Real X-Files, Angels & Zombies, Future Grrrls

Sad to report the April 13, 2018 passing of Art Bell, 72, one of the paranormal’s iconic advocates. Host of the globally-popular Coast To Coast AM late night radio show for twenty years, Art’s show was a seriously presented forum for all things paranormal, demonic, ghostly, cryptid, crop circle-y and all around monsterific. And while Art’s charismatic deep voice and dry delivery wasn’t enough, his callers’ supernatural stories and UFO sightings were the stuff custom made for ratings.

So popular was his radio show, he was syndicated in 500 markets in the U.S. and Canada. (Canada, by the way, is where all things paranormal were born, no doubt fueled by Moosehead beer.) Radio DJ Alan Stock described Art’s show as being “like a Disneyland for sci-fi.” Coast To Coast AM still broadcasts with the super cool George Noory at the mic. (He also regularly appears on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens.)

So here’s to you, Art Bell — thank you for being the legendary voice for the real X-Files. And while you can hear archived shows on YouTube™, here are a few just released and upcoming horror and sci-fi movies that might’ve been right at home on Coast To Coast AM…. 

AVZ: ANGELS VS. ZOMBIES (available now)
“At the end of days seven archangels arrive to deliver us from evil. Get ready for the resurrection, the dead will rise.”

Never understood the term “archangel.” Does that mean they have osteoporosis? So angels doing battle with zombies. Seems like everybody wants to take a swing at the undead these days. Heck, God’s delivery sycophants have battled everything from Bigfoot to aliens to even other angels. (Angels are like the Amazon Prime™ of religion.) be double awesome if someone would come up with AVS: Angels vs. Sharktopus.

ALONG WITH THE GODS: THE TWO WORLDS (available now)
“Ja-hong, a firefighter, is taken to the afterlife by three guardians, where only after passing seven trials and proving he lived a noble life will he be able to reincarnate.”

Guess if firefighter Ja-hong is in the afterlife, he must not have been that good at his day job. And who wants to reincarnate? Being back on this toilet Earth is the last place I’d wanna return policy. Except my favorite bar, which I coincidentally call “the afterlife.”

HOUSE ON ELM LAKE (available now)
“A couple and their young daughter move into a lake house that remained unsold due to the brutal, ritualistic murder of a family years ago. Soon, they realize that a dormant evil has awakened, a possessive force that has preyed on unsuspecting families like theirs for centuries.”

A house on Elm Lake? Is this Freddy Krueger’s Airbnb™? If I was dormant evil and lived on a lake, I’d wake up, goon out a few ducks and make splishy splash happen. And I’d do it in a Speedo™, you know, just to up the horror factor.

FUTURE WORLD (May 25, 2018)
“Inside a desert oasis, a queen lays dying as her son Prince travels across barren waste lands to find a near-mythical medicine to save her life. After evading violent raiders on motorbikes led by the Warlord and his enforcer, Prince meets Ash, the Warlord’s robot sex companion-assassin who’s in search of her own soul. As Prince is captured by the Druglord, the Warlord’s forces roar in — and Prince fights to save the remnants of humanity.”

The trailer makes this look like a Road Warrior (1981) knock-off, but with lots more riot grrrls. Maybe they should call it Mad Maxine. The drool-worthy Milla Jovovich stars and still looks a sexy fresh as she did in the Resident Evil (2002) six-movie franchise, where she got more attractive with each consecutive sequel. I bet she eats a lot of preservatives. Heh.

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.

Grandma Zombies, More Sharks, Hollywood Bigfoot

Got a kick out of actor Rob Lowe’s recent statement that he and his sons had a face-to-face encounter with Bigfoot in the Ozarks while shooting a new docuseries called self-servingly, The Lowe Files (premiering August 2, 2017 on A&E). From the press release: “The reality show follows Lowe and his two teenage sons, Matthew and John Owen, as they travel around the country investigating mysterious phenomena and paranormal activity.”

This is what happens to your career when it runs out of gas. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lowe told the celebrity gossip magazine, “We had an incredible encounter with what locals call the ‘wood ape,’ which is in the Ozark Mountains. I’m fully aware that I sound like a crazy, Hollywood kook right now.”

Looks like Rob just wrote his show’s first review.

Speaking of kooky Hollywood things, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that you may or may not come face-to-face with on your TV/movie theater screen — whether you live in the Ozarks or not…

GRANNY OF THE DEAD (July 14, 2017)
“Regular guy Ed awakes one morning to find that his Grandma has become one of the living dead. Trapped in his home, Ed struggles to handle the situation. When he discovers the rest of the town’s elderly have also been infected by the zombie plague, Ed must become a hero in order to save his family and friends.”

Aren’t old people zombies already? I mean, minus the flesh-eating part? Then again, I suppose it’s easier to chew human flesh with dentures, provided said cheap meat has been cut up for you and served around 4PM at Royal Fork Buffet restaurants.

OPEN WATER 3: CAGE DIVE (August 11, 2017)
“Three American tourists are making an audition tape of a shark cage dive for a reality TV show. A catastrophic turn of events leaves them stranded in the waters of South Australia surrounded by hungry great white sharks.”

