Squid Rock

As a 12 year-old boy, Ray watched his mom and dad get eaten by a Kraken (aka, giant squid), plucked off the boat and ripped into pieces of something that could be fried in tempura batter and served with dipping sauce and a napkin (cloth or paper – your choice).

Fast forward to however how old he is now, Ray is on the hunt for the multi-tentacled beast to share his feelings about how wrong it was for Kracky to just eat his parents without asking.

Good for everyone involved is that Nicole, a supermodel marine archaeologist who wears a science bikini, and with the help of another stunningly smart blonde in a mico-swimsuit, dives among Alaskan sunken boat wrecks in search of a Trojan war mask. She’s been looking for it for years – and this time she finds it within the movie’s first 15 minutes. How lucky is that?

Boatless Ray looks like Huey Lewis and smooth talks his way onto Nicole’s science barge, where he assists in finding the elusive treasure. But Ray cares not for oversized decorative body wear – he’s out for hard-core fishy justice served up movie star style.

This would be child’s play were it not for the giant digital squid guarding the treasure. But does that stop everyone from diving down into murky depths to get it? Nope. Do people get eaten by the squid in less time than it takes one to make a sandwich? Yep. Does Nicole show her flotation devices? Nope. Did that make me upset? Yep. Did I like Kraken – Tentacles of the Deep (2006)? Nope.

Go Ask Alyce

Alyce is young, hot, drunk and uses the F-word as if it were an adjective, as does her equally young, hot, drunk and gutter-mouthed BFF girlfriend. Sexually liberated with boyfriends that cheat on them, they proceed to get drunk, flirt with expanding the parameters of their friendship (ahem), and get inebrated even more on the roof of their downtown apartment building. All is fun and F-words until… OOPS! The girlfriend took the express way down.

Alyce, overwhelmed with guilt (it was an accident – or so she says), lies to the police about what happened. It’s one thing to give your soulmate flying lessons, but another issue entirely to be untruthful to the Law. Amazingly, the BFF survived the drop in altitude and is in the hospital with a Frankenstein’d face. Can’t have her recovering and spilling the truth beans. So she has to try, try again because at first she didn’t succeed. And thus starts Alyce’s descent into guilt-driven drug abuse, sex abuse and all the ancillary depravity that goes with it.

Alyce Kills (2011) is grim and mesmerizing in the same way when you see a car sliding on ice towards the edge of a bridge. But it isn’t until the last astonishing 20 minutes where this thing goes into OMG territory. Armed with a baseball bat, a chef’s grade knife, a meat cleaver, a hacksaw, a blender, a microwave and a handy pistol, Alyce balances the crazy scale by resolving issues with her girlfriend’s brother and that wasted drug dealer who made her submit an oral exam on his front pocket area, and anyone standing in her way. (I’m looking in your direction drug dealer’s friends.)

And just when you think it couldn’t get anymore entertaining, it’s the last word that comes out of her mouth that puts a nice exclamation point on her newfound personality. I’ve said that same word a one hundred million times, but not nearly with the same effect. Alyce kills, indeed.

Free-Love Vampire

Several things you need to know before you watch Female Vampire (1973). First, there is a LOT of naked nudity. Front, back, upside down, sideways, rolling around, perpendicular… Secondly, it’s sub-titled. But when you have that much sex and naked stuff, sub-titles seem more or less an annoyance.

Female Vampire is a European horror film about Countess Irina von Karlstein, a young and eerily attractive, fang-less descendant of a family of vampires, who, unable to speak (not with her mouth full all the time), goes around having unsafe sex with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Just so you know, it’s not blood that sustains her. Use some imagineering here.

And since this is the ‘70s and in Europe, there is an abundance of body hair, all of which is zoomed in on – sometimes uncomfortably close. Which reminds me, I should probably mow the lawn and trim those bushy hedges.

There’s a plot, but it only gets paid lip service as Irina pays a lot of lip service on her victims and spends most of the movie wearing nothing but a leather belt, knee-high leather boots and a cape. In case she gets cold. I don’t see how as she’s so hot. Heh.

Unlike Irina, all bases are covered: girl on guy, guy on girl, girl on girl, girl on bed post, girl on bed pillow, girl on bath tub… There’s even an S&M scene thrown in there to make it more continental.

Female Vampire comes in several varieties/titles: The Bare Breasted Countess, in both hard R-rated and X-rated versions. Regardless, you could say this movie sucks. But that’s the point, is it not?

P.S. Female Vampire is available for streaming on Netflix™. You’re welcome.

Banned Horror

Recently clicked across CinemaBlend.com’s Top 10 banned movie posters and was bemused by what the censors “protected” us from. I am just so glad someone has my back here. You never know what these “socially disrupting” images would do to my brain. Note to censors: no one needs you, so go to Heck.

