All eyes on The Hills Have Eyes franchise

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Daniel

It’s one of the most iconic titles in horror history, and every installment has horror master Wes Craven’s name on it, but does the series live up to its reputation?

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)

Much of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes laid the groundwork for future inbred, cannibal, mutant, and backwoods horror movies. And it is for sure more my type of horror film than his rape/revenge flick The Last House on the Left. Despite not being a fan of that subgenre, I always felt the movie dated terribly fast and paled in comparison to I Spit On Your Grave.

Watching The Hills Have Eyes almost forty years later, there are parts I still think remain classic horror, but overall, I find some seriously disappointing aspects to the film. Most glaringly…the cannibals talk too fucking much! Other than them looking like they haven’t showered or brushed their teeth in a while, they’re not all that grotesque and are pretty much everyday hillbillies in caveman costumes.

We even meet the lone wolf nice cannibal at the very beginning, and she looks damn normal. She wants out of the cannibal clan, but there’s not much the old dude who runs a gas station in the middle of the desert can do for her.

A family driving through with a camper is warned away by the old man…but they continue on. I’ll never understand why anyone even leaves their house, let alone goes driving through a fucking desert.

In a ridiculous scene, they get into an accident due to…a loud plane overhead and a rabbit in the road? This scene is absolutely laughable.

Several members of the group stay behind while some go out to get help. My favorite scene involves one guy going back to the gas station at night and encountering the cannibals. This scene really holds up.

Meanwhile, the cannibals terrorize the group back at the camper. Another intense scene involves an implied rape followed by the women in the group trying to fight off the cannibal men. A young Dee Wallace gets in some good rehearsal for her role in Cujo as she fights to save her baby, but her talent is totally underutilized.

Overutilized are…guns! The entire camper invasion scene is ruined when the cannibals start shooting everyone. Ugh. But it’s a good transition to the final segment, when the family strikes back. Cue the horrible 1970s action flick music and the feeling that you’re watching Charlie’s Angels or Starsky and Hutch, not a disturbing horror movie.

Even the family dog gets in on taking down the cannibals, with a taste for Michael Berryman. I’d credit Berryman’s natural look for making this film as revered as it is, because even his character is not very scary.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (1984)

The intro narrative of Wes Craven’s sequel reveals that the first film was based on fact (something the first film didn’t), and dramatically drops the line “The hills still have eyes!” Should’ve been the name of the sequel.

The sequel was initially not completed, but after Wes’s Elm Street became a hit, he was ordered by the studio to complete it…without filming any other scenes. So…two of the characters from the first film return and have plenty of flashbacks to extend the film to 90 minutes. If you ask me, Wes would have been better off just skipping the flashbacks and making it an 80-minute flick.

One character is a young dude from the original camper encounter, the other is the cannibal girl who wanted out and is now his domesticated friend. They also bring along the dog from the first movie when they go motocross riding in the desert with a bunch of friends, including Kevin Spirtas of Friday the 13th Part VII and Subspecies 2 & 3, and T-bird Peter Frechette of Grease 2.

Honestly, aside from the absence of Dee Wallace, I prefer this film because it is soooo 80s. Just look at this group.

The movie follows a typical 80s slasher template, with music that sounds stolen from Friday the 13th Part 3, jerks in the group pulling scare pranks, couples going off to have sex after they crash in an old mine, and chase scenes and body reveals.

Michael Berryman is the only returning cannibal, and his new cannibal clan is determined to reclaim their defector. He and the dog also pick up right where they left off as frenemies. Berryman and the other cannibals even ride motorcycles this time! This shit feels like Mad Max half the time.

The main hero from the first film is tired of doing all the work, so hands the duties off to Spirtas. I like the slasher elements, but the final battle with him and the cannibals is just as hokey as the conclusion of the first film.

If you’re a completist and are curious about the bogus third film in the series, see my blog about Mind Ripper here.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006)

Wes Craven probably produced this remake realizing he could have done it so much better the first time. Director Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Piranha 3D) definitely does.

Very little in terms of plot is changed here other than the overall explanation for the freaks this time—the very new millennium horror theme of nuclear testing in the desert. And man, are the freaks deformed. We’re talking cashing in on the success of the freaks in Wrong Turn deformed.

Add to that some gruesome gore in the unrated version and much more intensely disturbing upgrades of the major scenes from the original, and there’s no way this wouldn’t be a better movie.

it also features familiar faces, including Kathleen Quinlan, Vinessa Shaw (Home Sweet Home, Hocus Pocus, Stag Night), and Dan Byrd (Mortuary, Salem’s Lot remake), who is a shamefully overlooked actor.

There is only one major addition here, and it’s a goodie. One guy stumbles upon an old facsimile town used for nuclear testing and has an incredible, super brutal battle with a few freaks, complete with chasing and jump scares.

The scene and the house in which it takes place are undeniably a nod to Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And this character is made to be the “pussy democrat” who turns out to be tougher than the gun-loving members of his family. Leave it to the Bush Jr. era to leave its divisive tone on horror.

If there’s one complaint I have about the unrated cut is that it’s 108 minutes long. There is a terrible lull between the cannibal attack segment of the film and the victims strike back part that definitely could have been trimmed down while retaining the graphic additions of the extended cut.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (2007)

The director of Grimm Love takes over directing for the sequel to the remake, while Wes Craven actually wrote the screenplay—perhaps his way of apologizing for the original sequel, which he hated.

