Roly Poly Snakeheads

Had they known people chewing  snakehead fish were still in existence, the small town citizens living around the popular Cultus Lake probably wouldn’t have gone swimming/peeing in it.

Thanks to human growth hormones the local coroner has been dumping into the lake, the snakeheads have been growing and reproducing at an alarming rate. This is what caused all the regularhead fish to disappear. The snakeheads can crawl out of the water on their front dorsals and live on land for up to several hours before they dry out. (I’m the same way if I don’t find a tavern within two hours.) Since they’re ravenously hungry, humans seem a suitable side dish.

A call to the sheriff and his response gives you an idea of the high-quality level of this film: Deputy: “We found a dead body.” Sheriff: “What kind of dead body?” The sheriff wants to close down the lake. The mayor doesn’t want him to do that as the lucrative fishing season is about to start and they need the tourist dollars.

 

A supermodel Game & Wildlife agent, so shot up with Botox™ she looks like a snakehead fish, shows up to add to the problem. Meanwhile, people are getting eaten in a manner befitting a nameless renegade 30-foot shark. The coroner thinks its a crocodile. The fish are the size of crocodiles and are just as vicious, though.

While Snakehead Terror (2004) had some chuckle  moments (a head floating in the water, arms, legs, torsos turned into meat pies), I have several questions. Since when does a small town need to employ a full-time coroner? More importantly, why didn’t the sheriff’s 17 year-old daughter wear a micro-bikini to distract the snakeheads so they could be shot? I hope these questions will be answered in the sequel, because this floundering flick doesn’t otherwise work for me.

Wed, Dead, Shot In The Head

The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), with its multiple stab wounds, vampire neck biting, and noisy shotgun blasts to the head and coffin, certainly lives up to its descriptive title. Only thing it doesn’t tell you is that the story, while provocative for its time, is like waiting for multiple stab wounds to heal.

It all starts with Susan, a very gorgeous and very young newlywed, who keeps having violent sex visions and a wispy lady in a white gown who always seems to be just out of visual reach. Susan’s older and sexually predatory husband (referred to as “husband”, which is like calling your pet dog, “dog”) spirits Susan off to his big ‘ol country mansion and forcibly proceeds to get busy with her, over and over and over. Geez, hub – save some for tomorrow.

And still the lady in white looms. Turns out she’s the husband’s ancestor, Mircalla Karnstein, a vampire with no bra to speak of. She and Susan have a lot in common, what with Mircalla being sexually violated in a manner of ways on her honeymoon all those ancient years ago. This carried a severe penalty – the newly dubbed Mrs. Karnstein stabbed her newly dead husband one billion times and cut off his hangy doo. I don’t know which is worse.

Mircalla finally makes herself known (now going as Carmilla) and is found by husband buried in seashore sand, wearing nothing but a scuba mask and snorkel (!). Seems husband was out digging for clams and, well, found a keeper!

Bringing Sand-ra (heh) back to the house, it doesn’t take long for Susan and Carmilla to develop a special, um, bond, swapping spit and comparing husband infractions. It’s settled then – Susan will need to kill horny husband and cut off his hangy doo. But husband, whose hangy doo almost became a hangy don’t earlier, discovers the two slumbering vamps in a coffin in the basement, wearing nothing but invisible nightgowns.

Husband goes all proactive on ‘em and unloads 40 rounds into the lunch box with a rifle that never seems to run out of ammo. After shooting his servant’s 12 year-old daughter in the head as well (she revealed she’s now a vampire, too), husband opens the coffin and, with a knife worthy of carving a fresh roast holiday Turkey, starts hacking away at…

Guess.

Intergalactic Relations

 

A honkingly large meteor crashed in the Arizona desert and John Carlson, an amateur astronomer, saw it, man. And because he’s not a pro, no one believes him (I do) when he tells everyone (me) that it’s actually a spaceship (it is).

A craptacular luck would have it, a bunch of dirt covered the craft when John went to investigate, and almost got himself a complimentary burial plot. (Those things can be expensive.)

