Rock ‘N Roll Halloween, 50% Alien, Terrible Giants

KISS is one of most popular and successful rock bands in the world. You may have heard of them. KISS (Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley, Peter Criss) has sold over 100 million records and are regarded as one of the most influential music artists of all time. Don’t think so? How many people have you seen sporting Bob Dylan tattoos?

To commemorate this Halloween season, KISS — kings of the nigh time world AND kings of merchandising — have come out with a Halloween spin on their classic t-shirts and hoodies: “All Hallow’s Eve,” “Rock And Roll Demons,” “Zombies of the Night,” “Rock And Roll Hell,” “Kiss-O-Lantern,” “Searching For The Darkness,” and “Creatures of the Deep.” You can obtain them HERE for a scary $30.00 per shirt and $65.00 per hoodie.

So while we go to a dermatologist to get our Bob Dylan tattoo removed, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not be worthy of a tramp stamp…

BITCH ASS / October 14, 2022 (VOD)

“A gang initiation goes wrong when a group of four recruits break into a house of horror — and they’re all forced to play deadly games for their lives. Win and you live — lose and you die.”

I liked this better when it was called Saw II (2005).

THE LAIR / October 28, 2022 (Theaters, Digital, VOD)

“Sgt. Tom Hook as he is tasked with leading a unit to find Lt. Kate Sinclair after the Royal Air Force fighter pilot was shot down in Afghanistan. Pursued by insurgents, Sinclair has sought shelter in an abandoned bunker where she unwittingly releases the Ravagers – a half human-half alien man-made biological weapon. Hook and his team, accompanied by a handful of British SAS troops, must save Sinclair from insurgents and the Ravagers before they overrun the area and threaten the entire world.”

Half alien/half human. Kinda makes you wonder — which half would work best…alien top/human bottom or human top/alien bottom? Advantage #1: You could scare the conspiracy out of people with an alien top, and have a lot of fun flashing your human bottom on buses. Advantage #2: You could scare the bus pass out of people with a human top, and have a lot of fun baring your alien bottom on…Uranus. (Sorry — seriously unable to control myself.)

EVIL DEAD RISE / April 21, 2023

“In the fifth Evil Dead film, a road-weary Beth pays an overdue visit to her older sister Ellie, who is raising three kids on her own in a cramped L.A. apartment. The sisters’ reunion is cut short by the discovery of a mysterious book deep in the bowels of Ellie’s building, giving rise to flesh-possessing demons, and thrusting Beth into a primal battle for survival as she is faced with the most nightmarish version of motherhood imaginable.”

A new Evil Dead movie? Did I just wake up at Disneyland™, the happiest place on Earth? Just like waiting in line to ride Disney’s Splash Mountain™, it’s gonna be a while before we get to revisit evil. Unlike the line to ride Splash Mountain™, Evil Dead Rise will be worth the wait.

LEIO: THE TERRIBLE GIANT / Pending release US 2023

“A once-famous singer who returns to his hometown and takes part in a water field drilling contest, hoping to win a large cash prize. But what they do not realize is that a mysterious beast lurks underground.”

Leio was released in the summer of 2022 in Thailand and is now getting a US makeover. Just wondering out loud why they call him the “terrible giant”? He seems nice.

Lollipops and Death

The Lovely Bones (2010) is one of those rare combinations of the horrifying act of child murdering built around a ghost netherworld full of sunshine and lollipops.

Susie Salmon, a 14 year-old neighborhood girl the absolute embodiment of innocence, is heartbreakingly raped and murdered by the old guy across the street in their neighborhood. Not a plot spoiler — as stomach-turning as the premise is, they want you to know this. Thanks a lot.

Susie’s spirit is caught in a Disney™-esque fantasy world (the lobby of Heaven, as it turns out) where she can see her family — and the guy who killed her. And she’s joined by the killer’s other victims in the afterlife as well. Man, that’s some f’d up club to be in.

 Even without the dazzling eye-candy fantasy stuff (I made up the lollipop part), this one’s a stunner, as the grieving father – an emotionally destroyed Mark Wahlberg – is just mere feet from the guy who killed his daughter the entire time, and believes Susie is trying to contact him from beyond the realm with clues. marky Mark spends his days relentlessly tracking down the guilty party. He better hurry – the killer’s next target: Susie’s sister, Lindsay. Bruuuutal.

Not easy to watch, The Lovely Bones doesn’t end the way you want it to, but it offers some closure all the same. A lollipop might help ease your pain.

I See Sea People

What was thought to be a flick about mermaids who lure stinky fishermen to their watery graves, then crack their skulls open like clam shells and feast on their gooey duck brains, turned out to be a fantasy Disney-esque tear-jerker. Dammit.

Hume Cronin, all but reprising his role in Cocoon (1985, another breast-less feature), is an actual mermaid (but he prefers to be called “Sea People”). He and his mermaid wife eat seaweed and pump seawater into their sleeping tanks, which are industrial strength aquariums.

Hume (that name sounds SO made up) looks as old as the barnacles growing on the bottom of the boats that sail in and out of the unsuspecting harbor. He has no fins, visible gills, or creature-like attributes, but does manage a decent dog paddle. In short, Sea People (1999) is out to sea.

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.

Melting Faces and Exploding Limbs

After being successfully Kickstarter’d, Lab Rats (2015), the British eco-horror film short’s trailer, is popping up like, um, rats all over the Internet. As promised via their crowd-funding pitch, Lab Rats is filled with “melting faces and exploding limbs.”

