eric Roberts. I swear, the only thing missing from this film is Danny Trejo as the head of the centipede and Lance Henriksen as the doctor. As the warden shows off the centipede, he notices the anus of the tail segment is dirty and makes his assistant wipe it with a handkerchief, which causes it to fart.

So how to make this final film even more ridiculous? The warden also decided to create something new: a human caterpillar! This smaller insect consists of a handful of prisoners with their arms and legs cut off. If the movie weren’t going for totally absurd at this point, the concept of being connected ass-to-mouth with no ability to move at all would be a definite fucked up elevation of the original concept.

The big kicker is the film taking a jab at the state this nation was about to head a year after its release. Roberts loves the idea, says it’s just what America needs, and believes the plan could land him the presidency.

While I get the exclamation point of this message (complete with “God Bless America” playing over the final scene), I actually prefer the alternate ending included in the bonus material on the Blu-ray (which also includes an explicit deleted scene of Harvey blowing Laser). The alternate ending cuts to the warden waking up to discover the third film was all a dream…and he’s actually the doctor from the first movie, at the beginning of the first movie. Awesome. The ultimate meta moment, it brings the films into an infinite loop and even reflects one of the final points made by the warden; he suggests they could even connect the entire centipede together and make one infinite circle of prisoners that just keep passing their feces through the chain.

I have to admit, as sick and disgusting as it all is, Tom Six did a brilliant job of bringing us three very different films and never holding back in making things even more psychotic than the time before. The Human Centipede truly does shit all over the redundancy of most trilogies out there these days.

 

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THREEQUEL TRIPLE FEATURE! A look at three horror sequels

Posted on May 5, 2020 by Daniel

I’ve seen the previous films, so why not check out the sequels? Here are my thoughts on For Jennifer, American Slasher Part II, and Slasher House 2.

FOR JENNIFER (2018)

I’ve been watching and blogging about each new installment of the “Jennifer” series (here and here) because they build on each other and always manage to bring something different to the story. For Jennifer ties together aspects of every previous installment while poking fun at itself and the found footage genre in general, and once again incorporating some queer stuff into the mix.

In short, a young horror fan named Jennifer gets drawn in by clips from the Jennifer films, so she decides to make a new installment of the series with her friends.

In between campy audition montages (Felissa Rose has a return cameo), Jennifer begins hunting down those involved with the previous installments to get their blessings and some deeper insight into the creative process. Her interactions with them become surreal because none of them has broken character since making their movies. Awesome.

Nothing new here in terms of found footage, and it’s not scary at all, but it is a treat for those who have been following the series–actually it’s really only for those who have seen the other installments.

I thought the opening scene here starts things off right (with a kill and a glimpse of man butt), and the meta madness is great fun.

However, my favorite entry remains 2 Jennifer—which makes it all the more thrilling that the director/star reprises his sexually confused role in this sequel.

AMERICAN SLASHER: PART II (2019)

Was this sequel to a low budget indie slasher necessary? No. Does it add anything to the subgenre or the legacy of the first film? Not really. But the filmmakers do seem to have fun doing it.

Billy Creed, the gardener killer from the first film, is back to kill a bunch of campers in the woods with a variety of gardening tools (and perhaps to recreate the poster art for The Burning while he’s at it?).

There’s a fireside story about his past, a lot of walking around in the woods, forest POV, and occasional appearances of the killer, all in daylight.

It’s kind of hard to believe filmmakers that now have some experience would make a sequel that is inferior to their first attempt, but that’s what happens here. I much prefer the first film to this one.

Things get better and feel a bit more like a genuine slasher when day turns to night, but this is really just a sloppy series of events rather than a carefully planned and presented slasher. Plus, there’s one character that is apparently supposed to be funny but is instead so unbearably annoying that he’s more a caricature than a genuine character.

The film is only an hour long, then the end credits are followed by fifteen minutes of bloopers and outtakes.

SLASHER HOUSE 2 (2016)

     

The first film was about a young woman who wakes up in a madhouse filled with serial killers she must fight to survive.

Just like that film, this sequel is essentially another hack ‘n’ slash action horror where she does the same thing. Only this time the role is played by a different actress, and she has a stripper companion with her. It adds a little something different to the proceedings, but not enough to warrant the rehash.

Drenched in the same palette of neon horror colors, Slasher House 2 feels like a video game, complete with a final boss. The action and baddies weren’t compelling enough to keep my interest and lacked the intensity of the baddies in the original film.

The only part that really caught my attention felt like a different movie—a bunch of kids in a cemetery drenched in neon blue and cloudy with fog machines is hunted down by a corpse killer.

It features one of the best BJ interruptus kills ever, which is the one thing I will remember most about the film.

I hope that director MJ Dixon, who has made several films I’ve covered (Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, The Legacy of Thorn), revisits this graveyard killer and makes a full-length slasher out of him.

The sequel may be short in plot, but it does come full circle to connect with the first film and ends with the promise of another sequel. It literally says after the closing credits that part three is coming.

