Artificial Werewolves

Always up for a new werewolf movie, but after watching the trailer for the poorly titled Dark Moon Rising (releasing August 4, 2015), I have some reservations. First, the plot…

“A group of shape-shifting werewolves descend upon a small town in search of a girl who is re-born once every 2,000 years. She holds the key to their survival, and all will die who stand in their way.”

Seems reasonable enough. But digital werewolves are not my flea bag. Something about artificial hair and fangs just ain’t cool, man. Even though they self-proclaim Dark Moon Rising as “An American Werewolf in London takes a bite out of Near Dark in this bloody, unique take on The Wolfman legend,” computer generated monsters are suck-o.

P.S. There was another werewolf movie called Dark Moon Rising that came out in 2009. You’d think the filmmakers of the 2015 version would’ve done a bit of homework. But hey, Hollywood – birthplace of the copy machine.

The upcoming Dreadtime Stories anthology shows more promise, and even sports a werewolf in one of its 10 (!) stories. I watched the trailer; Now that’s some quality fur and fang action. Here’s an overview…

“A party turns bizarre when a malevolent book makes its way into the hands of the attendees who reveal its tales of monsters, madmen and the supernatural…”

Dreadtime Stories features more than 50 cast members, the bulk of which we can only hope will suffer painful and splattery fates for our entertainment. But we’re gonna have to wait a bit to experience the mayhem as Dreadtime Stories isn’t slated to come out until early 2016.

That sucks. Heck, by then I could be converted into a religious nutcase, renounce all my horror movie ways and quit drinking refreshing adult beverages. Just kidding. Not gonna happen. If it did, that would be the scariest horror story of all time.

Fishy Horror

First tripped across the British horror movie Weaverfish on YouTube™ back in summer of 2013. I watched the trailer, read the movie description and was duly unimpressed. Then I clicked away, vowing never to return.

It’s now summer-ish of 2015 and Weaverfish is now downloadable and/or rentable on Vimeo™. Watching the updated trailer, I’m still wondering what the movie is about.

Here’s the description: “Trouble lurks when a group of friends enter the restricted grounds of a condemned oil plant, eager to exploit its secluded river creek for a night of partying. The eventful weekend takes a sickening turn when one by one they fall victim to a grossly disfiguring infection.”

“The rapidly deteriorating members embark on a journey back to civilization through the woods, unaware of the other presence hunting them down. As their weekend suddenly escalates into a chilling race for survival, the dangers of their trespassing finally begin to surface, untangling a surprising and shocking conspiracy.”

Still confused. Some deep research (clicking on a link) into the weaverfish (or “weever”)  revealed it to be 37 cms in length, mainly brown in color, and have poisonous spines on their first dorsal fins and gills. Weevers are sometimes used as an ingredient in the recipe for bouillabaisse. Guess what I’m gonna quit eating.

So maybe the oil-polluted water mutated the fish and the fish infected the dumbass teens who drink and take illegal drugs and smoke, when it’s been proved over and over that smoking is not good for you and carries long-term health complications. Dumbasses.

Then the movie goes on to propose there’s a mysterious stalker who tracks down the infected teens. Maybe the stalker is trying to cover up the mutated weaverfish (or “weevers”). I just don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that all species in the weaverfish family are restricted to the eastern Atlantic (including the Mediterranean). Man, I hate it when horror movies make me do homework.

Fear The Walking Dead

As a hardcore mega fan of AMC’s The Walking Dead series, I liked the onset premise that they just threw you into the deep end of the dead pool without any back story as to how the undead came to be. (In episode “TS-19,” Dr. Edwin Jenner – the CDC’s last survivor – couldn’t answer the question, best guessing that it could be microbial, viral, or simply not washing your hands after playing with people poo. Okay, that last one is a personal theory as to why the dead have come back to get us.)

With the summer 2015 impending Fear The Walking Dead six-episode spin-off, questions are proposed and possible answers hinted as to how the world got f’d in the b-hole in the first place.

My best guessing is that they won’t reveal the inception of the dead. Once you know the answer, the rest is just running, screaming, biting, chewing, burping, farting. Then repeating all of the above. Why ruin a good thing?

What makes The Walking Dead work so well has never really been the omnipresent zombies (okay, maybe for the first few episodes), but the characters themselves and the ridiculously dark places they go with each other just to survive.

That established, Fear The Walking Dead – set in Los Angeles – has to step up hard out of the gate if they want to milk this cash cow. They can start by paying me big coupons to consult, direct and star in the series. And I’d have everyone get eaten by the undead except me, which would make me a hero of some sort.

I’ll have my agent call their agent to work out the deets.

Screams On Demand

Happy to see Shudder™, a new horror/sci-fi channel, getting ready to make its gory debut. While no premier date is set in stone, I’m already making tweaks to the ass groove in my couch, because if it doesn’t suck, Shudder™ will get a lot of my butt time. Okay, that didn’t come out right.

