Jinn and Tonic

Jinn are mythological and supernatural engendered creatures who have free will. What they don’t have is pants. At least none we mortals can see. Jinn can be good, bad or last call drunk ass crazy, which makes me believe I have Jinn in my bloodline. (More likely GIN in my bloodstream. Ha!)

Anyway, the movie Jinn arrives March 10, 2015 on VOD and DVD on April 14, 2015. If you’re tired of rubbing the lamp, you can pre-order through Amazon.com. (Is that thing still around?)

Here’s what you need to know about Jinn: “Shawn, an automotive designer, enjoys an idyllic life with his new wife Jasmine until it is interrupted a cryptic message, which warns of imminent danger and a curse that has afflicted his family for generations.”

“Having lost his parents as a child, Shawn doesn’t believe this unsettling revelation of his past….until strange things start to happen. Unable to explain the threats and fearing for his life, Shawn turns to Gabriel and Father Westhoff, a mysterious duo claiming to have answers.”

“With their help, and the aid of Ali, a shackled mental patient, Shawn discovers there is far more to this world than he ever imagined. These revelations set him on a collision course with the unknown, and he alone must find the strength protect his family and confront the ancient evil that is hunting them.”

Curse? Shackled mental patient? Ancient evil? Sounds like The Poggie Tavern, of which I am an open-to-close customer. OK, maybe not open-to-close. But enough to qualify as an employee.

Medium Rare Face

Peyton Westlake is a scientist who has been working on developing synthetic skin. Hmm, not seeing an obvious market for such a product other than adding a new taste texture to Hostess Cupcakes™.

Peyton’s bummed because the skin can only last 99 minutes when exposed to light, melting away into a messy goo as it disintegrates. Stays put in the darkness, though, so there’s that.

The doc’s girlfriend is an attorney who has enough evidence to put a local crime boss into the crossbar hotel for life. Guess it wasn’t very smart of her to drop by Peyton’s waterfront warehouse lab with that evidence. So it’s kind a hard to blame Durant, the crime boss, for blowing the place up, unfortunately with Peyton in it.

His flesh seared off and his body flash-cured, the well-done doc is not done yet. He makes it back to shore without being eaten by sharks, res-sets up his lab, and goes about perfecting his synthetic skin, because now he has a customer for it.

Seeking revenge, Peyton is able to make his skin look like yours or your mom’s, which means he can imitate the very criminals he hates with what’s left of his stir-fried sanity. This causes much confusion and angst among the criminals, who can’t figure out what the epidermis cookin’ hell is goin’ on around here.

Darkman (1990) plays like a comic book come to life with lots of exaggerated action and facial expressions. Those WITH faces, anyway. And Peyton is crazy cool, what with his bandaged face, dark hat and trench coat, and his inability to feel physical pain (ask the doctor who experimented on him after the “accident”). That he goes freakin’ nuts means someone’s gonna have to FACE up to their punishment. Heh.

Sex Monster and Barnyard Horror

A couple of upcoming new ones that look old. But they’re not. They’re new. For reals.

First up is It Follows, due out March 13, 2015, probably before lunch, but definitely after breakfast. It involves a young girl who is plagued by nightmarish visions after an “innocent sexual encounter” in the back seat of a car.

OK, no sexual encounters are innocent. That’s what organized religion tries to drill into our horn dog brains. Secondly, who hasn’t had nightmarish visions after hooking up? Think Lair of the White Worm (1988) and go from there.

ANYWAY…after said hook up, 19-year-old Jay (chick with a dude’s name) can’t shake the sensation that someone – or something – is following her. As the threat closes in, Jay and her friends must somehow escape the horrors that are only a few steps behind.

I bet it’s organized religion.

An old school treatment for The Barn arrives October 1, 2015 in the form of some of those cool illustrated ’80s style horror movie posters. And the plot feels right out of that era as well. Behold…

“It’s Halloween 1989. Best friends Sam and Josh are trying to enjoy what’s left of their final Devil’s Night before graduating high school. But trouble arises when the two pals and a group of friends take a detour on their way to a rock concert, finding an old abandoned barn and awakening the evil inside.

Now it’s up to Sam and Josh to find a way to protect their friends and defeat the creatures that lurk within “The Barn.”

