|
Post by Joker on Apr 15, 2011 19:18:40 GMT -5
Rob Zombie will drive you nuts after a while since he seems stuck in grindhouse mode. It's good sometimes, but all the time wears out his welcome.
The Devil Hunter (1980) a.k.a. Mandingo Manhunter
A beautiful young actress is kidnapped by a gang of thugs and taken to a remote island to be held for ransom. The studio head hires a Vietnam vet to go save her by delivering a bundle of fake money to get her back, but the plan goes wrong and becomes a standoff. Unfortunately for everyone the local tribe has a problem with a cannibal devil guy who they have to offer naked hot women to...and they just got their hands on the young actress!
This is a very sleazy film where the hero (Zombie's Al Cliver) is just useless and can't seem to get the job done right as this poor young woman is tortured and raped by her kidnappers. His annoying shell shocked vet sidekick has a very bad dubbed Southern accent. The dialogue just gets terrible after a while and the devil guy is just a naked black man with a horrible bulging bloodshot irisless appliance on his face. Just terrible.
The Curse (1987)
A young boy (Wil Wheaton) lives with his ultra-fundamentalist stepfather (Claude Akins) on a failing farm out in the country when one night a meteor crashes in their field. Overnight the space tumor-looking thing drains slime into the soil and suddenly the farm starts to get very bountiful. However, it quickly turns to crap as the vegetables and fruit are full of corruption and the well water seems to be mutating the family into deformed maniacs. This boy's whole world begins to unravel as his family begins to rot...
This is a gruesome version of H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Colour Out of Space" where a corrupted tomato spews a blood-like sludge all over a woman and sores appear all over people's faces until they're unrecognizable. There's a subplot about covering up the meteor's crash so that a local realtor can make a bundle on the sale of the land with John Schneider as a state water surveyor. There are solid performances all around and good direction from actor-turned-director David Keith.
They remastered the picture on the DVD so that I could see the rod attached to the meteor when it crashes. No one decided to try and cover it up. That's really the only quibble I have here. All of the sequels just used the Curse title to capitlize on all of the cult success of the original. The second film is about a guy mutating from a mutated snakebite.
|
|
|
Post by Joker on Apr 16, 2011 20:04:11 GMT -5
The Deathmaster (1972)
A coffin washes up on a beach in California and a surfer guy gets strangled by a big creepy man after he looks inside. In town a fair is winding down and a young hippie named Pico (Bill Ewing) and his girlfriend and a biker couple go to a hippie commune in what appears to be an abandoned mansion. That night a charismatic guru named Khorda (Robert Quarry) shows up to offer the aimless youth there a new way of thinking and takes over.
The cynical biker guy thinks its all hot air and tries to take off and finds out too late what the real deal is with Khorda - he's a vampire! Pico finds the undead guru's coffin in the caverns beneath the house and tries to get his girlfriend out. But Khorda's grip on the hippies is complete and Pico can't seem to get anyone to believe him about it.
After the peace movement collapsed in the wake of the Manson killings there were a lot of disaffected people who would be perfect targets for a predator like this. Robert Quarry is one of the best actors to portray a vampire in b-movies like Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and The Return of Count Yorga (1971). Khorda is a mesmerizing leader with an incredible perspective on life because of his immortality. He lifts this film out of conventional vamp movie cliches as a Jesus-looking bad guy. It's a well made low budget film directed by Ray Danton from Secret Agent Super Dragon. Recommended.
Teenage Exorcist (1991)
A cute young woman (Brinke Stevens, who also wrote the film) begins to have hallucinations in her new house where the ghost of some evil guy possesses her and turns her into a sex vixen. Her sister and brother-in-law come over to help and have to call a priest (Robert Quarry) who is useless. Then a mix-up with a phone call to a cardinal makes an extremely annoying pizza guy (Eddie Deezen, naturally) show up...
