The Dead Speak Through Beaks

Dr. Joe Darrow’s freshly deceased wife nags him from beyond the grave. All women have the power to do this.

T’was a mud slide that made a pancake out of the Third World bus she was riding in while tending to sick jungle kids with no HMO worth mentioning. Raising the bar on this tragedy was that his wife was also pregnant – presumably with his child.

At a hospital in the “Hurry up and take ’em to Disneyland” ward, a kid whose heart keeps stopping comes back to life and tells Darrow  that he’s seen his dead wife on the Other Side. Then his dead wife’s parrot, trained to say “Honey, I’m home!” every time she walked through the door, wakes Darrow up in the middle of the night (stupid bird) by invoking that very mantra. Then there are all these signs and eerie things happening that couldn’t really be happening.

Thinking he’s losing his mind, he believes corpses are talking to him (they are), that sick kids can see beyond the veil of death (they can), and that parrots crap all over the kitchen when frightened (they do).

The trail of spooky signs leads him to the vacation destination of his wife’s demise. You shouldn’t have to guess what he finds as the eerie clues practically spell it out, but with wavy lines and bird poop symbolism. Yapping parrots aside, Dragonfly (2002) is a taut paranormal drama covered in suspense and bird poop. Sorry, couldn’t resist one more.

Evil Reunion

Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) is the backstory about Father Merrin, the priest who drove the Hell out of Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973).

Turns out Merrin is an old buddy of the demon Pazuzu, whom he first encountered in East Africa and then again in Holland during WWII. Even Pazuzu’s stink breath was no match for the war atrocities Merrin witnessed. So the priest/archaeologist heads to Egypt where he thinks he’ll knock back a few cold ones, pet a camel or two, hang out and leave a pyramid in every bathroom.

But the call comes in to return to Africa, this time to scope out an ancient church that was just discovered buried under dirt. (People in that part of the world know nothing about vacuum cleaners. Heathens, I tell you.)

Merrin arrives in Kenya and upon entering the Centuries-old church, notices the place is in pretty good shape despite being buried under elephant crap that long. What the hoohaw, thinks Merrin; this can’t be a church as it was built several millennia before Christianity plagued the world.

But I didn’t come here for a history lesson. I’m here to see evil stuff, which includes babies being born with maggots on ’em, a little boy being torn apart and eaten alive by wild hyenas, another little boy’s head turning all the way around without that snap, crackle and pop sound…

All this leads up to Merrin having a reunion with his ’ol BFF Pazuzu, who looks like a white-faced, stupid Goth wussy. While the demon stuff is icky, it serves no purpose other than to gross you out. I’m OK with gross out, though there’s no impending sense of religious dread causing an immediate need to wash your naughty parts in holy water.

If Pazuzu wants to get back to being truly evil, he needs to quit listening to weenie-ass Goth and start banging his horned head to some righteous heavy metal. And to quit making prequels/pointless sequels.

Super Fly

As remakes go, 1986’s re-imagineering of The Fly (the original came out in 1958) ranks as one of sci-fi’s all time best. And not just because I said so. Ask the internet.

Seth Brundle, scientist, invents a teleportation pod that can zap objects from one place to the other, just like the Transporter™ in Star Trek, but with more steam and wires.

His first attempt to transport a baboon leaves him with a big inside-out monkey mess to clean up. His new girlfriend, who teaches him the ways of the flesh, inspires him to reprogram the machine to successfully deliver a biological life-form from the living room into, say, the kitchen for some celebratory snacks.

Seth transports himself at the same time a housefly decides to give its wings a rest inside the mix master machine. The result is a sticky man-fly creature that is one of contemporary horror/sci-fi’s greatest experiments-gone-oops.

Seth’s slow, exquisite, flesh-dripping transformation into a six-foot fly is something you’ll want to try yourself. In fact, I’m doing it as we speak. So from this point on refer to me as Super Fly.

Shark Happens

The surprise hit Sharknado came out July 11, 2013 and, when aired on the SyFy™ Channel, spiked ratings and returns through the roof, enough so for someone with leftover lunch money to fund a sequel. Hence, the lazily titled Sharknado 2: The Second One, due for release on July 30, 2014.

