More Gore, The Merrier

The lurid Smash Cut (2009) is a clever — and at times — dead-on homage to splatter filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis, the guy behind such cultural treasures as Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), and The Gore-Gore Girls (1972). In fact, Smash Cut applies the framework of The Gore-Gore Girls, working in a sexy female journalist who teams up with a prissy nancy boy detective who has never failed at solving a case. Even the eye-gouging scene is back, though it sure looks like they just spliced footage from The Gore-Gore Girls into this one.

Able Whitman is a 70 year-old horror movie auteur whose latest movie, Terror Toy, is mercilessly ripped to shreds by critics and fans alike. He seeks solace in the bikini of his stripper girlfriend (who looks like she could be his granddaughter), and later crashes his car, killing her in non-reversible death. He puts her body in his trunk and goes back to work, only to get an inspiration: use real blood and real body parts in his film!

So Gigi Spot (really?) has a role in the movie, and all she has to do is lay there and rot. She doesn’t have any lines, though. Maybe in the sequel. April Carson, a TV news reporter, is in search of her missing sister (Gigi, duh) and enlists the help of Isaac Beaumonde, the aforementioned narcissistic private detective. He looks for clues and suspects Whitman, but can’t prove it. Yet.

April auditions for a scream queen job with Whitman and, in a moment of pure eewww, has her doing a scene from Hamlet with her sister’s head. (It was pretty rotted and not at all recognizable.) She gets the job and Whitman proceeds to round up more body parts and blood for his greatest cinematic achievement. As April and Issac close in, bladders start to splatter, reaching its rewarding nail gun climax.

A grindhouse movie about a grindhouse movie, Smash Cut is often cornball, but entertaining in how they managed to emulate the look and feel of z-grade horror movies of the ’60s. Real-life adult film star Sasha Grey has all the emotional range of an inflatable love doll, but she does look good in a tight, blood-splattered nurse uniform.

David Hess (playing Whitman) is in top form, maniacally cutting off limbs and poking eyes out with an exacto knife. You may remember him from such films as The Last House on the Left (1972) and Swamp Thing (1982). No nudity, but there is buckets of gore and a cameo by Herschell Gordon Lewis himself. Even though it sounds like an oxymoron, stick around for the blooper reel.

Inappropriate Aliens

The crew of a cheesy, paranormal TV show in London goes to a remote island farm in Wales to investigate the claims that a young woman and her boyfriend were abducted by aliens, where she was knocked up and returned to her home with two inbred bothers and a dad who can’t speak a lick of any language.

Even though the aliens implanted her with a space fetus with chompy teeth two weeks ago, she’s about to give birth any day now. (Her boyfriend didn’t fare so well as his business class was power probed with a drill. That must’ve pinched.)

Once at the farm, which is situated near Stonehenge-like rock structures called Devil’s Teeth, the crew go about re-enacting the abduction. Then the real aliens show up. From this point it turns into a gleeful splatterfest unlike anything you’ve seen since the genre-bending Dead Alive (1992).

There are UFOs, cattle mutilations, three-boobed female aliens, sexual intercourse (both of this Earth and not of this Earth), lots of f’n swearing, alien dogs, alien death orbs, arms, legs and heads torn off, shotgun blasts to the face, bow and arrows to the neck, death by wheat thrasher and weed whacker. And there’s not just gallons of blood, but swimming pools of it. This just keeps going on and on, and it’s freakin’ hilarious.

Evil Aliens (2005) is smart, gory and goofy, which is why I wade through miles of rancid horror movie garbage while breathing through my mouth, just so I can find ones like this.

Confederate Cannibals

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams (2010) is a remake of the 1964 splatter classic, Two Thousand Maniacs! and sequel to 2001 Maniacs (2005), in which tourists/travelers are re-routed to the small town of Pleasant Valley, where they are tortured, sliced, diced and put on ice by the locals paying tribute 2001 Confederate rebel-rousers who were slaughtered 150 years ago during the aptly-named Civil War.

