Enchanting Garb, Fruit Cult, Alien Parents

A fairy/faerie in literature, art, European folklore culture and slasher grindhouse horror movies is defined as being a type of mythical being or legendary creature and a form of spirit, often described as being metaphysical, supernatural, or preternatural — with or without a butcher knife and/or chainsaw.

Not surprisingly, many women want to be fairies, a fantasy that started with Disney’s™ Tinker Bell and the Nutcracker’s Sugar Plumb Fairy (who sounds like a drug dealer). This fantasia annually fuels the sale of countless fairy costumes every Halloween. But while most of us are content to augment our wardrobe from Spirit Halloween™, one should look to Pinterest™ for fairy fashion options. 

These exotic and otherworldly gowns (or “dresses”) — suitable for cosplay or fantasy horror movies — can fetch thousands for an ensemble that probably shouldn’t be cleaned in a coin-fed washing machine. Also, you’d have to sell a lot of teeth to the Tooth Fairy to afford one.

So while we drink absinthe (fun fact: “The Green Fairy” is the nickname for absinthe) and fantasize about wearing one of these dresses to a bachelorette party and/or doing some light grocery shopping, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not tinker your bell…

WAKING KARMA / January 26, 2023 (VOD)

“Karma and her mother have spent their lives evading Paul, her cult leader father. With Paul closing in as Karma reaches adulthood, she and her mother flee to a friend’s remote compound. Paul tracks them there and traps them within its walls, putting Karma through a series of escalating tests designed to break her spirit and awaken an unholy inheritance that lives within her.”

So if she misbehaves, do we call her…“Bad Karma”? Heh.

SEEDS / January 31, 2023 (VOD)

Grieving mother Macha must track down her husband Andrew, a university professor who has been invited to a remote area of New England to take part in mysterious cult’s ritual in order to receive an inheritance from his uncle. The cult that worships the mystical and ancient power of the apple has also been infiltrated by the Catholic Church under the command of the very ambitious Cardinal Sinibaldi.”

An apple a day keeps organized religion away.

ONYX THE FORTUITOUS AND THE TALISMAN OF SOULS / Release pending 2023 (VOD)

“Amateur occultist Marcus J. Trillbury — aka Onyx the Fortuitous — is struggling. He’s misunderstood at home and work, but his dreams for a new life seem to be answered when he lands a coveted invitation to the mansion of his idol Bartok the Great for a ritual to raise the spirit of an ancient demon. He excitedly joins Bartok and his fellow eclectic group of devotees as they prepare for the ceremony, but pretty quickly it becomes apparent everything is not as it seems. As Onyx and his new friends fight to keep their souls, he must decide what he’s willing to truly sacrifice in order to meet his destiny.”

Marcus should worry more about getting beat up for having a dumb name than conjuring ancient demons.

ALIENS ABDUCTED MY PARENTS AND NOW I FEEL KINDA LEFT OUT / Release pending 2023 (Theaters/VOD)

“Itsy is new in town and her life seems over until she meets her space-obsessed neighbor Calvin, who believes his parents were abducted by aliens. An aspiring journalist, Itsy decides to write an exposé on Calvin but ends up discovering much more.”

Hey kid — your folks weren’t abducted. They abandoned you. Bet you’re feeling really left out now.

More Gore, The Merrier

The lurid Smash Cut (2009) is a clever — and at times — dead-on homage to splatter filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis, the guy behind such cultural treasures as Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), and The Gore-Gore Girls (1972). In fact, Smash Cut applies the framework of The Gore-Gore Girls, working in a sexy female journalist who teams up with a prissy nancy boy detective who has never failed at solving a case. Even the eye-gouging scene is back, though it sure looks like they just spliced footage from The Gore-Gore Girls into this one.

Able Whitman is a 70 year-old horror movie auteur whose latest movie, Terror Toy, is mercilessly ripped to shreds by critics and fans alike. He seeks solace in the bikini of his stripper girlfriend (who looks like she could be his granddaughter), and later crashes his car, killing her in non-reversible death. He puts her body in his trunk and goes back to work, only to get an inspiration: use real blood and real body parts in his film!

So Gigi Spot (really?) has a role in the movie, and all she has to do is lay there and rot. She doesn’t have any lines, though. Maybe in the sequel. April Carson, a TV news reporter, is in search of her missing sister (Gigi, duh) and enlists the help of Isaac Beaumonde, the aforementioned narcissistic private detective. He looks for clues and suspects Whitman, but can’t prove it. Yet.

April auditions for a scream queen job with Whitman and, in a moment of pure eewww, has her doing a scene from Hamlet with her sister’s head. (It was pretty rotted and not at all recognizable.) She gets the job and Whitman proceeds to round up more body parts and blood for his greatest cinematic achievement. As April and Issac close in, bladders start to splatter, reaching its rewarding nail gun climax.

