Ganja & Hess

This was the biggest head trip of a film I’ve seen since Altered States, and that’s a damn shame. There definitely needs to be more joyously strange films like this out there to blow the minds of unsuspecting cinema goers. I can’t even give you the general premise – a blaxploitation vampire movie – because that would just give you the impression that it was nonsense like Blacula or something, when it actually just exists on a strange cosmic plane all to itself.

The film opens with text explaining that, while living with a native tribe and exploring their culture, Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones, of Night of the Living Dead fame) was ritualistically stabbed in the heart three times, once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Ghost. After this, he could not die, nor could he be killed. That’s pretty heady stuff for a genre that’s normally little more than people with pointy teeth running around biting people and getting naked a lot. The film then follows him at home, now addicted to blood (tying it in with problems with 70s black culture, the film views it the same as any other drug addiction). The film rejects normal stereotypes, as he has no fangs, can travel around in the daylight, and normally gets his blood supply by stealing from hospitals rather than committing murders (though when a pimp and prostitute try to murder him, he is fine with utilizing them). Further, rather than the normal street level character one would find in a blaxploitation film, he’s an educated professor that lives in a mansion with his own servant. Bill Cosby may have made that seem acceptable for a black family in the 80s, but that was certainly a rarity for the times.

Eventually he meets, and falls in love with, Ganja, who comes to stay with him while looking for her husband. Her husband, she knows, was staying with Hess before he disappeared, but she doesn’t know is that her husband killed himself and Hess has been pragmatically keeping him on ice for a handy supply. Her reactions to Hess both before and after she discovers what has become of her husband, are very well done. I can’t reveal the ending or climax, but I will say that it ends in a unique manner perfectly befitting the rest of the movie.

And now that I’ve gone on about the plot for two paragraphs, let me explain that the film really isn’t about the plot. This is a movie that focuses heavily on religion, with him gaining his immortality through a dark religious ceremony, giving us a number of scenes at a black church, and featuring a soundtrack of spirituals and African tribal chanting. Even the unrevealed ending focuses deeply on this, and deals with a vampire’s relationship to God and Christianity in a much deeper and more intelligent way than the mere “touch of a cross burns them” scenario I’m used to dealing with. The film is also pretty slow paced, focusing more on the visuals and sound rather than a story, and is edited pretty loopily. Scenes jar against each other dischordantly, and the film’s sole real framing device, three title cues that tell us the various stages of his existence (“Addiction”, “Survival”, and “Letting Go”), doesn’t exactly go out of its way to explain things. It’s a surprisingly challenging film for a horror movie in general, but in particular for a vampire movie, and after one viewing it’s already earned a place as one of my favorites.

It’s disappointing, but unsurprising, that this isn’t a more well known film. It’s essentially an art house horror movie, and I can’t think of a one that’s all that popular, but it should be all the same. The 70s are renowned for being arguably the best decade for films in general, and that’s certainly just as true for horror movies as it was for dramas. Ganja & Hess may not quite be the Godfather of vampire movies, but at the very least it’s the Nashville of the genre.

Rating: *** ½

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Blood & Lace

And Midnight Video Week comes to an end with one of the best movies in the mix, giving us multiple deranged killers, some oddly brilliant music, and a home for orphans that’s even more horrid than the halfway house in The Halfway House (though with a tragic lack of lesbian sex and cameltoe). It even gives us not one, not two, but three surprise twists at the end, one of which was pretty blatantly obvious, though the other two did catch me a bit by surprise.

Blood & Lace (not to be confused with the Bava film Blood & Black Lace) opens with a POV shot of a killer creeping around the exterior of a house at night before sneaking in through a door, grabbing a hammer, and heading for the bedroom. Inside the bedroom, a man and a woman are sleeping, and we get a delightfully retarded moment as we see the door opening from inside the room, but as the identity of the killer must be kept a mystery, rather than a hand pushing the door open, we get the hammer, which I can only assume was also used to turn the knob. Naturally, both sleepers are quietly bludgeoned to death (rather than the normal creaming one would expect from such a scene, the most either can muster up is a sort of lustful moaning), and the house is burned down.

We then cut to a newly orphaned daughter (in her late teens, I guess, though she looks like a full adult), who now has to live in a house with a bunch of other orphans. This house, of course, is a big scam, as is shown when a boy tries to escape in the night and has his hand taken off when the groundskeeper throws a cleaver at him. If that’s not enough for you, then I feel I must add that there are a number of bodies of previous unruly orphans kept in a meat locker in the basement, and that Mrs. Deere, the master of the house, has a truly inspired speech about modern medical advances and how someday soon we will have conquered death through the dark power of cryogenics (well, not in those exact words, but you get the idea). Really, she’s doing everyone a favor by killing them and keeping them perfectly preserved.

This film is truly inspired in its badness. There are unfortunately parts where it drags a bit, and it’s not extremely well made or acted, but there’s so much delightful silliness contained within it that I can’t help but love it. I couldn’t help but grin, for instance, at how every last action sequence had overly dramatic music blaring like Captain Kirk was duking it out with a deadly alien. Or the spontaneous catfight that occurs when our young heroine finds that she has a rival for the affections of the theoretically hot orphan boy there. Or the film’s final line, which may not be on the level of “Nobody’s perfect”, but it certainly ain’t bad for a horror movie.

I have to say, while there weren’t any grand slam **** films in the bunch, I really dug most of the movies I got from my impulse purchases at Midnight Video. It’s a shame the place is shutting down shop at the end of the month, it was nice being able to grab some otherwise unavailable obscure horror films like Hunchback of the Morgue and Spider Labyrinth from them. If you’ve got the cash, I’d definitely recommend checking out their site and seeing what they have left in stock before they’re gone. You likely won’t be disappointed.

Rating: ***

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Death Weekend (a.k.a. The House by the Lake)

Well, as rape-revenge pictures go, this one has two things going for it: it at least managed to wait until the end of the film before it goes all the way into morally reprehensible territory, and unlike I Spit on Your Grave the filmmaking technique is fairly passable. That being said, this is a genre that relishes extremism more than filmmaking, so there’s two ways that one really has to judge this by.

