Suffering Sasquatch

Two new ones to accentuate your hallowed couch time: The Suffering (release pending sometime 2015) and the intriguing Valley of the Sasquatch (2015), which has a valley of some sort and possibly a Sasquatch if the title is to be believed.

In The Suffering: “Henry Dawles is at a crossroads in life. A diminished bank account and a baby on the way with his estranged wife have his personal life in shambles. When Mr. Remiel, an elderly shut-in, offers Henry a lucrative sum to appraise his rural estate, he accepts without hesitation.”

What follows is a harrowing exploration of mind and madness. A journey through an estate as vast and beautiful as it is secretive and horrific. When Henry closes in on the land’s dark truth, Remiel’s eccentric behavior takes a menacing and unforgettable turn.”

Need some clarification here as “eccentric behavior” can encompass anything from scratching your butt and smelling your fingers to practicing the Dark Arts with instructions found on the Internet. I’m guessing Mr. Remiel does both.

Valley of the Sasquatch is a great title. So why are red flags going up? First, no one in the history of the world has been able to make a great Sasquatch/Bigfoot movie. (OK, Harry and the Hendersons/1987. Hey, guilty pleasure – stay out of my wheelhouse.) Secondly, of all the 1,017 Bigfoot movies I’ve seen, the best costume is the one in the Jack Link’s™ Beef Jerky (or “meat snacks”) commercials.

So here’s the rally in the valley: After losing their home following a devastating tragedy, a father and son are forced to move to an old family cabin. This trip into the forest will unearth not only buried feelings of guilt and betrayal, but also a tribe of Sasquatch that are determined to protect their land.”

Of course Sasquatch is territorial – every time a hunter, day hiker, camper, forest ranger leaves a trail of stink in the woods, you’re dissing and pissing in Bigfoot’s hood. Can’t blame him for wanting to eat your face like it was an overpriced meat snack. (They had to pay for the suit somehow.)

Coach Class Werewolf

Is it just my fertile imagination or are there more movies being made about werewolves as of late? Besides the fact werewolves – or “wolf men” – are gooning out my neighborhood and digging through trash cans for human entrails (next block over, you hairy dumbf*cks), it seems I wake every morning at noon to find YET ANOTHER werewolf movie is about to go to market.

Is this a bad thing? I say HECK NO! Werewolves are all purpose apex predators and don’t wear Hot Topic™ clothes and act all depressed and Goth-y like vampires do. Nor do werewolves drop out of the sky in tornadoes. Nope, just good old fashion die/kill/bleed. Or the reverse of that. See how versatile werewolves are?

So there’s this new werewolf move called Howl (release date pending 2015), not to be confused with that 2010 James Franco movie of the same name where he plays professional hippie Allen Ginsberg who yaps about his life and art. Nor is Howl to be associated with all those wretched The Howling sequels. (The original one in 1981 was pretty cool, though).

Nope, this Howl has a werewolf or two, a train and human entrails not yet committed to recycling. Here’s the plot…

“Joe, a young ticket collector, is riding the last train out of London on a dark and stormy night along with a meager bunch of passengers. When the train brakes violently and comes to a sudden halt deep in the middle of a forest, it seems they have hit something on the line. But when the driver ventures out to investigate, he never returns, leaving the passengers in a state of panic – particularly when Joe sees the driver’s mutilated body outside the carriage.”

“Realizing there’s something dangerous lurking in the forest, Joe tells the passengers to make barricades to secure themselves in the carriage, but soon the deadly creature is stalking the besieged train and smashing through their defenses, picking them off one-by-one. Joe rallies his “pack” of passengers to fight back. During a vicious battle they manage to kill the creature, revealing it to be a hideous mutated fusion of human and wild animal – a werewolf. However, celebrations are cut short when they hear more howls coming from the forest…”

Howl stars Sean Pertwee, who appeared in the superior werewolf movie Dog Soldiers in 2002. He has experience dealing with these ferocious flea bags and is a good choice to have on board. And the train probably has a bar on it. Werewolves, trains and cocktails. I smell a sequel coming on.

Feral Werewolf

Does a werewolf crap in the woods? And if it did, would there be anyone to step in it? There are entire college courses given over to philosophical quandaries such as this. Still in school or not, it makes one think.

So think about this: what if a cub scout troop goes into the woods, gets lost, and fall prey to a Kai, a local legend werewolf thought to crap all over the same forest they’re wandering around in?

