Destroy Frankenstein? That’s Just Crazy Talk

Last time we saw Frankenstein (the British version) in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the good doc was being led to the chopping block for crimes against humanity (killing people, bringing people back to life).

In Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), he had escaped the guillotine with the help of a dwarf. (I know, right?) He stayed the course through The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) to end up here in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969), back in action in a new town, conducting business as usual: cutting off heads, scooping out brains. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Frankenstein, whose secret lab was breached by a drunk (wasn’t me this time), moves into a boarding house and discovers the supermodel running the place and her boyfriend (a doctor at an insane asylum) are selling drugs (cocaine) to help pay for her mom’s medical bills (expensive).

Blackmailing them, Frankenstein sets up a new lab in the boarding house basement and uses the shamed doctor into helping him take Frankenstein’s former partner out of the asylum (going Nut Bag City due to lack of oxygen to the brain), so he can hacksaw the head open and transfer it into a new head/body and mercifully save him.

Successful with all of the above, Frankenstein performs a 45-second operation to release the pressure in his buddy’s brain that was causing all the radio ga ga. Here’s where I’m confused. Why did he have to take the brain in the first place? All he did post brain swap was jam a match-sterilzed knitting needle through the skull to let the hot air out of the bag. Heck, I could’ve done that.

The cops, having been close to re-capturing Frankenstein yet again, are hot on his brain-tradin’ ass. Escaping with his now fully functioning friend and Mr. & Mrs. Blackmail, everyone bolts for a hideout in the country.

Alas, all good plans must go to hell in a Coach™ handbag. Professor Richter, thinking clearly, decides Frankenstein is a douche bag, and fights with him inside a house engulfed with flames. As always, Frankenstein’s good intentions go up in smoke. As does he. No doubt we’ll see him back in biz, as Frankenstein has a way of bringing things back to life.

Other than that, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed has a splish splashing of blood, no graphic medical procedures or bare boobies, and a lot of medical science fact thrown out the window in order to convey the horror that is playing God.

Dreaming in Sci-Fi

Twenty-something/good time boy Alex would rather use his pseudo telekinetic powers to bet on horses at the race track than to help humanity. ME, TOO.

After local thugs catch wind of Alex’s remarkable winning streak, they want a piece of his brain action in trade for not making him bleed through newly added holes. So Alex needs to hide out for a while and agrees to let Dr. Novotny – who runs a sleep disorder clinic – experiment with Alex’s “gift.”

This part is cool: A patient with severe nightmares is induced to sleep. With the help of attached wires and electric thingies, Alex is able to enter the dreams of the patient to find out what the freakin’ problem is. For one kid, it’s a monster. For another man it’s fear that his wife is cheating on him. (For me it’s a cocktail lounge with free booze – and locked doors.)

As the sleep clinic is a government-funded deal, the President’s top aide finds out about Alex’s ability and needs to use him to help the President, whose been having horrendous nuclear nightmares about the world being blown up due to pushing The Button.

But the aide has other plans – he’s trained a psycho killer with the same abilities as Alex to enter the dreams of our leader in chief and kill the plagued prez in his sleep (what happens in the dreamworld doesn’t necessarily stay in dreamworld). It’s the ultimate assassination, leaving no proof whatsoever.

Alex has to get in the sleep head of the President and face off with the killer. Where this gets really fun is while in dream world you can change into anything, like a giant snake, for instance. (I’d change into a gun and shoot teeth bullets out of my mouth.)

Dreamscape has a neato plot for a 1984 movie, with some great dream sequences, like when Alex goes into the sleep mode of the above-average hot Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw) and attempts to make squishy love with her. Jane’s tight sweater alone is one of the movie’s better special effects.

Boned By The Bone Eater

The Bone Eater (2007), yet another legend born from ancient Indian folklore, is a 10-foot digital skeleton riding a dust horse whose agenda is to turn you into dust, and snort up your soul powder as if it were cocaine or “Texas gunpowder.”

A construction crew unearths the remains of said craptacular creature, where it wakes up, reassembles itself and hops around after its victims. Just when you thought fighting a monster that wouldn’t make it in the video gaming world could get any worse…it does.

The sheriff, whose half-white man/half Native American (but a full-blooded douche), puts on his Indian clothes and war paint, mounts a horse and rides down the street while spaghetti western music plays. Oh, yeah – he just happened to find a bone sword laying around with which to defeat the creature.

The chicks in this turd-eater are walking centerfolds, but that doesn’t distract from the fact I thought I was renting a porn movie.

Giant Monsters Dine ‘N Dash

First a little backstory. A million billion years ago (OK, only ten thousand, but that sounds boring) the technologically-advanced people of Atlantis created a flock of flying reptiles, winged dinosaurs if you will.

