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Post by Joker on Nov 15, 2011 15:46:48 GMT -5
The Demon Lover (1977)
A bunch of college students hang out at the castle tower owned by the arrogant Luval, an occult magician who has organized this group for a ritual to focus his magic powers. Once these young folks (who look like they're all in Three Dog Night) find out what the ritual requires they all split. It would seem that Luval has failed until a strange woman shows up for him to complete the ritual and it works, with a horned demon with glowing eyes shows up. Now its stalking all of the young folks for some reason and many bloody deaths ensue.
Why the demon is stalking these people is a mystery as the soundtrack is so muddy that you can't understand much that's bellowed by the thing. All I heard was that he was going to kill them all and that's it. The annoying detective investigating the deaths is irritating and Gunnar Hansen is in the movie very briefly as a professor of the positive side of the occult that he has to consult with. Hansen is not really that interesting either. Luval is annoying as hell as the would-be sorceror who doesn't seem to like anyone and is constantly whipping his hair out of his face trying to be cool. Co-director Donald G. Jackson went on to make better cult films like Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988), but this movie is terribly inept.
Night of the Demons 2 (1994)
In the original Night of the Demons (1988) a bunch of teenagers went to the haunted ex-funeral home Hull House and were subsequently killed and possessed by the evil spirits dwelling there, with the goth woman Angela (Amelia Kinkade) becoming the gruesome demoness there. She still haunts the place, destroying anyone who shows up. A nearby Catholic school has a Halloween dance coming up, but all of the cool kids get grounded and sneak out to the damned house for a party. Amelia's sister "Mouse" has been dragged along and they all get terrorized by Angela and escape, but a tube of lipstick taken from the property is all that's needed to make a bridge to the Catholic school for Angela to cross and slaughter her way through the students.
A typical horror sequel becomes much cooler because Autralian director Brian Trenchard-Smith makes it fun. The story gets wayyyy over the top campy as a student of the occult and a militant nun gear up for a battle with demons with water guns and balloons full of holy water. It's wacky and gory as hell and loads of fun in the second half and well worth the wait. I myself was terribly smitten with Zoe Trilling, the busty brunette bad girl in the movie whose breasts become caustic hands at one point! Recommeded for b-horror fans.
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Post by Joker on Nov 22, 2011 21:22:14 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers are not work safe The Last Circus (2010)In 1937 Madrid a bunch of circus performers were drafted into the civil war against the fascists where a clown managed to kill a lot of them and was forced into hard labor later. He wanted his son Javier (Carlos Areces) to be a sad clown, but he also says that revenge will ease his pain. In 1973 Javier gets a job as the sad clown straight man in a circus with Sergio (Antonio de la Torre) who is the star funny clown. Sergio is an abusive drunk after the show and is seeing the beautiful trapeze artist Natalia (Carolina Bang) that Javier secretly adores. Sergio puts Javier in the hospital and Javier mutilates Sergio's face. A dark descent into madness leads Javier to mutilating his face and arming up for a war for the woman he adores. Sergio now seems like the sane one with a stitched together face and terrible rage against Javier with the put upon Natalia caught between them. This seems like a horror film with the amount of gore and violence onscreen. The characters go through major changes and becomes a gruesome drama leading to a shocking conclusion. At times funny and at others tragic it's one of the strangest films you'll see, but it's excellent nevertheless. Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)Two homicide detectives (David Carradine and Richard Roundtree) investigate the killing of a window washer whose head was torn off and the skinned corpse of someone killed in some sort of ritual and find that they're related. A small time crook running from a jewelry store heist named Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty) hides at the top of the Chrysler Building and inadvertently finds the nest of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a giant bird serpent monster summoned by someone to NYC. People keep getting eaten by the thing and eventually the detectives have to accept the unbelievable. When Jimmy finds out the cops are looking for the bird he decides that it's finally his payday for a life of hard knocks. Larry Cohen made some of the most clever b-movies in the 70's and 80's and this one is another in a long list of cool stuff he's made. Q winds up seeming pretty outdated as a monster as the creature is done with stop motion animation. This absurd idea becomes neat when the NYPD have to fight the beast with machine guns like King Kong. I wish the person who summoned the monster had been in the movie as a main character so that there could be a neat twist at the end, but it's still okay. Moriarty is great as the not-too-swift Jimmy who comes up with a plan to extort a bunch of cash from the city for the info he has. A bizarre and fun flick. ;D
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Post by Joker on Dec 1, 2011 1:08:06 GMT -5
Super 8 (2011)
In a small Ohio town in 1979 a bunch of kids go out to an abandoned train station to shoot a scene for their homemade zombie movie. After a train crashes in a hail of twisted metal something breaks out of one of the cars, with their Super 8 camera running the whole time. As the days pass after the crash weird stuff begins to happen in town. All the dogs abandon the town and engines and appliances go missing. Monster kid Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) has to deal with his dad (Kyle Chandler) not wanting him to be friends with his major crush Alice (Elle Fanning) because of his mother's death. The Air Force is desperate to find the creature that escaped the train wreck and will do anything to find it. Things get even more complicated when the monster starts abducting people - and it just took Alice.
