Skeleton Sex

Andre Chang, an Asian/New Zealander English teacher (!) developed cancer after a ghost got into his body. Across town, 18 year-old hottie Juliet Reed (who learned about sex from her Tickle Me Elmo™ doll) came down with cancer as well. Yep, a ghost.

Both end up at a clinic to undergo treatment using experimental hallucinatory drugs. Sure, why not?. Once there, Andre and Juliet see visions of a Charlotte Reid, a feminist novel writer, drowning her 9-year-old son in the hospital’s community bathtub, and then hanging herself in her room. Harsh.

Turns out her surviving sister is the hospital’s head nurse, in charge of administering the fun drugs. She seems transfixed by Juliet’s hotness. Me, too. Blaming the vision on the drugs, Andre and Juliet form a friendly bond that leads to sex. (“You’re almost as good as Elmo,” smiles Juliet.)

But the visions are becoming more clear, this time showing the suicide hanging in its entirety with no commercial interruptions. The extension cord, with which she hung herself, gives way and Charlotte lands face first on the legs of the very metal stepping stool used to facilitate her new necktie. Her heads slides down one of the chairs legs and… You get the idea. These horrific visions provide the clues needed to solve the TRUE mystery and to punish the real criminal.

Diagnosis: Death (2009) is played as a very dry comedy with some mystery and romance crap thrown in. Despite teacher/student/Elmo sex there is no nudity. Lots of swearing and funny one-liners, though. A doctor describes a rather large suppository as akin to being butt-probed by a pineapple. That’s humorous on several levels.

Almost forgot — you get to see two skeletons having sex. It’s not nearly as erotic as one might imagine. My diagnosis of this semi-funny watered-down “horror” film: Meh. 

Bigtime Bigfoot, Erotic Horror, Giant Worms

It’s official — Bigfoot has finally made the big time. (Just kidding — BF’s always been the king.) I’m talking, though about the latest Sasquatch movie, called Primal Rage: Bigfoot Reborn, which makes its debut on Fathom Events’ one-night-only premier on the big screen on Tuesday, February 27, 2018. It must be a good movie for it have this kind of coming out party.

Here’s what goes down: “Lost deep in the forest of the Pacific Northwest, Ashley and Max Carr are stalked by a terrifying creature that might be Bigfoot. Soon they find themselves embroiled in a strange land of Native American myth and legend turned real. Hopelessly trying to survive, with a handful of unsavory locals, they must fight back against this monster in a desperate battle of life or death.”

Sounds cool. I hope Bigfoot turns ‘em all into outdoor oatmeal. Yeah, going to the movies has gotten really expensive over the last year. (Nearly $10 for a large popcorn? Gimme a break.) But hey, Bigfoot on a screen the size of a side of a house. Come to think of it, Bigfoot is the size of a side of a house as well. So I’m thinkin’ win/win.

If Primal Rage: Bigfoot Reborn isn’t playing near wherever you’re munching on a lot less expensive store-bought popcorn, here are a few just released/upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not deserve a shot at the big screen — unless you have a 60-inch TV. In which case, go about your business…

COMPULSION (March 6, 2018)
“Sadie, a budding erotic novelist, is enticed by an ex-lover to join him and an enigmatic woman named Francesca at an Italian Villa. Once there, Sadie is confronted by the demons of her past as she becomes embroiled in a surreal game of murder and betrayal.”

Possible warning: There may be naked nudity in this one. Whenever the word “erotic” is used to describe a movie, you know pants are coming off. Speaking of, time for me to go take an erotic shower.

CHILDREN OF THE CORN: RUNAWAY (March 13, 2018)
“A young pregnant woman named Ruth who escapes a murderous child cult in a small Midwestern town. She then spends the next decade living anonymously in an attempt to spare her son the horrors that she experienced as a child. She lands in the small Oklahoma town…but something is following her. Now, she must confront this evil or lose her child.”

This is the 10th (!) installment of the Corn-y Children, which began its unlikely run in 1984. That another one is coming out makes about as much sense as all those Amityville Horror movie sequels (20+ —yeesh!). Was never a fan, though. I do like corn, however.