Once word got out that Sharknado not only rained down tons of man-eaters via a weather-borne delivery system but tons of profit and the inevitable sequel, the internet community wasted no time coming up with their own shark/weather mash-ups – and fake Sharknado 2 movie posters as well. Sharknado’s movie producer douches should have paid attention; someone came up with the far superior Sharknado 2: Aftersharks. (I was gonna do it, but I was busy washing my hair.)

This got me using previously thought dead brain cells and cleverly deduced that there had to be more fan made shark movie art. A simple search yielded the results you see here. And looking over them, I think each of these fake movies should be made into a real movies.

There’s shark/volcanoes, shark/tsunamis, shark/avalanches… Pretty much every extreme weather/shark mash-up you could ever want. Sort of. Wondering why no one came up with Fog Sharks or Sharkwaves or Sharkphoon (sharks/typhoon). Consider those legally copyrighted as I’ll be writing the screenplays while eating a sandwich – about the same amount of time the script for Sharknado was written.

Cutting Cookies With A Machete

From the uninspired movie title, to the tired formula plot of a bunch of teens breaking into an amusement park fun house where gruesome murders were committed years ago, to the painful dialogue and escaped-lunatic-from-a-mental-institution killer, Dark Ride (2006) is as entry-level/paint by numbers horror as it gets.

All they did was change the location and give the killer a new mask. Hell, they were so lazy, they didn’t even give him a different killing implement. Another mask-wearing killer with a machete? Really?

A bunch of stereotype teens on their way to Spring Break bust in after hours for kicks. That’s when Jonah gets busy. (Couldn’t they have come up with a name that doesn’t smack of outright intellectual property infringement on 1980’s Friday the 13th’s Jason, whom Jonah is so redundantly modeled?)

The only good part is when one of the chicks is giving one of the guys an oral lesson and Jonah cuts off her head right as the guy is completing his, um, homework. The look on his freshly dead face could be best described as horrified, but with an undercoat of contentment.

I never thought I’d say it, but watching teens get slaughtered is boring. Times they are a’changin’.

Hell’s Log Ride

The Ferryman (birth name Charon) is that scary dude from Greek mythology who runs the canoe service that takes you across the river Styx, right into downtown Hell. But no one rides for free, so if you don’t have any cash or a debit card to pay him, you’re doomed to loiter on the shores of Acheron for 100 years. Sadness abounds.

So the Ferryman has come to collect on this fat old guy who doesn’t want to go to Hell. But F-Man has this cool ability to move into other bodies, which, as you can imagine, really f’s things up for everyone else.

A Tahiti-bound sailboat carrying three couples detours right into some evil fog, responding to an S.O.S. signal where they find an eerie fishing boat with one person on it. They bring the sole surviving fat guy aboard and the fun commences as his soul, with barely an explanation how, can enter the body of any male or female. When he goes into a chick, he gets to touch that fuzzy private area.

To accomplish this he first has to stab the body he intends to occupy with a magical dagger. The wounds heal miraculously fast…WITHOUT A BAND-AID™! Right there that would’ve been my signal to abandon ship. But as he bounces around each person, the madness, violence and blood-distributing gets insanely intense. Warning: If you like dogs, DO NOT watch the dog scene. If you’re more of a cat person, then go right ahead.

Somehow it’s figured out that the fat guy’s soul is doing all the wife-swapping and in a genius maneuver, gets the tables turned on him big time. When the Ferryman comes to claim his lard-y essence, he shows up looking like a very wet Freddy Krueger, but with a sea cloak instead of a color-coordinated red and green sweater.

The Ferryman (2005) features LOTS of screaming and hemoglobin and not much else. The ending, though, will make you smile as though you just swapped bodies with a porn star.

Meat Your Maker

A detective proficient at solving puzzles investigates a gooey murder that left the victim looking like he was processed by a juicer. This police officer, it should be noted, is a coke-sniffer, bribe taker, and a panderer of prostitutes, even though he’s married and has a kid.

Finding a Lament Configuration at the crime scene, the detective figures out how to open the Rubik’s Cube of Doom and summons the Cenobites. The creatures this time out look pretty dang cool, but there’s only three of ’em, two being twin chicks with gaping flesh wounds and partial faces. He just figures it’s a whiskey and hooker hangover, and shakes it off to look for the killer.

