That ’80s Slasher

“Okay, you rock ’n rollers—it’s time to spin out and boil your heads!” I’m glad someone finally gave me the permission to do so.

A quotable hot chick rock ’n roll TV deejay (or “disc jockey”) counts down the New Year during a live coast-to-coast punk rock concert as a knife-assisted party pooper drinks champagne from urine sample cups and counts down his victims’ lives in each time zone. Should auld acquaintance be forgot.

You don’t need me to tell you that New Year’s Evil (1980) is a sub-standard ’80s slasher headache. Why did I watch it? Haven’t figured that part out yet. And yes, that is a punk band playing the blues. I just don’t have the heart to tell them.

Haunting Done Right

Two guys and two chicks (one a psychically-tuned smart-mouth girl-preferer, the other so sexually repressed she’s actually scarier than the ghost) embark on a scientific study of a mega huge house haunted by an old sick broad who used to stink up the place with her oldness.

Door knobs turn by unseen hands. Pounding TV-interrupting noises emanate from the walls. Laughing voices trickle from nowhere. (Probably canned ghost laughter from a ghost TV.)

All this surprisingly effective spooky-ass stuff going on and the best line comes from one of the guys making a pitcher of cold booze. Holding a fresh batch of the good stuff, he walks into a room that just experienced a full-on spectral visitation, looks up and notices everybody staring in horror. “What – did I use too much Vermouth?” Classic.

Even though it came out in 1963, The Haunting remains as one of the greatest ghost flicks to ever make us fill, empty and re-fill our pants due to being spooked out ’n stuff.

Bionic Bigfoot

If it isn’t already, my head must be shaped like a Tootsie Pop™ because I’m a sucker for movies with titles like Megafoot, an upcoming killer thriller about Bigfoot that’s half bionic, clanking around the woods, making threatening overtures towards all it encounters.

I would like to be a cherry-flavored sucker, please.

Megafoot isn’t a done deal, however. The filmmakers are trying to raise money via social fundraising a IndieGoGo™. Great. There’s goes rent. And why? Just to see a part cyborg/part Bigfoot movie? Hell to the yes.

Like beer in a sufficiently cooled refrigerator, the plot is near to irresistible: “A highly classified experiment accidentally unleashes a top secret killing machine known as Megafoot. Now it’s up to an elite squad of soldiers to track down the beast and kill it before it destroys everyone and everything in its path.”

“A married couple, a group of college students, the scientists who know the truth, and some not-too friendly locals are about to confront their worst nightmare in this action-packed, horror thriller, gore ride.”

Gore ride. How, I ask you, can you NOT be slobbering all over yourself in anticipation?

Time to flavor up – you know what to do.

Skin Sandwich

I Eat Your Skin (1964). A perfect movie title, no matter horror, educational or porn. It was also released as Zombie. Meh. That said, no one eats anyone’s skin, which I feel is misleading and downright cruel.

Tom Harris, a womanizing fiction adventure writer, for some reason, goes to an island filled with voodoo stuff. Maybe he’s gonna write about the zombies there that don’t eat your skin. They have sunny-side up egg eyes, though. I think eggs are edible.

An American scientist is on the island, trying to find a cure for egg eyes…uh, cancer, and discovers that a certain snake venom is causing everyone to zombie up. But someone else forces the doctor to create an army of egg zombies to do illegal stuff.

Tom has to intervene and get everyone off the island without getting egg on his face. He only succeeds at one of those things.

Dying To Read

It’s 1990, knee deep into the science fiction-y future. And books, deemed hedonistic, are outlawed. This is why TV is better than books, which ironically, are TVs you can’t plug in.

The firemen of the future don’t put out fires, they start ’em, raiding apartments to find cleverly hidden novels and anything else resembling the written word, and burning them into unreadable ash. Those charred remains are then doubled burned in case someone figures out how to glue the ashes back together and start reading, which is also against the law.

Unfortunately, some people would rather go up in flames with their books than have a life without ’em. I guess making a reference to cook books (Kindle Fire™ – heh) would be really harsh here, so I won’t do it in the name of all that is decent. (Wanting to make a joke about it is burning me up.)

Fahrenheit 451 (1966, and based on a Ray Bradbury unburnt book in 1953) is in reference to the temperature at which paper ignites. This just sucks – what the gosh darn heck am I supposed to do with all these crayons? The future blows.

Rat Monkey Vampires

Spooky Blackwood Manor, an architect’s dream reach-around, has rat monkey vampire creatures that live in the caverns beneath the dark historied mansion. These little gremlins eat teeth, which confuses the enamel outta me. What do they use to chew with? Major plot discrepancy.

