It seems like almost every week I sit here and prepare myself to tell you about the latest Alien ripoff I’ve seen, and now…wait, didn’t we just have this conversation? I’m not honestly sure that this makes for the greatest double bill with The Terror Within, as not only are both films bad (though Dead Space is clearly superior), but both are shameless ripoffs of the same damn movie (okay, this one’s a remake of Forbidden World, but Forbidden World itself was a bit of an Alien clone), to the point where they have almost identical plots. At least this one’s set in outer space, though, so points for that.
The film stars Marc Singer, who as everyone knows is the Goddamn Beastmaster, as the captain of a spaceship whose idea of r & r is to lean back in his chair and kick his feet up while wearing only a speedo. “Sadly”, his rest is interrupted by a distress call from a nearby research station that’s under threat from what starts out as a deadly virus, but which quickly turns out to be the birth of an alien monster that quickly grows larger than any of the humans at the research station. Now, Singer has to try to stop the monster, as it stalks the station and kills the researchers one by one, before he becomes its next victim.
There are a great many ways director Fred Gallo was able to make this better than The Terror Within was. The most important, and the one I am most grateful for, is that it’s much shorter, clocking in at a lean, mean 70 minutes. First-time filmmakers, take note: a 70 minute running time is nothing to be ashamed of for your debut film, particularly if you’re making a cheapo genre film. If you’re reading through your script, and you’re uncertain as to whether or not you have enough interesting material for a 90 minute film, that means you don’t, so start trimming the fat. Of course, there’s no real guarantee that cutting it down by twenty minutes is going to make the film good, but it certainly isn’t likely to make it worse, now is it?
There are other aspects of this film that are superior to Terror Within, such as Singer’s presence. While I obviously enjoyed George Kennedy in Terror, he was only a supporting character and died stupidly, leaving us to deal with the guy that was imitating Michael Biehn and the girl whose name I never learned as our non stars. The Beastmaster, on the other hand, is just effortlessly charismatic and action star-y. Just watch him in the trailer below; you could buy a car from that man, you just know he’d treat you right. The film is also somewhat better lit -- while it’s still a fairly dark film, you can at least see what’s going on at all times, and I can’t stress enough how much it benefits a film when you can actually watch it. The monster’s a bit of a wash, though. It’s got a more interesting design than the one in Terror, but was clearly unwieldy, as rather than seeing a guy in a monster suit running around, we’re largely just limited to close-ups of its head moving around, and cuts to frightened reaction shots of the poor humans in its path. This is what happens when function tries to follow form.
I feel rather conflicted here. This is still a very bad movie, but The Terror Within set the bar so low that I want to praise it at the same time, as it takes the same basic story and visibly improves on it. I’ll just say this instead. If you’re a big (and I mean somewhat obsessive here) fan of lousy no budget science fiction from the 80s, then this movie should hold some appeal for you. The rest of you should probably look elsewhere.
Rating: * ½
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Dead Space
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
The Terror Within
It seems like almost every week I sit here and prepare myself to tell you about the latest Alien ripoff I’ve seen, and now here’s another one for me to share with you all. This is another of Shout! Factory’s recent Roger Corman releases, on a double bill DVD with Dead Space (which I guess I’ll be reviewing tomorrow), and it’s almost eerie how little effort was involved in its creation.
We’re in the future and most of the world has been wiped out by some man-made plague. We center on a small group of survivors led by George Kennedy that live in an underground bunker out in the desert somewhere (ideal for a post-apocalyptic film, as it greatly reduces the chance of a car driving by and wrecking the shot), as they venture out of their lair in search of food, finding both some monsters (called gargoyles) and a pregnant woman that’s somehow survived the plague without the vaccine those in the bunker had taken. Of course, as anyone who’s seen Alien can expect, it’s actually a gargoyle baby, and when it comes time for her to give birth, it tears its way out of her belly (spraying blood all over the medical staff) and skeedaddles into the air vents. After that, it’s just a matter of hunting and being hunted, and preparing various weapons (including, yes, a flamethrower) to take down the abruptly adult gargoyle that’s now in there with them.
So let’s see: we’ve got a monster that impregnates other species with its young (though these monsters admittedly eschew the facehugger-style monsters in favor of just raping the women), a tiny crew of people in a confined, dingy metallic area with poor lighting, a monster that goes from being infant-sized to full adult in about an hour, lots of hiding in air vents, and a black guy trying and failing to stop it with a flamethrower. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone else? I didn’t think so, because this is the most original film I’ve seen since Snakes on a Train.
Of course, a lack of imagination isn’t always enough to kill a movie, so let’s get to the other problems. First, there’s the rubber suit design of the gargoyles themselves, which look like the creature on the cover of the Neon Maniacs DVD but with a crocodile snout (I haven‘t actually seen Neon Maniacs, so I can‘t really say if the monsters in that look like they do on the cover or not -- though given that it came out three years before this film, I have to assume it‘s more than coincidence). We also have the sheer delightfulness of how director Thierry Notz seemingly decided to disguise his inability to make an exciting action scene by shrouding the film in so much darkness that you can barely make out what’s going on half the time (this was a frequent occurrence back in the 80s, particularly among first time filmmakers like Notz who apparently didn’t realize just how much lighting they needed in order for their scenes to actually be visible). The bare bones lighting is kind of like today’s shaky cam action movies in how it renders the film impossible to follow at times. This means a good deal of the money shots of the gargoyle killing people are also buried in shadow, though the ones that we can see easily tend to be pretty lazy and uninspired, so I guess it evens out.