One of the aliens inside the galactic taxi gets out and photocopies other humans to help fix the ship (minimum wage, of course) and get off this toilet Earth. John is able to communicate with it (extended middle finger indicates “peace, space brother”) and tries talking sense into its one eye.

Since the local sheriff is a dork and hates John because the hot local school teacher Ellen Fields is hot for John and not him, he saucerblocks all over the place. When John proves those are for real aliens, everybody wants to shoot ’em. If someone photocopied me, I’d feel similar.

All of this leads up to It Came From Outer Space’s (1953) disappointing climax that has John talking the aliens out of disintegrating Earth humans. Thanks for nothing, John. Because he resolved this interstellar crisis without bloodshed, however, everybody now likes him and Ellen gets even more hot for John.

I need to impress chicks by discovering more aliens.

Wolf-Man For President

Jack Whittier, the President’s aide, is sent to Hungary for no other reason that it’s there. While making his way back to the airport to get the hell out of that smell-infested country, his car is run off the road and he’s bitten by a wolf, which we later find out was a gosh-darn werewolf.

Once back in Washington, Jack turns into a marauding, suit-wearing lycanthrope and kills a few people that probably deserved it. (One attack has him on top of a woman’s car at a brightly-lit gas station. Fortunately, no one saw him.)

As luck would have it there are five nights of full moons. Jack’s gooning out and trying to tell everyone he’s the werewolf in the news that’s been biting people. No one believes him. I do, though. When he changes into a silver-haired werewolf in his apartment, he crawls around on all fours and bites the lamp. That’s OK – it was probably a stupid lamp.

In a really confusing plot deviation, wolfman Jack (Hey, I just got that!) makes his way into the White House basement where he encounters the dwarf, Dr. Kiss (no relation to the popular musical ensemble) who’s been experimenting on bodies. Jack sniffs the doctor’s butt and licks his face. This causes the doc to laugh, even though it probably wasn’t in the script.

And speaking of, there are so many laughably bad scenes in The Werewolf of Washington (1973), you have to see it to believe it. Great dialogue, too, as Jack, who’s been boinking the President’s daughter, tells her with a straight face, “I think your father is a cross between Abe Lincoln and Jesus Christ.” Man, you can’t even write lines that good anymore.

The President swears numerous times and eventually gets bitten by Jack. Let’s just say the Pentagon is now the Pentagram. Heh.

Feeding Formula To Snakes

This sounds like a bar joke: What do you get when you cross a giant snake with a little Asian girl, some terrorists and a lavish movie budget of about $300? You get Daai se wong (1988), aka Thunder of Gigantic Serpent. You also get one heckuva hot giant monster mess.

The aforementioned little girl finds some secret formula that makes animals and plants grow to one billion times their metric body mass, and feeds her pet snake a mouthful. You know how emotionally attached Timmy was to Lassie? Those two have nothing on Ting Ting (that’s what it sounded like when her parents yelled at her) and Mozla, a snake the size of half a hula-hoop. The darn thing actually understands her and nods when she talks incessantly to it. This gets really old.

Meanwhile, criminal terrorists who shoot scientists and use the “F” word, want that formula. Why? To take over the world, of course. They know the formula works, but haven’t seen how well as Mozla, growing like a Happy Hour bathroom line, hasn’t made his grand appearance just yet. He has to wait until the terrorists kidnap their girl in order to put the squeeze on ‘em.

Ninety percent of the movie is spent watching terrorists chase and being chased by bullets and swear words. When Ting Ting is captured and spirited away to a tall building and starts screaming INCESSANTLY for Mozla to save her, the serpent actually hears the paint-peeling cries and carves gigantic paths of destruction to find her. And because Mozla is now the size of a building, wrapping himself around one makes sense. It also make it a lot easier for the military to fire about 30 missiles to make him let go. I’ll say this for Mozla – he’s one tough worm.

