Cartoon Werewolves, Magic Cameras, Cruel Tools

Archie Comics™ was first published in 1939 (as MLJ Magazines™) and has been in print every since. If my Internet math lessons serve me correctly, that’s 83 years as of this blogging. And during that time, the freckle-faced teen Archie Andrews has never graduated Riverdale High School (except that time he dropped acid with his drug dealer Jughead Jones and hallucinated he made it to college, only to drop out and drop more acid). He started a band, had one hit thrash metal song (“Sugar Sugar”) in 1969, and has only nailed Veronica Lodge and Betty Cooper, the two competitive hotties in constant battle to win Archie’s affections, in G-rated fashion. Disappointing.

But what if Archie and pals were recast in a horror comic? Sure, it’s been done before (Jughead: The Hunger, Afterlife With Archie, Vampironica, Archie’s Madhouse, Archie & Friends: Twilight, Archie At Crystal Lake), but now there’s YET ANOTHER ONE titled Happy Horror Days O.S., a two-issue treatment (and two different covers) with the gang going up against Krampus and more. Here are the gripping details… 

“T’was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring not even a…werewolf? The holidays look a little different in Riverdale this year — Santa’s nowhere in sight but Krampus is on the rampage! Who can take him down? That’s right, WereJug returns to do battle with the horned and hoofed holiday beast with Betty Cooper in his corner! Then, we dive into the true story of the Icelandic yule cat, Jólakötturinn, and her master — Sheila Wu! Finally, Reggie meets a nice girl that he takes to the Mantle family holiday party — but things aren’t as they seem when she systematically dismantles Reggie’s life! The holidays are horrifying in this special horror anthology, that reunites the team of Jughead: the Hunger!”

In all, 32 pages of teenage horror (kinda redundant). Get ‘em here for $3.99. That’s less than Archie would pay on a non-base scoring date with Veronica/Betty. So while you’re making room in your vast collection of Archie Comics™ for two more, here a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not have blood flowing as colorful as comic book ink… 

LANDLOCKED / January 6, 2023 (VOD)

“Summoned to his soon-to-be demolished childhood home, Mason discovers an old VHS camera that can see into the past, driving him to record as many memories as possible before the doomed house is destroyed.”

Personally, I’d just set up the camera on a bar top, order refreshing adult beverages until last call and hit the record button. Lather, rinse, repeat.

HUMAN RESOURCES / January 10, 2023 (VOD)

“After starting a job at a creepy hardware store, Sam Coleman uncovers a shocking mystery involving a missing employee. With the help of Sarah, a cynical coworker, Sam plunges into the dark corners of the store and is forced to confront the terrifying forces that lurk just behind the walls.”

Of course terrifying forces lurk there. Hardware stores are one-stop shopping for theme-masked serial killers purchasing essential tools of their trade: trowel with ergonomic grip, reciprocating saw with double-edged bore blade for multidirectional cuts and rounded end for easy plunge cutting, garden hose with adjustable nozzles… A veritable candy land for those in the business of butchering wanting to up their game and add a little pizzazz to their profession.

65 / March 10, 2023 (Theaters)

“After a catastrophic crash on an unknown planet, pilot Mills quickly discovers he’s stranded on Earth…65 million years ago. Now, with only one chance at rescue, Mills and the only other survivor, Koa, must make their way across an unknown terrain riddled with dangerous prehistoric creatures in an epic fight to survive.”

65 million years into the past? Man, that would totally suck — 7-Elevens™ didn’t exist until 1927. That’s a long time to wait for a Mountain Dew Slurpee®.

RAVAGE NATION / Release pending 2023 (DVD)

“In 2036, CV5 was born. A stronger strain, vaccine resistance. Mothers gave birth to hybrid creatures and mutations. Others had zombie-like qualities. A mere bite or scratch and within 12 seconds you were turned. This was the new normal. Beasts hunt man for food and sport.”

Makes sense to hunt man for food and sport. You don’t wanna keep one of those messy things around as a house pet. Just cleaning the litter box alone would make you sick to your stomach.

A World of Vampires

The world is a vampire. Literally. It’s 2019. Ten years ago, an unexplained plague turned those that leak blood into those that drink blood. Oh sure, there are a few humans left, but they’re pretty much cows the vampires milk dry. So much so, the world is just about out of the sweet red body sauce. 