This movie is very Speilbergian with all of the usual aspects of his films in this story. The suburban setting, chaotic family scenes, huge spectacles, and the final goal of the alien are all taken from those films. People are also looking in awe at things a lot. The monster-loving make-up kid Joel is cool and the obsessive director kid, Charles (Riley Griffiths) is awesome. The kids film "The Case" is hilarious fun that I would have probably been trying to make if this movie had come out when I was a kid. The ending is a bit formulaic, but everything else is excellent.
Kiss Daddy Goodbye (1981)
Two little kids living in isolation with their father have their lives turned upside down when squatting bikers murder him. Unbeknownst to the white trash killers these two kids are actually telekinetic and use their Carrie-like powers to make their father a zombie to kill them all. A local deputy (Fabian) keeps finding the bodies of these losers and meets the kids' teacher (Marilyn Burns from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)) and together they begin to figure out what's happening - just as the bikers have decided to take out the kids for being witnesses.
This movie is boring as hell. Fabian apparently was some sort of heartthrob before I was born and should have stuck with singing. Burns is the only good actor really and she's just a helpless supporting character. The two kids just cannot act and their scenes drag this film down even though their dark powers are supposed to be the catalyst for all of these strange effects. When the zombie dad somehow burrowed under the sand of a beach to kill some people I just began to wonder why I was watching this crud.
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Post by Joker on Dec 13, 2011 23:41:43 GMT -5
World of the Dead: Zombie Diaries 2 (2011)
A team of British soldiers are stationed at a rural compound and receive transmissions from the coast for a rescue before the U.K. gets bombed out. After the zombie plague they've been isolated from shows up at their door they decide to make a break for the rescue. Unfortunately, the countryside is being terrorized by bandits.
There's a seperate subgenre in horror films for hardcore horror fans. Usually those are torture porn films about some guy raping, torturing, and killing women and are so close to reality that they usually get banned by various foreign governments (like The Human Centipede: Full Sequence in Australia recently). If you want to watch heavily armed military guys taking out zombies by watching this film you'd better realize that there is an extended rape and torture scene with the nasty bad guys from the first film. It doesn't really have a place in this story and adds nothing but some fake snuff anti-woman footage.
I wish they'd have kept their hardcore crap out of this zombie film as it's like mixing oil and water. It's like having a softcore sex scene in a children's film - it doesn't fit. One of the problems with horror fandom is some people just need harder and harder subject matter until they make a movie you'd just want to shut off.
I guess that was the only purpose of this film as the performances are too professional to be mistaken for a bunch of ordinary people on camera. The zombies are so easy to get past that when these survivors stop to shoot a few you start to get angry at them for wasting their limited ammo. When characters get killed by zombies here you get upset enough to slap them since the undead are so slow there is no way that this apocalypse could have overcome humanity. There is one somewhat spooky scene where the team has to sneak through an infested snowbound cemetery at night, but it's fleeting. The movie's nasty and average.
The Possessed (2005)
In this anthology of horror shorts a demon is summoned by a bunch of bland kids, a demon takes the souls of weak-willed people in a house to make paper dolls, and a young man in some southern gothic place investigates why he was left all of his father's luxurious wealth. But wait, this is just three edited together Full Moon movies so they suck quite badly. It was a scheme by Charles Band to make some more money off of his boring and obscure flicks.
The first movie is actually Witchouse (1999) where a bunch of unlikable and/or bland one-dimensional stereotype characters are taken out by the demon witch Lilith (Ariana Albright, whose name was not listed in the credits, lucky for her). There's no nudity, but because it's directed by openly gay Z-movie director David DeCoteau there's a guy in his underwear. I'd still not recommend it to gay viewers as it's dull as hell.
The second movie is J.R. Bookwalter's Stitches (2002) where an old woman hides a dark secret beneath her skin and manages to make weak people give up their souls with some sort of debilitating psychological trick that keeps people from just running away. A series of implausible no-win situations makes this extremely slow and un-scary.
The last film is Netherworld (1992) and is actually a bit good since the low-budget effects and the incredible southern gothic production value. The story gets creepy when a weird mannequin or sex doll or whatever grabs a guy and twists it's head around to show several different spooky masks. This is the only one I'd be interested in seeing, but then again this is the most interesting parts of these films boiled down into an attempt at an anthology film with no connecting device like a Cryptkeeper or anything. So I'll check out Netherworld now at least.