On the filmmaking side, at least, the movie works better than most of what I’ve seen from the genre. The film follows a man and a girl he’s trying to get with as they go to spend a weekend at a lakehouse together, and run afoul of a gang of misfits that go on to torment and torture them both. This is done in a fairly unusual manner, for while most films like this portray the victims as young and innocent, here the man is a complete sleaze, caring only for his possessions, and lying to the girl and telling her there was going to be a big party at the lakehouse to get her down there. It does, however, make sure to include the required “villain that’s not really as bad as the others, except when he is” that we feel the need to have in every one of these films. I don’t know what that’s about. A) Why do we need to have one villains that we can half sympathize with, and B) how sympathetic is he expected to be when he goes around beating the girl, tearing apart the house, assaulting a cop, and cheerfully joining in in the killing of two old men who show up solely to provide early victims to keep the film moving along faster?

Still, the film is surprisingly restrained for the genre. The rape in question doesn’t occur until the final third of the film, is short, features no nudity, and ends badly for the rapist. Indeed, it’s so oddly filmed that it may well have not been a rape at all, but rather just the guy dry humping her with all their clothes on and nutting just from that. Hardly the sleaze you would expect from a genre that includes such “delights” as Night Train Murders and House on the Edge of the Park. As such this curiously manages to be both a better and a worse film than either one of them is.

I do confess to not being a very big fan of rape-revenge movies, despite having seen a startling number of them. Usually their efforts to bring something new to the table are something along the mentally vacant lines of Rape is a Circle making the rapist a woman. I’m not saying Death Weekend really brings anything new to the table, but at least it’s comparatively well filmed, and manages to go most of the film without being as morally vacant as most of its brethren (the ending is still atrocious, but I guess it was expecting too much to think we could make it through the entire film without a problem). It’s not a good movie, but it’s an alright one, and sometimes that’s all you can really ask for.

Rating: **

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Toxic Zombies

This film is a rarity among the videos I ordered from Midnight Video, as it’s the only one in the bunch that I could have also gotten a copy of from Amazon (hence the link at the end of the review). Also, much like yesterday’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, it manages to be consistently entertaining throughout its running time without ever managing to really differentiate itself from the pack at any point.

The story, at least initially, involves a clash between a group of hippies secretly growing marijuana on federal land, and two bloodthirsty federal agents trying to get them. After an initial failure to capture the hippies, they hit upon what seems like a perfect solution: crop dust the whole area with an experimental new poison to wipe out all of the marijuana, and if it turns out to be toxic to human life, hey, nobody’s supposed to on the land right then anyway, right? Naturally, there are Unforeseen Consequences, as the hippies doused with the poison are transformed into zombies, who then go on a rampage against everyone in the woods. As it should, this provides us with some nice moments, as when the zombies stumble upon a family camping out in the woods, and the dad immediately hightails it and leaves his family for dead. There’s also what has to be the single dumbest truck driver ever, who picks up the mom, crying hysterically, her clothes torn, starts driving her back to town, sees another person crouching down by the road, sees the mom start screaming at the sight of him and yell that he’s the one that came at her, and then parks and leaves the truck to see if the newcomer needs a ride too. Frankly, at that point you have to start wondering how he managed to live long enough to make an appearance in the film to begin with.

We do eventually get an actual hero, in the form of an EPA officer who occasionally patrols the region, and who stumbles across the grand cropdusting plot and the zombie hippies, and it becomes a showdown between him and the two agents who inadvertently created the zombies. This is made tough for the officer, as the feds are apparently trained specifically to shoot through people’s necks, doing so multiple times throughout the film, just to show off their marksmanship, I guess.

The directing is pretty generic, which can admittedly be a blessing, after the distracting visual styles of more recent films like See No Evil and Automaton Transfusion, so while it never excels it at least isn’t actively irritating. The pacing works well, keeping the various killings coming at a fairly steady clip so you never get bored. It needed a little bit extra to make it truly memorable, but as it is it’s entertaining enough for at least one viewing.

Rating: ** ½

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Blood on Satan's Claw

We’re at Day 2 of Midnight Video week, and we’re dealing with what is easily the most famous movie I got from them. Blood on Satan’s Claw is a staple of early 70s British horror, about a small village that becomes host to the rise of witchcraft after a demonic skeleton is uncovered. It doesn’t quite work perfectly, but it is an enjoyably moody enough thing.

The film opens in a field in 18th century or so England, where a young man and his plow have just accidentally dug up a skeleton that’s not completely human. Before he can get to his master, a judge that occasionally dabbles in smiting witches, and return to the scene, the skeleton has vanished, and soon an ever-growing collection of townsfolk is dabbling in Satan worship, and conducting human sacrifices for their dark lord. The group is led by a girl named (of course) Angel, who not only leads the band (mostly comprised of children and teens) in their murders, but who also strips down to try to seduce a reverend over to her side, and when she is unsuccessful, accuses him of rape and murder. She’s a good egg, that one.

While the film is entertaining enough, it never really manages to go far enough in any direction to really make it stand out. It thankfully doesn’t have the vile core to it that the similar film Witchfinder General did, but it’s also too slow paced to really garner any excitement up until the big battle at the end between the Satanists and the Christian army. There’s also surprisingly little blood or nudity, at least in my estimation – I had heard tell that there was quite a lot of both in the film, and so was a little disappointed that it didn’t have nearly the violence of Hunchback of the Morgue, and a comparable amount of nudity (possibly even less than the previous film). It does have a nice overall visual appeal, but that’s hardly uncommon for British horror movies of the time. After all, Hammer Films was still going strong when this movie came out.

Still, there’s enough quality moments in the film to make it worth at least one viewing. After all, how many films can you name where you see a mob, whipped up into an anti-witchcraft frenzy, grab a girl and toss her into a lake to see if she floats? Or where the leader of the Inquisition’s right-hand man is a large bald mute whose main contribution to the witch hunt is to point at a captured witch and go “Uh! Uh! Uh!” like he’s a bloodhound or something? Not too many, I’d wager.

