Slices – Doesn’t Cut It

An insomniac has chronic “stay awakeness.” Reading books about sleeping doesn’t help. Neither does pot, which is a known gateway drug to the hard stuff like Excedrin PM™ and/or warm milk. But if he really wanted some shut eye, all he had to do was watch Slices (2008) an anthology of frightless and mundane short horror.

There’s “The Exterminator,” a torture porn bit about a corporate guy whose in charge of keeping the world’s population at 300 million. Those deemed a drain on the system, get exterminated. Guess who just fell into that category?

Weaker still is “Dead Letters,” where an aging writer is so overcome with grief over his wife’s passing, he can’t write anymore, which displeases his agent. The same agent who had an affair with the wife. I don’t know why – she had eyebrows the size of a stick of chalk and could stand to lose a few pounds. He finds a way to resurrect her and pick up where he left off in the smooching department.

Then there’s “Night Screams,” a near-to-pointless tale about a modern day sexy female vampire. I’ve never heard of such a thing. I know that look you’re giving me, but you’ve heard all this before.

Yep, Slices is templated after Creepshow (1982), but without the wry humor, comic book scares and budget. (I believe this was shot on a borrowed camera.) The insomniac may have had trouble falling asleep during this movie. I didn’t.

Ski-Rex

Even as much as creature DNA swapping horror movies suck (Sharktopus/2010 instantly comes to mind), these mega cheesy quickies with digital monsters so lame they couldn’t cut it in video games from 1990 somehow manage to become guilty pleasures all the same. (Thank you, beer, for making me even more easily entertained.)

Take the latest God cocktail: Poseidon Rex (2013), or “P-Rex,” which makes an aquatic hybrid out of a presumed extinct tyrannosaurus rex. Awaken the monster via a limp plot about divers searching for lost treasure, cut him loose on some vacationing bikinis and you’ve got yourself another SyFy Channel™ floater.

A creature like Poseidon Rex, though, is nothing new. In fact, a land/sea multi-tasking beastie named Titanosaurus has been around since 1975, making his big scream debut in Terror of MechaGodzilla. Titanosaurus can breathe under and on top of the water, has a roar that sounds like a trumpet firmly submerged in your Mariana Trench, and has been known to kick Godzilla in the nadzillas.

Titanosaurus has been around nearly 40 years. Let’s see how long Poseidon Rex can hold his breath. In the meantime, don’t hold yours.

Sun Gone Wild

Solar Attack (2006), a story about the earth’s atmosphere burning up, is about farting.

The sun farts (generically referred to as CME, or “coronal mass emission”) and sends said emission on a collision course with Planet Us. That’s not so bad. But all the farts we’ve been snapping off have created an elevated level of methane gas close to the ozone. That’s not so bad. But the holes in the ozone are big enough to let the CMEs in, where it ignites the methane, which burns like a hard fart and takes out all the oxygen we’re currently recycling. That’s bad.

A radical plan is formulated to extinguish the incoming fire storm: detonate nuclear warheads over the North Pole, thereby sucking up enough water particles into the atmosphere, and hopefully putting out God’s BBQ. U.S. subs don’t have any nuclear warheads in the area that can handle the job. But the Russian sub does. It’s enough to make you fart in your own pants.

Even though it borrows liberally from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (the 1961 movie, not the TV show) with a smattering of The Hunt For Red October (1990) thrown in, Solar Attack has some squeezy moments that’ll keep you from lighting your own farts to see if the theory about methane catching on fire will suck up the atmosphere and kill us all. P.S. You’re thinking about doing that right now, I can tell.

Resident Zombie

In a plot lifted directly from Resident Evil (2002) and a bunch of movies that ripped off Resident Evil, The Shadow Walkers (2006) finds a team of scientists sealed in an underground facility with a bunch of their own genetic mutations wanting to bite them on their b-holes and arms.

The failed military-funded project totaled several billion dollars and two years, not to mention all the torn lab coats and broken test tubes. The goal was to create a super army man that could go shock and awe on the enemy while retaining its cognitive thought process. In other words, a zombie that can think. (Pffft – I’ve been doing that drunk for years.)

The test subjects have gotten loose and a handy welding torch to the locks makes sure that the infected and the about-to-be infected don’t get out and go around biting people on the b-hole.