I’d also try to criticize the acting, but I have an unwarranted amount of love for George Kennedy due to a misspent youth involving constantly rewatching all the Naked Gun movies and Police Squad! You’ll never get me to find fault with him, so don’t even try. I can’t even criticize the male lead, played by Andrew Stevens of Night Eyes 3 fame, as he spends the whole movie trying his hardest to look like Michael Biehn did in The Terminator, for no discernable reason, and so I assume it was done specifically to confuse us and make us think the movie couldn’t possibly be ripping off Alien when it’s clearly ripping off Terminator instead.
This is not the kind of movie one watches by themselves unless they either have a very masochistic streak in them, or they are concerned the average ratings on their movie blog are skewed too high. It’s bad in just about every way possible, and is perhaps the worst Alien clone I’ve yet seen. I trust Dead Space will turn out better, but I’ll keep you posted either way.
Rating: *
Monday, October 18, 2010
Feeding Frenzy
This is exactly what a low budget horror movie should be like. It’s the newest film by the guys at Red Letter Media, who have risen to some measure of internet fame from their video series critiquing the Star Wars prequels. With Feeding Frenzy, they have shown that, given a budget less than 1% of the first half of Phantom Menace, they can make a much better movie.
The film, which cheerfully advertises itself as an homage to “Critters, Ghoulies, and all the other films that ripped off Gremlins,” features the villainous Mr. Plinkett (Rich Evans) of the Star Wars reviews as the owner of a hardware store that also has a side gig killing hookers. His employees have begun to suspect something is the matter, particularly after he destroys the security tape from Monday night. Refusing to bow down to any of their demands for answers, he instead unleashes an army of little rubber monsters he’d been keeping locked up in the store’s basement. The monsters, well-trained little scamps that they are, immediately begin hunting down all the store’s customers and eating them, which any retail employee can agree is only a good thing.
The main thing one notices about the movie is that it’s so damn funny. Much like Gremlins 2, it focuses on the comedy first and the blood second (though frequently both at once), which anyone who’s seen their videos on Youtube can agree was a good choice. I would compare the film to the works of Broken Lizard, except this is a great deal more successful than their horror comedy Club Dread. It’s the sort of film where girls find they are in serious need of some caulk, where hardware employees need to wear Hazmat gear when cleaning “tomato sauce” off of the floor, because it’s probably contaminated with AIDS, and where a middle aged Russian woman goes off to fist herself in celebration at her husband being eaten.
The movie moves along at a pretty fast clip, too. It makes the mistake of letting its only weak scene open the film (when Plinkett has his fun with a prostitute, who lets him know she charges extra for the handicapped), but once the rest of the cast arrives it doesn’t stop zipping along until the end credits. Which is not to say that everything’s rushed, mind you; there are, after all, a few scenes where characters just stare at each other in uncomfortable silence just to sell a joke. There’s simply no part in which the film stops being interesting, which is generally something of a rarity for a zero-budget horror movie (So Mort It Be is the only thing close out of the thirty-some movies I’ve so far seen in the Tomb of Terrors collection, and even it drags a bit at times), even one that’s mainly a comedy.
This holiday season, horror fans should be happy to find a movie this entertaining showing up. The past month has seen several quality horror titles getting DVD releases, and while the bigger theatrical releases like The Wolfman, The Crazies, and A Nightmare on Elm Street may not have been all that good, at least the less famous titles this year seem to have largely kicked ass. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you order yourself a copy of this.
Rating: *** ½
P.S. While Amazon does not have the film available for purchase, you can order yourself a copy here.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
The Deadly Spawn
If there’s ever a low budget monster Hall of Fame, the creatures from the Deadly Spawn absolutely deserve to be among the first inductees. On a budget of roughly twenty five grand, Douglas McKeown and company crafted some of the greatest looking monsters in film history, easily besting the lame CG monsters we often get in films today. Seriously, go check out, say, the monsters from the Underworld movies, and then come to this film, and tell me which look better to you.
This is a good thing, since the film operates on more of a premise than a plot. The story: aliens crash on earth, initially looking like large tadpoles with lots of teeth, and just growing more and more the longer they stay on the planet. Enter a small, relatively peaceful New Jersey family, whose cellar the alien fiends set up shop in, and who wind up getting chewed on a lot. The End.
So yeah, on paper it doesn’t really look like anything particularly special, but it’s simply a very fun, fairly gory 80s monster movie, in the grand tradition of the old 50s monster movies. The main character is a young kid, raised on such movies, who creates his own monster masks and is surprisingly well-equipped to deal with this onslaught. Somewhat less well-equipped are the boy’s parents, but hey, someone had to get eaten, right?
The eating, by the way, is easily the best part of the film, as it should be. Most movies like this, the actual violence is almost non-existent, or looks like shit. Not here. These bastards go around eating people’s heads, invading a vegetarian party full of old ladies (one of the best set-pieces in all of horrordom), and making blood splash all over the damn place. It is pure, unadulterated mayhem, and even though McKeown never went on to make anything else, this film shows he could easily have hung with horror standards like Craven or Hooper, had he wanted.
Rating: ***
Monday, August 11, 2008
The Borrower
If there’s one nice thing about horror movies (at least, ones that weren’t just shot on someone’s home video camera), it’s that the people involved with their creation often have the same fabulous taste in films that I do. Perfect example: out of all the vast multitude of movies out there that two of the characters here could have chosen to watch while an alien murderer killed their dog and wore its head before trying to murder a bunch of nearby teens, they were watching the Garbage Pail Kids movie. Now THAT is pimp.
