Dracula Vs. Guns ’N Gangstas

Actually, it’s not fair to lump Dracula in with all the people Bonnie and Clyde are up against. It’s a given that anyone on a machine gun-assisted crime spree isn’t going to have a lot of allies. And since bullets pretty much go right through the Invisible Man and the Wolf Man is off partying somewhere, Dracula is B&C’s latest practice target.

In Bonnie & Clyde Vs. Dracula (2008), the T-shirt worthy 1930s bank robbers are on the lamb (gangsta speak for “bilking the blues”) after a botched criminal activity. They end up in a spooky ass mansion owned and operated by Dr. Loveless, who wears a sack over his head, much like the Unknown Comic. This is not the same Dr. Loveless from the 1960s Wild, Wild West television series. Too bad – I liked that guy.

Loveless has Dracula locked up in his pad. Guess who gets loose? Guess who tries to kill Dracula with bullets? Guess whose turn it is to wear the sack? If you said yourself, you win something.

Of course, Dracula’s used to having a wide range of emotionally unbalanced people with guns going after him. There was Billy The Kid Vs. Dracula (1966), in which the famous Old West gunslinger tries to keep Dracula from sucking on his girlfriend. Billy’s bullets didn’t do anything to embargo that blood-taking. He ends up throwing his gun at Dracula. For sure that’ll make him seem cool to all the other outlaws around town.

But guns are but one of many annoyances to Dracula. In Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971), the vampire’s name is Zandor Vorkov (that somehow seems misspelled), and he has to fight Frankenstein’s monster, whose face looks like lumpy mashed potatoes. Dracula/Vorkov ends up ripping off the monster’s arms and beating him with ’em. Mess with the bull, you get the horns.

Guns or not, best not to go around versus-ing Dracula, because you’ll always end up on the wrong side of the law, let alone Dracula’s mouth, which always seems to be covered in icky stuff. I’m sure there are products out there that’ll fix that.

 

Rubber – You Will Get Tire’d

If the idea of a car tire coming to life and acquiring telepathic powers is right up there with a demonically possessed blender or an undead sewing machine being resurrected by a double-stitch virus, then Rubber, an independent horror movie about a car tire coming to life and killing stuff, should be right up your address.

Outside of blowing out while you’re driving 117 m.p.h. in a school zone, not sure how many ways a car tire can kill you. I supposed if you ate a car tire sandwich and the valve got stuck in your throat, that might count. Or if you were dangling over Crocodile River on a tire swing and the line snapped. Or if Superman threw a car tire at you really hard and hit you in the face. Not seeing much more threat here.

Nevertheless, Rubber, which hit theaters April 1st, 2011 (it’s been on VOD since now), is about a car tire named(!) Robert, who, while rolling through the desert, suddenly discovers he/it has telepathic powers and can explode stuff with his mind/treads. Every Sunday I go to church and ask Jesus to grant me that exact same ability. I’ve been really good, so any day now.

This tire – which may or may not be high performance – is a killer, and does what any other psychopathic steel-belted radial would do, and that’s to run people over. So yeah, not intended to be a serious movie, though the scene where Rubber Robert is forlornly looking at old wheels being chucked into a tire fire is both funny and heart-achingly sad.

Rubber is a good title, though they should’ve called it Wheel of Misfortune. That, or It Was A Goodyear™ For Killing. I can think this stuff up all day long. And this is why Jesus likes me.

Fashion Models Vs. A Tricky Witch

A group of fashion models fight an evil witchcraft curse while stranded at a secluded Hollywood mansion during a photo shoot for a magazine I’ll probably never buy. And they do it the only powers they have at their disposal: rampant female nudity! OK, maybe not, BUT THEY SHOULD. Why? Because fashion models only know how to do two things, and fighting an evil witchcraft curse is not one of them. I could help them out with my vast knowledge of the TV Guide Necronomicon, so ladies, call me…let’s do witchcraft.

Trick of the Witch releases the first weekend of March, 2011 and hopefully will feature lots of rampant female nudity. I’ve seen lots of witch stuff in movies over the years, but I never seem to tire of rampant female nudity. The movie’s trailer, though, does have some nifty witch-y stuff and promises and intriguing back story as to how the witch got to be all curse-y ’n stuff.

TotW stars Share Cherrie, Suzy Cote and professional dominatrix Abigail De’Ath (see extreme photo below). I don’t know the first two highly-photogenic girls, but I am hoping to be a long-term client of Ms. De’Ath at some point in the near future. I think my mom would like her. (photo courtesy of the ultra-awesome gothicsluts.com)

 

One Way Trip: A Single-Lane Highway To Hell

Never quite got the whole “stoner horror” genre, mostly because I’m not a stoner. A Rolling Stone-r, sure, but never of the Cheech & Chong variety. One Way Trip, yet another in this curious genre, is about eight 20-nothings who go out to the Swiss Jura region to camp out, get high on the area’s magic mushrooms and listen to Dave Matthews music. I can think of at least two things wrong with that – and neither have to do with camping or getting high.

