Game of the Dead

If you’ve seen it, the hit zombie TV series The Walking Dead on AMC is pretty darn thrilling, what with the beating and eating of skin and the last of the uneaten trying to stay alive long enough to not become dead. But the best part is that it’s happening to them and not us. Sure, we’ve all thought about what we’d do to survive a horde of zombies trying to chow down on our buttsteak (I’d throw water balloons filled with pee on ’em). But since an undead apocalypse is a few years off, we’ll just have to live vicariously through The Walking Dead’s survivor’s attempts at surviving.

Hold the boat – thanks to Cryptozoic Entertainment, you can immerse yourself in even more zombie drama with the new Walking Dead board game. It comes with everything you’ll need to cope with the undead – except pee balloons.

Here’s the official description: “In The Walking Dead board game, only the strong survive. The weak turn into walkers, and then turn against their former friends! Fight your way through zombie-infested Atlanta with your fellow survivors. Grab some weapons to clear a path. Visit destinations like the department store, old folk’s home, and the CDC. Find the tools you’ll need to live another day. Take on the role of Rick, Andrea, or one of the other hapless survivors and scrounge for sweet weapons like a shotgun or crossbow. Keep your eyes open for new allies, but watch your back! When supplies start running low, it’s every man for himself. If you can make it back to camp with enough gear to defend yourself and those you still care for, you win!”

“Should you fall to the hungry horde of walkers, the game doesn’t end. When a player dies and becomes a walker, they leave the world of the living behind and seek out the remaining survivors. Spring surprise attacks on the living, cause the walkers to frenzy, or contaminate the survivor’s supplies. Put the bite on your former friends and they’ll join you in your pursuit of the living. The fate of the human race is in your hands, either as a survivor or a walker.”

I’d rather be a walker. Good exercise.

The Walking Dead board game will run you $39.99. That’s a small price to pay for some sweet zombie action. Warning: the game is designed for those 13 years or older. So if you’re 12 or younger, go back to playing NeoPets or Monkey Quest until you can mentally handle eating human flesh.

Elvira’s Enhanced Hills

Elvira’s Haunted Hills, the prominently buxom Mistress of the Dark’s second movie feature (2001), was just released (October 4, 2011) in an enhanced version. There’s a joke in there somewhere. Other “enhancements” include a making-of featurette, a pretty funny commentary track from the main cast, a few outtakes, and a photo gallery showcasing plunging cleavage, all of which looks like my vacation shots of the Grand Canyon.

Elvira’s Haunted Hills is a slight re-telling of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988), but placed in the future past. (I know, don’t ask.) An 1851 Carpathian Count mistakes Elvira, who is on her way to Paris to star in the “Yes, I Can-Can” dance revue, for his long-gone mattress mate, and looks to hook up. This makes the Count’s ghost wife, who looks exactly like Elvira (what are the odds?) vengefully upset. A slapstick comedy dressed (barely) as a horror movie, there are one million one-liners, half of which are about boobs. I LOL’d at every single one of them. I know they were dumb, but I just couldn’t help myself.

Now that I got that off my chest…

Vampires In Cages

Vampires and leprechauns have a lot in common. Besides sucking the blood out of your neck like it was a free soda dispenser, both are quite hard to catch. In fact, darn near to impossible. Or is it? In the upcoming horror movie Fog Warning, a chick believed to be a vampire is captured. And her captors may not live to regret it.

As first reported by Dread Central, Fog Warning takes place in a New England town (there’s a new England?), a picturesque colonial town known for its postcard scenery, spectacular fall foliage and townsfolk sucked dry of their neck soda. Too far north to be a Chupacabra, so vampire it must be.