Unlike the remake closely following the storyline of the original, the sequel has nothing in common with the original sequel other than the group—an army team that has come to the desert for training—ending up in a mine.

Just like the sequel(s) to Wrong Turn, this sequel goes for the more slice n’ dice approach. The kills of the cannibals and their glee in slaughtering are the point of the film, while the characters are simply around to be dismembered for our entertainment. Ironically, one of the actresses is in the sequels of both series, released the same year!

My initial reaction was the usual disappointment when a film focuses on well-armed military. However, this is definitely a fun splatter fest as the military members, who are incredibly incompetent, are easily taken down despite being the ones with an arsenal of heavily artillery. These fuckers kill each other half the time and it takes like three of them to kill one damn cannibal.

The cannibals aren’t so much out to eat them this time; they want to abduct the females in the group for the purpose of procreation.

Yes, violent rape and gruesome pregnancy moments make this heavy on the exploitation as well. But it manages to stay mostly in the realm of over-the-top hack n’ slash territory, so the more disturbing moments are somewhat watered down. There’s even an absolutely ridiculous moment when a cannibal deep throats a woman with an insanely long, slithery tongue that brings to mind a demon more than a mutant cannibal.

If the franchise had continued, it definitely would have fallen into the rinse and repeat formula, and the Wrong Turn movies handled that just fine. Although…I would have totally been up for a crossover movie.

Posted in Living in the 80s - forever, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Streaming is free: Bigfoot Country and Late Fee

Posted on April 6, 2019 by Daniel

Every once in a while I scan the horror selection on the free streaming services—Popcorn Flix, Crackle, Vudu, BingeHorror, Tubi—for any new indies that haven’t landed on the pay services. This time around I scored a creature feature and Halloween horror anthology on Tubi.

BIGFOOT COUNTRY (2017)

I’m a fan of director Jason Mills (Alien Psychosis, 3 Hours Till Dead, The Changing of Ben Moore, Above Us Lives Evil) and have a few of his movies in my DVD collection, so I was looking forward to seeing what he would do with a Bigfoot theme. Unfortunately, while this one does have its moments, it’s not one of my favorites.

A quick found footage encounter between some men and something in the woods opens the film. It isn’t particularly exciting and doesn’t add anything to the remainder of the film, which is not found footage. It’s the usual. Four friends—two guys, two girls—go camping in the woods. During a pit stop, a crazy dude warns them away. Best part…the funny guy in the foursome references how cliché the situation is.

Yet they continue on.

As they hike through the woods, there are some tense, ominous suggestions of what awaits them, with the camera used perfectly to heighten the feeling. There’s also a great moment with the funny dude making some gay references to his cute bearded buddy after they wake up together in the tent.

Once the group gets a clear sign there’s a Bigfoot, things get thrilling for a while. They take cover in their tent, but little good that will do them. This scene is quite satisfying…but then the movie becomes little more than everyone running through the woods in a panic.

There are a few surprises, but it feels mostly like a wilderness survival film.

Bigfoot essentially does absolutely nothing to any of them, and the few times we see him, it’s like old school 1970s Bigfoot movie stuff, with just a halo of light around a furry form.

And the “conclusion” is incomprehensible. The final survivor winds up at an empty hospital, starts walking around in fear, and then…the end. WHAT???

LATE FEE (2009)

Love the title, love the intro credits with classic style Halloween masks and spooky sound effects.

And quite honestly, I like the effort put into this tightly presented low budget indie. My only complaints: a) as with all Halloween themed anthologies, I prefer that not just the wraparound take place on Halloween. These stories don’t. b) there are only two stories. The first is short, but the second could have been pared down to make room for a third tale.

For as long as the second tale is, a good amount of time in this 90-minute movie is given to the wraparound, which works for me, because it’s loads of fun and serves as another tale. And of course…it’s Halloween themed. The indie vibe feels comfortingly old school; a couple heads to the video store to rent horror DVDs on Halloween. The clerk lets them rent two movies even though he’s already closed and having a Halloween party in the store. There’s one catch…they have to return the DVDs before midnight.

This wraparound is a solid Halloween short of its own. The couple’s interactions with each other and with trick or treaters is genuine and realistic, and I love the girl’s comments about how Halloween has changed.

And the conclusion—after the other stories—is midnight movie horrorlicious. Also notable is the fact that when they’re in the video store, there’s major focus on the movie Wicked Lake (the co-directors produced that film).

So what about the other two stories? While not “BOO!” scary, they are a good mix of gory and sexual, each with an unexpected conclusion. Sort of like a perverse take on The Twilight Zone.

1st story – a man hires a prostitute to live out some fantasies.

One of them is going to get a sick fantasy they didn’t anticipate…a…um…sex change, so to speak…

2nd story – this story is longer for a good reason…it is an unfolding of events that basically blends the traditions of horror movies with the real horrors of sex trafficking.

The twisted situations that occur are not for the easily offended or disgusted.

As good as the second story is, I still wish a third story could have been squeezed in, because the filmmakers were on a roll with what they delivered. Perhaps we’ll get a part two?

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Time to return to House on Haunted Hill – twice

Posted on April 5, 2019 by Daniel

For me, 1959’s House on Haunted Hill is the masterpiece of William Castle/Vincent Price collaborations. So before revisiting this 1999 remake twenty years later, I was assuming I was unfairly hard on it the first time around. I was…until the very moment when I was brutally honest back then, just as I’m going to be this time.

