Don’t Drain The Swamp

Really digging the promo hype around the Swamp Thing TV series re-boot, premiering May 31, 2019 on the streaming DC Universe™. Hardcore fans will no doubt recall a Swamp Thing TV series that ran on the USA Channel™ from 1990 to 1993. It was mildly interesting, bordering on “meh.”

But the new version teasers are hinting at Swamp Thing being a lot more like his comic book counterpart, meaning way more aggro, revenge-y and…really icky. And speaking of the comic books (debuting in 1972), nice job of the new Swamp Thing key art paying homage to issue #28 from 1984.

In case you didn’t read my January, 2019 bloggedy blog about the new Swamp Thing, here’s a refresher: “Abby Arcane, an employee at Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control, investigates what seems to be a deadly swamp-born virus in a small town in Louisiana but soon discovers that the swamp holds mystical and terrifying secrets.”

Besides the swamp being a sewer-away-from-sewer for Swamp Thing, you can bet that’s where all the Louisiana toilet sweepings end up. And you wonder why Swamp Thing is so p*ssed off all the time.

Sweet Tooth Sci-Fi, Early-Period Zombies, Marsh Monster

If you’re a fan of Stranger Things (and who on this planet isn’t?), Itsugar.com just made available a whole bowl of Stranger Things themed candy, from My Little Pollywog gummy to Barb Missing Milk Carton (full of chocolate malt balls) to the Upside Down Chocolate Bar — half premium milk chocolate and half gray-speckled white chocolate. Pack your bags — you’re about to go to Yum Town.

Before you go indulging your taste for all things stranger and sweet, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi streaming series, which may or may not give you cavities…

STRANGER THINGS 3 (July 4, 2019/Netflix™)
Titles for the new episodes include: “Suzie, Do You Copy?, “The Mall Rats,” “The Case of the Missing Lifeguard,” “The Sauna Test,” “The Source,” “The Birthday,” “The Bite” and “The Battle of Starcourt.”

That’s all they’re giving us for now. Fine by me — the Stranger Things series is so addictively bingeful, it should be classified as some sort of visual drug, like porno. Except instead of Jennifer Lawrence’s Photoshopped naked/nude body wrapped around mine, you get the Demogorgon, which may or may not know who Jennifer Lawrence is. Or me.

KINGDOM (January 26, 2019/Netflix™)
In a kingdom defeated by corruption and famine, a mysterious plague spreads to turn the infected into monsters. The crown prince, framed for treason and desperate to save his people, sets out on a journey to unveil what evil lurks in the dark.

Looking forward to this South Korean period piece zombie apocalypse chewfest. And hey, it’s gonna be a series, which means more couch time for this professional squatter.

THE PUNISHER (2019/Netflix™)
“After exacting revenge on those responsible for the death of his wife and children, Frank Castle uncovers a conspiracy that runs far deeper than New York’s criminal underworld. Now known throughout the city as The Punisher, he must discover the truth about injustices that affect more than his family alone.”

If you saw Season One of Netflix’s The Punisher, it certainly lived up to its name — each show contained some of the most face-pinchingly brutal fight scenes this side of Daredevil ever filmed for enjoyment purposes. And Jon Bernthal, who played the loose cannon Shane on The Walking Dead, is the perfect choice to deliver the business end of his pummel-happy fists. I am so happy right now.

SWAMP THING (2019/DC Universe)
“Abby Arcane, an employee at Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control, investigates what seems to be a deadly swamp-born virus in a small town in Louisiana but soon discovers that the swamp holds mystical and terrifying secrets.”

A new series set to stream on DC Universe. As much as Swamp Thing is cool, it remains to be seen if he’s $7.99 a month cool.

Military UFOs, Teen Witches, Holiday Flesh-Eaters

UFO fans can rejoice — a TV series is being developed around the famous 1980 Rendlesham Forest Incident, wherein American military personnel, stationed in England, not only encountered a landing UFO, but recorded their observations (on YouTube™) and even walked up and touched the glowing, freaky thing. (Hope they washed their hands, because, you know, space germs.)

