Vampire Sequels, Family Ghosts, Social Media Killers

Got some vampires, ghosts, tweener ghosts and slashers headed your way. Not real vampires, ghosts, tweener ghosts and slashers, mind you. Just movie ones. But keep an eye open, just in case.

STAKE LAND II (February 7, 2017 / digital, February 14 / DVD)
“Set several years after the events in Stake Land (2010), in which mankind must struggle to survive in the wake of a vampire apocalypse. When his home in New Eden is destroyed by a revitalized Brotherhood and its new Vamp leader, Martin finds himself alone in the badlands of America with only the distant memory of his mentor, the legendary vampire hunter Mister, to guide him. Roaming the wilderness of a steadily decaying country, Martin searches for the one man who can help him exact revenge.”

Revenge. Where would horror movies be without it? One of the best summations of revenge comes from City of Bones (2007) author Cassandra Clare’s first book in The Mortal Instruments series: “I don’t want tea,” said Clary, with muffled force. “I want to find my mother. And then I want to find out who took her in the first place, and I want to kill them.”

“Unfortunately,” said Hodge, “we’re all out of bitter revenge at the moment, so it’s either tea or nothing.”

Snap! I gotta use that line somewhere. Oh, wait — I just did.

SPECTRAL (December 9, 2016 / Netflix)
“When an otherworldly force wreaks havoc on a war-torn European city, an engineer teams up with an elite Special Ops unit to stop it.”

Now there’s a grand idea — get a bunch of Army guys to shoot guns at ghosts. Why not just whip out your AK-47 and unleash hell on Mr. Bubble™?

WAIT TILL HELEN COMES (out now / Lifetime, January 2017 / VOD)
“The story centers on a 12-year-old girl who’s the eldest of three children in a blended family that moves from Baltimore into a house converted from a church in the Maryland countryside. The tormented ghost of a little girl comes to haunt the 12-year-old, but forms an intimate, though dangerous, friendship with her seven-year-old stepsister.”

Warning: as this is airing on the Lifetime™ channel, it’s a family-friendly, watered down tale of the supernatural. Too bad; a little blood and guts never hurt anybody. Oh wait…

SLASHER.COM (2017)
“Slasher.com combines the time-honored tradition of young people facing unfathomable horrors in the wilderness with the every day horror of meeting people online, and puts a gruesome twist on the perils of modern dating.”

Slasher social media horror. Maybe they should rename it DeFacebook.com. Heh.

Earth Must be Stopped

Remember The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951/2008)? Well, this time it stopped altogether. No loitering for this planet, just a complete and utter dead halt.

I could end my overview of The Day The Earth Stopped (2008) right here, but there may be one or two of you who never listen when I tell them movies that are quick knock-offs of other — and better — flicks, suck the big [insert your choice of disparaging proper noun here].

A battalion of spaceships pull up to Earth and park their giant destructo robots in areas all over the world. Six hundred and sixty-six of ’em to be exact, though you only get to see one.

Two aliens — a naked young man with zits on his face, and a nude 30-something woman with heavy eye shadow and thick lip gloss (from the “Hot Uranus Nights” weekend collection) — are captured by the Army and interrogated.

Turns out Earth has been pissing off all the other planets, and it’s time to kiss our arrogant fannies goodbye. That is, unless we can show them a reason for sparing our lives…by sundown. Unfortunately, the giant robots start blasting, wrecking an innocent Ferris wheel and shooting the top off the Eiffel Tower. France probably deserved it.

The lesson learned? Don’t watch cheap knock-off “sci-fi” movies like this anymore. But like touching a hot stove burner, I’ll probably do it again.

Robots Hate You And Your Planet

What if you woke up in a hotel room in a big city, only to discover you’re the only one in the entire city? Besides pulling down your pants and running out into the street screaming, you’re probably go looking for somebody to explain WTF.

No, this isn’t a Twilight Zone episode, though it plays out like one. Rather, it’s the plot for Target Earth, an obscure sci-fi movie from 1954, which predated TZ by five years.

So Nora King, having just woken up from a flubbed suicide attempt (she tried sticking her head in a toaster – just kidding), discovers all of Chicago is bereft of tax-paying citizens. Wandering around and starting to completely lose her beans, she eventually happens across a guy with impeccably combed hair just coming to after being smacked unconscious by criminals. Aha – an excuse is established!

