PRIME TIME: woman problems

Posted on February 27, 2020 by Daniel

3 films, 3 very different subgenres. But in each one, it doesn’t go good for women. Here are my brief thoughts on found footage horror Delivery: The Beast Within,  religious extremist film Between The Darkness, and living dead husband flick From The Dead.

DELIVERY: THE BEAST WITHIN (2013)

This one starts off in a very unique way—literally filmed and edited as a reality show about a couple going through their pregnancy. But when the show is called off due to unsettling circumstances, the adorable producer cuts the remaining footage as a movie…a found footage movie.

This easily could have been a Paranormal Activity installment, complete with overnight time-lapse bedroom footage.

The dog acts weird around the baby bump, the wife gets marks on her belly, there’s knocking on the front door but no one is there, the wife eats raw meat, it appears the Blair witch drops in to setup stick pentagrams in the nursery, demonic voices show up on audio recordings, you’ve seen it all before, etc, etc.

The eventual possession style delivery in shaky static cam mode is nothing impressive either, but the conclusion is pretty fucked up.

BETWEEN THE DARKNESS (2019)

I found this symbolic film (think M. Night’s The Village) to be quite creepy. It’s a story of the horrors religious people are brainwashed into believing exist. After the death of one of his daughters, a single father lives in the woods with his other children hoping to shelter them from the evils of the world. Instead they are all haunted by visions, dreams, and shadows of some sort of monster that encompasses their struggles with grief, guilt, and fear.

Although we never fully see the “monster”, the blurry glimpses we get make it clear that evil is a woman.

The father worships mythological gods to the point that his daughter believes she is seeing Medusa. His belief system is so earth-oriented he virtually comes across as a pagan witch. Yet he still manages to  go all conservative, bringing out his homophobia and racism.

The story focuses mostly on his teen daughter going through growing pains and a sexual awakening. She has a younger sibling the father refers to as “son” near the end, which confused me; perhaps an androgynous looking kid was an intentional acknowledgement of the father’s struggles with women and gender identity. Regularly coming around to tempt him and to try to keep the daughter grounded in the reality of being a female is Danielle Harris as a ranger. As always, she’s so natural it still amazes me that she never had mainstream success in Hollywood.

The suspense does ramp up near the end when the father loses his shit. In a subtle jab at the failure of isolationism, there’s even an invasion of their lifestyle by the “horrors” of modern society…people of color and what appears to be a trans woman.

FROM THE DEAD (2019)

This one is kind of like a Tales from the Crypt episode that runs 80 minutes long for no good reason.

There was plenty of potential for low budget fun considering it begins at a strip club. A two-timing husband argues with his wife, she accidentally kills him, and then she and her husband’s brother work with a witch doctor to resurrect him from the dead.

While they wait…for 46 damn minutes…a sleazy neighbor who knows what they did blackmails them.

When the husband finally comes back from the dead in gray face paint, he kills a few random people in the streets before targeting his brother and wife. If only this brief segment of the film had been the bulk of it, it could have given us suspense, chases, a little more strip club sleaze, and a lot more gore.

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Revisiting the terror of Corman’s horror shop, blood bucket, and wasp woman

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Daniel

Along with William Castle, Roger Corman was one of the most prolific horror directors of the 50s and 60s and introduced what would become some of the most popular actors in the horror business over the decades. So, with yet another movie adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors recently announced, I thought I’d go back and check out Corman’s original along with some of his other films that I’ve not yet covered on Boys, Bears & Scares.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

I first watched Corman’s original, non-musical film decades ago when I worked at the video store, so viewing it again now that I’ve seen the 1986 musical so many times, I thought I’d just note some of the alterations made to the story. It was fun watching the colorized version on my DVD because it’s one of the better colorizing jobs I’ve seen. If you weren’t around in the 80s when the practice first began, you have no idea how horrendous it used to look—like someone under the age of 10 took a water color paint brush to the film negatives.

Anyway, here are the glaring differences between the 1960 version and the 1986 musical:

-The dentist is one of the first characters we meet, and not surprisingly his sadism isn’t as “pronounced” as Steve Martin’s take, nor is he linked to Audrey.

-The plant isn’t an alien…Seymour creates it by cross-pollinating two different plants.

-Seymour, played by Jonathan Haze, who is quite funny in a Jerry Lewis way, lives with his mother.

-Audrey is a brunette and not a helpless ditz.

-Seymour doesn’t kill the dentist first. He accidentally kills a man on the train tracks.

-Seymour kills the dentist in his office. Jack Nicholson is the masochistic patient, and he comes in after the murder, so Seymour has to pretend to be the dentist.

-The plant is no Levi Stubbs. It speaks in an obnoxious, higher voice.

-There’s a narrator who turns out to be a detective on the case.

-Risqué  for the time, Seymour unwittingly makes moves on a whore he wants to feed to the plant.

-The best part, which was left out of the musical…the heads of victims become buds on the plant! Awesome.

-Since the play ending was changed for the musical movie adaptation, Seymour feeds himself to the plant at the end of the original movie, as in the play.

A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959)

A Bucket of Blood is virtually the template for the plot of The Little Shop of Horrors, has a hint of House of Wax thrown in, and has been re-imagined numerous times, even in an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares in which a photographer becomes famous after using dead bodies as her subjects.

