A Taste For Cannibalism

I never really understood cannibals. Unless you’re a zombie, I don’t see the point in eating human flesh, what with a McDonald’s every twenty-feet from where you’re standing. Must be a religious thing.

Which brings me to the point; There’s a new horror movie called Ghoul (releasing June 23, 2015), about a real-life cannibal/murderer/criminal Andrei Chikatilo, the Soviet Union’s most violent serial killer. This f’d-in-the-head nut bag committed sexual assault, murder and mutilation of 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990 in Russia and the surrounding counties and was finally caught and executed in 1994. I’m sure everybody wants to relive those memories with this movie.

In order to make Ghoul more palatable (sorry), the filmmakers have put a supernatural spin on things: “Three Americans travel to the Ukraine to film a documentary about the cannibalism epidemic that swept through the country during the famine of 1932. After being lured deep into the Ukraine forest for an interview with one of the last known survivors, they quickly find themselves trapped in a supernatural hunting ground.”

To prove there’s still a taste (sorry) for movie themes as this, Ghoul opened #1 in the Czech Republic and went on to become the highest grossing horror movie in Czech history, followed up by a limited U.S. theatrical release in March. Clearly, moviegoers ate (sorry) up the movie and the filmmakers are feasting (sorry) on profits.

All this talk about eating is making me hungry. Time to head to McDonald’s. I wonder if McRibs™ are made from real human ribs? Maybe in the Ukraine.

P.S. Ghoul should not be confused with The Ghouls, an upcoming (December 18, 2015) Chinese action/adventure/fantasy/thriller movie based on the novel Ghost Blow Out The Light, which I have not read as its written in some sort of foreign language, possible Russian.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Frankenstein

Sherlock Holmes vs. Frankenstein. I was wondering when those two were gonna lock it up given all the period piece mash-ups leaking into our popped cultured brains: Helen Keller vs. Nightwolves (2015), FDR: American Badass! (2012), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016).

Filming in Belgium near the German border in a castle of all things (what, Starbucks™ too “contemporary” for you?), Sherlock Holmes vs. Frankenstein (release pending) will make it to your face if they get enough crowdfunding via IndieGoGo [click HERE]. In the meantime, the filmmakers have uploaded a nice trailer to get your wallet warmed up.

So here’s how these two legendary icons get in a tangle: “1898. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson travel to Germany to investigate a strange case in the village of Darmstadt.”

“Who is the mysterious figure who digs up corpses and steals their limbs? Could these events be related to the nearby presence of Castle Frankenstein, whose name is closely associated to Mary Shelley’s horror novel? Everyone is a suspect.”

I’m not a suspect. I have a iron-clad alibi; I was drinking a cold refreshing adult beverage and watching the telly.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Frankenstein has a killer movie poster created by Gil Jouin, a French illustrator. I wonder if he’d be available to design the poster for my upcoming crowdfunded period flick, Daniel Boone vs. Mecha Old Yeller. I only need $15 dollars to get this thing done.

Medieval Predator

One of the coolest things you’ll find on the Internet besides pictures of naked bare boobies (just when you think you’ve seen ’em all, a new one pops up), is a ridiculously kick-ass fan-made film that puts the Predator in the days of the Templar Knights, those guys who wear garbage cans as helmets and stab people with swords that look cool over your fireplace.

Predator: Dark Ages, made after they raised enough Middle Age fun bucks, is set during the Crusades. As the press release goes, the “faith and fighting skills of a group of Templar Knights is put to the test when they encounter the Predator. Their battle is the thing myths and legends are born from.”

One of the best fan films ever made, Predator: Dark Ages clocks in at nearly a half hour and the Predator doesn’t look dorky; They really put a lot of time, effort and your dollars into this –and it’s worth it. Click HERE to view. Then go put a garbage an on your head and rule the neighborhood.

Addicted To Horror

Very frustrating to have horror movie ad materials smeared all over the Internet and not actually have a movie to back it up. Such is the situation with The House on the Frontier, in pre-production as of this e-barfing.

