Creature From The Emerald(!) Lagoon

A floating cryptid that looks like something you’d pull out of a clogged drain is conducting day-to-day business in Florida’s stinky Emerald Lagoon. Half man/half bag of lawn clippings, this swamp thing looks to add you to its food pyramid. The only thing left to do is serve you with a balsamic vinegar dressing and some breadsticks.

Emerald Lagoon, a new low-budget indie family horror flick, seems to boldly dog paddle into copyright infringement and/or homage territory. (You’ve head of The Creature From The Black Lagoon, yes? Came out in 1954. That was a good year for ponds and such.)

 The plot seems less about the creature and more about its drama drenched human counterparts, though. You have a missing scientist and Libby, his assistant. You have Libby’s dad gooning out over his missing daughter. You have a bumbling swamp guide. You have Swamp Guide’s unfaithful wife. You have their emotionally distraught kid. You have a local sheriff who would rather not get his pants soiled by searching for the pair in the Everglade’s unforgiving muck. And somewhere in this mess is the creature, who bubbles up to the surface to feast on the land brains of the living. (I bet they don’t show that part.)

Emerald Lagoon doesn’t have a scary title. And the creature doesn’t look all that menacing. And any time you put a kid in there, it ruins any opportunity for skinny dipping and lagoon boobies. But it may be a nice break from the flood of zombie movies polluting the movie waterways.

Thong of the Dead

A bunch of Asian zombie girls in micro-bikinis come out of the ocean. You don’t notice that they’re zombies because you’re staring at how well their eyeliner doesn’t run, even after hours of being in the water. Then long icky tongues shoots out of their mouths and slices your head off. But your head is not dead, and you’re still able to talk. So what does an undead head say? In the new upcoming indie comedy horror movie Zomb’asians: Thongs of the Dead (coming in Triple D), nothing too cerebral.

Horny teenagers are trapped on a cursed island inhabited by the aforementioned Zomb’asian bikini’d creatures. Where things get a bit hard to believe is when they take refuge in a temple run by a Taoist monk and his supermodel daughter skilled in the ways of kung-fu. The girls who are part of the beleaguered group are captured by a zombie queen and their internal juices sucked out so that the queen may sustain her perpetual existence. Sure, it’s a flawed business model, but one that works.

What to expect when Zomb’asians: Thongs of the Dead is released: girls in bikinis, knuckle-headed comedy and CGI special effects that wouldn’t make the grade in a video game. Don’t let any of that stop you from seeing it. No one said they were trying to re-imagineer Shakespeare.

Hardcore Horror

More than a little disappointed over the title of a new porn spoof of Halloween (1978). Simply titled, Halloween: XXX Porn Parody, there’s no slick double entendre or wicked pun. Take away the boobies and insightful dialogue and all that’s left is just dumb and dumber.

Mainstream movies have always been great inspiration for porn, and the horror/sci-fi/fantasy genres are no exceptions: Edward Penishands, Muffy the Vampire Layer, Whorrey Potter and the Sorcerer’s Balls, Flesh Gordon… But now the adult film industry, known for its ingenuity, is failing us with lazy titles like Scream XXX, The Blair Witch Project: A XXX Thriller, and The Twilight Zone Porn Parody. What jabs me in the neck is that they actually say “porn parody” in the title. You wouldn’t need to state the obvious if you gave ’em a twist like they did with Frankenweenie and The Human Sexipede.

On the flip side, just look at these great Hollywood mock-offs: Bi-Tanic, Missionary Position: Impossible, Rebel Without a Condom, Womb Raider, The Da Vinci Load, and my fav, How I Learned To Stop Clenching and Love the Plug. You’d have to be made of stone to pass up any of those.

Halloween: XXX Porn Parody stars Lilly Labeau. I’ve not seen any of her films or plays, much less her coffee shop poetry slams, so I can’t comment whether or not she has what it takes to put groceries on the table. She looks nice, though.

Dead Heads

It’s been out everywhere else in the freakin’ universe except in the States for a while, but beginning October 7, 2011 and concluding November 4th (same year), you can slobber all over The Dead, a zombie movie set in Africa, where zoo animals are gown and harvested. The Dead is playing 20 cities at a time. Click HERE to see if you made the list. Note: Your city has to have a movie theatre or you’re s.o.l.

The latest poster for the highly-anticipated zombie adventure draws its inspiration from the art of Fernando Vicente. I didn’t connect the dots, someone else did. I was busy eating a sandwich. It was a good sandwich. Regardless, credit should be credited to Shocktillyoudrop.com for the investigative journalism.

The Dead is represented by no less than four one-sheets. Each is not without its charms, but I do like the new one as it appeals to my concerns about global warming and sandwiches.

