Meatloaf Monster

The Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973) is neither. He/she/its an 8-foot mutant sheep born of the poisonous mustard-colored gas seeping from Virginia City’s old mine outside of Reno, Nevada, The Biggest Little City In The World™. (The have loose craps there.)

The town’s historical/hysterical mayor wants to capture the misshapen creature and sell tickets to see this “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Hello — King Kong™ already owns that title, dumbass.

Professor Clemens and his plain-as-paint assistant Mariposa want to study the creature. Eddie, a down-on-his-luck shepherd, is standing by as he was the one who found the beast when it was just the size of a glistening meatloaf, claiming ownership. And Godmonster, kept in a glass incubator with mustard-colored gas being pumped in, grows about a foot a day. In height, not as in needing an extra shoe.

Unfortunately, most of the movie is spent on an African-American real estate broker who is looking to buy the old mine for his clients, but meets resistance from the town’s old school ways. Mayor Silverdale is a racist and sets up Barnstable (the real estate dude — awful name) for a crime he didn’t commit just so he and his cronies can hunt it down and throw an old fashioned Texas necktie party.

But Godmonster will not stand for such social prejudices. Breaking out of his confines, he shambles across the land, looking like the world’s most disgusting laundry basket with an oatmeal face. Mariposa, who raised him from the toaster oven, tracks the butt-ugly beast in hopes of convincing it to return to the lab. Of the numerous you-gotta-be-kidding-me scenes, it’s the one where Mariposa starts dancing with Godmonster as she tries to calm him down. Where’s mustard-colored gas when you need it?

Two more scenes of mess destruction occur when the creature crashes a little girl’s outdoor birthday party, resulting in the dropping of hot dog and the scattering of potato chip. The second one is slightly more graphic, and ends with a gas station being blown up. If you’re gonna roast hot dogs, now would be the time to do it. 

Eventually GM is surrounded by cowboys on horseback, hog-tied and put on display for profit. As Mayor Silverdale whips the crowd into a frenzy, they turn on him — and Godmonster, too. Guilt by association. Apparently, the slow-leaking gas affects humans just as much. Think of it as farting times a million.

Godmonster, caught in the middle of it all, ends up in the garbage dump. All he wanted to do was rock hard and ride free, but The Man wouldn’t let him. I think there is a lesson to be learned here. If only I knew what it was.

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.)

Empire Sharks, Hockey Masks, Murderous Moms

Saw this mash-up of a Care Bear and Pennywise from It on eBay™, Think the going price is around $300. Not sure I want that hideous thing sitting in a corner, visually tasting my flesh. Still, it might keep solicitors from bugging my doorbell.

While I try and drum up $300, here are a few upcoming horror and sci-fi movies that may or may not scare the cotton out of you…

EMPIRE OF THE SHARKS (August 5, 2017/SyFy)
“In the future, most of Earth is covered by water and the only land is controlled by a warlord and his army of sharks. Humans are kept as food for the sharks until two friends risk their lives to rise against their captor and his legion of sharks.”

Sounds like Waterworld (1995) but with the more eating of humans. So yeah, YET ANOTHER Rent-A-Center ™ shark horror movie. These types of shark flicks are usually just bad video games. If you want a real shark movie that’ll make you pollute the water, try The Reef (2010). Just thinking about it is making me need to hide in the safety of my bathroom — until someone comes up with Toilet Sharks.

TO HELL AND BACK: THE KANE HODDER STORY
(August, 2017/England Film Fest)
“To Hell and Back is a harrowing story of a stuntman overcoming a dehumanizing childhood filled with torment and bullying in Sparks, Nevada. After surviving a near-death burn accident, he worked his way up through Hollywood, leading to his ultimate rise as Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series and making countless moviegoers forever terrified of hockey masks and summer camp. After decades of watching Kane Hodder on screen, get ready to meet the man behind the mask in To Hell and Back – n uniquely human story about one of cinema’s most vicious monsters.”

Kane Hodder, as many know, is the 6’4” monster behind such monsters as Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993), Jason X (2001), and as the deformed serial killer Victor Crowley in Hatchet (2006), Hatchet II (2010), and Hatchet III (2013). I say cast Hodder in the new Mary Poppins Returns 2018 remake — that’ll keep that persnickety b*tch from trying to teach the world manners.

AXEMAN 2: OVERKILL (October 17, 2017)
“When a band of crazed evangelicals, bank robbers and vigilantes descend upon Cutter’s Creek, there’s only one local legend that can separate them. And dismember them.”

Seems pretty cut ‘n dry to me — heh. Not really a fan of chop shop horror, but hey, crazed evangelicals and bank robbers need to taste the business end of the axe.