Shudder™ is horror-on-demand and is reputed to work along the same model as Netflix™, the current reigning champ of movie streaming. Here’s a cool offering – as Shudder™ goes through beta testing (potential customer complaint glitches), if you give ‘em your e-mail address you could get a 60-day free trial. I’m no mathamagician, but I think that comes to two months thereabouts.

I only have one red flag at this time – they’ve broken down the horror/sci-fi into an ass groove of sub-genres. (See below.) Cute, but annoying. This is done on other streaming channels like Fright Pixs™, and it’s a pain to navigate as many of the same movies show up in different sub-categories. Talk about padding the bra.

Hopefully, though, Shudder™ will implement what is the most valuable feature every horror fan requires: Just Added. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve become hair-pullingly frustrated after fruitlessly trying to uncover new releases. (Disclaimer: indie horror as opposed to mainstream horror, which you can trip over walking out your door.)

Better still would be if Shudder™ listed every movie on their website. Would make searching for my daily recommended requirement of depravity much easier.

Anyway, I’ll be among the first to jump on board as Netflix™, Amazon Prime™, M-Go™, Vudu™ and others are painfully weak in the horror/sci-fi department.

Here is Shudder’s™ sub-category listing… (More info at Sudder.com and their Facebook page dealie bob.)

• A-Horror

• Psychos and Madmen

• Identity Crises

• Socko Spoofs

• Into the Wild

• Comedy of Terrors

• Haunted Habitations

• Gross Anatomy

• Romantic Bloodsuckers

• Slashics

• Smart Slashers

• The Unblinking Eye: Diabolical Documentaries

• The Unraveling Mind

• Trapped

• Urban Decay

• Weird Science

• Zombie Jamboree

• Cult Masters: Euro Horror

• Foundations of Horror

• Hexes and Ooohs!

• Human Monsters and Serial Killers

• Monster Mash

• Possessions: The Devil Made Me Do It!

• Bad Genes and Killer Kids

• Not Your Ordinary Bloodsucker

• School’s Out… Forever

• Spectral Encounters

Human Centipede 3: Back Door Man

 

Can’t bring yourself to watch Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) yet? I hear you – I can’t get through the trailers without my gag reflex kicking in. And I’m still wondering how they got 499 people to get on their hands and knees and stick their faces in each other’s b-holes for the sake of furthering their movie careers. (Seriously, do you want the film credit of “Ass Mouth #209” on your resumé?)

While HC3 is now available on VOD, on the off chance you don’t wanna stick your face in it, here are four new ad posters, all of which I’m sure will get banned by some uptight b-hole. The first one is fairly gag-inducing once you comprehend what you’re looking at.

The next two are self-explanatory on a visual level. Bonus – naked chick! Not bonus – everything else.

The last one, while obscured, still gets the point across. And just what is the point? To explore uncharted medical territories for the advancement of health insurance rates? My guess is it’s to make the most offensive movie ever made.

To underscore the argument, IMDB.com gave H3C a 3.2 out of 10 rating, while Rotten Tomatoes gave it 7%. But wait – MetaCritic awarded a staggering 1% rating to the crappy (sorry) franchise installment.

Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence) is one hour and 43 minutes long. Bet you can’t make it through the last 10 minutes.

Killersaurus Is A Dino-snore

Can’t go to the mall cineplex without tripping over slobbering little dinosaur fans gooning out over Jurassic World (2015). And with all things massively successful (JW has already made over a billion fun coupons in just a few weeks of its release), comes the inevitable knock offs and cash-ins.

One such cash quickie is Killer/Saurus (releasing July 6, 2015), a science-gone-wrong take of the military trying to weaponize a T-rex. Good luck with that.

The bad news: “When a scientist runs short of funding for his life-saving medical bio-printing research, he accepts an offer of investment from a shadowy military organization. In return, he is forced to use his technology to create the ultimate battlefield weapon – a full-size Tyrannosaurus Rex. After a horrific accident in which the dinosaur massacres his research team, the scientist shuts down the project. However, his investors demand results, and it can only be a matter of time before the deadly T-rex is unleashed upon the world!”

The good news: Dinosaurs running amok on mankind can easily be found in the Carnosaur series, starting in 1993 and going all chomp chomp on your breadbasket with Carnosaur 2 (1995), Carnosaur 3: Primal Species and Raptor (1996), which is a direct-to-video part of the franchise but unwisely chose to not carry on with the proud Carnosaur family name.

P.S. Hope it doesn’t f-up your day, but there was a Killersaurus that was/is part of the Ultra-Man 1980s series that got its start back in 1966. (Actually, they referred to him as U-Killersaurus.) To further f-up your day, there was a Neo-Killersaurus that appeared in the Ultraman Mebius & The Ultra Brothers movie released in 2006.

Now that this information has totally f’d up your day, there’s nowhere to go but up!

Ghost Dimension

Just about gave up on the Paranormal Activity franchise after Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) aimed straight at ‘tweeners, and the ill-advised/painfully clumsy spin-off, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014). But all the lingering questions from the series that bubbled to the surface of my clearly damaged thought process look to be answered with the release of Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension, releasing October 23, 2015 on – get this – Imax™ 3D, as well as all the other 115 formats only tech nerds care about.

