The Trashy Horror Charlie Show

Short Reviews for 2009 Horror Films

2009-10-01T23:39:00.002-04:00

Here are some of the highlights of the mid-2009 horror DVD releases:

Trick R Treat- An anthology of four interwoven horror stories takes place on Halloween night. The film was originally slated for theatrical release in October 2007, but since movie studios are run by retarded shitheads, it is now being released direct to DVD on October 6, 2009. This movie gave me a nice warm feeling inside. Five stars.

Drag Me To Hell- The best horror film that was in theaters this year, and the best movie that Sam Raimi has made since the Evil Dead series. This film has something for everyone.

Pig Hunt- Great, great fun dealing with a group of kids who go wild boar hunting in Northern California. Meth-snorting rednecks, pot growing lesbian hippies, and a 3,000 pound monster wild boar make for a wild ride. Les Claypool does the soundtrack! So incredibly awesome!

Dead Snow- A group of typical teen horror movie characters go up to a ski lodge way up in a Norwegian glacier and encounter Nazi zombies! During WWII Nazis occupied areas of Norway, and a handful were left behind as zombie to punish the Norwegian villagers who resisted them. There is loads and loads of gore in this one, and pacing is a mile a minute. Available in Norwegian with subtitles or dubbed in English.

Histeria- This weird slasher-type film from Malaysia takes place at a muslim girls school and features a demonic monster and lots of gore. A great choice if you want to see something different, like a Malaysian horror film.

It's Alive- The remake of the 1970s horror film was tame and really dumb. Total waste of time. One or two good scenes, but mostly a waste of time.

The Hills Run Red- Direct to DVD slasher-in-the-woods movie, with a movie-within-a-movie, and a few good parts. This is a decent time-waster if you have already seen some of the better stuff. Gory with lots of nudity.

End of the Line- Canadian supernatural horror takes place entirely on the subway. A doomsday religious cult kills people and at the same time a bunch of demons show up. Great underground cinematography. Recommended.

Header- An awesome piece of hillbilly exploitation trash. If you like disgusting humor, this bud's for you. Made in 2006 but not released until this past summer on DVD from Synapse. Header attempts to create it’s own little world of revenge tradition. The film starts with a big goofy goober coming home after a long stint in prison to his Grandpa, a wheelchair-bound dirty old man who lives in a cabin in rural Appalachia. The two embark on their age-old tradition of having a “Header,” their slang for abducting a person, drilling a hole in their head, and skull fucking them. Classy stuff. Anyway, if you enjoy endless amounts of profane dialog and redneck jokes, as well as some extreme gore, you will enjoy this one. Cannes film festival anyone?

The Skeleton Crew- This film is from Finland, and is another "self-aware" horror film about some people making a horror movie. It's okay, but it's great that Scandinavia has started cranking out horror films. Filmed entirely in English. Worth checking out.

Rovdyr (Norway)- AKA Backwoods, AKA Predator- A typical Deliverance-style backwoods slasher film with some city slicker kids running afoul of the local inbred hillbillies. Except it’s in Norway. I loved this one. The violence was cruel and gory, and it clocks in at a tight 70 minutes, so there was never a dull moment. I think shorter is better when it comes to low budget slasher movies because unless the film has a really high body count, the filmmaker has to be good at stuff like humor, character development, and other stuff that most horror filmmakers aren’t good at

Train- Supposedly the movie was originally going to be a remake of Terror Train (1981) but I guess David Copperfield wasn't available for another cameo, so it morphed into it's own project. The result is a tasteless, retarded cliche that is basically a blow for blow remake of Hostel taking place on a train ride across Russia. There's lots of gore but the film is so bland it is a total waste.

Demonwarp (1988)

2009-04-20T19:25:00.005-04:00

Oh wow...For the 80s horror fan who feels they have seen it all, Demonwarp has it all in one. This is not your average Bigfoot/aliens/zombie movie. No sir, this one is weird!
The film opens with a guy dressed like an Amish person walking in a field spotting a UFO (offscreen) crash in the mountains (offscreen). Cut to a cabin in the woods, present day, and George Kennedy, the grizzled B-movie veteran and star of countless Brady Bunch-era TV shows, is playing board games with his teenage daughter. A large Bigfoot type creature crashes through the door, knocks George out, and carries off his daughter. Some idiotic kids show up later for a weekend of sex, drugs, and monitoring paranormal activities in the area with a load of electronic surveillance equipment. One of the kids (actor Billy Jayne) played Mikey, Corin Nemec’s best bud on the short-lived teen sitcom Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.
The Bigfoot stalks and kills the kids, who then turn into zombies later on in the movie. The zombies, as well as the Bigfoot, steal various types of electronic equipment from people. The Bigfoot also likes to chase hikers and rip their head off, then throw it like he’s spiking a football. Then the alien conspiracy is uncovered. The aliens, who crashed their UFO at the beginning of the movie, need to use the stolen radios and electronics for spare parts so they can fix their spaceship. But these aren’t just ordinary aliens, they are demons from outer space. Demonic rituals take place on their UFO, parked deep in the haunted woods and guarded by the Bigfoot creature.
Demonwarp is a laughably bad film, and plenty weird. It’s not weird in the schizo “acid-trip” way, more like a “stoned-on-lots-of-weed-and-xanax.” It’s like the directors and writers (there were probably several of them) forgot what was going on in the film from scene to scene, sometimes from one line of dialog to the next. Whenever they were bored and wanted more action, yet another fantasy-horror subplot was added. The film started out with space aliens, then Bigfoot got thrown in the mix, along with some demons, a little gunplay, sex scenes, then a bunch of zombies show up and it turns into a zombie movie.
The Bigfoot monster was designed by John Carl Buechler, the veteran effects artist who created better known monsters in films like Re-animator (1985), Ghoulies (1985), From Beyond (1986), and Demonic Toys (1992).
Buechler is quite the renaissance man when it comes to making horror movies, having also directed films such as Troll (1986), and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988). He did gore effects for Halloween 4 and Halloween 6, Nightmare on Elm St. 4, and Freddy’s Dead, so he has been involved in the three biggest franchises in horror movie history.
This poor film does not have the bad-movie fan base that other 1980s absurdities has, probably due to how hard it is to come across a copy. It was released direct-to-video by Vidmark Entertainment, a B-movie only VHS company that distributed tapes from 1984 to 1997. Vidmark brought renters their first glimpse of films like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992), Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper (1984), and the Leprechaun series. The company was eventually absorbed by media monster Lionsgate. Naturally, they have not released Demonwarp to DVD.
I would give them an A for effort at least, and the C stands for creativity. Or something. This film is insanely enjoyable. I would put this film, along with Night Train To Terror and Nightmare Weekend, in my list of horror films that I suspect were secretly made by 13 year old boys.

Creatures From The Abyss (1994) AKA Plankton

2009-02-23T04:13:00.003-05:00

If you like your cheesy horror to be psychotic, then this is your new favorite film. It’s a shame this movie doesn’t have more of a cult following. It makes films like Piranha and Reanimator look sedate and boring. It wreaks of cocaine and suntan lotion and looks like a Hawaiian shirt. It’s an extravagantly weird 1980s (even though it was made in the 90s) luxury yachting acid trip. Everything about this film is surreal, from the opening scene on the beach shot through an orange filter, looking as though there were a pair of pantyhose over the lens, to the pastel lit interior scenes, all accompanied by an ambient synthesizer score. It is Creatures From The Abyss, AKA Plankton.
It’s all a big excuse for some gory set pieces, slapstick, alcohol consumption, and sex. And line after line of obscenely stupid dubbed dialog.
Some teens set out from a beach in Miami in a rubber dingy, with no apparent destination in mind, and happen across an abandoned luxury yacht with a scientific laboratory aboard it. Apparently some genetic experiments have been taking place, resulting in monstrous little carnivorous fish, a contagious virus, and other slimy stuff.
The yacht is guarded and narrated by a talking computer system who states “Hi, I’m Jessica Rowland, I give good times,” (Who?!) and many more bizarre statements. Fictional technology is abundant aboard this ship, and there’s even a perverted, talking shower. At one point in the movie these words are spoken: “Professor, how long have you been fucking fish?” To which he replies,” They were old enough!” The inquisitor responds in an understanding mumble “These things happen…” Need I say more?
If you’ve ever seen the Discovery Channel programs about the fish inhabiting the deepest ocean depths where sunlight does not penetrate, and how freaky they look, then you will appreciate the “creatures” from the abyss. The killer fish in this movie can live out of water as well, and like to scamper across the floor in search of dumb teenagers to chow. Many of the fish POV shots are accompanied by growling noises, and of course they can fly through the air to attack as well.
The soundtrack reminded me of some of the 80s movies scored by Tangerine Dream, such as Manhunter, Risky Business, or The Keep. Knowing Italian horror directors, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was actually partially lifted from one of those films. They’ve certainly stolen music from other movies before, like when songs from Dawn of the Dead played repeatedly in Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead (1980).
Not a lot is written about this film. I would love to know how ridiculous the filmmaker was trying to make the film. There is a short interview on the DVD where he claims there were many difficulties and budget problems while making the film. It is perfectly plausible that he was trying to make a serious film. Claudio Fragasso, who directed Troll 2, still does not understand why so many people laugh when they watch his movie. I’m sure he is equally clueless as to why a documentary being made on the cult following of Troll 2 is going to be titled “The Worst Movie Ever Made.”
Massimiliano Cerchi, who also calls himself Al Passeri, was the director. I have not been able to track down any of his other films, although after having viewed this one repeatedly, I must confess that I would rob a video store armed only with a plastic fork in order to see them. With titles under his belt like Satan Claus (1996), Brainmaster (1993), Kendall Ransom: Bounty Hunter (1998), and Mummy Theme Park (2000), his films sound amazing.
Creatures From The Abyss is a maniacal cackle of a movie that must be seen to be believed. It would take too long to adequately describe the manic, “what next?” type of atmosphere this film runs on. Fortunately it won’t take long to find a copy of it because it is available on DVD from Media Blasters and on sale at Amazon and Netflix under both titles, Plankton, and Creatures From The Abyss. This is quite possibly the best bad movie ever made.

Red Spirit Lake (1993)

2009-01-23T08:20:00.004-05:00

Red Spirit Lake is a no-budget shot-on-video horror film that is guaranteed to offend and mystify. Anyone looking to see what the world of SOV gore-fests has to offer should consider this essential viewing. The film is an artistic, surreal, supernatural tale of witchcraft and demons.
The film begins with three thugs torturing a woman to death because she won’t sell them the property on Red Spirit Lake. Her sister inherits the property and goes to spend a little time at her dead sister’s house. There she encounters some mentally deranged locals (the more psychotic of the two is played by director Charles Pinion) who tell her the lake is a dwelling for demons and the angels that fight to keep them locked away. The same thugs who killed her sister show up, as do some of her friends looking for a party. The stage is set for demonic possession, rape, mutilation, torture, and horrific and creative deaths as people are killed by the evil spirits and by each other.
Here’s a quick sampling of what happens at Red Spirit Lake: a woman is tied up for some kinky sex, then burned with a lit joint, and gets her throat slashed. Her ghost comes back to haunt her attacker and kills him by shoving her fist up his ass. A man is cooked alive inside a haunted sauna. All the while there are numerous stabbings, beatings, shootings, and hammerings, sometimes happening to the same person all at once.
This is a great example of surreal SOV filmmaking at its finest. The director makes great use of the dismal winter setting, and the acting is pretty good for this type of film. The film walks a fine line between not taking itself too seriously and having some of the usual horror movie in-jokes without making the film a mockery of itself, something very few SOV films do. It is a moody, atmospheric and creative film, with an almost psychedelic tone. With a runtime of about one hour, it is well paced and compact. Some entertaining trailers for other films by the director follow the film. If you can locate a copy of this film, it is highly recommended. Originally put out by Something Weird Video. I learned about this film in the "Films on the Fringe" section of Critical Condition Online (http://www.critcononline.com), the most comprehensive source of shot-on-video horror film info on the net.