...and who really cares what's going on here. I really hate when a movie tries to be funny and only manages to be 5% of the time. The rest of the time it's working your nerves like a punching bag. Brinke Stevens may be hot, but this is pretty much a lame attempt at a sex comedy without the sex and only a little nudity. Michael Berryman shows up as a nervous real estate agent trying to get this house off of his hands. I had never seen him play a comic role so that's interesting at least, but not nearly interesting enough for this stinker.
|
|
|
Post by TurkeyVolGuessnMan on Apr 22, 2011 23:25:12 GMT -5
Joker, I hope you keep these horror movie reviews up as I really appreciate them. I haven't seen or even heard of most of them, but I hope to see some of them.
Also, if you know of any movies similar to Lost Boys or Near Dark as my wife doesn't care for horror movies unless they are like those two.
I did see The Curse and it's a great movie. Not a slasher film, just sick kind of things happening that kept my attention through the whole movie.
|
|
|
Post by Joker on May 6, 2011 23:44:57 GMT -5
Drainiac (2000)
A young woman and her hateful father clean up filthy and run down houses then sell them for profit. Their latest house is a real dump as some sort of horrible sludge running out of the faucets. Her father ditches her to do all the work and she gets some of her friends to help. Then the man-boy loser member of their group tries to rape her friend and gets pulled down into a toilet by some sort of tentacles. It turns out the house is haunted, and not just by a ghost, but by a water elemental. This gets explained by a callous exorcist who shows up out of nowhere to exorcise the demon away.
It's very low-budget b-horror that suffers from a common problem: no likeable characters. You really won't care what happens to anyone as the liquid tentacle beast kills them off and then there's a silly climax with stop motion monsters and updated (for the 2004 release) effects. A movie that seems to be going nowhere for no reason with a bunch of people you care nothing for.
The Day It Came to Earth (1979)
A mob informant gets gunned down in the street and his body gets chained up and tossed into a lake by mobsters. Then a meteor falls into the pond and reactivates the corpse that proptly kills the two bad guys as a couple of goofy college guys try to pick up women on campus and take them back to the zombie's lake and find the meteor. The undead guy goes back to the university to get the meteor and wants the tiny sliver of it one of the goofballs had made into a necklace for his girlfriend.
This is another film that is slow and pointless. The zombie is a guy in tattered clothes and a zombie mask with made up hands. Why does he need the space rock? There is some talk of it being possessed by an alien intelligence and the Monster A-Go-Go-type ending will really enrage you. When the zombie isn't around you have to watch the antics of these college people, mostly the horribly grating one played by Wink Roberts.
I guess it was supposed to be an homage to cruddy 50's B-movies. Why you would want that to come back when most of it was terrible I'll never know. The 50's period touches begin to pummel you after a while and you can feel the filmmakers hammering it home, "Get it? IT'S THE 50'S!!!" What a waste of time.
|
|
|
Post by Joker on May 7, 2011 23:02:40 GMT -5
Raw Force (1982) a.k.a. Kung Fu Cannibals
Somewhere in Southeast Asia a bunch of bad guys have a very lucrative kidnapping operation supplying an order of monks on an island with women for lots of jade. Meanwhile, there's a karate team from Burbank taking a cruise with a grumpy old boat captain (Cameron Mitchell). A chance encounter with the kidnappers leads to a boat attack that shipwrecks the team on the island of monks. They need to get back to the mainland, but first they must fight the zombies of disgraced warriors powered by the monks human flesh-eating rituals.
As you just read this movie becomes horror in the last 20 minutes or so. There's lots of fun action before then as the karate team along with the kung fu master boat cook clash with the bad guys while lots of bad jokes are flung like poo in a monkey cage. There's also lots of female nudity to keep you awake when people are not dealing out beatings to one another. Wacky fun, especially when the gray-skinned undead samurai, ninjas, and other martial arts guys fight our heroes.
Xtro 2: The Second Encounter
In an underground base a group of scientsts is experimenting with interdimensional travel and send a team of explorers to a parallel world. Only one of them comes back, and erupts in a giant alien beast that bursts out to kill everyone in the research facility. Jan-Michael Vincent plays a guy who survived the destruction of a previous lab explosion is brought in just in time for the base to get locked down to contain and destroy everything alive there with a radiation bombardment. Now scientists and a strike team of soldiers must face off against the alien beast and an infected scientist trying to contain the problem so as not to lose funding.