Edward Dalton is a blood scientist who has been trying for six years to come up with a human blood substitute. His latest batch made a test subject explode. BLAMMO —   vampire guts all over the walls and floors, as if the room itself was mortally injured. Dalton won’t drink human blood because he’s against wiping out an entire species. What a wuss. In the human world, we’d call him a people-hugger.

One night he helps an SUV full of humans evade the cops. They later track him down in hopes he can help them find a cure for vampirism. (Yeah — it’s called a stake through the heart, b*tch!)

Elvis is a classic car restorer and part of the vampire resistance movement who, when in bloodsucker form years ago, went joy-riding in the daylight and crashed, his body flaming the second he went Superman-ing through the windshield. The accident, while hurting like hell, transformed Elvis back into a human. Dalton needs to recreate that event in order to find a way out of this sucking of blood business. He has to hurry as the military — led by his vampire brother — and a near-rioting society is breathing down his back.

If you’re starved of human blood and all its deliciousness, you slowly revert into a primal state vampire, one of pure aggression, a mummified body, leathery bat wings, and unpleasant butt breath. These creatures, called Subsiders, are so hungry they feed on fellow vampires, which speeds up the mutation process.

Through it all, though, Daybreakers (2009) left you wanting more and less. More, as in Subsiders. Less, as in talking. Don’t get me wrong; Daybreakers is a visual stunner and has some killer graphic gore; Subsiders are chained and pulled out into the sunlight, where they ignite like campfire marshmallows. I just wanted to see more of the Subsiders making a cherry pie out of your face. If you’re gonna go to all that trouble to make a screaming, angry man-bat, put it to work chowing down on neck sandwiches. The rest will write itself.

Shark World

The bad news is global warming melted the ice caps and bottoms and flooded the entire Earth as if some sort of sci-fi take on Noah’s Ark, which, ironically, is also sci-fi. The good news is sharks have proliferated (made photocopies of each other) and have taken over the new real estate en masse.

Such is the premise for Planet of the Sharks (2016), whose plot on paper looks interesting the way an uneaten sandwich made with day old bread looks tasty. But the lower-grade special effects, painfully bad characters (some look like the B-team from Road Warrior/1981), and a LOL windsurfing scene renders the entire thing a wet messy mess.

Like Waterworld (1995), people now live on floating “cities”, which look more like discount boat docks. One appropriately named city called Junk is under attack from hundreds of hungry sharks, led by an alpha Great White that commands his army with mutated thinking abilities. Oh yeah, his snout freckles glow, too, which logically communicates with his mates. Think of it as a face walkie-talkie. Prior to the attack, which had sharks torpedoing out of the water to swallow anyone wearing Dockers™ (heh), Junk City had 72 citizens. Final head count: one.

With scientists on a nearby flotilla working to launch a rocket into the upper atmosphere to reset the weather, dry up the water, and go back to swimming at the YMCA. With all the shark attacks, this plan is falling apart faster than their docks. After the population is being reduced by the minute, it’s decided to drop a trigger over an undersea volcano that will explode right when the sharks swim over it. Yep, totally plausible.

The problem is, a shark ate the personal mini-copter carrying the Whiffle Ball™ device. So a female scientist with self-contained shirt pontoons, windsurfs out into the ocean to snag the device, jumping over sharks as she zooms around the waves. Barely avoiding becoming seafood, she deploys said Whiffle Ball™, which triggers the volcano, which kills a pile of shark and causes a tsunami the size of a tidal wave.

Alfie the alpha shark ain’t having none of this and makes trouble bubbles. It’s determined that this particular mutated shark emits a powerful electrical charge, not unlike a cordless shaver. The remaining scientists figure out how to stick cattle prods into its freckled face, thereby jump-starting the rocket, which is (barely) launched. Once the payload goes off, the sun comes out, the seas begin to dry up, and cities, which have been underwater for years, emerge all sparkly and clean as if just having gone through a car wash. (Why they couldn’t have a giant starfish stuck to the Empire State Building left me visibly shocked.)