Savage Harvest (1994)

2008-09-23T12:05:00.004-04:00

When it comes to horror movies, I feel that it’s the thought that counts. I enjoy content more than style, production value, and overall quality. All that and one other thing: GORE!!
Such is the case with this creative little shot-on-video horror film, Savage Harvest. I can best describe this film as a cross between Demons (1985), Night of the Demons (1988) and Evil Dead (1980). This blog site is aimed at people who have already seen the big time horror films, so I have no qualms about reviewing films like this one, which relentlessly reference the classics.
Deep in the Missouri farmlands lies a stretch of woods cursed by Native American spirits. A group of teenagers arrive for a camping trip and one by one they are possessed by ancients demons, each one representing a different animal. There is a spider demon, a scorpion, vulture, bobcat, wolf, boar, snake, and the most evil one of all, the demon of man.
The possessed people take on traits of the animal. Obviously the budget did not allow the filmmakers to get too elaborate in their special effects, so the demons still walk upright like humans. The spider demon-man hangs his victims in a tree with a web-like substance and periodically returns to suck their blood. The boar demon-man develops a pig snout on his face (reminiscent of what happens to the fat boy in Night of the Demons), and the girl possessed by the vulture demon simply cowers around the dead bodies and eats their flesh when nobody is around. There’s more, but I don’t want to give too much away, and like I said, this movie has quite an imagination.
The gore is pretty gruesome and includes some comical decapitations, explicit head-bashings, heart-steakings, stabbing, slashings, shotgunnings, and screwdriver-through-the-skull-ings. It’s all pretty graphic and slimy without being over the top in a cheesy way.
There is some creative camera work and good woodland locations are used. The opening scene had a surreal feel to it that reminded me of another bizarre Native American curse themed movie, Scalps (1983). A lot of the action scenes have a heavy metal guitar soundtrack, a good move in my opinion and another cinematic reference to other demon themed films.
Director Eric Stanze is a talented man. This was his first film and he was only 21 years old when he made it. He went on to direct another noteworthy SOV film, Ice From The Sun (1999), which I have not been able to see yet, and his latest film, Deadwood Park (2007) is about a child killer. I really loved this film and I watched it several times. I learned about it from the super awesome web site Critical Condition (www.critcononline.com), probably the single greatest online resource for information about low-budget horror on home video. The section titled “Films on the Fringe” is a primer on SOV gore films.
Savage Harvest is available in two different DVD editions. The one from Sub Rosa Studios includes a detailed making of documentary and better cover art but is currently out of print, while the new Image Entertainment DVD has three different commentary tracks.

The Signal (2007)

2008-09-16T07:49:00.002-04:00

This is the best horror film released so far this year. Yes, this one gets the award! And it is a film about what is “by far the most fucked up day in the history of mankind,” to quote a line from the film.
Divided into segments titled “Transmission 1,” and “Transmission 2,” etc., The Signal tells the story of several characters in the very real fictional city of Terminus during a major catastrophe. A signal being broadcasted through TV, radio, and telephone is turning anyone who watches or listens to it into a paranoid, violent maniac. The city erupts into apocalyptic chaos, and the story of three main characters is told through flashbacks and stories that intersect.
Filmed for a meager $50,000(!) in under two weeks in Atlanta, Georgia by three directors, The Signal is a product of modern digital technology used to cut costs. It turned out perfectly, and has a polished look to it not usually scene in other films of such low cost.
The film is funny, disturbing, bloody, gory, violent, suspenseful, and brutal without reveling in gratuitousness. Its unflinching dark humor carries social commentary without banging us over the head with it. There are already plenty of people getting banged over the head in this film. In fact, people get killed in pretty much every way imaginable.
This is an excellent film on every level. The story is memorable and unique, the acting is convincing and funny, it is just great all around.
I don’t usually waste my time reviewing films everybody will like, so I will leave it at that. I just had to spread the word on my favorite entry into the horror genre this year. Maybe I’ll write more later…

Children of the Night (1991)

2008-09-16T07:44:00.004-04:00

Children of the Night is a gory, slimy, and largely unnoticed vampire movie that has sadly slipped into obscurity despite its availability on DVD.
A catholic school teacher teams up with a priest, a teenage girl, and the town drunk to save a town that has been completely overrun by vampires. The vampires in question go to sleep inside mucus covered cocoon-looking external lungs that come out of their mouth before bedtime and envelop their entire body. They are quite ugly.
Filmed for $12 million in small towns in Michigan and Wisconsin, this movie focuses more on atmosphere, darkness, campy humor, and gross special effects than on scares or coherent plot. It seems more inspired by films like The Lost Boys and Monster Squad than the older, darker vampire movies. Despite its R-rating, it’s a fun, nonsensical 90 minute ride through teenage vampire movie land, but with a professional look and feel to it.
The cast is a who’s who of cult icons. Peter Deluise of 21 Jump Street fame plays the school teacher. The young Ami Dolenz, daughter of The Monkees’ Mickey Dolenz, is the female lead, Karen Black is a vampire, and the wino-turned-hero is played by Garrett Morris, one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live in the 70s.
The director, Tony Randel, was involved in the Hellraiser series having directed Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988), co-wrote Hellraiser 3, and did some editing work on the original Hellraiser. He also directed Ticks (1993), and Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992). He got his start in the early 1980s on Roger Corman productions such as Galaxy of Terror (1981), Space Raiders (1983), and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).
This film was the first of four movies that Fangoria Magazine helped produce through their Fangoria Films production company. The other three were less notable, such as Mindwarp (1992), Blood Drive (2004), and the cheesy Severed Ties (1992). Fangoria Films made better use of their company as a DVD and home video distributor of independent horror and continue to operate to this day. I highly recommend the Irish zombie movie they released, Dead Meat (2004).
I was less than surprised but a little disappointed to find mostly negative reviews for this film online, but then again most internet horror movie review sites are nothing more than soap boxes for the angry little parents’-basement dwelling D&D nerds of the world. If all you like to do is tear apart fun loving movies like this one, then maybe you should just watch TV instead. These movies were not made by the people who bullied you in high school!

Home Sweet Home (1980)

2008-09-10T07:34:00.005-04:00

Home Sweet Home is a delightfully absurd slasher film. A large, muscular killer escapes from the loony bin, gets jacked up on PCP, and goes on a stalk and slash escapade. There is no back-story or motive.
The killer is a Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk looking guy who cackles with hysterical laughter every time he attacks somebody. Credited simply as “Killer” in the end credits, he was played by Jake Steinfeld, a personal trainer for Hollywood celebrities.
The victims are some loosely associated family members having a Thanksgiving celebration in a rural area of Southern California. I say loosely associated because the whole plot seemed sort of thrown together, and most of the dialog seemed add-libbed. One guy runs around the entire time with his face painted up like KISS, and playing a Les Paul with an amplifier strapped to his back. His name is Mistake, and he seems created to annoy. I am not making this up. There is a bubbly Mexican stereotype female character who doesn’t speak any English and jams along with Mistake with her Spanish guitar. The rest of the people are fodder for the PCP maniac.
What it lacks in quality, Home Sweet Home made me feel right at home with its incessant craziness and hyper activity. Just when things started slowing down, Mistake would pop in and start jamming, PCP guy would run up out of nowhere and laugh, stab someone, laugh some more, and then disappear back off into the woods outside the house.
The producer, Don Edmonds, also made the rock n’ roll horror Terror On Tour (1980).
The title is a tame one for this manic episode of a film, and the cover art doesn’t do much to set it apart from the pack of early 1980s independent slasher films. I passed this film by for years before I finally decided to watch it last night after reading it’s write up on Bleeding Skull.com.
The film was never released on DVD, but is available for download from a few torrent sites. Sadly, it has slipped deep into obscurity. Video Review’s store copy was a VHS tape probably as old as I am. It was issued by Media Home Entertainment, whose tapes are built to last. It was also released under the title Blood Party, and Slasher In The House.

Blood Rage (1987)

2008-09-08T08:08:00.006-04:00

Ever joke about having an evil twin?
Terry and Todd are twin brothers. While camping out in the backseat of their parents station wagon during a drive-in movie, little Terry sneaks off and hacks some guy to death with a hatchet. He does it just for the hell of it, apparently. Then he hands the bloody hatchet to a bewildered Todd and smears some blood on his face so he looks like he did it. Todd gets blamed, goes catatonic, and is shipped off to a mental institution. Fourteen years later he escapes.
Terry is a very likeable villain. His flat acting, insincere demeanor reminded me of Eddie Haskel from Leave It To Beaver. Christian Bale may have studied this film before his performance in American Psycho. The beauty of his character is that his motives for killing are never explained. He just enjoys killing people, and when his twin Todd escapes from the mental institution he sees it as another great opportunity to murder all his friends and family and blame Todd.
Blood Rage is a great 80s slasher film with extremely gory kills and lots of feel-good teen horror schlock. All the ingredients are present, such as pre-marital sex, drugs, and ridiculous dialog. I laughed out loud a few times. The new wave synth-pop score was a nice touch. I’m humming the stupid thing right now. “Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nneeeeeeeooooooww…”
Watch for Ted Raimi selling condoms in the men’s room near the start of the film. I don’t how he wound up a part of this film, but it’s him alright. Pretty random.
The pacing is perfect. It opens with a kill scene, fifteen minutes later there is another one, five minutes later another, and all of this happens by the 23 minute mark. By that point the killer takes his machete and goes on a stalk and slash mission in the woods, eliminating all that may oppose him later on in the night. One lady gets chopped into three pieces, another guy get his hand chopped off and we see it still twitching and clutching his half full can of Old Style Beer. I didn’t know they sold that brand in Florida.
Terry stops by the bathroom to clean up afterward, and we see him standing in front of the mirror looking at his blood soaked shirt.
“It ain’t cranberry sauce!” he says to himself. A little Thanksgiving humor, I guess.
Do not confuse this film with another movie called “Bloodrage” (all one word). That film was made in 1979 by Joe Zito, director of Maniac (1980. Its alternate title is Never Pick Up A Stranger, a far more suitable one since the plot involves a hitchhiking killer.
Blood Rage (1987) was made sometime in 1983, released theatrically, and a little later on home video. The uncut version came out first on VHS from Prism. Then in 1987 some asshole cut out all the gore scenes, re-edited it, and retitled it Nightmare At Shadow Woods, and put it out in theaters and home video AGAIN. Such a thing is unheard of these days, but it happened all the time back in the day. That chopped up version is out on DVD, but the old Prism VHS version is totally M.I.A. There are some tapes for sale on Amazon.com. This film really needs a proper DVD release.