This is pretty much a low-rent version of Alien and Aliens which has nothing to do with the first Xtro (1983). I'm pretty sure the first one had to do with dropping lots of acid and making a film as a result. The monster is cool looking, but not really very agile. It's shot in extreme close-up most of the time to make it seem very claustrophobic (and save on sets). It's lots of B-movie fun with over-the-top characters and gory killings.
|
|
|
Post by Frameous on May 14, 2011 0:26:11 GMT -5
It's that time of year again! In the absence of television broadcasting, I'm showing my own Friday the 13th-a-thon, in honor of the holiday. Every time this day rolls around I get sentimental for Joe Bob Briggs, edited kills, and entries of the franchise aired out of order on varying stations. While I can't replicate that, I can spread the word and subject my friends and family to some Voorhees Violence. For my selection tonight, I have chosen some of the entries I watch less than others.
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
This is the sequel that started it all, and in some fan circles is infallable. I can’t quite agree, but it’s still one of the strongest entries. What bothers me are the little things. Like, doesn’t Jason seem a bit slight, and not fitting with continuity? And why is this the only Jason to have substantial hair on his hydrocephalus head? He jumps from skinny, mulleted hillbilly in part 2 to hulking, bald mongoloid in part 3. What’s most puzzling to me is this: doesn’t perfume on the privates burn?
Friday the 13th Part 7: The New Blood (1988)
This one opens with a killer recap, which shows former effects man turned director John Carl Buechler knows what he's doing. Like Friday 4, this sets the mood and gives fans some early bloodshed, reminding us why we love this hockey masked maniac. This has the most effective Jason effects in the franchise, and begins Kane Hodder’s reign as the definitive Jason. The exposed spine, rib cage, rotted clothing, and chain around his neck provide much needed continuity. Buechler was responsible for the effetcts as well, and the results are staggering. So graphic in fact that the MPAA had their greatest field day with its kills (the sleeping bag death is of particular note). My only crutique (one that I’ve often held), is that while Hodder is a superb Jason, 50% of his performance is exspressed viaually by breathing. When angry, he huffs and puffs like a big bad wolf. When silently stalking his prey, the slow rise and fall cadence of his massive trunk puncuiates the tension. Now, why would a dead or reanimated body have use for a cardovascular system? Anyway…while the choice of a telekinetic heroine may seem like a cliche, it pits Jason against a formidable opponent, and allows for some nifty practicle effects. Not only that, but Hodder would go on to make cinematic history for the longest uninterrupted on-screen controlled burn in Hollywood history (so say the Wiki). Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
There is so much wasted potential in this one, but it seems that any self respecting Jason fan knows that. While there are many well photographed scenes in real life NY, they are mixed in with filler shot in Canadian. Jason's face makeup is a travesty compared to part 7; it's just laughable. When unmasked, he stumbles around like a sad faced man child in need of assistance. The ending with Jason coughing up water and being (re)drowned in a deluge of toxic waste is a decent idea and fitting for the character, but poorly executed.
|
|
|
Post by Joker on May 14, 2011 21:14:03 GMT -5
I've seen all of the Friday the 13ths and the only good thing about them is the killings. They should have just edited them together into a "Greatest Hits" type DVD. I'd recommend the documentary His Name Was Jason (2009), but since it seems so lowbrow a series (which is not necesscarily a bad thing until the cast members talk about how Jason was "too stupid to die" seemingly because he was mentally retarded) I can't justify sitting through all of these lame characters I'm supposed to hate and enjoy the deaths of. That doc seemed like an infomercial trying to sell the series. I'd much more highly recommend the documentary Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy for a series that was more imaginative with a doc that portrayed how they made it - warts and all.
Black Death (2010)
In the 14th century a young monk named Osmund (Eddie Redmayne) volunteers to lead a group of war veteran witchfinders to a remote village that seems unaffected by the Black Plague wiping out the populace all around them. His reason is to meet a woman, but when it appears that she's dead he winds up being devoid of hope with the hardcase soldiers around him led by Ulric (Sean Bean) being no help since all they want is to find the necromancer in the village and bring him back to the bishop for torture and execution. When they get there it appears that a woman with pagan powers can bring back the dead, and has brought back the young monk's supposedly deceased love. In the end he has to make the choice between his God or his resurrected lover...