MOM AND DAD (2017/2018)
“A teenage girl and her little brother must survive a wild 24 hours during which a mass hysteria of unknown origins causes parents to turn violently on their own kids.”

It’s called parenting for a reason. This is what happens when you don’t clean your room. Speaking of, I’m gonna go do that right now as mom’s in town with a few days to kill.

Ghost Town With Real Ghosts. And Dogs.

Not since The Stand (1994) has a Stephen King movie adaptation had such a high body count. And these expired husks aren’t just for statistical/social reasons: they’re rotted, leaking, stinking and bloated, with snakes and hairy tarantulas coming out of mouths and holes where the eyes and south of the belt exit-only ramps used to be. Like human non-recycleables, these things are all over the place.

One person is responsible for all this carnage: the town sheriff. He’s so sadistic, you cringe in your swimsuit (hey, the washing machine’s broken —don’t judge me) every time he traps another victim on a long stretch of highway just outside the small Nevada town of Desperation. Those he doesn’t kill right away land in a small jail. The others get shot without a lick of thought. (i.e., a five year-old girl.)

As with all Stephen King stories/adaptations, you’re overloaded with complex characters, one of which is always “different,” in this case a young boy who speaks directly to God. Good thing as the other God (i.e., Tak) is possessing bodies (i.e., the sheriff) and making them rot from the inside out (i.e., goopy drawers).

The first half of Stephen King’s Desperation (2006) is intense enough to make your underpanties twist up under the driveshaft. The small town is completely dead from the inside out. Dozens of dogs evenly line the street as if waiting for a cat parade. Vultures peck nonchalantly at bodies, snacking lightly in-between meals. And there are rattlers (snakes) and crawlers (spiders) everywhere you step. (The grocery store scene will make you think twice about ever walking into a food shop full of dead people again.)

The second half, where the God kid and Tak’s prisoners get out of jail (great scene) and try and figure out what the flip, starts to sink under its own weight. Outside of town is the Chinese Pit, a coal/gold/gravel mine where Tak’s cathedral nightclub was disturbed, thereby unleashing the vengeful god and making the Chinese immigrants who were digging in the mine all those happy years ago to go crazy and kill each other with pick axes to the chest vicinity. 

The get-out-of-jail people wrestle with moral issues, more spiders and a cougar in a bathroom that changes shape to that of a Vietnamese guy with a bomb. That part will make sense if you just have patience. Instead of getting out of town, the survivors head for the mine where they have a redeeming showdown with Tak, complete with flashback wedgies and dialogue that works better in a book than in a movie with gnarly, decomposing bodies all over the place.

 Normally, I’m all about vengeful gods wreaking havoc, especially if they look like a monster and/or evil something or rather. But Tak looks like cigarette smoke (ala, Lost), which isn’t so scary, unless you factor in the health detriments of second hand smoke. The ending gets kinda “group huggy,” but in the end a decent take on a book with too many pages. Better, anyway, than Stephen King’s ultra-crappy The Langoliers (1995). (The movie version.) Man, what a punch bowl turd that thing is/was/continues to be.

Evil In Real-Time

We humans aren’t the only ones affected by pollution. After years of taking drugs, smoking drugs, eating drugs and overloading on McDonald’s Happy Meals™, our blood is so contaminated, even vampires won’t drink it. And when they do, they vomit all over the place. How rude.

Over the years this poor diet has led to vampire mutations, with some being able to walk around in day light as if a werewolf, others having their fanged mouths in the palm of their hands. (You DO NOT wanna give these vampires a high-five.)

So off four of vampires go, traveling from the blood-bereft Nevada desert to the gushing Hollywood Hills, looking for something to drink. Yep, you’ll find countless decorative ponds of untainted blood in L.A.

Hot on their trail is a whiskey-swilling old priest who carries a Samurai sword and guns. If you can’t figure out why the priest has been so hardcore about chasing down a particular vampire couple, you should stick your head in a garbage can.

Yeah, the movie title (Live Evil/2008) is dumb and the action is both hokey and Z-grade. But there’s lots of gooshing gore and naked nudity. Sounds like a typical day in Hollywood.

Hitler, Hamburgers and UFOs

Stopping off at the Lil’ Ale’inn — a roadside diner way out in the Nevada desert that sells hamburgers, fries (ketchup’s free) and flying saucer memorabilia, Megan, a mood-swing prone skank and Dylan, her boyfriend who occasionally passes out (probably to escape her nagging), hear tales of government cover-ups regarding UFOs at the neighboring Area 51. (Note: the diner operator is right — there is such a thing as the “government.”)