That’s the premise of Cub, a heavily-lauded indie Dutch horror movie that made the film circuit rounds in 2014 and is ready for release in the UK on June 15, 2015 and here in the States on August 22, 2015. But Cub is nowhere near being a werewolf movie, the topic of which was just the local spiel designed to scare the crap outta kids and to keep them tourist Euros rolling in. Here’s the real deal…

“Sam, a young imaginative twelve-year-old boy heads off to camp with his Cub Scouts pack and leaders. Once they enter the woods, Sam quickly feels something is not quite right. He soon stumbles upon a mysterious tree house and meets a shifty, masked feral-looking child.”

“When Sam tries to warn his leaders, they ignore him. As Sam gets more and more isolated from the other scouts, he becomes convinced a terrible fate awaits them: the Feral Child, it turns out, is the helper of the Poacher, an evil psychopath, who has riddled the forest with ingenious traps and is intent on slaughtering the scouts one by one.”

I bet anything one of the traps is a pile of werewolf doo doo that everybody steps in and tracks all over the forest. Talk about evil…

Hatching Horror

Movies about human-eating crocodiles (or “alligators”) are usually pretty fun to watch. Has something to do with seeing boneheaded people get eaten by an oversized reptile that’s gratifying on a “glad it’s not me” level.

While there are dozens of croc shop movies, The Hatching (release pending) is a new British horror comedy (at least judging by the gory yet funny trailer) that elevates the act of nature doing to humans what it does best.

Here’s the plot: On the death of his father, Tim Webber returns to his childhood village in Somerset to find something sinister is disturbing the idyllic peace of the villagers. As people disappear and gruesome body parts mount, the horrific truth emerges that crocodiles are hunting on the moors. As suspicion escalates, Tim is on the hook to make amends for his tragic teenage mistake years before. He’d better make it snappy though…”

If the dialogue is any indication (“How’d you kill the crocodile?” “Mark kicked it in the penis, which was a bit much…”), The Hatching is the must-see reptile vs. people movie of the year.

Headless Dead Head

In 1959’s The Headless Ghost, a sexy exchange student from Sweden is talked into spending the night in a haunted British castle with two American boy exchange students to see if the dump is actually haunted, or if it’s just a tourist angle. Swedish chicks will fall for any pick-up line.

The castle turns out to be bedeviled, but by a ghost who is so friendly you want to hang out and drink ale with the polterguy. Seems there’s a problem, though; Another ghost – a duke of some sort with a royal pedigree – has lost his head and he can’t find it. (It’s probably out in the barn where undead farm animals are eating his brains and… Sorry, I lost my head for a moment.)

So no-head ghost has to walk the castle between the living and the not, until such a time when his severed skull can be returned to its rightful owner and he can go to Hell like the rest of us.

There’s another problem. A third ghost doesn’t want them to find the second ghost’s face. Sounds cool on paper, but this is really cheesy teen scream stuff, with no screaming to scream of. In other words, too much talking and not enough head losing. And since when does a ghost movie end happily? I thought there were rules about that.

So exactly how did the ghost become headless? Best guess is that he was running with scissors. That, or he tripped and fell on a guillotine.

The Horror of Grandparents v.2

No sooner is The Visit (2015), a grandparent horror movie is announced, now comes At Granny’s House (release pending), another genre flick featuring a grandma, cookies possibly, and death.

The reason I say pending is At Granny’s House is currently in Kickstarter land, publicly begging its way towards a release.

Here’s the plot in case you have some fun coupons burning a hole in your pocket bank: “A typical Midwest house. A sweet little old lady. When a caretaker moves in to help out, Granny’s house becomes a macabre place of death – and love.”

Not too strong of a pitch. In fact, it sounds downright boring. I’m hoping there’s more to it than that and the death part outweighs the love part.

Anyway, click HERE to see what else happens At Granny’s House.

A World of Zombies

Oh, boy – YET ANOTHER zombie movie! Yippee! With the June 8, 2015 release of Zombieworld we can watch the 17,000th undead movie released this year! Wow, just think – the undead eating the living! How can the same movie/theme released over and over and over get boring?

Hard to convey sarcasm with the printed word without using a frown-y face Emoji.

So, yeah – Zombieworld. If you feel a yawn coming on, go nuts. Or go watch the superior Zombieland (2009). But if you have to know what Zombieworld is about (and you probably already do), here’s the pitch:

“The end is here! The Zombie Apocalypse is upon us – and all you can do is kick back and watch how it happened, right here, right now in the place we call Zombieworld.”

