Escaping Clowns, Kung fu Sharks, Space Garbage

While there are some really awesome escape room adventures — Saw and Evil Dead being at the top of that list — Warner Bros.™, Discovery Global Themed Entertainment™ and Egan Escape Productions™ look to top themselves with Escape IT Chapter Two — a Pennywise the Dancing Clown themed escape room challenge. And no need to go to Derry to clown around— it’s opening in Las Vegas later in 2023, which I believe is this year.

From Egan Escape Productions™ press release: “This thrilling experience features scenes from the first film, with the players immediately thrown in to aid in the search for the missing children of Derry. There’s no turning back as guests put their skills and critical thinking to the test, navigating some of the films’ most iconic locations including the infamous Neibolt House, Quality Meats, the Three Doors room, the Clown Funeral Room and even the sewer tunnels below Derry, all while trying to escape the clutches of Pennywise the Dancing Clown.”

Escape IT Chapter One is already open for pant-filling thrills. But Chapter Two promises 30,000 square feet, 20 interactive room, state-of-the-art special FX, lighting, animatronics and live actors. There’s also carnival-styled midway games and a full-scale It themed retail store complete with photo ops and exclusive custom merchandise. I hope they’ll be selling red balloons — I just love those things. Get affordable tickets here.

While we change our vacation plans from Derry to Vegas, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not be made better with red balloons… 

NINJA VS. SHARK / April 14, 2023 (Released in Japan only)

“The slaughtered corpses of villagers are found on the remote area beach in Okitsu village. Samejiro Mizuchi, the leader of the heresy group Koumashu, uses ninjutsu to force sharks to collect pearls from the villagers in order to gain the power of immortality. Frustrated by this situation, the village chief goes to see Kotaro Shiozaki, a bodyguard at a temple on the outskirts of the village, to ask for help. Kotaro accepts the job with a reward, but a female ninja named Kikuma appears in his path. Kotaro challenges Sameshirou to save the villagers, but what appears in front of him is a gigantic shark that doesn’t seem to be of this world.”

You can achieve immortality through pearls? Do you mix ‘em with a protein shake or just swallow ’em like marbles? Pearls don’t seem very chewable, but hey, if it’ll allow me to live forever so I can continue to pay taxes (which I just love to do) I’ll give it a shot.

MRS. DAVIS / April 20, 2023 (Peacock™)

“A nun who goes to battle against an all-powerful Artificial Intelligence known as Mrs. Davis is an exploration of faith vs. technology, an epic battle of biblical and binary proportions.”

A.I. or not, you do not wanna mess with nuns — they regularly hang out with God, and if you mess with the sistas, all holy hell will break loose.

SPACE WARS — QUEST FOR THE DEEPSTAR / April 21, 2023 (Theaters), May 2, 2023 (VOD)

“A father-daughter team of space scavengers must race against a band of evil mercenaries to reach the legendary treasures on board a lost mythical freighter.”

Pffft — space scavenger is just a fancy way of saying garbage collector.

BIRTH/REBIRTH / Release pending 2023/2024 (VOD)

“A morgue technician successfully reanimates the body of a little girl, but to keep her breathing, she will need to harvest biological materials from pregnant women. When the girl’s mother, a nurse, discovers her baby alive, they enter into a deal that forces them both down a dark path of no return.”

Harvesting “biological material” from pregnant women? I seriously don’t wanna know what that is — and this coming from a guy who eats freshness-expired tuna.

Super Batman

Full disclosure: Never actually saw the whole Super Batman vs. Mazinga (1990) movie  as it was playing on a TV screen in an independently-owned and operated video store. I watched it for about an hour before they kicked me out for not buying/renting anything.

From what I was able to ascertain by blocking the aisle is that Super Batman Vs. Mazinga is a Korean kid’s movie starring an Asian version of Batman. He looked cheesily awesome and with more colors than his US counterpart (the ’60s version, not the super cool 2005 Batman Begins version). 

The Koreans got it right by dumping the Joker and the Riddler and having Batman battle unlawful werewolves and criminally-intent aliens. That was/is quite excellent. And he does this not with a Bat-a-Rang™ or help from his festive sidekick Robin, but with amazing martial arts ninja punchings and kicks.