A grindhouse movie about a grindhouse movie, Smash Cut is often cornball, but entertaining in how they managed to emulate the look and feel of z-grade horror movies of the ’60s. Real-life adult film star Sasha Grey has all the emotional range of an inflatable love doll, but she does look good in a tight, blood-splattered nurse uniform.

David Hess (playing Whitman) is in top form, maniacally cutting off limbs and poking eyes out with an exacto knife. You may remember him from such films as The Last House on the Left (1972) and Swamp Thing (1982). No nudity, but there is buckets of gore and a cameo by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself. Even though it sounds like an oxymoron, stick around for the blooper reel.

Printed Splatter, Foreign Demons, Immortal Daycare

Before there were iPads™ and “smart tablets,” you got your news and non-porn ads from newspapers. Those things were cool — lots of pictures, tons of useless information and you never had to plug it in or recharge it. It was in those newspapers that movie companies placed ads. And in the ’80s, you got gore and slasher movie ads, which were an art form unto themselves.

Author/horror movie expert Michael Gingold (Fangoria, Rue Morgue, Birth.Movies.Death, Time Out New York, Scream, The FrightFest Guide to Monster Movies, Shark Movie Mania), has a new book coming out October 9, 2018 called Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s, a compilation of all those luridly glorious horror movie/TV ads. And even more frightening is the price: $34.95. In 1980s money, that’s worth the price of nearly 140 newspapers. That’s some serious fire hazard buying power.

I’m thinkin’ that the reprinted horror movie ads are all black and white, which gives ‘em a grindhouse-y aesthetic. The book might have a few color ads, though, (I’m hoping to see The Evil Dead/1981 ads in full blood-esque color).

While we impatiently wait for October (why won’t my homemade time tunnel work? I put new double AA batteries in it…), here are a few upcoming horror movies/TV series that may or may not be worth cutting out of a newspaper or downloaded onto your maxi-iPad™…

WELLINGTON PARANORMAL (July 11, 2018/New Zealand)
“The new mockumentary series follows officers Minogue and O’Leary as a pair of paranormal cops focused not just on vampires this time. New Zealand’s capital is a hotbed of supernatural activity, so Officers Minogue and O’Leary take to the streets to investigate all manner of paranormal phenomena including ghosts, demonic possession and werewolves.”

This is the TV series sequel to the incredibly hilarious What We Do In The Shadows (2014) vampire movie, and will premier July 11, 2018 on New Zealand channel TVNZ. My antennae doesn’t reach that far. Word around the antennae store, though, is the follow-up movie is tentatively titled, We’re Wolves. Flippin’ genius.

OPEN 24 HOURS (2018)
“Mary knew her boyfriend James was the Rain Ripper serial killer. But she felt powerless to act until he forced her to watch another victim being slaughtered before her eyes — and then she set him on fire. On parole from prison despite everyone thinking she was guilty by proxy, and on medication to control her paranoid hallucinations, Mary gets a graveyard shift job at the remote Deer gas station. Then the killings begin. Is what’s happening real? Are they just blood-soaked delusions? Or does she really like to watch people murdered as her ex always intimated?”

Rain Ripper seems like a dumb name for a serial killer. And since when does a pyromaniac get a job at a gas station? That’s like me going to work for Anheuser-Busch. (Note to AB — I totally promise to stay drunk on the job, as I am a company man, through and through.)

THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW (2018/2019/Shudder™)
“A separated father Simon and his estranged twelve-year-old son, Finn, head to Vermont to repair an old farmhouse and encounter the malicious spirit of a previous owner, an infamously cruel woman named Lydia. With every repair Simon makes, he’s also making her spirit stronger…until a terrifying encounter leaves him doubting whether he can protect his son from the evil that’s making its way into their heads and hearts.”

“Infamously cruel.” That’s some serious street cred. Looks good on a resume, though, especially when applying to work for Yelp™.

NOS4A2 (2019/AMC)
“A young female artist named Vic McQueen discovers she has a supernatural connection with Charlie Manx, a seemingly immortal man who feeds off the souls of children and deposits their remains in a twisted holiday village known as Christmasland. Vic sets out to defeat Manx and rescue his victims while keeping her sanity intact.”

This one’s gonna be a TV series (whoohoo — binge time!) on AMC, and is based on the same named 2013 book by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son. I can see why he didn’t take his dad’s last name — then he’d be “Joe King/Joking”. Heh.

