Devil Dolls, Witch Wedding Crashers, Sharks

Been toying with the idea to do a run-down of all the streaming horror/sci-fi movie chanels. Turns out there’s a lot, so that means work. I’ll probably call in sick so as to not work. Shudder™ tops the short list of good ones, but it can’t match YouTube™ for its unlicenced use of practically every horror movie ever made in broadcast quality ranging from beer goggles to bent antenna. Anyway, try Midnight Pulp, American Horrors and/or Frightpix (warning — if you don’t pay Frightpix’s admittedly cheap subscription, you’re gonna have to endure a commercial every two minutes.)

Speaking of wading in crap, here’s a few upcoming ones to consider stepping in…

HEIDI (Available now)
“After investigating a neighbor’s attic, two high school pranksters are increasingly plagued by a series of disturbing, supernatural events involving a creepy, vintage doll named Heidi. As she stalks them day and night, no one will take their claims seriously until it is too late.”

An odd trend in horror movies these days, using painted wooden dolls as the source of all which plagues non-painted/non-wooden citizens. It came back with the Puppetmaster series and got more mileage with Annabelle from The Conjuring franchise (the doll now has its own stand-alone film coming out in 2017). Its moderate success spread to horror lite flicks as The Boy (2016) and The Doll (2016) to rat out a few.

This is nothing new; possessed dolls go way back in time and have a long history of gooning out people who own them. The one that got to me as a kid was that messed up Zuni hunting fetish doll in Trilogy of Terror (aka, Terror of the Doll) back in 1975. Soiled my Underoos™, I did.

7 WITCHES (April 14, 2017)
“As their big day approaches Cate and Cody should be celebrating, they’ve got their family with them, and rented an island for the big day. Unbeknownst to them their wedding falls on the day when a 100 year old curse comes to fruition. Instead of celebrating they find themselves fighting for their lives as a coven of witches rise for revenge.”

Time to fire your wedding planner. Geez, of all the things to disrupt the happiest day of your life (for a few months, anyway), you’d think it’d be a drunk relative and not a flippin’ witch. Wonder what the witches will give the bride as a household wedding gift — a broom? Heh.

SHARKNADO 5 (August 6, 2017)
“With much of North America lying in ruins, the rest of the world braces for the inevitable — a global sharknado. Fin Shepard and his family must put a stop to this disaster before Earth is completely obliterated.”

Man, this joke has worn itself so thin, it should be shown on wax paper. The best — and worse — part of these Sharknado droppings are the C-list “celebrities” lining up with make cameos inside the shark’s mouth. I don’t know if I’ll be flattered or insulted if they ever get around to calling me.

NAILS (2017)
“Dana Milgrom, a track coach who, having survived a near-death car accident, finds herself completely paralyzed and trapped inside her own body. While recovering she becomes convinced that an evil presence exists inside her hospital room and is intent on killing her. Believing her to be experiencing a mental breakdown, Dana’s family brush away her concerns. Becoming increasingly terrified, Dana soon realizes that she may not be the only target. Unable to leave her bed, she risks losing the ones she cares for most.”

If you’re seeing an evil presence in the hospital, it may be time to up the morphine drip. Then you won’t care who the entity goes after. High or not, it’d be really funny if the evil presence tripped over a full bed pan. Just thinking about it is making me LOL.

Junkie Werewolf

In the first sequel to the awesome Ginger Snaps lycanthrope trilogy, Brigitte, the beleaguered younger teen sister of Ginger, has been infected with the blood of her werewolf sister. In order to keep from having to shave her legs every five minutes, she distills an injectable serum from wolfsbane to keep the wolf within at bay. Yep, a junkie werewolf.

Documenting her tracks she makes a cut somewhere on her lower person (slightly below the Fun Zone) to calculate how long it takes to heal — and determines if she’s wolfing up a lot faster than, say, yesterday. She is.

Thinking Brigitte’s a drug addict, the cops dump her off in a halfway hospital full of abuse and substance abuse chicks. The guidance counselor is a reformed addict so she thinks she has Brigitte figured out. She does not. Where most girls are content to get high off pot, pills, cocaine, goofers and glue sticks, Brigitte, the counselor believes, found a way to get high off wolfsbane.

A socially-misfit pre-teen girl named Ghost, whose grandma or mom or aunt is in the burn ward wrapped up like a mummy, wanders the halls, assisting and spying wherever she can. She reads werewolf comic books and suspects Brigitte to be one.

Finding a way to escape the hospital, Brigitte and Ghost go to the little girl’s house out in the woods. A temporary shelter at best because a werewolf is after them. It was after them in the hospital, too, but I forgot to mention it. They set traps for the beast, but during the course of the night Brigitte discovers she and the werewolf outside are not the only monsters running loose.