Evil Dead Trap AKA Shiryo no Wana (1988)

2008-09-07T06:46:00.003-04:00

Evil Dead Trap is the type of movie I like to refer to as a “fear is a place” story. A group of people arrive wherever and whoever or whatever starts killing them off one by one. He/she/it uses the unfamiliar surroundings to gain advantage over the victims. Evil Dead Trap is one of these, but a Japanese horror movie, made decades before the movies about lady ghosts with long black hair had tarnished that country’s reputation as a top producer of horror movies for the international market.
The movie starts with Nami, a hostess for a TV talk show where viewers send in their home videos. She receives a video tape (sound familiar?) from an anonymous source. The video opens with intermittent footage taken from inside a car showing directions to a warehouse. Inside the warehouse, the killer/video-taper films himself murdering a young woman. Seeing an opportunity to jumpstart her journalism career, Nami and a camera crew follow the video’s directions and go looking for a story inside the warehouse. The big spooky building is full of booby traps, and they are stalked by a killer. It was a trap. An evil dead trap.
The manic, rock n’ roll filmmaking style obviously, makes it like Evil Dead but much darker. And of course, to stay true to the title, there are also traps. But the moody tone reminded me more of the supernatural thrillers from the 1980s such as Prince of Darkness, and with influences from atmospheric slasher films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Hellraiser.
The footage is interspersed with grotesque images and ominous music. The moments of humor in the script are all too brief, despite the occasional bursts of kinetic energy characteristic of Asian genre films. There is a gloomy feeling as if all the daylight scenes were filmed on a brisk October afternoon. It really does follow the formulated plot of the 1980s slasher film, but one has to keep in mind that for Japan in 1988, this probably wasn’t considered a completely worn out cliché.
It slows down a bit in the second act, but the climax is a real gore-fest. People get impaled with spikes, shot with arrows, and there’s even some slimy creature action. I consider Evil Dead Trap to be a perfect example of several modern styles of horror film-making all rolled into one. It is essential viewing for serious fans, even though you might not see it for sale at the local Blockbuster or Best Buy. It really doesn’t get much better than this, and if it weren’t for the fact it was a foreign language film, Evil Dead Trap would have a strong mainstream following in US. It was followed by two sequels that have little to do with the plot of the first one.
Evil Dead Trap is readily available on DVD from Synapse Films in Japanese with English subtitles.

Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki (1991)

2008-09-07T06:07:00.003-04:00

Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki is a sequel in name only. It is the story of a fat and unattractive young female serial killer who murders prostitutes. She stalks the city streets without narrative, while dealing with haunting visions of a young boy and her lack of sex appeal.
There is none of the kinetic energy present in the first film. There is none of the rock music or fast zoom shots of the first film. The tone is dark, brooding, and bitterly artistic. It is a grotesque portrait of a modern Japanese urban landscape, lit with neon signs reflecting on puddles of rainwater on the streets. The camera always moves slow and there are several long takes. The characters are not particularly likeable and are presented in unflinching, unapologetic manner. In the nihilistic world created in Evil Dead Trap 2, everybody could die and we wouldn’t particularly care.
I still enjoyed it thoroughly. The emphasis of this film is style rather than plot or character development, or even action. The visuals reminded me of some of the modern Asian art film classics by Wong Kar Wai and Tsai Ming Liang. I have always loved disillusioned portraits of urban decay. It reminded me of the time I spent living in Bangkok.
I’ve never got deep into Asian horror, and it’s still a realm I plan to explore. Like most Americans, the ghost stories about women with long black hair and big eyes got old pretty quick. I’ve seen a few other Japanese horror films that fans of the Evil Dead Trap movies might find interesting. Angel Dust, available from New Yorker Home Video, Neighbor Number 13, are reminiscent in style and subject matter and I recommend them highly.
Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki is now available again on DVD from Unearthed Films.

Truth Or Dare? -A Critical Madness (1986)

2008-09-07T05:57:00.006-04:00

Good lord, was this a movie? It seemed more like an excuse to show a few car chases, explosions, naked breasts, and fake blood. It was a good enough excuse either way.
Our story starts with a drawn out scene where our dear murderous psychopath, Mike, catches his wife in bed with another guy. Mike cracks up pretty bad and an imaginary hitchhiking girl convinces him to burn his wallet, cut open his own chest, chop off a finger, and rip out his own tongue all in a ridiculous game of truth or dare. After thirteen months in the state mental hospital, Mike is released and tries to kill his ex-wife. He fails, winds up back in the asylum, escapes again, and goes on a killing spree. In one scene, the killer wears a crude mask and drives down a Florida interstate stopping chainsaw a young boy, machine gun some pedestrians at a bus stop, and stab a cop. Then he gets in a shootout with another cop, who decides to torch the shed he’s hiding in. Typical police procedure, huh?
I loved how amateurish this film was. Nowadays the amateur B-movies are all shot on digital video and everything looks like crap. There is no color, everything is pale and dull looking and screams out cheapness. This film actually looks good and sounds good, like it could be a half decent movie, but it’s so amateurish and ridiculous you cannot believe what you are seeing. I suppose that’s one reason people are always remarking that horror films were better back in the 80s. Even the nonsensical maniac films like Truth Or Dare looked decent, and were so damn weird and experimental that people at least felt like they were watching something a little bit unpredictable.
This film really grew on me. When I first watched it I thought it was going to be another classic example of a tedious, bland slasher film, but it was just so immature, bizarre, and far-fetched that I couldn’t help but fall in love. I guess you’ll have to see it to believe it.
For those of you who become fans, the director, Tim Ritter has his own website: http://www.timritter.com. He also made a sequel titled Wicked Games (1994), AKA Truth Or Dare 2, followed by Screaming For Sanity: Truth Or Dare 3 (1998), where Mike, the main character from the first movie returns for another round of mayhem. Both sequels are on DVD. The original Truth Or Dare? Was released on DVD but is long out of print. I recommend downloading it.

Forced Entry AKA The Last Victim (1975)

2008-09-07T05:50:00.005-04:00

Be aware that this is by far the most tasteless film I have yet reviewed, but in a day and age where films like Last House on the Left and Cannibal Holocaust are being remade, I think most viewers can handle this one. Also be aware that this is not the same film that just came out on DVD recently bearing the title Forced Entry. That film is a hardcore sex movie, which coincidentally was made around the same year as this. This film's alternate title is The Last Victim and stars Tanya Roberts as the female lead role.
For lack of a more articulate description, I would say this is like Joe Zito’s film Maniac (1980) except the focus is more on the sexual perversion of the attacker than gory kill scenes. The killer/rapist narrates the film via voiceover, as he picks off prostitutes and girls stranded on the road with broken down cars. Thank god we have cell phones nowadays!
The director, Jim Sotos (born Dimitri Sotirakis), also made Sweet 16 (1983), an interesting slasher film that took place on an Indian reservation. That film was issued on home video in the 1980s by the legendary Vestron Video, and was recently released on DVD by Code Red.
This film is not for the squeamish, to say the least. The killer's demented, misogynistic thoughts narrate most of the movie, which follows him as he rides around town in his car looking for victims. In the end he spots Tanya Roberts and holds her captive inside her own home. If you liked Maniac and have a high tolerance for tasteless exploitative trash, then you might enjoy this one. Personally I think it is a more interesting film than most of the grindhouse exploitation films that are about rapists. And believe me, there are hundreds of those films out there.
The DVD company Code Red announced plans to release a DVD of this film in 2008.

Raw Meat AKA Death Line (1972)

2008-09-04T21:13:00.003-04:00

Surprisingly grim and gory for an early 1970s British production, Raw Meat is the story of a subterranean cannibal man stalking the London subway. He is the last survivor of a cannibal clan trapped underground since 1892. Yes, quite a ridiculous plot, but the film has Donald Pleasance, Christopher Lee, and is heavy on atmosphere, setting, and gore.
The director, Gary Sherman made the popular living dead film Dead & Buried (1981), another atmospheric masterpiece, and the not-so-great Poltergeist III.
Gary Sherman is a well connected man in the horror biz and is a close friend of director Johnathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs). His film Dead & Buried featured some of the earliest special effects work by the recently deceased Stan Winston. The script for Dead & Buried was written by Dan O’Bannon, who co-wrote Alien (1979), and directed Return of the Living Dead (1985), as well as the grossly underrated H.P. Lovecraft film The Resurrected.
I really had to wonder why Gary Sherman isn’t as well known and only made three horror films, but he answered my question in his interview that appears in an article by Marcelle Perks published in the Eyeball Compendium book.
“I’m a good filmmaker and I love making films,” said Sherman, “but the business is so funny right now, nobody makes movies, they make deals.”
The article also revealed the filmmakers originally planned for Marlon Brando to play the part of the cannibal man, and that Donald Pleasance was always playing practical jokes on the cast and ad-libbed a lot of his lines.
A couple years ago I decided I wanted to see some films about the subway, don’t ask me why. I guess sometimes my quasi-manic episodes take the form of strange movie fixations, and the subway-themed movies were but one, along with the Charles Bronson one, the shot-on-video zombie one, and the ocean-themed film binge. Having gained more perspective on subway-themed films than most people ever will, I must say this is definitely the best of the horror genre (C.H.U.D. doesn’t count because it takes place in the sewer system!).
It’s got some trashy scenes with nudity and a lot of gore, but most impressive was the camera work. One very long take shows us the interior of the cannibal’s lair, with hanging slabs of bloody human flesh, bones, half eaten corpses, and his sick, dying mate in the background. The cannibal man needs another mate, so he kidnaps our beautiful female lead and tries to have his way with her, but Donald Pleasance and the gang arrive in time to kill the bastard.
The soundtrack is a particularly groovy piece of 70s porn-esque type music, heavy on bass and keyboard. It was actually released on CD and is two tracks consisting of about 30 minutes of music. The composer, Wil Malone, still arranges and composes many types of music and has worked with artists such as Massive Attack, UNKLE (the song “Lonely Soul”), and The Verve (for their song “Bittersweet Symphony”).
MGM released the film on DVD with no extra features, but the transfer is great, as with most MGM DVDs, and really highlights all the details in the dim underground scenery.
What surprised me the most about this movie was that it was damn good, and is readily available for under $10 new, with perfect picture quality by MGM. I guess I had become so used to the best of the obscure horror being expensive near impossible to find that I almost ignored something that was right under my nose.

Il Bosco Fuori AKA The Last House In The Woods (2006)

2008-08-08T06:30:00.007-04:00

The Italians are back. Dream-like camera angles, fairy tale plotlines, and extreme gore all combine into a modern Italian horror film that is a return to the classic style of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. While not exactly a modern masterpiece, Il Bosco Fuori is definitely better than almost any horror to come out of Italy in well over a decade. Since the early 1990s Italian horror has become a thing of the past, with few films of any real significance being made.
Il Bosco Fuori literally translated means “the woods outside,” or “outside in the woods,” as the subtitles read in the opening credits, and is being released on DVD in the United States as The Last House in the Woods. It has also been released in some countries as Italian Chainsaw. It is certainly a throwback to the glory days of exploitation cinema with weird colored lighting, fast zoom-in shots, and extreme gore.
Like most of the classic Italian gore films of that era it does its share of borrowing from more popular horror films. One of the final shots of the film is of the bloody heroine running down the highway, reminiscent of the final scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And the musical score was a reworked version of an American movie soundtrack, but which one I cannot seem to put my finger on at the moment. Maybe I’m just imagining things.
The plot, not that it matters in Italian horror, resembles Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A young couple run into some would-be rapists, but are rescued by an older couple. But the pleasant older couple is host to a house of horrors deep in the woods. Chaos ensues, there are some nauseating gore sequences, creepy little kids, shootings, stabbings, and chainsawings. It’s pretty low budget, but quite entertaining and well paced.
Let me say that it is a wonderful relief to see Italians making gory horror films again. I suppose they realized they could do it again since so many French horror films have been big hits recently. Frontieres, High Tension (aka Switchblade Romance), Them (aka Ils), and Inside (aka l’Interieur) have become incredibly popular in the US. Italian gore guru Gianetto De Rossi, former make up effects artist for Lucio Fulci’s classics like Zombie, The Beyond, etc. actually worked on High Tension.
Sergio Stivaletti the other biggest Italian gore guy, having done the effects for almost all of Dario Argento’s movies, including his latest, The Mother of Tears (aka La Terza Madre). He offers a shining display of the red stuff in this one, the old school way without any stupid looking computer generated effects.
Director Gabriele Albanesi is a new director, with only three short films to his credit prior to this full-length feature. This film is not extraordinary, but it is such a welcome return to the Italian subgenre we all know and love, more so than Dario Argento’s latest releases, which I thought were quite watered down style-wise. It’s been as if the Italians stopped wanting to make Italian style B-movies and try to tone themselves down for the American market. What they didn’t realize was that their style was unique and in a class of it’s own, and by self-censoring they simply self-destructed. Argento’s Mother of Tears was good, and also quite explicit, but was only about one percent as good as it could have been. Argento has actually expressed interest in making another movie tying in with Suspiria and Inferno, possibly a prequel. While it will never be considered a milestone, Il Bosco Fuori could be another step in the right direction towards a new era of European horror success.
UPDATE: The Last House In The Woods has been released on DVD in North America in October as part of the Ghosthouse horror DVD series by Lionsgate. The DVD includes an optional dubbed English language audio track, original Italian language with subtitles, and a director's commentary track.

