Zombie Skin Care, Oceans of Terror, Hippie Horror

If your goal is to look like a zombie AND years younger, but don’t wanna go through the slight discomfort of being bitten by a zombie or those excruciatingly painful Botox™ injections, just click on over to Amazon.com™ and get yourself a Zombie Pack™ and start being the you that you wanna be.

The Zombie Pack from Skin 1004 one-step skin-tightening mask uses a aloe and egg albumen to tighten, brighten and moisturize your face. And it’s on sale for $17 — normally $90. That’s a face-chewing $73 savings! So where does the zombie part come in? From their sales pitch: “It comes in a powder and you mix it with a liquid that activates the mask. You then brush it onto your skin and let it do its work for fifteen minutes. It dries and cracks, but because it’s clear, you start to look like a zombie. Then just wash it off with warm water to reveal tight, glowing skin.” (Rush to buy it here).

I don’t know about you, but I could care less about having tight, glowing skin. I’d put it on and let it dry and party-up my face. Then I’d go to the store or attend a myriad of social opportunities. So while I’m doing that, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not leave you feeling dry and cracked…

LAST SENTINEL / March 24, 2023 (VOD)

Set in the near future, unchecked and rampant climate change has caused temperatures and sea levels to rise catastrophically. Only two large continents remain and billions died during the mass migration to these higher lands. Surrounded by an endless ocean and thousands of miles from home, a skeleton crew of soldiers stand as the last bastion, defending their homeland from an invasion by an enemy they have never seen, monitoring for signs of attack and prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause. Their tour of duty ended three months ago with no relief in sight. Alone and uncertain as to what fate awaits them, the simmering tension amongst the crew escalates when a mysterious boat drifts into range – is it the help they have been waiting for, or something far more sinister?”

Wonder if that mysterious boat is the S.S. Minnow, carrying two old people, one smart guy, two hot chicks and two sailors who “bunk” together? If it is, and you’re looking to be rescued, put down the flare gun and look at other options.

DARK ENTITIES / April 14, 2023 (VOD)

“Following a tragic accident in 1977, the three Winters siblings move into the mysterious home they inherited. They soon discover the house holds dark secrets that seek to threaten everything they hold dear.”

Suspiciously, Motörhead’s debut album came out that very same year. Two words: cause and causality.

THE ANCESTRAL / Release pending 2023 (Screambox™)

“After suffering a family tragedy, a widower moves his two daughters to a centuries-old ancestral home. When both daughters fall prey to sleep paralysis and night terrors, their father seeks the help of a local psychologist. These chilling secrets and frightening visions eventually prove that not everything is what it seems in the old family house.”

The Ancestral had a theatrical release in Vietnam last year. I’ll have to do more intense research to find out what year that was. As for sleep paralysis and night terrors, is there a Tug Tavern in Vietnam?

TRIM SEASON /Release Pending 2023 (VOD)

“A group of diverse twenty-somethings from Los Angeles as they head up the coast to make quick cash trimming marijuana on a secluded farm in Northern California. Cut off from the rest of the world, they soon realize that the estate is harboring darker secrets than any of them could imagine, as they race against time to escape the dense woods with their lives.”

We can only hope the dark secret is undercover DEA agents looking to put the law boot down hard on entry-level hippies.

As The Giant Worm Turns

Digging up the front yard of a rural, British convent’s front yard, a budding archaeologist unearths a weirdo animal skeleton head artifact this size of a tuba. Tubas rock hard when honked. And the archaeologist thinks the skeleton head rocks, to which he loudly exclaims, “Yeehaa!”, thus setting in motion one of the more unusual and provocative giant monster movies you’ll see on a smart device.

Turns out the skull could very well be part of the D’Ampton Worm, a gigantic mythical wiggler. Apparently, the super-sized Lumbricus terrestris was worshiped by an ancient cult. (What is it with ancient cults, anyway? Couldn’t you just pray at the porcelain altar after worshiping a case of Worm Brew? Geez.) The snake monster was later slain (or “cut in half”) by the then Lord D’Ampton for later generations to sing pub songs about. (The lyrics could use some work, but the tune is rather catchy.)

