Eating Horror With Your Mouth Full

Arriving October 6, 2015, the horror movie Eaters promises to be scary, bloody and blood-curdling. Sounds like just another exam day at the proctologist.

The synopsis is typically uninformative and generic: “Five friends embark on an epic road trip, but when one friend disappears at a rest stop, their search brings them face to face with a violent biker gang. After a narrow escape from death, their nightmare goes from bad to spine-chilling when they find themselves being stalked in an abandoned town.”

Why can’t anyone write compelling press releases? There’s nothing in that copy that compels me to seek out Eaters. Heck, the highly descriptive advertising copy put out by my proctologist had me racing to the phone to schedule an appointment.

The trailer holds more promise, but given the lazy title (another Eaters and The Eaters – retitled Eat Me – came out in 2010) and plot, I’m gonna need a whole lotta beer to convince me to watch it.

Note to filmmakers – contact me via this blog to get my address so you can send me a whole lotta beer. No fancy pants metro beer, either – I want only the good stuff: Budweiser™. In cans, preferabbly chilled. And would it kill you to throw in a bag of Cheetos™?

Toasty Horror

Freddy Krueger toast. Okay, it’s official – I’ve now seen everything.

As high camp as this is, A Nightmare on Elm Street toaster ($54.99 at BigBadToyStore.com), which burns Freddy’s image into bread, is still pretty dang cool. Hey, Jesus has been showing up in tortillas and pancakes for years. Time to share in the wealth.

The press release for this product is hilarious…

“He terrorized your dreams while you slept…and now Freddy Krueger haunts your breakfast when you wake up!”

“But don’t worry — while the Springwood Slasher may have felt the burn, your bread and bagels will only endure the perfect amount of heat, toasting the shape of Freddy’s signature bladed glove into each slice.”

“UL-tested and approved, our collectible toaster includes illuminated function buttons for Cancel, Reheat, and Frozen. The Nightmare on Elm Street logo appears on its stylish, glossy black finish. Watch out – it’s the bastard toast of a thousand loafs!”

Bastard toast of a thousand loafs. Man, that’s killer. All of a sudden I feel sorry for people on gluten-restrictive diets. One can only hope Halloween’s Michael Myers will come out with a line of pre-sliced tofu for those who vomit and get diarrhea from eating sandwiches. Ones not made at 7-Eleven™, anyway.

More Ghosts = Less Scares

If you were at SXSW back in the ancient days of March 2015, then you might have been one of the chosen few to see a sneak premier of The Diabolical, a new horror/sci-fi ghost movie, which seem to be the rage these days.

For those of us who were not personally invited to SXSW via a handwritten and/or engraved invite delivered on a silk pillow, The Diabolical comes out in the fall of 2015. If privileged people have already seen it, why do we commoners have to flippin’ wait that long? One-percenters suck.

So yeah, The Diabolical is YET ANOTHER ghost-y movie. I watched the trailer and it reminded me of Poltergeist. Not the 2015 remake (which sucked polter-ass), but the original from 1982. Anyway, here’s how the ghost goes…

“Madison – a single mother – and her children, are awoken nightly by an increasingly strange and intense presence. She seeks help from her scientist boyfriend Nikolai, who begins a hunt to destroy the violent spirit that paranormal experts are too frightened to take on.”

Good luck and all.

In the original Poltergeist there was a haunted steak. Hope The Diabolical can top that.

Cartoon vs. Carnivore

Archie vs. Sharknado. Not only am I NOT making it up, it’s actually a for-purchase comic book for $4.99 [click HERE]. As wacky as this is, thankfully it’s not a movie. I don’t think I could take that.

So yeah, famed comic book cartoon icons Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica and Reggie –  sugaring up the pop culture pipeline since in 1941 – brave a shark storm after sharknados are spotted on the “Feast” Coast. They have to figure out how to get back to Riverdale, where the storm is about to hit next.

Just once I’d like to see everything hit the fans and their legs and arms get bitten off and splewn (splattered and strewn) all over “Betsy,” Archie’s famed 1916 Ford Model T jalopy. Oh wait, the junk heap was permanently demolished (not by sharks) in Archie Digest #239, published in October 2007.

Now that certain lines have been crossed, there’ nothing left to do except wait for Casper vs. Ghost Hunters.

A Cleaver To Cleave Her

First e-barfed about Slasher House on November 8, 2010. Promptly forgot about it on November 9, 2010. Not a fan of slasher movies, so I went back to combing my hair. The reason I even bring it up is that there’s a sorta sequel (actually, more a spin-off), called Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown, who was a colorfully harmful character in Slasher House.

Hmmm, where did I put my comb?

While the slasher genre bores the living sandwich outta me, there are those in the community that buys into this kind of horror movie. I’ll say this for Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown – cool movie posters. And I’ll let them say this about the movie…

“1990 Oklahoma: Carlton Layton arrived home to find his wife in the arms of another man, he went out to his van and donned the clown suit that he used as a children’s entertainer and proceeded to slaughter his wife and her lover. All of this was witnessed by his 5 year old daughter and Carlton escaped into the night leaving his little girl behind.”

“5 Years Later: Halloween night and Carley, a young college student, is hired to take care of a little girl as her parents head out to a Halloween party, but someone one is waiting, someone wants the girl, someone who we know as The Cleaver…”

Always Halloween night and always a college coed. When will filmmakers unhitch from that super dumb/cliched merry-go-round?

Anyway, Cleaver: Rise of the Killer Clown comes out just in time for…Halloween.

