Exorcism Gone Wild

The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) is an interesting, though fright-lite horror tale based on a true demonic event that for once I had nothing to do with.

Nineteen year-old Emily Rose got a scholarship and moves out of her wild Catholic home in the middle of farm f*ck nowhere. Once at college she starts seeing visions of demons in the faces of other students and in the shower steam on her dorm window. (Catholic guilt, workin’ its magic.)

Doesn’t take long before she starts convulsing into pretzel shapes (see “Frat Keggar”), getting sores on her face and screaming like someone just invited her to a frat keggar. The doctors pump her full of medication thinking she’s an epileptic. But the drugs are keeping her in a state of perpetual possession by not one but six demons, all of whom name themselves. (Again, not me.) But an eventual exorcism in a barn where cows recycle hay doesn’t go according to scripture and the girl dies.

The movie isn’t so much about Emily with six devils inside her (isn’t there a porn movie with that same premise?), but about the priest, put on trial for her demise (he counseled her to quit taking the medication) and the hot attorney (Laura Linney) who has to defend him.

As courtroom drama goes, it’s OK. (I’ve seen better “hang ’em high” trials on Perry Mason.) The added “demons are after the attorney now” stuff is annoyingly hokey. But it’s the closing statements that pour some juice.

Several fun facts: Emily’s night stand clock stops at 3AM every morning. This is explained in church-speak as the Devil’s way of mocking in reverse the 3PM time of day Christ rose from the grave. (So that’s why all those clocks in other horror movies stop at 3AM. I wonder if demons know how to set their watches to Eastern Standard Time?)

Also as interesting, Laura’s boss in this flick (Colm Feore), played the devil protagonist in Stephen King’s Storm of the Century (1999). The Hell you say.

Godzilla Dies

Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah (1995) is the movie where Godzilla actually dies. Yeah, Godzilla kicked the bucket in his very first movie. That didn’t count, because in that one he was murdered. No one kills Godzilla in this movie – he kills himself!

His digestive system a virtual nuclear reactor, Godzilla’s core is heating up at an accelerated rate and radiation is literally eating him from the inside out. Hence, the steaming and glowing red sores all over his shirt. (Note: The steaming could very well be the after affects of eating refried fleeing citizens.)

This monolithic meltdown poses a serious problem for Tokyo – when Godzilla goes, everybody goes. G is already past the point of eruption, which will burn a hole to the center of the Earth, thereby annihilating all of this over-priced planet and its handy convenience stores.

With that on their plate, the about-to-be-dry-roasted city has to deal with deadly life-forms that’ve been brewing in the ocean every since Dr. Serizawa invented the Oxygen Destroyer™ and murdered Godzilla back in 1954.

These life-forms mutate faster than my beer gut into the monolithic Destoroyah (American pronunciation: Destroyer), one of the coolest/biggest/badassiest G monsters in the cupboard. He’s a bit on the unmanageable side, turning buildings into gravel chunks, sprouting city-wide bat wings and sporting numerous mouthy fangs the size of God’s pocketknife. There’s no way this can end good.

The spiritually epic finale will make you cry. I cried. It’s just not fair to keep piling all this sh*t on Godzilla. How would you like it?

Don’t Have a Cow-Man

Gozu (2003), a seriously messed up Japanese horror film is so surreal, I swear I was on drugs while watching it. But I don’t do drugs. (No, beer is not a drug, no matter what the prosecuting attorney argues).

A man goes in search of his missing brother, Ozaki. Along the way he encounters the lactating woman, a human skin suit in his closet and an underwear-clad Minotaur (human with a bovine head) licking his face and covering it with so much cow spit you’d swear a snot balloon just exploded all over him. And I’d rather not talk about that soup spoon being used for insertion purposes right now. I just can’t. And I’m warning you up front about the dog-smashing part.

The ongoing bizarre scenes paint a bigger picture, although I’m not sure what that is. Something to do with repressed homosexuality, repressed heterosexuality, repressed non-sexuality. The birth scene is legendary and carries an ick factor of 9 on a scale of 10. I don’t know about you, but I liked Gozu even though I have no idea what it was about.

A Handful of Horror

A successful cartoonist loses his drawing hand in a freak accident. He stuck his arm out the car window and zing! Oh no! + ouch! = screaming. Time for a career change (music conductor comes to mind).

His wife leaves him because she has two boobs, but he can only feel them up one at a time. The newspaper that syndicates his long-running strip hires a younger guy with two hands to keep the cartoon going and to draw it for ’ol Lefty. He even tries training his remaining fingers to draw, but like pleasuring yourself in an impure manner with the other hand, it just doesn’t work.

Now he’s getting pot-boilingly pissed. His anger brings back his severed hand, crawling through the grass where dogs poop, where it does the only thing it can do: choke people to death. (This looks like it was done with a stunt stump.)