Italian Reanimator, Repeatable Stabbing, El Rey TV

Just discovered the Robert Rodriquez El Rey™ TV channel is no longer available through Sling TV™. Thinkin’ this isn’t a big loss as El Rey has been subjecting us to increasingly lazy programming and is nowhere near the grindhouse/bullets & brawlers/cult horror channel it promised to be. Example: El Rey keeps falling back on endless re-runs (with endless commercials) of bland stuff like V, Miami Vice, Air Wolf and Night Rider to be the channel’s meatloaf filler. And their Creature Feature Fridays? Intentional b-grade fare — like we all haven’t seen Gremlins (1984).

Best to stream channels like Shudder, Midnight Pulp and/or FrightPix (warning — LOTS of commercials that lock up on you) for your horror/sci-fi/grindhouse needs.

Speaking of which, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi you may or may not need. (Who are we kidding — we need horror all the time to escape from the horrors of reality.)

HAPPY DEATH DAY (October 13, 2017)
“A college student who relives the day of her murder with both its unexceptional details and terrifying end until she discovers her killer’s identity.”

Yeah, you’re probably thinking the horror version of 1993’s Groundhog’s Day (but with less stink gophers). But it sounds more like “Monday,” that riveting The X-Files episode (1999) in which a girl has to relive her loser boyfriend’s bank robbery attempt, ending in ka-BOOM! over and over. (Note to money selfie: Do NOT go into banks frequented by criminals dressed in dynamite, however stylish of the times.)

HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR (2017)
“West is destroyed by a huge loss and he wants to defeat death in order to have his beloved ones back. It’s just a different perspective but with the same result: lots of experiments with lost of failures and lots of reanimated and very aggressive corpses.”

Like Cheetos™/pork rinds in the cupboard, a few points of interest: First, this is the Italian take on Re-Animator, which came out over three decades ago. Secondly — and this is from the director: “Herbert West: Reanimator is a modular project. We start with a web series, them we’ll have a TV series and at the end of the journey we’ll have a feature film.” You had me at Cheetos™.

DESOLATION (2017)
“A mother takes her son and her best friend on a trip into remote wilderness to scatter his father’s ashes; they must confront their fears when a lone hiker begins following them.”

So a lone hiker is shadowing mom and company while they go to kick dad in the ash hole? The filmmakers might be intentionally trying to mislead us; what if the lone hiker is merely a park ranger with a dust pan? I’ve said it before — a clean forest is a happy forest.

WHO’S WATCHING OLIVER (2017/2018)
“A mentally unstable loner is lost in a life forced upon him. By night Oliver aimlessly wanders the streets and bars on what can only be described as a truly shocking and humiliating killing spree. His only savior and possible way out of a life he is desperate to escape comes in the form of the beautiful Sophia with her sweet eccentricity and naivety to the danger she has put herself in.”

Not sure how this is even a movie. Doesn’t this stuff happen in real life all the time? Why pay to see it — just hang out with mentally unstable loners in dive bars and dark streets. I’ll meet you there.

Camera Killers, Teen Angst Ghosts, Satan’s Better Halves

The horror movie flood tides continue to rise, with EVEN MORE releases lining up to un-line your coin purse…

PLAYING WITH DOLLS: BLOODLUST (November 1, 2016 / VOD)
“A group of aspiring actors are chosen for a reality horror TV show. In the show, they must survive being chased by a killer. The program is filmed with scores of tiny cameras in a cabin and the surrounding forest. What the contestants don’t know is that this murderer is a real killer and the television program is a ruse.”

The sequel to Playing With Dolls (2015), wherein a serial killer is decommissioned by an institute for the criminally insane, presumably to go back to his day job. The new one, though, has a much more clever twist. Tiny cameras? That’s flippin’ amazing.

SHUT IN (November 11, 2016)
“Mary is a widowed child psychologist who believes she’s being haunted by the disturbed foster child Tom, who ran away while under her care. The haunting episodes take place in Mary’s deserted New England home where she tends to her stepson who is in a permanent catatonic state following a car accident.”

So is Disturbed Tom a vengeful ghost or just a “kid at risk” candidate? And since when is a house deserted when there are people living in it? Color me confused.

THE SIMILARS (November 15, 2016 / VOD)
“On the rainy night of October 2, 1968, eight people waiting in a remote bus station for a bus heading to Mexico City start experiencing a strange phenomenon. Threatened by paranoia and fear, the strangers show the best and worst of themselves as they try to unravel the mysterious condition that is invading each of them like a virus.”

I liked this better when it was called The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (The Twilight Zone, episode #22 / aired March 4, 1960). Exact similar plot. Word to your mother.

BRIDES OF SATAN (pending crowd-funding)
“Brides of Satan is a cinematic love story to the early exploitation films of the 1960s, The grindhouse revenge thrillers of the 70’s, and the apocalyptic punk rock 1980s. It’s a kitchen sink, genre f*ck – of action, B-movie and horror, featuring a gang of unlikely anti-heroes & heroines. Recommended for fans of Kill Bill (2004), Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (1965), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Death Wish (1974). Project is currently 1/4 into principle photography – we Need YOU to help COMPLETE this modern revenge thriller!”