Primal Rage (1988)

2008-07-14T05:11:00.005-04:00

Gore? Check. Bad one-liners? Check. Eye-gouging scene? Check. I smell spaghetti! Oh wait, it’s just another American-made Italian horror film from the late 1980s direct-to-video era. But at a glance you wouldn’t know it. This one was written by the notorious Umberto Lenzi, under the pen name Harry Kirkpatrick. This may explain the constant stream of bizarre one-liners such as “It smells like a pair of sewers in here!” and “It’s sort of like eating a lot if you don’t have a colon. You never know how it’s gonna come out.”
These Italian horror guys have more aliases than the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted. They had a solid reputation for making shaky movies in the 1980s, so they used pseudonyms constantly. Bruno Matthei once commented he prefers his alias of Vincent Dawn to his own real name. This clearly shows the bizarre taste Europeans have. Who wouldn’t want to be named Bruno! That would be awesome! It’s not like he’s named Pupi Avati, director of the odd zombie film Zeder (1983).
Nowadays, anything and everything Italian horror is a collector’s item, and to many including myself, the name Umberto Lenzi spells must-watch. The man who made Cannibal Ferox (1981) The Man From Deep River (1972), Eaten Alive (1980), and Nightmare City (1980) is a real crowd pleaser.
The story starts with Frank Duffy, a school newspaper journalist, who looks like a cross between Tim Mattheson and MCA from the Beastie Boys. He gets a bite from a monkey infected with the primal rage virus, and the wound soon turns into a pulsating, bloody puss oozing sore. He runs around acting very much like the wild ape he was bitten by, exploding into violent fits of rage. Those bitten by him behave in a similar manner. When they attack, their bloodthirsty frenzy is accompanied by pounding rock music reminiscent of Demons (1985). The score by Claudio Simonetti of the Italian rock band Goblin, bears a striking resemblance to the first few bars of the theme from Dawn of the Dead. Many of the cast were reused from Lenzi’s entertaining attempt at an American slasher film, Welcome To Spring Break (1988).
The film starts out looking like another killer-animal-on-campus movie, like Shakma or Gnaw: Food of the Gods part 2, but winds up being a bit of a zombie movie.
Highlights include a fat man dressed in a baby costume getting his scalp torn off, three racquetball jocks turning on a strobe light and heavy metal music before they attempt to gange rape a co-ed, and a guy in a Dracula costume getting his throat torn out. The climax takes place during a Halloween ball and the costumes must be seen to be believed. The late-80s pop-rock band plays on as a guy gets hanged on a basketball court, and a guy in a commando costume casually gets the flesh torn off his hand. But nevermind all that, I want to know who thought up the Halloween costumes. Who the hell dresses up as a three-headed baby with faucets on its noses? I don’t want to give away too much here, but this scene sports some of the best costume party deaths this side of Terror Train (1980). I actually had to watch it twice because I kept on having to stop and write this review.
The point? There really isn’t one. The purpose of the scientific experiments that created the virus is never explained. Not that it matters. The moral of the story: When someone or something bites you, go to the doctor.
Sadly, Primal Rage is only available on DVD in Italy, and only on VHS in the United States. Used copies are still pretty cheap on Amazon, and I found mine at Video Review. This is one of those films that could disappear into obscurity at some point. I wasn't even able to find decent cover art scans to post, and as far as I can tell, you have just read the longest review of this film ever posted to the internet.

Maya (1989)

2008-07-02T04:06:00.004-04:00

An Ancient Mayan curse is awakened in the ancient temples in Mexico, and people are killed in strange and gory ways by an invisible force. The Italian blend of supernatural and giallo horror subgenres, which climaxed early with films like Suspiria (1977), and Inferno (1980), proliferated in the late 1980s as Italian horror degraded in quality and became less focused. This is undoubtedly my favorite phase of Italian horror cinema, not because the films were better, but because they were more fun. The rules and traditional storylines went out the window as budgets grew smaller and the masters of the genre like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento got older and less energetic.
The late 1980s phase gave birth to some of the wildest and most bizarre blends of cinematic clichés, and the films just got crazier and weirder. But they were really cool because the general disregard for film logic meant infinite creative freedom for the filmmakers. An Italian director could make a magic masala of a film with ghosts, witches, zombies, demonic possession, and serial slashers, and it would get financed and distributed. Explanations were not necessary for the less-than-critical video store crowd, and if one was usually an ancient curse, voodoo, or witchcraft. Films like The Church (1989), The Spider Labyrinth (1988), and The Devil’s Daughter (1991) are artistic, well-made examples of this new-school approach. Their lower grade, crazy, inbred cousins like Ghosthouse (1988), Beyond the Darkness (aka Ghosthouse 3, 1990), Demons 6: De Profundis (AKA Il Gatto Nero), and Spectres (aka Spettri, 1988), are far more abundant, though just as much fun to watch.
Maya falls somewhere in between, with a very unfocused plot, but excellent displays of technical abilities such as camera work, gore, and atmospheric settings. It has less of a manic feel to it than movies like Ghosthouse or Demons 6, almost as if the heat and humidity of the setting slowed down the pace. The director makes great use of Mexico’s tropical, hedonistic tourist environment, and blends it with the indigenous superstitions and belief in the occult. The evil force causes people violent deaths at the invisible hands of the Mayan curse. One woman is thrashed about in a bathtub until her nose is pounded into pulp on the edge of the tub, and another man is crushed by a rolling pick-up truck. The climax takes place on Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican day of the dead.
The attacks are exclusively on outsiders and not the locals themselves. Most of the victims are sweaty gringo expatriates, doomed to drink themselves to death anyway. The film did a good job of capturing the lazy, alcohol-soaked lifestyle so many foreigners lead when they take up residence small tropical towns in the world’s impoverished paradises. When the booze and women come cheap, many retire at an early age and lose all their ambition.
Having lived in a similar place once, Thailand, it was easy for me to put myself in the head of the film’s creators and became especially appreciative. Horror is just as popular a genre in tropical Asia as it is in America, and I learned about some of their legends and superstitions by watching their made for TV supernatural horror movies. I’ve always liked films set in exotic countries and enjoy ones that involve local legends like voodoo or indigenous religions. The fact that Italians made this one automatically made it a cut above the rest.

Alone In The Dark (1982)

2008-07-01T04:52:00.004-04:00

Jack Palance and Martin Landau play two of the best schizoid psychopaths ever to grace the screen. You can tell these two had A LOT of fun making this movie. These two mental patients bust out of the loony bin intent on murdering one of the new doctors in their ward. Accompanied by a serial strangler nicknamed "The Bleeder," and a 400 lb. child molester named Fatty, they joyfully terrorize a small New Jersey town. The doctor they are after is played by who played Murdock, the crazy guy from the A-team, the one that Mr. T and the gang were always busting out of the nuthouse at the beginning of some of the episodes. Donald Pleasance (Dr. Loomis from Halloween) reprises his role as a psychologist for the criminally insane, and at times appears just as crazy as the inmates he is after. In fact almost every character in this film seems to have a few screws loose. Note the stuttering police captain, the weird looking little girl, and of course the nightclub band, aptly named the Sick Fucks.
You will really have to see this movie to believe it, and it is not the typical 80s slasher movie some reviewers have made it out to be. I first heard about this film when I read a rave review of it in “The Manly Movie Guide: Virile Video & Two Fisted Cinema.” Some of the best scenes were used as samples in the mid-80s horror movie documentary Terror In the Aisles (1984), alongside some other odd choices such as the Sylvester Stallone/ Rutger Hauer action movie Nighthawks (1981).
I would say the overall question this movie poses is who is crazier, the psychologist or the psychology patient? Donald Pleasance’s doctor seems just as berserk as his mental patients in a role that is practically a reprisal of his Dr. Loomis character from the Halloween series. And the other doctor is the guy from the A-team! When the lunatics escape, they are unleashed into a world of characters who seem as bizarre and illogical as those inside the institution. The film is set in suburban New Jersey during the punk rock years, and does an interesting job of holding up a mirror to society in the form of an 80s slasher film. While not exactly a gore-fest, this film did feature some make-up effects by Tom Savini. The DVD is available with extras and a pristine transfer from Image Entertainment.

The Spider Labyrinth (1988)

2008-07-01T03:59:00.006-04:00

The Spider Labyrinth (1988), AKA Il Nido del Ragno, made me wonder; was Eastern Europe always considered a creepy looking place, or do we just think that because it is the traditional setting for so many horror films?
Atmosphere is the name of the game in this spider’s web, and this type of film should be viewed for just that and not with so much of a critical eye. This is true for most Italian horror films, and this is one of the last of the great European gothic horrors, even though it takes place in the present. Budapest is the setting for this tale of the occult, combined with a giallo type plot, and a few stop motion monsters. The gore is not over the top, except for in the final reel, and then it gets downright disgusting.
The plot follows an American archaeologist researching an ancient religion that seems to have shown up in seemingly unconnected locations. He travels to Budapest to coordinate with another researcher and stumbles upon a pagan cult. They worship giant subterranean spider monsters that possess humans and get them to carry out their dirty work and spread the religion. Sound strange? It is.
There is lots of cool camera work and eerie settings, and Budapest’s inhabitants looked like the same villagers that chased Frankenstein with pitchforks and torches. The movie reminded me of other movies about cults sworn to protect religious secrets such as The Ninth Gate or The Da Vinci Code.
My main motivation in seeking out this film was one photograph from the movie. The back cover of the book “Spaghetti Nightmares” features a gruesome, bloody still from the movie of a man with a butcher knife and a mouth full of fangs. I knew right away that I had to see this film.
Sadly, The Spider Labyrinth is a very obscure movie, even for Italian horror fans. The copy I watched was downloaded and appeared to be VHS rip of a copy from Midnight Video, with hardcoded Japanese subtitles at the bottom of the screen. The picture quality left a lot to be desired. With such a small amount of information available about this film I regret that I cannot offer many hard facts. The Internet movie database says the US DVD release is cut by about 20 minutes, but that website has been known to contain errors. Aside from downloads, the only other way to obtain a copy of this movie is to order a bootleg DVD from one of the various online companies.

