Empire Sharks, Hockey Masks, Murderous Moms

Saw this mash-up of a Care Bear and Pennywise from It on eBay™, Think the going price is around $300. Not sure I want that hideous thing sitting in a corner, visually tasting my flesh. Still, it might keep solicitors from bugging my doorbell.

While I try and drum up $300, here are a few upcoming horror and sci-fi movies that may or may not scare the cotton out of you…

EMPIRE OF THE SHARKS (August 5, 2017/SyFy)
“In the future, most of Earth is covered by water and the only land is controlled by a warlord and his army of sharks. Humans are kept as food for the sharks until two friends risk their lives to rise against their captor and his legion of sharks.”

Sounds like Waterworld (1995) but with the more eating of humans. So yeah, YET ANOTHER Rent-A-Center ™ shark horror movie. These types of shark flicks are usually just bad video games. If you want a real shark movie that’ll make you pollute the water, try The Reef (2010). Just thinking about it is making me need to hide in the safety of my bathroom — until someone comes up with Toilet Sharks.

TO HELL AND BACK: THE KANE HODDER STORY
(August, 2017/England Film Fest)
“To Hell and Back is a harrowing story of a stuntman overcoming a dehumanizing childhood filled with torment and bullying in Sparks, Nevada. After surviving a near-death burn accident, he worked his way up through Hollywood, leading to his ultimate rise as Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series and making countless moviegoers forever terrified of hockey masks and summer camp. After decades of watching Kane Hodder on screen, get ready to meet the man behind the mask in To Hell and Back – n uniquely human story about one of cinema’s most vicious monsters.”

Kane Hodder, as many know, is the 6’4” monster behind such monsters as Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Jason X (2001), and as the deformed serial killer Victor Crowley in Hatchet (2006), Hatchet II (2010), and Hatchet III (2013). I say cast Hodder in the new Mary Poppins Returns 2018 remake — that’ll keep that persnickety b*tch from trying to teach the world manners.

AXEMAN 2: OVERKILL (October 17, 2017)
“When a band of crazed evangelicals, bank robbers and vigilantes descend upon Cutter’s Creek, there’s only one local legend that can separate them. And dismember them.”

Seems pretty cut ‘n dry to me — heh. Not really a fan of chop shop horror, but hey, crazed evangelicals and bank robbers need to taste the business end of the axe.

MOM AND DAD (2017/2018)
“A teenage girl and her little brother must survive a wild 24 hours during which a mass hysteria of unknown origins causes parents to turn violently on their own kids.”

It’s called parenting for a reason. This is what happens when you don’t clean your room. Speaking of, I’m gonna go do that right now as mom’s in town with a few days to kill.

Rent-Free Ghosts

Have to give credit to the Italian made Ghosthouse (aka, La Casa/1988). What it short sheets you in acting, dialogue and plot, it’s delightfully gory. Just the opening sequence alone has a slaughtered family cat, a hatchet through the top of dad’s formerly functioning head, and mom getting her face shredded and eye blown out by an exploding mirror before getting her neck sliced into lunch meat. A family slayed together, stays together.

That sets up the premise twenty years later of a young Boston ham radio operator and his emotional rollercoaster of a girlfriend intercepting an ominous call for help, along with an eerie cackle over looped spooky music. Using some sort of math he triangulates the signal and it leads them right to the very long-abandoned house the opening sequence murders took place. Seems some grandfathered evil still lives there rent free.

Teaming up with some age-similar squatters, they try to Scooby-Doo the crap out of the mystery. At the core of it is eleven year old Henrietta and her demoniacally-possessed jester clown doll. Even though she died all those years ago (locked in the basement and left to starve to death), she still has work to do. This includes showing up on TV with bleeding eyes, popping up in hallways and any one of the house’s 14 bedrooms in blinding white light, and packing around that evil-cackling clown doll.

The dialogue is so painful it makes your crevices itch. The acting ranks somewhere between “just graduated from junior high school to “will you please just stop talking?” Thankfully, Henrietta and her demon doll unleash double heck, turning the old mansion into a non-stop parade of haunted house cliches and gore.

Other than the entire thing, Ghosthouse’s paranormal activities are outright LOL: a bedroom where toys and pillow feathers encircle a victim as if an indoor tornado; An running unplugged and motor-less fan’s blade coming lose and frisbee-ing a new throat hole in another victim; Floorboards giving way to a bubble bath of thick milky goop that dissolves skin; A melt-y face skeleton wearing a Grim Reaper robe and brandishing a knife. But it was the blood coming out of a bathroom faucet that really put the frosting on this cadaver cake. And if you can get through it, the ending will put a grin on your non-sliced face.

Interesting note: The house featured in the film is the same one used in the splatfest The House by the Cemetery (1981). Wonder what it rents for on Zillow™?

Zombie Winos

The Raisins of Death. That’s how the title of the 1978 French zombie movie sorta translates. I don’t know why, but this rocks my world. Probably because I occasional sprinkle death raisins atop my dinner cereal.

So Les Raisins de la Mort (aka, The Grapes of Death) is a nicely gory horror flick that uses contaminated grapes (or “les raisins”) squished into wine that, when consumed with pinky extended, turns one into a rotting zombie. And here all this time I thought drinking wine turns you into a snob, or “snombie.”

How did the grapes get contaminated? Glad you asked. A worker at the Roublès winemaking vineyard becomes ill, complaining of a pain in his neck. (Either his boss, wife, or both is my guess.)

As the infection spreads to others via this pain in the neck, people meet painful ends: throats cut, assorted mouth bites, cars parking on your torso, stranglings, garden forks jammed into chests instead of nutritious salads, and best of all (or worst, depending on which side of the handle you’re on), living heads being chopped off with a hatchet. Makes sense when you think of the rudimentary wine-making tools they had back in the late Seventies.

As previously hinted, blood gooshes from every orifice, opening and so forth. Bright red blood, too. Not like that fake stuff you see on the news. But wait, there’s more – full frontal chick nudity, which comes with a side of bare naked boobies and glistening infected open wounds that look like someone glued rubber novelty vomit on said fun bumps. Lots of endless shrieking and screaming, probably caused by drinking face-pinching, sour ass wine instead of cold, refreshing beer.

Since everybody in France slurps wine – especially so during last week’s wine festival that infected the small village and made their faces turn into freshness-expired mini-mart soufflès – there’s no shortage of zombie attacks. That’s pretty much it, except that every single one of The Grapes/Raisins of Death actors and actresses have tongue-tangling names that no one but their mothers can pronounce. (Jean-Pierre Bouyxou? This guy is just begging to be turned into a zombie.)