Horror icon Dick Miller, who has a small role in Little Shop, is the star here. He’s a lowly busboy who wishes to be an artist like the sexy, bearded poet that performs at the restaurant where he works (horrified guy in the center below).

When Miller accidentally kills his landlady’s cat, he covers it in clay, presents it as art, and becomes a sensation.

Soon he needs more sculptures to keep up the momentum of his newfound success, so he goes on a killing spree, beginning with a young Bert Convy of the classic game show Win, Lose, or Draw.

Even the denouement is the same as Little Shop, with the truth being revealed in front of a group of people, the main guy running off, and finally committing suicide.

THE WASP WOMAN (1959)

Described as Corman’s answer to The Fly from 1958, The Wasp Woman might eventually have a woman with a wasp head and hands (53 minutes in if you watch the extended cut on the Blu-ray), but it strikes me as a definite inspiration for films like the 1988 film Rejuvenator.

A powerful woman running a cosmetic company is losing her looks…until a beekeeper comes to her with a serum he uses to reverse aging in animals. There’s even a cat that may very well have been the inspiration for Church in Pet Sematary.

The woman chooses to become the first human subject. At first things go fine and our leading lady is looking good, but of course other forces want to steal her serum, which lands the beekeeper in the hospital.

Without the serum, our woman goes wasp! She kind of bites people in the neck like a vampire. There aren’t many victims, but considering the kills are packed into the last 20 minutes of the film, the body count/minute count ratio is pretty good.

Note that IMDb has several pieces of trivia about the fact that parts of this film feature 1960s cars, probably due to extra footage being filmed and added for television airings.

THE TERROR (1963)

The only film of these four that was originally in color, The Terror comes from Corman’s Poe adaptation period and it shows…right down to reused sets and Boris Karloff in a castle. I was so not a fan of Corman’s period pieces that took place in castles…

The movie is sloppy and not very scary, even though it does have that classic horror movie charm–thunder, lightning, a melodramatic horror music score, trips to a cemetery, secret passages in the castle, a witchy woman, and a ghost.

When Jack Nicholson sees a young woman disappear into the surf by the shore, he manages to track her location to Karloff’s castle, only to discover the woman has been dead for twenty years.

Jack refuses to accept that truth and spends most of the movie running around the castle chasing her shadow. Corman regulars are back, including Dick Miller in a minor role and Jonathan Haze as a man who tries to help Nicholson escape the witchy spell he is under. The most tragic news of all here is that this is the longest of these four films.

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A home invasion double feature from Andrew Jones

Posted on February 24, 2020 by Daniel

The director of the Robert killer doll movies and the Halloween Jack killer scarecrow movies makes two real-life home invasion stories into horror movies with a crossover character. As with most of these true murder crime films, if liberties are taken to embellish on what happened, it runs the risk of feeling exploitative. Yet if the film sticks more to facts, it is sometimes a reminder that fiction is often more interesting than fact…

CABIN 28 (2017)

Cabin 28 assures us it is simply inspired by a crime story from 1981 and not factual, which might explain why I found it to be the better of these two home invasion films. It is faster paced, more suspenseful, and eventually, quite brutal.

A mother and her children have moved to a new town, so a few irrelevant neighbor characters are introduced before we get to the good stuff.

One son and daughter go out one evening, leaving the other teen daughter home with her mom and her younger brothers.

Mom gets an obscene phone call, and then while she’s out of the room, a man comes to the door. The daughter won’t let him come in to use the phone, so this plays out much like a hugely effective scene in When A Stranger Call Back. I don’t know where the hell mom is, but it takes her forever to come back, and when she does, despite the creepy call earlier, she’s quite flippant about the daughter overreacting.

Masked crazies eventually infiltrate the house, and this goes into The Strangers territory, with the tense moments inevitably turning into the family being viciously tortured. It’s not excessively gory, but the violence is so perfectly implied that it is still undeniably disturbing. There are even a few nods to the likes of Halloween and Friday the 13th .

The only part that doesn’t do it for me is the “interview” segment that takes up the last 20 minutes of the film and becomes tedious and boring fast.

THE UTAH CABIN MURDERS (2019)

I find it intriguing that Jones decided to explore more than one true-life home invasion story, but it’s odd that in doing so, he simply made a second film that’s a weak, derivative shadow of the first.

Based on a 1990 incident, The Utah Cabin Murders lands on my holiday horror page because it takes place at Christmas. It stars the cute deputy from the first film, who recounts his experience with that case to the sheriff working on this one. Their scenes feature some oddly out of place hints of humor, like a discussion that focuses on heavy metal music.

This is really quite generic and failed to keep me on the edge of my seat. We meet a family celebrating the holidays. The parents are religious, and one daughter’s conversation with her mom about why she despises religion feels quite forced. I guess the aspects touching on faith are supposed to offer more depth to this film than Cabin 28, but the bottom line is that this is still simply about…

…two escaped convicts in masks that show up at the vacation home and terrorize the family while trying to decide who’s going to be their hostage.

There’s just no substance here. It lacks the tense feel of the first film, nothing much happens, and the conclusion is quite anti-climactic.