The vast underground facility is dark, dirty and full of mutations (like many bars I hang out in) that look like a cross between Rawhead Rex (1986) and that clay-faced creature in the Outer Limits. Their strength and sex-drive has also been amplified, which is demonstrated by a mutated chick who tears her shirt off. If anything was mutated it’s those magnified mammaries of hers.

Does anyone make it out alive/un-alive? Do the infected chicks start to get as horny as a last call bar fly? Does the military need me to volunteer to be experimented on? By now the answer should be pretty obvious.

The Lord’s Vampire

When a “weak of flesh, but strong in the Lord” preacher is bitten by a vampire, you’d think God would step in a go, “Oh no you di’int.” Maybe because the preacher frequents strip clubs and does things in the private lap dance room contrary to his belief system. Back to Bible Camp for you, pal.

A small Southwest town and aforementioned strip club is the intersection for several drama collisions, one being a gorgeous single-mom stripper with a 10 year-old daughter, a suicidal-by-alcohol club bouncer who a while back killed his young daughter while driving drunk, a man and woman vampire looking to get in some low-key snacks, and the aforementioned fire-n-brimstone preacher who survives a vampire attack, only to become one himself.

Once shown the true light, the preacher recruits his flock to weed out the cancer in the community. His target: the strip club. But only after he makes the red-head his eternal bride of doom.

The bouncer, Hazel Fortune (half of that is a cool name), becomes emotionally attached to the stripper’s young daughter, and sees a chance to be the dad he wasn’t on that night he made his own daughter pay for his drinks.

The local rednecks are all too eager to help usher in the Lord’s way, and do redneck-y stuff to those they capture and hold hostage in an old house. The dude vampire, now single as the Preacher managed to kill his toothy wife after the initial attack, steps up to help Hazel rescue the little girl and stripper mom, who is a vampire stripper now. A lot to suck in, but stay with the group.

Lots of neck puncturing, eye stabbing, knife poking and head shot-gunning. But oddly, no bare boobies. You’d think with a strip club as the metaphor, they’d at least put ’em on the glass. Not so with this one.

Southern Gothic (2007) has a few corny moments (the preacher is waaaaaaay over the top with his preachin’), and a platter of splatter. But it felt like the vampires needed explaining. And at least one bare boob. It would’ve helped the plot waaaaaaaay more.

Booze Cruise With Ghosts

The intro of Ghost Ship (2002), a haunted-ship-at-sea flick, has one of the best opening sequences to a horror movie ever seen. Unfortunately, after that it heads for the drain faster than a non-alcoholic beverage.

A lush and plush Italian ocean liner sets sail to America in 1962, back before over-priced cruises such as this were offered on Expedia.com™. A spectacular group death sequence (I really want  to ruin it for you, but I won’t – this time) slaughters everyone on board, except for a little girl. Then the ship disappears for 30 years until suddenly discovered bobbing around the sea like a rusty Christmas ornament.

Before the Navy can pee on it and call it theirs, a salvage team heads out to claim the ghost boat’s booty. Soon enough, bad things not related to sea sickness begin to take place: visions of the little girl, wires and cables moving around, noises that sound like Aquaman processing some bad clams, horny ghosts who drop top… From there, though, it becomes The Shining at sea, with haunted ballrooms and interactive spectres.

The crew is dispatched one by one and the true story of what really happened to the boat comes to the surface, kinda like a high-fiber bowel movement that just won’t go down with one flush. Sufficient measurements of blood and cool ghost effects, and the atmospherics are just the right shades of evil and half-lit darkness. But you get the haunting feeling you’ve seen it all before.

Too bad they raised the bar so high with the opening shot – that alone was pure art, like a ballet dancer caught in a wood chipper.

The Fungus Among Us

A bunch of dipsh*t American college kids go to Ireland in search of mushrooms with which to consume and get high. Puts a whole new spin on “higher learning.” Off they go into the woods and start picking ’shrooms, except one chick eats the dreaded Death’s Head mushroom and almost dies. Unfortunately.

She spasms out and her heart and lungs don’t explode as promised by their guide, but she does gain premonition-esque powers and sees her friends all die graphic deaths via an unnecessarily complicated backstory-heavy local folklore involving a nearby abandoned all-boys Catholic school and the sadistic schoolmaster who tortured and murdered 78 students (all but two were reconstructed from the pieces).