Enter the overtly seductive Lady Sylvia Mars, a mysterious gal who has an affinity for slithery things. After scene after scene of waiting for the worm (that’s thought to still be alive in a nearby cavern), Lady S sets up shop in a nearby mansion, takes off her clothes right down to the string of G, and lures men to worship at the altar of her R-rated booty. It’s here she brandishes her snake fangs and bites them on the trouser worm, injecting and infecting the prey with paralyzing spittle. The debilitated victims are fed to you-know-what.

Astonishingly, the D’Ampton Worm turns out to still be doing business, worming its way up from the depths of Hell for some take out, with human sacrificial groceries provided by Sylvia Snake. Of the numerous nightmare sequences, a stand-out is a rather disturbing flashback scene of people being crucified amid shoulder height flames with giant white worms twisting around the nail-hung bodies, nuns being non-consensually romanced by pant-less soldiers, and the snake woman hissing and her-ing all over the place.

The Lair of the White Worm (1988) is quite entertaining (except to nuns), and slithers happily between surreal horror and deliberate black comedy. (Sylvia plays Snakes ‘n Ladders with her “offerings” and can’t help but twist-y dancing when hearing music.) You have to wait most of the movie’s 93 minutes to see the whopping worm, but there’s people being turned into vampire snakes ’n stuff. Almost doesn’t matter after watching Lady Sylvia (topless the entire last scene) pose over her victims in attire best suited for a fetish nightclub.

And the worm? Big time big.

Vampire Face Cream

I, Vampiri (1956), also known as Lust of the Vampire and The Devil’s Commandment, is a patience-testing Italian vampire movie based on the Elizabeth Bathory legend, which has Giselle du Granda, a vampire chick who needs the blood of young chicks to bathe away her oldness in. She goes to all this trouble when a nice moisturizer would add miles to her mug. (I recommend a purse-friendly jug of Kiehl’s™ Ultra-Facial Cream, which sells for a reasonable $27.50 at Nordstrom™.)

No scares or suspense, a lot of yapping and a lot of stock footage. Then there’s the usual stuff of missing bloodless young chicks and E-Bath trying to stay one step ahead of the local inspector (or “detective”).

I’ll say this about her pad, though —  the skeleton bat gargoyle decor makes for excellent ambiance and really enhance the Zillow™ estimated value of her castle real estate. You might need to upgrade the curtain-esque spider webs, though. I’m thinkin’ something along the lines of a nice mummy wrap chiffon.

Wanna know how many sub-titles you need to navigate before you see Giselle turn into parchment paper? Un sacco. (Sounds cooler if you say it with an Italian accent.)

Furnace Face

Ghost Rider is a leather jacket wearing skeleton with a flaming head who drives a demon-fueled motorcycle up the sides of buildings. He also has a flaming whip with which to snap your crime ass.

Before he was a flaming skeleton vigilante, Ghost Rider was Johnny Blaze, a daredevil motorcycle stunt performer. Sheer coincidence about the whole flame/blaze connection.

So how did he get to be such a hot head? The old west town of San Venganza is populated by 1,000 corrupt souls. Mephistopheles sends a Ghost Rider to round ‘em up. GR doesn’t want to do it and runs away. Time to hire a new Ghost Rider. Blaze is offered a deal: his father’s cancer will be cured if he’d sign over his soul. But as in all deal’s with evil, you ultimately get f’d in the b-hole. Hence, the flaming lips.

Blaze takes the job in order to get his soul back. (The deal for his father went up in smoke.) But what a dumbass – you can drive up walls, man! That said, Ghost Rider (2007) is loaded with comic book thrills and PG-language. Needed more flames, though.

German vs. Germ, Man

The flesh-eaters in The Flesh-Eaters (1964) are miniature marshmallow-sized sparkly organisms in the water that eat your flesh. You don’t need to know where they came from or why human flesh is the only thing that makes their tummies feel all nice ’n happy. All you really need to know is that the handsome pilot of a chartered sea plane and his two hot clients (an alcoholic movie starlet and her tight-sweatered assistant) were forced to land on a barren island whose waters are teeming with said hungry microbes.