Even so, me being me, I will so totally check out a third home invasion film based on a true story if Andrew Jones makes one, because I’m a fan of his dedication to horror and appreciate that he keeps working and growing.

 

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HULU HORRORS: Six flicks

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Daniel

Cleaned out my Hulu watchlist, and here are my brief thoughts on what I got out of the six flicks in it.

BEAST OF THE WATER (2017)

Once in a while I need a SyFy level creature feature with some beefy guys that I can watch with the hubby, and this one delivers.

It’s a tale as old as horror movie time. Native Americans are protecting our natural resources, corporate white man sweeps in to take-take-take, supernatural monster comes out to make him pay.

In Beast of the Water, a college professor’s search for the fountain of youth is taken over by big, bad, greedy bastards. Out pops the awesome creature, which materializes in water and begins tearing apart members of the expedition.

It takes a while to get the ball rolling, but once the monster appears, it’s good old cheesy monster movie fun that features wrestling hunk Michael Hutter and wrestling slab of beef Tyrus.

HUNTING EVIL (2019)

This low budget ghost/demon girl movie is almost passable as a throwback to bad direct-to-video horror of the 80s and also delivers some gore. However, it’s such a mess even Corbin Bernsen in a minor role appears to have no idea what is going on…or why he suddenly seems to act as bad as the company he keeps.

A man with a troubled past is released from prison and is visited by a computer-generated demonic ghost girl apparition that takes his son.

Seven years later Corbin Bernsen has the same problem. Conveniently, his character doesn’t seem to care too much about his missing son, which helps limit his presence to a cameo. So the first dad steps in with his crew of ghost hunters to find the boy.

Poltergeist it isn’t. The ghost girl kills random people, and eventually the man has to pull an Insidious; he enters another plane to face her and save his own son. I really should have skipped this one.

OUT OF THE DARK (2014)

It’s my own fault for being lured into a 6-year old movie I never heard of because it stars familiar faces. It’s also my fault for continuing to watch after the first “suspense” scene—the little daughter wanders off in a market and everyone panics until she’s found seconds later.

Julia Stiles and Scott Speedman have come to Africa so she can work for her father (Stephen Rea). Soon, ghost children are on the prowl.

They spook a babysitter. They spook the family. The daughter gets taken by them. The wife and husband run around talking to all different shaman and witch doctors to find out what is really going on.

It ends up feeling like The Ring with too many kids and not enough well.

WOUNDS (2019)

Speaking of…The Ring in a bar?

Wounds is probably deep and metaphorical, but I don’t have the time or patience for so much talk. A guy who works at a bar breaks up a fight…while some other people film it. Someone leaves their phone behind. He takes the phone. He starts seeing weird things, like bugs. There are morbid Ring-like videos on the phone.

His woman, played by Dakota Johnson, becomes comatose while literally looking at a Ring-like well image on her computer screen that is accompanied by that humming tunnel echo bass chord. WTF? She also ends up in a tub of gunky water with her hair all around her. WTF?

Meanwhile, the dude starts…getting pit rash?

None of it seemed to want to come together, but like I said, I may have been too bored to pay attention. Eventually he visits his confederate flag loving beefy buddy with a confederate crack.

There are more bugs, and I believe this is the pinnacle of what the film was building towards, but I didn’t get it.

THE REMAINS (2016)

This is a well-made but drastically derivative haunted house film if you’ve been around the horror block for as many decades as I have.

It begins in the 1800s with a séance gone wrong. Cut to modern day, and Todd Lowe from True Blood moves into the same home with his little daughter and son, and his teenage daughter, who looks like a young Debbie Gibson.

There are scary ghost children, a scary psychic medium ghost from the 1800s, a nice neighbor who knows something is wrong with the house, and a chest fully of creepy stuff in the attic that causes the kids to act weird once they dig into it.

Before all is said and done, the dad goes into The Shining dad/Amityville Horror dad mode for a while. It is definitely creepy enough and fast-paced enough to keep your interest if you’re into this type of movie.

PURE (2019)

I put off this September installment of Into the Dark because it didn’t have any obvious holiday theme—I assume it’s some sort of dance of the virgins/fall harvest calendar date or something? Who knows. Doesn’t even matter.

Directed by a female, Pure actually has a pretty good feminist theme intertwined with what promised to be a fun tween girl horror film loaded with some cool songs, cheesy jump scares, and ghost girls. There’s even some nice bashing of male dominance and religious control…but it simply fizzles out rather than ramping up.

The story is about a white dad, his blonde teen daughter, and the black teen daughter he just discovered he has. Scandalous…especially since they’re on their way to a religious cult camp for one of those father/daughter purity dance/ceremony/retreat things.

The girls banned together and get rebellious by inviting teen boys to have some fun, yet all the while I was wondering why the girls weren’t going for the sizzling hot, homophobic asshole cult leader instead…because you know he’s hit it with underage girls…

Anyway, the black girl keeps seeing flashes of veiled ghost girls. That’s pretty much it all the way until the final scene at the purity dance.

Imagine if Carrie had it out for domineering daddies and lacked pyrokinesis and that’s the boring climax you have here.

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The horrors of Showtime February 2020

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Daniel

Showtime is the premium channel with the most On Demand horror titles, so I check it every month or so to see what’s new. Here’s a look at five selections from my latest Showtime horror marathon.