“Satisfy your thirst for all things zombie as we take you back in time to the biblical rise of the living dead before running screaming from continent to continent as reports of zombie devastation arrive from Ireland, Canada, Australia, and all over the U.S.”

“Watch for the ‘Government Health Warnings’ on ‘How to Survive a Zombie Attack.’ They could be the only thing between you and a newfound hunger for human flesh. And above all else, enjoy yourself – you may not have much longer to live.”

“With ultra-violence, gallons of gore, and heaps of bloody fun, Zombieworld – a ravenous collection of deadly tales – is like nothing you’ve seen before.”

“Like nothing you’ve seen before.” And that’s the problem, isn’t it? More like, “everything you’ve seen before – over and over and over.”

Where is that frown-y face Emoji when you need one?

P.S. Zombieworld is not to be confused with the 2014 Spanish movie, Zombie World. Seems filmmakers have run out of movie titles.

Bigfoot: The Movie

 

Bigfoot: The Movie (2015) is the latest in a l-o-n-g line of Bigfoot films that, for whatever reason, never seem to run out of mythological gas. And it’s not hard to understand why. Bigfoot is real and is seen tromping all over any place where you’re knee deep in pine cones. Whereas sharks, leading the pack of go-to monster movies these days, are only seen in nature documentaries and anyone falling off a surfboard. So yeah, Bigfoot still rules the box office.

Bigfoot: The Movie, due out on  DVD, Blu-ray™ and digital download on May 29th, 2015, is a horror comedy and goes a little like this: “Bigfoot has come to the town of Ellwood City, PA and is causing BIG problems. Now it’s up to three town locals to take him down.”

Taking Bigfoot down is like trying to out-swim a Great White shark after your surfboard floats away. But hey, they have my rental dollar. Nothing says “value for your money” than Bigfoot taking on a bunch of dumbass rednecks.

A Bigfoot Among Men

Beast: A Monster Among Men (2013) is a thriller horror drama filmed in Six Rivers National Forest. In other words, Willow Creek. In some other words, home of Bigfoot. I don’t know why Bigfoot wants to live there; Too many douche bag idiots with video cameras trying to capture footage of the King of the Forest. Heck, the poor guy can’t even take an upstream dump without some YouTuber™ filming it and posting this clearly private moment online.

Beast: A Monster Among Men is slightly different in that you don’t get to see the monster until the very last frame. Even then he’s busy pounding a body into spatchcock cut of raw meat and is out of focus. Ironically, the whole movie you’re thinking it’s a werewolf doing the do. I wish it was; I’m very tired of Bigfoot being portrayed as a serial murderer.

To save you the pain of watching the movie, here’s the plot: “Five friends head out for a week getaway to a secluded cabin just outside of the Six Rivers National Forest. When an argument forces the group apart things begin to deteriorate quickly. One by one the campers turn up dead and things are clearly not what they seem. As day breaks only two men remain. Yet ,what if neither man is responsible for the night’s carnage, but instead the BEAST who calls Six Rivers home?”

There is a slight twist at this moment, which is the movie title’s hint. Kinda weak, but something you’ve seen before. Send me $5 and I’ll tell you rather than waste the money renting this tedious flick full of arguing dudes, one of whom can’t shut up to save his life. Bigfoot fixes that for us all.

The Horror of Grandparents

So now they’re using grandma and grandpa as horror movie antagonists. Not sure I’m down with this as going to my grandparents house as a kid was like a trip to Disney Land™: free cookies, cartoons all day on TV and what I firmly believed to be a giant rat monster in the downstairs cellar that smelled like freshness-expired cadavers/peaches and a single light bulb that worked only half the time. How did my grandma get me to descend into Hell to fetch a jar of cadaver peaches? Free cookies, duh.

So The Visit, a new horror movie by the hit beleaguered M. Night Shyamalan whose After Earth (2013) was slammed by critics with more credibility than me, is about grandparents harboring a dark secret in their remote Pennsylvania farm. (I bet you anything it’s giant rats.)

As the press release goes, a brother and sister, sent to their grandparents farm, soon discover the old farts are involved in something “deeply disturbing.” If it isn’t squeezing mutated tentacles from a cow’s bikini area to get breakfast milk, one can only imagine what the disturbing part is. Here’s the kicker: the kids can’t leave the house. So if they want milk on their farm cereal, time to man up and go deep.

Look for The Visit to arrive September 11, 2015. And while it’s on your mind, call your demonic and deeply disturbed grandparents today – they’ve been waiting to hear from you. (Ask about free cookies.)