Business hasn’t been good for Pleasant Valley as of late, so they take their Guts ’n Glory Jamboree on the road. Just a lucky break to run into a bus load of ingratiating douche bags filming the reality series, Road Rascals. If there was anyone who deserved to pointy end of a meat cleaver, it’s these annoying a**wipes.

The gore is disappointing at best, given its heritage; I’ve seen more blood at hockey matches. The cannibal scene leaves you wanting seconds and the kid who gets impaled on an iron pole, still manages to get up and walk around. Yeah, this is supposed to be a horror comedy, and while there are a few funny bits (sex with sheep — a knee slapper every time), the dialogue, more painful than the deaths themselves.

Lots of boobies and faux sex scenes, one of which is an old granny being ridden like a hobby horse. To that I say ick. Horror icon Bill Moseley as Pleasant Valley’s Mayor Buckman, is in fine hammy form, though his Southern accent sounds a bit too Northern. If you’re looking for blood, there’s a splatter here, a splatter there. If you’re looking for hard-core gore, you’ll have to go back to 1964 to find it.

Tasty Body Modifications

In the super gory Splatter: Naked Blood (1995), three hot young Asian chicks offer their firmness up to science for an experiment that will be a boon to mankind — a drug that will make them not want to wear bras. OK, that’s not exactly it, but this Japanese movie is sub-titled and I can’t really read.

One chick is unable to sleep, another obsessed with food, the other addicted to clothes and beauty products. In other words, just average chicks. But the woman scientist’s 17-year-old son, a prodigy scientist, has secretly mixed his experimental drug in with his mom’s drug, and it’s unknowingly administered to the hotties. It’s a super endorphin that boosts the brain’s pain-killing chemical and makes everyone happy and not depressed. People, beer can do the same thing without needles or surgery gowns where your butt shows.

The drug’s effect happens almost innocently, with the food chick accidentally cutting her finger while preparing a succulent repast of tempura squid. Sucking the blood out of her wound, she starts to feel…aroused. Staring at a pot of boiling oil on her stove, she gets the idea to dip her hand into the tempura mixture and then deep-fry her hand. Tempura cooks quickly (about two to three minutes, or until golden brown) and she’s ready to take a bite.

Therein lies the movie’s genius plot: the endorphin chemical turns pain into sexual pleasure. (Now you know why we drink beer.) What began as a slow-moving flick about nothing suddenly turns down a dark road, with the food chick — fork and knife in hand and sitting on the dinner table half naked — starts cutting bite-sized morsels out of the area normally used for outgoing mail. Then she feasts upon said bite-sized morsels.

Seeing her reflection in the knife blade, she gets another idea: stab said eye with said fork and force it out with said knife. All of this, it should be noted, is done without the camera moving away and is brutally and realistically graphic. So much so, it’ll probably turn you off to eating your own eye.

And the scientist mom? Someone cut a portal so big in her gut as to allow her dead husband to crawl into. (Don’t ask — just watch.) The gore is magnificent and lives up to the movie’s title of splattering and being naked, so really, the plot is all but there to pass the time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I got a hankerin’ for some elbow macaroni.

Extreme Aliens, Extreme Demons, Extreme Tacos

Uncovered a whole steaming pile of obscure, indie Bigfoot movies, the goal being to watch every single one of ‘em. Hope they don’t make BF out to be a killer of campers, roasting their flesh on a stick over a roaring outdoor fire. Oh wait…

While you’re waiting for me to profile ‘em, here’s some upcoming horror to help pass the time…

THE QUIET HOUR (March 21, 2017)
“Sarah must protect her blind brother and farm. Meanwhile, aliens are harvesting the planet for resources. When a mysterious soldier comes to her door, she must decide if she can let him in or not. Is he another bandit? With few survivors to turn to, Sarah must make a difficult choice to ensure her family’s survival.”

So exactly what are Earth’s resources aliens are always coming here to harvest? I’m guessing our bit coins, tacos and Internet porn. Extraterrestrials could easily do that without infringing on our taco/porn civil rights.

RAISED BY WOLVES (March 28, 2017)
“When a group of extreme skaters go searching for an empty pool rumored to be behind an abandoned house in the barren desert, they learn they should not have ignored the rumors that the house is haunted by a demonic presence and a dark history of occultism. What follows is a terrifying tale of evil possession causing the friends to slowly turn against each other.”