Heading out into the night, Dylan turns on the radio and hears Hitler’s 1936 Olympic Games motivational speech. Not much fun to sing along to. Suddenly, the car ceases all operations. Dylan passes out while Megan goes screaming into the desert. Incredibly clever as there’s no one around for miles except…Hitler. He shows up — in full military dress — and says, “I know who you are.”

An army guy with his leg cut off says something phonetically similar. A little ghost girl with zombie eyes says exactly the same thing to Megan, who then screams like she’s passing a half-cooked diner burger. Dylan, whose been transported away by strange lights, returns with glowing eyes, talks her back into the now-functional car.

Something’s not right — Dylan is driving the car without using keys. They pull over and he says that nothing is real and that he knows who she is. Running out into the black desert yet again (at first if you don’t succeed), Megan happens across a small cabin with hundreds of UFO photos on the walls. A strange and sad man walks in. Must be his place. Getting outside, Megan is flanked by the diner dude and Dylan. (I think Hitler was off peeing behind some cactus.)

As limp as this is, you should’ve already figured out the “mystery.” What you can’t decipher is all the abstract clues and how it all pertains. (Hitler? Gimme a break – that exact same plot device was used 10 years earlier in Contact/1997). And in case you were hoping for UFOs in Dreamland (2007), there aren’t any. I feel as though my movie rental dollars were abducted.

P.S. Dreamland, is of course, a nod to UFO/conspiracy/paranormal/etc. late night radio host Art Bell and his Coast to Coast AM talk show Dreamland, a roadside diner forum for UFO/conspiracy/paranormal/etc. space case (and me) call-ins.

Aliens and Werewolves

Some new horror offerings, in case your daily recommended allowance of horror has not been met by watching the evening news.

First up is Area 51, in production since 2009 and just now hitting VOD and is YET ANOTHER one of those flippin’ annoying hand-held camera jobs. In this Area 51 (not to be confused with 2011’s Area 51 Confidential), as a class project several conspiracy theorists break into the legendary military base out in the Nevada desert said to house a junk yard of broken down UFOs and even an alien body or two. Or six.

Here’s the official rundown: “In 2009, three friends travel to the infamous Area 51 in order to uncover its secrets. They infiltrate the base using freon filled body suits in order to mask their body temperature. Once inside, the group discovers incredible technologies before finding themselves running for their lives from an unknown force.”

The “unknown force” probably has more to do with farting inside their body suits and not being able to escape the ensuing terror. AVClub.com’s review, though, says it all about Area 51: “A few fun and creepy effects shots, nothing that happens here couldn’t be surmised from simply reading the film’s title. What we really get is a complete failure of imagination.” Ouch.

If probing for government secrets or being probed by aliens isn’t your cup of beer, then you might be up for Uncaged (2015), a new werewolf movie that mixes found footage with trad-style filming.

Plot: “After several nights of waking up in the woods, a troubled teen straps a camera to himself to document how he’s getting there, only to find some things are better left a mystery.”

So a teen wolf doing selfies. I’m intrigued, though a werewolf running around with a GoPro™ strapped to his fuzzy head seems highly improbable. With all that wolfing around, you’d think the camera would fall off.

“Something’s lookin’ for food – and it found us…” Great line in Dark Was The Night, arriving in theaters on July 24, 2015. An ancient curse, a small town out in the trees, and stat worthy body counts.

Synopsis: “Maiden Woods is a remote and quiet town of decent, hard-working people, but something stirs in the dark woods surrounding this isolated community. After a logging company decimates an area of the forest, a rash of increasingly violent and unexplainable events transpires. Sheriff Paul Shields and his deputy struggle to confront their own personal demons while facing down a new breed of raw terror that is possibly older than humanity itself…and much hungrier.”

Is the monster a werewolf? Bigfoot? A hillbilly with abundant facial hair? Probably all three. Better be if they want my movie coupons.

Identified UFO

Been a while since I’ve seen a new science fiction-y UFO movie. I usually feed my inner conspiracy freak with all those UFO footage YouTube™ videos, which, after exhaustive research (laying on the couch in my underwear and watching), have determined them all to be TRUE. Even the fake ones.

While I wait for even more factual UFO footage to be uploaded, there’s Unidentified, a movie about a group of friends in Vegas who, while dodging criminals, end up in the Nevada desert (home to every flying saucer ever to visit Earth) and find out aliens go to Las Vegas on vacation, too.

As the official, or “fact based” plot tells us, after eluding a loan shark, four friends, seeking refuge in the desert, discover a mysterious metal fragment. One of them promptly goes missing during the night. When the remaining three catch up with their lost friend, there’s something different about him. As his condition worsens, the others realize that something unearthly might be stalking them in the desert.

Yep, he’s been probed.

Unidentified is released when the military says so.