Rating: ** ½

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Hunchback of the Morgue (a.k.a. Rue Morgue Massacres)

In celebration of not dealing with the Tomb of Terrors collection this week, I thought I’d indulge myself by spending the week reviewing rare horror movies that I got from the sadly soon-to-be-gone Midnight Video. First up is this weird little Paul Naschy gem, where he plays a hunchback that goes around acquiring bodies for his mad scientist friend in the hopes that the scientist’s experiments in creating artificial life will enable him to bring the hunchback’s love back from the dead.

If that sounds a bit similar to Frankenstein, well, it should, but the film diverges pretty severely, starting with how the bodies aren’t just acquired from graverobbing. While there are the obligatory scenes of that, the bulk of the physical specimens used are acquired fresh, with Gotho (Naschy) or the scientist murdering people for their work. There’s also the matter of the artificial life form the scientist is creating. While in Frankenstein the creation started and ended as a freakish, patchwork human, here we start with a single, overlarge cell in a jar that rapidly grows organs as it consumes more human prey until it grows large enough to escape the confines of its jar and must be locked up for the safety of the scientist. If all that sounds uninteresting to you, then why on Earth do you come to this blog?

It’s that kind of delightful over the topness that makes the whole film so fun to watch. Obviously Gotho and the scientist play things to the hilt, but they’ve enlisted everyone and everything in the film to join them in their madness. At one point, an exaggerated drunk is leaving a pub to go home and one of his friends bids him a fond farewell with the line, “Be careful, Hans, and don’t bump into the devil on your way home!” I’m sure you’ve all said similar things to your friends at the end of a get-together. There’s also a group of children near the beginning that see the hunchback and decide that the logical course of action is to start pelting him with rocks, as any normal children would do in such a situation. Even the animal life gets into the act, as on two different occasions Gotho is attacked by a swarm of rats that jump so high at him that they seem almost to have been flung through the air, before he fights them off with the natural enemy of the rat, a flaming torch.

There’s a fair amount of violence and nudity in the film, as one would expect from a Spanish horror movie from the 70s, and the look of all the different locations (when it’s not too damned dark to see them, at least) is quite nice. Like the rest of the films I’ll be reviewing this week, you’re going to have an uphill battle getting ahold of this, but if you should happen to find a place selling it, it will be well worth your money.

Rating: *** ½

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Wendigo

I will admit to being a little suspicious of this film at first, based on a combination of a cumulative Amazon score of 2 out of 5 and a general disenchantment with recent movies about big monsters hiding in the woods a la Sasquatch. Still, after seeing it listed on a list of great horror movies that nobody watches, I felt I had to at least get a used copy of it, and I’m very glad I did.

The film was made in 2001, but stylistically is largely quite similar to horror thrillers from the 70s. In the happy vein of movies such as Deliverance, it follows a happy family as they decide to spend a weekend out in the woods, only to run afoul on some villainous townies. While the father of the family (Jake Weber of Medium fame) deals with a local who’s resentful of where they’re spending their weekend, his son (Erik Sullivan of Malcolm in the Middle), after speaking to a local old Indian, becomes fascinated by the legend of the Wendigo, a shapeshifting spirit that devours people. It may be a bit of a misnomer to label this a horror movie, as the film largely leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not there actually is anything supernatural going on, or whether or not it’s all in the boy’s head (yes, they do take a fairly decisive stand at the end, but I won’t reveal which way it goes), but given how much he daydreams about the Wendigo attacking him I felt it fit.

It’s interesting, coming as it does on the heels of See No Evil and Automaton Transfusion, to see how the camerawork manages to be just as flashy in this film as in those two while actually working with the story rather than distracting from it. This is a pretty slow-paced film, and we get a lot of shots of the wilderness, but they and the music are so well done that they manage to draw us further into the film rather than bore us like they would in a lesser film. Writer-director-editor Larry Fessenden really did a superb job here, and while this is the first film of his I’ve seen, I hope it won’t be the last.

There’s a lot of great moments to the film, not least of which is the opening credits sequence. As the credits roll against a black screen, a series of children’s monster toys move on and off the screen, while the boy makes sound effects for them. It may not sound like much, and really, it isn’t, but it certainly got me in touch with my childhood and made me happy. There’s also a nice bit of understatedness to the film, as characters are witness to events that are shown to us without explicitly stating what happened, something that happens in almost every movie. For example, there’s one part where the wife is in the kitchen and goes to grab at the sugar, only to see that the sugar is leaking out of the bag. Leaving the bag, she goes across the room to see that there’s a hole in the window. Just form that, we’re able to piece together that someone had shot the bad through the window, but in most movies the director or producer would have felt the need to dumb things down and overexplain what had happened. I’m very grateful to this movie that it trusted me not to be an idiot.

This movie probably will not appeal to everyone. It’s slow paced, and doesn’t have much in the way of action. However, it’s smart, has characters that actually seem like real people rather than a parade of cliches that serve no purpose beyond dying, and has a curious hypnotic manner of drawing you further into the film. I have to believe there’s an audience for a film like this, otherwise why do I even have this blog?

Rating: *** ½

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Automaton Transfusion

I saw this movie as part of my ongoing efforts to see every last thing featuring zombies that looks anywhere close to non-terrible, and while by those fairly low standards this film certainly succeeds, it really doesn’t excel at all. It’s certainly not a bad movie, by any means, but it has all the same flaws See No Evil had: wonky directing, a paint-by-numbers story, and an ending that, to put it nicely, really sucks.

Here’s the situation: we’ve got a small town where all is not as it seems, which finds itself at the heart of a plague of fast moving zombies, the result of a government experiment gone horridly awry. At the center of this grim scenario are a group of high schoolers that all look suspiciously like they were in their 20s, that are all trying to find each other and escape the surrounding area to safety. I know, never been done before, right?

