That ’80s Werewolf

The 1989 werewolf movie Night Shadow has more problems than just its super lame name. In human form, the werewolf is a drifter who looks like he spent the night under a cactus along the desert highway he trolls for victims. And he never utters a single word though the entire movie and just glare stares at you until you’re hypnotized. Or bored. (Growls don’t count as words, they’re just one long syllable.)

A big city news reporter gal comes back to her home town on vacation just as bodies and half-eaten parts are showing up like highway litter. Then there are three young guys who joke their way through the whole thing, all with bad mullets and mid-drift tank tops. (Those things were outdated the minute they went on sale.) The Asian member of the trio happens to be a martial arts expert (and motel fix-it dude) and Bruce Lees several bikers who are trying to have a romantic moment with a screaming biker chick in one of the rooms.

What does this have to do with the werewolf? I’m still trying to figure that out. And speaking of, the woolly bully makes his first fully formed moment one hour and seven minutes into the 90 minute flick. When he makes with the fur, he looks like a sheep that needs to be sheared.

The werewolf in human form has been staying at the roadside motel and stalking the big city girl, attempting to put her under his leash. (When he stares long enough, lightning bolts flash around his eyes. Wish I could do that. Then I’d be a millionaire or something.) He keeps maggot covered body parts snacks in the dresser where neatly folded clothes and/or local magazines go.

The local sheriff, whose hot for the city chick (they almost smooched, for cryin’ out loud), ends up in a face off with the werewolf in an abandoned warehouse. The kung-fu kid, who was being blamed for all the maggot-y chew bones, comes to the aid of the sheriff, whose deep in the doghouse with this non-speaking wolf-man.

Painful ‘80s hairstyles, day-glo clothing, Valley girl dialogue, and overly furry werewolf costume. Night Shadow is totally fer sure non-bombdigity.

British Zombie Bikers

The rules are simple: make a deal with the devil and you get immortality and candy. Break a deal with the devil and you get turned into a frog and eat house flies and grub worms for all eternity. (I’ve only eaten gummi worms, so probably gonna pass on any deal-breaking.)

That’s the premise of the British zombie biker horror oddity, Psychomania (aka, The Death Wheelers/1973). But the young, heck-raising youths wearing spook masks and mocking traffic laws who each commit suicide so that they can come back from the dead in “forever in blue jeans,” think being dead is fun. In fact, it suits them, as their motorcycle gang name is The Living Dead. Cute.

Tom, the gang’s uncombed leader, loves black magic. He was tainted by evil as a crib rat when his mom made an immortality pact with the devil. Now that he’s old enough to make his own satanic bargains, Tom kills himself and returns exactly as he was prior to the expire (no rotting faces or unbrushed teeth), and convinces the rest of the direction-less youth to do the same.

How the gang commits suicide is not very imaginative or graphic: Jumping out of a plane and not pulling the parachute cord, wrapping oneself in chains attached to a cement brick and taking swimming lessons, jumping out of a hi-rise window, driving face first into oncoming traffic… If you waver, you actually die and don’t get to rejoin your zombie biker brothers and their quest to be bothersome to the community.

They drive their motorbikes into the grocery store (punks – there’s tons of parking outside), crashing into carefully stacked canned goods (good marketing). Then they drive into a police station holding a few of their rapscallion pals in conjunction with murder (lots of bloodless associative deaths) and break them out. Then they meet at a fog-drenched place called “The Seven Witches” (a field filled with standing stones) and question one members’ lack of pact. It’s Tom’s girlfriend. She tried offing herself with pills, but goofed up with the goofers and didn’t die. Now Tom and the gang want to die her for good.

Meanwhile, Tom’s mom has had enough of her son’s troubleness and summons the devil (some old guy in a suit, with a sword and a jeweled magic ring) to renege on their arrangement. She’s warned about the whole “frog for eternity” thing, but she doesn’t care — just get it over with and stop that Tom.

With absolutely no blood, gore or even salty language, Pyschomania wraps up with The Living Dead turning into cocooned corpses and finally into stones, which the devil further augments his collection, which he keeps in “The Seven Witches” front lawn. And Tom’s girlfriend who was about to be killed? She’s now single, but lives to die another day.

Frankenstein Created Bikers

Frankenstein Created Bikers. Great movie title. Better still is the trailer for this “coming soon” (sometime in 2016) grindhouse offering: boobies, gore, explosions, tattoos, bikers with tattoos, guns, monsters, and some smacko foot to the face MMA action. Only thing missing is me!