The first banned movie poster is the ad sheet for the black horror comedy, Teeth (2007). In that one, Dawn, a virginal young girl discovers she has a second set of teeth growing where a toothbrush normally doesn’t brush. This was news to her until she was forcibly sexed by a classmate and the sudden explosion of terror and anger brought on the clampdown. (The next sound you hear is that of one million guys crossing their legs.)

The banned poster doesn’t even come close to the chomping action, especially when she seduces her selfish punk rock brother who let their mother die while he was doing the bedspring symphony on a gal with really low standards. What happens after this sexy Dentist the Menace does afterward is one of the “holy sh*t” moments that, if you’re a guy, will stick with you for, I don’t know, the rest of your life.

Still, there was something quite familiar with Dawn’s lower smile.  It reminds me of something I once saw on Tatooine…

The Bat Wears A Hat

In Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003), a school bus filled with a mid-western high school football team coming back from winning a game scores a flat tire. A teacher homeworks the wheel to find a really sharp tire-poking ninja-type weapon stuck in the tire’s shredded remains – and it’s made of human bone, a common cause for flat tires.

No one responds to calls on the school bus radio. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere, the only bathroom is a sticker bush. (You don’t wanna know what they used for toilet paper.) One by one the teachers and bus driver are snatched from the street – hundreds of feet straight up in the air. They don’t come back down. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

Left to fend for themselves, the students are confronted by a hat-wearing, jacket-sporting, cannibalistic bat-winged flying creature, and in a goosebump-y sequence, are picked out in order of dining preference by the monster who hangs upside down and looks through the bus window, licking the glass as if it were a sneeze guard at an Olive Garden™ salad bar.

The tense situation inside the bus gets even more unbearable as the students, being stress-separated by racism and sexism and bullyism, are submitted to relentless attacks by Mr. Creeper, who regards the school bus as a giant Hostess Twinkie™ with a lot of screamy filling inside.

Another frantic call on the radio connects with the farmer dad whose son was previously eaten by the monster. He and his as yet uneaten other son track the school bus’ location out in the middle of rural nowhere and show up in an old Ford truck outfitted with a makeshift harpoon system. In one of the coolest scenes, dad harpoons the monster and it tries to fly away, all the while tethered by the rope attached to the pile-driven pointy pole. The truck is pulled along as the monster tries to fly yonder, dives and jerks like a fish on a line.

More great action as the monster breaks free and goes for the kids, who are running and screaming like me at an all-you-can-drink beer sale. During the hunt the creature gets dismembered, but his outer husk still won’t die. I totally want to reveal the twist ending, but I won’t. This time. But I will tell you what you’re getting for Christmas.

Mars Gets Marred

In the futuristic year of 2010, a bunch of space guys ’n gals go to Mars to see how cheap the real estate is and end up discovering a mysterious dirt mountain that doesn’t want them to see what’s under all that lunar dust. So it forms itself into an uncircumcised weiner-esque tornado and sucks them up.

Time for a rescue crew to earn their NASA food stamps. After an over-long mishap that has the search mission abandoning ship right outside Mars’ stinky atmosphere, the survivors hitch a ride on an orbiting satellite (!), land it, and discover the Mars Face is real, made by a race of aliens that glow in the dark.

No brains get eaten, no space-borne infestation worming its way through an unsuspecting cerebral cortex. Just a lot of word barf and meager special effects.

Mission To Mars (2000) is remarkable in that it doesn’t make – or have – a point about anything. If only there were just one scene where a female astronaut wore a bikini space suit so we could see…Uranus. Man, that joke never gets old – heh.

Haunted House On A Haunted Hill

Sarah, the sister of a magazine editor chick, was the only living survivor from the blood jamboree at the Vanacutt Mansion in House on Haunted Hill (1999), which was a remake of the far superior 1959 version. Sarah kept a diary, detailing her experiences with undead demonic forces. (Wonder what she said about me in it?) Then she dies. At first it’s thought she committed suicide, but as it turns out, nope.

An art collector seeks the ridiculously evil Baphomet statue inside the abandoned mansion/insane asylum where unnecessary medical procedures were performed on patients without their written consent.

So a gang of thugs shoots the sister in the hair and steals her journal, which holds clues as to the statue’s whereabouts. Meanwhile, an archaeological college professor and the dead girl’s sister and boyfriend go to the mansion to recover the same exact statue. How’s that for a coincidence?

But the criminals have guns, so they have the upper hand and… Not so fast – the ghosts have sealed up the mansion and wanna play “1-2-3 Your Limbs Belong To Me” with their uninvited guests. Mind you, this is a totally dumbass stretch to get people back into the mansion. But I’m usually open-minded when it comes to vengeful ghosts tearing off body parts. Think in terms of Gumby being made of meatloaf with LOTS of ketchup, or “catsup”.

The ghost of Dr. Vanacutt keeps showing up, as do his angry patients. The idea, though, is to avoid them while hunting for Baphomet. It’s discovered that if the statue is taken outside of the building, flowers will thus grow, the sun will shine and puppies will no longer get run over by 18-wheel trucks.