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Post by Joker on Dec 21, 2011 0:40:30 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers contain violence and gore Screamers: The Hunting (2009)A paramilitary team arrives on planet Sirius 6B in response to a distress beacon activated by someone. The problem with this planet is that a civil war led to the development of "screamers," an advanced kind of killing machine that exterminated all life there - except for a bunch of survivors. One guy on the mission wants schematics on the devices to sell for a fortune on Earth and inadvertently repowers a screamer factory and now these people must survive against the mechanized killer tech and get off the planet before a meteor storm destroys everything on the surface. The original Screamers (1995) was this film with Peter Weller based on a story by Philip K. Dick about these killer machines and the paranoia that comes from not knowing if your friends are actually enemies beneath their skin. This movie becomes like that for a brief moment and then becomes a survival horror nightmare as the machines find a way to evolve. Lance Henriksen is in the movie briefly as the scientist who developed the flesh-shredding machines in the first place. The whole film is very gory and much better than your usual DTV sequel. Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil (2010)Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) are two rednecks who just bought a dilapidated old cabin in the woods to fix up for vacation. A bunch of college kids just so happen to be in the woods on vacation, too. A series of unfortunate accidents and misunderstandings leads to lots of the kids getting killed in hideous ways that horrify the two redneck guys as they try to do the right thing again and again and things just get worse. One of the college kids decides he's going to be some sort of hero and hates hillbillies with a passion due to a tragic event that happened in the same area. Tudyk and Labine are like Abbott and Costello with the way they play off of each other and make the movie more and more hilarious. The joke doesn't really wear thin as the college kids keep getting taken out by dumb luck. Tucker and Dale seem to have about as much combined intelligence as one of those little dogs that barks at a pine cone for three days straight so they can't seem to end the carnage. It's one of the most hilarious horror-comedies ever. The House of the Demon (2007)A bunch of high school kids in Southwestern, TX (?!) decide to go to one of their uncle's house for a Halloween party and wind up awakening an evil demon. As the night wears on a bunch of people murdered there become flesh-eating demonically possessed zombies. It sounds like a cool idea, but some terrible jokes thrown in make this a hatefully bad waste of time. Most of the movie is wasted with lame jokes so when it tries to be serious by the end you've pretty much lost your patience.
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Post by Joker on Dec 28, 2011 0:35:58 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers are not work safe The Howling Reborn (2011)Will Kidman (Landon Liboiron) is an ordinary kid who somehow survived the murder of his pregnant mother and is seemingly just living on automatic, trying to get into college and pining after the girl of his dreams. Bullied by some sort of Eastern European thug from day-to-day he suddenly has a burst of strength when confronting the guy and is stalked by hipster guys for some reason. Then a beautiful blonde woman (Ivana Milicevic) seduces her father and then gets the school locked down with Will and his girlfriend trapped inside just in time for a blue moon. It turns out that the piled up and hung up corpses in the basement will become an unholy army of werewolves that will destroy the world if Will doesn't find a way to embrace his very special lineage and use it to make his own choice for once in his life. Howling sequels seem to fall into two categories: below average and terrible. This is of the former category as it at least tries to be more savage than some Twilight flick. The comic relief horror filmmaker sidekick is at least a little funny and not grating your nerves. Unfortunately the score is heavily derivative of Hans Zimmer's score from The Dark Knight to the point of being infringement. All of the werewolf transformations are CGI and the final lycan fight is like a bizarre WWE match. The ending will just leave you scratching your head as to why you kept watching. The only question I have is why would they keep making sequels in this series if they just get worse and worse? Poison for the Fairies (1984)A young girl new to school befriends a weird little girl who thinks she's a witch and eventually uses her fairy tale knowledge to convince the new girl that she really has dark powers. A web of deception eventually leads to the witchy girl to trying to brew a cauldron of poison as her friend realizes that things have gone too far. The film could have been at least 45 minutes shorter as just watching these two doing random things was so dull that I started to fall asleep. There's a good payoff that takes forever to get to. That's about it.
