Balding Sasquatch

The problem with movies about Bigfoot is that the monster always looks really dumb. The Sasquatch in the Jack Links Beef Jerky™ TV commercials looks way cooler than those used in low-rent films such as Clawed: The legend of Sasquatch (2005). Why not borrow the Jack Links™ Bigfoot and use him to rip people apart like beef jerky?

A bunch (four) of drunk, redneck poachers are attacked in the woods by Sasquatch, three of which get their guts ripped out. The surviving redneck (played by Miles O’Keeffe, that poser Tarzan in 1981), is p*ssed his friends are no longer around to drink beers with and to go four-wheelin’ and a’shootin’. So he rounds up three more redneck replacements to hunt down the “bear” that performed open-heart surgery on his bestest buddies.

Four high school students go camping in the very same woods on a homework assignment. The local sheriff has his hands full trying to keep people out of the woods and take care of the “bear” problem in time for tourist season. An Indian deputy (played by that Indian guy in Ginger Snaps III) knows the problem isn’t a bear, but Taku He (pronounced “talk-oooh-hey”), the mythical creature foretold in his culture’s instruction manual.

The racist rednecks don’t like the Indian and plan on shooting him and making it look like a hunting accident – right after that next case of beer. That they pass the time lighting their farts around a campfire means they’re just waiting for the right moment.

The students, though, are unknowingly caught in the middle, with Sasquatch throwing rocks (or “mountain stones”) at their tents to get them to leave so he can mangle the redneck’s red necks. When Sasquatch does appear, he looks like Trog’s uncle and is sporting a receding hairline. This is unusual as male pattern baldness is rare among missing links.

Building to a tedious climax, Sasquatch spares the kids, the deputy survives being shot, the rednecks all die, and the local news station airs the footage of Sasquatch taken by one of the students. Everyone thinks it’s a hoax. But WE know the truth – it was a bear dressed up as Sasquatch. Really, it’s the only logical explanation.

Vampire With A Pilot’s License

Based on a Stephen King story (scary guy who can type), Night Flier (1997) revolves around an investigative trash tabloid journalist/pilot who tracks a mysterious black Cessna (kite-sized airplane) that’s been landing at small town airports with little more than dirt for runways and leaving a trail of chopped-up bodies and moppable blood in its wake.

The journalist flies up and down the East Coast on the trail of the black plane, always just missing its gruesome repercussions. But the kill pilot is leaving clues for the writer, who discovers the murder guy calls himself Dwight Renfield (a nod to the actor Dwight Frye, Dracula’s mentally-unassisted assistant, employed for a short time back in 1931), and that the corpses all have window-sized holes in their necks. Eeww! 

Renfield knows the journalist is on to him and warns him to f-off in messages left in blood and that drippy stuff that may or may not be lower intestines. But the writer (Miguel Ferrer) is not easily spooked. He knows he’s about to break the big story and when he finally finds the plane parked at an out-of-the-way airport, it goons him out – the plane is entirely black and looks crusty, like it had just flown through a BBQ tornado.

Entering the pint-sized airport, he sees body parts everywhere, even in the baggage carousel. Eeww! Finally, they meet face-to-face. Or whatever passes for Renfield’s face, which looks like a wet sandwich, possibly roast beef. You’d think it’d all end happily right there. But then you’d be WRONG. There’s a b*tch twist you won’t see coming. (Neither did Miguel.)

It’s heartwarming to watch a vampire movie that dispenses with the agonizing clichés and clearly fake teeth, making you hungry for more. Not unlike a semi-dry roast beef sandwich.

Hellish Phone Bill

Hoax Wilmoth has worse problems than his  name. As a socially-exorcised teen with a religious freak mom who can make it rain fish and a renegade male cousin whom he feels a certain pant-tingling attraction for, Hoax finds a telephone number that puts him in direct contact with…SATAN. (What’s a “telephone”?)