In PA:GD (the final installment), a new family gets brought into the otherworldly mix, who move into a house and discover a video camera and a box of tapes in the garage. (Nope, not suburbia porno, unfortunately.) When said tapes are viewed, they begin to see the paranormal activity happening around them — including the re-emergence of young Kristi and Katie, the two little girls from Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) prequel, who hooked up with the invisible demon Toby (he’s mean) and started the whole supernatural familial curse thing hinted at in the first two flicks.

Toby better show himself in the new one. And I gotta know if anyone cleaned up the baby powder they sprinkled on the floor to see invisible demon footprints. While I’m on the subject, did anyone wash those sheets after some unseen thing yanked them off the bed and probably blew its nose in ’em like some paranormal hanky? And would it kill someone to properly dispose of all those bent in half bodies laying around? Talk about germ magnets.

There’s no reason a haunted house can’t be a clean haunted house.

Mutated Frozen Burritos

Harbinger is defined as anything that foreshadows a future event. For example – you eat a few 7-Eleven Truckstopper™ microwave burritos and a bathroom is a foreshadowed conclusion.

Another Harbinger is a boat in the upcoming horror/sci-fi thriller, Harbinger Down (2015), involving mutated sea creatures and global warming. (Look for Harbinger Down on VOD and limited theaters on August 7, 2015, as well as a commerical release on September 1, 2015.)

So how did the Harbinger encounter such boat-stopping creatures? Glad you asked politely: “A group of grad students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship’s crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly.”

“It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation. Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for three decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.”

Pffft – the warmth of human companionship can be found in any bottle of the good stuff, the cheaper the better. Still, I like the idea that a bunch of grad students, who are bottom-dwellers on the human companionship scale, are likely to be devoured alive, like some sort of human Truckstopper™ burritos.

Man, I’m easily entertained/fed.

P.S. Do not confuse Harbinger Down with Beast of the Bering Sea (2013). That one had sea vampires in it. Same location, though.

Hunting Vegetables By Night

You may not know the name, but you know his work. Australian filmmaker Philippe Mora is the guy behind such toilet gems as Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985) and Howling III: The Marsupials (1987) as well as The Beast Within (alien date rape, 1982) and Communion (alien butt probe, 1989). Returning to werewolf territory, Mora wants you to guide him back to box office glory with your overly-taxed fun coupons.

Seeking $200,000 to crowd-fund The Growling, Mora promises only this for your investment: “Werewolves in LA and New York are trained to be vegans to throw off investigators. Hybrid lycanthropes cannot control their own cursing and obscene language, particularly in Los Angeles. If someone starts speaking obscenities, stand back immediately…”

As of this writing only three people have donated for a total of $140.00. They have 18 days left to raise $1,999,860. (Update 6/25/15: Was just informed the fundraising campaign is open-ended, so get to clickin’.)

Maybe it has something to do with werewolves being cast as vegans or being foul-mouthed. (OK, that’s not quite new; check out Big Bad Wolf (2006) for some colorful four-letter werewolf speak.) Or maybe the concept lacks, I don’t know, something not what it’s being presented as. (Vegan werewolves? What do they do – attack rutabagas by the light of the silvery moon?)

Help fund vegetables and werewolves by clicking HERE.

Putting a Krampus In Christmas

For every god there’s a devil. For every Batman there’s a Joker. For every plaid there’s a stripe. For every peanut butter, there’s a jelly. So it stands to reason that for every Santa there’s a Krampus, a sort of evil opposite Santa Claus. And because of that, the Krampus makes for great horror movie fodder.

Arriving just in time for Christmas (4th of July for Jesus), Krampus – releasing December 4, 2015 – looks to put a cramp on the biggest commercial holiday of the year. Here’s how jolly this one’s gonna get…

“A horror-comedy, Krampus tells the story of young Max, who turns his back on Christmas as his dysfunctional family comes together and comically clashes over the holidays. When they accidentally unleash the wrath of Krampus – an ancient entity from European folklore – all hell breaks loose and beloved holiday icons take on a monstrous life of their own. Now, the fractured family is forced to unite if they hope to survive.”

There was a Krampus on campus several years ago: Krampus: The Christmas Devil (2013). It went like this: “Jeremy, a local police officer, leads a life of a confusing past, spending his current time searching for his kidnapper as a child. After other children begin missing, Jeremy pieces together the truth and realizes that his childhood kidnapper could be a creature of ancient yuletide lore, Krampus, who is the brother of St. Nick, and punisher of children who perform acts of unspeakable evil without repercussion.”

I like the business model. And if these seasonal slashers get you in the mood, try Rare Exports (2010), featuring 100 naked Santa Claus’ running down  a snowy hill with their sleigh bells a’ringin’.

And hey, for your zombie Santa needs, there’s Sint (2010), who rides an evil horse on roof tops, slaughtering children and not leaving gifts. (Man, that’s just mean.) How the evil horse doesn’t slip on the icy roofs is a testimony to Sint’s power. I fear him.