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Post by Joker on Jan 23, 2012 20:37:15 GMT -5
I got backed up on movies for the last few weeks. Warning: Trailers are not work safe Dead Noon (2007)Some bad guy (Kane Hodder) kidnaps a random woman and tells her the story of Frank, an outlaw who was killed along with his gang by a sheriff in the Old West. After winning a poker game with the devil he comes back to Earth with deadly supernatural powers. His undead compatriots stalk anyone alive in their path and then kidnap the fiance of a local sheriff, the descendant of the man who sent Frank to Hell. Now with the help of a rival and a heavily armed woman the face down the undead gang in a showdown of apocalyptic proportions. The performances are pretty weak and the overuse of awful CGI really detract from a cool idea poorly executed here. Island of the Fishmen (1979)A bunch of prisoners and their doctor are drifting in a lifeboat in 1891 after their ship sinks. Tensions are running high amongst the survivors when they suddenly crash their boat into something and are attacked by some sort of giant fishmen with only a handful wash ashore on a trpoical island. As the survivors get picked off only the doctor, Claude (Claudio Cassinelli) makes it to a remote mansion where a rich man (Richard Johnson) lives with his many native servants and a beautiful woman (Barbara Bach). But the questions begin to gnaw at Claude. Why does the young woman take a potion out to the fishmen in the night? Why can't he go into certain places in the house? And who is the old man (Joseph Cotten) sneaking around watching them all? All of these questions are answered in this very weird gothic horror film. Casinelli is a charismatic lead in the face of all of the weird goings on happening around him while Johnson (from Fulci's Zombie (1979)) is appropriately slimy as the rich villain. This winds up being a very well made monster flick with incredible production value from a low budget Italian production. Attack the Block (2011)A gang of street thugs mug a woman for slim pickings in a cruddy neighborhood in Brixton, U.K. when something crashes from the sky nearby. The gang's leader, Moses, chases down and kills the weird alien thing that crashed and brings it back to a local drug dealer's apartment, just in time to become a made man in his weed-selling operation. Outside more meteors crash and explode around the neighborhood and a horde of jet black gorilla-looking aliens with rows of glow-in-the-dark teeth are prowling the neighborhood, eating anyone the find. Now the gang is on the run trying to stay alive against the onslaught and wind up having to get help from the nurse they mugged at the beginning. A hidden secret amongst them is the key to survival, but it will take a lot of courage from Moses to make it work. Joe Cornish was Edgar Wright's cinematographer so this film he directed winds up being a hyperkinetic thrill ride where a bunch of thugged-out kids wind up being heroes. The eyeless aliens that absorb light to the point of being pitch black all the time are freaky and incredible. Nick Frost is also hilarious as the pothead guy who lives in the weed farm/apartment. The only complaint I had was that this is one of those British films where people have thick accents and use slang all the time so you'll have to turn on the English subtitles if you want to understand the English these kids speak. Plaguers (2008)A bunch of folks on a salvage ship are bringing a strange glowing orb back to Earth to make a ton of cash when they respond to distress call and recue a bunch of hot young women from an empty ship. A swift turn of events reveals that these women are actually a bunch of criminals who take over their ship. Then one of the hijackers ruptures the orb and is sprayed with some sort of goo that turns her into a flesh-eating zombie. Soo this infection spreads through the ship with this new plague threatening to kill them all before they escape. Roger Corman used to produce gory sci-fi films like this in the wake of Alien (1979), but had nothing to do with this. It shows quite a bit as the CGI is pretty bad, Steve Railsback plays a character who acts like he's very stoned and adds nothing to the film, and this just seems to get goofy at times. The nutty hijacker woman is cool and the special makeup FX are well done. These zombies are what we call Return of the Living Dead undead and are extremely hard to subdue. After the characters try shooting them in the head yet again to no avail you just get frustrated with them. Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978)In the jungles of New Guinea a rich woman (Ursula Andress) and her brother hire a jungle guide (Stacy Keach) to lead them into this green hell to find her lost husband. As their band is being whittled down by deadly jungle traps it would appear that a supposedly extinct cannibal tribe is still around. Their guide survived an earlier abduction by the tribe and wants to wipe them out, but they have to press on to get to the mountain the woman's husband was looking for. A charismatic doctor (Claudio Cassinelli) joins them and it would seem that they'll reach the mountain - until the cannibals find them. Cannibal movies were a weird subgenre that managed to disturb their way through the 70's and into the 80's. They pretty much revel in explicitness as there's lots of gore and savagery. There's also lots of animal abuse as people kill living animals and animals prey on each other to hammer home the point that the "law of the jungle" is the only law there. It's pretty despicable when the guys in the safari group kill and eat a living lizard and a scene of a boa constrictor eating a struggling monkey is also distressing. Then there's the cannibal tribe who smear orange paint on a nude Andress (the only part of this film that I could like - that woman's really game) and graphically punish a would-be rapist. These folks are so primitive they don't even cook who they're eating for a feast. They have some sort of orgy where a woman is graphically engaging in a very self-centered act while some guy gets frisky with a very disinterested pig. So you can get the idea of why these flicks get severely censored or just outright banned in other countries. I didn't really like the film because I'm not that impressed with overly explicit stuff. Albino Farm (2008)A quartet of college kids drive into the Ozark Mountains to put together some school assignment on the local culture there. When an old blind guy (Duane Whitaker from Hobgoblins and Pulp Fiction) tells them some cryptic stuff about the local legend of the titular farm and piques their interest. Two of them manage to get a local redneck (Chris Jericho) to take them to the place while the other two suddenly realize the secret of the town. The Albino Farm is full of hideous mutants, the products of generations of inbreeding - and they hate outsiders. A standard hillbilly horror film that ctually has good makeup FX is hard to find. This is only really good because of the FX and WWE's Chris Jericho, who steals the show as the shady redneck. I wish he had been the hero here, but he's just a supporting player in the film. This film was alternately called Wrong Turn 4, but probably had to be changed because there is actually a film called Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings.
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Post by MonsterX on Jan 24, 2012 0:12:16 GMT -5
I love Island of The Fish-men, although I own the Roger Corman "Screamers" version with the added gore.
Tucker and Dave vs. Evil was one of the best movies/comedies of 2011. You Sir, have good taste movies.