The movie opens with an alien condemned for his crimes to be devolved into human form and sent to Earth to live as one of us, for there can apparently be no greater punishment among overly prickish aliens. Sadly, however, the devolving process is a smidge flawed, and once each day he needs to kill someone else and take their body, a process that involves his current head exploding and him then needing to attach the new one on. I’m not really sure how it works, but there may be science involved.
There’s also a female detective thrown into the mix, who must try to solve the string of head-stealing murders while also trying to bring to justice a vicious rapist and occasional cross-dresser. If you think you can guess where and how these two plotlines intersect, you’re probably not far off. The film’s only serious flaw comes in the ending, which is way too rushed and is blatantly intended to be nothing more than a setup for The Borrower 2, which sadly has yet to arrive. And really, as far as horror movies go, that’s a fairly forgivable offense.
Rating: ***
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Death Machine
It’s always a little odd when a film set in the future makes references to earlier films in the genre, or even worse, a then-present day pop culture reference. This film, made in 1995 and set in the Near Future, does both. This film has a pair of irritating Humanist goofballs trying to bring down an evil corporation, and almost halfway through the film one of them decides to do a Schwarzenegger impression and tell everyone “I’ll be back” (yes, he was doing Schwarzenegger’s voice, it’s not something that could have been passed off as a coincidence), and then a few scenes later does a Street Fighter reference, shouting out “Shoryuken!” before going to town on an evil robot. These are small moments, granted, but movies do tend to live or die on a series of small moments.
Fortunately, the rest of the movie is generally pretty entertaining, if generic. We’ve got our futuristic world that’s typically 90s cyberpunkish, we’ve got our evil corporation that’s developing evil weaponry, we’ve got a killer robot that seems to be comprised almost entirely of fangs and claws, and we’ve got a small group of people trapped in the building with it whose chances of survival seem to be pretty easy to determine from the moment each of them opens their mouths. There’s really nothing here that you haven’t seen before, but it’s always pretty fun to watch a bunch of people frantically firing machine guns at a big robot thing that’s trying to eat them all. Especially when it’s standing on a platform above them and they’re shooting the robot and everything around it so that a hail of sparks and shrapnel is descending upon them, but with nobody getting wounded from this at all.
This, like Little Erin Merryweather before it, was another film I had gotten at Fangoria’s recommendation, and I have a feeling I’m not going to find any outright classics from their list of obscure greats. Especially not when they’re as much of a pain to get ahold of as this film was: the original copy I had ordered from Amazon came in a Death machine box, the DVD had a Death Machine logo on it, and when I put it in my DVD player Cyborg 2 loaded up. I guess because one cheesy 90s sci fi movie is as good as another, right?
Rating: **
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The Deaths of Ian Stone
I had a feeling, after really enjoying Borderland yesterday, that there would be a bit of a backslide in quality today. While it certainly wasn’t as great a decline as I’d feared (this really is no worse than, say, last year’s The Hamiltons), it does mean that (assuming Mulberry Street is good) this whole set as a whole is only marginally better than last year’s, and that is none too promising.
The film itself functions as a horror mixture of Groundhog Day and Dark City. A young man named Ian Stone is repeatedly killed by shadowy monsters, and each time he dies he comes back with a whole new life and no memory of what has come before. While this is quite a nice promising start to the film, he soon starts to figure out that someone is going wrong and begins remembering more and more of how he got this way, what these things after him are, and a whole mess of other things that get heavily overexplained. I know this is not a genre that is generally known for subtlety, but it is not really necessary to explain so much, particularly when the explanation is so lame and poorly-done.
Honestly now, what would you rather see a movie about? A guy losing a hockey game and then being tossed in front of a train for his ineptitude, or a guy going “What? I don’t understand!” over and over again as someone else tells him his whole hidden past? Indeed, I know which of those two I could watch all day long (I didn’t recognize his team jersey, possibly because the film is set in England, but I think we all know that, were he American, he’d have been making game losing shots for the Flyers). Unfortunately, that’s not the direction that director Dario Piana or writer Brendan Hood went with. Still, if you can get past the problem of it being very reminiscent of two much better films (three, if the monsters’ rapid head shake reminded you of Jacob’s Ladder like it did to me), it’s not bad at all. It’s just a good deal less than it could have been.
Also, what’s with these After Dark movies and poor cell phone reception? I mean, there are reality manipulating demons in this film so it's understandable with this film, but it’s the third film out of the seven I’ve seen (the other two being Lake Dead and Borderland) where someone tries to call for help only to not get a signal. Come up with a new problem already!
Rating: **
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Unearthed
What a piece of shit this movie is. I freely admitted yesterday to having stacked the deck with the new After Dark Horrorfest series by watching Lake Dead, generally viewed as the weakest in the set, first, with plans to watch Mulberry Street, generally considered the best, last. I’m now on my second movie in the set, and my plan has already unraveled before my eyes. I’m hoping that now, after this dreck, things will start to pick up and we’ll at least be able to work our way up to the mediocrity the first set was famous for.
The film is a pretty generic monster story set out in the West somewhere, as archaeological digging of old Indian lands unleashes a monster so damn close to the xenomorphs from the Alien series that I’m pretty sure Fox would have an easy time lobbing a lawsuit against the filmmakers. Not only does it look almost exactly like one, it’s also determined to come from outer space, and goes around with an oversized crab-spider thing that looks suspiciously like a face hugger that tries to jump on our heroine’s head and implant some nasty bug things inside of her. Not exactly the most original creation one could have for a movie.