SELFIE FROM HELL (2018)

If you want to scare the new generation, it never hurts to go the social media/electronic devices route, which is exactly what this mostly boring film does when it finally ramps up enough to scare tween girls at slumber parties by the end.

A vlogger afraid of taking selfies comes to visit her cousin…and immediately takes a selfie. She falls into a coma in a bed in the cousin’s house and gets exactly one doctor visit. WTF?

The cousin decides something supernatural is going on and digs deep into the web to see what is messing with coma cousin—sort of a dark web situation, only this is called the black room. Scary.

A perv starts calling and harassing her. A Skype buddy helps her investigate. Eventually they encounter the evil electronic entity that is set free by visiting the black room, which is the creepiest part of the film.

Selfie from Hell only runs 75 minutes long, so it’s not the worst thing to watch if you have nothing better to do.

HARPOON (2019)

This movie tries so hard to be a quirky, off-beat dark humor thriller but it failed miserably on all counts for me. The narrator and chapter title cards are not funny enough to elevate the underwhelming plot and characters.

Three entitled assholes—a straight couple and another guy friend—go boating. They are at each other’s throats from the start, and pretty soon tensions mount as secrets, cheating, and backstabbing are revealed. The running “joke” is that the weapon on board is a spear gun, not a harpoon. Gotta love the forced irony of the title.

When they’re not trying to kill each other, the three attempt to survive together since they’re stranded in the middle of the ocean, and we just sit and watch one predictable scene after another.

If you’ve never seen it, save yourself some time and just watch Dead Calm instead.

THE YOUNG CANNIBALS (2019)

Major points for starting a movie called The Young Cannibals with an all-out feasting fest: three guys in the woods, one refuses to eat humans, it doesn’t go good for the other two guys.

Then we meet a group of friends…you guessed it…heading into the woods. Along with a synth soundtrack throwback to 80s horror, the cute guy dancing and singing to the song “Violet” by H Bird while he’s driving is everything, and the song is so going to be on the next episode of my future flashbacks show.

 

The action kicks in quickly—the group is tricked into cannibalism during a barbecue and soon finds out why; there’s a monster in the woods that only hunts and kills cannibals.

This is a good old creature feature with a kick ass creature. There is just one problem…it should not run 100 minutes long. Once you set kids free in the woods with a monster, a slow burn is a bad idea. 10 – 15 minutes snipped from the center could have made this a much faster paced film. It takes way too long for the thrills and attacks to start, but once they do, this well-made film is back in business right to the end.

TONE DEAF (2019)

The director of Excision and Suburban Gothic goes political in a very timely fashion…which feels a bit forced to me considering we get literal “fucking millennials” and “fucking boomers” mic drops before all is said and done.

Tone Deaf just isn’t as quirky as his previous films, although it tries. The basic plot has a young woman getting away for a while after a breakup and being fired from her job all at once. One of her neighbors is Robert Patrick, who is simply crazy and thinks the world is going to shit because of young liberals.

So…he goes around beating people to death with a hammer. There are also dream and drug sequences. That’s about it. There’s not much of anything good beyond brutal kills going on here. Eventually he battles it out with the main girl.

Not even appearances by the likes of Ray Wise, Ray Santiago, and AnnaLynne McCord make this one particularly memorable.

I’LL TAKE YOUR DEAD (2018)

The director of Bite and The Drownsman gives us a horror drama…that actually kept me riveted. It’s amazing to see an engrossing, character-driven, fast-paced story told in 90 minutes, especially considering I watched this right after the 250 torturous minutes of much lauded Midsommar—and that’s all I’ll ever say about that film beyond adding it to the stud stalking page since we see penis and man ass in it.

In I’ll Take Your Dead, a single father is raising his teen daughter on his farm and doing what must be done to keep a roof over her head…by disposing of dead bodies for people.

A bunch of thugs drops off several bodies, but when the farmer goes to prepare them for disposal, one victim is still alive. The farmer keeps her tied up while he tries to figure out what to do, and she attempts to strike up a relationship with his motherless daughter.

In what is an odd mix of Misery and Ghost, the film becomes a tale of loss, grief, morality, and even race and class as the lives of the three characters intertwine. At the same time, the family business seems to be haunting the young teen, who sees ghosts of the deceased, as well as a freaky demon being. The horror isn’t the driving force here, but it sure is creepy and effective.

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Halloween horrors and a Valentine song stealer

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Daniel

Although it’s February, I discovered a couple of Halloween selections on Prime that I had not seen. Meanwhile, Hulu offers a new “Valentine” installment of Into the Dark for February, and it’s the only one here that won’t be landing on my full list of holiday horror films. Here’s why.

SHARP CANDY (2019)

I’m always up for a low budget streaming service Halloween anthology series, especially since The Witching Season was a goodie.

Prime series Sharp Candy starts strong, with a total 80s vibe and synth score, and plenty of Halloween spirit. There is an effort to make all the stories come together, but the episodes become less impressive as they progress.

Episode 1 – a young woman refuses candy to a masked trick or treater she thinks is too old…and is then terrorized by a clown instead. That tablecloth is virtually the same one I have on my dining room table in October.

Episode 2 – it begins in a cornfield then jumps to a pawnshop, where a cute guy is advertising his Halloween inventory.