The hand is a metaphor for the artist’s seething rage. But he should’ve at least washed it before making it kill people. I have to hand it to The Hand (1981), though – nicely depressing movie.

Zit-Covered Frankenstein

It’s all about Professor Frankenstein this time, thank you. The modern day professor, along with Dr. Karlton, conspire to build a working human out of parts of corpses. I’m sure I heard of a similar plot, but where? 

Frankenstein does not store his body parts in freezer bags, but rather drawers, not unlike where you keep your folded socks, hankies and prophylactics. What body parts are deemed freshness-expired get tossed to an alligator, also stored in the lab. That’s why he’s a professor – he thinks of everything.

A car wreck yields fresh stock, that of some dude. When he’s reassembled, he’s one real mirror cracker, what with his entire head looking like Play-Doh™ gone wild, and tufts of hair augmenting an eyeball bulging to the point of squish popping.

The monster gets loose, kills a little here, murders a little there, and generally misbehaves. Frankenstein commands the science abomination to dispatch a super handsome high school athlete, so he can graft that face onto the head of the monster. It works because hey, Frankenstein.

Unfortunately, the monster overhears Frankenstein’s plan to take him apart, ship the pieces back to London, and reassemble him there, kinda like Ikea™ furniture, but with more stitches. (It’s way cheaper to do it that way as shipping to England is cost prohibitive.) Here’s where the monster gets to chime in with his opinion, backed by the ever-supportive alligator.

I Was A Teenage Frankenstein (1957) is pretty cool stuff, though by today’s standards and practices it’s a tired story told over and over to the point where you just wanna throw yourself in an alligator pit. Don’t do that – Frankenstein will just have to put you all back together again in some other movie.

Samurai Werewolf

Kibakichi (2004) is a samurai werewolf who wears a hat that looks like an upside down bundt cake pan. His shoes and clothes are made of stylish rags and his eyebrows could seriously use some plucking. When not barking up the wrong tree, Kibakichi wanders the countryside – friendless and needing a bath – with no one to scratch his belly.

Those he does encounter think Kibakichi’s an easy mark. They think wrong, and get their heads zinged off for their insolence. Kibakichi, though, keeps things on the down low as he is a Yokai, a form of monster that once peacefully coexisted with man, until man turned on the Yokai and began chopping them up like bacon-filled pigs.

On his way to a ghostly village filled with spider geishas and gambling (a sort of Vegas for monsters), Kibakichi encounters turtle creatures that warn him of this “sin city” and what they do to Yokai tourists.

Once Kibakichi arrives he tangos with the town spider woman, whose steel claws and web-spitting make quick meals out of poor losers at the gambling tables. Wait a minute – she’s a Yokai! What the…? Apparently, the Yokai made a deal with the town’s corrupt mayor to protect the town from legal reprisal.

Enter a team of hit men hired to come in and make everyone stop doing illegal stuff. They enforce this rule with machine guns (!) Innocent people get slaughtered, which makes Kibakichi wolf up and do a samurai rampage rodeo on everyone’s sorry asses.

Blood sprays as if shot from Super Soakers™. Body parts fling around like Frisbees™. Hair remains uncombed. Throw in Anju, Kibakichi’s ex-girlfriend who wants to kill him with a razor-sharp boomerang, and this movie has everything: drama, action, love, fur, and dismemberment.

I totally wanna be a samurai werewolf. But I don’t wanna wear that goofy hat.

An Emotional Succubus

Alcoholic, jealous, bitter and unloved (wonder why?), June Talbot is not a leech in the entomological sense in The Leech Woman (1960). She doesn’t suck blood through your pores, but she does drain your freakin’ batteries with all the whining about not getting any of the good stuff from husband and endocrinology doctor, Paul Talbot, who would rather see her jump out the window than have to listen to anymore of her bellyaching.

That is, until some withered old crone shows up in his office and reveals unto him the secret of youth. Yeah, I though it was booze, too, but it turns out to be some sort of magic powder, that when mixed with the neck drippings of a male, substantially restores the feel-up factor of the female who ingests it.

Off the unhappy couple go to Africa to get some ’o this money-making substance. It’s there June discovers Paul’s just been using her. (What a cad.) So she uses his pineal gland leakings, mixes it with an orchid powder and, wham, instant hot date. Problem is the darn stuff wears off pretty quick. And when it does, you look twice as old as you were before drinking the anti-MILF cocktail. You can see where this is going.

Back home in the States she tricks her J.C. Penny™ catalog-handsome attorney into thinking she’s her own niece in order to seduce him. Why can’t I meet women like that? Great double-crossings, plunging daggers, plunging necklines, and, for once, slick detective work on behalf of a cop who manages to link her to all the guys in town with holes in their necks.