The main characters are all pretty much stock characters, and none of them are at all fleshed out except for the lead, who’s a young alcoholic sheriff about to be voted out of office, and who has a dark past. There’s nothing about her that doesn’t scream “by the numbers”, and trying to create some kind of conflict about her by having other characters lamely argue her merits (“Hey, leave her alone, she’s good people”) or lack thereof does not in itself constitute drama.
So yeah, was not a fan of this movie on pretty much any level. About the only serious enjoyment I got out of this thing was watching the cast wander around a cave that turned out to be filled with uranium, and imagining them all losing their teeth, hair, and skin the next day, much like when Ben Affleck was dramatically talking on his cell phone amidst the fallout in the Sum of All Fears. It’s a minor bit of happiness, but it was my happiness and I’m keeping it. You’re going to have to find your own, should you decide to watch this.
Rating: ½ *
Monday, February 11, 2008
Kill Them and Eat Them
God help me, I think I’m actually starting to become a fan of this set. I just started the third disc (of twelve) and the first movie here is better than any on the first two discs, continuing the process of each disc being better than the last. Indeed, had this one not dragged on a bit too much at the end, I was prepared to fill it a full blown three stars, I was digging it so much. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The film is the standard no-budget “shot-on-handheld-digital” that just about all the other movies in the set are. Curiously enough, the only one so far that actually seemed to have a production budget was the horror porn Demon Sex, which ranks just below Begotten so far as movies people have found this site from Google searches for. Unlike the other films, though, this one actually managed to work its lack of a budget into the film itself, with a pair of mad scientists stuck doing their genetic experiments in hiding, and bemoaning the fact that their work budget is so scant that they had to cobble together all their equipment from junkyards and set up shop in a basement. This being a monster movie, their genetic experiments involve kidnapping people and de-evolving them into hideous monsters, which due to the film’s budgetary concerns basically means they now look like people wearing masks and gloves they got from the local Halloween shop. I won’t lie, I was pretty amused by how writer/director Conall Pendergast couldn’t even bother with making the monsters look similar, but instead had them all wearing different masks.
I’m not sure if the monsters were actually supposed to be scary or not, at least within the contexts of the film’s reality. They’re certainly capable of doing a great deal of damage when they can grab someone, but it doesn’t bode well that the very first time we see one, the person it’s chasing picks up a rock and throws it at the monster, and the rock takes its damn hand right off. Really now, if their bodies are held so thinly together that a thrown rock can make them crumble, then perhaps they shouldn’t be so eager to throw down with everyone they see.
So it’s not going to be winning any awards on scariness. Lucky for it, then, that it’s actually pretty funny. Both the mad scientists (the elderly Dr. Gore and the youthful Dr. Tobias) and the men from the Company that’s hot on the trail of the mutants are very amusing. In particular, the idealistic Company man has some great lines, with his great love for his employers providing such nice moments as when he’s alone in a room and takes the opportunity to hug a Company poster on the wall and start stroking it affectionately with his fingers. Dr. Tobias gets in some nice character moments too, as in a brief montage of him complaining to his mutants about how hard he has it and how Dr. Gore just doesn’t understand him. Of course, the humor doesn’t always work; the bit about how the Company’s guns look like Buck Rogers weapons just kind of lies there sadly, for instance. In general, though, it does succeed much more frequently than it falters.
Were it not for the occasional comedic fumbles, the far too lengthy ending sequence, and the kidnapped girl whose acting ability seems to consist of staring at the other actors while they speak and waiting for her cue, then reciting all her lines as mechanically as possible (fortunately, she’s not in most of the film), I would give this an unqualified positive review. As it stands, I’m actually a little curious to see the rest of Pendergast’s films. He has quite a bit of potential to him.
Rating: ** ½
Monday, January 7, 2008
Humanoids from the Deep
I’m a little curious as to why this movie is so hard to come by. Yes, it’s out of print, but it really shouldn’t be. While yes, it is pretty incompetently made, and yes, the acting, if anything is even worse than the directing, but…perhaps I should just start from the beginning.
The film was one of the last produced by Roger Corman during his grand late-50s-to-early-80s zero budget exploitation movie run, a run that helped launched the careers of such illustrious directors as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and which gave us actors like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda. This film, directed by Barbara Peters (listed as Barbara Peeters in the film, which was her amazingly clever pseudonym), concerns a small fishing town beset by a new species of amphibious mutant fish men that are going around killing the men and impregnating the women. The fish men kind of look like C.H.U.D.s with retardedly long forearms, and they seem to have some measure of difficulty figuring out how they’re supposed to act. For starters, they kill their first victims in the daytime, only to later be classified as nocturnal hunters. Then there’s the problem of how they have such an expanded cranial capacity they look like their brains are actually exposed to the open air, and yet they keep getting caught on fish hooks. They also have the strange habit of hiding underwater that doesn’t even come up to the characters’ waists, despite the creatures all being well over six feet tall. Still, though, they’re quite capable of ripping off a bikini top, and God bless ‘em for it.
There’s a subplot involving a new cannery that will supposedly bring in lots of revenue and jobs to the town, but which is opposed by the local Native Americans because it’s set to be built on their holy lands or something. It wasn’t all that well explained, and never gets resolved, perhaps because the writers realized the whole plotline should be dropped if only they knew how to stretch the film out to feature length without it. Heaven forbid they actually fill up extra time with more violence and nudity or anything (Bonus trivia: Barbara Peters got replaced near the end of filming by uncredited director Jimmy Murakami for reportedly not putting enough nudity into the film. This despite her directing career having begun by making softcore lesbian films a decade prior), that would have just been crazy.