Lots of weirdo and surreal-o things happens, and Pinhead, the head Cenobite himself, only shows up towards the end (he had to get his nails done) and treats the steadily unraveling cop to some Hallmark™ advice. (The only thing missing is a hug.)

Dropping the whole Cenobite mythos, Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) concentrates on a dark character study rather than exploring the depths of stinking Hell. The end has a nice twist and Pinhead finally whips out the hooks and does his impression of a meat tenderizer. All said, I could do less with misbehaving humans and more with demons who can tear your shirt apart.

Corpse Condo

A teen girl who does not take her top off visits her grandmother’s bed & breakfast/funeral home. People keep disappearing, much like her grandfather did once he found a hot chick that would put out for him. There are muffled voices coming from that secret room in the basement where they keep all the old caskets.

Thinking he’ll get to feel her up, the granddaughter’s boyfriend talks her into going into the basement for, you know, relaxation purposes. If you’ve seen Psycho (1960), the ending is a spot on rip, complete with swinging light casting eerie shadows over the corpse of you already know.

Norman Bates, uh, I mean grandma, swings a good axe, but can’t seem to connect with the human target, breaking all those jars of goopy preserves on the shelves instead. Makes sense she would be good at making jams and jellies given that she’s also an embalmer or sorts. Just ask the corpse of you already know who.

That said, Funeral Home (1980) is a bloodless, gore-less, plodding butt-putting-a’sleeper.

New Age Crystal Godzilla

 

That butt-head Mothra. He gets a little Godzilla goo on him, flies into outer space and through a black hole, and when he comes out the other side, his backwash contrail fuses with a crystalline alien life-form and Biollante’s remaining spores. (See Godzilla Vs. Biollante/1989.) This entity grows into a giant crystal cocoon that heads to earth to do one thing: kill Godzilla, his estranged test tube father.

Once SpaceGodzilla arrives the military sends out Moguera (Mobile Operation Godzilla Universal Expert Robot Aero-type) to intercept. (Moguera looks a helluva lot like the alien space robot in The Mysterians/1957. I’m just sayin’.) SpaceGodzilla kicks Moguera’s tin ass as easily as if were an empty can of creamed corn.

A bunch of stuff happens, then Godzilla and his outer space counterpart eventually bash each other good, and while SpaceGodzilla looks to have the advantage, Moguera discovers a large nearby tower that’s been feeding SpaceGodzilla energy vinegar. Moguera knocks it down, thereby leveling the playing field for Godzilla to smack SpaceGodzilla right in the orbiting satellites. Whose your daddy now, b*tch?

SpaceGodzilla looks awesome with those huge ass crystals growing out of its shoulders. He also has a dark red belly and an energy mohawk. It’s like he’s Goth, punk and techno hip-hop at the same time. Godzilla doesn’t like Goth, punk or techno hip-hop, and emphasizes this by serving up a big bowl of f*ck off soup to those that do.

There’s a distracting sub-plot to Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994) that involves Little Godzilla. Got five words for you – who cares?

Horror Down The Drain

Something evil lives in the plumbing of a fixer-upper house. Is it a giant hair ball? Is it flushed leftovers? Is it special effects so cheap the producers had to resort to using mere water? (And not bottled, either.)

So, evil water lives in the plumbing of a drabby house needing a reach-around by Martha Stewart. A handful of teens are in this dump, cleaning and mopping and griping. But as the Holy Pine-sol™ works it’s cleansing magic, the water fights back – by getting everyone wet! 

Enter a parapsychologist who happens to be walking down the street and senses the liquid leviathan. He tells the teens that they have to wait until midnight to perform an exorcism. Once midnight strikes, he instructs everyone to lie around a pentagram (part of Martha’s Fall and Winter collection), and begins cussing out the invading spirit. The demon shows up and makes faces and gargles. Wind is blowing indoors – and you bet it’s hot air.

More yelling and screaming and the water is forced back into the gutter from whence it came. Somebody needs to go back to script writing school because the banter between the characters is way more ridiculous than the hokey demon entity.

Drainiac (2000) – yet ANOTHER wallet drainer. Really, I have only myself to blame.