Worse still is the movie’s description is about as dazzling as a burned out light bulb: “There’s a house where the world of the living ends…and it’s waiting for the next visitors.” We can only hope the movie isn’t as generic as the ad line.

Like a freshly opened can of Molson™, the crowdfunded One Drop (pending 2015), a rather polished indie horror film from Canada, shows more promise: “A drug addict single mother overdoses. She wakes up in a medical facility to find that everyone is dead and she’s nine months pregnant.”

Yep, it only takes one drop to accomplish all of the above.

Speaking of drugs, in the horribly titled Deimosimine (2016) is in reference to a substance a girl gets hooked on. To wit: “Cindy is a twenty-something girl who has had a rough life. She believes that her wealthy mother killed her father and got away with it. After years of running from this horrible past, she turns to heroin to cope with her painful memories. Embarrassed by her daughter’s addiction, her mother seeks out a doctor who has created a cure for all addictions…a drug that induces fear within the addict, a fear so frightening and real that, theoretically, the patient will not want to go back to those dark places and thus stop using.”

“Cindy becomes addicted to this drug (Deimosimine), and starts to believe she is hunting down demons, monsters, and aberrations, but in reality is slaughtering humans, becoming a mass murderer. As she ups her dosage, the drug begins to alter the chemical balance in her brain and she begins to become enveloped into this dark other world without the heroin.”

Deimosimine hasn’t even begun filming and they’ve released teaser art and plot? At least they have time to fix both.

Offensive Bunny

Haven’t been offended by weener nudity, graphic gore or micro-budgeted horror lately? Then you haven been watching enough evening news. So now you can get your depravity fix with Bunny The Killer Thing (release pending 2015).

Besides boasting a terribly lazy movie title, Bunny The Killer Thing’s trailer packs more offensive punch than most entire movies with all the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph. And here’s a taste of what you’ll find…

“In the dark winter woods of Finland, a group of Finnish and British holiday makers are stuck in a cabin where they are terrorized by a creature which is half human, half rabbit called Bunny the Killer Thing, who is after anything that resembles the female genitals.”

Spoiler: The half human/half rabbit creature is a guy running around in a costume with an oversized rubber hangy doo dripping and flopping around. And here’s the really offensive part: the costume looks filthy and in all likelihood smells like a junior high school gym locker. Ick.

Jaws In Your Bathtub

“You’re going to need a bigger toy box…”

A re-casting of the famous line in Jaws (1975) in which Roy Scheider’s character Chief Martin Brody is chumming the sea with fish guts and Jaws pops out and causes Brody to pollute his pants.

Coming soon is a new Jaws ReAction toy figures by Funko™. Their website says it’ll be released in July doesn’t line up with Amazon.com’s available date of September 30. No worries – Korea will probably bootleg this thing and have it for sale by the end of today.

A Gremlins (1984) set is being released at the same time as well. But I never liked those little trouble-making toilet brushes, so put me in the “not even close to being interested” column. Nope, I want me some Jaws.

The coolest part is the air tank accessory, which fits as nicely in Jaws’ mouth as action figure/shark hunter Quint. (For realism they should’ve added a beer can accessory to go along with Quint’s harpoon.) Then you have marine biologist and all-around wise-guy Matt Hooper. Oddly, he looks built to the scale of Quint and Brody. In the movie Hooper is a little dude, a veritable Scooby snack for Jaws.

Each uneaten figure is sold separately for $19.99 and Jaws for $24.99 (on Amazon), or buy ’em altogether for $49.88 + $4.99 shipping. Seems reasonable given how much fun time you’ll get in the tub with these guys. OK, that didn’t come out right. Really wish they would’ve made Quint’s boat, Orca. Now I’m gonna have to use a cereal bowl carrying his next three meals for Jaws to attack/kill/eat.

Boogeyman Comes Out Of The Closet

As a kid Tim saw his dad get taken by the Boogeyman when he was just old enough to be traumatized for life by the unfortunate experience. Tim’s older now and has a girlfriend who puts up with him sleeping on the floor and not having anything stored in closets – except Boogeymen. That’s not good feng-shui.