The cast is every bit as laughably bad as the writers and director. Led by Doug McClure (who IMDB tells me was half of the inspiration for the Simpsons character Troy McClure, the other half being actor Troy Donahue), this intrepid crew of actors mumbles and stammers their way through the whole film, pausing only to give an appropriate amount of blank stares. There really isn’t a single person who lands in front of the camera here that did not in some way deserve to be beaten repeatedly with a brick, so the fairly high body count of the film (starting off with an annoying child, always a nice way to get on my good side) was nice.
This film is a confused, jumbled mess. Outside of the really terrific looking women and the wonderfully poor monsters, there is nothing to recommend about it. So why am I rating it so highly, and why do I think it needs to be brought back to DVD? Simply put, it’s one of those movies that’s so bad that it transcends itself and becomes well worth watching. It’s almost like watching an early Troma film, if Troma hadn’t actively been trying to be funny. If this ever gets a proper release (the only DVD ever made for it was full screen and has been out of print for roughly half a decade), I highly recommend anyone with an interest in film trash to check it out. You won’t be disappointed.
Rating: ** ½
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Critters 2
I hadn’t seen this movie since I was a little kid, so after my purchase of the original Critters a year ago turned out fairly well, I was curious to see how the rest of the series would hold up. Sadly, going by this follow-up (the first of three), I’d have to guess that the series may have been best off by stopping after the first one.
This is not to say that the movie is bad, per se (although it is), it’s more that it’s a pretty big drop off from the first. The somewhat subtle humor in the original has now been replaced by wacky sound effects, giving it this weird dichotomy of being a movie that seems to have been made for children, but with brief nudity and people being eaten. The plot, like most horror sequels, is basically that of the first film, only on a somewhat larger scale. The evil space monster critters are back, and this time instead of mostly confining themselves to one small farmhouse, they are now trying to wipe out an entire Midwest town. The alien bounty hunters Ug and Lee (I so didn’t get that awful pun until I was reading the back of the DVD case for this) are also back, as well as the heroic young boy, now looking roughly college age.
The various monster attacks alternate fairly well between being pure comedy (like when the Critters swarm the town sheriff while he’s dressed up as the Easter bunny), and being, well, only semi-comedic, as when they ambush one of the bounty hunters. It’s better than most monster movies of this type, as it keeps moving along at a fairly steady clip, and there’s nothing outright dull or obnoxious about it. Indeed, there’s even a few outright clever moments to it, as when the Critters all join together at the end to create a massive ball of eating power, or the ridiculously fast response time of the bounty hunters. It’s just that there’s nothing really particularly impressive about it all, which is a real shame since the original was so much fun. I may still eventually get the last two in the series, just because part 3 marks the film debut of Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio, and part 4 is what I believe may be the first time a horror series jumped the shark by putting its monsters in outer space….IN THE FUTURE!!!!~ before it became almost a fad to do that when a series ran out of steam.
Rating: **
Friday, November 9, 2007
Demons 3: The Ogre
For a long time I thought this movie was actually a different one, due to its rather convoluted family tree. The first two demons movies, which I really liked, were written and produced by horror maestro Dario Argento and directed by Lamberto Bava. For some reason, however (I would guess due to a falling out between the two, though I admittedly have nothing but the films themselves to back this up with), they parted ways when it came to the third film, and Lamberto directed this one without any help from Dario. Dario, meanwhile, went on to write an produce another movie called Demons 3: The Church, with his protégé Michele Soavi. Both films came out within a year of each other, and given how much Soavi’s film resembled the earlier Demons films, I just foolishly assumed The Ogre and The Church were one and the same. Umberto Lenzi, never one to avoid jumping in on a piece of the action, made another Demons 3 called Black Demons a couple years later, which is also in this box set for handy comparisons sake. I can’t imagine where I could have gotten so confused.
At any rate, this really doesn’t have anything in common with its predecessors. While they both involved people getting transformed into a zombie-like plague of demons with pointy nails and lots of drooling and scariness (much like Demons 3: The Church did), this instead involves an American family that goes on vacation to a villa in the Italian countryside so the horror novelist mom can finish her latest book. Unfortunately, this villa appears to be haunted by an ogre (well, the title calls it an ogre, at least – it looks a good deal more like a man in a Seinfeld-ish puffy shirt and a monster mask bought at a local Halloween store) that lives in the basement and has been invading the wife’s dreams since she was a young girl. The movie spends most of its running time trying to leave things ambiguous as to whether or not the ogre is actually real, or if the wife is just crazy, so let me alleviate any of your concerns: yes, it is indeed real, but can also be made fake somehow. I wasn’t really clear on this, and the Nightmare On Elm Street-ish ending seems to actively try to obfuscate what actually happened.
This is a pretty poor movie, all told. Without Argento to help him out, Lamberto Bava really flounders here, making a dull, muddled mess of a film. Most of the movie is spent with the wife being shrill and hysterical as absolutely nothing happens, reminding me of nothing quite so much as the wife in Shock, another Lamberto turd. That’s 0 for 2 so far with this box set, and only one movie left to try. Not good.
Rating: *
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive
I’m going to tell you this as a friend: the only reason your infant child has not tried to murder you is because it lacks the ability to do so. Had it been born a giant mutant baby like the ones in this series, and thus been capable of murder straight out of the womb, you would be dead now. It’s only when they’ve had several years of life with society beating the evil out of it that a child begins to lose its bloodlust, its murderous rages finding safe outlets in movies, video games, and comic books rather than in cutting open the necks of neighbors and in throwing explosives at small animals. If the human race were to come out of the womb already able to walk, as some animals are, then it would not still exist today. Our collective weakness at birth is an evolutionary protective measure, necessary for the continued safety of our entire species.