Paranoia running high, a local comic book store manager (don’t say the Frog Brothers – this isn’t California) kidnaps a woman whom he believes is in league with Satan. (Pffft – bowling league, maybe.) This nutbag locks her in the attic of a hysterical, uh, historical house and, along with two thug buddies, try and extract a confession out of her using the time-tested means of torture and name-calling. The plan is to videotape her confessing to the sucking, thereby making the guys rich and famous on the talk show circuit. But if you know your vampire mythology, these plans are sure to go south in a bloody way.

Cool. Mostly because bullies need a lesson in humility every now and again. But is Fog Warning original? Maybe a little. Two other “captured vampire” movies come to mind, one being The Insatiable (2007) and the other, Demon Under Glass (2002).

In The Insatiable, Harry, a lonely dude, witnesses Tatiana, a hot chick vampire, sucking on a homeless person like a blood lollipop. Harry manages to trap her in his basement where he’s built a cage for her to be comfy in. Heck, he even brings her a dead rabbit on a platter with a rose, just so she won’t go hungry. That is so romantic. Harry’s guilt, though, is making his tummy hurt, so he can’t live with that or his unrequited boobie-feeling for the smokin’ hot vampire love prisoner, and offers to be her rabbit. Ick.

In Demon Under Glass, Simon Molinar, a centuries old vampire whose seen more birthday cakes than all of your grandfathers combined, is captured by the government. The idea is to study this charismatic creature of the night, find out his secrets, bottle it, and make millions. Vampires can be packaged and marketed (see Count Chocula™ cereal), but bottled? Never. In a nice twist, one of the doctors studying Simon, has the ability to turn himself into a vampire at will. I wish I could do that. I can only fart on command. (Not always, but more often than not.)

So if you get a wild stake up yer butt and set about to capture a vampire or leprechaun, don’t. Vampires and leprechauns weren’t meant to be caged and need to roam free. Like the wind itself.

Monsters In The Woods. Again.

The term generic should only be applied to such nouns/pronouns as aspirin, cleaning products, bottled water, and my sexual prowess. Unfortunately, generic keeps popping up when describing the plots of independent horror films.

Example: the upcoming horror indie, Monsters in the Woods, is being prepped for the American Film Market (i.e., not out yet). While MitW may very well be a groundbreaking work of art that’ll make The Blair Witch Project look like it was done by a Tijuana restaurant dishwasher with a fifth-grade education (oh, wait…), the title, one-sheets, trailer and plot suggest otherwise:

“A low-budget film crew treks deep into the wilderness to shoot horror sequences for their unsellable indie-drama. They soon find themselves in the midst of their own horror show as they are hunted down by real monsters.”

Let’s try this from a slightly different perspective: “A low-budget film crew (college students, teenagers, two jocks/a fat dork/two hot-but-slutty girls) treks deep into the wilderness (haunted house, summer camp, abandoned insane asylum) to shoot horror sequences (drink, take drugs, party, have sex) for their unsellable indie-drama (YouTube™ hand-held camera footage). They soon find themselves in the midst of their own horror show as they are hunted down by real monsters (escaped lunatic from insane asylum, in-bred cannibals, Bigfoot, revenge-seeking fat dorky guy everyone picks on and doesn’t get to have sex).

The plot for Monsters in the Woods is so generic, it’d take me hours to track down similar horror movies already made and do a 10,000 word blog essay on ’em. To take writing credit is like changing the recipe for hamburgers and calling it your own.

Then again, who am I to say? There’s probably a dozen horror fans out there who crave this sort of connect-the-dots filmmaking.

Video Horror

Horror movies based on video games? Who ever heard of such ridiculousness? Of all the dumbass ideas and… Oops, wait – I forgot Resident Evil (2002), House of the Dead (2003), Doom (2005), Alone In The Dark (2005), Silent Hill (2006), and Bloodrayne (2006). But to base a horror movie on Duck Hunt, the heavily pixilated, G-rated Nintendo game released in 1984? Either filmmakers running out of ideas or the need to put the pipe down.