And it didn’t have sub-titles. Who cares? I don’t need words when Batman is punching a werewolf in the hydrant or yanking the tentacles off an alien and beating it with them. Don’t know how it ended, but I’m pretty sure Batman won. I wouldn’t want to know if he didn’t as that would seriously make me distraught.

Ninja Mecha Bikini

After 11 young women were raped and dismembered by a band of criminals in a Japanese alternate universe (out in the woods), the last surviving gal was transformed into a Mecha, a mechanical, but drop dead (no pun intended) sexy android, housing all the souls of her dead sisters. As such, each has bestowed upon her 11 built-in weapons: ninja skills, hedge-trimmer and chainsaw leg extensions, removable boobs that turn into grenades when thrown. The clothes, though, come off by themselves.

Assisted by a heavy metal guitar playing scientist and a Buddhist nun with blue hair and white eyelashes, this Samurai Princess takes out the gang members in appropriate fashion: severed arms and heads, brains removed, squished and jammed back in, a guy punched so hard his skeleton pops out of his skin (great sequence), blood spraying as if shot from high-pressure hoses. And there are so many body parts, it looks like a butcher shop for humans.

The leaders of the gang are a half man/woman and the other half Mecha. (The woman portion wears entrails around her neck like fashionable jewelry.) They need to be killed. And not in a good way, either. The Princess has to be careful as the guy has a rocket attached to the chainsaw leg, and that thing is dangerous when it flies within facial zip codes. But the Princess can turn her entire chest into a buzz saw and give you a death hug.

Because the Princess is hot (literally), she has to shut down occasionally to cool her jets. In her dream state she has sex with the heavy metal guy. In her awake state she can’t feel anything, be it a sword or, um, a flesh sword. The madmen who makes the Mechas, collects body parts with the help of his twin hotties, who carry around baskets of severed arms, feet and stomachs like they were out picking flowers.

The Princess squares off with the ultimate Mecha for the final battle. This thing looks more freakish and cooler than any Hellraiser (1987) Cenobite on the block, sporting hoses, sutures, spiky stuff and flabs of borrowed skin. Then it’s a festival of sqooshed heads, split torsos, and stitched wounds that should be disinfected (but aren’t). And hey, grenade boobs — at least two more reasons to recommend Samurai Princess (2009).

Ninjas, Zombies and Sleeping Bags

In the title-better-than-the-movie Ninjas vs. Zombies (2008), some guy’s brother dies and is somehow resurrected with evil powers and uses his abilities to eat souls and bring dead people back to life to do something that involves breaking the law.

The only ones who have a chance at stopping him are his brother and two buddies, who are magically turned into white boy ninjas. (You have to do this when the movie’s budget is about the price you’d pay for a used sleeping bag.)

The story jumps around like the ninjas and the zombies are just friends with red and black gunk on their faces. There was one naked girl in the movie for two seconds. That part I thoroughly enjoyed.

GoD is a Helluva GaL

So the coffin everyone seeks in the Asian horror/fantasy flick Death Trance (2006) is reputed to either grant your wildest wishes or release the Goddess of Destruction. Guess which one this does?

An ancient Asian duplex/temple where the coffin has been baby-sat for years, is stolen by a martial arts expert who defends his prize by kicking everyone in the face. A wussy monk from the Tougan Temple has been tasked with bringing the coffin back and is given a sword, that when unsheathed, will help put back in the box whatever/whomever is let out.

Along the journey into the Forest of the Face-Kicks (that’s what I’m calling it, anyway), another guy seeking the coffin shows up to kick people in the face. Then a chick arrives who does pretty much the same thing. By the time the coffin is opened and the Goddess of Destruction is let loose to wreck everything, you’re left wondering what the point was to all of this. I was unable to figure it out — and I have a high school degree.

Lots of face kicking and ninja action. The GoD (oh, hey — I just got that abbreviation — thank you high school degree) lays waste to everything, but not before doing battle with the guy who stole the coffin in the first place. He got his wish. Can you figure out what it was? Only if you have the proper schooling accreditation. Like me.

Japanese Girls vs. Tokyo Zombies

A meteor crashes into Tokyo Bay, the resulting stink steam fusing with unknown heavy metal compounds and Hello Kitty™ energy drinks and creates Cosmo-Amphetamine, a chemical agent that revives the dead.

