Not My Earth

Even though he’s not from this Earth (or any other Earths for that matter, “Mr. Johnson” is a creepy old man with dark glasses who needs constant blood transfusions. Kinda like looking into a mirror. If he doesn’t get said body beverage, his juice will turn into dust and he’ll become not unlike powered Kool-Aid™.

So what the flippin’ flap? Why can’t Mr. Johnson get his own dang blood from his own dang planet? For starters, his home world of Davanna (that sounds so made up) has been flash mobbed by nuclear war. Looks like Republicans exist on other worlds as well. Old Man Johnson is here to test our blood to see if it’ll help keep his fellow Johnsons from going double extinct.

Johnson uses telekinesis and eyeless eyeballs to command people to do his bidding, like his doctor, for instance. He even manages to talk Nadine, the doc’s sassy/hot nurse, into moving in to his multi-roomed house to give him nightly blood transfusions. He has a young male assistant/driver to round up park bums with the promise of alcohol for experimental purposes and different “phases” of his program. Free booze or not, you don’t want to be one of his experiments — they end up in the basement furnace. Party foul — that’s where recyclables go.

With human firewood missing all over town, the cops are closing in. Johnson unleashes a flying umbrella brain sucking creature that lands on your head and sucks out your brains. That’s kinda cool, but does it hold up in the rain?

Seconds before Johnson can remote-control Nadine into an experiment, the cops close in and turn on the sirens to make the car chase scene more official. Before they can shoot him in the umbrella, it’s the blaring alarm that causes Johnson to crash AND burn. (It was earlier revealed he’s highly sensitive to loud sounds. Guess that’s why aliens aren’t into metal. Pity.)

Final note: Not of This Earth (1957) is in black and white, so all those bottles of “blood” in Johnson’s fridge might very well be powdered Kool-Aid™.

Four-Story Horror

They should have put a sticker on Rampo Noir’s (2005) DVD box cover that said, “Warning: Art Inside.” Four short, artsy fartsy Japanese horror stories, one of which is only seven minutes long, with no dialogue or sound, and a naked guy wandering around. Titled, Mars’ Canal, I interpreted it as being a commentary on the escalating price of rump roast.

Mirror Hell concerns a guy who thinks he’s cuter than chicks (he isn’t), and makes ornate hand mirrors out of a rare chemical found in dirt. When a woman he’s jealous of looks in the mirror, her faces melts off. They do not show the face-melting, which I felt was a noticeable discrepancy.

Caterpillar involves the wife of an army lieutenant coming back from the war as just a torso and head. Oh, he’s still alive, but unable to talk. He can gurgle and make spit bubbles, though.

The last one, Crawling Bugs, is about a guy who kills a woman and, in order to preserve her beauty, tries embalming her. That’s a lot harder to do than the instructions indicate. She starts to rot, so he takes acrylic paint and covers her browning skin in lovely hues of red, blue, yellow — all the corpse complimentary colors.

But internal gases are building up and she’s looking like a beached Free Willy. When the cops find him, he’s in his underwear, between her legs, with his head buried in a slit he made in her stomach. Best line of the movie occurs when they pull him out, and he turns to look at them: “What?” Couldn’t have summed up this movie better.

Terror Birds: Droppings From the Sky

Terror Birds, as the ad poster indicates in entry level Photoshoppery, is “hatching soon.” As you can see, there is a monster bird claw coming out of a giant egg. And hatching is what giant eggs do. So that makes it a clever turn of phrase, yes?

No. It’s Art Institute™ grade advertising at best. But I digress. The real reason for griping is that Terror Birds, an obvious cash-in to Jurassic World’s (2015) rampaging box office success using once-thought extinct dino birds as the movie’s antagonists, has already been done. Several times, in fact.

One example: Pterodactyl, starring “terror birds,” was released in 2005 and had rap star Coolio shooting machine guns at the prehistoric monsters. (Not a fan of rap music, but Coolio is pretty dang cool.) Terror Birds stars a bunch of generic, scrubbed and polished white kids straight outta Scooby-Doo™ and/or Disney™. There’s your target audience right there.

On top of this, Terror Birds even steals concept art from Pterodactyl to the point of plagiarism. But that’s the least of anyone’s worries, as you can see by the plot:

“When Maddy Stern discovers her father has gone missing during a routine birdwatching excursion, she and her college pals trek out into the wilderness to find him, only to end up in a wealthy scientist’s desolate ranch aviary, where they encounter a pair of giant, hungry terror birds believed to be extinct for centuries.”