No nudity, digital blood, some stock swearing in wincing fake accents, a far-reaching premise and sharks so dumbly designed, they’ll make your freckles start glowing. So yeah, something to not do for 83 minutes.

Neighborhood Gorillas, Lady Krampus, Rappin’ Snakes

Ammon Smith of Salt Lake City, Utah knows how to throw down for Halloween. This year he built — using wooden boxes, chicken wire, trash bags, black fabric and pool noodles (I don’t know what those are, but they sound cool) and paint — to create a massive King Kong Halloween display in his front yard. No word on whether or not he’s handing out screaming citizens instead of candy.

With “Kong” clutching a Barbie doll and battling bi-planes, clearly, we all want Ammon, a 33 year-old woodworker, to live in our neighborhood. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, it took Ammon 80 to 100 hours to complete the ultimate Halloween yard decoration. That’s about how many hours a week I lay around watching monster movies. Just think of what I could create for my yard on Halloween if I got off my unmotivated booty instead of turning my couch into a Jell-O™ mold of my entire body. (The comfortable sitting device kinda looks like a pod from Invasion of the Body Snatchers/1956).

While we bask in our own jealousy that we didn’t do anything nearly as cool to commemorate Halloween, here are a few just released horror/sci-fi movies/documentaries to help pull us out of our collective shame spiral…

HAUNTERS: ART OF THE SCARE (available now)
“Haunters is a heart-warming and heart-stopping documentary about people who sacrifice everything to create the most popular and polarizing haunted houses for Halloween — from boo-scare mazes to a controversial new subculture of extreme terror experiences.”

Fun stuff, although I’m partial to real haunted houses with real ghosts, mostly because you don’t have to pay to get in. That, and there’s something kinda liberating to soil one’s britches in public after having the groceries scared outta you. Okay, I probably said too much.

MEATBALL MACHINE: KODOKU (available now)
“A lonely man’s life is thrown into chaos when alien parasites turn a city’s average citizens into kill-crazy cyborg creatures.”

If you saw Meatball Machine (2005), let’s just hope you’re not a vegetarian, otherwise this hyper-gory sequel might make you decorate your Old Navy™ shirt with recycled beef stroganoff.

MOTHER KRAMPUS (November 7, 2017/DVD)
“For the 12 days before the Christmas of 1921, children went missing near the local towns woods. A traumatized girl was found, but her mind had gone – she later died of her horrific injuries. Just before the Christmas of 1992, a further five children disappeared again. Their bodies were found in the same woods. Angry and seeking vengeance, the locals hung a woman they believed to be the killer. But before dying, she cursed the town that one day the Christmas Witch, Frau Perchta, would come for them to avenge her death. 25 years later, the story has become little more than a local myth. But as children start to go missing again, everyone begins to wonder if the tales of a curse might be true. This Christmas it’s not only the children that are in danger, it’s the adults too.”

A woman Krampus. Seems kinda redundant as lots of women (and me) turn into “monsters” when they get “crampuses” during certain periods (sorry) of their life. As for the plot, all they did was switch out the old woman (example: see Darkness Falls/2003 with the “tooth fairy” coming back for revenge) and let hilarity ensue.

SNAKE OUTTA COMPTON (2018)
“A young rap group suddenly finds themselves up against a giant, mutated snake that threatens to destroy their search for stardom. Aided by two corrupt cops, a crazed gangster, and a mad scientist, the band has one thing to do before getting the record deal they need; get that motherf**kin’ snake outta Compton! Prepare yourself for dope ass beats, unfriendly fire, and the biggest, nastiest snake you’ve ever seen in this outrageous satire of creature features, urban gangster films, and hip hop culture.”

Just when you think no one can come up with a snappy horror movie name. Snake Outta Compton might very well get title of the year. I just hope rap icon/legend Ice Cube makes a cameo.

Healthy Horror

Drugs and horror movies are similar in that they’re both addictive. But drugs taken out of moderation can wreck your life and/or face, whereas horror movies are nutritious and watching them makes you a better — and healthier — person. That should be a goal for 2017 — to become a horror movie addicted, better and healthier YOU.

I should be a life coach. I don’t know about you, but here’s how I plan on staying healthy this year…

BEWARE THE SLENDER MAN (January 23, 2017/HBO)
“Slender Man is a fictitious, abnormally tall, faceless man with long arms who stalks and abducts children. In 2014, he inspired real-life horror as two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times in an effort to “appease” the fictional entity.”