Why would Atlanteans do such a thing? Well for starters, Atlanteans are big polluters. So these reptiles, or “Gyaos,” fly around and eat pollution. The dino birds grow to monstrous size because there’s a lot of vitamin-enriched pollution to eat. Then the birds started to breed. Then the birds started to eat the Atlanteans. Then the Atlanteans invent Gamera, a species of giant turtles with huge tusks and fireballs shooting out of orifices, to address the booming Gyaos population explosion. Like a new sheriff in town, Gamera takes care of the problem and all was well.

Move forward 10,000 years to 1995. (Just close your eyes and do it.) A ship called Kairyu-Maru (dumb name – I would’ve called it Death Boat) is carrying plutonium and smacks into an atoll in the middle of the ocean. Some of the crew explore the craggy atoll and grab several souvenir stone amulets laying around, which factor into the rest of the movie if you’re interested in sub-plots.

They also encounter a huge obelisk sticking out of this oddly familiar island. There’s writing on the slab, too. (I didn’t have time to decipher it, but the movie scientists did.) Then the island moves and the slab crumbles like the plaster roof I just put on my house. Holy crap – this isn’t an island…THEY’RE STANDING ON GAMERA! Time to get the stinkin’ hell outta there.

Meanwhile, three Gyaos have turned up and are eating people, so they’re lured to an outdoor sports arena with a retractable roof. The idea is to get the Gyaos to fly in and snack on a huge pile of horse carcass, maybe catch a few innings of the game, then shut the roof, thereby trapping the gluttonous beak faces. The plan sorta works.

Two escape and Gamera appears out of freakin’ nowhere and blasts one of those anvil-headed b*stards into soot with his flame-ball breath. The others escape and go to the Kiso Mountains to recharge their energies (i.e., take a nap, eat more people). The military – those well intentioned knuckleheads – shoot Gamera out of the sky as they think he’s the bigger problem. But as it says on the lining of my underwear, you can’t keep a good turtle down.

The last remaining Gyaos grows to Godzilla size and Gamera, now recovered from friendly fire, chases the monstrous bird into downtown Tokyo where a spectacular battle ensues. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – watching giant monsters engaged in wholesale urban destruction is like comfort food to my face.

A welcome upgrade, Gamera looks way better than he did when he took drugs and stumbled around back in the ’60s. Gyaos, though, still looks like a bird puppet with a giant fist shoved up its ass. Nevertheless, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1997) is a sweet comeback for giant turtles everywhere.

One Hell of a Boy

After her young son stuck his head out the car window and a passing garbage truck decapitated it, Dr. Setsu Emma did what any grieving mother would do – bury her kid in a field.

While this saved on funeral costs, it probably wasn’t the smartest of maneuvers as an old wretched hag shows up and offers her advice on how to bring him back from the dead.

With the help of a mystical fang tooth, all Setsu has to do is find a boy of equal age, hog-tie him, slice his throat, let the blood leak down upon her son’s econo-grave, and presto – problem solved.

She does all of this, but when Daio, the headless kid, comes back to life (it’s only been 24 hours since zing!), his body is misshapen, his face is all clay-like, he has vampire teeth and his eyes look like a frog with hay fever. And he craves human organs.

But mom doesn’t care because the kid is alive. Fortunately, she just happened to have a cage in her attic in which to keep him on account of that whole organ-eating thing.

Daio escapes and eats chunks out of a woman who probably didn’t want to have chunks eaten out of her. As Daio’s flesh-feasting gets more intense, the cop closes in and everyone gets shot, sprays blood and makes a mess on the floor.

As fun as this all sounds, it’s a bit “meh” as the gore and makeup are comic book (it was inspired by Hideshi Hino’s Theater of Horror Hexalogy manga) and the whole thing is cartoonish.

The Boy From Hell/2004 is not without a few good moments: Daio in Hell as a giant who eats screaming/burning bodies, mom dismembering Daio with a knife, then with a chainsaw when the knife becomes dull.

No one loves you like your mother.

Capturing Bigfoot – NOT

The Capture of Bigfoot (1979). Pffft – it’s a proven FACT you can’t catch Bigfoot. So what’s the next best thing? Catch Babyfoot, his little kid. (His real name’s probably Bobby or Juan, but I’m unable to verify.)

Two trappers snare the furry brat and try to bring it back to the ski resort. They make it about as far as that tree Bigfoot is hiding behind. And since the ground is covered in snow, it makes sense that this particular Bigfoot (there are lots, you know) is all white with a face not unlike a plastic gorilla mask you’d buy at J.C. Penney’s™.

An asshook business man who throws under-performing employees out windows, wants to capture Bigfoot to put on display and charge admission bling. I’m against exploitation, but man I’d still fork over some serious admission bling to see that action.

A park ranger, sympathetic to our rug-fuzzy friend, seeks to intervene. Bigfoot puts up a decent struggle, heaving bodies and snowmobiles around like they were movie props. But it’s his stylish winter coat and human-sounding growl that make me think this probably isn’t the real Bigfoot.

Still, it was nice to see the carnage resolve equitably, with Bigfoot and Babyfoot looking back at his park ranger buddy and all but saying thanks and waving good-bye.

