Waterlogged Ghost

Four horny turn-of-the-Century New England guys with old time dork pants try to get it on with the new chick in town. She’s deemed cool because she’ll do it with four guys. The big stud of the group tries but can’t get the missile off the launch pad, if you know what I be sayin’. Of course, when he’s out with the guys, he tells tall tales of slidin’ into home base.

When the woman goes to set the story straight in front of EVERYONE, Limpy pushes her down where she cracks her head on a rock-like stone. Thinking they killed the life outta her, they put her in a car and push it into the lake. They do this because each comes from upstanding families and have bright careers ahead of them. A murder, even a non-intended one, would totally smudge their reps.

As the car slowly sinks, the “dead” chick suddenly comes to and starts screaming. I guess the water was really cold. Unable to get out of the car, she drowns. Oops.

Flash forward 100 years and each of the horny murderers are now doctors and lawyers. They’re also old farts still keeping THE SECRET. They refer to themselves as The Chowder Society and get together once a year to tell ghost stories. And to fart. But the first rule of The Chowder Society is that you don’t talk about that time they killed that chick.

Everything’s all fine and gosh darn dandy until the dead chick comes back from, uh, the dead. Count how long it takes for Chowder Heads to start rolling. This chick is pissed. Can’t blame her; cold water is not cool. I mean, temperature wise, it is, but not socially. Once The Clam Chowder Makes ’Em Louder Society figure out what’s happening (i.e., revenge from beyond the watery gravy), they have to make her stop before she makes them stop. Breathing, that is.

A few solid spook moments, a bit of pants-tightening suspense here and there, even though the occasionally wambly story line is filled with too many distractions. Dead Woman, however, is sufficiently eerie and her corpse looks like rotted meat Jell-O™. That’s a lot tastier than it sounds.

Ghost Story probably was really scary back when it came out in 1981, but by today’s standards, four really old guys are scarier.

Rats Rule

Willard, a socially wiped upon young man, is verbally and daily abused by his boss. That’s what happens when all you aspire to be is an office rat.

Ironic choice of words as Willard befriends two rats he intended to drown. He feeds them, trains them and eventually becomes Mayor of Rat City. When someone pisses him off, he commands the rats to chew on his enemies as if People Nips™.

Taking them to work, the boss finds one of the rats and kills it with the end of a broom. Right there you know Willard’s boss’ days off are about to become permanent. Swarming all over the fat protagonist, the rats are happy to fulfill Willard’s revenge protocol – until Willard makes the mistake of paying more attention to a hot chick (Sandra Locke) and forgetting about his furry minions.

The rats, led by the super-intelligent Ben (superstar of his own self-titled movie in 1972 whose super sappy theme song was performed by Michael Jackson), do to Willard what he was making them do unto others. The scenes of thousands of swarming real rats will give you a pee shudder more than once.

So if you have a rat-o-phobia don’t watch Willard (1971), not because it’ll goon you out more so, but because rats love this movie and will come out from your mattress where they nest to watch it with you.

Cowboy Robots

A sort of adult Fantasy Island, Westworld (1973) is an “amusement park” where you dress up like a cowboy, ride your horse into town, throw down a nickel for a cold beer, and shoot the cowboy in the face/saloon who just made a remark about your sexual preferences.

The best part is you don’t get arrested for killing said mule mouth because they’re all humanoid robots that get hauled off, repaired and ready to be shot the next day. That is, until something goes wrong and the robots start doing the killing. Ha!

An iconic sci-fi movie that’s been parodied one million times since it came out in the Seventies. Yul Brynner is freakin’ cool as the bad cowboy/robot in black who wants to slap leather with you. (That’s NOT in reference to the aforementioned sexual preference thing).

Speaking of which…ROBOT HOOKERS! You can’t tell the difference between a real 1800s working girl and a mechanical one, but the boobs are for sure fake.

Reform School Werewolf

A school for wayward girls (i.e., chicks who stuff, smoke unfiltered cigarettes, sip booze out of bottles and not glasses, go all the way before marriage) is under attack by a werewolf. The werewolf, however, is no match for the tough-talking bad ass b*tches who go through all your belongings looking for smokes and “color me dead” lipstick.

School rules dictate you shouldn’t go outside the dorm at night. Wayward chicks don’t care for rules, man. The ones that don’t get ripped in half by the werewolf. The girls that follow the rules have hope for social rehabilitation.

Lots of false trails lead to who everyone thinks is the werewolf, but you won’t find out until the end. (You could if you looked it up online, as Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory was made in 1961.) The werewolf himsel/herself/itself (ha, no clues today, sucka!) has impressive dental work, practically a bare face and a LOT of mascara. (Oops.)