When aren’t great white sharks hungry? As oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) expertly pointed out in Jaws (1975), “What we’re dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. All this machine does is swim, eat and make little sharks.” So yeah, looking forward to the sharks graphically doing at least one of those things. (Sorry, nature pervs — this is a PG-rated affair.) And while it sports the Open Water moniker, it’s only related to the previous two Open Water movies in name only. Odd, as the plot is nearly identical. This one, though, is found footage crapola, which in this case, probably works.

P.S. I wrote about this back on October 13, 2016 when it was merely called Cage Dive. With a title that uninspired, not surprised that they added “Open Water” to it to cash in. All things being equal, I would’ve done the same thing, but changed it slightly: Open Water: The Eatening.

DEATH NOTE (August 25, 2017/Netflix)
“Intoxicated by the power of a supernatural notebook, a young man begins killing those he deems unworthy of life. Based on the famous Japanese manga.”

I wrote about Death Note: Light Up The New World, the Japanese sequel, on April 25, 2017. You’re welcome. This Death Note is the American remake of the first DN movie, which came out in 2006. The new trailer is crazy cool nuts, the premise being that a “death note book” drops out of the sky and when you write someone’s name in it, they soon expire. My neck keeps hurting from looking up at the sky for falling books.

BLADE RUNNER 2049 (October 6, 2017)
“Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.”

The original Blade Runner (1982) has long been considered one of sci-fi’s greatest movies ever in the history of the future. Hence (from Wikipedia™), film critics Chris Ridley and Janet Maslin theorized that “Blade Runner changed cinematic and cultural discourse through its image repertoire, and subsequent influence on films.”

Not everyone liked Blade Runner…or even understood it when it first came out (me included). But re-watching the seven different film cuts (including one where filmmaker Ridley Scott had full artistic license to edit), Blade Runner holds up surprisingly well, and makes the future look as bleak and doom-y as it does today.

ROAD OF THE DEAD (2018)
“Road of the Dead takes place six years after 2005’s post-apocalyptic Land of the Dead and is set on an island where zombie prisoners race cars in a modern-day Coliseum for the entertainment of wealthy humans.”

A return to the zombie genre he kinda started with Night of the Living Dead back in 1968, George Romero’s Road of the Dead is being described as Road Warrior (1981) meets Rollerball (1975) at a Nascar™ race, with significant inspiration from Ben-Hur (1959). That seems pretty dang awesome, especially since his Land of the Dead arrived DOA. So zombies driving race cars — can you say “morning commute”?

Lunar Lunacy

In the dystopian sci-fi Pandorum (2009), The Elysium is a 60,000 passenger space ship/motel that’s 500 million miles from Earth. So much for remembering where you parked the car. Two astronauts awake from hyper-sleep (like regular sleep but with no noisy neighbors waking you) and discover they don’t know who they are or where they are, which accurately describes the morning after a Jager™ bender.

 Slowly their mind yarn begins to re-spool, and off one of ’em goes to find the ship’s nuclear reactor to power up the restrooms and such. What they find is that the indoor neighborhood is overrun by mutated versions of themselves. These creatures are pasty-white, slimy, super-strong, super fast, below-average hygiene, and addicted to survivor flesh. Several of those food types are discovered still keeping out of teeth’s length of the hungy mutants. And if that wasn’t enough, a condition known as Pandorum — a pronounced form of space insanity — is beginning to set in on Lt. Payton, the head astro guy.

The moon clock is ticking as the reactor is beginning its self-destruct phase. So, like, that lights yet another fire under everyone’s asteroids. Thankfully, there’s a grim twist to all of this as you kinda get bored watching people running away from the mutes, who all look like Road Warrior (1981) extras.

Lt. Payton is in the throes of Pandorum. The monsters are closing in. And the air stinks. (In space no one can hear you fart, but they can certainly smell it.) All of this sounds pretty cool, but for some reason it’s just a big “been-there-seen-that” meh.

Nice visuals, but I just wasn’t feeling the love from the mutants. You might be able to figure out the ending, but if not, don’t worry — it’s just a touch of Pandorum. Take two celestial Tylenol™ and call me in the new Millennium.

Bacon That Eats YOU

Pig Hunt (2008) is 140 minutes long. The promised 3,000 lb. marauding boar with pink eye doesn’t make an appearance until the 131 minutes in. So what the heck happens for the first hour and a half? You’ll be sorry I asked.

Four military buddies and a hot Asian chick go pig hunting in a wooded area filled with inbred hicks with guns, a hippie cult full of stoned naked chicks, and high-grade marijuana (aka, “The Devil’s Cabbage.”). It all ties together, though the characters are so comical as to be made up on the spot. (Hippies? Gimme a break.)

The cavity-ridden hicks make the bad guys in Road Warrior (1981) look like school crossing guards, stunt moto-crossing and dune buggy racing through the trees like they knew someone was filming ’em.

As for Ripper, the adorable 3,000 pound hog with an eye infection, he eats people. He doesn’t floss afterward. Not cool. Since his screen time is limited (as was my patience), you can see he’s an impressive beast, with teeth and tusks that look like industrial-grade roto-tillers. But he just saunters in, roars a bit, makes fart faces and slobbers all over the place. Sounds like me around beer #4.

Lots of gore, bare boobies, and severely ignored dental hygiene. Sounds like my neighbors.