The things I see by throwing every weird title I come across in my watchlist. Despite going off on various tangents, somehow this batch all managed to bring in elements of slashers or backwoods horror, so I figured I’d slap them together in one post.
ATTACKED ON SET (2012)
This exploitation horror flick is smart in having a running time of only 65 minutes, but even with plenty of pervy shit thrown at us, it totally can’t manage to keep itself together enough to entertain.
A film crew is more interested in doing drugs and having sex than making a movie at an isolated location. In completely unrelated and pointless news, a flamboyant gay tree hugger nearby is hoping to save a bird’s home by trying to stop a lumberjack from clearing an area for a new development. It’s completely unrelated to the main plot other than to up the body count…and doesn’t even bother to take advantage of the endless number of exploitative opportunities a flamboyant tree hugger and bearish lumberjack present.
As for the main story, the over-the-top characters are unfunny and boring until the killer in a creepy mask finally starts hacking them up.
There are a few good gross out scenes, including an ooey-gooey snowballing, a red wings scene complete with a bloody tampon, and a dick getting hacked off.
The sex and kills are the strong point, they just don’t carry the full 65 minutes.
BAD KIDS OF CRESTVIEW ACADEMY (2017)
2012 film Bad Kids Go To Hell was The Breakfast Club of horror. Turns out it’s also based on a comic book or something, as is this sequel, which fully integrates comic book panes into the film for a trendy style. Hottie Ben Browder returns as the janitor and also directs this time around.
Plot starts off the same. A bunch of kids in detention. It’s kind of Mean Girls-ish, with most of them part of a snobby group and the main girl a lower class outsider whose sister died at a recent party they all attended.
As the film unfolds, so do the flashbacks to that night, which ends up taking up way too much of the film and keeps us from the better part – the kids dying off “accidentally” and discovering they’re trapped inside the school.
In fact, there are way too few kills, which is a shame because they are nice and cruel. Even better, there’s a pretty wacky twist in the final act that makes it more complicated than just one of the kids being a psycho that decided to knock off fellow classmates.
I like the vibe, I like the kills, I like the appearances by people like Sean Astin and Gina Gerson. I just wish the film had been more about the kills and not the party. And I wish the gay guy had lasted longer, because he brought some major gay sexual situations to the film while he was around.
AS NIGHT FALLS (2010)
Amazingly, As Night Falls begins pretty rough, with that super hokey indie supernatural horror vibe that feels like it can only go down hill. But damned if this shit doesn’t eventually pick up steam and become a mini supernatural slasher blast.
A good old white trash couple and their kid move into a house in bumfuck…and are watched by a ghost girl projected with some pretty hokey computer effects.
During a sort of housewarming party we get to meet all their white trash friends, a rather lovable group that comes bearing plenty of meta movie references. Even so, they can only be so entertaining before the film kind of needs to start getting on with it already.
And at last, it does. The ghost girl makes more appearances…and so do her parents, a couple of weapon-wielding corpse bastards from hell! Not to mention, the mom is scream queen Debbie Rochon!
They start slicing through the partiers left and right, chasing them through the house and woods.
So the husband (funny guy and a highlight of the movie), teams up with the wife’s sheriff brother (Joe Davison, director and writer of the film), to fight the baddies…who summon even more undead. Awesome.
Highlights includes an awesome attack scene in the bathroom, metal music used right in a horror movie during a wicked chase scene with Debbie Rochon leaping onto a getaway van, and a massive shed fight, including one chick getting a hilarious smack down. Actually, it’s a smack up. WAY up.
CAMP KILLER (2016)
There’s a pretty traditional backwoods slasher in the first few minutes of this film—campfire story, couple going off to have sex, masked killer spouting one-liners as he offs everyone, a chase, body reveals—after which the film turns into a dialogue machine!
Seriously, this is supposed to be a satire, but virtually all of it is delivered through dialogue between the local sheriff and the killer as they hang out at a bar where original young drowning Jason Voorhees Ari Lehman is the bartender.
Eventually, the main girl from the beginning teams up with another girl to get revenge on the killer, which leads to some action at the end of the film. But believe me, it’s really hard to stick around that long.
SPACESHIP TERROR (2011)
This one ended up on my “to see” list because it’s from Harry Tchinski, who brought us the film Blood Demon Rising.
Considering this entire film is about a bunch of women in their underwear running around a spaceship being chased by a freaky psycho, Tchinski threw me a bone, opening the film with a shirtless hunk getting hacked up for the first kill.
Yes, I said a bunch of women in their underwear get chased around a spaceship by a freaky psycho. Oh, who the hell cares how or why? The bitches end up in this spaceship with their clothes off. For fuck’s sake, I’m gay and that’s all I care about.
They’re trapped in the ship, the halls are booby trapped, the boobs get booby trapped…hell, boobs even get bitten off. Oh yeah. Shit gets pretty gnarly. And with this many women in their panties, you know there will be a good number of bimbos doing all the wrong things to bring us just the right amount of gore.
And the freakazoid killer rox.
DEATH ON SCENIC DRIVE (2017)
Death on Scenic Drive sets up such an intriguing, unsettling scenario; a young woman drives to an isolated house in the snowy country to house sit. It’s just her and a dog…and the hot redneck ginge next door, who she barely gives the time of day.
She almost immediately begins to hear noises like someone else is entering the house at night (yet the dog never barks). She finds child-like drawings of pentagrams. She walks around the house, drenched in eerie shadows, followed by wonky camera angles, and to the tune of eerie music. She has trippy nightmarish dreams of the hot redneck ginge coming into the house at night.
And then she starts to seemingly become possessed. Don’t even ask me what’s possessing her here…
This is pretty much a one-woman movie that is agonizingly repetitive…until the shit suddenly hits the fan! It starts so not cool with a horribly graphic and disturbing scene involving the dog before this film very briefly switches to a vicious slashers in the last few minutes!
I can’t even explain. Just trust me. The last 15 minutes or so definitely tickled my slasher funny bone.
THE PROMETHEUS PROJECT (aka: The Frankenstein Syndrome) (2010)
Why did so many of these films require me to sacrifice at least an hour of my life just to enjoy a brief, kick ass slasher sequence here and there?
The bright side with The Prometheus Project is that Tiffany Shepis stars and gets a meaty role she is rarely afforded, which really lets her show off her acting talents.
She plays a doctor who becomes part of an illegal stem cell research group attempting to regenerate tissue to help cure people of illnesses.
Things don’t go as planned, and after more than an hour of your life goes by with mostly scientists talking…and talking…and talking, one of their “Guinea pigs” loses his shit and starts to kill everyone in brutal and graphic ways. Finally. And he’s shirtless.
Such a shame it took so long to get to this point.
EVEN LAMBS HAVE TEETH (2015)
After a whole lot of lesbian innuendo while hanging out with their friends, two white suburban girls head into the backwoods to work at an eco farm so they can make money to splurge on a trip to New York City. Clearly they need to pay for their privileged liberal lifestyle.
And oh do they pay. They take an offer for a ride from two cute guys at a diner…and are soon chained up and being whored out to sleazy backwoods freaks in the woods. Sigh.
BUT, here’s the catch. Even Lambs Have Teeth is like I Spit on Your Grave if it actually had a fricking sense of humor.
That’s right. There’s nothing too disturbing here. At least…nothing we see. Everything is just disturbing enough in how it is implied. Very well handled.
And when the girls get free, these bitches rock! They hit up a hardware store for a weapon buying montage and then get glorious revenge on the ass holes that tortured them.
In fact, all the violence, brutality, and gore is saved for the bad guys, with plenty of humor thrown in just for the fun of it. Awesome.