Angst AKA Fear (1983)

2008-06-08T03:24:00.004-04:00

Angst is a German language, English subtitled serial killer movie with flying, dizzying camera work, an impressive musical score, and explicit violence and gore, much in the tradition of films by Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci and other European horror masters. It is a relatively short film and wastes absolutely no time, clocking in at just 75 minutes. It takes place all in one day, and has one character, the killer, who speaks almost all the dialogue and narrates the entire film almost play by play.
It starts out with a very German-looking man in his mid-thirties being released from a large maximum-security prison. We come to find out through his narration this is his release date from a ten-year sentence for murdering a 70-year old lady. Before that he had served four years for stabbing his mother in the chest. Once the prison gates open, he sets out walking through town looking for more victims.
He winds up at an isolated house where he takes a family of three hostage and proceeds to torture and murder them in the most efficient way possible, his narration tells his life story. It is almost as if he is sitting in the room with you telling you his story over a few drinks. He tells of his early life and the physical and emotional abuse and neglect he suffered at the hands of his mother and sister, his abandonment, and his ultimate discovery that his greatest pleasure was to inflict pain and fear upon other living things. He wants nothing more in life than to murder as many people as possible, and he will never stop doing it. The sense of power he feels when he does it is profound. For once in his life he feels total control over another human. Instead of being abused he is the one that is feared, hence the title Angst, which means “fear” in German.
What really made this a special film for me was the camera work. I could tell many of the shots must have used a tall crane. At points I could imagine I was looking out the window of a tall building watching the character go about his murderous tasks.
The kill scenes were quite cruel and realistic, and extremely bloody. The killer comments in the narration about how quick it all happened. There are only three victims, but keep in mind that this is only an hour-long movie, so it worked. It is such an engrossing portrait of what goes on in a serial murderer’s mind, I would actually recommend this to psychology students or anyone interested in real life serial murderers.
At the end of the film the credits roll, the killer finishes the story, and finally we hear one other voice. It is the flat voice of the criminal psychologist who interviewed and tape-recorded the killer’s confession of what went on that day. He explains that it proves the killer was aware of what he was doing, and should not be allowed the insanity plea. He recommends a life sentence without parole.
Angst is an impressive 1980s Euro-Horror outing with very high IQ. Instead of relying on shock value, it puts you inside the killers head. I felt sorry for him because right from birth, he never had a chance. He exacts his revenge on people who remind him of his abusive family. Like the avid horror movie viewer, he is addicted to fear, but he likes to cause fear rather than feel it.

Of Unknown Origin (1983)

2008-05-24T05:26:00.003-04:00

“Did you know that over one fifth of all the grain on this planet is destroyed by rats? Now that’s more than drought, flood, or even insects destroys, did you know that? That’s over five billion pounds of food alone in this country. Can you imagine how many mouths that would feed, not to mention the possible fiscal loss it would mean to a company like this? Yes, it’s extraordinary. In the fourteenth century the rat carried the bubonic plague flea that killed one out every three people from India to Iceland….”
You take your average rat, it can nibble through a hole no bigger than a quarter, swim half a mile, and tread water for three days. They can eat through lead and concrete, with these teeth that are like chisels, they can exert an unbelievable 24,000 pounds per square inch per tooth! They can survive being flushed down a toilet and enter a building by the same route. They can fall five stories on solid ground and run off unharmed and two rats, mind you, just two, will give you twenty million rats in just three years. And they say there are as many rats on this planet now as people…”
Peter Weller spouts off on this three minute long rant to a table of well-dressed dinner guests, mouths agape, in this very memorable scene from his 1983 horror movie Of Unknown Origin.
This film is the epic story of one man, a good man, mild mannered business executive Bart Hughes, and his struggle of man versus beast against the worst that god’s animal kingdom has to offer- The Rat. One large, mean, clever Rat, that takes up residence in his Manhattan brownstone and chews up his mail, knocks over his furniture in the middle of the night, and generally scares the shit out of him and the movie viewer. This is the Moby Dick of rat stories.
It turns into an outrageous battle of wills between the mild mannered Weller, and The Rat. Between the two of them, the entire town house gets torn apart, Weller stops going to work, all his friends wind up thinking he’s crazy.
“You know what’s the matter with you,” says Weller’s overly enthusiastic, rat-hating maintenance man, “You don’t realize that you’re spending maybe twenty percent of your time thinking about him, but he’s spending one hundred percent of his time thinking about ways to outsmart you. ‘Cus he’s a rat. He’s got nothin’ better to do.”
Using some clever camera work and close-ups, the film emphasizes the grotesque-looking, alien-like appearance of rats. One particularly interesting shot is an extreme close up of the underside of a rat’s paw, showing the pink, wrinkly flesh giving way to it’s demonic shaped claws. These shots look especially good on DVD.
The films’ title refers to an illustration in a nature encyclopedia Weller is reading, in which the captions reads “Rat (Ratta, Ratte); of Unknown Origin.” A great title for the film, which points out this is the ubiquitous beast plaguing human habitation, not the great white shark or the grizzly bear.
While researching studying his foe, Weller also watches real footage of rats eating people, each other, and everything in between. Disgusting.
Shannon Tweed stars as his wife, so even though she’s only in the film for about five scenes, one of them is a topless shower scene, about two minut
The director, George P. Cosmatos, also directed Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Cobra (1986), a Stallone renegade-cop movie with some slasher movie elements. Also to his credit are Tombstone (1989), and the excellent Peter Weller sci-fi vehicle Leviathan (1989). Unfortunately, Cosmatos, an Italian immigrant of Greek heritage, died of lung cancer in 2005 having made less than a dozen films.

Peter Weller, the Robocop himself, still acts but has also taught at Syracuse and UCLA. Of Unknown Origin was his first lead role, made four years before Robocop (1987). In 1984, Weller appeared as the title character Buckaroo Banzai, a samurai-cowboy-rockstar-scientist in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, one of the strangest and silliest sci-fi comedies to see a major release. The film is also a virtual who’s-who of 80s actors with John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, and Christopher Lloyd running around, making me wonder how much cocaine was snorted on the set in between takes.
A Canadian production, it was filmed in Montreal and funded by the Canadian Film Development Corporation, also known as Telefilm Canada, a Canadian government agency that sponsors TV and film productions. What a cool country they have up there! This is the same government agency that helped fund other low budget horror masterpieces such as Videodrome (1983), which also starred Peter Weller, My Bloody Valentine (1981), Happy Birthday To Me, Scanners (both 1981), Visiting Hours (1982), Black Christmas (1974), Rabid (1977), and The Brood (1979).
In general, Canadian horror tends to be a cut above the dime-a-dozen Hollywood low budget fare, and most of their movies deserve a second look.
This film came at the tale end of the killer animal movie trend, after several other films about killer rats such as Ben, Willard, and of course the god-awful Italian “Rats: Night of Terror” that Bruno Mattei made. At least in that used guinea pigs spray-painted black as flame-thrower fodder.
If you watch the trailer for the film, you might notice it says nothing about a killer rat, in fact it makes the movie look like a supernatural thriller. Not even the film’s description on the back of the DVD case spells it out, it just mentions the phrase “rat-race” several times. I got the DVD for about $3.00 used. It’s not an incredibly popular or well-known film, but it’s one of those movies that Warner DVD keeps churning out. There aren’t many extras to speak of, but I guess they weren’t expecting a crowd of followers wanting a special edition. In fact, most people haven’t even heard of this movie.

The Last Winter (2006)

2008-05-21T09:10:00.008-04:00

“It’s haunted. We’re grave robbers. It’s coming up from the ground. Ghosts. I mean, what is oil anyway? Except… dead plants and animals from a long time ago.” Even as I type these words spoken by Zach Gilford’s doomed character during the film’s climax I get goose bumps.
Haunted oil? Drilling in the Arctic opens a gateway to hell? One could only hope for so much cosmic justice. The Last Winter, an excellent new direct-to-DVD horror film, raised a question posed in another apocalyptic film, 12 Monkeys. As Bruce Willis’ character mumbles to Brad Pitt, “Maybe we deserve to be wiped out.”
I thought this was a great concept for a supernatural horror film. The spirits of the animals whose fossils got turned into “fossil fuels” come back to haunt the creatures destroying the planet. The creatures of course, are us. The film follows the crew of a small oil-drilling rig in Alaska in the dead of winter. Strange things are happening left and right, and, well, the workers that aren’t disappearing are, of course, dying in gruesome ways.
The dramatic setting of the Arctic ice caps alone was enough to make this an enjoyable and absorbing film. The director, Larry Fessenden, had previously directed Wendigo (2001), another snow and ice horror movie. While Fessenden is no beginner, artists definitely have the odds in their favor when making pictures in such stark and barren natural environments. The flat, pure, bright white snow makes a wonderful blank canvas. Such perfect terrain exists the world over, but is neglected by a film industry centralized to urban and sub-tropical locales. Avid viewers will recall some of the most memorable shot on location horror films of the thirty years utilized bleak winter landscapes to convey a sense of isolation and dread. To name a few; The Thing (1982), The Shining (1980), Dream Catcher (2003), and the lesser known but equally ambitious Frost Biter (2000)
I must say I appreciated the ensemble cast of character actors. Genre favorite Ron Perlman (Hellboy, Blade 2) plays a stubborn engineer sent up by the oil company to kick ass and take names. The rest of the cast is also made up of people I remember dying in pretty hideous ways in the other movies they starred in. There is James Le Gros, who played Mike in Phantasm 2. Horror fans will recall he replaced Michael A. Baldwin as the main character only in that single installment in the Phantasm series. Viewers may also recognize Le Gros from his smaller parts in movies like Drugstore Cowboy, Near Dark, and Point Break. And we have Kevin Corrigan, who played Leonardo DiCaprio’s bone-headed cousin in The Departed, and “Goon” in the 1998 independent comedy Buffalo ’66.
As the tiny handful of my readers who watched Cookers, Encounter At Raven’s Gate or Ghosts of the Civil Dead may know, I am a fan of the atmospheric, somber horror films, and this is one of those. They make a nice little change of pace from the mile a minute gore-and-cheese fests I usually write about. I ONLY review movies that I like on this site, and I do it to spread the good word about different examples of B-movie horrors that people may otherwise skip. So check this one out. You may start to believe in ghosts as well as global warming.

Zombies In Prison: Dead Men Walking (2005), Shadow: Dead Riot (2006), and Zombie Death House (1987)

2008-04-26T06:23:00.000-04:00

I work at a video store where I can tell the owner has purchased certain films just to fill up shelf space. Each week we get in a new shipment of films, usually between ten and twenty films, and there are ALWAYS ultra low budget horror films. Most of these films look both horrible and terrific, depending on who is looking at the DVD box art. So each week I make it my duty to watch at least one of the micro-budget terrors to see if I have found a gem. I am always digging for that diamond in the rough. And I have decided to give a little free advertisement here on my blog for some of the better ones. I think I can best sum up my state of mind right now by quoting the text message I sent a friend today: “You can watch what you want, all I want to watch is shot-on-video zombies-in-prison films.”
Zombies in prison. I dare you to come up with a better idea for a film than that. If you can, then you will forever know my respect. It’s like when my friend Hunter once mumbled “They should just make a movie called GUNS.” I was like “Man, I had that idea three months ago!” Who knows though, maybe he thought of it before I did.
Our first zombie prison movie is Dead Men Walking (2005). A guy goes to prison for murdering three people who had just turned into zombies. He is a doctor working for the government, or something like that, involved in a viral strain that turns people into fast moving zombies. One of the zombies bit him before he could kill it, so he winds up in prison a dead man, literally. The virus spreads, just like in most zombie movies, and chaos ensues. There is loads and loads of gore, and even a few moments of actual suspense, providing the viewer thoroughly secure their suspension of disbelief. This is but one of three zombie prison movies I have watched recently, and I must say that it is the best. It makes good use of the claustrophobic environment, it actually looks like something resembling professional, and there are lots of zombies. I liked it more than Beyond Re-Animator, to hold up better-known example of a zombie prison movie.
Next up we have the film Shadow: Dead Riot (2006). I noticed on the Internet Movie Database a reviewer described this as a C-movie. That statement sums up the mentality of almost all the reviewers on the IMDB rather than the actual movie they are reviewing. Most of these people are only impressed by movies with Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie in them, and hate all horror films made before this decade unless they are called The Exoricst or The Shining.
Dead Riot is a good example of a modern horror film that is not afraid to let loose and revel in its own absurdity. The 80 minute long kung-fu/ zombie/ women-in-prison in prison combines three of the best exploitation film ideas of twenty years ago into one festival of gore, shower scenes, and prison fights. Totally awesome! If you can appreciate this one, or even the premise, then we will probably get along just fine.
This movie isn’t quite as amazing and awe inspiring as it might sound, but let’s face it, I don’t need to give it a good review for people to want to see it. If the words kung fu zombie women in prison film don’t peak your curiosity, then you probably shouldn’t bother.
To round out our trio of zombie prison films, let me tell you about Zombie Death House (1987), also known simply as Death House. Veteran horror and exploitation actor John Saxon took his sole turn as a director and made this forgotten zombie film. It’s not very good, but it’s a hell of a good idea for a zombie movie. As far as I know, this was the first of it’s kind, and the sheer cheese factor alone made it the most memorable of the trio.
The plot is a combination of Attica and Re-Animator, and while extremely clumsy, does have a couple good scenes. This is probably more of a prison movie than a zombie movie. As far as time-wasters go, you could do much, much worse than this one, and the pace was pretty good. Any movie about a prison riot is always entertaining, and this one is good campy fun. I heard about this movie because it constantly pops up in my recommendations on Amazon.com. It sure as shit was a hell of a lot more exciting than some of the other ones the square world has tried to push on me like Prom Night, April Fool’s Day, or Saw. Sorry folks, but I am going to give you until the end of this article to think of something in those films that was edgy and insane. At least with zombie prison movies you can’t say “Seen one, seen ‘em all.”