Sure it’s nice to see him tied up while wearing a tight T-shirt, but this one feels a little cheap, silly, and disjointed.

Episode 3 – on the way to a Halloween party, a young deaf woman is abducted by the not-so-scary clown from the first story, who talks way too much about his philosophy on killers and horror, especially considering his victim is deaf.

And don’t ask me why he has a jump rope made of penises—even if it is my favorite part (of the show).

Episode 4 – a tale of a student trying to get revenge on his high school principal on Halloween night, this one runs the longest at 28 minutes.

I think the production ran out of money, because the character spends way too much time at the end of the episode basically explaining to another character how the four tales connect.

MY VALENTINE (2020)

For its second February horror movie, Hulu’s Into The Dark series gives us a “what could have been” take on a bizarre and scandalous real-life Internet sensation (or two) in the music industry. If you don’t know the story of how producer Titanic Sinclair transferred the quirky video persona of his singer girlfriend Mars Argo to his new girlfriend Poppy, who grew even more popular with her weird, robotic video personality, then catch up by watching this intriguing recap video on YouTube.

 

Basically lawsuits, accusations of abuse, and restraining orders followed. That is where this fictional account picks up. This dark thriller filled with awesome pop songs and music videos may appeal most to those who are familiar with the true “bizarre love triangle”. The songs for the movie are performed by an artist named Dresage. Oddly enough, her usual music is more Mars Argo, while the stuff she did for the movie is more Poppy. Here’s Dresage as Dresage:

 

And here’s one of her “Trezzure/Valentine” tracks as lip-synced in the movie:

 

As for the plot, Valentine has had her identity stolen by her ex-boyfriend/producer Royal and his new girl Trezzure, so she’s attempting to rebuild her career, starting in a small venue, where she must face both her true fans and those who think she is the phony.

But then Royal shows up, despite the restraining order, with Trezzure in tow.

As the night unfolds, real motivations are revealed, the pop hits keep spinning, and things turn violent and deadly in a splash of campy flickering footage, neon colors, split screen, and booming bass beats.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the “sides” taken in this film fan the flames of the online Mars/Titanic/Poppy wars, which still haven’t wound down. If only this fiction were fact, the ongoing drama would finally be beaten to death for good.

Meanwhile, although one of the characters is named Valentine and there are a lot of hearts in the music videos, I believe this film isn’t even set on Valentine’s Day.

DOLL FACTORY (2014)

I’ll say right up front that I ordered the DVD of this one before it was even over. I was expecting a low budget killer doll movie, not the funny little Halloween killer doll horror comedy that unfolded.

It opens on Halloween 1976, with a sheriff, his deputy, and a black dude right out of a 1970s blaxploitation film fighting killer dolls behind the specks and tears of a grindhouse movie filter. The sheriff is really cute.

Well, at first…

In the present day, kids at a Halloween party decide to visit an abandoned doll factory with a spell book to see if they can conjure up some ghosts.

It all seems pretty typical and cheesy at first, but since I didn’t realize this was a horror comedy, once the dolls show up and the kids begin dropping funny one-liners in reaction to being hacked to pieces, I was wickedly surprised.

Not to be overshadowed, the killer dolls are just as quirky and silly.

They all look alike, talk with high-pitched voices, and have loads of fun collecting souls for their “master” while smoking pot, being sexual perverts, and delivering super gory kills that don’t rely on CGI.

I can even overlook some minor shit humor because everything else is so up my Halloween horror comedy alley.

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Gay horror, thriller, and comedy overload

Posted on February 10, 2020 by Daniel

Just when I finally decided to break down and watch some titles I’d not yet seen that are on my complete homo horror movies list, a few new and unexpected ones came my way, so here’s a smorgasbord of 6 films focusing on gay guys—starting with the silly and moving to the (hopefully) scary.

YETI: A LOVE STORY (2006)


It’s no surprise the Troma intro kicks off this film. What’s more surprising is that it’s probably worse than most Troma films, mostly because despite having some raunchy humor and running only about 70 minutes long, it’s boring on top of being dumb.

A cult sacrifices young men to the Yeti in the woods…for anal rape. A group of campers begins getting killed off, but then one of the guys falls in love with Yeti and gives up his ass willingly. In the meantime, his friends hatch a plan to stop the cult.

The bright side is there’s no fart humor. But man is this movie slow. Dialogue is not funny, there’s an “old man” character that is just a person in an old man mask, the Bigfoot mask is a bad ape mask, and about all that I enjoyed was the adolescent sex stuff—especially Yeti getting a hand job.

Definitely reminded me of the trashy sex in my Comfort Cove gay horror novel series…there just wasn’t enough of it.

ANOTHER YETI A LOVE STORY: LIFE ON THE STREETS (2017)

It took over ten years, but a sequel finally arrived. While I prefer the first film’s plot from a “horror” perspective, in terms of a trashy exploitation flick about a dude and a gay Yeti getting it on, the sequel does way better.

I appreciate it for the excessive pervy sex scenes that were lacking in the original film, but the story, while ripe for sexploitation, is beyond absurd.

The guy from the first film is now in a relationship with a guy in a wheelchair, and together they are raising the Yeti baby he had with the Yeti.