One can barely imagine the horrible creatures in a barn: pigs, horses, cows, rats, bugs, snakes, spiders, poisonous squirrels, stink beetles, electric eels…

Could this be the Old MacDonald version of Night of the Demons (1988)? I will ponder that over a nice breakfast of barn eggs, barn sausage and horse apples. OK, probably not that last one.

Water Nymph

 

The mysterious lady of the lake is a passably attractive redhead who seduces men by letting them snorkel in her sea grotto. Then kills them by vomiting in their mouths. Ick.

Cursed, killed and sentenced to spend her days chained to an anchor at the bottom of a lake-y grave, this water woman drew the ire of some guy back in ancient times by not doing it with him. (Probably had something to do with the fact he looks like a pumped-up Richard Simmons.)

Enter the nephew of a guy recently vomited on/in by the swimming siren. The strapping lad carelessly falls in love with her and she comes to him in his dreams, which turn out to be wet. She loves him for now, but in a week he’s fish food when the curse kicks in. There’s a demon in a red bathrobe, sword play, aqua zombies, soft-R humping, and some clumsy-yet-satisfying gore.

Lady of the Lake’s (1998) corny special effects help pass the time in-between bare boob shots. The acting, though, is all washed up.

Parentless Ghosts

In need of a job, Ana is young, pregnant and hired to clean up after a bunch of runny-nose orphans at a huge orphanage where they manufacture orphans. The “school” for abandoned WWII kids is empty for the summer, but the place is a stink hole, so she takes the gig, knowing it’s better than working for Kinkos™ and hoping it’ll get her mind off the fact her former employers raped and beat her.

Two people remain in the cavernous orphanage: an old lady who serves as the school’s cook/doctor (what can’t be healed goes in the pot) and a “disturbed” young gal whose mind is a silverware drawer where none of the silverware matches. A crazy chick practically alone in a spooky old building? Hell, the only thing missing is me, a bottle of Jager™ and a roll of paper towels.

But something’s not right in the building besides Ana’s roommate’s sense of reality. Noises, voices, spectral farting. (OK, that one was really just part of my wish list). Ana was warned about the scary children. Now we’re getting somewhere. Previously brought to the school by the bus load, about 300 war-wounded kids turned up in various stages of bleeding. With only one doctor and a nurse, let’s just say some of ’em didn’t need a doctor bill at the end of the day.

Determined to find out who or what the scary children are, Ana and demento chick go into the big bathroom where there hangs a big mirror, which conceals a big mystery. Ana chucks a flashlight through the glass and damn if there isn’t another room back there. And hey – there’s a service elevator just big enough for her to crawl in. Yeah, that’s what I’d do in a haunted house – squeeze into an elevator that hasn’t been used for years and throw the switch. Why doesn’t Casper just come right out of the wall and push me down the shaft?

The elevator goes screaming down for what seems like three commercial breaks. When it opens, Ana discovers the hospital wing of the orphanage. It’s all painted an eerie white and lit up like a Christmas barbershop. Uh, oh – somebody’s about to go into labor. Good timing…something is down there with her. But what could it be?

House of Voices (aka Saint Ange, 2004) is a pretty darn creepy and atmospheric flick, but the story takes freakin’ forever to get where its going. A couple of nice distractions: Ana’s boobs. While this movie does not end on a happy note, I think I tracked down that cool crazy chick on Facebook™.

The Dead Belong In Jail

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a bunch of dweebs sneak into an abandoned funeral home to party. Someone whips out a Ouija board, thereby unwittingly summoning the dead. One by one the dumb asses are possessed, hacked, sliced and diced by mean undead warriors with glowing evil eyeballs and machetes on loan from Friday the 13th (1980) — and not even graphically enough to warrant a G-rated bandage.

 

The gore in the lazily contrived Prison of the Dead (2000) is so PC’d, all you get to see is a couple of ketchup squirts simulating a violent act. They should give away french fries with this flick. And where the hell has illicit sex gone in these Z-grade handle jigglers? No one drops top anymore, which breaks the #1 cardinal rule of low-budget videos.

Prison’s most notable scene comes at the end where the “action” abruptly stops as though it were my car driving around on $1.25 of gas. The director either ran out of money or ran out of ideas. Hard to believe the latter as the whole movie is as cookie cutter as it gets. Someone needs to go to prison for this.