Ghosts...Of The Civil Dead (1988)

2008-04-26T05:57:00.001-04:00

Horror. Real life horror. This is story of what fear is made of in our society. This is a real horror movie because this is something that really happens all the time. Anyone could wind up in a prison like this one. In fact, most maximum security prisons, in America or elsewhere, are even worse than the one portrayed in the film.
Starring Nick Cave, who also made the soundtrack, Ghosts of the Civil Dead is the story of ten months inside a maximum security prison in an Australia. It is narrated mostly by one of the guards and told from the point of view of several inmates and correctional officers. Over the course of the year we see the usual prison violence and the administration react by taking away the few possessions the inmates have. First they crack down on drugs and the various forms of chemicals that keep the general population sedated and docile. Then they cut off their TVs. Then they take away all personal property. Then they take away recreation time. Nobody is the hero and nobody is the bad guy. The guards hate the administrations actions almost as much as the inmates do because these vices are what keep the violence at bay. Some guards resign and one kills himself. The inmates kill each other and sometimes the guards. Everybody is just doing their job.
In one of the climax scenes, a prisoner retaliates by stabbing a guard 56 times. I was not counting, but I'm pretty sure they show all 56 stabs happening. The prisoner then turns on two other guards, who take refuge by cowering inside a cell, erupts into a frenzy of violence that I can only describe as animalistic. The guard working the electric cell block doors does nothing to help the two officers because he is on the floor puking and crying, frozen with fear.
The inmates are put in these prisons as killers, and return to society as more efficient killers. And when they return to society and kill again, they are just doing their job, the same way the prison guards are doing their job and the police are doing theirs. It creates fear in our society so things stay the same, and our military-industrial-prison complex gets stronger. They let the inmates out so they can kill innocent people. Then the innocent people are afraid of each other because of them. Then the innocent people want the police and the military to have more power.
There is very little soundtrack, and the overall feel is one of dread and sorrow. The film is presented in the same dreary, fluorescent bulb-lit lighting as the inside of the facility. This film should be mandatory viewing for anyone studying criminal justice or corrections, as it does not stray from the subject of prison itself the way many mainstream prison movies do such as The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke. It was also of interest to me as a horror movie fan because it is a look at the real life horror show we call the penitentiary. Personally, I would much rather confront Freddy Kreuger or Michael Myers than serve a sentence in a place like this.
Of all the films I've reviewed on this site, this one is probably the hardest to obtain a copy of in the United States because it has never been released here on home video. You can buy it on an Australian PAL Region 4 DVD if you have a PAL region-free DVD player.

Gnaw: Food of the Gods Part 2 (1989)

2008-04-20T04:30:00.000-04:00

I cannot recommend this film enough to fans of B-horror. There's lots of gore, violence, slapstick humor, and it's like watching a how-to guide of making movies about giant rodents. I thought it was alot better than the first one. Plus it's Canadian, and their horror movies are usually better than the average hollywood low budget programming. The land of the bloody maple leaf previously brought us David Cronenberg films, Pamela Anderson, and My Bloody Valentine, as well as this beauty. If you study the camera angles you can see how trick photography made the rats look enormous. The scene with the giant 5-year old kid was the absolute best though. If you want to see a little more of the film before you get this product just see if you can find the trailer on youtube. I saw the preview for this movie on an old vhs tape of a different movie and I immediately had to watch it!

The Unseen (1980)

2008-04-20T04:06:00.000-04:00

This movie is pretty cool and has some really good acting. But the main reason to watch it is to see the retarded man child who lives in the basement, sleeps in a trash pile, and likes to play with, kill, and then eat the people daddy gives him. Especially the girls. The sight of this gigantic man dressed in a diaper and dirty tank top who communicates only in a series of grunts and maniacal laughter pretty much made it among the most memorable films I've seen. View it on an intellectual level or just watch with some buddies and laugh, either way it's alot of fun. I hope they release a DVD soon. The last half hour of the film is worth a million bucks.
On a sidenote, I have to mention something in the small world category. Last Christmas, my dad was talking about his friend who lives next door to him, a fellow by the name of Goldbach. Mr. Goldbach, clearly a rather wealthy man, mentioned that his sister had been married to Ringo Starr for the last 25 years. Her name is Barbara Bach, the former Bond girl, and the star of this film! Apparently she shortened her last name to Bach when she started her acting career. At some point after that she starred in this movie as prey for the retarded, diaper wearing man-child in this monumental so bad it’s good movie, The Unseen.

Bone Sickness (2004)

2008-04-20T04:02:00.000-04:00

Finally, some of these penniless shot-on-video filmmakers got the right idea! If you can't make a good movie, make a SICK ONE!! If this film had a bigger budget it would have been amazing. The zombie gore is extreme. It looks pretty fake at times, and some of the gags clearly involved props purchased at the local Halloween store, but the murder and dismemberment they depict with it is imaginative and funny.
While the film itself is extremely amateur, I must say it's the thought that counts. It's a very ambitious take on the no-budget zombie movie genre. While it's not as good the more well known shot on video films like The Dead Next Door, Street Trash, or Slime City, it's still a lot better than Ghoul School, Night of the Living Dead 3-D, or Days of Darkness. The filmmaker really had the right ideas here. Blood spurts everywhere, people vomit worms, numerous people are torn in half, entrails or are eaten, heads broken open, etc.
 The extreme stuff doesn't really start up until the one hour mark, but after that it's relentless. There's a lot of nudity too. Pretty much every female character gets naked at some point. Most of the acting sucks. But just sit tight and your patience is rewarded. Just pretend you are watching Citizen Kane or something with Helen Mirren in it. Then go F yourself dildo butt!! Just kidding.
 If the film had a bigger budget that allowed really professional looking special effects, this would have been the best gore film of the decade. I really hope the filmmakers are able to make more films that get better funding. I think if they got the proper equipment, a half decent budget, and some help from the right people, we might have the next Dead Alive on our hands. And I am proud to say this was lensed entirely in my native New England, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island (which is neither a road or an island).

The Final Terror (1981)

2008-04-20T03:32:00.000-04:00

This is one of my all time favorite "killer in the woods movies, and it is really a lost gem. The main characters are played by Darryl Hannah, Rachel Ward, and Joe Pantoliano! I can't believe more people haven't seen this film. It ranks up there with The Burning as one of those great early 80s teen horror movies with a big cast of actors who later went on to make it big in mainstream hollywood. Another cool thing is that the plot is not one of the those formulated slasher films that is completely predictable. There are actually some original ideas here!
The only thing that I found inexcusable is the DVD transfer quality. It is awful, worse than a VHS!! The sound is bad, the picture is blurry at parts and dark, just poorly done! The original movie is not like that. I originally watched this movie on VHS made by Vestron Video about 20 years ago and the picture and sound are fine. Shame on these jerks who manufactured this cheap knock-off DVD. This film deserves a deluxe treatment!! If they put out a good edition a lot more people would probably buy it.
But all in all, I would still recommend this film. The DVD is still worth 10 bucks if you don't mind poor picture quality, or just buy one of the VHS copies still floating around. Somebody will eventually reissue this film if it sells.

The Beast Within (1982)

2008-03-29T04:11:00.000-04:00

The Beast Within
The Beast Within is an absolute classic of the horror genre, regardless of its status as a "drive-in" or "Grindhouse" or "Midnite" movie. This film has never had the recognition it deserves. It is atmospheric, edgy, and extremely well acted. The teenager undergoes a gradual transformation into a giant man-cicada swamp creature, but about 85 percent of the film focuses on his mental change. It is not a cheesy swamp monster physical transformation, but it is more like in the film "Christine" where you watch this ordinary teenager slowly degenerate into a blood-crazed loony.
His change is kind of a metaphor for puberty, much the way the "Ginger Snaps" films depicted turning into a werewolf as a metaphor for a girl going through puberty. What carries the film is the boy's acting ability as he grows creepier and creepier. Ronny Cox (the guitar playing city slicker from Deliverance) is great as his concerned father coping with the fact that his son may actually be the offspring of a savage beast-man. And L.Q. Jones is another recognizable face, reprising his role as a rural southern sheriff.
Another quality of the film is the way the story deals with the way some small towns have a guilty secret. Some vile crime against humanity lurks in their past. This is a quiet place in the middle of nowhere, yet something horrible happened there 17 years earlier that they just want to forget. Then along comes this boy...
I love movies about small towns, and I especially love films about the rural American South. There is an anthropological edge to this movie. It is almost as if the film, made in 1982, is telling America to wake up. The time of the sleepy, innocent farming community is over. Or so it may seem for so many small communities in the South. A violent incident reminds us there is a “beast” within us all, and 17 years later everybody remembers. The film uses the metaphor of the 17-year cycle of the cicada bug. This is probably the only film ever made about a man turning into a giant cicada monster. It is actually a good animal to choose if you are going to make a monster movie about teenagers, as many generation gaps are 17 years wide. It is an approximate timeline from human birth to sexual maturity.
In 1982, 17 years ago would have been the year 1965, which may have a turbulent time in parts of the south. There was the civil rights movement and all the violent resistance to it throughout the south, not to mention the birth of a counterculture that still isn't completely accepted. A town can erupt in violence and paranoia, and later people feel ashamed for having acted a certain way or still harbor resentments towards their neighbors. They just want to forget and go back to being a sleepy little farm town.
The climax of the film features quite incredible creature effects that will satisfy the gorehounds and probably nauseate the film critics. This film is an absolute must-see for horror fans, especially if you enjoy similar films like those of David Cronenberg and Stephen King. I would love to see a special edition release of this film with extras and more info about this lesser known horror gem.