So extreme skaters go up against extreme evil. Sounds incredibly dumb. This, coming from a guy who watches stuff like Shark Exorcist (2015).

BLOOD FEAST (April 28, 2017 / Limited)
Fuad Ramses and his family have moved from the United States to France, where they run an American diner. Since business is not going too well, Fuad also works night shifts in a museum of ancient Egyptian culture. During these long, lonely nights he is repeatedly drawn to a statue representing the seductive ancient goddess, Ishtar. He becomes more and more allured by the goddess as she speaks to him in visions. Eventually he succumbs to her deadly charms.

After this pivotal night, Fuad begins a new life, in which murder and cannibalism become his daily bread. He starts to prepare a ritual FEAST to honor his new mistress, a lavish affair dripping with BLOOD, organs, and intestines of human victims. As butchered bodies are heaped upon the Altar of Ishtar, Fuad slowly slips further into madness, until he is no more than the goddess’s puppet; and she thirsts for the blood of Fuad’s wife and daughter, too.”

Early reviews are calling this remake “Nothing so appalling in the annals of horror since the original…” Sounds like last call at The Poggie Tavern. Gory beyond the standards of the time, Blood Feast (1963) was the first splatter movie and broke hard ground in explicit gore and goosh, raising the bar on pretty much all the graphic horror that’s since followed. That’s probably significant in some form or fashion.

DEATH WARD 13 (2018)
“It’s 1973 and the Stephens Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane prepares to shut down permanently. Days before closing, four beautiful nursing students arrive to care for the last handful of ‘harmless’ mental patients in a suspiciously understaffed ward.”

“Confronted by their violent charges, the nurses soon realize that they are trapped inside the asylum with a deadly crew of vicious lunatics. Each patient has their own perverse identity, their own personal demons and their own violent agenda. Pushed to the brink of insanity, the young nurses find themselves in a gruesome fight for survival inside Ward 13.”

Four Spring Break-grade young nurses vs. vicious lunatics. I’m in. This, coming from a guy who just re-watched The Disco Exorcist (2011).

Lip Wart Horror

Just when I think I’ve covered all the new horror releases, like lip warts more just keep popping up. Unlike lip warts, though, more horror movies are welcome. And when you’re done with ’em, you just turn off the TV. Lip warts, or “pie-hole papillomavirus,” can only be vanquished with rinse-lather-repeat sippings of Bleomycin™-flavored martinis (stirred, if you’re an uneducated heathen with sores on your face).

So much for that metaphor. Until they make a lip wart horror movie, here’s some alternatives…

SIREN (December 2, 2016 VOD, Digital HD  / December 6, 2016 DVD)
“Jonah, an apprehensive groom-to-be, sees his bachelor party turn into a nightmare when he frees a seemingly innocent victimized girl locked up in a supernatural sex club. Her ruthless handler/proprietor of the sex club will stop at nothing to re-capture his prize. Jonah struggles to rescue the girl only to discover it is he who needs to be rescued as he comes to the realization that she’s a dangerous fabled predator who has chosen him as her mate.”

Supernatural sex club. Is that like the downtown YMCA but with dealer’s choice happy endings? Which begs the question: If you’re a demon working in the sex trade, do you accept monetary tips instead of a customer’s inner chi? If so, then demons should have their tips taxable like all the rest of us public service clock-punchers.

FORGOTTEN SCARES (No release date at this time)
“Forgotten Scares: An In Depth Look at Flemish Horror Cinema goes back to the birth of Flemish horror in the ’70s and shines a bright light on the potential future of horror in Belgium. Through this documentary the viewer gets to discover long forgotten – and even unfinished – genre gems and learn in-depth info about underrated ‘splatter and gore’-fests, post-apocalyptic movies, slasher-films, Nazisploitation, women-in-prison and other fantastical Flemish genre benders through the eyes of the directors, producers, composers, principal actors and genre experts.”

I’ve never heard of Flemish horror. Sounds like what comes out of your nose during a nasty sinus infection. In reality (thanks to cut ‘n paste from know-it-all websites), Flemish refers to any of the varieties of the Dutch language spoken in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium. I totally did not know that.