No stranger to horror, director William Malone has a career that goes as far back as Scared to Death and Creature from the 80s, and includes episodes of Tales from the Crypt and Masters of Horror, plus more recent films like Feardotcom and Parasomnia.

This remake features a stellar cast: Jeffrey Combs, Geoffrey Rush, Famke Janssen, Chris Kattan, Peter Gallagher, Taye Diggs, Ali Larter, and Bridgette Wilson. Even James Marsters of Buffy fame and Lisa Loeb of “Stay” fame appear in a brief scene at the beginning, and Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” is featured in the opener, making this movie so fricking 1999.

It’s also part of a trend of “it’s alive!” haunted house films from that era, most notably The Haunting and Thir13en Ghosts. It’s particularly similar to the latter (right down to shots of mechanisms turning in the house) because they were both produced by Dark Castle Entertainment.

Impressively, House on Haunted Hill generally follows the plot of the original with some fresh changes to make it just different enough. Wealthy Geoffrey Rush (whose character’s last name is Price—wink wink) invites a group of seemingly random people to come to the eerie house on haunted hill. The catch is they are locked in for the night, and anyone who manages to stay alive until morning gets a butt load of money. To make sure they can defend themselves (from what, they don’t know), they each receive a little coffin with a gun in it, a detail borrowed right from the original.

Also keeping in line with the original, Rush and his wife, Famke Jannsen, loathe each other. Chris Kattan plays a role similar to the nervous guy in the original who knew more about the house than everyone else, which is also almost identical to Matthew Lillard’s role in Thir13een Ghosts.

Tragic that the creepy servant couple wasn’t resurrected for the remake, but we do get more information about the house’s past. Horror icon Jeffrey Combs plays an evil doctor (in flashbacks…and ghost flashes) who experimented on patients in the house when it was a mental institution. Yes, this house is much more haunted than the original. There are some incredibly effective moments, because naturally the idiots split up! They see things that aren’t there, they see specters through a camera lens that aren’t visible with the naked eye, and there are even some nightmarish monsters not unlike something you’d encounter in the Silent Hill video game, which was released about 10 months before this film. Hmmmm…

House on Haunted Hill is one of the most well known films to feature the spasm head special effect that was all the rage at the time. I’m surprised it didn’t get exploited more, because it was damn creepy.

As the film plays out like an awesomely eerie update of the original (with one twist to the original plot that I adore), the only part I could have done without is Rush having some sort of trippy hallucination/dream sequence that serves as an excuse to introduce other ghouls.

Overall, while I like the Silent Hill type ghouls, they don’t quite make sense considering the house is supposedly haunted by ghosts.

So where does it all go wrong? The final act, when we get what my friends and I referred to as the Rorschach Test ghost back in the day. The survivors are chased by an undulating ectoplasm ghost with human faces embedded in it. You want to talk about bad CGI. This drops an otherwise chilling film into b-movie territory and sucks all the frightful fun out of it. What were they think?

The deleted scenes on the physical release of the film include one that would have made more sense than most of the retained ghouls: Ali Larter falls through a hole into an underground area of the house and is swarmed by corpses that rise from the dirt. Perfection. Not only should this scene have been included in the final cut, the remainder of the film should have followed its lead and given us more of this tangible type of horror.

RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (2007)

A sequel was released 8 years later (astonishing), with Victor Garcia (The Damned, Hellraiser: Revelations) directing. The story sucks, but this film does what it must to make it a more exciting experience than the original: a) it runs only 81 minutes long b) the ghosts absolutely mutilate people this time.

Not what I meant by “I want to get him in the sheets,” but…this will do.

Oh yes, it is a gorefest, which is the only thing that makes the weak premise excusable. Why do people go into the house this time? Ali Larter’s sister and boyfriend end up being bullied (at gunpoint) into helping find a statue worth millions that happens to be hidden in the house somewhere—because we learn crazy doctor Combs was a refined lover and collector of art. Ugh.

The bright side? Combs returns and is more of the ghostly focus this time, which is generally a more logical plot point. While Ali Larter’s “character” also returns briefly, the role has been recast. Boo.

You’ve heard this one before. The good guys and bad guys get trapped in the house and must work together to survive. What’s kind of ridiculous is that the baddies are supposed to be quite dangerous (like, they’ve killed people), yet the good guys are absurdly flippant with them.

Once again there are Silent Hill inspired monsters—including freaky nurses, not to mention a couple of lesbian babe corpses. Awesome.

And unlike the first film, even though there are deformed ghouls here, it’s made clear they are the patients from the hospital—every time one of them grabs a victim, the victim gets a mental picture of what the doctor put that patient through years before. Personally, my favorite scene involves characters falling into a body of water…in which they’re not alone. Eek! It gave me a Poltergeist pool scene flashback.

When you add the super gory kills and minus the Rorschach Test, you have what is actually a more satisfying horror experience overall and a more cohesive ghost story, despite all its sequelitis issues.

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Is the Boogeyman trilogy a thrillogy?

Posted on April 4, 2019 by Daniel

As I revisited the 2005 Boogeyman and got the same vibe the chilling opening of Darkness Falls gave me—boy terrified of monster coming into his room—I couldn’t fathom why I remembered nothing about this film.

Then I watched the rest if it.