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Post by Frameous on Jan 27, 2012 23:34:52 GMT -5
I've recently seen Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Attack the Block, and Troll Hunter. Rather than bore everyone with additional reviews, let me just say I loved them all, and found them the best of last years offerings.
The Grey (2012)
I have been a fan of the director Joe Carnahan since I saw Narc. If you love hard boiled, twisty cop mysteries, that is one to check out. He has done some more commercial work lately (Smokin Aces, The A Team), so this was a nice, gritty return to form for him. The film was produced by Ridley and Tony Scott (I know, that can mean both good and bad things these days), and is based on a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers.
All I knew going in was it's a man vs. wilderness story, and I'm a sucker for those. What I got was a very well written, directed, and acted contemplation on masculinity, faith, and loss. The dialog was littered with humorous moments, alleviating the grim tension that dominated the story (something I find can really round out a script). The direction featured the dreaded shaky cam, but in this setting it was used to great effect, and non action shots weren't wobbling around for no reason (another annoying offshoot of this trend). The camera is thrown violently when someone is attacked, and plunges into water when a character does the same. Nothing ground breaking here, but an excellent example of how this technique can be used. All that being said, once we're established in the story, the tension is jacked up into one hell of a survival horror trip.
Without giving too much away, a group of loner oilmen are stranded in Alaska after a plane crash and stalked by a pack of wolves. As the characters slowly reveal themselves and are picked off one at a time by the deadly animals, parallels begin to emerge between the wolf pack and our heroes. The characters use more brain than bravado, and eventually band together in times of crisis rather than splintering apart (much like The Thing). The end reaches an inevitably heartbreaking conclusion, where pieces of a character's motivation finally fall into place. When the screen went black, and the people behind me started complaining about the ending, I found myself actually moved by what I just saw. The last time I felt that was a recent re-watch of Blade Runner (my favorite film), and I can't tell you how long it's been since it's happened theatrically.
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Post by Joker on Feb 1, 2012 22:44:02 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers are not work safe Burke and Hare (2010)After their money making schemes fail again to make them any scratch William Burke (Simon Pegg) and William Hare (Andy Serkis) come home to their shabby apartment in Edinburgh where Hare's wife berates her husband for messing up again. An old guy died in their spare room and the two men luck upon a new scheme. New legislation has left a local medical school without cadavers to dissect and the head doctor (Tom Wilkinson) needs dead bodies now. Now the two resurrectionists (a nicer way of saying "grave robbers") try to find fresh bodies for profit. The cemetery is too well patrolled so they resort to killing people. It would seem despicable to everyone else, but this is good business for the two as they manage to bumble their way into more victims. Burke is trying to help his new girlfriend (Isla Fisher) put on an all female produstion of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hare's wife (Jessica Hynes from BBC TV's Spaced) is extremely happy that her better half has a well-paying job. Unfortunately the local militia is closing in on the killers and their livelihood is in danger. John Landis is one of the all-time best comedy directors and here he gets to work with a lot of British comic talent for a one-two punch horror/comedy film. Pegg and Serkis play off of each other well (who knew that Serkis had such incredible comic chops!) and the supporting cast makes this a fun pitch black comedy. Christopher Lee shows up as a mad old veteran of the Napoleonic wars in a role that is much different from anything he's played before. Highly recommended. The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)The wife of Verden Fell (Vincent Price) is convinced that his newly deceased wife, Ligeia (Elizabeth Shepherd), will come back from the dead. Years later a beautiful young woman named Rowena who looks just like her (Shepherd again) shows up on his gothic property and his grip on reality begins to weaken. Slowly it seems that the dead Ligeia is returning to take back her life with her husband, even though he has just remarried with Rowena. As Verden seems more out of control of his own faculties his young bride and her friend uncover the truth about what is really happening. Roger Corman would seem like an incompetent director if you only watch his films that were featured on MST3K, but he made a lot more interesting stuff when he was making these lush Edgar Allen Poe-based films. Suppressed desire becomes obsession, turns to madness, and then leads to murder like in Poe's stories. Production values are incredible, like a much more interesting gothic version of a Merchant Ivory film. Recommended. An Evening of Edgar Allen Poe (1970)Four Poe stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Sphinx," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Pit and the Pendulum" are told here by Vincent Price as the narrator. Originally broadcast on TV this winds up being a one man show powerhouse that showcases how incredible and actor Price was. Camera angles, lighting, and music make the stories much more animated even though there is only the one actor. An extremely well done production. I Am Virgin (2010)A plague has turned the population of the planet into sex-crazed lesbain vampires leaving a young man named Robby and his basset hound alone to survive. Robby was brought up by prudish parents so he keeps observing all sorts of vampires having sex, but is afraid of it himself and just waiting for the right woman. As he keeps finding vamps having sweaty relations he realizes that he needs to get over his fear. The only noteworthy thing about this film is the incredible production design. The ruined dead world Robby travels through looks cool. Too bad that this film is just a softcore porn film and the setting is irrelevant. The heavily tattooed female vampires are super hot, but there are some male ones thrown in - so the idea of a vampire plague making a world full of lesbian vamps isn't really accurate. Also no blood, nor any other bodily fluid is consumed to sustain these beasts so they're fangs are irrelevant. Well, at least it wasn't rotten zombies...