Sadly, this deep profundity is not found as much here, as, like all great horror series eventually must, this film kind of falls apart. There are two fatal flaws with this movie, one in the casting, and one in the overall concept. The more instantly glaring problem, and one that never gets better at any point, is in that of the lead, Michael Moriarty. A quick look at his IMDB bio reveals that I’ve seen him in exactly one other movie, Pale Rider, and I can only hope Clint Eastwood had the decency to kill him swiftly in that. He sleepwalks his way through this film, throwing out irritating smart ass remarks at everyone that he doesn’t even try to make funny, just irritating. He is a complete pest, which is all the more glaring when considering I watched this back to back to back with the first two films, and got to see the abrupt, major decline in the quality of actors/characters. He really is the pits.
The other problem that cripples the film is that, unlike its prequels, this film doesn’t focus solely on the universal problem of killer infants, but instead has the foolish audacity to let them grow up into evil adults. This is accomplished by a judge ordering them all to be shipped off to an island uninhabited by man where they can live out their natural lives, at least until a government expedition to study them is launched, with the tedious Moriarty along as an expert. Naturally the expedition is doomed, and soon Moriarty is “forced” to take the demons back to Florida with him (I put forced in quotes because he is so blasé about it that you get the feeling he really doesn’t care that they just killed a bunch of people, nor that they are using their bodies for food while sailing back to the U.S.). Moriarty’s child wants to go to Florida because they all have mental homing beacons for their parents, and Moriarty’s estranged wife is living there. I’m not sure why all the rest wanted to go there, though, but maybe they had heard about the way cool goth punk clubs they evidently have down there.
Every time a horror series goes on long enough, it eventually turns into garbage. Some, like Halloween or Psycho, manage to hold out for a while and have a good two or three quality sequels before falling to pieces. Some, like the Puppet Master series, are just crib deaths, sucking at their very inception. The It’s Alive series falls smack dab in the middle, giving us two good movies before it turned into shit. Still, I guess two good movies for about ten bucks isn’t bad at all, even if they’re attached to a third, less fortunate film.
Rating: *
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Halloween Spooktacular # 5: Dust Devil
This is a somewhat lesser known horror movie from the early 90s that I first stumbled upon entirely by accident, happening to notice it mixed in with a bunch of random horror movies in someone’s folder in DC. While I didn’t see it then, it always stuck with me, so I was quite happy when it finally got a DVD release about a year ago.
I’ve long been a big fan of horror movies and westerns, and so have always been eager to see a mixture of the two genres. Sadly, filmmakers themselves tend to disagree with me on this, and so this is the only one I’ve seen that’s actually good. Set in South Africa, it observes a truism to all good horror movies: location is vital. Most of the film is set in the vast expanses of the desert, which, unlike the pleasant and friendly seeming deserts of American westerns, looks harsh and alien and all too eager to kill. The plot concerns the fates of three characters as they slowly entwine around each other: Wendy, a troubled woman that flees her abusive husband and attempts to go westward to the shore, to possibly try to eke out a new life, or to at least end the one she’s got, Joe, an aging policeman that’s trying to strike a delicate balance between solving a series of serial killings while not stepping on the toes of any U.N. officials who want to take over for him, and the Dust Devil himself, a shape shifting demon who feeds on the souls of the suicidal, and who may actually be an ancient African god himself.
The Dust Devil is out on the prowl.
The movie is nice in how it is willing to take its time and build a mood and characters, rather than rushing into things. We’re given the time to actually grow to care about and empathize with our cast, even the Dust Devil himself, and we’re given enough nuggets of information on how he operates and what it would take to stop him that we start to get an idea of how its going to all play out, but do we necessarily want it to play out that way? The film keeps wisely ambiguous as to just how villainous he actually is, and kept me surprised at the end, with the characters arriving at somewhat different endings than I would have thought. I can’t understand how there are so many much more famous bad horror movies out there, while an actual intelligent and well-made one like this languishes in obscurity. It’s a damned travesty, is what it is. You should frankly all be embarrassed to not have known about this before now.
Rating: *** ½
Halloween Spooktacular # 2: The Descent
Upon my second viewing of this film, I managed to confirm what I had originally suspected: this is one of the best non-comedic horror movies to come out in years, More than that, though, it’s one of the few horror movies I’ve ever seen that I would consider to be genuinely scary and doesn’t just do the standard “Oh look, here’s something jumping out from off-screen while the soundtrack screams at me” nonsense.
This is the second film from director Neil Marshall, whose debut film Dog Soldiers I think ranks as possibly the very best werewolf movie of all time, despite its crappy ending. This is even better, focusing on an all-female group of friends who, years after a personal tragedy broke them apart, are attempting to rekindle their old bonds by going cave diving in the Appalachian Mountains. Naturally, Everything Goes Wrong, and after a cave-in the group finds that one of them decided they should all be exploring a new path that nobody else has tried yet, so they have no rescue coming when they’re noticed missing, and so they have no choice but to find their own way out. Sadly, the other way out is somewhat blocked by an undiscovered species of cave-dwelling monsters that have grown very used to eating everything that comes within their range.
A screenshot from the movie?
It’s a fairly simplistic story, but the film is rather brilliantly directed, particularly in its usage of darkness. Put simply, I have never seen any other movie that uses a lack of light as well as this film does. Once they’re in that cave, there is no light but what the characters generate from their flashlights and flares, leaving a good chunk of each scene just coated in blackness. It’s creepy and claustrophobic and awful, especially since Marshall took the time to flesh out most of the characters so that they actually feel like real people rather than movie characters. The ending is also nicely ambiguous, as there are certain small clues left throughout the film that indicate that the actual story may not have quite played out the way we think it did.