As the plot goes, the kids are baked on mushrooms, overdosing on Dave Matthews, and made bloody by someone systematically killing them due to their horrifying taste in music (OK, I added that last part. But it makes sense when you think about it.)

If this sounds familiar (a phrase often used in the horror arena), it’s because it was done before with Shrooms, a horror stoner movie that came out in 2007. It goes something like this…

A bunch of dumbass American college kids go to Ireland in search of mushrooms, with which to consume and get high. One chick eats the dreaded Death’s Head mushroom and almost dies. She spasms out and her heart and lungs don’t explode, but she does gain premonition-esque powers, and sees her friends all die graphic deaths via an unnecessarily complicated backstory-heavy local folklore involving a nearby abandoned all-boys Catholic school and the sadistic schoolmaster who tortured and murdered 78 students, probably for good reason.

But hey, when you’re loaded it’s all groovy, man. Just kick back and roll with it. And for cryin’ out loud, will someone put on something that rocks?

Another Look At Aliens

Found these three obscure and rarely-seen one-sheets for Alien (1979) on the internet while looking for porn…uh, global warming solutions. I’ve seen the second example, but the top version is new to me. It must not have been widely printed as I don’t see my name on it anywhere. I’m pretty sure I starred in the movie. But that was so long ago, I can’t recall. But know this – I was great in it. The bottom movie poster is from Japan, wherever that is.

Alien, as you know, is the best horror sci-fi film ever made. Then came Aliens (1986), the sequel, which was better than the first one, which just ruined that last sentence. Then came Alien 3 (1992) and Alien Resurrection (1997). They were solid, but not quite as good as the first two. That’s OK – even a crap Alien movie is better than 76.4% of all the other sci-fi movies.

Alien is a heartwarming story about a deep space mining ship that let a life-form on board via someone’s face without following the usual quarantine procedures. Once the alien gestated inside a human host, it popped out, grew to, I don’t know, 27 feet tall (give or take), and hunted down the ship’s crew in a very claustrophobic environment. It’s way better than I just described. Famed film critic Roger Ebert said at the time that Alien/Aliens was “painfully and unremittingly intense.” I agree, although I don’t know what unremittingly means. I suppose I could go look it up instead of cruising porn, uh, science research sites.

Aliens Invade L.A. Twice In Three Weeks

Asylum, the movie studio for bottom-feeding off every genre hit for the last decade (Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers: Fall of Man, The Terminators, Almighty Thor), has done it again, this time so blatantly as to mandate a warrant for grand theft.

Releasing Battle of Los Angeles, three weeks before the big screen premier of Battle: Los Angeles, a movie abut an extraterrestrial global assault, Asylum made the exact same movie with the exact same title, but with a budget than less what you’d pay for the exquisite Lobster Saffron Risotto dinner in the upscale Cafe La Boheme in West Hollywood. (Also try the Berkshire Pork Chop, which offers a fine balance of familiarity in flavor and innovation.)

Battle: Los Angeles plot:
A Marine platoon faces off against an alien invasion in Los Angeles.

Battle of Los Angeles plot:
A super secret fighting force is created to combat the threat of alien invasion in Los Angeles.

But it isn’t enough for Asylum to rip off a movie that isn’t out yet (as of this writing); They also stole the one-sheet concept from Independence Day (1996).

Most of Asylum’s flushings end up on the SyFy™ Channel, a veritable dumping ground for all things cheap, crappy and derivative to the point of plagiarism. That Asylum has more direct-to-video/TV movies than any other studio on the planet (190), means you will have the misfortune to step in a steaming pile of one or more of their “mockumentaries.”

If the alien invasion does indeed take place in Los Angeles, we can only hope they’ll start by taking out the street Asylum lives on. As for the rest of the city, everything but Cafe La Boheme is up for grabs.

Look, Up In The Sky…It’s Super Shark!

Mega Shark…Ghost Shark…Swamp Shark…Psycho Shark…Snow Shark… Seeding the pond with yet another cartoonish chewer comes Super Shark, a 18-wheeler sized Great White that not only flies, but can also walk on dry land via his tippy-toe flippers. Jaws must be rolling over in his aquarium with all these pretenders to the throne cashing in on his finned legacy.

As mentioned, Super Shark can kinda fly, but does not have a cape. That’d be like asking Superman to swim underwater and bite swimmers in half without a gigantic set of razor-sharp teeth. Super Shark attacks military jets and beach-dwellers with equal aplomb (man, I love those word-of-the-day calendars). Additionally, oil rigs are but sea pretzels to accommodate Super Shark’s raging appetite. And if guilt-free micro bikinis start showing up in dump truck sized piles of shark droppings, you’ll know what he’s been eating for dessert.