The Hunt, a 10-minute splattery horror short, re-imagines Duck Hunt’s breathtaking game play wherein quacking ducks appear one or two at a time, and the player is given three shots to shoot them down. Two weekend hunters are directed to an off-the-beaten track area of the woods for some sweet duck blasting. It’s there they encounter a horrific, car-sized fuzz beast that removes their arms and legs in graphic detail for snacking purposes. Game over.

Described as Duck Hunt meets Jaws, The Hunt is one of three horror shorts by G4 Films, with Kart Driver (Mario Kart) and The Birds of Anger (Angry Birds) rounding out the terror trifecta. You can watch ’em by clicking HERE.

All of this is just peachy, but I’m continuing my vigil for a movie adaptation of Frogger, in which a herd of bloodthirsty frogs pursue you across four-lane highways against a backdrop of (wait for it…) hip hop music.

Heh.

Livide Is French For Horror

S’il vous plaît. Ça ne me plaît pas. Laissez-moi tranquille. It’s like those French have a different word for everything. And it’s not like Spanish, where you can kinda figure out the word (“el burrito” =  “the burrito”). And since I speak French about as good as I dress myself in the morning, I had to go online to translate Livide, the title of a new French fantasy horror thriller. It comes up as Livid. Crap on a croissant – I never would’ve figured that out on my own.

Moving forward, Livide is a stylish horror tale involving three teens who break into the remote house of Mrs. Jessel, a comatose old lady, seeking to appropriate her fabled hidden treasure. Mon Dieu! While in the big spooky house, they discover Mrs. Jessel’s real identity (I bet she’s a le vampire). Perfect timing as ol’ lady Jessel just woke from her coma. Au revoir, bitches. (Teenagers make me so livide. For their impudence they deserve the business end of a pied dans l’âne.)

Livide is short but sweet, with a tight running time of 88 minutes. You can do a fair amount of damage to one or more teens in an hour and a half. Firstshowing.net posted a review, saying that “Livid provides all the elements to please a fan of horror from any angle: the scares, the tension, the atmosphere, and, ultimately, the gore. Fans of An American Werewolf in London and/or Halloween III: Season of the Witch are given subtle, but noticeable, Easter eggs.”

Easter eggs? I didn’t know the French were down with our religion.

Destroy All Monsters…Today If Possible.

The year was 1968. Madison Square Garden opened. Congress adopted the Gold Standard. Mattel’s Hot Wheels™ toy cars were introduced. NASA launched Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission. Boeing’s 747 made its debut. Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes premiered. And hippies, like some unchecked pestilence, proliferated the pop culture landscape.

Yep, a lot of tumultuous societal action went down that year. But of all the culture shifts taking place, one milestone was overlooked: the release of Destroy All Monsters, the mother of all giant monster movies. OK, a slight overstatement. But it was pretty dang neat, what with the first monster movie to feature not only Godzilla in his ninth starring role, but nearly every known kaiju in Toho’s monster garage: Mothra, King Ghidorah, Rodan, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, Manda, Minilla, Baragon, and Varan. (Don’t get your shorts in an origami knot if some of these names don’t sound familiar. You have to be total hardcore to even know how to pronounce their names correctly.)

Destroy All Monsters is being released for the first time on Blu-ray™ today (October 25, 2011). Wanna know what Baragon’s b-hole looks like in hi-def? Your prayers have been answered. And the disc package comes with a bunch of geek features, most of which mean nothing. All you need to know is that you need it.

Destroy All Monsters takes place in the future: 1999. All of the rowdy giant monsters have been rounded up by customs agents and deported to Monster Island. (Signs posted on the beach warn the monsters that it’s illegal to leave the island. Good thing giant monsters can read.) Everything’s groovy until some alien chicks brainwash the monsters with science beams and cuts them loose on the world: Godzilla recycles New York…Rodan craps all over Moscow…Mothra re-landscapes Beijing… Gorosaurus sacks Paris…Manda squeezes the limeys out of London. And the three-headed King Ghidorah is called in to referee. In all, 85 minutes of enjoyable hell on Earth.