A divorced architect and his similar-careered girlfriend are restoring Blackwood Manor. Lots of rooms to feel each other up in – until the guy’s nine year-old daughter is foisted off on them. The little handful is so moody as to be classified emo. But the creatures who can talk (again, if you eat teeth, what do you use to talk with?), get in her head and persuade her to release them from their unholy hole.

Of course dad and his upgrade don’t believe her. When they finally do, it’s too late. And by too late, I mean for you for waiting and waiting for something scary to happen. Aside from a very painful death at the very end for one of the major players, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011) goes in the “don’t be afraid of not wasting your money” category.

Zombie Beavers

What is up with beavers these days? Joke opportunities notwithstanding, beavers have shown up on my horror movie radar alarmingly frequent these days. With just about every other creature of the forest being showcased as a “chew with your mouth open” monster, I guess it was only a matter of time before beavers – who perform a variety of important nature services – get their day in the sun.

First up is Field Freak (2014), the one-sheet poster of which is anything but a beaver. Then again, what do I know? I’m an indoor face. Maybe there have been scientific advancements in the field of freak beavers. Here be the plottage: “A family moves into a remote cabin only to be terrorized by a creature known as the Field Freak.”

That doesn’t indicate beavers, rabid or otherwise, but the trailer (on this newfangled thing called “YouTube™”) makes beaver references throughout. Maybe the wood chompers are Bigfoot’s minions. I just don’t know.

Then there’s Zombeavers (2014), this year’s Sharknado (2013). The plot, if you could call it that, easily assembles like this: “A group of college kids staying at a riverside cabin are menaced by a swarm of deadly zombie beavers. A weekend of sex and debauchery soon turns gruesome as the beavers close in on the kids.”

No wonder the beavers are drawn to the “sex and debauchery;” lots of…wood.

Don’t look at me like that.

More Godzilla Is Not Enough Godzilla

It’s painful enough to have to wait until the middle of May (2014) to see the new Godzilla movie. But now the film company is just being cruel to the point of sadistic by issuing another teaser poster, this time showing more of the Big Guy’s new duds.

I can only beg and plead to whoever will put up with my begging and pleading (i.e., whining) that the scale of Godzilla in this poster is in correct proportion to the buildings he’s about to turn into gravel soup. (G’s a portable earthquake.)

Hard to tell what city this is, though it looks like San Francisco. Good – I’m tired of seeing New York getting all the fun. And New Yorkers just don’t seem to appreciate a good monster stomping anymore since it has become just another day to them. I will NEVER become jaded watching giant monsters re-develop urban crapholes.

May 16, 2014. Anybody got a time machine I can borrow? I promise to bring it back yesterday.

The Day The Laughter Died

Back in the good ’ol days a circus train turned into a circus submarine when it went off the tracks and into the ocean, thereby drowning all the entertainment clowns and getting them permanently soaking wet. Fifty years later, the clowns have come back from the dead to eat the guts of the living. Don’t ask me to explain why, just go with it.

Interesting premise, but the plot is full of more holes than my retirement portfolio. If the clowns coming back from the dead have been underwater for 50 years, why are their costumes clean, dry and looking like they were washed in some sort of high-priced laundry detergent?

And when the zombie clowns attack – practically in slow motion – how is it no one can get away? And why is it when the zombie clowns tear into your flesh and graphically consume your flesh and take some flesh to go in doggie bags, that they don’t go for the more savory buttsteak instead of the less flavorful lower intestines?

Dead Clowns (2003) – plus: explicit flesh-eating. Minus: everything except explicit flesh-eating.

Weirdo Russian Sci-Fi

Day Watch (2006) (also known as Night Watch 2: The Chalk of Fate), is the Russian sequel to the sci-fi fantasy hit Night Watch (2004) and is as equally as confusing. (I just don’t get sub-titles, man.)

There’s this guy Anton, who is a modern day enlistee in the war between Light and Darkness. He possesses some sort of power to tip the balance of power. Shut up, that was not redundant.

Zavulon is the cheesy named leader of the Dark Others. Anton (his name’s OK) and the good powers of Night needs to get his son Yegor (gonna get beaten up on the playground with a name like that), who is the wild card in this battle, and who Zavulon has all but recruited. Yegor has been f-ing things up as he’s already chosen which team he’d rather play destiny volleyball for.

Bookending all of the above is cars driving across the sides of buildings, an apocalyptic war, snow where there should be no snow, and Anton being able to take over a female body (makes dating a whole lot easier).

Yegor has daddy issues, which paints Anton into a surreal corner, where the forces of Light and Dark meet, greet and dish out defeat. There’s way more to it than that, but I lost track 20 minutes in and just decided to stare slack-jawed for the rest of the movie instead of taking notes. Hey, I freakin’ tried, man.