Thinking it’s one of those horoscope pay numbers, Hoax (yeesh, that name is stupid) calls and gets advice on how to deal with the gang of teen gay guys who beat him up every day and play strip poker together. (Instructions: chop off one guy’s hand, stab another with a neon pitchfork (!), punch through the chest of two others, yank out their black hearts and show it around the room.)

And that chick who scorned him? The evil voice tells him to make a pentagram out of salt and bugs, and the next thing you know, she’s being devoured alive by salty bugs.

Mom gets the phone bill and freaks. Hoax is pretty much up to here with her fire and brimstone, so she’s got to go. Then he writes a bunch of anti-church stuff all over the walls. I’ll give him this, his handwriting is nicely legible.

A final confrontation between Hoax and his dreaded cousin Spike makes the house fall apart to reveal a pit leading straight to Japan. Or Hell. If you’re not evil, go to Japan. If you’re evil, then go to Hell.

Hoax is played by Stephen Geoffrys and is the same character he played as Evil Ed in Fright Night (1985). All of 976-Evil’s (1988) gore and violence is done off-screen, which is surprising given that Robert Englund – Freddy Krueger himself – directed this horror-lite butt toffee. So when evil calls, hang up on it.

Nutty Horror

Squirrels have been referred to as rats with good PR. That’s dang funny. I’ve since paraphrased in order to impress the high society crowds I hang out with by employing lines like, “I say dear fellow, waffles are merely pancakes with good PR.” Top drawer stuff. Always gets a laugh.

Squirrels are in the Top 10 of all time cute animals that you just want to rub against your face and give ’em adorable names like “Mr. Fuzz,” “Chip Monk,” and “Destroyah.” In truth, though, squirrels, the latest animal to be made a horror villain, are four-legged toilets brushes that can infect you with foamy rabies with one well-place nibble.

Scheduled for release in 2014 and based on a 30-second concept by producer Timur Bekmambetov (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter/2012), the blandly titled Squirrels finds our furry forest friend wreaking utter havoc. Hence…

“When a young man’s estranged father is killed under suspicious circumstances, he returns home for the first time in years to get to the bottom of the mystery. Hoping to uncover some logical explanation, he instead finds his mom’s sleazy new boyfriend, a natural gas company buying up the town, an angry female sheriff who happens to be his ex-girlfriend, and an army of flesh-eating squirrels hellbent on destroying everything in their path due to an erosion of their food chain as a result of environmental destruction by the gas company.”

Flesh-eating squirrels. Kinda rolls right off the tongue. I bet these squirrels would eat your tongue. If they didn’t, then the movie wouldn’t have a whole lot of appeal. Yeah, the whole thing sounds pretty dang dumb. I’d rather see a movie about acid syrup-spraying waffles that punch square holes in you. And the movie could be made in Belgium. And cities under siege by these lethal breakfast monsters call on butter companies to combat… Yeah, pretty dumb as well. I really thought I was on to something there for a sec.

And then the beer wore off.

Cobra + Alligator = Cobragator

Ever want to know what you’d get if you cross a king cobra with an alligator? Of course you do. And you’ll get to find out when Roger Corman presents Cobragator, a Jim Wynorski “film” shooting in October 2013 and coming eventually to a SyFy Channel™ near you.

No plot details as of this e-barfing, but you already know what’s gonna happen. Some scientist or lab experiment goes awry, the two creatures are morphed together, it gets loose and goes on a people eating spree, the military is called in (but are useless), and one guy or gal figures how to stop it, all the while saying stuff like, “We’re gonna need bigger guns.”

Hope the put more effort into creating the monster than they did on the teaser poster. It looks like it was done by a snakeodile with an Art Institute™ “degree”.

Giant Snakes Are So Constricting

Eighty-five foot digital snakes that growl like lions are almost as stupid as the actors that appear in “horror” movies (Python II / 2002) such as these. How they live with themselves is beyond me. How I live myself for watching movies like this is beyond me.

A military cargo plane heads back from Russia after capturing Monty Python and putting him into a steel box. Yes, the plane is shot down. Yes, the snake escapes. Yes, somebody wants to try and recapture it. And yes, they get swallowed and spit on for their efforts.