From the press release: “The alleged sightings began on December 26, 1980 when U.S. Air Force security patrols stationed at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England saw lights descending into nearby Rendlesham Forest. When servicemen went to investigate, they found a metallic object with glowing lights in the middle of the forest, and when approached the object moved through the woods, causing farm animals to panic. In daylight the next day, impressions were found in a triangular shape in the forest clearing, and on December 28, deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt and several other servicemen took radiation readings at the clearing and noticed lights in the distance.”

“The show will reportedly wave a complex family drama into the real-life events, which will span the 1980s through to 2020, which will mark the 40th anniversary of the Rendlesham incident.”

I’ve seen lots of documentaries about Rendlesham and, despite the commercials, I want to believe. Thus is the power of television. Until the show premiers, which is in the works as we speak, here are a few just released and upcoming horror/sci-fi you may or may not want to believe in…

MERCY CHRISTMAS (available now/VOD)
“Mercy Christmas follows Michael Briskett as he meets the perfect woman. His ideal Christmas dream comes true when she invites him to her family’s holiday celebration. Michael struggles to survive once he realizes HE will be Christmas dinner.”

A cannibal Christmas movie? Another reason for the season. I’m no gourmet chef (although I do make a mean bowl of stove top popcorn), but what would be an appropriate wine pairing with holiday human flesh? My go-to would be Steel Reserve™ (okay, not really wine, but man, what a kick in the pants). Probably some red chardonnay that’s deep, complex and stays with you long after you’ve tasted it. Kinda like flesh. Hope they’re also serving those neat pop-up dinner rolls. It’s like eating fluffy chemicals, but man, what a kick in the taste buds.

THE DEVIL’S TOY BOX (available now/VOD)
“Cynthia O’Neil enters a haunted asylum known as the Madison Seminary in search of her father who went missing in the asylum while shooting a reality television show.”

Kinda makes you wonder what the Devil considers toys. Slasher Gumby? Silly Blob Putty? Matrix Monopoly? I’d buy ‘em. Just so we’re transparent here, The Devil’s Toy Box was also one of the names of Hellraiser’s (1987) The Lament Configuration (aka, Lemarchand’s Box), a puzzle box, that when solved/opened, would summon Hell’s most Goth entities to welcome you to their depths. As local urban legends go, The Devil’s Toy Box is also cabin in Louisiana that when occupied, makes people go insane. Probably because of intermittent Internet connection, questionable plumbing and no bars for your Evil Smart Phone.

THE LURKER (2018)
“A group of theatre students, celebrating their final show, begin to slowly disappear one at a time.”

Seriously? This is a horror movie? The students probably snuck off to partake in the weed, or in my case, Steel Reserve™.

THE WITCH FILES (2018)
“A group of marginalized young women form a powerful coven and find they have the ability to grant their every wish. Though they soon realize the danger of messing with powerful forces beyond their control.”

I liked this better when they called it The Craft (1996). So yeah, high school chick witches. I’ll stick with TV’s Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (1996 — 2003) ‘cause she’s such a cutie.

Dead On Arrival Horror

And now from the Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen files. These are horror/sci-fi movies that were once gonna be made but due to various obstacles/mucking (usually some movie studio d*ckwipe), all deals are off the table. Here’s a few that had the potential to be craptacular…

BUBBA NOSFERATU & CURSE OF THE SHE-VAMPIRES (D.O.A.)
“Elvis, shooting a film in Louisiana, finds himself mixed up with a coven of she-vampires.”

Dang — as a sequel to 2002’s hilarious bent Bubba Ho-Tep (starring the statue-worthy Bruce Campbell — or “Ash” from The Evil Dead/1981 — as Elvis), this would’ve been flippin’ crazy fun awesome cool. And yet flushables like Friday the 13th (except the 1980 original) get sequel carte blanche with all the regularity of an Ex-Lax Maximum Strength™ user.

CARPE DEMON: ADVENTURES OF A DEMON-HUNTING SOCCER MOM (D.O.A.)
“A suburban housewife is tasked with ridding her town of demons.”

So this is where Stan vs. Evil (2016) got its floor plans. Oh well, if anything they got me to LOL over the title (taken from the 2005 book of the same name by author Julie Kenner). Now to go clean up my LOL.