Here’s what I cut and pasted about The Dead: “After his plane crashes in the South African bush, Brian Murphy joins forces with Daniel Dambele to cross the vast desert by any means necessary. A daunting task under normal circumstances becomes particularly challenging after the zombie apocalypse.”

If my plane crashed into the South African bush, I’d just go buy a new one and fly over the heads of the undead and, like, spit on ’em or something.

Return to Return of the Living Dead

When zombies were enjoying their second renaissance back in the ’80s (the first ressurection was the ’70s – the were called “hippies” back then), one movie rose above the grave to become an enduring cult fav: The Return of the Living Dead (1985), which spawned four sequels, some which rocked and some that made a mockery of the term “undead.”

ROTLD had it all – beautifully rotting zombies, hysterically funny bits, a killer punk rock soundtrack, zombies with punchlines, and that infamous scene where Linnea Quigley, playing a punk rocker called Trash (Garbage and Composte were already taken), dances full frontal naked atop a grave where the undead come out of the ground and start throwing dollar bills at her. (OK, they didn’t really do that, but the zombies turned her into ONE OF THEM, her death fantasy.) Much has been made over this sequence, the first of its kind. But prudes, shamed by the pant-tingling display of shaved flesh, failed to realize that Linnea wasn’t 100 percent naked – she was wearing leg warmers. Prudent – it’s cold in graveyards.

Now you can relive it all with More Brains! A Return To The Living Dead, a DVD retrospective, coming out in October, 2011. No word if the Blu-ray version will contain promotional leg warmers or Nair™.

The two-hour documentary DVD contains never-before-seen material, behind the scenes stories, over 30 new interviews with cast and crew, deleted scenes, bloopers and special effects test footage that brought the dead to life. Don’t take my word for any of this – click HERE to visit the DVDs website, thereby exonerating me.

If you’ve never seen The Return of the Living Dead, quit your job and go rent/buy it (along with some leg warmers – they’re due for a comeback). Along with being highly entertained, you’ll discover the reason zombies want to eat our brains. When it’s explained, it kinda makes sense.

German Sewer Horror

You see this stuff on the news all the time – a bunch of people go into the sewer and never come out. In addition to alligators that’ve been flushed down the toilet and thrive in our doo doo ecosystem, you have rats the size of shopping carts, leftover aliens, and the occasional C.H.U.D. But outside of a brief news clip, that’s all you ever hear about it. Thanks to the Germans, who are experts in fecal matters, there’s a movie that takes us right into the heart of the stuff you wouldn’t step in with hip-waders.

Urban Explorer (sounds like an expensive SUV) follows an international group (OK, four) of urban explorers who take a guided tour through the “maze of escape tunnels and subterranean fortifications under Berlin.” Notice they refer to their sewer system as escape tunnels. Clever. Of course their guide, who’s supposed to be an expert in the ways of down under, takes a nasty fall and just…can’t…go…on.

While two chicks take off (and blindly at that) to seek clean Band-Aids™, the only American in the bunch (distinguished by all that red, white and poo), stays to comfort the fallen comrade. All’s well until a former East German border guard (those guys are so mean) shows up out of nowhere. Reluctantly, they follow him to what they think will be safety, only to find out he made the worst mistake of his life. Auch du lieber! My guess is that they ran into a herd of sewer gators, were mugged by C.H.U.D.s, or the border guard went all psycho on ’em. Or all of the above.

Despite being a somewhat pedestrian plot, the advance reviews are giving Urban Explorer four flushes. (In Germany that’s good.) Unfortunately, you’re gonna have to go there to see it when it’s released on October 20, 2011 as there is no projected U.S. release date. That’s just great. They’ll use an American victim and not let us see him suffer. Not cool. I demand to speak to a U.S. Ambassador and/or video store clerk to get this international matter resolved expeditiously.

I waited all week to use that word in a sentence.

The Australian Voodoo That You Do

It probably sucks to have knitting needles stuck in your face. Unless you’re one of those weirdos who digs that sort of thing. (And I bet you fancy can openers parked in your cul-de-sac, too.) But like Pinhead, the iconic Hellraiser Cenobite whose nail-studded head that looks like a Pachinko game, Australia’s new genre movie Needle looks to poke holes in conventional horror.

Where Hellraiser had the Lament Configuration, Needle has a metal box called Le Vaudo Mort. Both, when rubbed like a genie’s lamp, unleash not cool supernatural voodoo. And people with fish hooks stuck in their necks. (I added that last part to beef up this blog. Think of it as adding salt to a steak and/or your morning cereal.)