A U.S. covert operation infiltrates Russia (!) and, with the help of an unemployed baseball player who now drives a cargo truck (he was fired for beaning a guy with a baseball, nearly killing him), goes to retrieve the reptile for military applications, such as swallowing and spitting.

So, as it turns out, there are two snakes. A preemptive air strike was pre-planned (damn, that’s redundant) in the event the cargo couldn’t be contained, and everyone not yet eaten by the Wonder Worm has to get out of the military complex they’re trapped in before being bombed with bombs. You know who survives, you know who dies, you know what’s coming next: Ass Cobra: Feel the Squeeze.

Recyclable Ghosts ’n Zombies

Tsui Ting-Yin is a successful romance novelist who scored three best-sellers about love-gone-flush, based on her own experiences. Now she wants to write a horror novel. I fail to see the difference.

Once she begins drafting her book, spooky things happen: someone using the shower and leaving long black hair all over the place, phone ringing, hissing noises that make it hard to watch TV, typing paper moving as if by an invisible and possibly demonic secretary. Seems whatever Tsui writes is coming to fruition.

Convinced there is an entity in her stylish, yet conservative apartment (there is), she is directed to leave and go wherever the spirit indicates. Tsui goes outside to find the entire world is totally messed up. Everything looks old and abandoned (like me after last call), and a horror-faced ghost (with like-minded associates) fast on her tail. But how to get out of this mega dump? The bus hasn’t been by in decades.

She meets an old man who tells her she can’t stay (really?), and that she needs to get to the Transit, a way back to her world. A cute little girl with a dirty face and dirtier clothes tells Tsui that this place is where the discarded go: ideas, toys, goods and services…and people. Again she is told to get out here, because hey – dangerous. They have to hurry because everything around them is beginning to disintegrate into black particle stuff, which would plug up your nose if you breathed it.

The old man gives her a riddle clue as to the Transit’s whereabouts, but doesn’t know the exact location as the map got some root beer spilled on it or something. He gives her some Hell money and advises them to do a bunch of seemingly nonsensical stuff as IT’S IMPORTANT.

First stop, a forest where bodies hang from trees. Their necks are stretched out from dangling so long. And they aren’t quite dead. Then it’s a race through a Fetus Tunnel and across a foot bridge blocked by the living, but rude dead. Then through a graveyard where people are buried outside their graves. That is plain f’d up. Still the zombie/ghost/vengeful spirit pursues.

When Tsui and the girl arrive at the Transit, the truth about why she’s in this dimensional part of town and the little girl herself are revealed. Warning – it’ll mess with your head, especially if you’re a chick.

The cinematography and effects are stunning on a Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter level. (When it rains, bodies pour from the sky. Be sure and wear human-proof galoshes.) Re-Cycle (2006) is one of those winning Lotto™ tickets after buying (or renting) thousands your whole stinkin’ life. In its native Thailand, this movie was called Gwai wik. I don’t like that title any more than I do Re-Cycle, as it lacks a certain “brain-eating” quality. But just see it, ’k?

Frightmare Rhymes With Nightmare

1983’s Frightmare is also known as Body Snatchers and Horror Star. If the movie didn’t suck, I’d wear a shirt with Frightmare on it, probably to the store or some sort of social function, like a wedding, the opera or perhaps a rodeo.

After Golden Age Hollywood horror movie icon Conrad Radzoff dies (think Vincent Price, but with lots more ham and cheese), his body is buried in a well-appointed crypt.

A bunch of  Radzoff fanatics/drama students rob his final resting place and take his body back to his mansion where a lot of his classic horror films were shot for one last tribute. Despite the fact it’s highly illegal to break into someone’s house, they spend the night toasting Conrad’s corpse, dancing, drinking and dying.

Turns out Conrad, while not quite stinking but still dead, somehow isn’t. Retribution from beyond the grave comes in the form of a ripped out tongue, a chick being burned alive, impalement, suffocating crypt vapors and decapitation.