Now compare that to the plot of Pterodactyl: “A dormant volcano deep with the Turkish forest holds within it a deadly secret. Perfectly preserved, a nest of pterodactyl eggs are ready to hatch…”

Couple that with Coolio, steaming piles of pterodactyl droppings, machine guns, a volcano, and you have quality sci-fi entertainment. (Note to anyone who gives a dropping: stick it out to the end; there’s a final scene that’s pretty coolio.)

P.S. For all you hard-core pterodactyl fans, seek out The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (aka, Les Adventures Extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec/2010): “A popular (and supermodel hot) novelist flies around 1912 Paris on the back of a pterodactyl, dealing with her would-be suitors, the cops, and monsters.” Fun movie, but unfortunately no machine guns. Or Coolio, who wouldn’t be born for another 51 years. Pitié.

Baskin Evil

Baskin is another one of those indie foreign horror movies I saw a trailer for about 1,300 beers ago, but have dutifully waited for its release while sitting in a dive bar. Judging by the new trailer, my patience is about to be rewarded.

First, the plot: “A group of Turkish police called in to a desolate area stumble upon a squalid and blood-soaked den of satanic ritual. Baskin is a visceral trip into the darkest pits of a very palpable evil.”

That’s an understatement. Baskin sports one of the more goopy/gory/goon-out trailers in recent memory.

First heard of Baskin in 2013, but was alerted through the e-grapevine it’s premiering at the 40th Annual Toronto Film Festival 2015 during the “Midnight Madness” line-up. Wish I could go, but I can’t stay up that late.

Some funny trivia about Baskin I copied/stole off the Internet: “The film was shot independently in Istanbul, Turkey, during the height of the police brutality and Gezi resistance that hit the headlines worldwide. It was a risky night shoot with actors dressed as cops, two police cars, and a live goat.”

A goat. I thought those things were extinct. That they found a live one means this movie is gonna kick göt, which ironically sounds like “goat” but is translated from Turkish to “ass.” Heh.

Demonic Tenants

In The Landlord (2009) a property owner can’t collect the rent as Hell demons keep eating his tenants. But that’s his job – to keep the cupboards full of chow, or else the demons will eat him. Not seeing an up side to all of this, especially when the landlord has to clean the bloody mess after each meal. At least he gets to keep the damage deposit.

Tyler (the landlord) inherited the three-story old house from his devil-worshiping parents. (I wonder if my parents do that kind of stuff? Looking at how I turned out, I’d have to say MORE THAN LIKELY.)

The two demons are constantly feenin’ for human fixin’s. Tyler’s not totally on board with this but plays waiter for their insatiable hunger because, hey, DEMONS. If that wasn’t a mouthful to deal with, all this bloody body buffet is drawing the attention of the cops, one of which is Tyler’s sister. Gasp out loud!

The Landlord is an ultra low-budget comedy horror flick that, while inherently dumb, is momentarily entertaining. The demons look totally fake, though. To see a real one, ask your devil-worshiping parents.

Texas Vampires

This artery-rippin’ sequel of From Dusk ’Til Dawn (1996) is a pretty cool take on vampires. Since these undead heads are made from Texans, they wear snakeskin boots, drive big black Eldorados and have teeth the size of San Antonio lollipops (jalapeños).

A group of poor robbers head south of the border to steal five million dollars (or $53,565,073.88 pesos) from a bank guarded by a minimum wage security employee. Along the way one of the robbers goes into the Titty Twister Club (they still had that cool sign left over from the first movie) and gets bit on the collar area by a bartending vampire. (And no, he wasn’t serving Bloody Marys, though you think he would, you know, just for inside laughs ’n stuff). He then sucks on the rest of his gang. When the cops show up (not realizing it’s their last day on the job), it’s carnage ala’ mode.

Killer action (heh), campy gore, clever camera angles, which includes a vampire chomping down on a throat – from the inside point of view from its mouth! Despite the fact there’s only one sex scene (barely showing any boob), it does lead to a shower scene which plays as a nifty tribute to Psycho (1960). All the robbers turn into suckers, except one. If he can last the night, he gets all the cash/pesos/vampire coupons and the keys to the Eldorado.

The shoot-out between the cops and neck-suckers that lasts until daybreak is pretty much the Bout to Suck The Blood Out of vampire bloodfests. Why can’t all movies – including romantic comedies – be like From Dusk ‘Til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999)?