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Muscle killers in tank tops

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Daniel

It’s not every day we get beefy boys showing off their bods while doing their killing, therefore I simply had to make a double feature out of A Wakefield Project and The Dare. So are the psychos as scary as they are sexy?

A WAKEFIELD PROJECT (2019)

The killer isn’t the only muscle hunk in this one. The two main boys that move to a small town to open a B&B together are also a couple of hunks.

What they are not, despite the setup, is a couple of gays. It’s insane to me that with an opportunity that obvious the filmmakers didn’t just make them a gay couple. It would have worked fluidly with the plot…and the erotic body shots.

Anyway, one of these boringly straight guys hires a psychic medium to put out feelers at their new place, while the other cliché straight guy researches the building’s history. As the town folk act weird towards them and irritating noises keep getting under everyone’s skin, the pair comes to the same realization—there were murders in their new building that the realtor didn’t disclose.

Conveniently there has been a solar flare, and it has opened up the planes of existence between the living and the dead, so the hunky killer and a bunch of creepy zombie people chase the main characters through dark shadows and eerie blue light.

It’s a fun concept for sure, although it does take quite a while to arrive at the crossover and all the chasing.

Unfortunately, A Wakefield Project isn’t scary or suspenseful enough. And the music, which is obviously inspired by Carpenter’s Halloween score, sets a tone at first, but it becomes clear as the film progresses that it’s a pale imitation, because it’s turns more annoying than effective.

THE DARE (2020)

The opening scene is a goodie, starting immediately with killer POV and turning into a suspenseful home invasion sequence. And then…

…our main guy wakens up in dungeon-like room, chained up with a group of strangers who all have no idea why they are there.

Ugh. It’s the cliché Saw trope. A muscular killer in a mask comes in and starts making his captives torture each other…or else.

The torture is mostly inflicted with knives and bugs. The bug shit is pretty nasty.

So what makes The Dare any different than other Saw rip-offs featuring victims trapped in a room navigating a survival of the fittest scenario?

There’s a parallel story about an icky man who keeps a young boy chained up, tortures him, teaches him how to endure and inflict pain, and pushes him to grow stronger. All the while he’s manipulating the boy into accepting him as his father. If you’ve seen films like Chained or Plank Face, this kind of Stockholm syndrome horror feels so very familiar.

As the stories merge just as we’d expect and motivations and secrets are revealed, there’s simply nothing here that is unique or original, so I personally found it all underwhelming and not very scary.

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PRIME TIME: horror anthology madness

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Daniel

There’s some seriously weird shit going on in this tripled feature of anthologies I checked out on Prime. Let’s break down Scare Me, Terror Overload, and The 4bidden Fables.

SCARE ME (2020)

This is one of the most confusing “anthology” films I’ve ever seen. To me it felt like a full-length wraparound movie with very brief campfire tales sprinkled here and there.

Along with the very 80s score, there are definitely some fun moments of horror here, plus many of the guys are cute. Even the jerks.

For a change, rather than opening with a summary of the wraparound, I’m going to begin with the stories being told since the film itself begins with a tale instead of the wraparound.

– A cult of witch babes strips a guy’s shirt off and performs a gruesome ritual. Nice gore.

– A woman’s friend in need comes over, but something isn’t quite the same about him. Creepy feel, but after the tale ends abruptly, even one of the guys at the wraparound campfire has questions.

– When an unarmed black man is shot by cops, they find out they’ve messed with the wrong black guy.

– The most delicious surprise tale of all features a guy intervening when he catches his neighbor beating and banging a gimp up the ass. It lands this one on my does the gay guy die? movie list.

– A promise of a Christmas/immigration commentary/babysitter/monster in the closet tale is interrupted…

…by the wraparound! This is a very long and confusing plot about campers and park rangers challenging each other to tell the scariest story. Thing is, when the killing began I had no idea what was actually going on and who was killing who for what reason.

TERROR OVERLOAD (2009)

When a redneck trucker picks up a blonde babe stuck on the side of the road, he figures there’s no better way to make her feel safe than to start telling her torture porn stories!

While there’s plenty of sleazy sexual situations in each of these three tales to tantalize, it truly is surprising that two of them have no real depth beyond someone being tied down, tortured, and sliced up. Not even a sense of fear or dread is established. But again, plenty of cute guys!


What an actor. Look closely.
This dude is seriously digging for the taint with his fuck finger.

1st tale – a sweet guy and girl have an in-house date, but one of them turns out to be more bitter than sweet, and slices and dices the other one. The end.

2nd tale – indie horror king Marv Blauvelt does a nice job playing an arrogant, hunky boy who picks up two women in a bar. The girls have a whole different idea of fun than he does…

3rd tale – the only tale that breaks the mold here, this is a silly sexual creepozoid flick full of redneck incest.

The highlight is Ari Lehman, the original drowning young Jason Voorhees. I noticed it when Ari made an appearance in Clown Motel, and it’s more apparent here—Ari is a great comedic horror actor and totally steals the show. Not to mention, if you’ve ever wanted to see Jason’s ass, this is your chance. And it’s a cute one.