This film is like an A-list movie that slipped through the cracks somehow. All of the performances are excellent with Bean as the driven leader who is a hopeless and seemingly soulless killer. Johnny Harris plays another sociopath on the team as the bald and terribly intense Mold. The film seems like a mash-up of The Wicker Man (1973) and The Deer Hunter (1978) near the end. Highly recommended and classy period horror.
Splatter Beach (2007)
A trio of friends are on vacation at a cruddy beack somewhere in the middle of a sea monster's killing spree. The nerdy journalism student from the group is trying to get to the bottom of the mystery when a young woman (Erin Brown a.k.a. Misty Mundae) who's boyfriend was killed by the creature knows what's happening.
This is a Z-movie from the Polonia brothers, who specialized in them. That means that they would have one scene with a very hot woman (in this case Leslie Culton) being nude and getting killed. Then a boring as hell story. There's some extra nudity from another hot woman who gets topless and has numerous butt shots, but that's just lame. Why watch a movie this lame set at a rocky beach that's especially bleak since it's always overcast. A lame wannabe bodybuilder cracks unfunny jokes and seems to be competing against the hip-hop loser who can't help but be a womanizer for Worst Character in this Film. People dancing to a surf rock band that were taped seperately against some sort of green screen kind of interact with people actually at the beach. The monster is just a dude in an obviously crappy suit that would get you just a bag full of rocks on Halloween night.
It's just not worth the trouble. They should have closed this beach.
|
|
|
Post by Frameous on May 14, 2011 21:47:54 GMT -5
I've seen and enjoy both docs, but Never Sleep Again was far superior. I know the Fridays are body count movies, but I guess that's why I like them. They are mindless garbage that satisfies a base level within me, and I'm not ashamed to admit that. Appreciation in context.
For you, Joker:
|
|
|
Post by TheNewMads on May 15, 2011 8:08:57 GMT -5
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) This is the sequel that started it all, and in some fan circles is infallable. I can’t quite agree, but it’s still one of the stronest entries. What bothers me are the little things. Like, doesn’t Jason seem a bit slight, and not fitting with continuity? And why is this the only Jason to have substantial hair on his hydrocephalus head? He jumps from skinny, mulleted hillbilly in part 2 to hulking, bald mongoloid in part 3. at the risk of sounding like one of those hardcore fans, aren't you blaming part 2 for continuity problems that were actually in part 3? i have a hunch they went with skinny jason in part 2 because they were going for an ed gein type vibe, whereas in part 3 they were probably starting to think they'd be better able to sustain sequel after sequel if they made him more of a huge hulking type and sorta go in a more gore-action-movie direction. part 2 is my favorite, i gotta say. pretty dark stuff. (that said, there are quite a few i haven't seen. part 3 irked me and after that i was pretty intermittent in watching F13 movies, esp. since every time i gave in, i was disappointed in just about the exact same way.)
|
|
|
Post by TheNewMads on May 15, 2011 8:14:12 GMT -5
I've seen all of the Friday the 13ths and the only good thing about them is the killings. They should have just edited them together into a "Greatest Hits" type DVD. i assume you've all seen this? it's rather hypnotic. and linked together like this, you see how little the grossout depends on the blood and prosthetics, and how much on the foley sound effects. that's a lot of crunchy lettuce! i've eyeballed black death twice at the redbox now, this'll light a fire under me to get it next time. redbox gets a lot of pretty decent movies that slipped through the cracks. course they get a lot of drek too.