Neil Marshall is currently working on his third film, an end of the world movie titled Doomsday. Apocalyptic doom films are like porn to me, and I am dying to see if he can top himself a second time. One can only hope.
Rating: ****
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Sasquatch
This film came highly recommended to me by my friend Erika. After this and the copy of City Heat she and her husband got me for Christmas last year, I can only conclude that she is harboring a deep hatred of me and wishes me to be miserable at all times.
This film, “based on actual accounts”, according to the back of the DVD case, concerns an expedition into the wilderness of Canada or somesuch unnecessarily cold place in the hopes of retrieving a downed plane and its passengers. As one might infer from the title, however, things are complicated by the fact that this is sasquatch territory. As one might infer from a movie that prides itself on being about people being menaced by fucking bigfoot, it’s not good at all.
The film stars Lance Henriksen, who is normally fully reliable even when he’s in a completely dogshit film like this one, but even he is beaten down by this awfulness, spending the entire film looking cranky and miserable. Led by his proud example, the rest of the cast is equally useless, taking their undeveloped roles and making sure each of them has one character trait to rely upon and nothing else. The directing is typical Sci-Fi Original Movie nonsense (I don’t know for sure that this was actually a Sci-Fi channel movie, but I refuse to believe this was made with the intention of a theatrical release), complete with ridiculously overdone camera flashiness coupled with endless scenes of walking through the woods. It reminded me at first of Survival Quest, another film where Lance Henriksen leads a group of people through the wilderness, with the obvious difference being of course that that film was half-decent while this movie is all bad.
Perhaps the best, and by best I of course mean worst, part of the movie is the title character. The sasquatch is a piece of work here, and when I describe him to you you’ll understand completely why these characters just had no chance against him. He was able to drag a 2+ ton plane through a few miles of wilderness, is fast enough that he can be standing still when someone fires at him from about fifteen feet away and still dodge it, and he’s somehow smart enough to understand what a DNA analyzer and GPS tracker are, and knows to specifically target them. Add to this the fact that, when finally revealed, he pretty much just looks like an ape, and it all becomes clear: they haven’t been sparring with a sasquatch at all, but Gorilla Grodd! Hell, if the Flash has trouble with him, of course this pack of tools isn’t going to stop him. If only the rest of the Rogues Gallery had shown up, then this movie could have really cooked.
Rating: ½ *
The Manitou
I had been a little nervous about getting this film. The only other movie by director William Girdler that I had seen before was Grizzly, and saying it sucked would be rather kind. Fortunately for me, this was a vast improvement over that earlier film.
I guess part of the overall increase in quality could have been guessed just from the plots of the two films. If nothing else, a film about an Indian medicine man sending his essence 400 years into the future so that he can be reborn into the present day by way of growing as a fetus off the back of a girl’s neck is certainly a good deal more ambitious than a film about a giant grizzly bear eating people. As could be expected from such a synopsis, Girdler just tries with all his might to pack this movie full of the kind of stuff you always love to see (well, okay, that * I* always love to see, at least). When the growth on the poor woman’s neck is first discovered to be growing, an attempt is made to surgically remove it, only to have the operating surgeon’s body taken over and him forced to slice into his own wrist with the scalpel. A follow-up attempt, this one involving lasers (no sharks were harmed in the making of this film), turns out even worse. The film also finds time to throw in a séance, a levitating woman, and a climax that I won’t spoil, but which is every bit as over the top and delightful as the climax to Altered States was. Okay, I can’t resist spoiling it a little bit. At one point the entire hospital shakes with what appears to be an earthquake, only to have a medicine man they brought in to counter the 400 year old medicine man growing out of their friend say that the quake was actually the arrival of Satan. And no, that’s not the most over the top part by any means.
The acting has also been heavily improved from Grizzly, most notably in his big star coup of Tony Curtis. Curtis plays the lead here, as his career had pretty much been over for some time by this point, and he does a fully capable job. If it’s not quite up to the level of his classic roles in films like Sweet Smell of Success or Some Like It Hot, well, I’m certainly not going to hold it against him.
This is one of those films where you just need to sit back and let it all wash over you in a torrent. It’s completely ridiculous, but you sometimes need that in a film just to keep you honest. Let’s be honest with ourselves here: the holiday season is coming up, and that means that we’re all going to be bombarded with really weighty, Serious Issue films until February sometime when we’ll go into our annual filmic wasteland. If between now and then you start feeling a bit bogged down by the self-importance of all the movies you see, a viewing of this will make everything feel all right again.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, October 22, 2007
Brainiac
This here is a good and proper creature feature from the start of the 60s. While these things died out a long time before I was born, in part because they mostly weren’t very good, it’s still fun to revisit them every now and again. It’s especially fun when they don’t really suck like Monstroid did, and this film achieves that lofty goal.
The film opens with an evil baron being burned at the stake for dabbling in witchcraft. As he’s being burned (though he seems strangely unharmed by it) he yells that he’s going to reappear on a passing comet 300 years in the future to kill his attackers’ descendants. Naturally, in the interests of time, we immediately jump ahead 300 years to the present day of 1961, as the comet he hitched himself to returns to Earth and he immediately sets out to kill off pretty much everyone in town.