Still, these kinds of movies aren’t watched for their originality, they’re watched for their violence and humor. The film is fairly light on humor, per se, but there are some pretty nice bits of violence here and there. My personal favorite, which should surprise nobody that knows me, comes when a pregnant woman comes face to face with a zombie, who decides to helpfully alleviate her condition. There’s also a couple nice touches, like how these are the first zombies I’ve yet seen that actually sleep (though I did read about such things in Stephen King’s Cell). There’s also the added adrenaline rush that only comes with the onset of zombies running full speed at our heroes, and (for perhaps the first time ever) having no difficulty whatsoever with opening a door, all of which keeps the film moving along at a pretty steady clip.

Still, though, the unnecessarily flashy directing is a distraction more than anything, if not quite as bad as with See No Evil, and we get an ending that literally flashes a “To Be Continued” on the screen at us, something I haven’t had to deal with since The Matrix Reloaded. And I think we all remember how that all turned out. This isn’t a lousy movie by any means, but it’s something that could have been a lot smarter than it was.

Rating: **

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See No Evil

I had resisted seeing this film for some time, as a horror movie produced by the WWE and starring one of their top pro wrestlers as the villain seemed to give it a greater than average chance of failing. A surprising number of positive reviews of it convinced me to give it a try, however, and I have to admit, while not exactly a good movie, it isn’t half bad.

The plot is fairly standard slasher fare. A group of co-ed convicts agrees, in exchange for reduced sentences, to help clean up an old, decrepit hotel that happens to be the secret hidey-hole of a deranged killer (played by the WWE’s Kane) that enjoys cutting out women’s eyes for religious purposes. It’s a fairly standard film, though for what the genre requires, it’s largely done well. The setting is always crucial in films like this, and the old hotel here does have a nice amount of grunginess and creep to it (though, just for comparison’s sake, it’s not quite up to the level of the apartment complex in Tobe Hooper’s Toolbox Murders remake). Kane himself also looks appropriately badass, and spends a large chunk of the film attacking people with a big old meat hook on a chain. I wish we could have done without all the character explanation at the end, but I’d say he still qualifies as a quality entrant into the horror ranks.

In addition to the weak climax, there’s one main problem with the film, and that’s with the editing. For whatever reason (presumably having something to do with how it was produced by the WWE), the director felt he had to be all “hip” and “edgy” in the editing room, and so half the scenes in the movie felt like they were edited by someone with an extreme case of ADD. People aren’t allowed to just walk across the room, oh no. That would take far too long. Instead, they’ll take one step, then the camera will cut to them halfway across the room, whereupon they’ll take a second step, then the camera will again cut to them walking out the door. Why? Is the audience really expected to have such a short attention span that if a camera shot lasts longer than two seconds, they’ll pass out? I can see from IMDB that director Gregory Dark’s previous directing credits are pretty much all music videos and softcore porn, which does offer up a good amount of explanation for this, but an explanation is not an excuse, I says!

Still, that aside, the film does qualify as a pretty decent slasher movie. There’s actually a small effort made to give our cast of characters some measure of depth, at least moreso than with most films in the genre, so you actually do care some small amount when a few of them get killed. There’s also a character that is not far removed from a character in Bug, which was one of my favorite borderline horror movies of the past few years. I can't say which one, though, without running the risk of ruining part of the films’ endings. If you’re a slasher fan but have been avoiding this one because of its pro wrestling connection, you needn’t worry. This film will largely treat you right.

Rating: ** ½

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Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3

So here’s where the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series collapsed upon itself, never to return. The original film stands out in the world of horror as one of the scariest damn movies ever made, and, knowing he couldn’t top that, Tobe Hooper went for broke on the humor with the second film, making it a delightful horror comedy. This film, however, the first not made under his watchful eye, lacks the nerve to go in either of those directions, instead preferring to just kind of sit there and quietly stink.

The film follows a guy and a girl on their way through Texas, and after stopping at the required Awful Gas Station where they run into a young Viggo Mortensen (I guess starting a trend of the series showcasing eventual film stars that would continue into the next film with Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger) and the required Horrid Gas Station Attendant, who chases them to an unmapped road. If you’ve never seen this film before, you should already know where this is leading. Of course, they all run into the cannibalistic family from the first two films, and of course both Viggo and the gas station guy are connected to them, though I admit I didn’t quite expect the two additional comrades they acquire in their struggle. One is a survivalist that they almost drive into while fleeing from Leatherface, the most impressively charismatic of the family, and one is a young girl who fled from Leatherface in the film’s opening scene. She has such a small, useless role in the film I have to question why she wasn’t just killed right at the start.

I guess the biggest problem with this film is that every character in it is so far beyond stupid that their deaths would seem, if anything, a wasted effort. At one point, the two main characters have had their lives threatened twice already, and at least two of the last three people they’ve met have turned out to be crazy psychopaths, and so naturally when a man claiming to be a survivalist offers them unnamed pills to relax them they down them without question. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me and my hang ups about taking strange pills from strange men during life or death struggles, or maybe it’s just my aversion to what certainly seems to be an eagerness to do the most counterproductive action possible at any given moment. Then there’s the survivalist himself, who listens to the two talking about how there’s people trying to murder them, sees that their car has been attacked with a chainsaw, and then decides the best course of action is to go back onto the unmapped road and flag down help from the first car that passes by. Then there’s the girl from the beginning, who, after drawing Leatherface away from another victim, runs from him for all of half a minute and then just starts to roam the woods like she’s on a Sunday stroll. These are not people even interesting enough that you can be satisfied when they’re killed, whether they live or die you just feel kind of sad about the whole situation.

There’s also another pretty big problem involving the film’s rating. Originally rated an NC-17, it was pared down to an R for theatrical release. The DVD claims to have both the R rated and unrated versions, though when I watched the unrated version, not only did I notice nothing that would warrant anything more than an R, I noticed several moments where they cut away from the violence right before it got really graphic, leading me to the inescapable conclusion that the unrated version on the DVD is still edited. I hardly require gore to be entertained (hell, the first film was all about implying rather than showing, and I loved that), but when the film has little else to offer, it would be nice to not have the absence of graphic violence be so glaring in its omission.