A relief to see melting faces that aren’t associated with binge drinking.

Anyway, here’s what the lab cooked up: “Kat and her eco-warrior friends embark on a mission to expose the international bio-chemistry company, Ring-Amnion, as liars after a tip-off that they ran an animal testing lab – despite their public profile claiming otherwise.”

“The gang – and Kat’s 20,000 blog followers – are eager to find out what Ring-Amnion have been hiding as they break into an old building, but they aren’t prepared for what they find inside…”

Crossing fingers here – I hope they find melted faces inside. Wanna see a teaser for yourself? Click HERE.

I know what you’re thinking – there were Lab Rats before this, 2012 to be exact. Lab Rats – currently on its fourth season – is a Disney™ produced “sci-fi” show featuring a group of family TV-sanitized teens who have bionic super powers. Think Fantastic Four on high doses of Clearasil™.

Time Traveling Hookers

Timegate: Tales of the Saddletramps (1999) a loose interpretation of sci-fi, finds two restlessly horny wives whose attempts at seduction with their workaholic hubbies fall on limp sheets.

Conveniently, they discover a magic mirror that transports them back 100 years to the Old West where they find they’re new recruits at a bordello. (The script writers must be paid in Ferraris.)

“But Grace…we’re prostitutes!” frets horny girl #1.“I know – don’t you just love it?” giggles horny gal #2. If there’s a plot that outlines the rest of the movie, I haven’t found it. The plentiful boobs are visually tasty, but tragically the sex scenes are all but Disney-esque.

Rent Saddletramps to get your girlfriend/wife/Old West hooker in the mood without grossing her out. For the rest of us that prefer our sci-fi to be a lot more hardcore, this one stays in the past.

Kiss My Abyss

The USS Montana, a ballistic missile submarine, sinks near the b-hole gapingly deep Cayman Trough, where weird fish swim/poo. American and Soviet ships and subs race to salvage it (the re-sale of ballistic missiles on eBay™ is freakin’ HUGE).

A hurricane is forecast to make waves about the time a Navy SEAL goes all high-pressure nervous system crazy and plans to drop a nuke into the Trough to kill the NTIs (non-terrestrial intelligence) thought to be behind the sinking of the Montana. So it wasn’t gangsta clams as previously thought.

A brave dumbass volunteers to sink several miles down in a liquid-filled suit to disarm the nuke, the NTI’s show up looking like Disney™-made jellyfish to save the day. (Their first appearance was in the shape of a water hot dog, probing the underwater sub-station to check things out, a cool effect I often use in the shower.)

But it’s not the aliens that rock The Abyss (1989); it’s the fluid-choked people drama that scores. The parts where a chick has to voluntarily drown herself in order to be rescued, the bomb disarming descent into the bottomless toilet void, and the liquid-filled diving suit scene where the guy has to load his lungs with some sort of liquid, are the things that make lower extremities clench. And the NTIs? Yeah, kinda cool for water hot dogs and such.

Dead Sea

Hard to not be a fan of water-based horror movies. The ocean, as it turns out, is full of awesome life-hurting creatures, like Dinocrocs and Sharktopuses, all designed to make you ruin your bathing suit. So it is with great anticipation I look forward to Dead Sea, arriving on the outdated DVD platform April 15, 2014.

OK, so everything about Dead Sea seems generic, from the title (how about H2O-Noooo!?), to the DVD cover art (yet another chick in a bikini moments prior to being devoured – see Piranha 3D / 2010 and spin around from there), the kicker line: “It’s Feeding Time” (how about: “You’ll Wet Yourself”?), to the plot: “A marine biologist is thrust into the violent paranoia surrounding a town preparing for the return of a legendary serpentine creature.” All “meh” stuff. But c’mon – sea monster!

But judging by Dead Sea’s art, the monster’s mouth (at least I hope that’s its mouth) looks suspiciously similar to the alien octopus creature(s) in the hysterically cool Grabbers (2012), in which a coastal Irish fishing village defends themselves from sea monsters by getting as drunk as possible. (The creatures react to booze like vampires do to garlic. They must be from Utah.)

A great primer for multi-tentacled mega creatures of the deep is 1954’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, based on a novel (book with extra pages) by sci-fi fantasy author Jules Verne and adapted by Disney™, a corporation long known as being a monster factory.

Anyway, regardless of Dead Sea’s perceived shortcomings, I will dive headfirst into this ocean of terror – and this time I might even wear someone’s swim suit.

Raiders of the Lost Shark

From the makers of Jurassic Shark (2012) now comes Raiders of the Lost Shark, an admittedly tongue-in-cheek chew-a-thon done on a budget that wouldn’t cover your monthly shark repellent bill.

Literally zero is known about the plot at this time. However, they might think about re-titling the movie as it’s been used before, going all the way back to the heavily-copyrighted Raiders of the Lost Shark Disney cartoon in 1994.

Then there’s the upcoming The Ghastly McNastys: Raiders of the Lost Shark kid’s book by Lyn Gardner and Ros Asquith that comes out in May 2014.

Then there are the Raiders of the Lost Shark movie poster spoofs littering the internet…

I could go on. But I choose not to at this time as I’m busy hunting down a replacement DVD of the holiday shark movie, Santa Jaws. I wore out my last two copies.