Nothing to lose your head over, but this Frightmare isn’t much of a frightmare at all. Blame the cheesy lighting and sound effects and Conrad’s cartoonish persona. (Yeah, I now he died, but he just won’t stay dead.) As a bonus, there’s a videotaped message from Conrad from beyond, telling us he’ll see us all in Hell. Does watching this highly derivative “horror” movie count?

Cannibalistic Ghost Moose

Global warming with a twist – it’s not the toxic greenhouse gases leaking up from thawing permafrost that’s causing an oil drilling advance team in Alaska to walk naked into a sub-zero midnight snow storm, but the mythical Wendigo, a cannibalistic ghost moose. And all this time we’ve been buying into the lies of scientists. Damn conservatives.

Begrudgingly working alongside of hippies, uh, I mean, Greenpeace™ type environmentalists, Ed Pollock, a tough-talking leader of a drilling base in the de-cooling Arctic, needs massive equipment delivered, but ice roads can’t be constructed due to the ground being all warm ’n fuzzy. The environmentalist won’t sign off on letting the gear to be brought in because it’ll damage the Tundra. That’s like saying you won’t go outside because the wind will mess up your hair.

While that battle rages on, a team member is beginning to freak out over incessant noises, mysterious tracks, out-of-nowhere windstorms, and ghostly visions of cannibal ghost moose running around like they own the place. This culminates in the taking off of clothes and wandering out into the frozen night.

The next morning victim #1’s footprints lead 15 feet from the building, then disappear as if having been given a lift from a passing cannibal moose. His body was found miles away with the eyes picked out by crows. (Note: Since it’s so globally-warm in Alaska, birds can hang out up there and eat all the delicious snow/eyeballs they want.)

A rescue plane doesn’t fare much better, with a less-than-textbook landing into the drilling station. More than one are burned alive, which means BBQ buffet for the birds. The team captain and hippie, uh, environmentalist take off on a snowmobile (or “Ski-doo™”) to get help. They find none. Then the Ski-doo™ pulls a doo-doo and conks out. Then the Wendigos arrive to gore you with their antlers of death and hooves of doom.

The Last Winter (2006) has a good creepy build-up of events, some nicely-enunciated swearing, and a cheery dread that something is out there in the show that has the potential to eat your snowshoes off from the knee down. Too bad the Wendigos were computer graphics, though. Would’ve been nice to see a real one for once.

Chew Chew On This Choo-Choo

There is some mean person hammer-killing people on a New York subway, draining them of downtown juice and hanging them on meat hooks in the reliable public transit system. Just another day in the Big Apple.

A photographer stumbles onto the carnage and discovers a silent killer who butchers the passengers as though they were Black Angus™ signature steak specials. Leon, the photo dude, tries telling the cops, but they don’t believe him, so he tries to solve the murders himself.

Encountering the butcher (known as Mahogany) on a midnight train run, Leon manages to push Mr. Knife out of the rail car and rides the train all the way into a secret underground cavern where there are one million skeletons, some picked clean, others half-rotting and no doubt smelling like an Arby’s™ restroom.

Half-human/half reptile creature people enter the train and pick up their delivery food, as it’s been done for over 100 years. This makes it so the reptile people don’t have to come to the surface to find tasty citizen food. In return, the reptile people make the city rich. (I don’t know how – none of ’em seem to have jobs.) This is why the police weren’t interested in Leon’s suspicions; they’re in on the whole yummy plan.

Mahogany, bruised and bloodied after his tumble out of the train, shows up and he and Leon get into it. This match doesn’t work out so well for Leon – his tongue gets ripped out and eaten, his girlfriend is sacrificed on a dinner plate of bones and her heart ripped out of her chest area. All while Leon watches. But the night isn’t over for Leon; He just got a new job. Guess what that is?

Adapted from the Clive Barker 1984 short story of the same name, The Midnight Meat Train (2008) could have used a bit more meat as it just wasn’t enough to make you go vegan. But then, how can you say no to human beef? It’s what’s for dinner.