As mentioned prior, Destroy All Monsters featured almost every monster made in Japan at the time. (Gigan, Jet Jaguar and Megalon wouldn’t be drafted into the war until the early ’70s.) If you know your rubber suits, two were missing: Ebirah (giant lobster) and Maguma (giant walrus). Unfortunately, they were cut from the team before they could even suit up. Their families back home were crushed…literally.

Destroy All Monsters sells for $21.99 on Amazon.com, a bargain at ten times the price.

Paranormal Activity 3: False Advertising

Disclaimer: this blog/blawg is not designed to disparage the just-released Paranormal Activity 3. The movie’s quite good and in many ways, better than Paranormal Activity (2007) and Paranormal Activity 2 (2010). Rather, I take double-frown-y face issue with the misleading marketing. Or should I say…OUTRIGHT LIES.

We’ve all seen the commercials. Those of us with TVs, anyway. (If you don’t have a TV, you’re dead to me – and being dead you should probably audition for Paranormal Activity 4.) The commercial shows a grade-school young Katie and Kristy, the two doomed sisters, in a prequel segment, reciting the “Bloody Mary” incantation into a dark bathroom mirror. When the lights go back on they scream and leave the restroom without washing their hands or flushing, and a mysterious shadow appears in the mirror. That did not happen in the movie. A re-worked version with Katie and her step dad’s baby-sitting BFF did, though.

Then there’s the part in the movie’s trailer that showed Kristy jumping off the one-story bedroom balcony in the middle of the night, only to coming running back upstairs to do it again. Didn’t happen in the movie.

Then there’s a specialist who is called in to help solve the issue of Kristy’s invisible friend. He is assaulted by an unseen entity right before the shocked parent’s gaping mouthed faces. Didn’t happen in the movie. Neither did the part where Kristy, attempting to prove that the invisible “Toby” was standing right next to her and her mom by throwing water on him/her/it, and the wet demon reacts by hurling stylish furniture around. (I don’t care what layer of Hell you come from, that kind of behavior is very unbecoming.)

Then there’s the house on fire (didn’t happen), Kristy hiding in the car (didn’t happen), a picture of the demonic Toby drawn on the inside of the girl’s bedroom closet (didn’t happen), and dad running upstairs with his video camera just as mom was yanked out of the bedroom by an unseen yanker and hurled through the door. Didn’t happen.

What did happen: plenty of jump or “tinkle a bit in your pants” moments, most of which borrow profusely from Poltergeist (1982). (There’s even a line in the trailer – but not in the movie – that refers to Carol Anne, the Poltergeist’s demon-beleagured little gal who probably worshipped Satan behind her parent’s backs.) No soundtrack, just unnerving background noises and two impressive shock moments, one of which is a nice pant-filler.

You already knew some of the backstory, which is the premise of Paranormal Activity 3. And that is grandma was a witch. Don’t give me that look – it’s not a spoiler. Grandma, who pops up once or twice in the beginning, urges her daughter to have another kid, and to make it a boy this time. (See PA 2.)

I see a big red flag, which might swamp the storyline of Paranormal Activity 4 (the end of PA 3 totally leaves the lid up.) First, Paranormal Activity had a video camera obsessed boyfriend who couldn’t even take a steamer without filming it. In Paranormal Activity 2, the husband, also a video camera freak, set up cameras all over the house so he could watch ghosts take unholy steamers. In Paranormal Activity 3, the prequel (set in 1988), the step-dad (hmmm, part of the story arc?) is a wedding videographer.

See where I’m going? As each film moves backward, in order to tell evil grandma’s tale, they’re gonna have to rely on Super 8 film or View-Masters™ (plastic binocular slide shows) to convey the plot as consumer-grade video cameras did not exist that far back. Then again, with grandma being a witch, maybe she filmed her wrong-doings using…MAGIC.