|
|
|
Post by Frameous on May 16, 2011 22:22:43 GMT -5
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) This is the sequel that started it all, and in some fan circles is infallable. I can’t quite agree, but it’s still one of the stronest entries. What bothers me are the little things. Like, doesn’t Jason seem a bit slight, and not fitting with continuity? And why is this the only Jason to have substantial hair on his hydrocephalus head? He jumps from skinny, mulleted hillbilly in part 2 to hulking, bald mongoloid in part 3. at the risk of sounding like one of those hardcore fans, aren't you blaming part 2 for continuity problems that were actually in part 3? i have a hunch they went with skinny jason in part 2 because they were going for an ed gein type vibe, whereas in part 3 they were probably starting to think they'd be better able to sustain sequel after sequel if they made him more of a huge hulking type and sorta go in a more gore-action-movie direction. part 2 is my favorite, i gotta say. pretty dark stuff. (that said, there are quite a few i haven't seen. part 3 irked me and after that i was pretty intermittent in watching F13 movies, esp. since every time i gave in, i was disappointed in just about the exact same way.) You're absolutely right, I am. It's not a fair thing to do, but I didn't evolve with the movies as they made them. I got into them by the time 6 and 7 came about. So I suppose I tend to view the series like a flat canvas. Still, part 2 has evident growing pains, yet remains a fan favorite. Maybe I didn't have any glowing comments towards it, so I fell back on easy criticism. Anyway, here's the Fright Night trailer. Consider me underwhelmed. Still, it could always be worse. www.moviehole.net/201140906-heres-the-fright-night-trailer
|
|
|
Post by Joker on May 20, 2011 19:32:49 GMT -5
The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007)
A team of incompetent soldiers are sent by the U.S. Army to a remote outpost in a restricted area of New Mexico. They were just supposed to drop off some supplies, but when they find no one around they try to find the commanding officer. It turns out that the military was conducting search and destroy operations to kill off all of the irradiated savage cannibal mutants still left there. Can this team of undisciplined losers survive the onslaught of killing?
Who cares? The problem with the remake of the remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) was that the brains layered into the original about family dynamics and third world rage against the first world people were torn out and replaced by the French "new wave horror" of extreme gore over substance. The mutants are still unlikeable engines of destruction with no personalities or character who are sadistic for no real reason (don't play with your food). That leaves only the irritating team of incompetent soldiers to watch as they make stupid decisions and get killed off.
The movie is also obsessed with just showing everything so it's not scary at all, just gory. This is the ultimate visual example of how less is more when it comes to being terrifying. The movie must have been made for teenagers who have no imagination. The filmmakers decided to show even the mutant leader Papa Hades raping a woman, even though you can tell what he has planned for the women in the team after the bloody birth in the beginning of the movie. Gee, thanks for nothing movie, and I didn't punch you in the face or anything. Did I mention I watched the R-rated cut of this movie? I don't really think I'd want to sit through this movie again to see what was cut out for an R. It can't possibly be something that would have made the movie better.
This movie is also a prime example of how sequels to remakes don't work. They don't seem to make money. They just seem to fail. All they really do is make the original sequels look like masterpieces. Rob Zombie's Halloween II (2009) wound up making Rick Rosenthal's Halloween II (1981) look like a dark and frightening nightmare of terror suddenly. This sequel suddenly makes the original The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985) seem like a good movie suddenly. If you haven't seen the original sequel directed by Wes Craven it was mostly a clip show with the survivors of the first film having flashbacks to the first film (including the dog) and becoming just a slasher film. It's still better than this flick.
Wes Craven and his son Jonathan wrote this sequel to a remake and they should have taken their names off. Just a horrible film all around.
Stanley (1972)
Tim (Chris Robinson) is a Seminole Indian Vietnam vet living quietly in the Florida Everglades who has rejected humanity and has a family of snakes in his house. He seems to have a peaceful life until a greedy businessman (Alex Rocco) tries to make a deal with him to use his kinship with snakes to start a snakeskin supply, which appalls Tim and he tries to keep the snakes safe from the businessman's thugs. Then Tim finds out from a blabbermouth thug that they had killed his father and he snaps. It doesn't help that everyone around Tim doesn't care about snakes either. Now Tim is going to go out with his best pal rattlesnake Stanley to take out everyone with a sack that seems to have about 50 poisonous snakes in it.
Robinson is not really the most charasmatic lead. He delivers his lines flatly most of the time, which I'm pretty sure wasn't some sort of method acting of portraying a traumatized veteran and more just an unprofessional actor. The amazing thing is him draping live rattler Stanley over his shoulders and the animal not biting him. Alex Rocco winds up acting circles around everyone as the slimy businessman and is a delight to watch. William Grefe directs this film with his usual eye towards beautiful cinematography and colors that pop in every scene.