Pumpkinheads and Pinheads

Vengeance (Pumpkinhead’s birth name) has been called back for active duty in Pumpkinhead: Ashes To Ashes (1994), this time avenging townspeople whose dead kin’s bodies have been defiled (i.e., buried in a swamp as well as stacked up in a barn like rotting bales of hay.)

Seems the local doctor/mortician (played by Doug Bradley, Hellraiser’s Pinhead, 1987) has been facilitating the deaths, extracting organs for re-sale, then discarding the bodies like so many empty yogurt containers. The small town can’t pay for medical care, so the doc balances the checkbook with no longer needed kidneys, hearts, eyeballs, stomach gunk, etc.

Helping him is his crystal meth-addicted hottie daughter, some other guy, and that Bud Wallace kid from the first movie, now all grow’d up.

After the bodies are discovered and lined up out in the street in the hot sun for inventorying, a highly attractive young mother comes searching for her little daughter’s body—and finds it among the putrefying corpses. Harsh-o-matic. So she gets three other friends to go in on hiring Pumpkinhead to balance their revenge checkbook.

Haggis the witch (Pumpkinhead’s enabler) is back, dispensing warnings, as does Lance Henriksen as the ghost of Ed Harley from Pumpkinhead (1988). But no one ever listens to them and P to tha’ H does his dirty business, all the while taking everyone’s soul to H-E-C-K.

This is the first time we get to see Haggis in broad daylight and she looks like a supermodel that’s aged 115 years. The medical gore is particularly graphic, but P-head’s vengeancing is just your basic meat ’n potatoes heart-ripping, choking, impaling, etc. In a glaring misstep, the movie makers turn Pumpkinhead into a digital video character during an attack scene in a church. Not cool. Everything else, cool.

Visiting Flesh-Eaters

Wanna see a couple of ill-intent criminals consumed by a flesh-eating creature? Well hey – who doesn’t?

Gonna cost you, though. The Visitors – a crowd-funded movie on Indiegogo [click here] that’s reputed to contain healthy elements of The Evil Dead and The Thing, need your fun bucks to make the criminal-eating possible.

Here’s the pitch: “After settling into their new home in the country, the Cooper family’s night of peaceful relaxation is brought to an abrupt halt when two mysterious drifters come knocking on their door. As the drifters attempt to unleash a strategic plan of terror upon the unsuspecting family, their plan is soon foiled by a flesh-eating creature fixated on only one thing – survival.”

“In order for the family to survive the night they must entrust in the one person who once sought to harm them, but as the events of the evening begin to unravel it becomes clear that there is more to this situation than meets the eye and more than one monster lurking in the shadows.”

Hmm – sounds like they need to work together with one or more criminals to fend off this creature that eats flesh. Since The Visitors is set in the country, I’m betting the flesh-eating creature is a mad cow with mad cow disease. Makes sense when you think about it.

Getting A Hand on Horror

“Heir” on your palm. That’s pretty dang funny for a visual pun. I never understood the joke until I went through puberty, which was just last week. So, like, good timing for Heir, a Canadian horror short, to come out, making its world premiere debut at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2015 in Montreal on July 28th.

So you think the ad poster tells what the “heir” thing is about? Guess again: “After connecting with a stranger of similar interests online, family man Gordon and his young son Paul embark on an ill-fated road trip, in which Gordon aims to indulge in a secret passion. Before the day ends a horrible truth will be uncovered and a harsh lesson will be learned.”

I sense impending ickiness. If the eerie trailer is any indication, Heir will have you in the palm of its hand. Heh.

High-Fiber Horror

Horror anthologies seem to be plopping out with all the regularity of a high-fiber breakfast these days. Hot on the tale of Tales of Halloween (2015) comes The Horror Network in time for October, 2015, featuring five stories of super icky fun horror stuff in the form of serial killers, inner demons, otherworld monsters, creepy stalkers, and ghostly phone calls. Oooh, ghostly phone calls – I really miss those on my old land line.

So, like, five of horror’s most promising new directing talents join forces to pay homage to classic horror like Creepshow, Tales From the Crypt, V/H/S and The ABCs of Death. I happen to be a big fan of all of the above. You’re welcome.

FYI: The DVD of The Horror Network will exclusively include a number of bonus features. Oooh, I really like bonus features.

Game Show Horror

Hellevator is an upcoming horror-themed game show hosted by Jen & Sylvia Soska, who look exactly like each other. Either they’re twins (unlikely) or that’s some serious make-up special effects (my money is on this one.)

Debiting in October 2015, Hellevator goes like this: A team of three friends rides a haunted elevator into various levels of an abandoned warehouse. One player must get out on each floor and conquer a frightening challenge in order to earn money for the team. But if they don’t make it back in time, the elevator moves on without them. Horror film icons Jen and Sylvia Soska, aka the “Twisted Twins,” pull the strings throughout the game – taking delight in the horror.”

Cool, yes – but still a game show. Those dumbass things suck harder than nuclear powered vacuum cleaners. But judge for yourself, suckas.

While we’re on the subject of sucking, the game show creators sucked the Hellevator title right out from underneath a 2005 Japanese horror/sci-fi movie of the same name. Accurately described as a “bloody and claustrophobic social satire, Hellevator: Bottled Fools (the original title) has an odd but super weird plot:

 

“Luchino’s routine morning elevator ride up from her subterranean home on level 138 to her school many stories above turns horrific when the elevator operator is ordered to pick up two passengers from floor 99, the maximum security level. What starts as psychological manipulation soon turns wholly physical as both the cruel convicts and Luchino’s own dysfunctional past are unleashed. And then every passenger must fight for his or her survival.”

If only they could turn that into a game show…