This is one of the most inept, sloppy, disjointed scripts you could imagine, with the whole concept of the film morphing constantly, unable to decide what story it wants to tell. And watching the deleted scenes on the DVD thinking they might clear things up, I discovered these messy deletions would have just made things worse and can’t even imagine how someone thought it logical to have them in the script in the first place.

7th Heaven cutie Barry Watson (Teaching Mrs. Tingle) meanders through one scene after another, scared and nearly in tears, not making any sense of anything being thrown at him…or us.

15 years after witnessing his father get dragged into a closet by the Boogeyman, Watson’s Thanksgiving at his annoying girlfriend’s house is interrupted by news of his mother Lucy Lawless’s death, right after her corpse ghost terrorizes him for reasons unknown.

He goes home, stops at a mental institution to see some girl, goes to his mom’s funeral, and then goes back to the creepy old house he grew up in. He talks to a another young girl, goes into the scary closet and encounters the Boogeyman, hangs out with his former girlfriend just before she became the star of Bones, gets attacked by a bunch of ghost children, checks into a motel with his girlfriend, and then starts using closets to travel from one place to another to watch people he loves die.

He talks to the little girl again in the park in the middle of the night, she brings him to some lair covered in newspaper clippings, I guess we are supposed to assume the Boogeyman was a child molester, we have no idea why he hangs out in closets and kills only adults, and finally, Watson seems to conclude that he can kill the Boogeyman with the toys in his bedroom (exactly how old was he when he left home for college?).

BOOGEYMAN 2 (2007)

Ah, when they decide to dig in their heels and make a sequel to an already bad movie…and just end up digging the storyline into a deeper hole.

In this opener, a kid is afraid to go to the bathroom because the hall light is out. So dad change the bulb…and Boogeyman 2 comes out of the closet to deck dad in the halls instead, while both the boy and his sister watch the attack.

Years later, the sister is the one who is all fucked up over it. She checks herself into a loony bin so Boogeyman 2 can play Elm Street 3, slicing and dicing a bunch of teenage nutcases.

The sequel has something going for it—lots of gory kills. But once again Boogeyman 2 can’t stick to a clear mythology. At first his kills seem to be sort of supernatural—a kid from Super 8 gets caught up in a Session 9 light chase scene then killed in an elevator, the kid from Jennifer’s Body gets bugs in his chip bag then drinks a poisonous chemical. Yet Boogeyman 2 where’s a mask and uses sharp objects to kill. Curious.

Suddenly the main girl decides he actually uses your fears against you, a theory that barely holds together—for instance, was the dude afraid of the dark or death by elevator? Was the other dude afraid of bugs or of drinking poison?

The main girl finds an article that tells her the fate of Barry Watson to provide some connection to the first film. Also, Tobin Bell takes a break from the Saw franchise to play a creepy doctor who acts and sounds like Jigsaw. And when all is said and done…

This shit is basically Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. LAME.

BOOGEYMAN 3 (2008)

It seems as if the director of Jolly Roger and Axe Giant was like “I’m just going to take this crap out with a bang and do a Freddy Krueger type slasher.”

And Boogeyman 3 totally works as that. It doesn’t even need to connect to the other two films, but it does. The girl in the first scene is Photoshopped into a picture with Tobin Bell. After being terrified by Boogeyman 3, she runs to her friend’s college dorm room. She pulls some Elm Street 4 shit, handing the horror off to make it her friend’s problem.

Boogeyman 3 not only kills people in gory good ways, he also puts them through scary dream-like experiences first (mostly blood pouring into rooms from various openings).

He’s a great looking ghoul this time, the downside being that he always flickers onto screen looking like he’s trying to insert himself into the “Take On Me” video by a-ha. The best part is that every time he pops up, he growls “Rah!” like a kid scaring a sibling from behind a bedroom door. It’s hilarious and annoyingly effective. I can’t deny that one of the most obvious jump scares scared the shit out of me because of the “Rah!”

The fantastic kills even deliver some eerie aftermath at times, and there’s a fricking vent scene from hell. Plus, the plot is finally simple…if you believe in Boogeyman 3, he comes for you. That leads to a delicious decision for the main girl…but then the movie totally throws that all out the window for a couple of final scares. Argh! But not argh to the scares. They were cool.

Seriously, Boogeyman 3 is the best of the bunch, and now I know why I bothered to keep the series in my collection. This film is a worthy inclusion, and my OCD would never allow me to own just the third film in a franchise.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Slashing in the woods, in the mountains, and in a T-shirt?

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Daniel

Slashers never fully go out of style, but they sure do go through dry spells. If you’re hunting for something you haven’t seen yet…does these three satisfy?

YOU MIGHT BE THE KILLER (2018)

The director of Husk, Animal, and contributor to Chilling Visions: 5 States of Fear brings us a slasher that tries desperately to approach the tired, meta slasher genre from a different angle, but the references are so cliché at this point that it’s time for filmmakers to start making meta movies about meta movies. Hell, that could have been the point of this one. There’s just no way to tell anymore.

Poor Fran Kranz of The Cabin in the Woods is once again stuck in a horror template, running from a killer at his summer camp this time (complete with the Jason kill-kill-kill sound). So he calls his friend Alyson Hannigan, who works at a video store, for tips on how to survive.

Willow tries using her comic experience from Buffy, How I Met Your Mother, and American Pie to make the material feel fresh, but it’s just not. The only difference here is that a character on the phone is delivering the same old slasher trope references instead of the actual characters in the slasher story.