Steve Alaimo is in the film as one of the thugs. This guy started out as a clean cut bubblegum pop star in Grefe's The Wild Rebels and The Hooked Generation. This was the 70's and holy crap did this decade hit him with the goofy fashion stick. Here he has a huge white guy mullet, an open shirt to show off his chest hair, and finally a gold medallion. Yeah...that's where the action is, ladies. It's a radical shift from his neatly parted hair from his previous films and here he looks like David Hess.
This story winds up being a gritty and dark story about a disturbed outsider at war with the rest of the world. When Tim kidnaps a woman to be his "Eve" in his new "Eden" it winds up going in a weird direction from there. Unfortunately, animals were clearly killed in the making of this film, which winds up being the most repulsive part of the film. They just decided to kill snake instead of having makeup FX I suppose. It's still an interesting film, but it's ironic that the filmmakers had the same disregard for snakes as Tim and Stanley's enemies.
|
|
|
Post by Joker on May 23, 2011 23:36:19 GMT -5
I just watched that massive Jason body count clip. Now I feel all numb and desensitized. It's amazing how that much violence all at once (and for no real reason from a giant zombie in a hockey mask) can make you feel so drained. Well, at least now I don't have to sit through all of those movies with their very thin plots.
Pink Eye (2008)
At a psychiatric hospital somewhere the patients are having deadly fits of psychosis. They seem to be mutilating themselves in gruesome ways. At the same time a new patient with a bad skin condition named Edgar (because he quotes Edgar Allan Poe) manages to escape. As he roams the wintery woods nearby he keeps killing random people and finally kidnaps a beautiful woman for some reason. A final showdown at the asylum winds up exposing why the people there are dying...
Okay, this is two horror movie ideas that are both half realized. Insane people mutilating themselves because of some sort of secret is one film idea that goes nowhere and seems to just be the jumping off point for the escape of Edgar, but he seemed evil to begin with. The slasher Edgar is the other story that should have been the whole film. Joshua James plays Edgar and his powerful deep voice makes his dark monologues excellent even as he peppers them with Poe quotes and talks through a brown swollen pink eye infection mask. Unfortunately, he passed away after this film came out. He is the best thing about the film, but the rest of the movie is not so good.
Open House (1987)
There's a hulking giant dog food-eating psycho is squatting in expensive homes in L.A. and begins killing female real estate agents. He really hates them and makes his opinion known on a radio call-in show. The host is in a pickle as the police want to tap his phone and his girlfriend (Adrienne Barbeau) happens to be a real estate agent. The killer fashions a weapon out of a toilet plunger with razorblades affixed to it and seems relentless in his pursuit of victims.
At first I thought that this was some sort of different kind of slasher film with strong women for once. The victims all seem to be professional career women - and one dominatrix - who own their sexuality and are bold in what they want out of life is diffrent from virgin final girls in slasher films. Then I realized that those are the only victims other than a couple guys who happened to be around them at the time. It's just more of the same old stuff and on top of this irritating and insipid slasher flick. It's not even a whodunit as the identity of the killer doesn't mean anything since you don't really see him interact with anyone when he's not killing folks. His reason for killing them winds up being extremely lame as well.
Barbeau gets topless a couple of times, but why bother wading through another dumb stalk-and-slash affair to just watch that for a few seconds at a time? Now you see why I don't want to sit through some Friday the 13th flick just to get to the killings.
|
|
|
Post by The Mad Plumber on May 24, 2011 21:35:10 GMT -5
Here's a series of YouTube videos I discovered sometime ago that I thought might be of a little interest to this thread. I'll post some more as time goes on. I also appreciate seeing the House movies get some mention in this thread. I've already commented on House II in another thread and I might bring up up House and House II in more detail later.
|
|
|
Post by Frameous on May 24, 2011 22:22:11 GMT -5
I don't know a lot about you MP, but I do know you love House II, and that tickles me to death. I adore House I and II and get royally cheesed off when I see 'House' all over my Time Warner on screen guide, and it's that medical drama with no rubbery monsters or zombie cowboys.
Thanks for joining us in here and I hope you keep posting. We are few but proud.
|
|