Things get really (OK, I’ll say it again) hairy when the guidance counselor tracks them down and has an ugly confrontation that does not end in sexy results. Brigitte, unable to control her transformation any longer, starts getting long in the tooth, if you catch my drift. There are lots of cool scenes worth mentioning, but the one that really resonates is a dozen girls self-diddling in a therapy class. I have GOT to enroll in that class next semester.

Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed (2004) never pees on a fire hydrant of predictability, nor will you be able to figure out Ghost’s jaw-dropping secret until the last scene. (No, she’s not a werewolf or a mini Bigfoot). Superb lesbian werewolf entertainment. What’s that — you haven’t heard of a lesbian werewolf movie before? We need to talk…

Hellthcare

A car crash leaves super hot Amy’s boyfriend with a severely broken leg. This is indicated by a pained expression rather than the preferred snapping of bone and screaming. That the accident could’ve been prevented had someone been keeping their eyes on the road is not the point as the boyfriend is carted off in an ambulance and taken to a hospital that DOESN’T EXIST.

Along the way to the hospital she encounters people (street bum, police officer, preacher) who reveal their demonic, tar-drooling wrongness to Amy, saying stuff like, “You can’t have him, he’s ours now!” That must suck for her. Meanwhile, back in the Hellspital (my word for hospital — pretty cool, eh?), a bunch of centerfold-quality nurses tend to the boyfriend and draw blood on a daily basis. Beats sucking the blood out of a broken leg, I suppose.

These nurses later gather in a room, take off their clothes and squirt syringes filled with the collected blood into their mouths. Then they kiss each other on their mouths. I need to find out why my health plan doesn’t offer this benefit.

Amy finally manages to find her broken boyfriend, goes inside HELLSPITAL and encounters zombies that want to rub her buoyant shirt pontoons. Somehow she manages to get away with only a copped feel or two and intercedes right as the doctor is about to perform a slicectomy on the love of her life. Amy somehow manages to get him out of there, and just in time, too – the place is going up in flames…flames from HELL, no doubt.

In all, the ending of Room 6 (2006) is a lazy cop-out for all that effort. But for at least 61 minutes of this 90-minute movie, I was entertained…ish.

Dead and Buried: Obscene But Not Heard

Dead & Buried, a 1981 lurid crap classic and, despite its budgetary limitations, actually added a new twist to the zombie genre without evening knowing it or promoting itself as a zombie movie. But to tell you what it is, I’d have to spoil the entire thing. By doing so, as the neighbor’s 4 year-old kid says, will have me “going to jail for a very long time.”

Since I don’t want to go to jail for any length of time, I’ll just give you a few of the juicy details – and by that, I mean oozing, shiny juicy gore.

Potter’s Bluff is a small coastal New England town where its residents act nice at first, then bash you over the head with hard objects, tie you up, then light you on fire while you’re still screaming about being hit with hard objects. As you’re doing your best Joan of Arc impersonation, this large group of PB’s citizens take pictures and home movie footage, all the while showing about as much emotion as someone totally wasted on Zima™.

If you somehow manage to live, you get taken to the hospital, where a nurse will give you a co-pay lethal injection in the eye. Then off to the coroner you go, while the local sheriff searches for clues as to who is wasting gasoline and matches on tourists.

Daily explicit and grisly deaths, with the recently deceased showing up soon thereafter, fit as a fiddle, looking no worse for wear and tear (emphasis on the tear). The sheriff is flummoxed (word of the day calendar –sweet), but slowly starts to assemble the clues. It isn’t until he stumbles across footage of the townsfolk’s handiwork that he loses it, especially since one clip involves his wife and… Uh oh.

During this, the emotionally distraught sheriff also discovers who is behind all this madness. And it’s right here we get the money shot. In a sweet twist, the horror of all this “bringing ‘em back to life” whack-a-do pays off like a max bet penny slot machine. Did for me, anyway.

FYI: Due to its unflinching gore and violence, Dead & Buried was initially banned as a “video nasty” in the UK in the early 1980s, but was later acquitted of obscenity charges and removed from the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list. Whew!

Parentless Ghosts

In need of a job, Ana is young, pregnant and hired to clean up after a bunch of runny-nose orphans at a huge orphanage where they manufacture orphans. The “school” for abandoned WWII kids is empty for the summer, but the place is a stink hole, so she takes the gig, knowing it’s better than working for Kinkos™ and hoping it’ll get her mind off the fact her former employers raped and beat her.

Two people remain in the cavernous orphanage: an old lady who serves as the school’s cook/doctor (what can’t be healed goes in the pot) and a “disturbed” young gal whose mind is a silverware drawer where none of the silverware matches. A crazy chick practically alone in a spooky old building? Hell, the only thing missing is me, a bottle of Jager™ and a roll of paper towels.