They go wandering and hear a piano being played in a cocktail lounge of all things. It’s here they meet a guy and his gal, both getting drunk as skunks because hey, free booze! Through the haze of sweet alcohol, they tell Nora and her crime statistic guy that the town had been evacuated because of a mysterious invading force, but that they were unable (too drunk) to go with the rest of the group.

Now there are four and… What the flap – they find another person. Now the town is starting to feel crowded. They find a newspaper with a headline warning of impending disaster, so new guy is freaks out and tries to start a car when he gets mad zapped by…an alien robot from Venus! That’ll teach him to try and jack a vehicle.

The group heads into a hotel, finds rooms and try to figure out their next maneuver. If they were of sound mind and body, they’d pry open the mini bar. Before everyone figure out a plan, a criminal shows up with a gun and holds everyone hostage. Um, I think they were doing that to themselves.

Bullets fly and then there were three. But an alien robot, scouting for loose citizens to eye fry, hears the gunfire and crashes into the hotel, eventually clanking its way up the stairs to the room where all the action is.

Heading to the roof, the robot is in slow pursuit. The drunk guy sacrifices himself to save Nora and her bullet perforated boyfriend and is vaporized by some sort of science beam. Before you can say “they’re f’d in the b-hole), the Army shows up, and using a loud speaker broadcasting a disrupt-o signal, disable the robot before it can shine a light on the situation.

You never get to see the alien robot army, just the one tin can. The introduction of the criminal with a gun didn’t make sense. Not staying in the cocktail lounge didn’t make sense either because hey, free booze! And when the “army” shows up, there’s only a couple of jeeps. And too much time is spent talking and not screaming.

Target Earth needed to find a bulls-eye.

One Billion Frankensteins

Like the monster itself, Frankenstein branded movies just won’t die. Hence, Frankenstein: Day of the Beast, which “coincidentally” arrives weeks within Victor Frankenstein (2015), the big-budget re-imagine of the seriously overplayed story of science’s first zombie. Here’s how the one billionth version of Frankenstein goes…

“In a foggy winter morning, a raft brings a priest to an isolated island. He is getting paid to perform a wedding ritual under very mysterious conditions. The groom is Victor Frankenstein, and the young and beautiful bride is his cousin Elizabeth. Seven armed and dangerous mercenary soldiers have been hired to protect her against something huge that hides in the woods, awaiting for that wedding night to be consummated. Victor is the only one who knows the truth about their enemy. His secret will be paid with the life of his private army, whose men will die one by one, as the creature gets closer to his target: the bride.”

He’s marrying his cousin? Now there’s a way to make more deformities in the lab.

IMDB.com shows Frankenstein: Day of the Beast as having a November 2011 release. Like Victor’s famous monster, the movie must’ve arrived D.O.A. as I don’t recall hearing anything about it since. (Apparently, it was only released in Germany and Japan. I can see Germany, but Japan? They already have enough knock-offs.)

But hey, thanks to the science of licensing and distribution, you can now see Frankenstein: Day of the Beast on Blu-ray™ in the States and Canada via a sweet hook-up with SGL Entertainment.

To be fair, even though the mere thought of YET ANOTHER interpretation of the 1818 Mary Shelley novel (Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus) gives me science gas, the trailer for FDotB looks to have high production values/makeup/effects. That’s puts them ahead of at least a half-billion versions.

Z-Grade Godzilla

“This guy makes Godzilla look like a p*ssy!” shouts one army guy shooting his machine gun at an alien monster the size of Godzilla’s recycling bins.

Reptilian (1999), a Korean creation (Yonggary) ripped off by American filmmakers, looks a heckuva lot like the U.S. version of ’Zilla and has a lot of the same mannerisms and breath problems. Its bones discovered in the desert, Reptilian is unearthed by nefarious archeologists who, after deciphering hieroglyphics left by an alien race, have figured out an invasion is forthcoming – with a revived Reptilian clearing the road.

The climactic battle in New York is an almost scene-by-scene lift from Godzilla ’98, with the military causing most of the downtown damage by missing(!) the 40-story reptile with their warheads.

While the destruction is impressive and the effects “meh” passable, it’s the unintentionally hilarious (and embarrassing) dialogue (see first sentence)  that’ll destroy your funnybone. Army guys buzzing Reptilian with jet packs strapped to their backs (human bottle rockets) is right up there with the Battlestar Galactica-esque aliens looking like they were glued together as if made from a modeling kit.

Leave Reptilian buried in the dirt – it’s where he belongs.