Horror Hospital (1973)

2008-03-29T03:37:00.000-04:00

This film is absolutely great! It's kind of like a 90 minute R-rated episode of The 70s TV show "The Monkees" if it was produced by Hammer films. There are lots of cheap thrills and sick jokes, sex, nudity, violence, drug abuse, midgets, and of course a good amount of blood and guts.
One of the first scenes in the movie introduces our hero, a Mick Jagger look-alike living in the excesses of rock and roll decadence. He's had too much to drink and sniffs too much coke and starts a fight. He gets beat up and his band members are fed up with him so he agrees to go somewhere to chill out and get his head together. There was this one scene where the guy booking his trip to this "health spa" (the "Horror Hospital" of the title), and the guy is slyly eyeing his crotch and the bulge in his super tight 70s pants. By this time I was cackling with laughter at the plentiful tasteless humor, and this is all just within the first 15 minutes of the film!
This is a great, great 70s tongue in cheek horror movie. It's basically a satire of the UK rock and roll lifestyle done as a horror comedy, much the same way as the films Rock n' Roll Nightmare and Hard Rock Zombies are horror movie satires of the American hair-metal music scene of 1980s. There is a playful nature to the movie that makes it stand up to repeat viewing. The film is also quite atmospheric with some great visuals and scenery of old England. I especially recommend this movie to those who enjoyed the Hammer horror films of the 70s, or any of the horror films starring Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing. If you like this movie, another one I would recommend is Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, that one is even trashier!

Cookers (2001)

2008-03-06T04:57:00.000-05:00

It’s about time somebody made a horror movie about meth heads. Hector and his girl manufacture methamphetamine for a living. They take up residence in an abandoned house in the middle of the deep woods and set up a little meth lab. As they descend into amphetamine psychosis, it seems the house may be haunted. Or are they just getting too high on their own supply?
This shot-on-video thriller is an absorbing journey into the paranoia of hardcore drug bingeing. Low on budget, but high on atmosphere, Cookers is a typical episode in the life of heavy speed freaks, but with a spooky, supernatural horror edge to it. At times it gave me goose bumps.
It is more of a suspense film and psychological horror film than a blood and guts type movie. There are hardly any special effects, just three very talented new actors running around geeked out on meth in a big old house. The video footage has a soft, muted look to it, but the dialogue and soundtrack are well done with good sound quality. The almost constant indoor setting gave the movie an eerie look. Inside a house with no electricity, the characters blacked out the windows so nobody can see their meth lab. It is easy to convey the sense of isolation and the feeling these people must have of being in their own little drugged up world where anything could happen.

Automaton Transfusion (2007)

2008-03-06T04:23:00.001-05:00

Automaton Transfusion is great. I don’t know what the title means. It’s a straight-forward zombie movie. The zombies are the fast moving kind that can think and run, like in the Dawn of the Dead remake, and some of them even seem a little stronger than an average living person.
Like the zombies, the movie is very fast paced, and the run time is only 75 minutes. It wastes no time in getting the mayhem started up. The opening scene features an extremely bloody, painful looking zombie attack to kick off the apocalypse. The characters are just high school kids, so there’s the usual mild drama nonsense going on.
But the real highlight of the film is the gore, glorious gore! The film is a throwback to the days of the Italian zombie gore films. There are several scenes lifted right from some of those movies that well versed fans will recognize immediately. There’s the usual eye gouging, face ripping, and intestine pulling. Blood spurts every which way, and there are several scenes of entire rooms full of zombies feasting on cadavers. The living dead eat their victims’ flesh right down to the bone. Don’t watch this one hungry, it’ll make your mouth water!
Besides being an excellent rehash of zombie films past, there are also some pretty cool original scenes. The best was when our heroes charge full speed at a bloodthirsty mob of undead. Armed with only a few meager weapons such as a shotgun, a baseball bat, a fire axe, and best of all, a chainsaw, an insane frenzy of ultra-violence. The camera work is deliberately jumpy, and at times I even thought my DVD was skipping. It is a clever way of disguising the lack of professionally choreographed action sequences.
Overall, Automaton Transfusion is a fast paced zombie adventure. Most Gore hounds will be delighted by it if they can suspend their critical eye. And even if they don’t like it very much, it’s still only about 10 minutes longer than a TV episode, so they really won’t be wasting much of their evening if they watch it.

The Mutilator (1985)

2008-03-03T05:36:00.000-05:00

An odd blend of campy college kid humor, 80s pop, and typical low budget horror acting and screen writing combine with extreme gore and violence, and some eerie settings to make a pretty good slasher movie. The film opens with a stupid little kid whose Dad should have taught him a few gun safety lessons. He accidentally shoots and kills his mom with a huge M-1 rifle, in a scene that is both disturbing and hilarious in the way it is executed.
The rest of the film plays out like a standard slasher movie. The boy who shot his mom is all grown up and at college, and is a relatively healthy, mentally sound young adult. Him and five of his friends go to his dad’s beach house on the North Carolina coast for some fall break party time, and the usual underage drinking and premarital sex ensues. For whatever reason, however, the boy’s dad has chosen to finally flip out after all these years. He is a hunting and fishing enthusiast and kills of the kids one by one, using a variety of edged and pointed weapons. There’s a pretty disgusting involving a gaffing hook, the kind used for marlin and tuna fishing. There is also a battle-axe, a machete, and a power saw. But I don’t want to give the whole thing away. You’ll have to watch the film yourself, if you can ever find a copy.
It was released on VHS by Vestron Video, but never released on DVD in North America. The PAL Region 0 disc is uncut, as is the the Vestron Video release. This film is probably available on bootleg DVD. Code Red DVD has announced plans to give it a deluxe DVD release in NTSC format, probably with a good transfer and some extra features.

Scalps (1983)

2008-03-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

Top to Bottom: 1. Scalps is filled with strange images, often appearing as short flashes in the minds eye of the characters that add to the creepy atmosphere.
2. A scan of the UK VHS cover.
3. Scalps was originally released with The Slayer (1982) on a double feature VHS tape by Continental Video.
4. The uncut DVD by Retromedia features some colorful cover art

Cheese-meister Fred Olen Ray directed this odd supernatural slasher flick, with some pretty graphic gore and an incredibly eerie atmosphere. Of all the Fred Olen Ray films I’ve seen, and I’ve seen more than a few, I think this is by far his best one. It’s also one of his first. He pretty much went rapidly downhill after this, and descended into the world of b-grade sci-fi and softcore skin flicks. It’s a shame, although it’s pretty obvious why. Hollywood doesn’t reward art (sigh). Skin flicks make more money.
I once read a review of this film in which the viewer compared the first five minutes of this film to a documentary about the highways of America. There are long shots of the lonely roads that cut through the barren desert wastelands of the Southwestern United States accompanied by eerie music and sounds, similar to the kind heard in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The 16mm film used gives it a very soft look which helps set an atmosphere of gloom and dread. It’s almost easy to imagine you are watching some deranged killers home movies.
This film has a real mean streak to it, something that isn’t seen in most 80s horror films, especially those made by guys like Fred Olen Ray. It doesn’t play around when it gets violent. It’s one of those rare 80s amateur horror films that isn’t completely laughable. Sure, there are gorier and more action-packed films to be seen, but I would highly recommend this one to those looking for a slight change of pace from the usual 80s campy horror fare.

Demon Wind (1990)

2008-02-24T07:51:00.000-05:00

Demon Wind:
Priceless garbage, lay down and bask in its’ badness! This film is soooo awesome. The only reason I rented it was because I thought it was hilarious that the VHS box had a holographic cover. I figured it would either be bad in stupid, boring way, or bad in a senseless, over-the-top, hilarious way. It was the latter of the two. The plot is a real snoozer until the 45 minute mark and then the zombie/demon carnage begins. Despite the hack script, there are very professional gore jobs and decent horror action sequences. Italian zombie fans will notice the plot was ripped off The Beyond and the zombies resemble the hellish creatures in Bava and Argento’s Demons and Demons 2. This film has so much in common with Italian zombie films, I had to search everywhere for information about it just to make sure it wasn't Italian.

Monster Dog (1984)

2008-02-24T07:48:00.000-05:00

Monster Dog AKA Leviatan
Claudio Fragasso, aka Clyde Anderson (Zombie 4: After Death, Troll 2) directed this cinematic time capsule of 1980s headbanger horror starring Alice Cooper. Cooper stars as Vincent Raven, international rock superstar, “the biggest rockstar in the world” in the poorly dubbed dialogue of his girlfriend. He is also a werewolf, and has returned to his ancestral home in the old country to film his latest music video with his band, and confront the family lycanthrope curse. The film opens and closes with an original music video from Cooper, and I must say it is worth every penny to buy the bare bones DVD with the piss-poor transfer just to have the music video, whether you like his music or not. The film also features Fragasso’s trademark overused fog machine, and a motley crew of actors who overact or underact, but can’t seem to do anything in between.

Pledge Night (1988)

2008-02-24T07:46:00.000-05:00

PLEDGE NIGHT
A Shapiro/Glickenhaus production, directed by Paul Ziller
I never knew egg beaters could be used as a murder weapon until I watched this wacky little film. In fact this teen slasher movie has some of the most inventive death scenes ever committed to celluloid. A boy is strangled with someone’s spinal cord, a guy has a cherry bomb shoved up his ass, a hand comes up out of a toilet to kill another guy, and there’s a demon that keeps popping out of frat brothers chests, like in Alien (1979). This time the killings are done by a supernatural psycho named Acid Sid. These and other oddities more than make up for the lazy, amateurish feel to the movie. But the ample amounts of the red stuff, and the obvious toilet humor (just loot at the VHS cover), gives this one the Beavis and Butthead seal of approval.
The Shapiro/Glickenhaus production team has also created some pretty rockin' exploitation films such as the Basket Case series, Maniac Cop, and my favorite martial arts movie of all time, No Retreat, No Surrender 2: Raging Thunder (1988).
With it’s crazy twist ending and soundtrack by Anthrax, this 1990 slasher film bears a strong resemblance to Killer Party (1986). Joey Belladonna ,the singer from Anthrax makes a cameo appearance and then gets killed. Filmed at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Jess Franco's Demoniac (1979)

2008-02-24T07:42:00.000-05:00

Demoniac AKA Exorcism, Directed by Jess Franco

Let’s all thank Jess Franco giving us this time capsule on film. The atmosphere of this French trash pile absolutely oozes 70s Euro trash pussystink from every pore. And the dialogue is something you have to hear to believe. A bizarre, perverted old man, on the run from Interpol, is murdering prostitutes while hot on the trail of a satanic cult. It’s actually one of the more memorable Jess Franco films I have seen. If you like trash cinema, particularly of the Eurosleaze variety, you really can’t go wrong with a Jess Franco film. This film was re-released uncut on DVD under the title EXORCISM, but with an appalling lack of cover artwork. See above right image. Boooorrriiiiiiiiiinnnggg!!!!
The whole reason I watched this VHS tape in the first place was because the cover art was DOPE! Frequently DVD companies can secure the rights to the film but not the original artwork. Sometimes the company doesn’t even know who owns the rights to the artwork, especially if the film is old or from a foreign country.

Eaten Alive! AKA Mangiati Vivi! (1980)

2008-02-24T07:38:00.000-05:00

Eaten Alive aka The Emerald Jungle, aka Doomed To Die, original title in Italian: Mangiati Vivi (1980, D. Umberto Lenzi)

Personally I think this is the best out of all the Italian cannibal movies, and definitely the one with the most character. Umberto Lenzi was at his most absurd, sleazy best. This one has every sick gag featured Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust, just as much gore, and more. There is rape, gang rape, ritual gang rape, penis cutting, penis eating, breast eating, it has everything Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox have, except, of course, originality.

The Deadly Spawn (1983)

2008-02-24T07:32:00.000-05:00

The Deadly Spawn aka Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn:

Over the top gore and disgusting alien creatures make a winning combination in Douglas McKeown and Charles Hildebrandt’s low budget drive in flick. The alien, which strongly resembles the killer venus fly trap from Little Shop of Horrors, reproduces asexually and spawns thousands of little eel like creepy crawlies that slither and fan out across the countryside, a gag imitated countless times in dozens of B-movies since the films conception in 1980. Which films spawned, inspired, or copied the various creature designs and sight gags contained in The Deadly Spawn is a discussion in itself. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then the artists behind this century’s horror films hold each other in higher esteem than those of any other film genre.
This film was originally released in the early 1980s by Continental Video in an oversized video box as Return of the Alien’s Deadly Spawn, but has been re-released on DVD by Synapse as The Deadly Spawn. The DVD features audio commentaries, deleted scenes, and picture quality far superior to any version previously available on VHS. Hats off to Synapse for giving a cheesy old monster movie the tuxedo treatment.