We’ll just have to wait another year to see. Until then, my complaints with PA3 are few but valid (no possessed pool cleaner, not enough four-letter words, no nudity). But for the most part, it’s a solid value for your demonic dollar.

Hellraiser(s): Pinhead Vs. Pinhead

I’ve known of three pinheads in my life: Zippy, the Pinhead (Freaks, 1933), Pinhead (Hellraiser, 1987) and Dr. Joel Cenobite, my near-sighted acupuncturist. Barring any current GOP politician running for president, add one more pin to the cushion: Pinhead, from Hellraiser: Revelations (2011).

What’s that you say? Another Pinhead – a pretender to the Throne? Who would dare step into the shoes of Doug Bradley, the ONLY Pinhead fit to ever walk Hell’s rose garden? That any filmmaker should wave their remake arrogance around like a trouser wang at a frat party by attempting to re-interpret Hellraiser and its iconic figurehead is hubris of hellish proportions.

And that’s the shameful mess that is Hellraiser: Revelations, the ninth installment of the Hellraiser franchise. Filmed in an insulting three weeks (it should’ve taken 666 days minimum), Revelations is no revelation at all, making a mockery of the original groundbreaking Clive Barker short story, Hellbound Heart (1986) by loading it up with bland sexual deviancy (been there, debauched that), Clearasil™ method actors and the poorest excuse for a Cenobite to ever put chains on the snow tire that is your face.

Don’t take my prejudice for it – Clive Barker himself issued a terse Tweet, proclaiming that “I want to put on record that the flic [sic] out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO F*CKIN’ CHILD OF MINE! I have NOTHING to do with the f*ckin’ thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.”

Yes, he said butt-hole.

The movie’s press release even set themselves up for an epic FAIL: “Two friends discover a puzzle box in Mexico, which opens a gateway to Hell. Before long, dermatological nightmare Pinhead has returned to make the lives of everyone in his way miserable.”

Mission accomplished.

Tasmanian Devil – The New Werewolf

The name Tasmanian Devil is so bad ass, you should think about getting your name legally changed to it. Sure, your first introduction to the Tasmanian Devil was via the Looney Tunes™ cartoon character voiced by Mel Blanc from 1954-1989. But better Tasmanian Devil than Foghorn Leghorn or Hippety Hopper (though that one could be co-opted by a rapper).

In what may very well be a first crack at headlining a horror movie, Tasmanian Devils, a SyFy™ original, looks to shake off the T–Devil’s goofy yet highly entertaining cartoon legacy and pump up the body count. Here’s how the balls of fur and teeth make their debut:

“Five daredevil friends break the rules and BASE jump into a remote area of Tasmania – where another group of devils is waiting for them when they land. When Park Rangers arrive to arrest the BASE jumpers for disturbing a pristine, ecological haven, they don’t believe their stories about the monsters they have uncovered. But before they know it, the jumpers and the rangers are in the fight of their lives. Can they stay one step ahead of a clever enemy with lightning speed or will they all be ripped apart by poisonous teeth and claws?”

They had me at poisonous teeth and claws.

The cartoon Tasmanian Devil was a short-tempered little douche bag that spun around so fast he looked like a mini tornado. He also ate anything in its path, from other cartoon characters (often edited out) to raw garbage.

The real Tasmanian Devil is a carnivorous marsupial, eating everything in its path, from Australian tourists to BASE jumpers. According to Wikipedia™, the little f*cker’s large head and neck allow it to generate the strongest bite per unit body mass of any living mammal. Not buying it. I’d like to see the Tasmanian Devil and Jaws lock up in a hot dog eating contest. (My money’s on the Big Guy.) The real Tasmanian Devil probably doesn’t spin fast enough to look like a tornado, though.

Tasmanian Devils comes out whenever. I’d do a little more research, but I’m starving. Gotta go find me a tourist burger or some tasty raw garbage to snack on.