The Yeti is now a junky on the streets.

There’s a skanky strip club and a pimp dude who will do anything to keep his stripper whores enslaved.

The Yeti and his former human lover must reunite to save their family.

The film is much more gay-friendly than the first film, but there is a pretty darn tacky, flippant attitude towards HIV. Like I said, I’m so glad this one had pervy sex scenes.

POLTERGAY (2006)

It took me so long to commit to watching this French gay ghost movie because I expected it to be along the lines of the Yeti movies. If it were an American film, it probably would have been. Instead, it’s a campy, cute, sexy comedy without any gross-out humor. I adored it and ordered the DVD for my personal collection of gay horror films.

A straight couple moves into a wonderfully creepy old house, and the husband, who is sizzling hot, begins to hear disco music at night and noticing other odd signs of them not being alone—like penis graffiti.

The mischief continues, and it’s pretty clear why he’s got these ghosts…

Soon he encounters a gaggle of gay ghosts from the 1970s that his wife can’t see, so she thinks he’s crazy.

He befriends the disco queens that party nightly in his basement, calls in an expert to help them cross over, argues with them about reversed intolerance, and gets their help in recapturing the magic with his wife.

What astounds me is that there are reviews on Prime trashing this film for being dated, playing into gay stereotypes, and being homophobic. I can’t believe how far the gay community has fallen since the 90s—the last decade when we had a sense of humor and were able to laugh out ourselves, poke fun at our stereotypes, and just enjoy a campy, funny, sexy movie that actually shows a straight man and his gay ghost buddies finding common ground and working together to make their existences better, right down to the upbeat, feel good ending.

STRANGER BY THE LAKE (2013)

This is another French film it took me years to watch…because I was pretty confident it was barely going to pass as a thriller, let alone horror.

It passes mostly as a softcore porn, and a boring one at that. Supposedly the film was originally like 140 minutes long before the director pared it down to 100 minutes. He should have just kept trimming.

In short, a young man goes to a cruising beach, befriends an old “straight” dude, watches and has lots of explicit sex (including an actual hand job with cum shot), and romantically pursues a guy even after seeing him drown another guy. Hey, If I saw a guy this pretty smiling with his face buried in another guy’s ass, I’d probably want to marry him, too.

Anyway, the movie continues to creep along, an old dude detective keeps popping out of the bushes to ask questions, and we just wait and wait and wait for all hell to break loose.

Right at the end there’s a brief and way too dark chase scene, plus a few more bodies, but it’s not satisfying enough for this horror fan.

The film is more notable for exploring issues concerning gay men searching for casual, anonymous sex, from the threat of diseases to the risks taken when desperate due to being closeted or lonely.

The most compelling thing to me about the film is how it manages to present characters with distinctly different motivations and depth beyond being horny.

THE SIREN (2019)

This is a haunting film that manages to create unnerving suspense without exploiting visual horror elements.

A beautiful mute man comes to stay at a house by the lake, and we immediately begin to dread the water…and the sense that some sort of creature lurks in its depths and comes out at night.

The mute man meets a gay man who is convinced a monster in the lake took his missing husband. He also meets a pretty woman who swims around the water outside the house. As they fall in love and start a relationship, she struggles to fight the urge to do to him what she does to other men she seduces…

The gay guy narrates, but the film is focused more on the straight relationship. However, it is chilling when the gay guy realizes what the woman is; her warmth comes and goes in an instant, and we can feel that she’s a monster.

Just the fact that neither man questions where she comes from and why she just hangs out in the water all the time adds a subtle authenticity to the idea that she’s a siren they can’t resist.

The film is tragic, dark, and frightening and doesn’t wear out its welcome as it runs only 80 minute long.

BOOGEYMAN COMETH (2013)


I found Boogeyman Cometh to be an oddly charming, wickedly engrossing little indie slasher with a freaky as hell killer, numerous suspenseful chase scenes, brutal kills, a quirky tone and sense of humor, and a curiously gay subplot. The only downsides—it is so obvious from the start who the killer is, and absolutely none of the plot points presented ever come together to complete a thought.

An effeminate older black man is the boss of a young white guy who likes to blow shit up, but it’s never clear what their job is.

The older man also rents a house to the younger guy and his family. The pair is oddly close, and you would swear the older guy has the hots for the younger guy.

Meanwhile, the freaky killer, in a hazmat mask that registers the current number of kills inside the visor but doesn’t hide a head of Jheri curls, is stalking and slicing up women in the streets with a razor glove that would make even Super Freddy envious. Also, the young guy’s wife and son keep seeing the killer at their window.

Along with funky camerawork, there’s loads of focus on bugs on screen, constant references to the black guy’s sexuality, fog machines, and growls coming from the killer, which eventually does speak in a demonic voice.

Right up to the crazy babysitter scene in the final act, Boogeyman Cometh is such a fun, sleazy slasher with huge potential for a blatantly gay storyline, but dammit, not a single thing makes any sense at the end, and so this one lands a spot on the does the gay guy die? list with The Siren instead of the homo horror movies page.

Nothing is explained, the gay subplot fails to live up to its promise, and I don’t even think a sequel could fix that. Despite all that, I would love to add Boogeyman Cometh to my DVD collection, but it seems it never made it to physical media.