I just love happy endings.

Mutants With A Need To Breed

Originally titled Hemoglobin and Breeders, Bleeders is a 1997 Gothic horror movie that set out to give in-breeding a bad name.

A decadent Dutch family of mutated, flesh-eating, hermaphrodite aristocrats live, play and have nightly monster intercourse in convenient underground tunnels, which happen to run beneath the cemetery. This is almost as good as delivery pizza for the horny freaks when someone kicks the bucket.

A dying descendant – unaware of his cannibalistic lineage – shows up to find out why he’s bleeding all over the place and walks around for an hour with menstrual cramps. Zzzzzzz. 

The best moment comes when he dines on a fetus pickled in formaldehyde, the secret sauce that gives him his life back. Instead of opening a chain of embalming fluid espresso stands, he rejoins his dwarf mutant family where he screws and eats humans happily ever after.

A few boobs, one dull sex scene and mild gore, all of which is paced so slow you get an urge to wander into the kitchen to see if there are any embryo snack-packs left in the cupboard.

Ripping Off Giant Monsters

The Asylum – the world’s most accomplished cinematically-challenged bottomfeeders – have lowered the bar for themselves yet again.

After years of bold face copying (i.e., ripping off) dozens of blockbuster horror and sci-fi movies – in many cases BEFORE the big budget movies even come out – you’d think they couldn’t slide any further down the gutter. And you’d be wrong. Now, on the eve of the July 12, 2013 release of Pacific Rim, a highly anticipated sci-fi giant robot/monster romp, comes Asylum’s quickie knock-off, Atlantic Rim – WITH THE SAME PREMISE.

I know where giant robots and giant monsters come from. But where the hell are the copyright attorneys?

Pacific Rim’s synopsis: “When an alien attack threatens the Earth’s existence, giant robots piloted by humans are deployed to fight off the menace.”

Atlantic Rim’s synopsis: “Giant monsters rise from the depths (or are they aliens from outer space?). Humans build giant mecha with which to defend themselves.”

Have you ever bought an “authentic” Rolex™ watch displayed on a filthy blanket laying on the sidewalk from a street vendor in New York City?

This is nothing new. The Asylum is infamously notorious for sticking their weenie in other people’s campfires: Jack The Giant Killer, 30,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Abraham Lincoln Vs. Zombies, Battle of Los Angeles, Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers: Fall of Man, Paranormal Entity, Almighty Thor. And like a clogged toilet, they have a lot more in the pipes.

While the SyFy Channel™ remains The Asylum’s key enabler (if you’re gonna sell crap, you need a toilet paper salesman), there are some of you who think this “re-purposing” is all in good fun and OK. I am not one of you, and think the next project Asylum’s releases should be on Court TV.

Sabbath Not So Bloody Sabbath

How can you call a movie Black Sabbath (1963) and not have Ozzy Osbourne or Tony Iommi in it? There needs to be a ruling on this.

Three stories of horribleness, bookended by a corny but classic Boris Karloff, horror icon supreme. There’s a nurse in the 1900s has to prep the body of a psychic woman (or “spiritualist”) who died while channeling the dead. The nurse takes a valuable ring off the way scary looking woman’s hand. Guess who eventually wants it back? No, really – guess.

Then there’s a really hot prostitute named Rosy whose phone keeps ringing with one of her dead clients on the other side, tormenting her with telemarketing scams from beyond. Rosy, however gooned out, does not rip her bra off in terror.

The last story has a grandfather becoming a vampire and sucking on his little grandson. OK, that did NOT come out the way I intended. Though the tale is flat, the little kid, buried out in the yard, comes back in the movie’s best creep out scene. Everything else, been there, haunted that, phoned that, vampire bit that.

The Dead Don’t Wear Clothes

An attractive young school teacher dies, and yet doesn’t. Wasn’t her fault – her quick-tempered “almost” fiancé gooned her out and she drove off into the rainy night, only to be skewered by a truck carrying lead pipes. Superman can’t see through lead. Neither can she. But lead can see through her. Heh.

Taken to a funeral home run by a guy who can talk to the deceased, the girl doesn’t believe she’s dead, and argues with him while he preps her body for the funeral. He explains it’s his gift and curse to speak to the non-living, and that all the deceased do is crap and pee (he uses the other words that’ll get you sent to your room).

His point is the dead don’t know anything about dying. His theories intrigue me; I’ll have to subscribe to his newsletter. Meanwhile, the girl’s grieving “almost” fiancé, suspects she’s still alive. This is done through a series of clues, including a little boy, who was the gal’s student at school and who also can speak to the dead.

You see the story’s twist coming about half the way through, and by the time it’s put on the slab, it’s kinda “meh.” Still, Christina Ricci (the dead broad) is naked 89% of the movie. She’s hot even when she’s cold (heh). After.Life (2009) is sorta cool, but it needed less after and more life.