Batman vs. Dracula vs. James Bond, Robo-Cities, Bigfoot Returns

Batman Fights Dracula. Been looking for this movie for a million years. Here’s all I’ve been able to turn up: “Batman Fights Dracula is a 1967 color Philippines film directed by Leody M. Diaz. The cast includes Jing Abalos in the duel roles of Batman and Bruce Wayne, and Dante Rivero as Dracula, the Dark Prince himself.”

If anyone knows where I can watch this for free (okay, I’ll pony up some fun coupons, but let’s not get crazy here), let me know so I can take this one off my leaking bucking list.

Also looking for James Batman, a 1966 Filipino Batman/James Bond spoof. Besides the teaming of Batman with James Bond (and Rubin, the Boy Wonder), the premise tells us this: “An evil organization called the CLAW has threatened nuclear annihilation on the rest of the world unless all countries submit to its rule within five days. Presenting a united front, an alliance of countries tap James Bond and Batman (and Rubin/Robin) to stop the threat. However, both Bond and Batman play brinkmanship with each other, and as the hour to doomsday winds down, are eventually forced to work together. Little do the protagonists know that the real enemy is closer than they think.”

While you go out and do the research for me, here’s a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies to help take my mind off the likelihood that neither Batman or James Bond will be of any help. Then again, maybe Rubin can…

BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE (October 5, 2018)
“Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at Lake Tahoe’s El Royale, a rundown hotel with a dark past. Over the course of one fateful night, everyone will have a last shot at redemption…before everything goes to hell.”

Sounds a lot like Identity (2003), wherein 10 people who don’t know each other are stuck at a desolate Nevada motel during a gnarly rain storm. Doesn’t take long before they realize they’re being mysteriously being killed off, one at a time. I didn’t know it rained in Nevada. Learning something new every day.

MORTAL ENGINES (December 14, 2018)
“Mortal Engines is set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world where entire cities have been mounted on wheels and motorized, and prey on one another.”

Cities on wheels fighting other cities on wheels? In your face, Transformers! For people who know how to read without moving their lips (unfortunately, I’m not a one-percenter), Mortal Engines is based on the novel of the same name by Philip Reeve. Good for him. And good for us the trailer showcases stunning visuals that makes viewers re-shape their mouth lips into a “wow” shape.

BIG LEGEND (2018)
“An ex-soldier ventures into the Pacific Northwest to uncover the truth behind his fiancée’s disappearance and finds more than bargained for after teaming up with a local hunter. 

Word around the trailer park is that Big Legend stars Adrienne Barbeau (72), former girlfriend of Swamp Thing and Lance Henriksen (78), whose locked feet with Bigfoot several times before in Sasquatch (aka, The Untold/2002) and Devil on the Mountain (aka, Sasquatch Mountain/2006). Let’s get ready to rumble!

EXORCISM AT 60,000 FEET (2018)
“On the last flight of a transatlantic passenger airliner, a demon is discovered on board.”

This is supposed to be a horror comedy, which makes sense as exorcisms are both LOL and VOL. (Vomit out loud.)Which brings me to the question: How the heck do demons get airplane tickets? You have to show ID and since demons are sometimes made of a bunch of other demons (“Legion, for we are many…”), hellspawners no doubt use counterfeit identification. And that’s totally illegal, which is probably why they’re in Purgatory in the first place. (Man, when I go off the tracks, I seem to just hit the gas.)

Bigfoot’s Big Butte

In Sasquatch Mountain (aka, Devil On The Mountain/2006) — his third role in a Sasquatch flick — the legendary Lance Henriksen is the go-to guy for movies about Bigfoot. They should just start calling him “Hairy and the Henriksen.” (OK, now THAT was pretty darn clever.) Lance, though, is way more cooler as a hardened mountain man than I would’ve been. Hard to sell yourself as a believable outdoorsman while wearing a KISS T-shirt that smells like Bounce™.

A gang of bank robbers steal money from Lance’s small town bank and kill a cop in the process. Making a frantic getaway, they’re involved in a car crash with a supermodel with a low top who was making her getaway from a lousy marriage. The criminals take the supermodel hostage and head for the hills. Guess who lives there — Lance…and Sasquatch.

The mythical (ahem) beast is the reason Lance’s wife was killed 12 years earlier. No one believed him, so he kinda became that guy who “saw a UFO” type dude. While the criminals run through the woods, so doth Sasquatch, snapping in half the good guys because hey, Sas can’t differentiate between those that point guns at him and those that flee.

The cops follow and it turns into a stand-off until Sasquatch balances the scales of justice. Now the criminals and the cops have to work together to escape Sasquatch’s fuzzy wrath. Lots of character development with colorful dialogue. But it’s Lance who outshines them all. (He even calls one of the criminals “Pumpkinhead,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to his other mythical beast movie.)

Sasquatch, though, is overly hairy and looks like a heavy metal King Kong, but not as tall. He has a great howl, that will make your butt hairs stand on end — your REAR end.

Craig Wasson, who plays the lead criminal, hasn’t changed his hair since Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors(1987) And that was 20 years ago. Then again, I haven’t changed my hair since birth. Sasquatch Mountain has its flaws (unlikely cop and criminal behavior patterns/situations), but hey, what Sasquatch movie doesn’t? Until I star in one, anyway.