As of today (October 31, 2016) Brides of Satan has only raised $1,368 from 14 backers on Indiegogo™. With 17 days left on the green mile clock, it might be an economic pipe dream for them to hit their target of $66,666.66. That number seems familiar for some reason and… Oh, I remember – that’s my phone number. P.S. Lend them your bit coins HERE.

LOL Horror & Sci-Fi

Three new horror hopeful hits headed in this general direction. There’s probably more movies coming out, but I need to spend the day combing my hair YET AGAIN, so three is all you get from me on this 23rd day of the third month of the year 2016.

First up is The Snarling. Cool title. It could be in reference to anything from a werewolf or mad raccoon, to a bitter bear or my neighbor lady whose facial muscles are botoxed to the point she looks like her stretched skin is gonna pop.

Anyway, here’s the skinny on The Snarling, already screened in the U.K., but not here. I don’t know why: “When a cursed new horror film is being made in their village, locals Les, Mike and Bob see their chance to cash in and get famous. As the local Detective Inspector and his hapless sergeant Haskins eventually trace a link in recent bloody mutilations to the film, the race is on to stop the killings before our local heroes get caught up in the real blood and guts.”

Bloody mutilations is an oxymoron.

Next up is First Man on Mars, a spoof on The Martian (2015). In this one the send a guy to Mars, but he comes back infected with space gunk, turning him into a “crazed, savage monster with an unquenchable thirst for human flesh.”

Here’s the splashdown on First Man on Mars (release pending 2016): “In 2003 billionaire astronaut Eli Cologne began his journey through space to become the first man on Mars, but something went horribly wrong. The space craft crashed undetected in a remote part of Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina, and he’s been hunting both human and animal prey in the swamps for years. For small town sheriff Dick Ruffman, it’s a race against time to find the man-turned-monster before he kills again in this horrifying and hilarious satire of low budget drive-in grindhouse creature features from the 1970s.”

Crazed, savage monster with an unquenchable thirst for human flesh is an oxymoron.

Lastly, the brilliantly punned Australiens (releasing June 14, 2016) is a comedic take on an alien invasion set in the Land of Roo: “An extraterrestrial armada launches a nationwide assault on Australia. Seems the other nations of the world are far too insulted by their exclusion from the attack to come to Australia’s aid. Car-chasing spaceships, martial-arts aliens, giant killer robots and more.”

Australia doesn’t need our help – they have tasty beers. And you can never lose when you have tasty beers.

Wrecker: Tab-Expired Horror

It’s always painful to see Hollywood to run so dry of ideas that they shell out good pocket coupons to produce cheap/cheesy horror like Wrecker (releasing November 6, 2015): “Best friends Emily and Lesley go on a road trip to the desert. When Emily decides to get off the highway and take a ‘short cut,’ they become the target of a relentless and psychotic trucker who forces them to play a deadly game of cat and mouse.”

Not only is Wrecker NOT an original idea with a crappy title, who would pay to see a movie what you can see on a freeway any day of the week?

Wrecker’s plot is a direct lift from Stephen Spielberg’s Duel (1971), in which McCloud (or “Dennis Weaver”) is relentlessly pursued across dirty desert back roads by a 18-wheeler driven by a malevolent invisible trucker.

This was mimicked by Elliot Silverstein’s The Car in 1977, in which Amityville Horror’s James Brolin goes up against a possessed black car that “vroom-thump-thumps” anyone brave enough to use a crosswalk in Utah.

And picking up the pieces and running with that, who could forget Christine, the 1983 Stephen King horror movie that featured a “body by Chrysler, soul by Satan” ’58 Plymouth Fury that could return to showroom condition after being engulfed in flames and making griddle cakes out of thugs.

Then came Maximum Overdrive (another Stephen King adapted movie) in 1986 that not only turns a huge truck (with Spider-Man’s bestie the Green Goblin’s face on the front grill) into a “devastation wagon,” but anything mechanical that held a grudge against their human slave masters. (Can opener: “Take that, you opposable digit oppressors!”)

Let us not forget the Australian Road Train (aka, Road Kill), which came out in 2010. In that one the monster truck is a rolling grindhouse, running on the goop left over after it throws you in the back and food processes you into energy-efficient goop. (They got this idea from 2007’s really funny dark horror comedy, Blood Car.)

While we’re on the subject of all things vehicular homicidal, there’s the “destined for the junk yard” Super Hybrid (2010) that had a souped up Prius™-y type hybrid not yielding to the right of way of pedestrians.

Want more? There’s plenty out there – especially on the freeway.

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.