One key thing that sets this film apart from other creature features is that the baron in this doesn’t really get by by being a big scary monster that just overpowers people. Instead, he teleports, paralyzes and bewitches people with his eyes, and then transforms into a goofy hairy bug eyed thing with only two pincer-like fingers on each hand that sucks the brains out of them by piercing their skulls with his overlong forked tongue (I’m assuming this is where the film gets its atrocious title). It’s over the top and silly, and what’s what always makes movies like this fun to watch. One particularly amusing part of the film is how each batch of descendants is made out to be even more noble and wonderful a group than the last, just before he kills them anyway, kind of like the characters played by Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
As with any of these films, it’s pretty damned uneven, with more parts that don’t work than do. It does, however, manage its own goofy charm and insane troll logic (the police in particular, once they realize that the mysterious baron who appeared in town immediately before the killings began is actually the killer, are amazing in what they decide is the best way to deal with him), and that’s really all you can hope for from a film like this.
Rating: **
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The Pit
Back at the end of September, I was up in New Brunswick for my friend Stephanie’s birthday party. At the restaurant we were at, there was this family that had two little hellions that were racing around the entire restaurant completely unrestrained by their parents. Eventually I took matters into my own hands, and when walking back from the bathroom, as they were chasing each other around an empty table, I expertly positioned myself and kneed the boy right in the chest, knocking him on his ass to teach him a valuable lesson about when not to misbehave. Why am I sharing this story with you all? Well, it’s partly because I just really like sharing that story, but mainly because the boy that is the main character in this film is so goddamned annoying I wanted to give him the same treatment.
There’s not really that much to the movie, it’s just a tale about a creepy little twelve year old boy that lusts after adult women and feeds everyone he doesn’t like to a group of troglodytes living in a pit in the woods. I assume, at least, that they’re troglodytes, since that’s what the DVD case calls them. The boy just calls them “trollollogs”, which I can only assume is what troglodytes are called when speaking in Retard. His main crush is on his roughly college age babysitter, no doubt because she pronounces the first syllable of paleontologist like ‘pal’ instead of ‘pail’. Am I nitpicking? Well, it’s hard not to when the movie gives me no other healthy alternatives. That plot description I gave? The one that goes on for one sentence? That’s the entire damn movie, barring one brief stretch where he drops a rope to let them out so they can find their own victims. It’s atrociously acted, particularly by the children in the film, with me not being able to care about a single person. Seriously, there’s an enormous hole in the ground, and he lures his victims into it pretty much by taking them through the woods into the clearing the pit is in and letting them just somehow ignore their own eyes and fall into it. Sure, the old blind lady he kills has an excuse, but the rest are just actively trying to die here. Then, after they’ve died, he happily takes a souvenir from them like a proper serial killer (the old blind lady’s wheelchair, the mean little girl’s bicycle, etc.). Of course, even ignoring that he’s killing people, we can’t sympathize with the stupid little boy at all, as he keeps doing just horrid things, like calling a woman up and telling her that her daughter’s been kidnapped and will be killed if she doesn’t strip for him right then and there so he can take some Polaroids. Of course, his fun just had to be ruined by the killjoy little girl, who walks in after her mom has gotten topless. No wonder she had to go.
I am honestly baffled as to whom this movie is supposed to appeal to. It brings nothing to the table. On a filmmaking level it’s below amateurish, as I (am probably everyone reading this) can name student films that were made more professionally. On an acting level it’s pretty dire, on the level of a cheapo exploitation movie it’s one of the worst I’ve seen, and I do generally make it a habit to see quite a few of them. It’s just a terrible film all around.
Rating: Zero stars
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Isolation
I’m going to, if not necessarily lie, then at least randomly guess that this movie started off really slowly, if only because my mom and sister were talking so much for the first fifteen minutes or so of the film that I was completely unable to follow it, and so I am now quietly hoping that I didn’t really miss anything important. Regardless, despite such a clearly dull opening, once this film actually got going it wound up being pretty effective, in an “I don’t really know who these characters are, but we shall overcome all the same due to their being menaced by a really creepy monster created by science gone awry” type of way.
The plot, from what I eventually gathered, involves a scientist and his crew performing experiments on cows and their fetuses on an isolated farm out in Ireland (I’m guessing this location due to their accents and the director’s last name being O’Brien. Never let it be said that I am above casually stereotyping things). Something Goes Wrong, and one cow’s babies all turn out to be deformed monsters with insatiable appetites for intestinal tracts, and which can infest other animals either by burrowing inside of them, or merely by biting them. All but one of the monsters is killed right at birth, which I’m going to guess is because that one is so damned dangerous by itself to this crew of misfit toys that if his brothers and sisters were around too there wouldn’t even be the slightest chance of survival for the human race. It would be Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things all over again.
It becomes a very effective, though somewhat cliché, monster movie at this point, with some nice directing and a good dose of bad taste permeating the scenario, with blood coating walls so much one might almost think Stuart Gordon had directed it. There’s also one particularly gross scene in which they try to flush the monster out from its apparent hiding place in a goddamn lake of liquid cow feces by having one of the less important characters driving a vehicle through it that doesn’t quite go up high enough to keep him from having the liquid shit sloshing around his feet while he drives. If I made mention of how this scene culminates with the poo clogging up the engine, requiring him to wade back to the others, only to find something even nastier in the pool with him, would it really be much of a surprise to you?
If there’s one problem I had to pinpoint with the movie (you know, beyond the bafflingly dull opening), it’s that it becomes consistently less fun the larger the monster gets. It devolves a bit from being a really creepy movie about a deadly creature that’s so small it could really be hiding just about anywhere into a movie about a really big creature that just charges straight at everyone, and it’s just not as much fun then. Still, it’s a good sight better than most horror movies that actually show up in theaters these days, so I’d suggest you all go give it a rental, at the very least.