2017 might very well be the year of Slender Man, with this and another movie slated for release before the spring. If he catches on you might see some cool cross marketing, like Slender Man Weight Loss programs, where you don’t just cut calories, you kill them. Heh.

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS (January 26, 2017/DirecTV; February 24, 2017/VOD limited)
“The near future — humanity has been all but destroyed by a mutated fungal disease that eradicates free will and turns its victims into flesh-eating “hungries.” Only a small group of children seem immune to its effects.”

Pffft — the “mutated fungal disease that eradicates free will” has been around for years. It’s called “television.”

PERSONAL SHOPPER (March 10, 2017)
“Kristen Stewart stars as a high-fashion personal shopper to the stars who is also a spiritual medium. Grieving the recent death of her twin brother, she haunts his home, determined to make contact with him.”

I wish I had a personal shopper/spiritual medium. It’d be neat to have someone go to the Piggly Wiggly Superstore™ and buy me some new britches and then divine whether or not people will like them. Could save a lot of emotional grief if you ask me.

BEDEVILED (2017)
“Alice and her friends are teens like any other — social and tethered to their devices. When they download the latest Siri-like app offering quick solutions to life’s quotidian, the friends soon discover the app offers much more than directions and places to eat. So much more. The app probes the teens’ deepest fears, manifesting these fears in the real world in a diabolical quest to terrorize its unwitting users to death.”

Quotidian? Only a few days into the new year and that is easily the most pretentious word display in a horror movie press release for 2017. (Quotidian means “ordinary or everyday, especially when mundane,” which seems to apply to Bedeviled’s plot.)

The Tooth Is Out There

The Razortooth in Razortooth (2006) is actually an overgrown eel with sharp mouth utensils. Genetically tampered with, the creature’s altered DNA gives it a highly aggressive attitude and a voracious tapeworm. (Seems odd that an eel would have a tapeworm, but there you go.)

This particular mutation comes out of the Florida Everglades to gulp down tasty members of a small community that, up until today, lived and thrived along the swampy waterways. The body count is extraordinarily high, with each meal going down like before-dinner mints. Heads, torsos, arms, legs, butts — if it can fit in Razortooth’s mouth, it’s snack time.

Raz T comes up through outhouse sittin’ holes (ick), from under houses (makes sense, since it has no hands with which to turn doorknobs), and slithers like a snake on Ecstasy at a rave in search of flavors. Hard to tell how big the monster is as it goes from 6 feet to 15 feet in every other segment.

Lots of blood and half-eaten bodies, although given how much Raz eats in just a few hours, I’m surprised he doesn’t have people belly. In fact, he looks downright slim and in beach shape. Either his digestive system is set on high, or it’s all fake. I’ll have to get back to you on my findings.

Medium-Rare Bear

A city doctor and his pregnant wife go to the ultra-busy woods of Maine to tend to all the sick Native American kids covered in pine cones and sores that won’t heal. Mercury poisoning, it’s discovered, is behind the face herpes.

The doctor discovers the saw mill has been polluting the local waterways with Mercury-based chemicals used to make logs all nice and shiny. Fish swim in that water. The fish mutate. The local Native Americans eat the fish. The Native Americans mutate.

Evidence to this outlandish claim lies in a horribly disfigured baby bear cub, found almost drowned to death. Unfortunately, it’s a long way back to camp and horribly disfigured mama bear is looking for her crusty kid. But she’s been busy, killing sleeping bag campers as though they were foreign tourists. Ripped, shredded, half-eaten, mangled, chewed, regurgitated… It was if they were human snack cakes at the last Drinkin’ & Drive-in Bake Sale.

Plenty of great moments, but the best comes when the monster bear chases them across a lake and goes into the drink in an iconic horror movie sequence. Thinking that gosh-darned thing drowned, they don’t see the bubbles heading towards shore. The bear walks all the way under the lake without scuba gear or anything resembling a snorkel!

No matter what they throw at mom, it still keeps coming. She looks like a reverse bear with melted skin and gut stuff on the outside where fur should be. Prophecy (1979) is loaded with gnarly nature-gone-awry action that sets you up for a sequel (pregnant mom has been eating the tainted fish).