I don’t know that I’ll ever find a horror franchise that didn’t fall apart somewhere along its path. Halloween held out surprisingly long, and I’ll always have a place in my heart for all of the Nightmare on Elm Streets, even the one where he kills someone with the Power Glove. This series did not last as long as them, obviously. I haven’t seen the most recent one (the prequel that was intended to explain how the family got the way they are), but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all the others now, and every one from this film on was ass. Stop after the second film, there’s no reason to tarry.

Rating: * ½

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Hellraiser: Inferno

I think this may be my favorite film in the Hellraiser series. Made after the franchise had fallen into straight to video hell, it largely eschews the series’ apocalyptic overtones in favor of telling a grim detective story. It’s not really like any of the other films in the series (at least of the ones that I’ve seen), and that definitely works in its favor.

The film follows a corrupt detective that’s trying to solve a series of murders orchestrated by a man known only as the Engineer, who seems to be specifically targeting people that the detective knew, starting with a prostitute he had slept with. Of course, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to fans of the series who eventually gets involved in these shenanigans, or that a mysterious puzzle box would present itself at the first crime scene, but it’s nicely done in how subtly they’re dealt with. There’s no screaming in your face demons here (even though I admittedly enjoyed the third film in the series for just that reason – what can I say, my reasoning skills are not without their inconsistencies), just a man and his own personal demons, and how he allows them to slowly destroy him. Of course, there are the required Clive Barker moments, like how his initial leads to the Engineer take him to a gay bondage club, because why not, and there’s always the requisite punishing chains that always accompany Pinhead and the rest of the Cenobites, but these elements are all very surprisingly held in check for most of the movie, for the most part only used to wrap everything up and explain what exactly has been going on.

I of course will not say what is going on, as that would be unfair to the movie, and since I try not to spoil the endings of movies that I hate, you can rest assured that I won’t do it to one that I actually quite liked. Indeed, given how most of the movies in the series, at least from what I’ve seen (parts 1-3 and this one), don’t really connect to each other aside from the Cenobites and the puzzle box, you could easily make this the first or only Hellraiser film you ever see, and it won’t leave you lost.

As I said in my review of the third film, I’m really not a big fan of this series. Compared to the Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street series, this one is definitely second rate. However, despite this film’s occasional flaws (after all, despite all my championing of its understatedness, it’s still a Hellraiser film and still goes retardedly over the top at a few points), I would give it an unreserved recommendation as the best film the series has to offer. If you were thinking of trying the series out, definitely give this one a whirl.

Rating: ***

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Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth

Big fans of the Hellraiser series may be a little surprised, even disheartened, to find that I actually like this film more than the original. This movie gets pretty universally dumped on by fans of the series for being really campy, but frankly, while it’s no great shakes, I do still prefer the camp and over-the-top hysterics of this film to the overwhelming dullness of the first film.

The film revolves around a large sculpture acquired by a rich, violent prick that seems to be curiously made out of Cenobites, the demonic villains of the series. After bedding some ditzy chick and then trying to kick her to the curb immediately afterward, he is surprised to see the statue come to life and murder the girl, and then talk to him about a deal wherein he will continue bringing girls back there for the statue to feed upon, in exchange for power or something. Of course, he eventually brings back the wrong girl, who manages to overpower him and make her own deal with the statue, and the statue of course eventually gets enough victims to bring it to roaring full life, whereupon a gang of demons descends upon the city, but frankly, these are obvious plot elements that I’m personally quite fine with.

Let’s be honest here, what would you rather see in a movie? Would you like a movie that’s got one monster in it that spends the entire film hiding in a room in someone’s house waiting for some unlucky people to intrude on him? Or would you rather have a whole group of monsters charging through the streets going on a killing spree while the main characters all run around screaming and panicking and over-dramatic music thunders all around? I know which one I’d go for. The first movie was boring as hell, with nothing really happening for most of its running time. This movie, on the other hand, tries to throw everything it can think of at us, up to and including a Cenobite that fires horrid-looking CG discs at people to kill them, like the alien in I Come in Peace. This may not be the best film ever made, it may not even be a good one, but it is a decent film, and after way too many atrocious budget pack movies from the Tomb of Terror collection this week, I’m willing to accept decent for now.

Rating: **

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To Become One

To Become One (no doubt named after my friend Xavier’s favorite Spice Girls song) is a surprisingly decent horror movie from Australia (or possibly New Zealand – opinion on IMDB is a little divided on this). It transforms itself halfway through, playing more like an old 70s grindhouse style film than a straight-to-DVD-budget-pack piece of crap like most of the films in the set have been. It’s a much appreciated change of pace from what I’ve largely been dealing with up to this point, making it the only film really worth watching on this entire disc.

The film starts playing out like a standard slasher movie, with our heroine seeing a man in an old gas mask murder her mother, then a year later finding her friends stalked and murdered one by one by him. In an inspired decision, they flee their town in favor of hiding in an abandoned cabin out in the middle of nowhere, where there’s clearly no chance for a mad killer to find and hurt them. Shortly after this master plan fails, though, the film takes a turn for the weird and turns more into a Don’t Look in the Basement style movie, as our heroine is captured and locked up in a creepy clinic where a mad doctor is experimenting on people. I won’t reveal what exactly gets revealed there, partly because it wouldn’t be fair to the film, and partly because it’s not really that exciting, but it still brings things above the rest. It’s a different kind of stupid, I guess is what I’m getting at. It’s a stupid that entertains pretty well, rather than the stupid I’ve been getting that just makes me want to claw my eyes out in frustration at watching such drivel.

I know I said before that all I needed was one fun movie on this disc to keep my every other week rotation in effect, but I’m still going to take an extra long breather from this collection. I need to recharge my batteries a bit with some movies that aren’t, you know, total garbage, or good mostly in comparison to total garbage, and getting maybe one movie out of four that really fits that bill is not really enough for me, you know? Sorry to anyone in my devoted fan base who was curious as to how this set was gonna play out, but you’re going to be waiting an extra few weeks/months for that. Though to turn this back around to our main review, To Become One? Not too shabby, you could do much worse than it. And if there had only been a movie coming up later in the set titled Spice Up Your Life, I'd be all over it.