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Post by Joker on Feb 21, 2012 14:50:33 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers are not work safe Fort Doom (2004)A madam (Debbie Rochon) and her stable of prostitutes and a photographer take a train to a fort-turned-town in post-Civil War west. The train won't take them all the way there for some reason so they have to hoof it through the woods the rest of the way and when they finally get there they find out why. Someone is brutally killing off people in the forest. One of the stable of hookers is actually not a working girl and is just the madam's sister and she begins to investigate what's really going on. What happens next is a deadly showdown where deep scars from the Civil War come home to roost. The movie is pretty boring exept for Billy Drago as his usual kind of slimy reptilian bad guy mortician and Rochon as the sultry and savvy madam. Manhattan Baby (1982)During a trip to Egypt a young girl is given a strange necklace with an eye medallion by a creepy old woman while her father is on an archaeological dig and is blinded by an evil force in an ancient tomb. When they get back home to Manhattan weird stuff begins to happen as the man's kids start acting strange around their babysitter Jamie Lee (!) and his sight is suddenly restored. Then people start getting killed around them by some sort of unseen force while an antiques dealer tries to contact them in a weird way instead of just going to their apartment. Not much is happening that's very interesting until someone gets killed gorily, like when a guy gets attacked by stuffed birds that come to life. It's probably Lucio Fulci's worst film. Grace (2009)Madeline (Jordan Ladd) is a young vegan mother who goes against her mother-in-law's wishes and decides to have her baby delivered by her ex-lover midwife with the support of her husband. When he gets killed in a freak accident that she survives, but her baby does not, she's determined to have this baby. After she has the baby it would appear that it's stillborn - then the infant girl miraculously recovers. Things seem normal until it appears that the baby Grace draws flies and can only keep down her mother's blood. As Madeline becomes a shut-in obsessed with keeping her baby healthy her mother-in-law becomes sickly maternal after the death of her son and begins to pull strings to get the baby taken away from Madeline - but you never get between a mother and her child. This movie seems very feminist as all of the men are just jellyfish around very assertive women. Madeline will do anything for her baby Grace to keep her alive while her mother-in-law will do unethical things to get the baby taken away. The gory effects are good even though it's inpractical to put decaying makeup on the infant so they use a grey prosthetic baby with crusty skin in closeup while the baby looks healthy when they have to have an actual baby in the shot. Otherwise it winds up being very disturbing and unsettling at the same time as being very well-acted.
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Post by Joker on Feb 28, 2012 23:48:00 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers are not work safe Chillerama (2011)On the closing night for a drive-in a bunch of different people arrive to watch four of the most bizarre movies ever created. In "Wadzilla" a man taking a fertility drug has a problem after he realizes that any kind of turn-on results in him producing bigger and bigger sperm until one grows to gargantuan proportions. In "I Was a Teenage Werebear" a young man is grappling to accept his sexuality when a bunch of studly badass beast men come into his life and threaten everything he cares about. In "The Diary of Anne Frankenstein" Adolf Hitler (Joel David Moore) gets a hold of a diary full of scientific info from a certain Jewish family that shortened their name and creates the ultimate superweapon (Kane Hodder). Then finally there's "Deathication" a scientifically perfected film created by a schlock director to induce a certain bodily function in the audience. But while all of this is going on one of the drive-in employees has been infected with some sort of virus that has slowly been turning the patrons into a sex-crazed zombie horde! Troma only wishes that it could make this much of a tasteless, sleazy, and over-the-top movie. The difference with this film is that this kind of lowbrow humor actually works in this flick. Four different directors have made one of the most insane anthology films I've ever seen with some of the best comedy you'll see. The "werebear" story is very gay-themed, but was still enjoyable. I think that "Anne Frankenstein" is the funniest with Moore as an overacting Hitler speaking German that sounded like it was mostly just made up. Kane Hodder suddenly shows that he has great comedic chops as the monster. Highly recommended. Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966)In a small European village a young doctor arrives to investigate a series of murders involving young girls. Unfortunately, he gets no help from the populace who cling to their superstitious ways, with a local sorceress using magic to ward off whatever evil is plaguing this town. The ghost of a young girl haunts these people and becomes a harbinger for the deaths that are whittling down the village's population. Who this little girl was and who is responsible for this nightmare is the key to ending it. Another excellent gothic horror film from Mario Bava which has so much atmosphere it becomes a miasma of evil in this haunted village. Shadows and light make everything more menacing as the story builds to a shocking finale. Reality begins to warp as the evil becomes stronger and in one sequence the doctor keeps running through one room on a loop until he catches the person he had been chasing. The lovely Erica Blanc makes the movie more interesting as the doctor's assistant with a dark secret. Another recommended film. The Dead (2010)A virus spreads across Africa