One of the most infamous Belgian horror movies of all time and Flanders is Rabid Grannies (1988), which is pretty dang horrible. However, it does have highly graphic scenes of grandma gore. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere.

GEHENNA: WHERE DEATH LIVES (Release pending 2016/2017)
“Encompassing horror, suspense and a twist that will blow your mind, Gehenna fixes on five people who enter a hidden bunker from WWII, and realize it’s way more than a bunker. Some fates are MUCH worse than death.”

A history lesson: Gehenna, from the Hebrew Gehinnom, is the Jewish and Christian analogue of Hell. (I totally cut ’n pasted that from somewhere.) I bet the bunker is actually The Poggie Tavern. Once experienced, you’re Gehenna want to stay the heck away from there. Ha!

THE CRUCIFIXION (releasing 2017)
“When a priest is jailed for the murder of a nun on whom he was performing an exorcism, an investigative journalist strives to determine whether he in fact murdered a mentally ill person, or if he lost the battle with a demonic presence.”

A nun being exorcised? Yeesh – either she wasn’t fully committed to a rewarding life of wash ‘n wear robes and abstinence, or the demon possessing her must be, like, the House Majority Whip for Evil. Either way, f’d in the b-hole.

Exorcisms seem to be making a big comeback lately. This is good as my finger probe-inclined primary care medical rep recommends exorcising at least three to five times a week. That’s a HELL of a lot. Heh.

Sex In The Time Of Hyper Zombies

The Stink of Flesh (2005) is without question one of the more messed up (in a good way) zombie movies you’ll ever see.

Matool, a kick-boxing Mexican with a hammer, is inadvertently captured by an alternative lifestyle husband and wife team. Two sisters also live with them in a fortified house out in the desert: one just to the left of normal, the other growing out of her sister’s stomach.

Matool’s tool has been recruited to feed the wife’s insatiable need. The bent sister gets off by whacking Matool’s bare Mexican grupa with a section of Hot Wheels™ race track. The husband watches, and when he’s in the mood for romance, goes out to the garage where he keeps a naked, rock chick zombie chained up — and the scent of love and rotting flesh fills the air.

Military guys, out patrolling the countryside, are ambushed by “hyper zombies” and take refuge in the House of Non-Stop Porking. They’re enlisted to fulfill the deep desires of the wife who needs as much flesh as the undead. One of ’em is actually sexually motivated by the conjoined twin in the sister’s stomach and makes out with it. Super ick.

All the while an assembly line of the undead converge on the house. On the gore-o-meter, the splat of brains and overripe gunk is a 9 on a scale of 10. Bonus: the movie is filmed in broad daylight for optimum viewing pleasure. This one’s a keeper, much like the zombie chick in the garage.

Gory Story

Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki (1991), remains hands down, a Hall of Fame horror/sci-fi Japanese classic so over the top in its straight-faced comedic depiction of mega-violence and flesh re-purposing gore, it has yet to be rivaled. (Though you could probably make a street cred argument for 1993’s splattery Dead Alive.)

Riki is a frown-y pensive guy with gym-sculpted muscles sent to prison for man-slaughtering a crime guy who, in a flashback, caused Riki’s college girlfriend to be killed to death. The prison, while clean, is a living hell for the inmates, who are tortured and mutilated (de-skinned) and forced to grow opium for the warden. (P.S. Don’t do drugs.)

It’s here Riki endures a non-stop litany of torture and punishments for standing up for the bullied inmates: knife and crochet needle through the hand. Buried in wet cement. Almost strangled by an enemies’ entrails (one of the movie’s most famous scenes). Punched to the point of permanent bruises. Imprisoned in a cage of sharp rebar. Cell roof with spikes being lowered on him. Razorblades stuffed in his mouth. Buried for seven days in prison dirt with only a bamboo stick to breathe from. And that’s just the first half!

Not only does Riki have to defend himself from the warden and assistant warden with a candy-mint filled artificial eyeball (not making this up), he has the prison’s gangs (including a giant fat bully named Silly Lung) with supernatural fighters who beat our hero like a dirty rug with dirty tricks. Riki responds by punching criminals through their neck and up through their face, where his fist pops out.