Rating: **

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From Venus

I should point out right now that this film doesn’t deserve such a high rating, but given that it’s slightly better than Flesh Eating Ghouls From Outer Space, and I overrated that one just on the basis of comparison to other recent films in this awful collection, I felt I might as well do the same here. So yes, if you decide to watch this film, do so with the understanding that it’s a bad movie. Just make sure that you also do so with the understanding that it still easily outshines two thirds of the other movies in the whole set.

The film, utilizing a similar framing contrivance to that in The Neverending Story, has a man receive a mysterious package on Halloween night that contains, among other things, a science fiction comic containing the story From Venus. The bulk of the film is a rendition of the story he’s reading, with the occasional cuts back to the guy reading so that he can freak out at what he’s reading and annoy us all like the stupid child in Neverending Story did. The story itself concerns two soldiers who arrive at a small town in search of one of the soldiers’ sister, who has fallen in with a cult of priestesses with magical powers. It’s now up to them and one local to rescue her and stop the cult before they can do whatever it is they are hoping to accomplish. Take over the world, or throw us all into eternal darkness, something like that no doubt.

The film is surprisingly tame; outside of some moderate profanity, it could almost warrant a PG rating. It’s poorly made, woodenly acted, and lamely directed, but it seems sincere in its desire to entertain, and that alone puts it a leg above awfulness like Rape is a Circle. There’s not really any particularly good moments that I can point to, but there are some parts to the film that are better than the rest. For instance, the priestesses of the cult are described as being siren-like in their overwhelming beauty, which makes it a little off-putting when they show up looking like regular strippers from some dive, which, let’s be honest, they probably were. There’s also the curious introduction by the director before the film proper, where he pretty much outright says the film’s not that great and he needs a drink in him just to try to get us prepared for it. It’s a rather refreshing bit of honesty, and one that few directors would be willing to offer up. However, a couple amusing moments does not make up for the fact that the film is just badly made on pretty much every level. If the final film in this set (To Become One) isn’t a clear step up, and I doubt it will be, then I’m taking a break from the collection for a while. I need more than a week to recharge from this nonsense.

Rating: * ½

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Flesh Eating Ghouls From Outer Space

It is a definite mark of lowered standards that I am rating this film so high, but after such a lengthy string of terrible films from this set, I’m just happy to be finally watching another one that is nonawful, and which has the added bonus of being quite short, clocking in at a mere 18 minutes. It also has a fairly unique visual appeal, having the honor of being the first (and almost certainly only) puppet show in the entire collection.

Basically a mild parody of old science fiction monster movies (or at least in the same vein as the space alien movies from the Simpsons), this follows the bloody invasion of a group of deadly alien monsters that terrorize the world while everyone sings. We mostly focus on the monsters themselves, as the human characters tend to appear and get gobbled up pretty quickly. There’s a trailer trash couple that provide the first meal for our two aliens (there might possibly be more, but only two ever show up at once), a mother and daughter that obsess over Twinkies, and a dashing news reporter out to expose the invasion as a government cover-up. None of them matter, really, except to provide further victims, but they serve their purpose for the time they’re all given.

I don’t know what else to say about this, really. It goes in, does its own thing, and then leaves before I can really care one way or the other. It’s certainly not “good”, per se, nowhere close to the level of a Meet the Feebles or Twisted Puppet Theater (to grab at the only other demented puppet shows I’ve seen), but it’s better than a lot of the films in this set, so at least it’s got that.

Rating: * ½

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Three Can Keep a Secret

On my last outing with the Tomb of Terrors collection, I was witness to pain the likes of which no mortal man should have to bear. The films found on the fourth disc of this box set were a complete abomination, and I seriously debated just leaving the set semi-permanently, to return to it when I had run out of halfway decent films to watch. As we can see here, I did not follow through on that idea. As we can also see, I should have.

Three Can Keep a Secret is an exercise in boredom, giving us a group of college friends – two guys and a girl, whose names I didn’t bother to write down – as they go through life drinking, hanging out, having generic college debates, and doing nothing of any real interest. Then about halfway through the movie, the girl gets date-raped, one of the guys gets drunk and murders her rapist, the three all decide to bury the body out in a desert somewhere, and a detective shows up to investigate. It’s kind of a double-edged sword, really, this film: it’s actually filmed and acted with some small degree of competence, and while clearly not good by any means, there’s obviously been an actual effort made, which should give it a leg up on its entertainment competition in this collection. However, the story is almost nonexistent and what little there is takes so long to get moving that the only real note the film hits is one of unrelenting dullness. It moves slower than that mountain moved trying to get to Mohammed, slower than a dentist is when drilling a tooth. It is not a very swift film.

There’s also a real problem with the directing. The camera will not stay still at all, constantly swirling around the cast, jerking around, and rapidly zooming in and out as though the director is hoping to get noticed by the producers of The Shield. Not only is it just distracting, but when the camera is moving a great deal faster than the film itself is, it really just adds to the overall desire for something to just frigging HAPPEN ALREADY. And then nothing does. If this is what I can be expecting from the remaining films on this disc (quality-wise of course, not the randomly throwing a crime drama onto a horror set part), I will indeed be taking that hiatus from the set for a while after this week. I just got a new job, I don’t need the grief.

Rating: ½ *

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The Expedition

I didn’t realize it when I ordered this film, but it’s by Brain Damage Films, the same company that brought us Sabbath. Between the two films, I think there’s more than enough grounds to bring everyone employed there up on war crimes charges.