A QUIET PLACE (April 6, 2018)
“A family lives an isolated existence in utter silence, for fear of an unknown threat that follows and attacks at any sound.”

The trailer for this one is crazy cool. The family soundproofed their lives so they don’t call down whatever evil icky thing wants to deathify ‘em, going so far as to learn sign language to communicate. But what happens after a nice quiet dinner eating healthy steamed broccoli and someone farts? I’ve heard of passing gas as being “silent but deadly,” but this time it’s for real.

TREMORS: A COLD DAY IN HELL (2018)
“The sequel finds Burt Gummer and his son Travis at a remote research station, where they must go up against Graboids that have been converted into living weapons.”

The 6th installment of the people-eating underground giant worm creatures. These “Graboids” can hear you tromping around topside, hone in your dinner bell and swish — nothin’ but neck. Hey, maybe Graboids are the monsters in The Quiet Place. Food for thought. Heh.

White Trash Vampires and Werewolves

Vampires and werewolves are at each others’ throats (heh) in the ambitious, though low budget Death Hunter: Werewolves vs. Vampires (2010). Who wins? Well, if you’re a human, you already know the answer.

Jack Croix and his market fresh wife whose newly pregnant, get lost driving around the desert and, running out of precious gasoline, pull into a way out of the way dive bar for help. What they get is the drink emporium’s white trash clientele are all vampires. That sucks. (Oh, hey — I just got my own joke!)

Jack’s packin’ a gun and try as he may to perforate them with a weapon that doesn’t seem to run out of bullets, his wife is taken by the vampires and he’s left to wander the desert, where werewolves play in the dirt.

John’s rescued and taken in by a mysteriously hooded man whose own wife was imminent domained by the vampire clan. Since that time, he’s lived in a cave and honed his vampire/werewolf recycling program. And over the next few months, teaches his skillz to John. But dang it, the man got his fleshy parts bitten by a werewolf during an ambush and won’t be alive long enough to pay next month’s dwelling rent.

This causes John to take up the cause, shave his head and face with a hunting knife (no shaving cream for this hunter of death) and set out to get his wife back, who has been turned into a pregnant vampire. Along the way, John runs into two young couples, also lost in the desert, but still managing to play strip poker while driving. The attacking werewolves don’t play strip poker — they play stripped flesh.

During the simmering climax, John locates the vampire stronghold — in a wine cellar — and his wife, who along with the other had vampire concubines — is sleeping standing up. In the desert there are no pillows. If John kills the main vampire, he gets his wife back, defanged and about six months pregnant.The “battle” is so limp as to be uncooked bacon. Very little nudity (opening sequence), and a smattering of blood. Somehow I expected more from dive bar/white trash vampires and wereolves whose boss is a digital video game reject.

The Horror of Exercising

Someone or something is gruesomely canceling gym memberships for the patrons of Los Angeles’ hi-tech Starbody Health Spa, a sort of fitness, nightclub and disco playground where big hair and big muscles populate the landscape.

One fully naked gal is temporarily rendered blind by chlorine steam in the sauna. Another gal belly flops in a pool when the diving board mysteriously unbolts itself. A shower room occupied by super wet supermodels nearly get steam broiled in the locked locker room. A tanning bed turns into a human toaster. A woman gets her hand shredded off in a cocktail blender gone rogue. And a exercise machine literally rips a mullet-wearing guy in half. Feel the burn, then shake it off.

No one can figure out why this poser palace is going awry. Michael Evans, the club’s handsome owner, believes his ghost wife, who earlier doused herself with gasoline and did her impression of a car tire fire, is behind the mutilations/killings. He’s unfortunately right.

His wife’s suicide was never fully explained, but Micheal thinks it’s because she was with child, and then not. As she revenge returns from the grave (leaving typed messages on Mike’s computer, invading his dreams, using the gym’s facilities and skipping out on towel fees), she ends up possessing her brother, who works for Michael and blames him for his sister’s BBQ. Do your best to figure out what happens next.