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PRIME TIME: three kinds of monster hunters

Posted on February 8, 2020 by Daniel

Zombie-killing stoners, vampire slayers, and a ghost terrorizing a masked psycho. Three very different films…so which was my fave?

BONG OF THE LIVING DEAD (2017)

I’ve never been stoned, but if this stoner zomcom is any indication of how mellow and boring it makes you, I’m glad.

I can never understand how movies that seem to have all the potential in the world get made and no one along the way admits that it just isn’t working.

The plot is simple. A group of stoners, friends since childhood, hangs out in a house and occasionally fights zombies.

There’s promise at first. We meet them, they work at a video store, there’s some sex. Then they start with the excessive meta talk about zombies and it begins falling apart.

You would think an hour of mostly talk would help build their characters, but not even interspersed clips of them playing together as children creates the nostalgia this seems to be going for. Everything that could have played a part in the fun of the movie feels underplayed and irrelevant, from the video store to the pot. Although, I’m all about irrelevant man ass, which I freeze-framed for me…uh…you.

With only twenty minutes left, there’s finally zombie action. It actually feels jarring because I simply wasn’t prepared for a sudden burst of energy complete with raucous metal music and a weapon preparation montage.

On the bright side, we get to stare at cutie Dan Nye of The Legend of Wasco and Harvest Lake for most of the movie.

RED SPRING (2017)

The Director of Red Spring also stars in it, and I’ll give him props for a valiant effort. The film is competently made with plenty of character development, varying locations, and car chase scenes.

The real issue here is that there simply isn’t anything new. Whether the plague is vampires or zombies, these films about a group of survivors existing in the aftermath are all exactly the same. For instance, this one is like The Walking Dead meets I Am Legend.

The survivors have a camp. There are certain times when they can go scavenge for supplies. They welcome a new survivor into the fold. One of the characters is injured and becomes incapacitated for the remainder of the film. The camp is infiltrated. They must battle the baddies and find an escape route. They inevitably hope to get to a boat. The group is slowly whittled down to just a few main characters.

The only thing that can make these films stand out is the monster design…and unfortunately they are not the critters shown in the artwork. The vamps are simply people in white foundation with black raccoon circles around the eyes.

COLD MOON (2016)

I became a fan of Griff Furst from the moment I saw him as the lead in Dead Men Walking, one of my favorite zombie prison films. He has clearly been paying attention while working in the industry over the years, because Cold Moon is such a tightly crafted, mixed subgenre film. Furst also wrote the film, which is based on a novel by the writer of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The small town tone, the characters, the masked killer aspects, and the otherworldly creeps that terrorize one of the characters all bring to mind the video game Deadly Premonition.

Cold Moon takes place in 1989, but in this small town, it feels like the 1950s. A killer in a black mask is on the loose, and when bodies start turning up , leading the sheriff into an investigation. But be warned…the killer is mostly no secret to the audience.

This is a film about a ghost girl and other supernatural creeps terrorizing the killer, including one that I swear is a nod to Beetlejuice.

Movies with the bad guy being tormented are usually a turnoff for me, but the bike-less, cycling ghost girl that floats around town is all this movie needed, because it’s freaky as hell.

As a bonus, the cast is great, including plenty of horror alum, like Christopher Lloyd, Josh Stewart (The Collector movies), Candy Clark – a horror queen since the 80s, and Robbie Kay of Blood Fest.

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PRIME TIME: a quick foursome in a variety of subgenres

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Daniel

Since there’s no lost gem to celebrate here, I’ll make this quick as I look at four films I’ve watched recently: a dark comedy, a vampire film, a slashers, and a found footage backwoods horror.

EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES (2019)

Watching the trailer for this one I was excited at what I thought might be the first juicy dark comedy teen flick I’ve seen in a while in the tradition of Jawbreaker and Heathers.

Sadly, everything in the ridiculously long trailer is about as edgy as it gets. It’s not that the plot is lacking or the cast is weak, it’s just that the film has no energy, and the vibe it’s going for seems to miss the beat. Everything just falls flat.

The film is about a high school teen who kills his classmates’ pain in the ass, embarrassing, affluent parents for money.

A detective investigating the “accidents” is on to the teen very quickly, but no one believes him. So it becomes a battle of wits between the two.

If only it were as enthralling and quirky as it sounds. Even the kills just happen with no build-up or suspense. They just happen, like split-second, unexpected accidents. Bummer.

BLOOD TYPE (2019)

This film only runs 58 minutes long and is listed as “in production” on IMDb, so I’m guessing the makers ran out of funds and salvaged what they completed just so they could release it. The sudden ending that ties up nothing suggests the same thing.

The story is about a burly man who wakes in a cave only to discover there has been an outbreak of some sort of vampire infection…and he might be the answer to questions being asked by a scientist in a survivor community he joins.

It’s melodramatic with lots of talking, but we do get a handful of vamps, and they’re pretty cool looking. And I’m all about the high burly body count—from men to monsters, including vampire nipple action.

There was some good potential here. However, considering you’ve seen vamps like these in more complete films, you’re better off watching Stake Land instead.

FINAL CUT (2019)


Final Cut is well made—the film quality doesn’t scream low budget indie—but it does come across as a movie created by someone who grew up on meta slashers of the late 90s.