Filmed in what appears to have been an afternoon, The Expedition follows an ill-fated documentary crew as they go to an abandoned mental asylum to try to document some form of paranormal activity there. Tragically, out of the five people that went in there, four of them made it back out safely, forcing the world to deal with their nonsense for years to come. The movie, with its “based on a true story” idiocy, is clearly trying to recapture the success of the Blair Witch Project, and fails to do so pretty spectacularly. With the exception of a few horrid “dramatic reenactment” scenes at a police station interspersed throughout to try to give the film some tiny level of structure, it’s all filmed by the actors themselves, giving us 107 minutes that is almost nothing but them wandering around the asylum lost, as nothing happens. One of them is separated from the group early on, and they spend the rest of the film wandering around looking for him, without anything ever really happening. There’s not big shock ending, there’s no body, there’s no scares of any kind, just roaming around with a handheld camera and cursing.

And by the fucking way, let’s talk about all that fucking profanity in this fucking movie. The main fucking character, who’s fucking also the fucking director and fucking writer, uses the word fuck like it’s the only fucking word he fucking knows. It’s like fuck, yo. I’m not fucking shy about cursing, believe you fucking me, but at some fucking point it stops being fucking effective and just fucking starts being crass. And the fact that while he’s constantly cursing and saying nothing of any substance, he sounds uncannily similar to that idiotic bear lover from Grizzly Man does not help.

It’s hard to really mount a proper criticism of this film that doesn’t also sound like I’m criticizing Blair Witch, which I loved. I realize that my description of the plot sounds virtually identical, just with the location switched from ‘woods’ to ‘abandoned asylum’, but believe me when I say that while Blair Witch was able to take that concept and make it work incredibly well, this is more of a cautionary tale as to how such a concept could be hopelessly butchered. This company needs to be nuked from orbit. It’s the only way we’ll be safe from more of their films.

Rating: Zero stars

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Zombie Island Massacre

You know, I really don’t ask for too much here. When I watch a movie with the name Dracula in it, I do so with some expectation of seeing a vampire named Dracula killing people and drinking their blood. When I see a film titled Cannibal Apocalypse, I’d better see some damn cannibals tearing some shit up. And when I see a movie with the word “zombie” in the title, at the very least I expect there to be actual zombies in the damn movie.

So yeah, not to ruin the big late-act surprise, but there are no zombies to be found in this film. What we get instead are drug dealers posing as zombies to frighten the natives of the unnamed Caribbean island the film is set on so they can get right to the business of murdering all the non-native members of a Caribbean tour. If that seems like a somewhat sketchy plan to you, then I have to confess that it did to me as well. I guess that’s why we’re not successful drug dealers. But anyway, that grave disappointment aside, the film is about the same overall level of quality as Blades (though I’m giving it a lower score because I’m pissed at its deception), giving us a pleasantly watchable film that doesn’t do a damn thing to excel or make itself noticeable.

Well, it’s noticeable in one way. It’s got a score by Harry Manfredini, patron saint of horror music, which means that whenever someone gets attacked or killed, the music sounds almost identical to the music when Jason Voorhees murders someone in Friday the 13th. He gets ragged on a lot for imitating his past success so much, but here he mostly tries to make different music, and so we learn that he was only able to make one really effective score, and so had to keep reusing it to put bread on his table. Seriously, when he’s not ripping off his old stuff, it’s as generic a score as they come.

The film itself, so far as the Troma collection it comes on goes, is definitely the most violent of the three, and is the only one (if I’m remembering correctly) to have any nudity, even if it’s only brief. It also has the most completely bizarre moments, like a Caribbean tour that includes letting the tour guests watch an actual voodoo ceremony, or the characters, now lost and running from what appears to be monsters but which is actually just some stupid drug dealers, randomly find a mansion in the middle of the jungle, and figure that there can only be friendly, helpful people inside. I suppose this next one isn’t that implausible, but I would maintain that it’s still a tad curious to find an empty mansion in the middle of a freaking jungle that has a bunch of working light switches in it. Sure, it’s possible that there could have been a generator somewhere nearby that somehow managed to survive constant swarms of jungle animals deciding to explore it and blowing themselves up, but how likely is that? Really now.

I suppose this is probably the best film in the set and all, but that is a very sliding scale, and it should not be getting a pass on its awful lying title. If you go into it knowing that there’s not actually any zombies to be had, it may work a bit better for you than it did for me. However, and I don’t know that I can stress this enough, you still should not be going into it at all. This whole collection is one big dog.

Rating: *

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Blood Hook

I was debating whether or not to tag this one as a comedy as well, based on the sheer premise of someone going around killing people at a lake using a giant novelty fishing hook, but given that the film itself is just a pretty straight-laced slasher flick I couldn’t really justify that. Regardless, this is the second movie in the Troma Triple B-Header collection (the first being yesterday’s Blades and the last being tomorrow’s deeply disappointing Zombie Island Massacre), and the reason I got the collection in the first place, as I had seen it in the horror section at Livingston’s video rental place and had always wanted to watch it. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

The film follows a group of vaguely twentysomething friends as they go on vacation to a lake down south just in time for a big fishing tournament (sadly, Zombie Island Massacre doesn’t have a tournament to draw all three movies in the collection together), only for them to be stalked and killed off one by one (as well as some locals) by a crazed killer with a giant ridiculous looking fishing hook. I would say it’s unique, but in the film’s efforts to throw us off the scent as to whomever is committing the murders it shows us no less than three different characters using them, which strikes me as a tad curious. I don’t fish, so I may just be oblivious to some overwhelming need for giant hooks when hunting for swordfish or tiger sharks or giant sentient lawnmowers or something, but I have to assume that in a regular lake like the one everyone in the film is at such a device is just overkill.

The mystery of it is a bit silly, as we get two suspects right off the bat that both seem so overtly crazy that you know instantly that neither one can actually be the killer. When the killer is revealed, it’s kind of ho-hum, as he’s the only person left that it possibly could have been. I guess that’s as it should be, since the film itself is pretty ho-hum, with a collection of characters that are fairly unlikable, but who are also not jerkish enough to give us at least the small benefit of hating them. They’re just…there, much like the rest of the movie.