Ting Ting cries hysterically at her fallen phallic symbol, who symbolically shrinks to a third of his size after the job is done. All of this sounds vaguely familiar. I must’ve seen it in another movie or heard about it in a locker room.

Red-Headed Werewolf

A prequel (but third in the series), Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) snaps back in time to show where the Fitzgerald sister’s lycanthropic (sorry – word of the day calendar) lineage began its bloody tale/tail/trail.

Wandering on horseback through the snowy woods in the early 19th Century (yes, they had snow back then), Ginger and Brigitte come across the aftermath of a werewolf rampage with blood and gunk everywhere. They’re found by an Indian who takes them to the improvised-fortified Fort Baily, a trading outpost (d.b.a., Northern Region Trading Company). That there are deep claw marks on the outer walls suggests something was trying to get in without permission.

The fort is occupied by a handful of men, including a doctor who has a practical approach to determining if you’re a werewolf, an uptight military guy who doesn’t brush his teeth but wants to shoot everybody in the face, and a preacher who wants to burn the girls at the stake because they’re tempting to the flesh (duh).

Aside from all that stuff, life at Fort About To Be Eaten just doesn’t seem right. This is probably due to the nightly werewolf attacks. The preacher, wanting to purge the fort of its sins, lets a werewolf in and traps it with the sisters. Barely escaping, Ginger, the hot red-head sister, is later bitten by a child werewolf hidden in the fort’s happy walls. Then the real fun starts.

More intense confrontations with the stressed-out fort dwellers, more werewolf attacks (i.e., neck-biting/face-ripping), and the growing of fur where there was no fur before. The final werewolf siege is pretty dang hairy (ahem), but it’s the showdown between Ginger – now well on her way to needing a shave – and the bully army guy that’s the icing on this hair cake.

A cool original take on the werewolf theme. And hey, the werewolves themselves don’t look like Halloween rental costumes. If they were gonna screw up this flick, that would’ve been the point to do so.

Red Riding in Da Hood

Her name isn’t Red Riding Hood, it’s Valerie. I like her gangsta name better. The dreamy guy she longs to ride is named Peter. (Gimme a break.) Both live in the stink Medieval village of Daggerhorn, with chickens running around like they owned the place, heavy metal blacksmiths, religious fanaticism and a werewolf.

Seems there was an agreement – the villagers would put up their finest livestock for sacrifice every full moon and the werewolf wouldn’t eat them. Fair trade. Until the werewolf, after 20 years, takes out Valerie Hood’s older sister.

An angry mob attack on the werewolf’s cave yielded a stunt double’s head on a stick. But the monster, who looks like a computer-generated version of my neighbor’s rabies-infected dog, has ’em all fooled and has come to take Valerie with him into the woods for whatever perverted reasons.

Getting in the way of all this is dumbass teen drama surrounding two guys wanting to get under Red’s hood and a hammy religious freak who shows up with bodyguards to exterminate the werewolf whom he believes is living right in their midst.

Val-Red can mind-meld with the werewolf, which has her branded a witch and condemned to become bait. False swerves swerve all over the place, from every horny guy in the village and even Red’s grandma being suspected of werewolvery. Cute.

Barely any blood/gore/face-eating worth mentioning, only half a naked boob shot from Valerie who finally hooks up with one of the horny guys in the snow (!), and a very unconvincing werewolf. You already know Red Riding Hood’s (2011) twist ending. Here’s a better one: the OFF button.

Frozen Tornadoes

Ice Twisters (2009), an unhappy story of weather gone wild, is built on a premise of drought in the Pacific Northwest, with scientists not only artificially creating clouds, but seeding them to create rain. (Note to b*tt-hole scientists: I live in the Pacific Northwest; do NOT seed my f’n clouds. I don’t want science rain getting on my hair.)

Once primed with silver oxide these babies form a mega-storm cell, creating a phenomenon known as “vertical weather.” For those without a meteorological degree (everybody except me), that’s like turning your rump horizontally and farting super hard.