As with all these craptacular shark movies coming out, you gotta throw in freshness-expired ’70s and ’80s actors/singers to save the day, like Jon Schneider (Dukes of Hazzard) and Jimmie Walker (Good Times), who goes around invoking “Dy-No-Mite!”, the three syllables that gave him a long and lucrative career. (Note: I watched the trailer with Walker wearing garish sunglasses, purple pimps hats, shirts so loud you can’t talk over ’em, and flapping his gums at every possible opportunity. I thought he was Flavor Flav. My bad.)

Super Shark’s sand-strolling ways gets him in trouble with the military, who introduces him to an AT-AT styled mecha-tank. I don’t wanna know how this turns out as it may not end happily for SS. And somewhere in the background is a mayor insisting the beaches stay open so as to financially exploit some sort of festival/spring break celebration.

I’m washed up like all those other guys – why doesn’t someone put me in a crappy Z-grade horror movie with a digital walking/flying shark? I have feelings, too, you know.

Bigfoot + Devil = Devilfoot

Bigfoot has been called many names: Sasquatch, Yeti, Hairy Potter, Bear That Walks on Two Legs, Dumbass Butt-Face Supreme… But to reference him as “Devil” is downright disrespectful. The new indie Bigfoot horror film, The Devil at Lost Creek, calls him that right in the title. And people wonder why Bigfoot has anger issues.

Two emotionally f’d up kids are obsessed with the “Devil of Lost Creek,” a mythological creature that uses the nearby woods as its own private restroom. Legend has it, if you bang a stick against a wilderness tree three times, Bigfoot will appear. (Note: This does not work. I tried it over and over and Bigfoot did not appear. The cops did, though.)

By summoning Candyman, uh, I mean Bigfoot, the kids invoke a creature of rage, death and destruction. One can achieve the same results after last call.

The movie’s website says that “The Devil at Lost Creek draws inspiration from 1970s low-budget Bigfoot movies such as The Legend of Boggy Creek and Creature from Black Lake. The film respects its antecedents, but resists wallowing in retro nostalgia. Lost Creek uses the Bigfoot horror subgenre as a milieu for assertive, contemporary storytelling.”

That’s the eleventh time I’ve seen the word “milieu” used in conjunction with Bigfoot. I had no idea our fuzzy forest friend had that wide range of vocabulary. I would’ve simply said “die, kill, bleed.” But then, that’s why Bigfoot/Devilfoot is cooler than me.

Cannibalism: The New South Beach Diet

The problem with cannibalism isn’t that it’s socially not cool and makes God super mad, but rather trying to floss human flesh out from between your molars. Man, that stuff is hard to remove. You’d think that vigorous brushing would do the trick, but it just doesn’t.

Gnaw, a new dark comedy horror movie now available for you to chew on (dang, that was funny), is all about the eating of flesh. Six entrees, uh, people head for the country for a little R&R (reckless retardation), and cross paths with a clan of cannibals who happen to not only be handy with a carving knife, but superb cooks as well. Yeah, I’m thinkin’ Texas Chainsaw Massacre, too.

The movie’s press release says that “What follows is a brutal battle for survival, complete with shocking carnage, killer twists, and graphic reasons to avoid UK cuisine forever.” I was never a fan of UK cuisine in the first place. Fish ’n chips wrapped in a newspaper? No wonder England is a Third World country.

Sure, it’s OK for zombies to eat skin, but when psychopaths do it, everyone freaks out. An unfortunate double standard we all have to live with.

 

Mutant Rats. I Like ’Em Already.

I thought rats came from the toilet and/or sewer, but the rodents in Rat Scratch Fever, a new vermin-infested independent horror movie, come from outer space. Space is like a sewer, I suppose. Though I’ve never been, I imagine outer space to be filled with all of the stuff that comes out of Uranus. It’s OK, you can laugh.

Sonja is a supermodel astronaut who rolls to a distant planet, looking for new shopping opportunities. Once there, space rats attack her sumptuous lunar orbs as well as her team. Because this is a movie, the rats, with LED red light eyes and whiskers of death, make it back to Earth and end up in Los Angeles. Better L.A. than San Francisco, who is up to here with mega sharks and giant octopuses.

Finding a nutritious food source in humans, the rats burrow into bodies and eat their way out. (I bet the space rats could beat Willard and his gang in a hot dog eating contest.) Happily, the rats grow to the size of ice chests and are able to chew through walls as well as torsos.

Slip-n-slide guts, gore, well-enunciated screaming, and the glowing of rat eyes. I’m not seeing a downside to any of this. The movie’s tag line is “From Deep Space, An Army of Man-Eating Terror.” It should be “Nice Gnawing You,” or, if the movie was based in San Francisco, “They’ll Take You Out For Drinks…Then Eat Uranus.”

Lined up around the block, I tell you.