In fact, the movie is pretty poor enough and brings us so little that I came close to just slapping the garbage tag on it and calling it a day. I will say that what stopped me is the climax, where our hero, enraged at the deaths of his friends, demands that the required Crazy Old Guy In A Horror Movie teach him how to properly cast so that he can take the fight to the killer, and then later that night showing a grueling fight as they each land their goofy giant hooks into each other’s chests and grimace a lot. The likely inadvertent humor coming from that made sure that the film at least ended on a moderately high note, and gave me at least some reason to enjoy it.

It should be noted for those of you who like their films dark or edgy or what have you that this, as was Blades before it, is a pretty clean movie. There’s no nudity, little blood, and little profanity (at least that I noticed), to the point where I have to believe it borders on a PG rating. I am amazed that it has an R rating, and must therefore assume that whoever rated it just saw it was a horror movie and automatically slapped an R rating on it without really watching it, because it’s as mild as cool ranch. It was also briefly (though no longer) listed on IMDB as part of the Bottom 100, and I think that’s a tad harsh. Yes, it sucks, but I’ve seen much worse films just this year, to my great shame. So if you accidentally bought this collection thinking that Troma would never steer you wrong (and really, you should know better), don’t worry too much. Every film in the set is at least watchable, though this one is definitely the weakest of the three. Just make sure you’re still watching at the climax, because that’s when all the good moments happen.

Rating: *

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Blades

I’m sure a good movie might have very well been made out of this premise: Jaws transplanted onto a golf course, with a sentient, man-eating giant lawnmower as the killer instead of a shark. Unfortunately, a good movie was not made out of this premise, as instead we got a movie that was so obsessed with aping a classic that it forgot to include any jokes beyond that of the main premise.

The movie, to its “credit”, starts out looking as though it’s going to be parodying another movie, namely Caddyshack. Despite the occasional off-screen murder (beginning with an opening pair of young lovers that separate themselves from their group in the woods), what we mainly get near the beginning is the setup to a local golf tournament complete with wacky pros and nervous club employees. It doesn’t focus, at least at first, on openly aping Jaws, and instead exists in its own little world of harmless fluff. Of course, once we get about a third of the way through the film, it kicks into overdrive and essentially presents us with Jaws, but on a golf course instead. If you think I’m repeating myself here, I am, but I do it because I cannot stress enough just how slavishly this movie imitates its predecessor. We get scenes like the one where a smaller lawnmower is captured and destroyed, and the two main characters tear it open to see what it had eaten, one where the owner of the golf course demanding that the people need their tournament and so the course will stay open, regardless of safety concerns, and one where they try to track it by firing harpoons attached to bales of hay at it. If all this sounds hysterical to you, then by all means, you are this film’s target audience and should get it posthaste. It comes with two other movies on one DVD (plus an unskippable three-way intro by Lloyd Kaufman), so it’s a bargain, really.

That this movie is essentially just a remake of Jaws with some mild – very mild – parody thrown in should be understood by now. What I may not have made clear is in how badly it screws up its mimicry or those classic scenes from Jaws. One could say that while Jaws was like Hitchcock’s Psycho, this film is more like Gus Van Sant’s. Sure, it’s watchable enough, but when you’ve got a much superior original right there for you to watch instead, what is the point of watching this one at all? You know, unless you need to review a movie every day for your blog, but outside of that, come on. It's like those recent big movie spoofs (though admittedly somewhat better) like Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans, where they assume that the proper way to parody a movie scene is to recreate it exactly, then have one of the characters fart a lot. I wouldn’t have seen this myself, if not for how Blood Hook was on the same disc (you know, if you were curious as to which movie I’d be doing tomorrow), and I have a strong feeling I’ll have forgotten of its very existence within a few months.

Rating: * ½

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Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

So here it is, the film where the Halloween series comes apart at the seams. While the franchise had wobbled a bit with the fourth installment, here’s where it really just fell to pieces, giving us a group of Keystone Kop wannabes complete with their own goofy theme music, a vast number of scenes of a little girl panicking or screaming or, often, both, due to her mental connection with Michael Myers, and a mysterious stranger in black who is not explained at any point in the film.

The movie opens at the climax of the last film, with Michael on the losing end of a shootout with the police at a very stagey looking graveyard, and narrowly escaping death by explosion. Near death, he is taken in by a kindly mountain man who slowly nurses him back to health, until we get the “1 Year Later” notice, at which Michael’s Halloween bloodlust causes him to rise up, kill his kindly benefactor, and make his way back to the town where his kid sister is still living. His sister, we learn, is now at a mental asylum, having not spoken a word since the previous film. However, now that Michael’s killswitch has been thrown back on, each time he goes to murder someone she suddenly gets all wide-eyed and starts convulsing, which at first would seem like a case of extreme overacting, until you realize that she’s opposite Donald Pleasance and nothing short of pitching fits every couple minutes will make her noticeable. Eventually she does start talking again, which quickly starts to make us nostalgic for when she wasn’t, but by then we’re racing toward the climax and To Be Continued ending, so it’s not that terrible.

I should say that there are some nice parts to the film, before I make this sound too much like I’m just an endless complainer. Donald Pleasance is his usual brilliant self, as one would expect, and just gets more and more insane with each successive film. There’s a really nice chase scene near the halfway mark where Michael’s sister is left alone in a building when someone comes after her, chasing her down into the boiler room. The ending to this sequence is a complete letdown, but up until then it’s quality stuff. There’s also a nice bit of work at a barn toward the end with some frolicking teens that we know is just not going to turn out happily, and in addition to being one of the scarier parts of the film, it also has a line that was later sampled by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, which I was much happier than I really should have been to hear.

Despite all that, though, this represents an unmistakable nosedive in quality for the series, and one which the films never recovered from. The only one that I have yet to see now is part 6, which is supposed to explain who the mysterious man in black that comes to Michael’s rescue here, and why we had to focus in on his goofy mystic tattoo, but from what I’ve heard that one’s even worse than this. If you’re a die hard slasher fan, this has just enough good moments in it to make it worth your while, but everyone else should keep their distance.

Rating: * ½

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