This satanic 1700s Jack-in-the-Box was made by Victor Rubinstein, a hardcore groupie of the dark arts. When an archeology student shows the Le Vaudo Mort to his drama-ridden friends, their dramas become a thing of the past, mostly because THEY become a thing of the past. One guy dies from slice wounds that look like he fell under a Benhihana cook’s knife. Another takes a fall that turns him into a human paintball. The local coroner finds a link inside all this twisted flesh (and probably a few sticks of Slim Jim™), and now everyone not yet turned inside out has to band together to beat the box.

Needle, which came out in AustraliaLand summer of 2011, is making it’s way to the U.S. for critical assessment (i.e., jaded snap judgment.) The movie also stars the down under hottie, Jessica Marais. Man, I sure hope she doesn’t get poked. By a needle, that is.

Bachelor Party Zombies

Strippers and zombies are enjoying another sweet hook-up, this time with Stag Night of the Dead. Yeah, this British zom-com came out in 2010 and not a lot of people saw it. But now it’s coming out as a DVD in a couple ’o months. That means it’s fresh meat once again.

If you were one of those who missed the first go-around, here’s what went down: A bunch of old school friends hire a stripper for their buddy’s bachelor party. Even with the onset of a global pandemic, all these guys can think about are boobies and beer. God bless them. The plan is to head to an abandoned military base with said clothes remover and play Zomball, a game where you get to shoot zombies (think undead paintball) with a stun gun. Things go south when, after breaking the golden rule of Zomball (“never humiliate a zombie”), it becomes a fight for survival. This is all fine and dandy, but how do the boobies factor in? Shooting zombies may be fun and educational, but the promised whoppers should be more than in a supporting character role.

Stag Night of the Dead, featuring the “first cycling zombie,” has been described as being in the tradition of Shaun of the Dead (2004) with “a bit of American Pie (1999) thrown in for good measure.” Wasn’t that the movie where some horny high school kid got busy with an undead fruit pie?

Stag Night of the Dead stars Sophie Lovell Anderson as Candy, the £50 Stripper in PVC Catsuit. Unclear here. Is her entertainment fee £50, or was that the cost of the PVC Catsuit? I’m fine with either as £50 seems a reasonable price break.

Zombie Santa

Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before: a viral outbreak turns a big city into the walking dead. A few survivors have to defend themselves against the hungry horde. The end. Yep, yet another zombie movie blaming all that yummy flesh-eating on yet another viral outbreak. Silent Night, Zombie Night, arriving on DVD and Blu-ray October 4, 2011 (that’s a Tuesday if your smart phone doesn’t have a calendar app) is different because it has a zombie Santa as one of the ambling undead. No word if his reindeer also walk the earth as the herd of the damned.

Sure, there’s more to it than several survivors picking up guns and baseball bats and turning zombie heads into particulate matter piñatas. There are two cops and a chick. One is married to the chick. The other loves the chick. You can see the problem, especially since one of the police officers also loves shooting zombies in the face.

Also what makes Silent Night, Zombie Night noteworthy despite the run-into-the-ground theme, is that is stars Vernon Wells, that over-excited mohawked biker from Road Warrior (1981) and Felissa Rose, who had one of the most iconic moments in horror movie history as Angela Baker in the cult fav, Sleepaway Camp (1983). I won’t spoil your undead Christmas by telling you what Felissa does, but it happens all the way at the end. Trust me, it’ll goon you out.

A zombie Santa Claus. That goons me out.

That Lady Is A Vamp

I always fear for my life when MTV sticks its weenie in the horror movie campfire. I.e., My Super Psycho Sweet 16 (2009), Death Valley (2011), Teen Wolf (2011). And they’re gooning me out again with Vamps, a made-for-TV-and-nothing-else story about two hot New York chicks who happen to be vampires. Then some Clearasil™ dude shows up and throws their weirdo world into a romantic tizzy. On a happier note, Vamps stars Sigourney Weaver and Malcolm McDowell. It also stars 35 year-old Alicia Silverstone, who seems a bit outside of MTV’s ’tweener viewing curve, as one of the “vamps.” She played Batgirl in 1997’s Batman & Robin, so at least she has some experience with being a creature of the night.

Hardcore horror movie fans, not unlike myself, will recall a similar titled movie called Vamp (1986), in which two frat dudes go out looking for hookers for their fraternity’s weekend box social, only to find out the ladies are actual vampires who suck neck gunk. I know vampires find that stuff delicious, but quite frankly, I’d hork all over someone’s shoes if I ever had to eat a blood sandwich. Not cool.

No word on when Vamps comes out, so I’ll just say in a week or two. I may be a little off on that, however. So, like, don’t yell at me.