To guide him through his situation, Willow has Kranz describe everything that led up to the moment he has reached in his slasher plot, which is where the problems begin. The movie is presented out of order, with each new time shift giving an onscreen count of how many counselors are dead. So it can go from seven to five to zero to six, which creates a nonsequential mess that leaves us simply watching for the kill scenes.

The kill sequences are the best part. If the film had just presented itself chronologically, it would at least be a serviceable formulaic slasher. Even the concept of how the killer comes to be and relates to Kranz’s character is kind of fun, it just gets overshadowed by all the jumping around.

The thing I was feeling most about this movie is the theme song by Harlo.

 

HELL’S BELLE

This silly slasher was okay, but it really needed a more intense ending. Instead the climax is, well, anti-climactic.

A college professor takes a bunch of students into the mountains looking for evidence of Jesse James and his gang.

After too much talk and a couple of shower scenes (seriously, there are two shower scenes), the professor goes missing and the students go looking for him.

They also begin getting terrorized by a supernatural woman who appears in a black cloud of plasma before doing shit like throwing victims off a cliff or dropping a rock on them.

As basic as it is, there are a few scenes that have a lot of creepy potential—the ghost levitating over a sleeping guy, a shifting, contorting, floating body incident, and an attack in the water. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of nothing to get through between those scenes. But mad respect to the stylist for the woman police officer.

SILK SCREAM (2017)

The early 80s video rental opening kill grabbed me immediately, right down to the freeze frame and echoing scream as a synth score kicks in.

That and just a few other kills absolutely nail that vibe. What we are left with is a bunch of people at a screen printing T-shirt shop trying to act all Clerks quirky drab, but the writing simply can’t pull it off. For instance, you know the creative forces are struggling when they resort to fart humor.

It’s always disappointing when an indie film demonstrates a great sense of classic horror moments but not much in the way of narrative. Two guys at the shop try to investigate the murders, and so do two detectives, but none of it is compelling. And all the character banter at the shop just fills time between kills.

They are the highlight here, and they get more and more bloody and graphic with old school sexual situations as the film progresses, plus they use only practical effects.

Posted in Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, Sound Check - The Songs Stuck in My Head, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Slashing in the woods, in the mountains, and in a T-shirt?

Indulging in the full Feast

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Daniel

John Gulager, son of Clu Gulager (who reignited his career with 80s horror), won Ben & Matt’s Project Greenlight, and the first Feast was born. Naturally, his dad stars in all three installments, and these midnight movie grindhouse creature features just get more disgusting and perverse along the way. So let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

FEAST (2005)

You can kind of tell the first film was less in John Culager’s control and more in the hands of Hollywood. There are numerous familiar names in the cast (Balthazar Getty, Jason Mewes, Henry Rollins, Duane Whitaker, Eric Dane), and even the most over-the-top moments are tame compared to what comes in the sequels.

A group of rednecks gets trapped in a bar by a handful of big gnarly monsters in the first film.

Each film begins with still frame introductions of characters with stats. Shaky cam and quick, choppy editing is used to create a frenetic pace in all three films, and keeps the monsters more of a mystery for most of the first film. It’s the full awesome CGI-free monster Monty in the sequels. Also of note is that the surprise trick in these movies becomes less of a surprise after a while—the person you least expect to die gets torn apart out of nowhere.

Here’s some of the fun you can expect in the first film:

–A kid is eaten

–A baby monster humps a deer head on the wall

–Baby monster also face fucks a bound biker chick who spits out its cum

–A face gets ripped off

–A guy’s eye gets pulled out slowly and then the socket gets maggots later

–Two monsters have sex

–A monster’s dick and balls get trapped in a door

–A monster pulls off Henry Rollins’s pants (clearly it has better taste than the face-fucking baby monster)

–Balthazar Getty asks him if he’s gay later because he is wearing pink sweats and speaks like he’s educated

–The group straps bombs to a person with no leg and uses her as bait

–one chick gets to a truck safely and leaves them all to die. This self-serving theme carries through all the films and just gets worse.

FEAST II: SLOPPY SECOND (2008)

Picking up where the first film left off, the sequel’s plot is about a biker chick hunting down Balthazar Getty for something he did to her twin in the first movie, yet she never finds him because he didn’t return for the sequel. This movie is also my least favorite. It runs 100 minutes long and starts to drag despite all the insanity, such as:

–Biker chick heads to Balthazar’s town after torturing Clu until he gives the address. She takes him along and they meet a whole new group of sleazy people

–The biker chick shoots a dog

–We see hairy girl pussy when a chick having sex with a little man is dragged out the window by a monster.

–Clu bites off the ear of the chick who deserted them in the first film after banging her head against a toilet bowl with shit floating in it

–The group dissects a monster and goo splats all over them. Its wiener pisses all over them, too

–There is a domino effect puke party

–Another maggot moment during a sex dream

–A guy goes to rescue a crying baby, but when the monsters start catching up with him, he tosses the baby to them in the most wrong and hilarious scene in the whole franchise

–Trapped on a roof, they throw a chick off to distract monsters

–They build a slingshot to catapult themselves to another building. They use a whimpering old lady to test it, cutting parts of her off until she is light enough. When the test fails, they slingshot a little dude across anyway

–A bunch of girls ends up practically naked because the group used their clothes to make the slingshot

–Part 2 has no clean conclusion because it segues right into part 3, and they were both release the same year

 FEAST III: THE HAPPY FINISH (2009)

The final film is better than the second, and not only because it runs only 80 minutes long. The pacing is just better. Since it picks up right where the second left off and the two were filmed simultaneously, maybe they should have just taken 10 minutes from that one and added it to this to make them two 90-minute movies! Nah…they should have just lobbed 20 minutes off the second film.