The kids get high and the requisite jock with gangsta rap leanings goes off in the woods and meets a talking cow that warns him to not go any further or else he’s dead meat. (That’s the pot calling the kettle black.) But this sets up the first of many misdirections that do little to keep you from predicting the outcome. (C’mon – kids on psychedelic drugs vs. ghost legend. Who do you think is to blame for the stabbings, hackings, chokings, drownings?)

Dressed up in high (sorry) stylish photography and trick edits, they want you to believe Shrooms (2007), with its butt awful movie title, is not your standard “college kids die” horror crap. Not so much. That said, they really fumbled the ball by not giving the talking cow more lines.

That ’80s Sea Monster

DeepStar Six™ is an all-the-way underwater Navy-funded sub-station with a science/janitor crew setting up a missile silo, which will later be used to blast Russia or whales right in the blow-hole.

The constantly bickering crew has fatigue syndrome, which makes the confined workspace more socially exciting. While drilling through a sea wall, a mini-sub is attacked by a prehistoric monster that looks like one of the graboid sand worms in Tremors (1990). Never mind that this movie came out before Tremors did – the worm was copied, I tell you.

The aquatic monster barely makes an appearance at this point, and doesn’t show up again until the last 30 minutes when it gets inside an air lock and goes after the crew, whose numbers fall prey to severed limbs and liquid-filled lungs.

Swear word-infused yelling, a torso bit in half here, a heart exploding there, but mostly a dry tale of underwater horror. Not to be confused with  The Evil Below, The Rift (Endless Descent), Lords of the Deep, Leviathan, and The Abyss, all of which had pretty much the same plot and came out the same year as DeepStar Six (1989). Hollywood needs a new lifeguard. 

Martian God

Using Radio Shack’s™ new hydrogen valve, an American scientist manages to get a radio signal to Mars and receives transmissions back that the Red Planet is way more awesome than Earth. My own experiments confirm this.

The Martians explain, via math language, that they’ve overcome fuel, food and health problems with their advanced technology. This causes Earth’s entire economic system to collapse. Why employ people when the Martians can supply us with technology that does the trick for a fraction of the cost? Thanks a lot, Mr. Science.

But high in the Andes is a German scientist living like a hermit with the exact same radio transmitter. He was the one who invented the hydrogen valve, and he’s using his version to advance Russian interests in world domination by “listening” in on the interplanetary conversations.

The Russians are gleeful. Having been unsuccessful in defeating the U.S. in everything but chess, they’re wringing their hands over the financial meltdown, which is bringing everything to a screeching halt and… Wait a minute – that’s not Mars talking, it’s the Russians answering back, giving us erroneous information, which is causing everyone to freak. Pretty smarty pants when you think about it.

Meanwhile, the Nazi scientist effortlessly manages to get out of the Andes before an avalanche wipes out his stylish slum hut, get on a plane to America, and sneak into the American scientist’s military-guarded house, all to take credit for single-handedly crushing the United States through simple deception.

But while he’s there, one more transmission comes through. The “Martians” send an incomplete final cryptic message that implies that God is talking to them. The message goes out and the world calms the heck down. But not before the Nazi, usurped by The Lord, gets in the last word. And speaking of last words, the President addresses the nation and it’s all but a propaganda speech for organized religion.

Not surprised the Martians are Christians, but I am visibly shocked the hokey Red Planet Mars (1952) didn’t come with a collection plate.

Zombie Gladiator

An ancient burial cave (or “tunnel”) holds the rotted carcass of Demonicus, a bully gladiator left in the cave for a really long time to reflect on his poor behavior. To wear his shiny helmet is to serve Demonicus. So, hey – why not?

A bunch of teens go hiking. One finds the cave and dons the evil chapeau, then slaughters his friends with a sword he can barely hold up. He then collects the body parts, puts them in a boiling pot with some chicken stock and chopped celery, creating a nutritious soup that’ll bring Demonicus back to life so that he may continue to shout Latin slogans and bite the arms of the weak.

As dumb v.3 as it gets, Demonicus (2001) makes no attempt at dialogue, sub-plots, or hiding the fact that “actors” will one minute be standing in complete darkness, then a few minutes later in sunlight. Then in an unemployment line.

If the plot doesn’t kill you, the story line will. It’s enough to make you wanna perform a ritual sacrifice on your TV.