Campy monster fun, but it’s the ladies who supply all the action. I think my aunt was in this movie. I wonder if my uncle knows?

Exploded Face Giant

The 60-foot tall Lt. Col. Glenn Manning didn’t die after going berserk in Vegas in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957). (People going mad in Vegas? Yeah, that’s likely.) Even though we saw him get shot with military bullets and fall off the Hoover Dam™ and plunge one million feet to his watery grave, turns out he floated downstream all the way into Mexico – and no one saw him!

The authorities want to capture him because he’s in the country illegally. Mexican people wouldn’t cross our borders without proper papers, so we gotta help them.

Manning, whose face is half blown off, missing an eye and sporting more scar tissue than a breast augmentation clinic, is starving. So he grabs trucks off the road and opens them up to see if there’s some yummy goodness inside. There is.

This gives the military a bright idea, so they drug some food bait and the next thing you know, Manning is tied up in an airplane hangar. No one knows what to do with him as his mind is Jell-O™ and he keeps making growling sounds like a constipated harbor seal.

Thankfully, he breaks free and goes for a walk, smashing a few things along the way. They finally corner him at the Griffith Observatory – right where a school field trip is in session. Even though it’s nighttime and even though a bald 60-foot giant with an exploded face and circus tent undies is in the area, the police seem to think it’s OK to let the kids learn about Uranus.

When Manning appears and the kids are quickly hurried onto the bus, they suddenly look to him like a giant Hostess Twinkie™ with lots of scream filling inside. Manning picks up the bus and threatens to eat/throw it (I was really hoping he would, even crossing my fingers and wishing out loud), but his sister shows up and pleads for him to put the bus down. What a partyblocker.

As a monster, War of the Colossal Beast (1958) is truly one of ’50s sci-fi more awesomely awesome icons; his exploded face will scare the circus tent pants right off you. And that sea lion growl with extra reverb he makes…friggin’ eerie, man.

Japanese Death Circles

Uzumaki is a Japanese word meaning “spiral” or “vortex.” For instance, if you ate a bowl of freshness-date expired Fruit Loops™ and needed to go to the bathroom, you’d be making spirals to be flushed down the vortex. That’s just one example.

In Uzumaki (2000), however, unusual and freakish events plague a small Japanese town. A chick’s boyfriend’s dad suddenly finds himself obsessed with spirals and stays at home from work to draw them, collect them and eventually uses his own body to create them. (Ever see a guy crawl into an operating washing machine?) When he’s cremated, the smoke from his burning body forms a huge spiral in the sky, kinda like the hurricane/smoke pollution on the movie poster for An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

Soon, the girlfriend’s dad’s handmade pottery is showing signs of spirals and the faces of the citizens of Kurozu (the aforementioned town) that recently died. This includes a jilted boyfriend who throws himself in front of a car, only to have his body twisted around the wheel and forming a…spiral. He looks dead.

Another classmate only comes to the school in the rain and walks real slow and has a gnarly spiral scar on his back. No wonder – he and the entire town are turning into…SLUGS. Right the hell on. Amazingly, Uzumaki gets way more surreal than that. The local lighthouse factors in, as do the mosquitoes (they are SO icky) and the girlfriend’s hair that keeps growing and growing into huge spirals without the use of curlers.

At first I thought I was on drugs while watching Uzumaki. But I wasn’t, because drugs are illegal. Despite the 11 LEGAL beers I had consumed, the movie made a lot more sense to me after I climbed into the washing machine. What I’m sayin’ is Uzumaki will leave your brain in a swirl. Heh.

Scarecrows – A Roll In The Hay

When a group of para-military criminals rob a three million dollar payroll in Scarecrows (1988), then kidnap a pilot and his cutie teenage daughter and hijack a plane so that they find a mall in which to spend their insta-cash, you’d think the Army, with all their extra aircraft, guns and soldiers would be hot on their tail. Not so much as a weather balloon was deployed. This, of course, gives the criminals extra time to fly/dink around, looking for a place to land.

One criminal, though, decides to parachute out with the cash, which is in a box the size of refrigerator. The others go after him, meaning to shoot him with their bullet-loaded guns ’n stuff. The chick criminal stays in the plane and has their captives circle around, keeping her eye on the loot and directing traffic from above. This goes on for 15 minutes. Still no cops.

Everyone eventually lands in an abandoned farm area surrounded by socially f’d up scarecrows. (The farmhouse is empty as well, probably because the scarecrows ate everyone inside. That’s what I believe, anyway.) But the scarecrows, incredibly, don’t like people, and hack ’em up good.