This condition actually sucks bad weather out of the stratosphere and delivers it in the form of extreme temperature drops and tornadoes that fling ice pellets around like a spraying machine gun. I know what you’re thinking – unless they’re made out of lead, umbrellas are useless. A man-made mega storm is headed straight for Portland, Oregon, spawning icy tornados that stand still, twirling and twirling in a spinning dance of doom.

Ice Twisters is a leap in science conjecture, not allowing any room for substantive evidence or proven weather-halting methods, like Superman or Jesus. The visual effects wouldn’t cut it in a Mario Bros. video game and the tornadoes barely interrupt Portland’s rush-hour traffic. And who is gonna fix the ozone after they’re done? If they don’t, we may as well just throw out a welcome mat for any passing space monster.

Wicked Wiccans

Four crazy attractive, modern day witches take off their clothes and pretend each is an ice cream cone on a hot summer day.

Attracting the unwanted attentions of two groups of in-bred/greasy/horny guys, their weekend up at the mountain lake in a nicely appointed cabin filled with wine, music and personal comfort devices, is interrupted by the men wanting to gang date the ladies.

Tying them up and forcing them to perform acts of involuntary kindness on their private parts, the men probably weren’t prepared for what happens at the stroke of midnight. The full moon makes the girls impervious to bullets, knives and insulting language. It also makes them hungry for flesh sandwiches.

One guy is impaled to the cabin’s front door where he hangs and flops around every time someone has to go outside. Another guy gets his Oscar Meyer bit off. Yet another is carved like a sacrificial Thanksgiving turkey.

Back in town two detectives are hot on the girl’s tails, uh, trail. They find rotted corpses, human teeth, blood, wee wee stains and other unmentionables that would best be left in a roadside gas station restroom.

A ritual has to be performed to extend their shopping hours, so when the cops show up, one gets re-fashioned into being dead, the other tied up and a few of his teeth pulled out with pliers. Cutting him up to extract blood of all things, the cop manages to break free and do a little mutilating of his own. (That stick through the face of one of the girls was one smooth move.)

The groovy grue happens towards the end, so you’ll just have to be content with four naked supermodels splashing around the title wet hole in Wicked Lake (2008), making out and touching each others’ lady lumps. P.S. For additional group grope, stay through the credits.

Psychiatric Ghost

The Danvers State Mental Hospital has been abandoned for years, but it’s time for the spooky sucker to come down so that unhaunted market-price condos can be built.

Hazmat janitors Gordon and Phil head up a small team contracted to remove harmless asbestos, but they gotta do it in five days. I don’t know, guys – Danvers is the size of the Overlook Hotel and smells like a bus station bathroom. During the clean-up in the barely-lit building, Gordon starts hearing a voice saying hello to him. That’s nice, because ghosts aren’t known for their pleasantness.

Another guy finds some cassettes marked Session 1 through 9. Playing the tapes he hears interviews with a mental patient with multiple personality disorder. There are six “people” inside the patient, but the one the other personalities don’t wanna go there with is Simon. And a clue to Simon’s evilness is revealed (something involving a knife).

Later, a figure is encountered in the dark hallways and a worker disappears. It’s when the others split up (good idea) to look for him that make your butt hairs stand on end. (That’s kind of a pun, now that I think about it.) The workers hallucinate really gnarly st*ff, like Gordon going home on his lunch break and killing his wife and two-month old daughter. Did it really happen or was it imagined? Do NOT ask me.

As the men become increasingly stressed more fun stuff is introduced to the mix, including a lobotomy pick and a pile of coins just begging for a slot machine. When Gordon walks into a room and finds photos of his wife and child taped to the wall, sanity is about to hit the insanity fan. Good word choice given where everybody’s standing.

Not a lot in terms of special effects, but this one will gnaw on your mind. When the tape is played, Gordon hears… I won’t say, but it may or may not goon you out. It gooned me out. I’m easily gooned out-able. Despite my condition, Session 9 (2001) is top drawer ghost st*ff.