Tim’s ghost mom tells him to go back to the family home and the scene of the dad-taking. Really good idea. There Tim discovers a history of children being taken by the Boogeyman, him being one if his “protective” dad hadn’t gotten in the way.

All of this is just an excuse to get Tim to go into the closet, which he does. It acts as a time portal, transporting him back and forth to his old bedroom. Why he didn’t use it to go to the store is a glaring plot hole.

Solid creep-out moments, including the ghost kid victims of Boogeyman and bathtubs filled with blood instead of hot soapy bubbles and shampoo bottles. Taking it one step further, Boogeyman turns into electricity and possesses toys.

Through an overly-long set-up, Tim finally grows a sac and throws a solid slobberknocker, sending Boogeyman back to the place of coats, shoe boxes filled with pictures instead of shoes, and some other junk you don’t use anymore. This paves the way for several sequels no one asked for.

Boogeyman (2005) is a sorta nice spin on a fond childhood memory, though B-man should probably stay out of that one box in my closet marked “Evidence.”

Zombie Ghost Bug

A viral zombie, a demon ghost, a mouth bug. That’s what’s new on your horror movie horizon. Or, if you’re not into those kinds of things, nothing is on your horizon. Nothing at all. Welcome to boring.

Virus of the Dead (releasing in the UK on August 29, 2015) comes with a twist – the entire thing was shot on smartphones, webcams and video logs (or “vlogs”).  This is an anthology with each of the 18 segments only lasting five minutes each.  Good thing Virus of the Dead is about zombies or they’d have to call it V/H/S (2012).

Up next is Before I Wake (2015) in which a couple who lost their young son to the clutches of death, go to a little boy pet shop (or “adoption agency”) and get a replacement. Slight problem with this model – his dreams and nightmares manifest physically as he sleeps. Pffft – in my youth they called that wetting the bed. Before I Wake looks to cash in on the onslaught of generic wetting-your-pants ghost movies currently scaring tweeners in mall cineplexes.

This one’s kind of icky. In Bite (2015), Casey, a bride-to-be at her bachelorette party getaway, gets a seemingly harmless bite from an unknown insect. Soon she starts exhibiting insect like traits. Between her physical transformation and her wedding anxiety, Casey succumbs to her new instincts and begins creating a hive that not only houses her translucent eggs, but feeds on the flesh of others.

Translucent eggs. I wonder how many breakfasts would be ruined by a serving of those, bug embryos or not. Still, cook anything in enough butter and it’ll taste good.

The Truth About UFOs

Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers (1956) is a long-winded documentary turned into a movie about the burgeoning UFO phenomenon in the late ’40s/early ’50s. Do they show any flying saucers? Not until the very end of a b-o-r-i-n-g story loaded with endless tech talk of a few close encounters with military flying objects.

And when they do get around to showing you some UFO action, the footage is just of glowing lights in the sky as opposed to the ground. In which case they wouldn’t be flying. Then we’d have to call ’em UGOs. That doesn’t work for me in the slightest.

I wish flying saucers were made out of shiny future metal instead of hall closet lighting.

Kill Club

A group of Korean college friends form a club and call themselves A Few Good Men, even though they have several really hot chicks as members. They don’t say what this club actually does, but I’m assuming some of it is keeping a dark secret they all were involved in years ago.

One of the new recruits, the shy-but-sexy Eun-ju, commits suicide by jumping off a building and landing on her face. Now, years later, all the club members start dying by eyes being plucked out, glass in the face… You know, the usual die-kill-bleed stuff.

At a running time of 97 minutes, Nightmare (aka, Gawi/2000) is 67 minutes too long. (Hey, wasn’t Too Long the name of one of the extras? Okay, that was uncalled for, even it is is true.) The horror stuff is entry-level and the foot-on-the-brake pacing will make you want to pluck your own eyes out. Or jump off a building. Or put glass in your face. Or join a club, which kills its new members. Oh, did I just say that out loud? My bad.