 They never made another movie, though. Too bad; I felt Underwater Bear deserved to be been fleshed out a bit more. Oh, hey — I just got my own joke. Sweet!

Sharp Teeth = No Bite

Sharp Teeth (2006) is a horror “comedy” involving a mutated carp in a local lake that drags people to their watery grave for dining purposes. Mind you, the lake is full of crap, uh, carp, but only one seems to be adversely affected by the toxic waste run-off by the nearby nuclear power plant.

All the girls in this movie are, how shall I put it, robust and reverse attractive. They have big boobs, which they’re always squeezing, flashing and the public displaying. (Sharp Teeth was made by a chick. If a guy did it, everyone would be saying he was objectifying women. Since a chick made it, she’s “celebrating the female form.”)

Twenty people get taken out by the rubber novelty carp (though you never get to see it), yet no one seems to notice the disappearances in the small town. Zero blood, less than zero attempts at humor, no nudity, rummage sale special effects… Did I leave anything out? I’d say nice try, but it wasn’t.

Earth-First Zombies

Severed – Forest of the Dead (2005) purports to answer the age-old question: if hippies in the woods are being eaten by zombies, would they make a sound? The answer is, of course, hell yeah!

In a bid to make trees grow faster so they can be cut down more often (thereby generating fun bucks for the corporation that’s harvesting old growth forest sticks), scientists inject ’em with a bio-chemical growth hormone. (I think my doctor is one of these guys.)

But like any science experiment with breakable test tubes, you gotta have drama. Enter a bunch of tree-hugging, bean sucking, Earth-firsters trying to block the lumberjacks with highly-efficient signs and “bummer, dude” rhetoric. Yeah, right; like a hippie is gonna stop a top of the line MS 880 Stihl Magnum™ Chainsaw. With his face, maybe.

To thwart the loggers the insubordinate slackers spike the trees so that when the chainsaw hits it, the “solves all problems” machine breaks. Only this time the saw kicks back and slices into the shoulder of a logger who was simply doing the forest a favor by cutting down a tree that more than likely had two dozen poisonous squirrels living amongst its branches.

The tree sap, mutated by the chemical, gets into the man’s bloodstream and turns him into a flesh-eater in less time than it takes to say, “Timber, muthaf*ckas!” He bites another guy, who then bites another. You can see where this is going.

It’s here where one of the best scenes happens: hippies, earlier chaining themselves to trees marked for cutting, can’t get loose and are screaming their stink faces off as the zombies come crawlin’. You couldn’t save the trees, so how you gonna save yourself, b*tch? Man, nothin’ beats the sound of screaming hippies (heard as often as I drive on the sidewalk).

In the end, thankfully, it’s a full plate undead smörgåsbord. Someone finally found a way to make hippies cool – turn ’em into zombies! How groovy is that?

Frankenstein Created Bikers

Frankenstein Created Bikers. Great movie title. Better still is the trailer for this “coming soon” (sometime in 2016) grindhouse offering: boobies, gore, explosions, tattoos, bikers with tattoos, guns, monsters, and some smacko foot to the face MMA action. Only thing missing is me!

Here’s what’s on the movie’s highway to Hell…

“A resurrected outlaw biker finds himself addicted to the substance that brought him back from the grave. In order to get his daily fix, his gang is forced to do the bidding of two sadistic scientists attempting to capture a biological mutation and perform a human head transplant on kidnapped teenagers.”

“When his disgruntled ex-girlfriend is released from prison, she embarks on an explosive manhunt for her former lover and his strung-out pack of degenerates. With three dysfunctional bounty hunters, a rival motorcycle gang and an army of machine-gun toting strippers, it becomes a race against law-enforcement for bragging rights to the gang leader’s demise.”

Says the back-from-the-dead biker: “There is no hope…no God…no salvation here. Only pain.” Sounds like he just described my last hard drinking night.

Monsters on motorcycles is not a new concept. One must only turn back the pages of time to 1971 when the world was given the gift of Werewolves on Wheels. That one had boobies, blood rituals, black robed monks, satanic rituals, booze, and bikers who thumbed their beards at road safety. Only thing missing was me!