The double criminal finds this out the hard way as he gets ripped open and stuffed with hay and stolen cash. And the straw used for the impromptu taxidermy is evil. So yeah, everyone becomes fertilizer.

The gore is delightful, the dialogue loaded with more corn than the cornfield everyone’s dying in, and the mullet haircuts on all the guys look like Rambo are “party on” stylish. (This movie was made in 1988, so at least that part made sense).

What everyone is dismayed to discover is that bullets don’t kill scarecrows. Apparently, no one thought to light a match. Isn’t that what you do when something stinks?

4th Dimensional Pants

4D Man (1959) is also known as The Master of Terror. Am I the only one on the internet who thinks The Master of Terror was thought up by someone who only owns striped shirts?

So these two brothers are scientists. One is a jackass whose early experiments in amplifying molecular structure burns down his lab and the building it was in. The landlord cares not for science and is NOT happy. The other brother, the unacknowledged inventor of Cargonite, a substance so impenetrable, nothing can pass through it. Except Superman.

Tony Nelson, the younger brother, insists that his invention can render Cargonite as weak as wet toilet paper. He even has proof: a pencil stuck halfway between a block of lead. I totally want one of those.

Upset because his boss won’t give him credit for the Cargonite and losing his sweet trim to younger brother, Scott Nelson goes into the lab at night and tries the machine on for size. It works – his hand goes right into a piece of lead. One can almost see the practicable applications of having one’s fingers stuck in metal.

But the experiment yields a unique side effect – Scott is able to reach into mailboxes and pull out your drunk letters to your ex. He can also stick his lead-free hand into a grocery store window and steal an apple. And thus a life of hardcore crime begins.

The other two side effects aren’t as cool. When he touches someone and his hand goes into them, birthdays go flying by and they die of old age within seconds. That’s not an exclusive condition – each time Scott uses his 4D ability, he begins aging as well.

As his mind starts going into 5D, Scott walks through a bank vault and makes a large withdrawal. The cops, armed with machine guns (!) attempt to “apprehend” Scott. “Nothing can hold me,” he enunciates loudly, not a jail cell, nor brick handcuffs. Nothing, that is, except…Cargonite. Man, that’s some bad karma irony right there.

Final notes: The plot is cool but the dialogue is lame; Tony stumbles over his lines when he gets excited, which is every other minute. Secondly, the soundtrack is some rhythmic jazz thing with bongos, no doubt played by beatniks. Beatniks are like hippies, except they can read sheet music.

Grade School Vampire

Dawn is a 10 year-old vampire girl who can walk in the sunlight, wear mix ’n match religious artifacts without adverse reaction, and suck the tomato juice right out of your neck. I’m just guessing it’s tomato juice as this low-budget independent horror  “film” was done in black and white. It could be turkey gravy for all I know.

Dawn’s mom was a tough talkin’ vampire who died just after giving birth to her daughter in a bathtub with her clothes on. I’m not sure, but I think it’s illegal to bathe/birth with your clothes on.

Dawn’s human dad takes her from town to town so she can feed. And you know what tapeworms kids have – this chick is hungry all the freakin’ time. Dawn’s cravings are intensifying, which coincides with a handicapped psychic detective hot on her trail, the clues all but visible just by him touching the crime scene with his washed hands.

If you think the plot of Dawn (2006) sounds familiar, you’re getting warm – it borrows liberally from Firestarter (1984). But no fire is started here. Rather, it puts out the flame with entry-level acting, stiff dialogue and a 10 year-old girl sucking on the necks of elderly men. Why couldn’t she just drink turkey gravy instead? It’s not bad after you get through the first gallon.

Frankenfish

Forget alligators, piranhas or swamp sharks – there’s something more bitey than all the above, swimming/dining around the Louisiana Lunch Counter (i.e., Bayou.) Just ask the two guys it just ate. Go ahead.

Besides being incredibly hungry, Frankenfish (star of Frankenfish/2004) looks like a 10-foot dolphin that’s been huffing paint fumes. Ramming the bottom of the houseboat to apply strategic water holes, Frankenfish waits for the floating domiciles to sink. Brilliant, I say. Why? Think of it as reverse fishing. I know, right?

The guy who genetically fashioned the fin (“It’s a Northern Snakehead, and he’s not hunting…he’s shopping!”) shoots it full of rhino tranquilizer. I drank some of that stuff before. Mixed it with Diet Snapple™. Good buzz, but it tasted like FrankenAss. (The Snapple™, not the tranquilizer.) But if you think that’s all there is to the story, you don’t know frank about Frankenfish.

This is another trip to the store as Snakehead Terror (2004) already started the food chain. But this one’s better because it has a way cooler title.