resurrecting the dead as flesh-eating zombies. An engineer mercenary (Rob Freeman) is the sole survivor of a plane crash and has to move into the plagued land to find a way off the continent. He meets up with a soldier (Prince David Oseia) looking for his missing son. His son may be at an outpost on the edge of the desert along with a way to radio for help. The two men must rely on their skills and each other to survive as the dead are everywhere. No place is safe... When a good zombie movie comes along it's as rare as finding a $100 dollar bill in your ear. Beautiful cinematography, solid performances, and genuinely scary and tension-filled moments make this one of the very best. Every time these guys have to stop walkers stagger out of the bushes in the wilderness to eat them. The zombies in this film become extremely creepy with minimal makeup and dusty skin. I was shocked that a zombie film could actually scare me and be an excellent film in general. Yet another recommended film. The rare hat-trick of good horror films! ;D
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Post by Joker on Mar 7, 2012 19:58:57 GMT -5
Cut and Run (1985)
Somewhere in South America a drug running operation gets attacked by deadly natives led by a strange looking bald guy (Michael Berryman). An American TV reporter (Lisa Blount) and her cameraman fly down there to investiagte since the son of the head of their network has his son missing there. His son (Willie Aames) is very much alive and living as a slave in a drug operation in the jungle that gets attacked by the same deadly natives and desperately wants to escape with his girlfriend (Valentina Forte) and the TV crew seems like a good way out, but the reporters want an interview with the man who seems to control the killer tribe, Col. Brian Horne, a survivor of the Jonestown mass suicide. The jungle seems like a deadly labyrinth with no way out and when the colonel finds them...
This feels like that movie Traffic crossed with a cannibal film (without the cannibalism.) Ruggero Deodato directs a very gruesome action film that becomes a gorfest where people destroyed in all sorts of ways (including a guy torn in half). The movie seems pretty bland storywise with the subplot of the missing son coming to a very soppy head. It seems out of place amidst all the carnage. Richard Lynch saves the film near the end as the cynical main heavy and has an Apocalypse Now moment of self reflection. The movie is just okay, but way too explicit to be taken seriously really.
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
At a chic fashion salon in Italy a woman is strangled during a storm, opening up an investigation that reveals a web of secrets and deception amongst all of the suspects. Meanwhile the black-suited masked killer is killing more women and a no-B.S. detective is trying to unravel the mystery.
Another cool slasher film from Mario Bava that it so stylized that every scene is a visual feast. Again lighting and shadow are used to create an atmosphere of menace. The actors are all excellent including Cameron Mitchell as the head of the salon. The killings are all pretty gruesome with one woman having her face held against a red hot stove. The twisty plot leads to a very bizarre shock ending to an excellent thriller.
Autumn (2009)
After a sudden plague makes most of humanity cough up blood and die the remaining survivors try to figure out what to do. Then the corpses begin to get up and walk and that settles it for a few people who make tracks out into the countryside. The dead seem to be getting more dangerous the more rotten they get and soon the survivors can't even hope to hide from the building horde outside.
The performances are good and that's about all with this flick. The leads all seem like normal people in a worsening situation, but this story goes nowhere. The zombies are not really dangerous until the last 1/4 of the film. David Carradine is in the movie briefly as some sort of disturbed man living in a garbage house. It's a major disappointment for zombie fans and makes you angry at the filmmakers.
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Post by Joker on Mar 20, 2012 18:14:35 GMT -5
Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)
A model dies from an abortion and her doctor tries to cover up her death. Then someone dressed in a black leather motorcycle outfit with an identity-concealing helmet kills him, then proceeds to kill everyone else in the dead woman's modeling agency. The womanizing photographer at the place at one point gets the killer's face on film and the killer will do anything to get that evidence back while continuing the brutal spree.
As you can tell from the title this is a very sleazy and lurid film. Numerous women get naked and there is lots of sexual stuff (complete with one guy who loves his inflatable doll). How anyone thought that the sleazy photographer guy could be a symapathetic lead is beyond me. You won't care about any of these people really. It's more of a lame sofcore sex comedy than a dark giallo. There's lots of product placement for J&B scotch whiskey sprinkled throughout and one sequence in someone's house where there are a lot of those mirrored signs for booze on the walls, so at least I have some idea of what I think fuelled this flick. This is from the director of the tastelessly fun zombie film Burial Ground: Nights of Terror. 'Nuff said.
Satan's Wife (1979)
Carlotta is a divorced mother who had a tryst with Lucifer and bore a daughter named Daria. Daria appears to have a bunch of knowledge of the dark arts and is more powerful than any of the other people in her mother's old coven. It would appear that there is no way to stop this antichrist girl and it's not like any of these women would win anyway as Satan manifests himself whenever these women try to have any kind of control over their lives. A young priest (John Phillip Law) leaving the church to live life could be the key to undoing the evil that Daria inflicts upon the world.