So, what stands out in this final piece of midnight madness trash?

–Starts off strong with monster eating someone’s head and then shitting it out. That’s some fast metabolism

–Keeping with the shit theme, the girls beat up an old dude until he shits himself

–John Allen Nelson of fricking Killer Klowns from Outer Space is a muscle stud, but sadly he isn’t in the film for long

–A dude gets fucked through a glory hole in a wall by a monster and his stomach explodes

–Monster balls are swinging freely several times

–Biker girls get on a bus and drive off, leaving the others to chase after it on foot

–A crazy dude in a robe who can control the monsters says “I’ve got the gift, faggots.” You know, because that was totally necessary…

–As the group crawls through a vent, Clu farts in the face of a little dude…because when you’re running out of shock material for your trilogy, resorting to faggots and farts is the answer…

–Clu cuts off a dude’s damaged arm without warning him first

–There’s an overly long battle scene—only overly long because it’s filmed with a strobe light effect

–They use a pipe stuck in one guy’s head as a gun

–Clu gets the final line, it’s sexual, and it’s awesome

The final scene also sets the director up for a totally different spinoff, but that never materialized.

Posted in Scared Silly - Horror Comedy, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Indulging in the full Feast

Backwoods slashers and a supernatural killer in the 00s

Posted on March 30, 2019 by Daniel

Crazed killers, a grim reaper, and killer cannibals in this foursome from 2006, 2007, and 2008.  Did any of them stand out?

WILDERNESS (2006)

This survivalist horror flick essentially takes the most basic slasher premise and relocates it to a deserted island.

The premise is actually ridiculous. After bullying a fellow inmate to suicide, a group of juvenile delinquents is sent to spend some time on an island…with one single chaperone. These really bad seeds, who could easily overpower their leader, even get to roam around on their own.

To top it off, there’s a lady chaperone there with her gang of girlie delinquents. So when someone with a pack of crazed dogs and a crossbow seems to be out for revenge, the two groups must team up to survive.

The gore and violence are phenomenal, but this isn’t a jump scare horror film, and these kids are such pieces of scum that I just don’t see how we’re supposed to relate to them or care what happens to them. I was more disturbed and upset when one of the kids fights back against a dog.

The only thing that saves it for me (aside from the awesome gore) is the fact that one guy is just so much more vile than the others that he becomes more of a problem than the actual killer.

BARRICADE (2007)

Coming to us from a German splatter director, this is a very odd backwoods cannibal family movie.

It’s the usual plot—friends camping end up in cannibal family’s lair—but the “group” of friends is comprised of a mere trio: scream queen Raine Brown, scream king Joe Zaso, and his buddy.

The majority of victims are just random people in the woods, beginning with a group of guys in the opener, who don’t speak English and don’t get subtitles!

The good news? Their slaughter tells you exactly what this movie is about—the absolutely vile grindhouse gorefest.

The melodrama between Raine and Joe is just filler between some fantastically icky kills by a gnarly family.

Note that there also aren’t any scares and the music, both songs and score, are really annoying, so this one is absolutely about the practical gore effects…and Joe skinny-dipping…

GRIM REAPER (2007)

The director of Lethal Eviction, The Graveyard, and A Dead Calling brings us a messy supernatural slasher set in a hospital.

A stripper gets hit by a taxi, ends up in the hospital, and sees the taxi driver killed by the grim reaper in an operating room. That’s when she notices there’s barely anyone in the place and the staff is weird.

Before long she’s in a loony section with some other people, they’re trapped, they’re trying to find a way out. Forty minutes in they are finally chased by the grim reaper.

There simply isn’t enough slasher action here, and the attempts to present some sort of alternate timeline after she was hit by the taxi just makes matters more convoluted. A few decent kills and an ominous killer aren’t enough to save this one.

ALIVE OR DEAD (2008)

A girl having flip phone sex while driving a deserted road at night passes a parked bus with a “help me” written on a window…and stops to explore the bus?

It was really hard to buy the setup of Alive or Dead, and it just gets worse and more confusing as the film continues.

She finds a girl chained up with a mask over her face on the bus.

They hunker down when the killer gets on the bus and drives them to…a secluded castle in the desert?

They sneak off and explore nonchalantly until he finally starts chasing them 42 minutes in. They spend the rest of the movie fending for themselves instead of actually working together. I really did not get it.

Nor did I understand the deformed cannibal kid, the weird monk dude that suddenly appears wanting revenge on the main cannibal killer for eating his daughter, or the bizarre discovery the girl with the mask makes while exploring a house.

Good gore and chase scenes fail to salvage this mess.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Backwoods slashers and a supernatural killer in the 00s

Creepy ladies, killer guys

Posted on March 29, 2019 by Daniel

So I checked out four up-and-coming films—a ghost, a boogeyman, a psycho, and witches—but should you be waiting in anticipation? Let’s take a look.