After a screenwriting student’s script is stolen, he and his friends hurriedly come up with a horror movie idea and begin shooting. But then a real killer shows up in their killer’s welding mask costume and begins hunting them down.

There is a lot of talk for the first thirty minutes, with loads of horror movie name-dropping.

Dude! Make good choices! He’s so not dead…

Once the killing kicks in it is a serviceable slasher, but despite only running 70 minutes long, it feels like it just keeps going and going. And the denouement is really derivative of Scream-era slashers.

BLOOD MOON RIVER (2017)


This short, 61-minute found footage movie begins with two lesbians having sex in the woods. It’s my favorite scene, delivering the best horror moments, and I’m not talking about the carpet-munching. Wait…if most women shave bald down there these days, does that make it floor-licking?

A group of friends rolls in to film a video debunking the legend of Blood Moon River, where people have been disappearing for years.

There’s a dip in a pond, an encounter with crazy rednecks, and lots of running and screaming with shaky cam. Conveniently there’s a camera focused on everyone as they die, but I’m not complaining, because bloody victims are the highlight here, and it is nice to seem some gratuitous tit action even though I’m not into tits, because I miss the days when every horror movie had to have nudity.

The film temporarily ramps up to low budget Texas Chainsaw territory with an odd twist that is barely explained because the movie comes to an abrupt end right after it feels like it’s about to promise something really bad.

 

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The Triple Clown

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Daniel

If there’s a clown movie on a streaming service, chances are I’m going to drop it in my watchlist. So happens I dropped three in my Prime watchlist recently. Here’s how that turned out when I did a clown triple feature…

CLOWN OF THE DEAD (2015)

Clown of the Dead is an Indonesian film, and it’s dubbed on Amazon Prime, so when I first heard the bad dubbing, I was thinking it was going to be a bad movie.

It wasn’t bad! The biggest problem really was the dubbing, because a lot of this film is talk. I think the intention is to build an ominous tone, and at moments I felt like it did, but considering we don’t actually see a clown until halfway through the movie, the bad dubbing that carries much of the story become monotonous.

The film also seems like a simple attempt to mimic many of the clown movies that have hit the market in recent years, right down to a moment when one single red balloon floats by. Sigh. Even so, the familiar territory is comfortable territory.

A young boy sneaks into a carnival opening next to his tenement apartment building and steals a music box.

When he opens it, he unleashes the spirit of the clown version of Freddy Krueger…that we don’t see until the 47-minute mark when he pops up in a Lights Out rip-off scene.

Once the devilish looking clown finally starts materializing and terrorizing the tenants, there are plenty of good, cheap jump scares to make up for it being so derivative.

CLOWN MOTEL (2019)

The intro scene of Clown Motel felt a little silly—a group of thieves burns down a literal clown motel in the desert—so it left me with low expectations.

However, it quickly became more my speed. A trio of ghost hunter guys in an RV crosses paths with a group of girls on a pre-wedding road trip, and they all crash together at an abandoned clown motel in the desert.

So I guess these are clown ghosts. They sabotage the vehicles then terrorize the group and keep them trapped in their room. I’d be okay with that considering there’s a cutie in a towel…

But it wouldn’t be any horror fun if members of the group didn’t begin going out one by one in an attempt to escape. There’s some satisfying low budget gore, and the cast is quite likable.

I was most entertained by one of the guys that comes off as a sort of ambiguously queer pothead. He’s very comfortable being chummy with one of his buddies, although his sexuality and the depth of their friendship are never clarified. However, when he walks in on a clown jerking off and films it, we soon discover we might be dealing with a gay clown ghost rapist.

Another highlight is Ari Lehman, the original drowning Jason Voorhees, who steals the show as a clown in a brief attack scene that is both funny and brutal.

The clown plot is a bit messy, which I had no problem overlooking since the movie is entertaining overall, but it feels like it goes on too long, with a desert chase eventually becoming a cave chase, both of which hinder the momentum.

GAGS THE CLOWN (2018)

It’s no small feat to make the oversaturated subgenres of clown and found footage horror good on their own. Yet, first time director Adam Krause makes a found footage clown horror all in one, and it held my attention from start to finish, which means I can’t wait to see what else he has in store for us.

Krause takes the real-life trending stories from a few years ago of a mysterious clown spooking locals in small towns…and makes him a psycho killer. Admit it—that’s everything you were hoping the real story would turn out to be. Come on, just admit it. Am I alone here?

Anyway, the plot follows various groups as they are all affected by the newsworthy story of the creepy clown: kids at a party, two cops on patrol, a right wing radio personality, and a reporter and her sidekick.

The random clown attack scenes are perfectly creepy, but this is also quite humorous in tone, and the characters are mostly quite likable.

Naturally the conservative douche is ridiculously stereotypical, hating the gays and abortion and wanting to take back the country by killing anything that doesn’t look or think exactly like him. In other words, he’s incredibly realistic.

Lauren Ashley Carter (Jug Face, Darlin’, The Woman) is the main reporter, there are plenty of cute guys, there’s a Killer Klowns from Outer Space reference, and the film even manages to do something memorable with its final act and final scene. Gags is definitely the one film in this trio that need to be in my personal collection.

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