Finally, we do find out what the truck driver’s intentions are with his pretty passenger as the wraparound comes to a conclusion.

THE 4BIDDEN FABLES (2014)

You would never expect that an indie anthology could masterfully juggle beautiful cinematic artistry and some seriously dark and disgusting themes, but The 4bidden Fables does it. There were a variety of tales here, and only one didn’t do it for me at all.

1st story – a nightmarish scenario in which a mad doctor uses his expertise to create subjects for his “oddities” sideshow. Eek!

2nd story – a nasty tale of a young girl caring for her deformed sibling that her father keeps locked away in the basement.

Again, eek! And…ew!

3rd story – just too fantastical and not horror enough for me, this was a sort of metaphorical story about the power hierarchy in nature. I think. I kind of tuned out.

4th story – this is an unusual story of a man who recalls suffering the consequences of reaching the end of the rainbow…and the hell that waits there.

Each story features eloquently orchestrated scenes celebrating song, dance, and art, balanced by gory, macabre, and monstrous effects that are equally as artistic and the stuff of nightmares. The 4bidden Tales won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was mesmerized by how beautifully it is crafted.

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They’re back: a remake and two sequels

Posted on April 28, 2020 by Daniel

It always feels safe to take a horror ride with the familiar, but were Blood Feast, Hell House LLC: The Abaddon Hotel, and The Gallows Act II all joyrides? Let’s find out.

BLOOD FEAST (2016)

A Herschell Gordon Lewis classic gets a remake that’s big on gory practical effects and quite stylized, but is so darn boring despite a great performance by 80s horror fave Robert Rusler.

The plot is similar to the original, only this time the psycho protagonist runs a diner with his wife (horror queen Caroline Williams) and daughter (Sophie Monk of The Hills Run Red). Herschell Gordon Lewis also makes a pointless cameo—in an internet clip.

Updating the details, Rusler goes off the deep end after he stops taking his “medication”. He starts envisioning and then worships an Egyptian Goddess, builds a shrine to her in his diner basement, and begins torturing, killing, and cannibalizing people while wearing an Egyptian mask.

The death scenes are gruesome and often sexual, but everything else about this remake drags, so it was a struggle to get through it.

The family angle was a fresh touch, but it didn’t add enough to the story to propel it forward at all. As obsessive as I am about owning all movies in franchises once I’ve started collecting them, I really can’t be bothered making room on my shelf for this one beside Blood Feast and Blood Feast 2.

HELL HOUSE LLC II: THE ABADDON HOTEL (2018)

Hell House LLC is one of few found footage films that I actually think is quite effective. While aspects of what I thought made it work are here in the sequel—same creepy setting, unnerving camera pauses and editing, cuts back to still objects to find they are now closer to the camera, etc.—part 2 takes a different approach to telling the story, and it tends to intrude on the claustrophobic suspense.

A “real or fake” debate show with a panel being interviewed by a host is the catalyst for presenting the footage. It begins with a few short and frightening clips of others who went to the boarded up Hell House location and were never seen again.

This includes one pair of guys returning from a fashion show and following a young woman into the building while repeatedly calling her “sweetie” and “honey” so that we know they simply must be gay. Although in reality no gay dude is dumb enough to follow a bitch into the cellar of a haunted building, let alone two gay dudes. Even so, this one lands on my list of does the gay guy die? movies.

It’s not until halfway through the film that the actual cast goes into the building, hoping to do yet another story about the tragedy in the first movie. This is when it feels just like the first film, including the clown. If only they wouldn’t keep inserting debate show clips in between the footage, which constantly shatters the feeling of dread.

As is often the case with movies that get sequels these days, the film tries to embellish upon and revise the history of the plot to create a larger story for, you know, the next sequel, which I’ve yet to see.

THE GALLOWS ACT II (2019)

I think I’m one of few people who really like The Gallows, and I even appreciate the different direction this sequel takes. I just wish it had clocked in at about fifteen minutes shorter, because it becomes repetitive and loses steam.

This young woman entering a new acting school longs to be famous but just can’t seem to get a bigger following on her internet video channel. Then she sees a video of someone doing The Gallows challenge—film yourself reading an excerpt from The Gallows play and see if there is some sort of supernatural attack.

She films it, she posts it, she gets hundreds more followers, she’s compelled to make more videos. And then she begins getting visions of death and hangings, along with visits from the executioner. Eek! Even the hard copy of the play she has in her possession starts to come after her.

It’s all the usual tween scares, but they’re done just right, making for a fun popcorn movie filled with chills and jump scares. Plus she has these damn creepy mannequins in her place and never turns on more lights despite a shadowy presence lurking around her home.

With many moments that feel like something from an Elm Street movie, it kind of makes sense that when she first meets her love interest, he’s wearing a red and green striped sweater.

Like I said, the movie just needed to be shorter, but I guess that would have been a challenge considering there are over 30 minutes of already deleted scenes on the Blu-ray!

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