Bonus: ALL the chicks in this movie are spookily gorgeous. But because of the less-than-substantial plot and ghosts that weren’t as freaky/mean as in the first movie, Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007) only reaches a simmer in an evil saucepan on afterlife’s stove. OK, I don’t know what that means, but felt it was a cool metaphor nonetheless.

Billion Dollar Horror

Mind-boggling to think Saw (2004), celebrating its 10th anniversary as being the genesis of the highest-grossing horror franchise in film history ($103 million box office) was, in the beginning, given a small budget ($1.2 million) and shot in less than three weeks.

Since that time, we’ve been lavished with a total of seven Saw films, which have generated nearly $880 million sawbucks worldwide. (Saw VI/2009 made a mere bus change, coming in as the least successful of the batch at $68 million. How embarrassing.)

One of the coolest aspects of the first Saw movie is Jigsaw, the main character for the first few films, never killed his prey, but rather let them decide their own fate via incredibly ingenious traps that would allow you to live if, but with its pound of flesh toll for a reason that put you there in the first place. You might lose an arm or the ability to reproduce. But hey, you’d still be a player if you survived Jigsaw’s traps. (Man, I’m glad Jigsaw didn’t put me in one of those things; I call 9-1-1 whenever I get a paper cut.)

So here’s how nearly one billion dollar’s worth of torture horror began all those years ago…

Two men trapped and chained inside an awesomely filthy warehouse restroom with no anti-bacterial wipes or a way out. There’s also two dull blade hacksaws and a dead dude laying on the floor between ’em.

An eerie tape recorded message explains why they are here and how, if they can successfully “play the game,” can get out.

This is ground zero for one of horror’s most nasty chain of events, and a highly-successful franchise that situates deserving people in brilliantly designed death traps that, if not played by the rules, ends up with body parts being gruesomely penalized in a way I can only describe as exquisite.

The hacksaws should’ve gotten screen credits.

Le Devil Worshippers

One moment you’re getting obnoxiously drunk in a nightclub, starting fights and getting a bottle broken over your face, then the next thing you know, your eyes are being scooped out and the sockets sewn shut by a rural France family that worships Sheitan (French for “Satan.”) I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened to me.

In Sheitan (2006), three severely obnoxious guys and a chick are invited to a house way the HELL out in France’s countryside by a severely gorgeous gal. Her handyman dad  is uncomfortably friendly and his Defcon 4 pregnant wife, who is so ugly even makeup won’t stick to her face, is getting ready to burp something out at the stroke of midnight.

During their stay, bits and pieces of obnoxious guy’s clothes, hair and skin are used to fashion a voodoo doll of sorts. All that’s needed are a couple of eyeballs. Skin-crawlingly odd, the ickiest part comes when the mom gives birth on the kitchen floor. Best not to eat before, during or after this scene. Ever.

As for the hot chick, she displays her magnifique blouse bouncers. As for the obnoxious guys, one gets his face beaten into crème brulée by the handyman, who, racing against the clock, dispenses with the niceties and frantically pursues the lucky one chosen to donate his peepers for the cause. The hills have eyes. The handyman’s devil kid has eyes. The obnoxious guy does not. Sucks to be him.

You will oui oui your pants when you see the handyman making out with his wife who looks like a dude with a wig. Creepy, weird, pee shiver inducing. Not sure if any of that is a good thing.

Gnome Alone

Wikipedia™, the all-seeing/all-knowing bible of the internet, describes gnomes as “diminutive spirits in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th Century and are typically said to be small, humanoid creatures that live underground.”

Describes a gal I once dated.

Gnomes have shown up in horror movies for years. But now those little rat people are getting another PR push with Gnome Alone, arriving January 20, 2014 on DVD and VOD. If you can get by the painful title, here’s what to expect: “When a timid college student witnesses a hit-and-run, the dying victim gives her a strange amulet. Suddenly, all those who have offended Zoe in her life begin dying horrible deaths at the hands of a malicious gnome. When Zoe discovers the horrible history behind the amulet, will she be able to harness its magical power before the gnome begins killing those closest to her?”

I bet the gnome kills people closest to Zoe.

For anyone who is interested in this sort of topic outside of TV commercials, notable humanoid creature movies include Gnomes (1980), A Gnome Named Gnorm (1990), Blood Gnome (2004) and Killer Gnome (2008). Not 100% sure on the last one’s release date, but I do remember seeing it and thinking, “What a stupid movie – no one in their right mind should be watching this.”

But when it comes to movies about gnomes, one should look no further than 1967’s The Gnome-Mobile, made by horror king Walt Disney. In that one, an eccentric millionaire and his grandchildren are embroiled in the plights of some forest gnomes who are searching for the rest of their tribe.

I wrote about this one on August 14, 2012 [click here]. While The Gnome-Mobile has impressive special effects and a G-rated storyline, those hoping to see a gnome eaten by a raccoon or get run over by a lawnmower will walk away sadly disappointed. But hey, catchy theme song, so not a total loss.