But something’s not right in the building besides Ana’s roommate’s sense of reality. Noises, voices, spectral farting. (OK, that one was really just part of my wish list). Ana was warned about the scary children. Now we’re getting somewhere. Previously brought to the school by the bus load, about 300 war-wounded kids turned up in various stages of bleeding. With only one doctor and a nurse, let’s just say some of ’em didn’t need a doctor bill at the end of the day.

Determined to find out who or what the scary children are, Ana and demento chick go into the big bathroom where there hangs a big mirror, which conceals a big mystery. Ana chucks a flashlight through the glass and damn if there isn’t another room back there. And hey – there’s a service elevator just big enough for her to crawl in. Yeah, that’s what I’d do in a haunted house – squeeze into an elevator that hasn’t been used for years and throw the switch. Why doesn’t Casper just come right out of the wall and push me down the shaft?

The elevator goes screaming down for what seems like three commercial breaks. When it opens, Ana discovers the hospital wing of the orphanage. It’s all painted an eerie white and lit up like a Christmas barbershop. Uh, oh – somebody’s about to go into labor. Good timing…something is down there with her. But what could it be?

House of Voices (aka Saint Ange, 2004) is a pretty darn creepy and atmospheric flick, but the story takes freakin’ forever to get where its going. A couple of nice distractions: Ana’s boobs. While this movie does not end on a happy note, I think I tracked down that cool crazy chick on Facebook™.

Haunted 18 Million Times

Sometimes you just have to audibly gasp at the blatant plagiarism of a few/some/a lot of horror movie filmmakers. Take Sanatorium, available December 23, 2014 on DVD (who even buys those anymore?) and other formats reverse-engineered from UFOs. The plot involves a team of TV ghost hunters who spend the night in an abandoned and haunted sanatorium with the hope of capturing paranormal activity. Instead, as the press release warns, “they unleash a horrifying force of evil hell-bent on their destruction.”

Sound familiar? It should as the paranormal investigators/haunted so-and-so formula has been used 18 million times before. Which makes it even more laughable to see Sanatorium being marketed as an “After Dark Original” – there’s nothing original about it.

While I don’t have room to list all 18 million, here area dozen embarrassingly similar movies with actual plot descriptions from IMDB.com so you know I didn’t make up this stuff:

Grave Encounters / 2011
For their ghost hunting reality show, a production crew lock themselves inside an abandoned mental hospital that’s supposedly haunted – and it might prove to be all too true.

Grave Encounters II / 2012
A film student who is obsessed with the movie Grave Encounters sets out with his friends to visit the abandoned psychiatric hospital depicted in the original film.

Greystone Park / 2012
In October 2009, the filmmakers went into an abandoned psychiatric hospital to explore the “haunted” institution, famous for its radical treatment of patients with mental illness. Once inside the filmmakers quickly discovered that they were not alone.

Hollows Grove / 2014
A young filmmaker is shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary about his friends and their ghost hunting reality show. They set out to film Hollows Grove, an old abandoned and haunted orphanage. What they thought would be a routine investigation is turning in to a nightmare from which they can’t escape.

7 Nights of Darkness / 2011
In 2008 six reality television show contestants spent seven nights in an abandoned and haunted asylum. The prize for staying all seven nights was a share of one million dollars that was to be split amongst any contestants who didn’t leave. No prize money was ever awarded.

Paranormal Incident / 2011
Six college students armed with cameras and recording equipment venture into the infamous Odenbrook Sanitarium to prove the existence of the paranormal. Days later, when five of the six friends turn up missing, the lone survivor must go through the recovered footage in order to clear his name and find out what happened to his friends.

Episode 50 / 2011
A group of TV paranormal investigators are sent to explain a supposedly haunted insane asylum. The crew gets more than they bargained for when they actually make contact with a spirit of tremendous power and must band together to stop it before it destroys them all.

House of Bones / 2010
TV ghost hunters that enter a reportedly haunted house that may prove to be the death of them.

Reel Evil / 2012
Two filmmakers are hired to shoot a ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary for a major studio production. But their dream job quickly turns into a nightmare when they explore a legendary haunted hospital. Trapped inside, the crew is tormented by the evil, unspeakable fear.

Haunted / 2013
A TV crew films a paranormal investigation to obtain evidence that proves we are not alone. Something evil awaits them.

El Sanatorio / 2010
A group of friends decide to make a documentary about the ghosts that are supposed to be haunting The Sanatorium in Costa Rica.

The Crying Dead / 2011
In 2008 a cast and crew set out to shoot a pilot for a paranormal reality show. During the first night in a haunted psychiatric hospital vague apparitions became violent hauntings. This is a diary of the final tortured moments of real people in an unthinkable situation.