Hillbillies vs. Horror

Four movies in and ’ol Pumpkinhead’s legend of vengeance is like my underwear: darker and wearing a bit thin. Not that Pumpy isn’t cool, because he totally is. Rather, they’re running out of ways to tell the same story. This time they thought outside the patch, where the ongoing battle saga between the “still backwoods hicks” Hatfields and the McCoys is still raging via their descendants. First thought is, why do we keep letting these hillbillies breed? Second of all, with one billion square miles in which to move, why do they always live next door to each other? Geez.

So a Hatfield chick is in love with a McCoy dude and they meet in private to feel each other up. A sort of Hee Haw re-imagining of Romeo & Juliet, their secret is discovered and in the process end up with a McCoy sister getting killed in the face. Legal disclaimer: It weren’t no Hatfield that done it — they was a’chasin’ her through the woods and she fell down a sharp incline and whacked her head somethin’ powerful agin’ that there yonder tree.

As could be expected, the McCoys think the Hatfields did it. So the “Luv U 4ever” guy goes to Haggis, the town witch, to call upon Pumpkinhead for vengeance. (Her witch shack has been upgraded with extra rats and decorative stink bugs). Also returning as a “spiritual advisor” is Ed Harley (aka, Lance Henriksen), doomed to walk the earth, caught between here and there, a penalty curse for invoking the Pumpster. The drag is he can’t even see his own dead son, the one whom he brought down Hell in retribution for. That’s f’d up.

Disregarding ALL the warnings, the McCoy kid calls on Pumpkinhead to kill the entire Hatfield clan (there’s like, 20 of ’em)‚ except his beloved skirt. So they can be together. Forever. (That boy needs to get a clue into the ways of barnyard booty.)

In an ironic twist of fate, the Hatfields and McCoys have to team up against Pumpsie. It doesn’t work, because like drinking beer, once it begins IT CAN’T BE STOPPED. If you’ve seen the previous three Pumpkinhead movies you’ll know how this one ends.

Better than Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1993) and Pumpkinhead III: Ashes To Ashes (2006), Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud (2007) is more gory, with P-diddyhead stomping on faces (making ’em go goosh!), slashing open bellies to let loose the intestines within, gouging eyeballs, ripping off limbs and making that eerie noise that sounds like a rattlesnake with an electric toothbrush caught in it’s throat.

Somebody needs to quit making these sequels long enough to let Ed at least time to change his shirt. That thing has got to be stinking up the place good after 20 years.

Mangled Up In Blue

A bunch of bad college kids in a private school have to stay after class for being bad college kids. Serves ‘em right, the trouble making butt-wipes; A good education is a privilege, not a right.

The university, it should be noted, is hard-wired, which means a computer runs the joint by opening and closing doors, thereby saving the campus thousands of dollars. The security cameras, also robo-controlled, catch the bad college kids doing bad things, like smoking illegal drugs and drinking unsafe amounts of alcohol and using language no doubt learned in study hall.

After a deadly virus is introduced (or “uploaded”) into the system, the computer deems everyone tardy, and one by one the bad college kids are put into eternal detention.

In the original Mangler (1995), the kill-bot was a mutated washing machine with a thirst for color-fast bleach and blood. In the sequel (related in name only), this Mangler is a bunch of extension chords and loose wires that wiggle in a menacing fashion and chase bad students down the hall. Even the ultra-cool Lance Henriksen as the controlling principal who literally becomes part of the education system can’t re-boot this mess.

Your personal computer/washing machine/waffle iron is more scary than The Mangler 2 (2001).

Pumpkinheads and Pinheads

Vengeance (Pumpkinhead’s birth name) has been called back for active duty in Pumpkinhead: Ashes To Ashes (1994), this time avenging townspeople whose dead kin’s bodies have been defiled (i.e., buried in a swamp as well as stacked up in a barn like rotting bales of hay.)

Seems the local doctor/mortician (played by Doug Bradley, Hellraiser’s Pinhead, 1987) has been facilitating the deaths, extracting organs for re-sale, then discarding the bodies like so many empty yogurt containers. The small town can’t pay for medical care, so the doc balances the checkbook with no longer needed kidneys, hearts, eyeballs, stomach gunk, etc.

Helping him is his crystal meth-addicted hottie daughter, some other guy, and that Bud Wallace kid from the first movie, now all grow’d up.

After the bodies are discovered and lined up out in the street in the hot sun for inventorying, a highly attractive young mother comes searching for her little daughter’s body—and finds it among the putrefying corpses. Harsh-o-matic. So she gets three other friends to go in on hiring Pumpkinhead to balance their revenge checkbook.

Haggis the witch (Pumpkinhead’s enabler) is back, dispensing warnings, as does Lance Henriksen as the ghost of Ed Harley from Pumpkinhead (1988). But no one ever listens to them and P to tha’ H does his dirty business, all the while taking everyone’s soul to H-E-C-K.

This is the first time we get to see Haggis in broad daylight and she looks like a supermodel that’s aged 115 years. The medical gore is particularly graphic, but P-head’s vengeancing is just your basic meat ’n potatoes heart-ripping, choking, impaling, etc. In a glaring misstep, the movie makers turn Pumpkinhead into a digital video character during an attack scene in a church. Not cool. Everything else, cool.