1989’s Death Spa (aka, Witch Bitch) throws everything into the exercise program — choreographed disco dancing exercise classes, skin-tight work-out spandex, rampant full frontal nudity (a marketing ploy featuring perfectly fit bodies), day-glo clothes, stacked hair and gore scenes so bad, you almost wish they’d cut back to the disco classes. (Note: Disco has never not sucked.) You already know how this movie ends.

P.S. If you want to augment your disco horror fitness regime, watch 1987’s Killer Workout (aka, Aerobicide). Feel the burn, then shake it off.

Bavarian Vampire

In the based-on-a-true-story Bloodlust: The Vampire of Nuremberg (1977), a family-beaten, deaf and dumb guy who witnessed his sister being molested by Father Knows Best (or “Pastor Bedtime”), grows up to discover he has a penchant for watching women have sex with each other and sucking the embalmed gunk out of the throats of dead chicks (not in this order). Fortunately, for him, the local mortuary is overstocked with corpses of attractive young gals.

Calling himself “Mosquito” (cute), he cuts open their boobs, slices off their heads with a pocketknife (!), pops out their eyes, and does near text-book tom-ghoulery in his quest for bloody goodness. He eventually goes after the living and takes out a horny couple trying to bust a move (how rude).

The pacing is slow, the nudity plentiful, the gore explicit. In an homage to Bloodsucking Freaks (1976), try and stomach (if you can) the graphic scenes of a two-pronged straw being used to sip delicious Neck Slurpees™. You’ll never drink blood again.

Bigfoot’s Girlfriend

Tanya is a big city supermodel whose artist boyfriend has hair-trigger anger issues. He wants her to go away. She doesn’t want to go away. Instead, she fantasizes about the two of them on a deserted island, where clothes have no meaning and there are bananas everywhere, some even for eating.

While exploring the island, Tanya happens across a grotto that serves as a rent-free apartment for Blue, a lonely Bigfoot (or “island gorilla”) with more bananas than he could hope for. (Intermission: Tanya names him Blue because the ape’s eyes are that color. “Grotto” would be a better name for a gorilla. Just sayin’.)

Tanya develops a friendship with Blue, which taps into the jealous rage anger of Lobo, her mood swingin’ boyfriend. His temper is as bad as his name, which seems like it would be more suitable on a can of chewing tobacco. He sees the odd couple beauty and beastin’ it without him, so he traps Blue in a remarkably sturdy bamboo cage (i.e., island jail). What follows is a series of LOL moments punctuated by Tanya’s liberal nudity.

Lobo war paints his face, goes all Rambo crazy, and he and Blue get into a prolonged dust up, fighting for Tanya’s bounty. Blue manages to imprison Lobo in his own cell and makes off with Tanya, who by now is fed up with both her boyfriends’ behavior. She tells Lobo, “Go away, I don’t want to be with either of you,” like being in a relationship with a gorilla was an option. Blue responds by chasing her through the jungle. He must’ve tripped, because he fell right on top of her bare bottom and seemed to get stuck there. Gee, I hope he’s okay.

All this fun, and yet the best moment is was watching Tanya in waist deep water trying to catch fish with a bow and arrow. Tanya, btw, is Vanity, who later became Prince’s girlfriend. Too bad the monkey didn’t learn how to play guitar.

P.S. You can find the horror-esque fantasy Tanya’s Island (uncensored) on YouTube™.  I’m not promising I won’t tell your mom of your perverse viewing habits.

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.

God and Satan On A Train

If you’re updating your bucket list, put 1985’s Night Train to Terror on it. With its mind-juggling array of monsters, demons, rampant nudity and wincingly painful music/signing/dance choreography segments from a bunch of New Wave kids dressed in day-glo spandex and headbands making a video for MTV™, this is one of the more surreal horror movies you’ll ever see.

It starts out almost like a bar joke set up: God and Satan are on a train, negotiating for souls, in this case three specific ones. (The train conductor addresses the Most Unholy One as Mr. Satan. Train conductors are so polite.) Elsewhere on the train (headed to Hell, by the way), the New Wave kids are rocking out, dancing gleefully and happily singing so bad, you’ll believe you’re in Hell already.

Broken into three mini stories, Night Train to Terror wastes no time getting to the good stuff: The Case of Harry Billings involves a hypnotized guy who lures people into being graphically tortured and skulls squashed for their remaining fairly fresh organs to be marketed.