But it’s the grand finale with Riki doing a spectacularly gore splattered battle with the warden, who mutates into a giant creature with super-strength, that’s the movie’s money shot. (Riki has super strength, too, a gift from birth and super punch fighting skills courtesy of his uncle.)

The prison’s industrial strength meat grinder plays an important role in taking Riki-Oh’s story to unmatched levels of bloodletting. And if by now you think enough is enough, Riki does one more thing with his fist. I’ll leave you to find out for yourself. But man, is it funny.

Interesting note: The phrase “Why so serious?”, uttered in The Dark Night (2008) by the Joker, was first coined in this movie as a question by the assistant warden to the sullen and non-talking Riki. You’d be sullen and non-talking too if someone tried strangling you with icky lower intestines.

Zombie Winos

The Raisins of Death. That’s how the title of the 1978 French zombie movie sorta translates. I don’t know why, but this rocks my world. Probably because I occasional sprinkle death raisins atop my dinner cereal.

So Les Raisins de la Mort (aka, The Grapes of Death) is a nicely gory horror flick that uses contaminated grapes (or “les raisins”) squished into wine that, when consumed with pinky extended, turns one into a rotting zombie. And here all this time I thought drinking wine turns you into a snob, or “snombie.”

How did the grapes get contaminated? Glad you asked. A worker at the Roublès winemaking vineyard becomes ill, complaining of a pain in his neck. (Either his boss, wife, or both is my guess.)

As the infection spreads to others via this pain in the neck, people meet painful ends: throats cut, assorted mouth bites, cars parking on your torso, stranglings, garden forks jammed into chests instead of nutritious salads, and best of all (or worst, depending on which side of the handle you’re on), living heads being chopped off with a hatchet. Makes sense when you think of the rudimentary wine-making tools they had back in the late Seventies.

As previously hinted, blood gooshes from every orifice, opening and so forth. Bright red blood, too. Not like that fake stuff you see on the news. But wait, there’s more – full frontal chick nudity, which comes with a side of bare naked boobies and glistening infected open wounds that look like someone glued rubber novelty vomit on said fun bumps. Lots of endless shrieking and screaming, probably caused by drinking face-pinching, sour ass wine instead of cold, refreshing beer.

Since everybody in France slurps wine – especially so during last week’s wine festival that infected the small village and made their faces turn into freshness-expired mini-mart soufflès – there’s no shortage of zombie attacks. That’s pretty much it, except that every single one of The Grapes/Raisins of Death actors and actresses have tongue-tangling names that no one but their mothers can pronounce. (Jean-Pierre Bouyxou? This guy is just begging to be turned into a zombie.)

Sex Monsters

Sexually transmitted diseases seem to be making a comeback in horror movies lately (Contracted, Contracted: Phase II, It Follows), and look to replace science/space virus recipes normally used to make zombies. About time that old hat got an upgrade. But the message is clear: get a boner, become a donor.

The aforementioned crotch cooties gone wild are at the root of Night of Something Strange (2015), in which five teenage friends set out for the beach on their Spring Break vacation.

While it seems to be a contemporary spin on The Evil Dead (1981), the gory story goes like this: “Good times are cut short when one of the group, Carrie, contracts a deadly sexual transmitted disease during a bathroom stop. When they stop for the night at an isolated motel, the real terror begins when the STD virus starts running rampant, turning those infected into the living dead. However, there’s more going on at the motel than meets the eye.”

Contracts a deadly sexual transmitted disease during a bathroom stop? Super ick! What is it with young people these days that the urge to merge is so powerful that they seek out the nearest super ick-infested gas station bathroom to get momentarily romantic in?

Back in sensibly horny days, a vacationing neighbor’s garage was a veritable Chateau Marmont. The smell of old gas-y lawn mowers and half-used cans of fragrant paint brings back a few puberty party memories.

My next door neighbors knew me too well, though, and set up guard dogs, snipers and booby traps around their property when they left town. Took me three weeks to dig a tunnel.