HOUSE OF RE-ANIMATOR (D.O.A.)
“Ignoring the previous three Re-Animator films, the story focuses on a ‘Bush-like president’ who dies in office and his staff covertly brings in Dr. Herbert West to reanimate him.”

More timely than ever, this one should be made immediately. Then again, I’m a sucker for anything Re-Animator/Herbert West. If you haven’t seen Re-Animator (1985), it’s a horror staple, so like, go staple yourself.

GROWL (D.O.A.)
“A traveling underground fight club called The Brawlers arrive at a derelict ghost town tucked away in the Colorado Rockies. They meet the town’s only residents, the Maxilla family who want to buy on to the fight card. But the Maxilla family’s true intentions for the Brawler crew is soon revealed in teeth and claws. Some will be hunted, some will be feed, and some will become part of the family…whether they like it or not.”

Crud balls — been waiting for this on every since I LOL’d about it here back on February 18, 2011. Growl (originally titled Brawlers — both are kinda sucky), sounds like Fight Club (1999) but with flea collars and infect-o teeth. But fighting werewolves go back to 2003’s Underworld, wherein naked lycanthropes in man form morph into naked werewolves and fight club each other because that’s what werewolves do. Well, that and rifle through my garbage can during full moons. Some pure silver cantaloupe rinds — strategically hidden between empty bags of Cheetos™ and unopened jars of faux mayonnaise — should take care of that problem.

Shark Porn

Ever notice how Lou Diamond Phillips looks just like porn legend Peter North? From the neck up, anyway.

In the rogue shark movie Red Water (2003), Lou plays a charter boat captain in Louisiana in financial trouble because his business is seasonal and his customers aren’t. He used to work on oil rigs, but they had a blow out and two guys were killed. It wasn’t Lou’s fault, but he blames himself and traded his hot wife and career to own a stinky boat that barely floats. I probably would’ve done the same thing, but kept the hot wife (in case the boat quit working and we needed to be rowed back to land).

Speaking of which, she shows up as a rep for the EPA wanting to charter his boat so she can keep tabs on the oil drilling going on up river. Lou’s hot ex-wife is played by Kristy Swanson, the original and ONLY Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Also in the drilling zone is three million dollars scuttled when the feds were closing in on a drug run gone horribly awry.

Now the drug dealer who owns the spending rights wants it all back and hires a shark-bitten scuba expert/criminal to retrieve it. He also sends rap icon Coolio along to keep an eye on things. Coolio has played good guys before, but he really shines here as a gangsta thug brandishing a gun to cap yo’ ass and using appropriate street talk to get his point across.

Prior to these soon-to-cross scenarios, a 12-foot bull shark has made it up river and has eaten several people. I see you waving a red flag here: sharks are salt water fish. Not so fast — bull sharks are ambidextrous. The criminals clash with Lou, resulting in a MANY opportunities to bleed in the water. To a hungry shark, that’s like a refreshing human beverage to wash down its hourly meals.

Realistic criminal behavior, all-purpose explosions and enlarged fish attacks build up to a well-staged climax. Lou’s past factors in nicely on the final face-off with the shark (which looks like its made of some sort of water-proof rubber when it launches (!) out of the water to eat people).

The oil drill, it should be noted, looks to be of Peter North proportions, if you catch my drift. But it’s the snappy dialogue and double-crossing gangstas that are the real heroes 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.

Mammoth Fail

A museum curator has a completely preserved woolly mammoth encased in a block of ice, ready to over-charge people to see.

For whatever reason, he drills through the ice and extracts a transmitter that was lodged in the mammoth’s butt area. This “analometer” suddenly activates and sends out a deep space transmission to a flying sausage, uh, saucer. Said UFO makes a u-turn for earth. I don’t know why. Neither will you.

Out of nowhere a flaming meteor streaks across the Louisiana skies and crashes into the museum, waking up the slumbering beast. Before it goes outside to get a breath of future air, it sucks all the life force out of a museum guard via its trunk. As much as I wanted to be making that up, I’m not.

Later, two government agents – clearly aware of the extraterrestrial nature of the “awakening” – show up to track the monster and have space guns that presumably emit mammoth-stopping waves of some sort. After that, the whole plot gets really dumb.