Since the meteor just killed a city’s worth of people (6.5 million to be exact), Capt. Fujuka is tasked with keeping people from coming into Tokyo and zombies from leaking out. Thanks to grade-school special effects, he fences off an entire city in a few hours flat. That’s why they made him a captain.

But Fujuka is ill-intent, experimenting on survivors, using Cosmo-Amphetamine to create a squad of military zombies that squirt green liquid when split open. Someone needs to clean up this mess, but who? How about the easily-pronounced K-ko, the hot daughter of Colonel Kirihara, who is working on the problem from outside the quarantine zone?

You’d think she’d have her hands full, what with 6.5 million zombies and Fujuka screwing around. But there’s hardly any living dead encounters, and the fight scenes are so bad as to be nothing more than dance moves with chin kicks. Not a lot of gory undead gunk, either. Oh sure, a few rotters are made into sandwich bread slices, but hardly anything that satisfies a deep hunger for black gut stuff.

If you’re gonna title a movie Battle Girl: The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay (1991) then you should have way more violent gore and ninja moves than, say, a chick flick. This felt like a snack when it needed to be all-you-can-eat.

The Bat Wears A Hat

In Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003), a school bus filled with a mid-western high school football team coming back from winning a game scores a flat tire. A teacher homeworks the wheel to find a really sharp tire-poking ninja-type weapon stuck in the tire’s shredded remains – and it’s made of human bone, a common cause for flat tires.

No one responds to calls on the school bus radio. Stuck out in the middle of nowhere, the only bathroom is a sticker bush. (You don’t wanna know what they used for toilet paper.) One by one the teachers and bus driver are snatched from the street – hundreds of feet straight up in the air. They don’t come back down. See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

Left to fend for themselves, the students are confronted by a hat-wearing, jacket-sporting, cannibalistic bat-winged flying creature, and in a goosebump-y sequence, are picked out in order of dining preference by the monster who hangs upside down and looks through the bus window, licking the glass as if it were a sneeze guard at an Olive Garden™ salad bar.

The tense situation inside the bus gets even more unbearable as the students, being stress-separated by racism and sexism and bullyism, are submitted to relentless attacks by Mr. Creeper, who regards the school bus as a giant Hostess Twinkie™ with a lot of screamy filling inside.

Another frantic call on the radio connects with the farmer dad whose son was previously eaten by the monster. He and his as yet uneaten other son track the school bus’ location out in the middle of rural nowhere and show up in an old Ford truck outfitted with a makeshift harpoon system. In one of the coolest scenes, dad harpoons the monster and it tries to fly away, all the while tethered by the rope attached to the pile-driven pointy pole. The truck is pulled along as the monster tries to fly yonder, dives and jerks like a fish on a line.

More great action as the monster breaks free and goes for the kids, who are running and screaming like me at an all-you-can-drink beer sale. During the hunt the creature gets dismembered, but his outer husk still won’t die. I totally want to reveal the twist ending, but I won’t. This time. But I will tell you what you’re getting for Christmas.

Vampire vs. RoboCop

 

Also known as The Vampire Lives (1989), Counter Destroyer (ugh – sounds like something I’d come up with while under the leadership of cold hard booze) is about Joyce, a young gal needing peace and quite to finish a movie script. So she and her micro-bikini wearing, she-male voiced secretary move into a secluded, yet haunted Japanese home.

A Taoist priest warned them not to move in as the place was already occupied by an evil vampire who jumps around, wearing Freddy Krueger knife gloves. (You don’t want to second guess Taoist priests – they know things. Spooky things.)

After drinking a possessed soft drink, Joyce unleashes Hell. And by Hell, I mean for anyone watching this stunning piece of vampire droppings, as the plot suddenly shifts to the movie company’s secretary assassinating a rival film studio trying to make the same movie.

When a blow-dried American boy shows up to check on Joyce and finds her arm is possessed by a vampire, he rotates counter-clockwise a few times and turns into a ninja warrior with a rifle. Think Robocop (1987) with a mullet. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get lost right after the opening credits roll.

In closing, Counter Destroyer/The Vampire Lives is insanity bad. And that’s me being nice for a change.