Belly Deli – Serving Real Bellies

Faud Ramses III, the grandson of the Egyptian-esque Faud Ramses, is opening a catering business. Falling under the spell of Ishtar (a statue in the back room with Duracell™-powered red eyes), Faud III harvests body parts from supermodels to make a buffet for an upcoming wedding.

Two problems: The bodies are all those of the bridesmaids. (So much for white gowns.) Secondly, the groom is the detective on the case looking for the murderer. (There’s a way to save money.)

Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002), like its predecessor, doesn’t skimp on the gore. Necks are sliced like wet deli meat; Intestines are pulled out like Silly String™; Eyes are gouged and used as hors d’oeuvres; The skin covering a girl’s head is cut and her entire face and hair pulled off as if removing a ski mask. Her brain is then liberated by way of a carving knife. (It’s nice knife, too – infomercial quality.)

In 1963 when Blood Feast came out, that kind of graphic gore was considered taboo shocking. Today, it’s just yesterday’s intestines. Look how years of voting Republican has desensitized you.

Barn of the Naked Dead

Barn of the Naked Dead (1974) is also known as Nightmare Circus and Terror Circus. I don’t like either of those titles because they don’t have the word “naked” in ’em.

Showgirls headed to Vegas to take their clothes off for pay are abducted by a guy who lives in the desert. For whatever reason, he has a circus fetish and keeps 10 chicks chained up in the barn until it’s time to perform. He doesn’t, like, do stuff to them with his dingus, but he horse whips the sexy gals and makes them walk around in circles. Every so often he smears cow blood on one of ’em and lets them go. Then he lets his caged and hungry leopard go as well.

But the guy’s dad, mutated by Nevada atomic bomb testing, is out there, ripping the girls to shreds first. The leopard just bolts for Vegas. And it doesn’t help matters that one of the showgirls looks exactly like his mom, the one who abandoned him as a child. Put another log on the crazy fire.

Brief nudity, endlessly crying/screaming women, a bit of blood. A kinda cool psycho shocker, but with that title, I was really expecting to see nudist zombies on a farm, e-i-e-i-o.

Keeping an Eye on Sci-Fi

The “beast” in The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes (1955) is really an alien, at times represented as a blinking soup can that acts as housing for irritating mind waves.

This morphing soup can, um, alien doesn’t have a million eyes on its own space face. Rather, it overtakes birds, dogs, barnyard animals, and even a steer (cow on steroids), to “see” for him.

So instead of finding the nearest girl’s locker room, the extraterrestrial dumbass attacks a farming family who bitch and argue so much, you’d wish they’d just stab each other in the pig pen with pitchforks.

The alien makes life even more uncomfortable for the Kelly family, who has a mute worker living on their property, doing glamorous chores like licking chicken eggs clean enough for market and turning cow pies when the sun cooks ’em to a nice pancake brown.

Under the control of The Soup, the minimum wage mute goes after the hot teen daughter, setting off a chain of events that is right up there with watching water heat on the stove. Why the alien didn’t mind-control a common pterodactyl or a C.H.U.D. was a serious misstep that resulted in everyone yawning in its general direction.

Weathering Horror

I haven’t seen a good horror disaster flick since the video of my last proctology exam. And the ad poster for Into The Storm, in theaters August 8, 2014, brings back less than fond memories of being probed by Dr. “Big Finger” Lindermund.

Okay, T.M.I.

Anyway, a psuedo docu-horror movie about really mean tornadoes chewing up the countryside is right up my alley. Um, that didn’t sound right. Here’s what’s coming down the chute (crap, what is wrong with me today?):

“In the span of a single day, the town of Silverton is ravaged by an unprecedented onslaught of tornadoes. Storm trackers predict the worst is yet to come. Most people seek shelter, while others run towards the vortex, testing how far a storm chaser will go for that once-in-a-lifetime shot.”

“Told through the eyes and lenses of professional storm chasers, thrill-seeking amateurs, and courageous townspeople, Into the Storm throws you directly into the eye of the storm to experience Mother Nature at her most extreme.”

Extreme Mother Naturing brings nothing but bad news, starting with the first ever documented tornado back in 1937, which disintegrated cornfields, turned cows into hamburgers, and poured down upon us a reign of witches all over rural Kansas.

It could be worse. We might share doctors.

Ghost-sitter

Part of the 6 Films To Keep You Awake series, The Baby’s Room (2006), a Spanish ghost story, finds a young married couple with a factory-fresh kid moving into a new house that, for all intents is haunted, right down to the stylish terracotta tiling.

The ghost (a dude and not a babysitter dude) first makes himself known via a hi-tech baby monitor with video screen, sitting by the kid’s crib and freaking out the new parents. So dad buys 20 baby monitors and does a double freak-out – he can’t see the ghost with regular eyes, but he can see and follow the spectre through the video camera.

The spooky guy looks really familiar, though. Could it be dad has seen that face before, like in a mirror, perhaps? (No, that wasn’t a spoiler as far as you know.)

Overly long, often cliched and occasionally tedious, The Baby’s Room takes some time to build up scare steam, but has a kinda cool twist the punch line ala The Shining (1980). But I totally get the movie’s message: the best part about kids is making ’em.

Aliens On A Train

A meteorite forces a train carrying what could be our next President to stop, thereby letting the meteor aliens onto the vehicle – without a ticket. Not cool, aliens. A cop who suspects aliens are on the train has a puppet helicopter fly him over it so he can drop down and arrest those dang thangs. To complicate matters, the puppet train is about to rear-end another puppet train up ahead carrying puppet radioactive waste.