The Case of Greta Connors follows with a guy and a gal having lights on sex before hooking up with a cult that is enamored with death and all it’s perks. This culminates with a Jimi Hendrix lookalike who gets an electric chair treatment (at a cocktail party, no less) and melts right before your eyes. Thankfully, his headband survived.

More spastic dancing and screwdiver-in-your-ear singing.

The Case of Claire Hansen, the final segment, has a corporate ladder-climbing Devil’s apprentice, who set his job goals a little on the high side: to destroy all of humanity. He should start with the New Wave kids making all that racket in-between the stories. A group of Immortals tries to stop him. Good luck with that.

All of this is just a capsule summation. But every story is drenched in everything from couch pillow-sized flying death bugs and claymation monsters tearing clay victims in half like they were a wishbone, to demon things, heads making like water balloons hitting concrete, open-face surgeries, flooding blood and other bodily fluids, and more importantly, comprehensive naked stuff, all of which is punctuated by mid’80s blow-dryed hair, glow-in-the-dark fashion and headbands. (I knew those things could withstand the test of time.)

So who wins the souls, God or Satan? Not gonna spoil the soup, but those on this Highway to Hell are making specific fashion statements. Regardless — and this is clichéd as all get out — you have to see Night Train To Terror to believe it.

Monstrous Minnows

So the government-funded “Razorteeth” project to assist with the Vietnam war was kind of a not-so-much. The plan was to dump a bunch of “super breed” piranha in North Vietnam swimming pools and let nature take its course. (All the had to do was give a bunch of little kids all the Kool-Aid™ they could drink, put ‘em in the waterways and let nature take its course. Problem solved.)

Two horny teens, out looking for a place to get their horn on, happen across a vacated military installation, and find a pool/fish hatchery. Off go the clothes, in go the appetizers. Have you ever seen a hot dog eating contest? The teens are the hot dogs and the genetically-engineered piranha are the contestants.

Later, when not so much as a crumb of the teens can’t be found, an insurance investigator happens across the compound, finds the pools drainage switch, and empties it…right into Lost River Lake, where a filled-to-capacity resort and summer camp waits for their turn on the hot plate. If you’ve seen Jaws (1975), you know it goes from here.

Menu items include summer camp kids, pets, and lakeside resort guests… The plan, though, isn’t to stop the piranha from eating anything that sticks its pink toes and fingers into the water, but rather to keep them from reaching the ocean. (Saved for Piranha II: The Spawning/1981.) That’s the military for you. Cut your losses, think outside the box, look at the big picture.

The piranha are only seen as toothy blurs, driven into voracious hunger frenzy by tasty floaters (think oyster crackers in tomato soup). When you do get to see one up close for a second, it looks like the chest-burster from Alien (1979). Same facial expression, anyway. They’re probably cousins. Elsewhere, some token female nudity, which is pretty much required in order to hold your interest in this one-punchline joke. I liked it, though. The female nudity, not the fish.

Evil Bathrobe

A voluptuous chick has nightmares, so she takes off her shirt. This is clearly the right thing to do when confronted by the unknown.

Her Goth girlfriend picks her up and, after meeting up with friends (a large chick and a reverse attractive large chick), head for the beach to score with men with boogie boards.

The party car only makes it a few miles out of town, so the girls walk right into an unlocked furnished house with plenty of booze and nobody home. Mysterious voices pester the boob-gifted chick, so she takes her clothes off and hops in the bathtub. Again, she has what it takes to smash evil.

The biggest drawback (besides the food stamp-esque budget), is the Evilmaker turns out to be the chick’s ghost ex-boyfriend in a discount black bathrobe. And not an absorbent bathrobe, either. (P.S. Not a spoiler – they practically hand it to you in the beginning as if an obligation-free cheese sandwich.)

Explained in flashbacks, he was caught cheating on her (that butt!) and was chopped up by an axe. Neither deeds are shown onscreen, and it only gets worse when the reverse attractive large chick exposes one of her Sarah Lee™-filled poundcakes.

So how evil is Evilmaker (2000)? About the same as a discount black bathrobe.