The elephant in Mammoth (2006) looks like one of the Banana Splits™. While it does have a decent roar (I wish my car horn sounded like that – then those stinkin’ hippies would RUN), it only gores one person with its tusks of doom and stomps the entire car a guy was trying to hide under.

The whole thing is played for laughs, which falls as flat as the guy under the car is now. Someone saves the day but at what price? I get the feeling I may have paid a bigger price by watching this dud.

Classic ’70s Sleaze Horror

Hard to come up with a horror movie title more tantalizing than 1977’s Eaten Alive. Oh sure they tried, even by re-titling this Seventies lurid gem: Death Trap, Horror Hotel and Starlight Slaughter. Meh. Eaten Alive tells you everything you need to know.

And this is why it’s so cool Eaten Alive is being re-issued on Blu-ray™ with a metric ton of extras sometime in July, 2015. So why all this fuss over a low budget sleazy horror movie that barely made it to the drive-in big screens and was left collecting dust in VHS discount bins?

First, look who was involved with this thing: Tobe Hooper directed and did the soundtrack. You may remember him as the director from another forgotten little movie called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Then there was a starring role from Caroline Jones, widely known as Morticia from The Addams Family cult TV series (1964 – 1966) playing a brothel owner. And who is that shirtless redneck hick trying to score with a hooker? None other than Freddy Krueger himself – Robert England. Marilyn Burns, who played the endlessly screaming survivor in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, stars as an unhappy wife. How can you ever be happy after being tormented by a chain saw?

Eaten Alive has it all – a war-damaged scuzzy hotel owner, some bare boobies, some gory deaths by way of a scythe, and a GIANT CROCODILE. Set in the Louisiana swamp backwoods, Judd, the hotel proprietor, has loose noodles for brains and keeps the aforementioned GIANT CROCODILE as a pet in the stink pond the hotel (more like a shack with several rooms) ’round back. Throw in a beleaguered prostitute, a feisty redneck, some guests who shouldn’t really be there and the GIANT CROCODILE that eats you alive, you have a movie that practically writes itself.

The re-issued Eaten Alive contains so many extras, it would take me away from watching my UFO stories on YouTube™ to list ’em all here. Of the plethora of bonus stuff, I’m visibly shocked they didn’t have an interview with the GIANT CROCODILE itself, reminiscing about what Freddy Krueger tastes like. Then again, it’s not polite to talk with your mouth full.

Ghosts Bothering You

More ghost-y stuff finally headed for your head, this time in the form of a young gal who, while returning to her pre-training bra home in Louisiana to re-apply bandages and recuperate after a splatto car accident, comes human face to ghost face with a long-tormented spirit that’s been seeking her return. And get this  – that spooky whatzit has no intention of letting her escape. Yeow, I say!

With that, Jessabelle (2014), from some guy involved with Paranormal Activity (2009) and Insidious (2011), looks to add some doctor bills to your chills. I am so down with that.

I watched the trailer for Jessabelle last summer while drinking an ice cold AND refreshing beer. While the movie was supposed to come out in August 2014, it did not. And because I just didn’t seem to care about anything except beer during a hot summer, it fell off the radar. According to my staff out in the field (the neighbor kids), Jessabelle is scheduled for limited release on November 7th, 2014.

Rotten Tomatoes™, that highly opinionated movie review site, gave it one and a half stars. And I thought I was a movie a**hole.

Louisiana Werewolf

A werewolf in a plaid shirt and polyester pants? Hair perfectly combed and trimmed? His teeth job-interview white? No sniffin’ other werewolf butts or hangin’ out by rusty fire hydrants for this uptown party monster.

A lycanthrope worthy of a Roger Miller song is loose on Louisiana’s Marsh Island. The sheriff is inclined to believe the throat-ripped murder of a local girl is the work of wild dogs with an utter disregard for flea collars.

Everyone else immediately goes for the werewolf theory. I thought it might be gators given that there are, like, millions of ’em in Louisiana, some perhaps that even howl at the moon. That would’ve made more sense than the color-coordinated wolf man who turns out to be known by everybody.

Moon of the Wolf (1972) – no blood, no gore, no suspense and no fun. I dug the groovy ’70s threads, however.