Here’s what’s on the movie’s highway to Hell…

“A resurrected outlaw biker finds himself addicted to the substance that brought him back from the grave. In order to get his daily fix, his gang is forced to do the bidding of two sadistic scientists attempting to capture a biological mutation and perform a human head transplant on kidnapped teenagers.”

“When his disgruntled ex-girlfriend is released from prison, she embarks on an explosive manhunt for her former lover and his strung-out pack of degenerates. With three dysfunctional bounty hunters, a rival motorcycle gang and an army of machine-gun toting strippers, it becomes a race against law-enforcement for bragging rights to the gang leader’s demise.”

Says the back-from-the-dead biker: “There is no hope…no God…no salvation here. Only pain.” Sounds like he just described my last hard drinking night.

Monsters on motorcycles is not a new concept. One must only turn back the pages of time to 1971 when the world was given the gift of Werewolves on Wheels. That one had boobies, blood rituals, black robed monks, satanic rituals, booze, and bikers who thumbed their beards at road safety. Only thing missing was me!

The Joi of Bigfoot

The best bait to lure Bigfoot out into the open? Gorgeous women in bikinis. Shocked that Bigfoot hunters haven’t thought of this before.

This isn’t the plot of Bigfoot, a 1970 sub-budget “horror” movie, but it should be. Rather, it’s just one part of a bigger tapestry that weaves together a horror legend (John Carradine), a supermodel (Joi Lansing), and dynamite-packin’ bikers with semi-combed hair. (What a bunch of disrespectful punks.)

Parachuting into the forest after her plane quits flying, Joi, with her flotation devices stored safely under her blouse, runs smack into Bigfoot. Elsewhere, a biker guy horizontally makes out with his bikini-clad new girlfriend, only to discover they’re  swapping spit on a Bigfoot burial ground. Guess who shows up to punch out the boyfriend (wicked right hook) and make off with the make-out girl?

The local sheriff doesn’t have time for this hair-covered nonsense, and pretty much doesn’t do much to solve the mystery of the missing women. So Biker Rick (the guy whose bricks were earlier flipped by Bigfoot), turns to hucksters for help. Some help – they plan to capture B-foot to exploit for financial gain. (“People will pay 50 cents to see it!”)

Meanwhile, the top-heavy abducted gals are tied up (!) by Bigfoot, where they hypothesize about their situation and give away a big clue as to the what lies ahead. (More than one Bigfoot, as it turns out – and they seem to be gooning out over something at the top of the mountain everyone’s partying/making out/peeing on.)

Finally, after much hippie bongo music, noisy motorcycles tearing up the woods and great one liners (“They’re practically sub-human, but they look like animals…”), the hucksters and Biker Rick (cool name) slog through the forest until they happen upon the abducted gals and the Bigfoot lair (not quite an apartment as it doesn’t even have a kitchenette).

And it’s here we get the “slap your head in astonishment” big surprise. The thing at the top of the mountain the other Bigfeet are fearful of is… I’ll just say that the hint lies in the Bigfoot creatures themselves, all of whom are female. Run with it. And the end? Has something to do with dynamite – and Joi Lansing running through the woods, barely keeping her mountainous region from popping out of her top.

P.S. Bigfoot fights a bear in this one. I thought they were friends. The bear probably owed him money. Or a honey-dipped pine cone. Man, I could sure go for one of those right now.

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™?

Vampires Heart Werewolves

A silly splatterfest done in old school grindhouse fashion, Blood Moon Rising’s (2009) plot, if there is one, is set in 1969 and revolves around two chicks who luv each other. (A lesbo vampire and a lesbo werewolf. Since neither shaves their legs, it’s hard to tell who’s the biter and who’s the barker.)

Because they’ve been dating since 1889, they have to wait until a full eclipse in order to, um, express their luv physically. This gets dinged up by Satan’s Goth daughter, who wants to bring an end everything on Earth. (Better to leave that up to the pros – politicians.)

The only thing in her Goth way is her granddaughter, a young hippie chick with a serious set of hi-beams, and a comic book dork boyfriend. So how do you stop people from Hell and brain-snacking zombies and vampire bikers and werewolves that look like they were pulled out of a soup line? With shotguns, of course. And some knives and a mini meat cleaver. You never know when one might come in handy.

Porn legend Ron Jeremy gets painted in the gore. They also have him stepping in dog doo doo. That’s nothing to him – you should see some of the girls he works with.

Blood Moon Rising’s jokes wear a bit thin, but it’s all in good dumbassery fun. Even with all the monsters, Sadie/Lucy, the hippie chick with two names and two big acting skills, is pretty good with a shotgun. She’s so cute, I’d let her shoot me any day.