Evil Girlfriends, Crosswalk Bigfoot, Horny Ghost

Gotta hand it to Monsters In Motion for coming up with The Evil Dead action figures of the possessed girlfriends. And like real girlfriends, they’re not cheap; both Shelly and Linda, in super cool retro styled packaging, costs $89.99…EACH. Even if your own girlfriend wasn’t possessed and dressed in a retro fashion style, that’d still be a hefty chunk of bit coin to spend on her, a romantic McDonald’s™ hamburger dinner notwithstanding.

Better hurry if you have the fun bucks to spare as they’re limited to 75 each. If they sell out, that’s $6,750.00 for a pile of painted plastic. And while you’re scrounging for the dough, here are a few just released/upcoming horror/Fantasy movies that may or may not be as affordable as your girlfriend and/or a McDonald’s hamburger…

THE BACK 80: A MODERN DAY BIGFOOT ENCOUNTER (available now)
“During the summer of 2013, a woman’s world is turned upside down after seeing a Bigfoot cross the road in front of her one afternoon. She soon realizes that she is not alone on her own property and struggles to separate the truth from her own obsession. She finds others in town who have similar stories to tell and her quest for answers takes her to the abandoned, gated woods of the back eighty.”

Pffft — not seeing why everyone gets so gooned out from seeing a Bigfoot. I could, though, see causing an internal stink if the alleged cryptid jaywalker was wearing a funny hat.

GOOD MANNERS (available now)
“A mysterious and wealthy woman hires a lonely nurse named Clara to be the nanny of her soon-to-be born child. When a full moon brings about the birth of a werewolf, Clara makes it her mission to care for the monstrosity and protect it from others.”

A nanny to a werewolf. Clara isn’t thinking too clearly about this new job of hers. For one thing, it’d look really suspect on your resume when applying for future workings. Unless you wanna go to work for Victor Frankenstein. In which case, he’d probably hire you on the spot.

MUSE ( August 21, 2018)
“Inside a gritty, DTLA loft is a lonely, struggling painter who longs for artistic inspiration and to become a successful artist. But, when Adam’s muse takes form in a glimmering, mystical and deadly spirit creature from Celtic lore, the Leannán Sí, who is based upon the Gaelic legend of a mythical Celtic, she chooses Adam as her human lover to protect and seduce.”

Is there a downside to this? I’m thinkin’ win-win here.

DEAD LOVE (August 21, 2018)
“Brandon is a young train engineer whose world is upended when his mother suddenly takes her own life. At the funeral home, he meets Fiona, a beautiful and mysterious mortician who takes a strong interest in him. Soon they discover they share a passion for music. And when Fiona serenades him with an ancient folk song, their lives become entwined for eternity.”

They share a passion for music? How about a little “bedspring symphony”? Heh.

The Darkness of Corners

Dark Corners (2006) is a graphic psychological horror movie that bends reality for a young and totally hot blonde wife whose experiencing horrific nightmares. Unfortunately, she does this without the solution-solving cure-all: going topless.

Um, lemme try that again. A serial killer is all over the news, eviscerating his victims with surgical expertise. This provides the grim backdrop for the gal whose been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant, but having nightmares so real as to short-circuit her sense of reality.

She dreams of being a Goth chick with black hair who works for a ghoulish mortician whose twin brother slept-walked out a seven story window the day before their twelfth birthdays. (“It wasn’t so bad…I got all of his presents.”) This alternate chick is being stalked by the Night Stalker (hence, the clever name) and rides the bus with messed up creeps and whose bathroom looks like the rest room in Saw (2004). Not even Scrubbing Bubbles™ could get that thing “guests coming over” clean.

But hold the phone — the Goth chick is dreaming she’s the blonde chick living in the corporate world whose co-worker, an older gal, says stuff like, “After three kids, my vagina has all the elasticity of an over-washed tube sock.” Thanks for the visual, aging lady. But the nightmares for both women get worse, with the Night Stalker doing really nasty stuff, like having non-consensual sex with the Goth girl after he punches her unconscious while she’s asleep. Eventually he knocks her up after he knocks her out.

The blonde chick dreams this. The doctor says its all a by-product of the doctor-assisted fertilization process. (Since they can’t get pregnant the time-honored way, then needles and spatulas it is.) She’s also been going to a hypno-therapist to get to the root of her disturbed sleep time. He’s hiding something, and it’s not just his delightful British accent.

Several scenes might have you saying stuff like, “Eeewwww,” and, “That’s soooo icky,” and “He DID NOT just lick that aborted fetus.” At no point can you tell which way this thing is going. As the two realities converge, the mental pu pu platter hits the fan.

I suppose I could tell you about the displaying of stomach parts, the demon kid that chews holes in flesh and the talking corpse with a boner (“Just break it — like a carrot.”) Really, it’s best to see if for yourself.

Vomit Zombies

Most kids would think that having their mom be a mortician as a modern woman career choice would be pretty dang cool. But why did she have to move her teen son and nine-year-old daughter into a decrepit mortuary in a small, blue collar stink town to explore job opportunities? Having the business by the local interstate where car crashes seem to happen on a daily basis was a prudent choice, though. Location is everything.

But the town legend has it the deformed kid with crooked lips who lived in the house years ago IS STILL THERE. That, of course, is like handing an engraved invitation to the local booze-sneaking teens who break into the cemetery located in the front yard (!) to make graveyard babies among the deceptively romantic crypts.

But while mom’s in the basement learning how to embalm, leaking fluids are absorbed by the evilness in the house and makes black gunk grow on the walls. It also gets into the party teens, turning them into vomit zombies. You do not want zombie vomit on your face as it will turn YOU into a vomit zombie. That, and the stains are really hard to get out of your shirt.

More zombies, more vomit, more fun. When mom turns into one of the spewing undead and her non-living associates converge on the house, a warm fuzzy feeling comes over you as there’s no way out for the uninfected teens. As if out of the blue, the deformed kid with crooked lips, now an adult, kidnaps the teen brother’s little sister and takes her away into his under-the-cemetery lair. The zombies follow because hey, zombie rules, man.

Like trapped mall rats, the teens are flanked by the walking dead, the deformed kid who’s now holding the little girl over a big hole in the ground, and a demonic tooth worm that lives in the hole, waiting to be fed. What to do? Personally, I’d crap my pants then and there.

Mortuary (2005) is brimming with horrific ingredients bookended by some pretty funny turns. Not too bad for a low-budget horror flick, but the total hack ending certainly won’t make your lips go all crooked.

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!

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.