Spider: Made By Volkswagon

What started as an anemic sci-fi yawnfest, Spiders (2000) turned into a goopy killfest almost worthy of a video store rental fee.

Three college paranormal investigators working for the school newspaper witness the crash of the space shuttle. Mutated spiders made it fall from the ozone after eating the brains of the occupants (Astro – nots. Ha!).

The infected bodies are taken to a secret military base, and the news-minded team infiltrate because the truth is in there somewhere. A lot of yackety-yacking until one of the reporters gets bitten by a spider that bursts out of an expired skull and the splatter starts to matter.

The killer bug grows to the size of a Volkswagen Beetle™, and oh what a tangled web he weaves. Super spidey breaks out of the army base and goes on a casual rampage through the college campus where it further expands to the size of a mutated Volkswagen Beetle™. The monster bug crushes cars, smashes buildings and eats undergraduates.

One surviving military guy and the hot chick reporter get in a helicopter conveniently parked near the college and, using bazookas, blast the bug into spider spaghetti. The star chick is really hot, but she blows many an opportunity to distract the spider by taking her top off. When will humans ever learn?

All in all, satisfactory fun if you can fast forward through the first half.

Nazi Gargoyles

 

During World War v2.0 the occult-believing stink Nazis unearth a mythical fortress containing gargoyles. Reanimating them via the wonder juice known as human blood, the gargoyles come to life and pick up where they left off, which is to kill everything. The Krauts wanna use them in their bid to thwart Allied bombers that’ve turned the German war effort into Swiss cheese.

One particular bombing run is interrupted by a swarm of such gargoyles, led by Volthorn, the Horn King. (GREAT name). He’s a bigger gargoyle made out of rock, whereas his winged minions are still spongy flesh and blood.  They bring down the planes, ripping through the wings to get at the mechanical stuffings inside.

Reign of the Gargoyles (2007) had me with the war angle, but lost it with Volthorn’s pixelated pants. Because we’re Americans, bombs aren’t the only thing that drop from the sky. C’mon, you knew how it was gonna end, so don’t give me that e-scowl.

A Locker Full Of Ghosts

A ghost chick lives in a Shibuya bus station locker. Rent is only 25 cents. As the legend goes, if you put a coin in the locker – possibly a quarter – your romantic wishes will come true.

It doesn’t work because the locker is cursed. (There was a dead baby found in it, which explains the ghostly crying, ghostly hand prints and the ghostly Ringu-type lady who wants to eat your soul for brunch.)

 

Six clearly bored teens try their luck with the locker in hopes that it’ll grant them feeling-up privileges. All but one don’t make it to Locker 3. (This movie is 1 and 2 together, which could be considered a bonus. Not so much as it means a boring ghost story is just that much longer.)

The Locker (2004) – dumb premise, no gore to speak of, lukewarm ghostly sequences and a few hot teen Asian chicks. Back to the bus station.

Bigfoot Costumes And Free Zombies

 

Love In The Time of Monsters. Upcoming 2015 indie horror film or accurate term describing last call at The Poggie Tavern? Probably both.

In LITTOM (fingers too tired from gripping beer cans to type out the whole title), “two sisters travel to a cheesy tourist trap where they battle toxic monsters dressed in Bigfoot costumes in order to save the ones they love.”

I want a Bigfoot costume.

Dead Rising: Watchtower, arriving March 27, 2015 has one of those titles that just screams “yawn.” Dead Rising? Really? Man, I can fart better sounding titles.

Sigh. Anyway, here’s the plot: “Watchtower takes place during a large-scale zombie outbreak. When a mandatory government vaccine fails to stop the infection from spreading, the four leads must evade infection while also pursuing the root of the epidemic, with all signs pointing to a government conspiracy. Politics, public paranoia, and media coverage play an important role in the story’s narrative.”

In other words, seen it all before. And this is why zombie movies of late suck/keep sucking/continue to suck. Here’s a better title: Yawn Rising. (Watch – this thing’ll probably be a smash hit and make me eat my words like a mouthful of beer cans.)

P.S. Dead Rising: Watchtower is a Crackle Original™ (owned by Sony™), which means while it’ll be free, there will be a commercial every 2.6 minutes throughout the entire thing. If you think I’m kidding, go ahead and try watching ANYTHING on Crackle™ – it’ll make you wanna smash your face area with a TV/smart phone/tablet device.