Thinking they’ll have to wait out the storm by sleeping in the dirt, a German scientist scuba diver comes out of the surf and lets them sleep in his zelt (tent). Ach du lieber — this man’s a Nazi! Accent aside, he seems nice — AT FIRST. He even acts appropriately sympathetic when a picked-to-the-bone skeleton washes up on shore (Was not aware skeletons were bouyant.). “Must’ve been a shark,” he rationally deduces. There’s German logic for you.

With no coconuts to make a radio out of, the castaways have to wait a few days for a supply boat. But the German — like all zelt-dwelling Germans — has a secret agenda. He figured out a way to stun the microbes. By throwing a positive and negative charge into the water he can immobilize the twerps, then put ’em in jars and eBay™ ’em off to the highest bidding government as a war weapon.

But what the Nazi didn’t count on was that the electricity makes the organisms bond together and grow into an electric shellfish with one eye. Fortified with 10,000 volts, this “electro-crab,” the size of Godzilla’s dining room table, rises out of the ocean, ready to shock and awe. Mostly shock, though.

Can the pilot save the day with his good looks? Will the Nazi get a taste of his own burning flesh? Will the hot assistant find another reason to take off her shirt? Man, they really knew how to make drama-filled sci-fi back in 1964.

Rent-Free Ghosts

Have to give credit to the Italian made Ghosthouse (aka, La Casa/1988). What it short sheets you in acting, dialogue and plot, it’s delightfully gory. Just the opening sequence alone has a slaughtered family cat, a hatchet through the top of dad’s formerly functioning head, and mom getting her face shredded and eye blown out by an exploding mirror before getting her neck sliced into lunch meat. A family slayed together, stays together.

That sets up the premise twenty years later of a young Boston ham radio operator and his emotional rollercoaster of a girlfriend intercepting an ominous call for help, along with an eerie cackle over looped spooky music. Using some sort of math he triangulates the signal and it leads them right to the very long-abandoned house the opening sequence murders took place. Seems some grandfathered evil still lives there rent free.

Teaming up with some age-similar squatters, they try to Scooby-Doo the crap out of the mystery. At the core of it is eleven year old Henrietta and her demoniacally-possessed jester clown doll. Even though she died all those years ago (locked in the basement and left to starve to death), she still has work to do. This includes showing up on TV with bleeding eyes, popping up in hallways and any one of the house’s 14 bedrooms in blinding white light, and packing around that evil-cackling clown doll.

The dialogue is so painful it makes your crevices itch. The acting ranks somewhere between “just graduated from junior high school to “will you please just stop talking?” Thankfully, Henrietta and her demon doll unleash double heck, turning the old mansion into a non-stop parade of haunted house cliches and gore.

Other than the entire thing, Ghosthouse’s paranormal activities are outright LOL: a bedroom where toys and pillow feathers encircle a victim as if an indoor tornado; An running unplugged and motor-less fan’s blade coming lose and frisbee-ing a new throat hole in another victim; Floorboards giving way to a bubble bath of thick milky goop that dissolves skin; A melt-y face skeleton wearing a Grim Reaper robe and brandishing a knife. But it was the blood coming out of a bathroom faucet that really put the frosting on this cadaver cake. And if you can get through it, the ending will put a grin on your non-sliced face.

Interesting note: The house featured in the film is the same one used in the splatfest The House by the Cemetery (1981). Wonder what it rents for on Zillow™?

Talking Gargoyles

Gargoyles aren’t just for curb appeal and for rain to goosh out of ornate cement orifices. They can also be the subject of hilariously goofy made-for-TV movies. Such is the case of Gargoyles, a 1972 horror “classic” that maintains its campy appeal to this very day.