THE CABIN (2018)

I’ll never understand why indie directors produce movies blatantly inspired by hugely iconic films and then do nothing to make them unique or at least effective for what they are. I mean, you’ve studied some of the best horror movies! Mimic THAT instead of just imitating the plot!

The Cabin opens with a promising scene of a man hearing something outside his cabin before that something comes in wearing a mask and wielding a hatchet.

It’s all down hill from there. A couple spends the entire movie arguing at a cabin. They meet a weird but not very menacing dude in the place next door and then…

Absolutely no surprises here. He invades their house. They have to figure out a way to escape.

During what could have been a suspenseful scene of the guy sneaking into the neighbor’s house, there are constant distracting jumps to the woman back at their cabin just standing at the window waiting for him to return.

They find scraps from a butcher shop strewn across a table to look like someone has been hacked up. Then the cat and mouse game begins, with the woman painfully understating what a terrifying situation she is in.

Personally, I would skip this one if I were you.

PET GRAVEYARD (2019)

Way to cash in on the remake of Pet Sematary—make a low budget Flatliners clone that’s also a slasher, and throw in a cat once in a while.

There’s not a lot to say beyond that. A group of friends learns of this ritual that lets you kill yourself temporarily to speak to the dead. So, they begin suffocating each other.

After a (long) while, they start to see a hooded grim reaper during their death sessions, and eventually he begins killing them in reality.

The brutal deaths are all this one has going for it, because it’s a rather dull Flatliners/Elm Street mashup…the second one I’ve seen in a matter of a week, the other being Sleep No More.

BLOOD CRAFT (2019)

I applaud James Cullen Bressack for plugging away and continuing to bring us indie horror films. I just don’t often applaud his films (I think Bethany has been my favorite so far).

Watching Blood Craft, something clicked for me that explains why a lot of highly praised horror films (that I won’t mention) disappoint me—they’re basically dramas wrapped around a horror premise that doesn’t deliver enough chills and thrills.

For instance, Blood Craft is a family abuse drama with some witchcraft, blood, and torture thrown in, but not enough to give me genuine horror feels. And honestly, dramas mostly bore me. I’m better immersed in “deeper” horror stories when I’m reading them as fiction stories. I just think they work better in that medium.

Anyway, two sisters reconnect after their father dies. Their father is played by horror cutie Dave Sheridan, who will simply never satisfy me in a horror movie again unless he reveals all he did here…

The girls have flashbacks to practicing witchcraft with their mother and being abused by their father. So they do a spell to resurrect their father’s soul—and put him in their neighbor (Michael Welch of Z Nation). Once they do, they torture him for revenge.

That’s it. That’s really all that happens…aside from the pointless lesbian incest…

AMERICAN POLTERGEIST: THE CURSE OF LILITH RATCHET (2019)

I’m a fan of the indie flicks of Eddie Lengyel (Hellweek, Mother Krampus 2, Voodoo Rising, Scarred), so I’m always happy to see him come out with a new one.

We meet Lilith Ratchet in the opener, and this freaky floating, ghostly woman brings to mind the bitch from Stay Alive. In fact, the film reminds of the early 2000s era of supernatural slashers.

The main plot is about a dude who wants to do a “Lilith Ratchet” shrunken head hot potato game at a Halloween party and film it for the Internet (things sure have gotten more complicated than just saying Candyman three times). Unfortunately, the silly urban legend is true, and soon everyone is being hunted down and killed by the resurrected legend.

Lilith is super creepy, scream queer Roger Conner makes an appearance in the film, and there are some fun deaths, but in terms of pacing and plot, this isn’t one of my favorites from Lengyel.

Scenes run too long, there’s excessive talking that doesn’t add to the plot and slows the film down, and the final girl chase scene loses steam, lacking the energy to keep us on the edge of our seat. Even so, this is by far the most satisfying horror flick I watched in this bunch.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Do you dare enter the house of the dead without a light gun?

Posted on March 27, 2019 by Daniel

Everyone loves to hate Uwe Boll’s movie adaptations of video games, but as a huge fan of the goofy original arcade game (Don’t come!), I always felt 2003 film House of the Dead was the exact piece of trash it needed to be and fits in comfortably with the cheesy MTV style horror movies of the era.

One thing people seem to detest is the inclusion of flashes from the original video game, which occur between scene changes for no logical reason. I think it’s deliciously novel, and as a bonus, the DVD menu even begins with one option: insert coin(s). Awesome.

According to IMDb, this is supposed to be a prequel to the thin plot of the 1996 light gun arcade game. It makes sense, considering the movie takes place at a rave on a desolate island. However, it is only the very last line of the movie that links it to the video game, with the mention of one character’s name.

Otherwise, this is just a silly early 2000s horror flick. Group of friends takes boat to the rave, everyone is missing, friends start getting attacked by all kinds of zombies, from slow to fast, rotten to fresh meat, land and water.

In between trying to stay alive, they discover the lab where it all started.

There are plenty of horror names in cameo roles, including Clint Howard, Jürgen Prochnow, and Ellie Cornell of Halloween 4.

Even the Sega name makes an appearance as a sponsor of the rave since it’s the company that created the game. And there’s also some nudity, which is sorely lacking in teen horror these days. Unfortunately, all we get of adorable Will Sanderson is this nice bubble butt shot in jeans.

This otherwise ludicrous zombie flick is all about the huge chunk of action that takes place in the middle. It is laughably fun as we get a bullet time arena battle between humans and zombies, set to the thumping beats of techno music.