There's not much to see here as the monotone and cold Daria looses the devil's work on people. The devil appears in the film as some sort of vaguely menacing man who looks like he's in some progreesive rock band of the time. I guess the filmmakers thought Satan was in Emerson, Lake, and Palmer at some point. He simply appears to drive away any chance at happiness these women can have. One woman from the coven has become a prostitute just to have sex, but the devil shows up to block her and scare away her johns! There isn't much violence, but lots of nudity and satanic stuff, so it wasn't that interesting to me.
Fiend Without a Face (1958)
After a plague of mysterious deaths where victims brains and spines are sucked out (?!) keep happening around a U.S./Canadian joint Air Force base a major (Marshall Thompson) investigates. The trail leads to a scientist who found a way to solidify his thoughts into invisible killer brain monsters that feed off of the radiation from the nearby base while preying on the locals. Things just got worse as the base has increased the power generation from their reactor for their radar program and now a swarm of flying brains have gathered outside of the scientist's house to kill everyone within.
A standard 50's monster film becomes one of the most bizarre survival horror films where people have to face off against flying brains trying to bust into a boarded up house pre-Night of the Living Dead (1968). It's surprisingly gory as shooting the brains results in their squirty, gooey demises. It's pretty extreme for a 50's film. One of the most fun b-movies I've ever seen.
Night of Death! (1980)
A young woman named Martine gets a job as a nurse at an old folks home. The domineering head of the home and the creepy handyman are covering up the terrible secret of the place: everyone there is a cannibal! When they take out Martine's predecessor for meat she begins to suspect something is up. She never sees the hidden room where the old folks go at night to chow down on the dead woman's raw flesh. Somehow all of this gory feasting keeps these people in their current state and on the 28th of every month they need more meat. The 28th is coming up and Martine keeps finding more clues that are leading to the terrible truth.
They keep showing scenes of the old folks chowing down on raw meat and guts to keep you interested as this movie is more about a slow buildup to the brutal climax. The old people don't seem to get much from their ugly habit and I wondered why they just kept eating people meat. An exteremely slow film with a weird twist and an ironic ending.
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Post by Joker on Apr 3, 2012 21:45:47 GMT -5
Warning: Trailers are not work safe and contain spoilers Circus of Fear (1966)After a armored car heist ends in the death of a guard the team of hoods take off with the loot, with the faceless crime boss behind the robbery giving an extra big share to an ex-guard. He escapes into the English countryside and winds up at a circus packing up for winter. Then someone kills him and the money disappears, The killer could be anyone and an inspector looks into it, but the web of deception amongst the members makes it very tough to find that guilty person. This movie is not much of a horror film as much as a thriller with Klaus Kinski lurking about as one of the gang of robbers wanting the money and a edgy performance by Christopher Lee as a disfigured lion tamer who hides his scarred face behind a mask. It's neat in it's intricacy among the characters at least. Alien Vs. Ninja (2010)An effective team of ninjas just pulled off a job in feudal Japan ( that somehow has guns and gas masks) when a meteor crashes in the forest and an alien creature pops out. Now all of these trained killers face a regenerating, impregnating foe that decimates these skilled assassins. At least the filmmakers know how to stage incredible action sequences and knew to use rubber suited guys for aliens instead of dodgy CGI. Unfortunately, there's a hatefully bad comedy relief guy along from the ride that drags this movie down in every scene he's in. The movie is very over the top and gory at times, but is a fun time waster. Stop Me Before I Kill (1960)After surviving a devestating car accident with brain damage race driver Alan Colby (Ronald Lewis, who looks a lot like David Hasselhoff) goes to France for vacation with his wife (Diane Cilento). Alan now has a very short fuse and dreams of killing his wife, but with the help of a psychiatrist (Claude Dauphin) he tries to overcome these evil urges. He thinks he's been cured and goes home with his wife to London. Then one morning he wakes up and his wife is gone...and there's blood all over the bathroom. This is another of those very cool Hammer thrillers where the story builds to a tense climax, but there are a lot of weird cover-ups that seem to be happening that could easily be deciphered if given a little thought. Also Cilento may be goregeous, but her voice is very shrill and slices through every scene she's in. Because of these setbacks it winds up being only minor among thrillers. Boarding House (1982)Years ago a couple experimenting with the occult and the hidden powers of the mind were killed by what were ruled as "accidents." Their daughter was sent to an institution, then breaks out. More people were killed at the house as well, but it was just bought by this European guy named Jim (director John Wintergate) who has a hip 80's lifestyle where he never has to work and has plenty of time to work on his own telekinetic abilities. He also gets some really hot women to live in the house and occasionally has sex with one of them. Meanwhile, some sort of dark presence is at work and people are being gorily taken out. The whole film is shot on video from '82 so it feels irritating to watch because of the picture. They didn't really digitally remaster this film. Another problem here is the haphazard way that the plot unfolds: important scenes just end quickly and seem to be cut in the middle. The whole movie just seems to be an excuse for women to be nude and sexy with occasional killings to keep some action onscreen. It's just so crappy, and not much fun either.
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