For once I’m glad someone didn’t turn into a people-sized bug.

Werewolf House Cat Demon

Also known as Night of the Demon (1957). Night….Curse… How about Super Fun Social Gathering of the Demon?

Psychologist Dr. Holden is a skeptic. He doesn’t believe in demons or magik (with a “c” or a “k”) or witches or satanic whatchamahoo. His colleague, Professor Henry Harrington, didn’t either. Until he was cursed by Dr. Julian Karswell, who holds a Ph.D in Satanology.

That curse unleashed a smoke-emitting 50 foot-tall evil entity with cloven hooves, semi-flapping bat-wings and a face that looks like a cross between a werewolf and a house cat on psychotropic drugs.

Holden and his gang of academics are setting out to expose Karswell’s cult, thereby mocking the evil doc’s belief system. Along the way Holden himself gets cursed, with a warning that he’ll die in three days on a specific date and time. He better put that on his “things to NOT do today” calendar.

A few nerve-wracking events leading up to D-day include a hurricane storm out of nowhere, a house cat on drugs turning into a leopard (with extra dots), and an invisible satanic whatchamahoo pursuing Holden in the woods, with steam coming out of massive footprints. If one was gooned out enough to void the warranty on one’s pants, the woods are a good place to take care of business.

The demon in question only appears twice – at the very beginning and end of the movie. It arrives in the form of boiling clouds and grows to telephone pole height. It looks pretty cool, or at least as cool as a steaming puppet could look.

While it would’ve been nice to see more of this fuzzy fellow, Curse/Night of the Demon is a taut, atmospheric tale of the dark side and the ramifications of poo-pooing someone with learned skills to summon Hell’s finest ambassador.

Monster Rocks Rock

The Monolith Monsters (1957) is an obscure-yet-kick-ass sci-fi movie about a lonely meteor hurtling through space, eventually bashing into this toilet Earth. Specifically, the small desert community of San Angelo, CA (not sure of the zip code).

Breaking apart, the meteor’s chunks (meteorites) grow out of the ground, needing humans and their inner moisture to feed themselves with. Of course, this turns people into statute material. But that’s a small price to pay for what lies ahead.

A bitchin’ thunderstorm with extra rain causes the black space crystals to grow until they look like 100-foot gasoline-powered sharp things. Remember Superman’s house with all those pointy crystals sticking up out of the hockey rink floor at perpendicular angles? These are like that, only bigger.

But with no Jenny Craig™ rebar to help support their weight, the monoliths break apart and crash into things like your house, the stores you shop in, and any vehicles you may have in your driveway. Oh, and YOU. Here’s the bitch – the broken pieces grow into even more monoliths. I’m simply aghast at how cool this is.

A school field trip has kids picking up the meteorite fragments for show and tell. One little girls washes hers and… Uh, oh – her hand and wrist has turned to stone and her parents likewise. Figuring out how to save the little girl’s shopping arm, a doctor also stumbles across the monolith’s weakness. I thought it might be beer, but as it turns out it’s salt, not unlike that which one would sprinkle on popcorn or slugs.

The special effects in this 1957 bad boy are pretty dang neat; The black crystals are so believable, you pretty much want them to find more water to grow even bigger so you can see them goon everyone out. I did, anyway.

Blood Beast Loves You

While tooling around in the upper atmosphere an alien hitches a ride on an American space rocket also out tooling around in the upper atmosphere. This causes the pilot to crash land on Earth – and not in a good way.

The pilot dies and the military has to go retrieve his gooshy remains and examine said goosh in an isolated lab and… Wait a second – he’s not raspberry space jelly after smashing into the ground at 1,000 m.p.h. after all! Could it be his superior flight skills saved his intact husk, or those extraterrestrial embryos implanted in his body? Maybe a little of both.

An x-ray reveals the alien seeds, and the hunt is on for the creature that is believed to have knocked up the male pilot. Unfotunately, you heard me correct.

After a doctor’s head is eaten by the alien to gain his knowledge (the things that pass for food on its planet), the “blood beast” is cornered in a cave, where, through the miracle of science, has acquired the gift of speech. It is here we learn of the space monster’s plan – to have John, the astronaut, give birth to an alien species, who will then go about conquering the Earth. Why? Because it’s there. Duh.

The alien looks like a cross between laundry washed in a swamp and a parrot fed a diet of wet cardboard. Before the creature dies via homemade bombs (!), it warns that someday his people will avenge his death, and that the Human Race is doomed and blah, blah, blah. I get so tired of hearing aliens tell us that over and over. Bring it, don’t sing it, you space goons.

In all, Night of the Blood Beast (1958) is an entirely crappy movie that renders fiction the laws of gravity, male impregnation and brain-eating. And if that alien looks familiar, it was used again in Teenage Cave Man (1958). Now THAT was an entertaining and believable film.