Forget that House of the Dead is not a fighting video game, because right in the middle of battles we get that whole freeze frame character rotation crap indicative of combat games.

However we are also treated to loads of exploding headshots with guns, so that definitely captures the spirit of the game.

Plus, there’s a final boss battle sword fight with a dude who was a sexy fiend in flashbacks revealing the origin of the zombies.

The director of Room 6 and Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud brings us the 2005 sequel, which I used to think was the better of these two films because it was a more straightforward zombie flick.

Revisiting it, I realize that makes it kind of boring. Even worse, it’s all well-armed military men against zombies. YAWN!

Well, yawn except for the locker room scene.

This might play out like a lame, mission-based, third-person zombie video game, but there are no cheesy nods to the games at all.

However, Sid Haig appears in a cameo as the relative of the video game character mentioned at the end of the first movie. Also tying this in to the first movie, Ellie Cornell reprises her role briefly. Yay!

Horror hotties Ed Quinn and Emmannuelle Vaugier make one sizzling military couple sent on a mission to retrieve a blood sample from a college campus overrun by zombies.

As an added pretty person bonus Sticky Fingaz of the Blade TV show leads their team, but for unknown reasons, neither he nor Ed Quinn show off their ta-tas in the locker room scene.

The few initial zombie attacks are perfectly in keeping with the zombie resurgence of the era (Dawn of the Dead remake, Shaun of the Dead, Resident Evil) with good makeup and gore, but once the military team comes in with guns blazing, it’s a boring cycle of them moving through halls and rooms shooting random zombies.

Super annoying is the fact that we are presented with too many dumb military guys that know they are dealing with zombies, yet keep approaching figures standing in dark corners and not responding to them at all. Absurd.

Give me a gun and military armor and I’d still be running from that shit and hiding under the bed.

The movie only picks up steam at the end when there are very few survivors left and finally we get some college student zombie action. This includes a ridiculously tone-shifting game of tackle football between humans and zombies. Hello, this isn’t the first House of the Dead.

Of note however is the fact that Ed Quinn smears zombie guts on himself to walk among the dead way before Rick Grimes did it.

Posted in Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror, What I'm Doing With My Joystick | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

STREAM QUEEN: rock ‘n’ rave

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Daniel

Both of these films came out in 2010…yet the music genre around which each centers feels about twenty years too late. But that alone doesn’t make them bad movies…

NEOWOLF (2010)

This cheesy film, which is like The Lost Boys or Near Dark meets the Twilight werewolves, stars a couple of cuties, including Agim Kaba, who was just coming from a near decade stint on As The World Turns.

Two deliciously gory werewolf attack scenes in the first fifteen minutes totally had me anticipating more thrills to come.

But then shit gets all fantasy horror, shifting focus to a college girl, her hot emo rocker ex, and his initiation into a werewolf pack that travels around in a tour bus. The girlfriend must do whatever she can to rescue him from his hairy fate.

Neowolf is basically about groupies having sex with werewolf rockers in the desert.

Some of the werewolf makeup is cool, and it’s fun to see Veronica Cartwright as a witchy type (and hard to comprehend why she even ended up in this film).

There’s even a scene in which a bi guy is about to get a BJ from a dude.

But the movie is boring! Way too many faux emo band performances, and the quick edits and slow mo clips are way too late in the game to cash in on the MTV music generation.

Despite some good gore and genuine monster effects, this story just feels like it’s targeting a starry-eyed female tween audience.

TRANCE (2010)

Seeing little Gracie from The Nanny, scream queen Dominique Swain, and Jeremy London in the cast of this flick, I didn’t expect to roll film and feel like I was watching a washed out camcorder video from back in the VHS days.

In fact, a majority of this film looks like someone went to a rave in 1993 with a camcorder and recorded people just dancing or making out in private rooms. NOTHING HAPPENS.

It’s supposed to be Halloween, but other than an opening scene visiting a pop-up Halloween store (it’s becoming a bigger tradition than trick or treating), don’t expect any holiday festivities. And although none of the costumes the kids wear are horror related, I do think the girl dressed as I Dream of Jeannie should have won a prize for best costume.

The point of the film? Girls at the rave are slipped a drug that causes them to eventually start seducing and killing boys. It’s just an infected film in which the infected aren’t even vaguely menacing. The first attack doesn’t start until 50 minutes in, and with 20 minutes left, Jeremy London appears as a cop.

His minuscule role could have been played by anyone, but I guess someone got the impression that having a London brother in your cast is going to attract a horror crowd.

Only one scene delivers what this movie should have delivered nonstop. Two girls dressed as an angel and a devil get sexually aggressive with a guy, leading to a vicious attack that actually has a cool vibe the rest of this film totally lacks.

Other than that one moment, there is nothing scary or gory here at all, and there’s a disappointing lack of nudity. With kids getting high and having sex at a rave, there should be nudity. Trust me, I know. I was there. Not to mention, where are all the gay dudes? Not one guy-on-guy face suck in the whole film…at a rave where kids are getting high and having sex?

If there’s one…um…saving grace, it’s that Gracie gets the last scream.

Posted in Johnny You ARE Queer - Gay Thoughts, Movie Times & Television Schedules - Staying Entertained, The Evil of the Thriller - Everything Horror | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on STREAM QUEEN: rock ‘n’ rave