The premise: An anthropologist/paleontologist and his bra-less daughter, travel through the southwestern US, stumble upon a colony of living, breathing gargoyles in the Southwestern part of the United States. The gargoyles just want to be left to do whatever gargoyles do, like vent rain water. But these mythical creatures, when threatened, want to end human life as we know it. Have to say, I’m with the gargoyles on this one.

The movie cuts right to the chase and tells us gargoyles have been here for thousands of years, or “millennia.” They were born of that satan dude and get uppity every 600 years to turn mankind into decorative rain spouts. Good luck with that.

The anthropologist and his bra-less daughter come across a strange skeleton of some as yet undetermined animal thing. They take it with them. Guess who wants the bones back? Clues come in the form of the sound of flapping wings in the night. (I thought it was seagulls, but hey, what do I know?)

The classic part comes when the gargoyles, looking like a hybrid of snakes, frogs, goats and seagulls, abduct the bra-less daughter and take her to their cave dwelling, where she discovers a big pile of about-to-hatch baby elephant-sized gargoyle eggs. The females must have really strong birthing hips.

In a bold rescue attempt of bra-less daughter, the gargoyles are hunted down by barking dogs and riled humans with gasoline and cigarette lighters. Having earlier taught himself to speak English, the head gargoyle lays out a veiled manifesto in a gravelly voice as he attempts to flee with the last surviving breeder gargoyle: “How clever you are; your choice has allowed your and your (bra-less) daughter to survive. It also allows me and my kind to survive, perhaps at the price of your supremacy on Earth one day!”

The English-fluent gargoyle makes a scary face at the humans, picks up the wing-wounded female gargoyle and flaps away. They’ll be back. Then we’ll see what’s what.

Dr. Dead

Dr. David can see the dead. As a physician, that’s probably not the way to get new patients. But it’s true, an ability he came down with when he flat-lined as a kid, which gave him peeping rights to the Other Side. But for some unexplained reason, everyone around him can see the dead as clearly as he. So much for being special.

This all ties in to a female ghost who has been killing men on their birthday and plucking out their left eyeball. Detective Iron Cheung (cool name) is a friend of Dr. D and is investigating the mother-plucker. Turns out all the victims were related – including David and Iron Lung, uh, Iron Cheung. (They’re all old friends.) Oh, before I forget – happy birthday, Cheung! (His special day is right around the corner and the ghost woman is coming to blow out the candles on his death cake. And take his eye.)

 As a preface to this de-facing, each victim starts to get body scars where there were no body scars before. This is all connected to a girl that went missing years ago, a girl that all the guys knew. You better not ask me who the ghost is or I’ll kill your eye. (If you’re double thick and still can’t figure it out, think Stir of Echoes/1999).

What little blood in Sleeping With The Dead (aka Cham bin hung leng/2002) gets splashed about is digital. (What, a doctor can’t find real blood?) Besides the pale-face chick ghost with long black hair, the only other “spooky” thing is a skeleton dummy. That could easily be a metaphor for this lifeless attempt at j-horror.

Must be The Season of the Witch

Despite being made by John Carpenter, the same guy who did Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1981), Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) has nothing to do with its predecessors. That’s good because there’s only so many sexually-active teens you can poke with a knife before it gets boring.

A druid descendant, fronting as the silver head of Silver Shamrock Novelties™, makes full-head witch, pumpkin and skeleton Halloween masks. These popular items are embedded with a microchip made from pieces of Stonehenge™, and placed there by robots with nice hair. If you’re wearing the mask and watching TV at the specially-designated time, you’ll see the broadcast Halloween secret. And that secret is that it activates the microchip in your mask and your head implodes and turns into snakes and bugs. Oh, yeah – green stuff that used to be your brains also leaks out.

An alcoholic doctor uncovers the plan and, with hottie Stacy Nelkin, tries to convince TV stations to not run the commercial so that kids all over the world won’t get the living room carpet dirty with particulate matter. Good luck with that.

As cornball as it all is, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a fair investment for your DVD rental coupons. Bonus: Once you hear Silver Shamrock’s “Happy, Happy Halloween” theme song used for the marketing of said kill masks, you won’t be able to get it out of your, uh, head.