These extraterrestrials are quite possibly the worst looking space creatures this side of those boot-crushable fuzzballs in Gremlins (1984). They have cartoon-sized plastic teeth, growl like an unfed stomach and zip around so fast as to be almost invisible. Besides a taste for human flesh, their blood is methane, or “farts.” When the creatures are lit, they do the blue flame mambo and explode.

The dialogue should count as comedy it’s so bad (“We’ve got to get those aliens somehow…and we’ve got to do it NOW!”). The “you’ve got to be kidding me” ending of Alien Express (2005) is but whipped cream on this turd sundae.

Blood Monkeys Out For Blood

Six anthropology graduate students go to Africa to assist the esteemed Professor Hamilton as he documents crotch-swelling exciting flora and fauna.

Unknown to the students who bring their cell phones – even though they’re going into uncharted jungles – is that Hamilton has discovered an undocumented primate species that’s super-intelligent, super aggressive and super mad at anything human. He wants to be the first to catalog these killer apes and needs the students as bait seeing how his other assistants have been eaten alive by the gore-rillas. (I invented that name – no one better take it.)

The best scene comes when everyone settles into their tents and it starts raining. But it isn’t water – it’s monkey pee! A whole bunch of apes are in the trees, pissing on the tents. Damn, that was funny. Gives a whole new definition to acid rain, it does.

It’s right here Blood Monkey (2007) slips on a banana. Trapped in a cave, the last two students have wandered into the gorilla’s condo, and we finally we get to see the monster monkey – for exactly two seconds, then right into the credits. Adding to the insult, the monster monkey looks like the title character from Donkey Kong. I’m so mad, if there was a tent around, I’d totally go number one on it.

Aliens vs. Rednecks

Fifteen years ago some young boys were out hunting and ran into some aliens wanting to play “probe the redneck.” Thankfully, they don’t show this. Now potty-mouthed adults with mullets and guns, they manage to track and trap one o’ them gol’durn aliens and make him pay for killing one of their friends and messing up the mind of another.

They wrap it in tarp, bind it in chains and put a welder’s mask on it so that its thought beams can’t shoot out and get you. They bring the alien to the house of the sole abductee survivor for a little R&R (revenge and retribution). It’s here this entertaining film turns up the fun volume.

If the alien bites you, you’re cooked. Literally. Like a Komodo dragon, the infected wound eats you up from the inside until you’re begging for someone to put a bullet in your rotting face. The best scene comes when one of the aliens plays tug-of-war with human intestines still attached.

Loosely based on the TRUE Travis Walton UFO incident in 1975 where Travis was actually sucked into a UFO (OK, that didn’t sound right), Altered (2006) is as taut as a stretched intestine. Though it was directed by one of the people behind The Blair Witch Project (1999), one of the worst horror movies of all time and space, Altered, with an alien that seems to like Earth bathrooms, is a probing good time.

At War With Bigfoot

Once Bigfoot Wars comes out on May 23, 2014 , it’ll change the entire film industry. How do I know this? Several reasons. But first, the plot…

“Bigfoot Wars focuses on a small-town sheriff who with the help of a “Dixieland Mafioso” family patriarch sets out to hunt a creature that is widely believed to be a myth. They soon find themselves battling for survival as they discover they aren’t dealing with just one beast, but are at war with many.”

The movie’s title is an ass kick. That is to say it kicks ass. Secondly, they aren’t doing a movie with just one Sasquatch, but lots and lots. My hope is that there are 30 dozen of the iconic cryptid. Even if there’s a mere 100 of ’em, that alone makes Bigfoot Wars the must see movie of the year. And don’t let the fact the C. Thomas Howell, who has been in more SyFy Channel™ movies than me, keep you from seeing it.

Bigfoot Wars, incidentally, is based on the bestselling novels from Eric. S. Brown. I have no idea what the “S” in his middle name stands for. Probably “success.” He’s written more books than a library can hold.

Too bad I can’t read, because with books titled Space Stations and Graveyards, Season of Rot and Zombies II: Inhuman sure sound like quality entertainment. But hey, I can still watch TV with the best of ’em. Some call it a gift.

Vampires Bite Uranus

For a movie about vampires to call itself Bloodsuckers (2005) makes you wonder who got paid to come up with it. If it was more than a dollar, they were over-paid. Fortunately, someone kinda sort a fixed it when the made-for-TV sci-fi flick was retitled Vampire Wars: Battle For The Universe. Still dumb, but not Bloodsuckers dumb.

In the future we find that the universe is being scourged by a snack-pack variety of vampires. Teams of vampire hunters roam the galaxy and shout “lock ’n load, people” pseudo-military slogans and do a lot of synchronized posing.

One such team has a hot vampire chick working with them (she can smell vampire B.O., even in space), who has to drink plasma (space term for blood) instead of “snecking.” (Snacking on necks.)

They land on an abandoned planet, only to discover the place is overrun with dozens, maybe even a hundred dozen vampires. Seems some disenchanted Earth people have teamed up with the vampires to eliminate humans throughout the star system because they’re fed up with humans acting so aggressively towards EVERYTHING.

No flinching on the gore and cannibalism (some vampires eat the flesh of their victims as though it were Red Vines™), and if you can put up with the painful dialogue (“That their genetics were merged by the vampirazation process was of profound interest.”) you’ll be rewarded with a talking chest-burster parasite (i.e., phallic-shaped sock puppet), and the super hot vampire chick offering to have sex with the captain to get him to relax.

Because sex with a vampire can be fatal (I’m willing to risk it), she does the whole “tantric non-touching” space boot-knocking that’s alledgedly mind-blowing. Thanks, but in the future I’ll stick with making out with a lunar chick in the back seat of my space pod. (I hope I can afford one of those in the future. Space pod, not a lunar chick.)