Encounter At Raven's Gate (1988)

2008-02-24T07:11:00.000-05:00

I’m not sure what to make of this film, or who to recommend it to. All I can say is I liked it, it was amazingly well made, and it definitely held my interest throughout the duration of its run time.
Visually, film has amazing composition. The cinematography and directing is striking. The audio is quite striking as well, like during the dog attack the sound of digiridoos (spelling?) blends with the dog’s growling.
The film reminded me there are still many things in nature we do not completely understand yet. Some things seem to defy scientific explanation. Having just finished viewing this film for the first time, I could probably write a dozen pages about this film and how I interpret it. Someone else could do the same and our ideas might be quite different.
For one, this film is about is how every once in a while, whether you live in the city or the country, sometimes everybody’s biggest problems can come to the surface all at once. In this film, the s--- hits the fan for several different people in the same place, but in different ways. There are no flat, one-dimensional characters here.
I don’t want to muddle people’s impressions of this film with comparisons to other movies. There is definitely some “X-Files” type stuff going on, and parts of it reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But in general this film is quite unique, and is virtually unknown in the United States.
There is no DVD available in NTSC Region 1, and the copy I watched was a dusty old VHS tape issued by HBO, I recently found it in the Sci-Fi section of the old, cluttered video store I work at. The cover looked interesting. Usually when I find a film made in certain foreign countries, I assume a lot of people there must have liked it if it a US distributor picked it up. Of course that is not always true, and thousands of great foreign films never get released here, while plenty of crap finds its way here thanks to the money hungry corporations monopolizing the distribution networks. But I’ve always had good luck with films from Australia, such as Chopper, Razorback, and The Last Wave.
I really hope this film gets a DVD release over here. I would love to view it with better picture quality. I am also curious to know if this film was big hit in Australia.

My Thoughts On Upcoming Horror Remakes, Part 1

2008-02-24T06:52:00.000-05:00

My Thoughts On The Silent Night, Deadly Night remake
This could be good if...
-the guy that directed The Fog remake doesn't direct it. That was one of the most generic remakes of recent. I heard he was attached to the project at one point. What were they thinking? Probably all the extra money they would make from teeny boppers willing to shell out 10 bucks at the theater because the film will be rated PG-13.

-They don't wimp out and sanitize the damn thing like they've done with so many remakes and sequels recently. It better not be PG-13. It should be a "hard R" rating with loads of gore and shock value.
-I think the key to a cool remake is just the word "more." For example, the Dawn of the Dead remake, was well received by audiences. I think it was because there were more zombies, gore, bullets, mayhem, there were even several more characters trapped in the mall than in the original. They even made the zombies fast. The Romero zombie survival strategy kind of went out the window with zombies that could actually chase you down.
Anyway, another thing about the original Silent Night is it's social commentary on Catholic guilt, sexual repression, and even the linking of sex with violence in the killer's mind.
I still wish they would stop remaking 70s and 80s horror movies, no matter they do it. Why can't these filmmakers be content with ripping off ideas or making loads of copycat movies? They never seemed to have a problem with that up until a few years ago.
Horror trivia hounds may recall that Silent Night Deadly Night came out in 1984, but loads of other "killer Santa Claus" movies had come out years before. I don't know who pioneered the idea, but Christmas Evil came out in 1980. Silent Night Deadly Night just happened to be more popular than that one (and deservedly so in my opinion), so it is remembered better than the others.
By the way, I'd like to thank Anchor Bay for reissuing their DVD of this classic. Hell yeah.

Howling VII: Worst Movie I've Ever Watched?

2008-02-04T06:11:00.000-05:00

Film Review:

Howling 7: New Moon Rising:

I love this movie because it sucked so bad. You really have to see it to believe it. It's a really unique film. After finishing it, I actually rewound the tape (nobody's ever issued it on DVD) and watched it again, just to be sure it was actually as bad as I thought it was the first time I watched it. I really want to buy this movie and just put it on as background noise whenever I'm doing something else. It's just amazing how bad it is. It shows me what makes a movie good by showing what makes a movie bad.

Oh man. This is the Holy Grail. The absolute worst of the worst. Forget Troll 2, Komodo vs. Cobra, 2 Sick, forget EVERYTHING, this is hands down the worst one. This is inspiring. Here is a list of the magnificent attributes of HOWLING VII: New Moon Rising.
-No actor appears to be under the age of 30. Only one of the characters appears under age 40. This movie is like a nursing home for elderly and middle aged never-has-been actors.
-The acting is not even wooden, it is petrified wood. There is a country western music soundtrack. There are line dancing sequences. And even those appear as tired, staged, and half hearted as the rest of the film.
-The dialogue features the corniest jokes imaginable. It is absolute bottom of the barrel bar room banter, stuff that you would not laugh at no matter how wasted you are, even if you were a werewolf.
-All of the action and werewolf scenes before the climax are clips from the previous six Howling movies.
-The original footage of the werewolf comprises a total of only 10 SECONDS of the entire film! The time elapsed from the transformation of the werewolf until it is gunned down in a hail of silver bullets is just under 30 SECONDS!
-The picture quality is just above that of a home camcorder.
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In addition to some of the highlights mentioned above, here are some interesting facts about the techniques used to make a film like Howling 7:
-None of the actors used were professional actors. The cast is composed of writer and producer Clive Turner, a few local country western musicians, and a handful of townspeople in the filming location of Pioneer Town in Yucca Valley, California.

The campfire sing along song towards the end, the one that starts out “Oh they don’t make drugs like they used to…” is priceless.
This film will have you shaking your head, cringing, and dropping your jaw scene after scene, line after line, country song after country song. This is the baddest of the bad, the lowest of the low, and I loved every minute of it.

Short Reviews for some unremarkable films

2008-02-04T06:07:00.000-05:00

Short reviews for a few unremarkable films:

Curse 4- Despite its Italian cast and crew, this film is void of both gore and nudity and the plot has nothing to do with the previous films in the Curse series. The scene where Christ comes to life, gets down off the cross, and kills the priest is the film’s only redeeming quality.

Breeders- This one is a real cheapo sleaze fest with tons of nudity. An alien species is taking over the bodies of New York men and raping virgin after virgin in order to procreate. It’s kind of like Humanoids from the Deep but really amateurish. Keep an eye out towards the end and you will see a naked blonde in the vat of alien semen that looks suspiciously like Rosanna Arquette. Turns out it wasn’t her though. That would’ve been funny.

Chainsaw Sally- Imagine a Texas Chainsaw sequel with a tiny fraction of the budget but a much sicker sense of humor. Instead of Leatherface we have Sally, a mild mannered librarian by day, a cannibalistic bondage freak by night. She lives with her gay brother in a shack strewn with various weapons, torture tools, and horror movie memorabilia. Sally is literally to die for, played by the stunning, raven-haired sex bomb, April Monique Burril. Gunnar Hansen, the original Leatherface, has a minor role. What little funding went into it was used wisely, and there’s some great cinematography with the digital camcorder they shot it on. The film was also cleverly marketed and every web geek has heard of it. I propose a sequel!

Nightlife- A rather generic entry into 80s teen horror, this one is sort of like Night of the Creeps but without the cleverness. There are some pretty good gore scenes and necrophilia jokes, however, and when the film turns sick it doesn’t wimp out.

The Dark Power- This is boring amateurish stuff with little gore and only one nude scene. This one starts out giving us high hopes but fails to deliver. The zombies are little more than a few dorks in Halloween masks. Its only excuse is that it was a student film, shot in Kernersville, NC, near Greensboro. Otherwise it’s so bad it’s just bad. Next!

Hellgate- The funniest thing about this South African production is the accents. Several cast members put on fake American accents, some use their South African accent, and others switch back and forth randomly. South Africa has actually put out a few really good horror films such as Dust Devil, and City of Blood. This is not one of them but I still enjoyed it. There is quite a bit of gratuitous nudity, decent gore, and a plot that makes absolutely no sense.

NIGHTMARE aka NIGHTMARE IN A DAMAGED BRAIN aka BLOOD SPLASH

2008-02-04T05:59:00.001-05:00

Here is a review I wrote about a horror movie I recently discovered.

NIGHTMARE

AKA Nightmare in a Damaged Brain, AKA Bloodsplash

1981, directed by Romano Scavolini

George is a very troubled young man. When he is not strangling and stabbing young people, he is stalking houses, hiding in the closet, and generally acting creepy. Every once in a while when things get to be too much, he has a seizure.

Nightmare is a unique slasher film. It does not follow the usual cookie-cutter routine of the dark faceless figure knocking off teenagers one by one. Instead it tells the story of a schizophrenic psychopath institutionalized since childhood when he murdered his parents with an axe. After being treated with an experimental drug, the doctors pronounce him cured and he is released back into the world. From there the story takes us on the road from the seedy peep shows of Manhattan’s 42nd street to the white sand beaches of Daytona Beach, Florida where he grew up. George returns to his childhood home. He stalks its current residents, stalking the house and killing them one by one over the course of a week.

The film itself has an uneasy feeling to it, from the grainy picture quality to the lack of music. George rarely speaks during the film, but his wide eyed, schizoid stare tells us everything we need to know about

This is one of several slasher movies that Tom Savini worked on in the early 1980s, and is probably the bloodiest. It was released in 1981, the same year as his equally jarring films The Prowler, and The Burning. Like the latter of the two, it saw a limited release on home video and slipped into obscurity. On some VHS releases it was titled Nightmare in a Damaged Brain. Hopefully, like The Burning, it will see at least a basic DVD release. This is a truly original horror film with a style all its own, regardless of who did the effects.
I am hoping that a DVD will be released of this film. Code Red has announced plans to release in on DVD sometime in 2008. I hope they follow through.

NOW PLAYING: TRASHY HORROR MOVIES!!

2008-02-04T05:32:00.000-05:00

Check it out people. Here is my blog spot I'm trying out to chronicle my quest for the trashiest gore films ever committed to celluloid. Why? Because I just got hi speed internet, fool! So sit back and follow my adventures in obscurity in The Trashy Horror Charlie Show!

Perhaps a little about myself: My name is Charlie Counselman, and I am trying to develop my writing hobby. In addition to movies I like to travel, especially in "third world" countries. I like hip hop and electronic music, asian food, I work at a video store, and I collect DVDs. I live a pretty straight and narrow life, I'm an upstanding citizen, I suppose. I am really good with people and I can talk to anyone.

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on November 7, 1980. Coincidentally, this was the day President Reagan was elected. I was supposed to be born on Halloween, that would have been more appropriate. My mother was a psychologist, and my father was a professor at MIT. They still live in Boston. I have an older sister who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Nobody else in my family really likes horror movies.

Growing up I rented alot of movies. I came up in the golden age of home video, the 80s and 90s. My folks refused to get cable TV so I rented a lot of stuff, and saw a lot of random movies on network TV. Growing up in the Boston area, I swore by one particular chain of video rental stores called Videosmith. They have since gone out of business, like most independent movie stores. It was there that I would spend substantial periods of time browing the horror, action, and cult films sections.

These days I live in Greensboro, North Carolina and work at another independent video store. I watch alot of dusty old VHS tapes of films nobody has ever heard of. I only know a handful of people here whose movie knowledge equals mine. Hopefully this internet thing will introduce me to some more people that can expand my horizons in terms of film.

In the mean time, let's get down to business. Let's go dumpster diving for some cool films.