Killer Homework

In the teen rubber-stamped horror knock-off Tamara (2005), wallflower teen chick is picked on by her socially attractive schoolmates and in a prank gone wrong, end up killing her. They dispose of the body and swear secrecy.

The dead girl shows up to school the next day looking like a porno supermodel and dishes out after-school revenge on those responsible for scorning and killing her and copying her homework.

I know I’ve seen this “back from the grave for revenge purposes” plot before but where? Oh, I know — EVERYWHERE. 

Swapping DNA In The Shower

In Species IV: The Awakening (2007), Miranda is a supermodel quality college teacher whose alien DNA is getting restless. This means the human part of her will die and the pointy-haired alien part will come out and transform her into an H.R. Giger painting.

Her “uncle,” a scientist, is to blame. Miranda was a lab EZ-Bake Oven™ that he used to marinade her human goo with a concoction of extraterrestrial DNA strands. It worked. But she doesn’t know it yet.

A trip to the hospital to find out why she’s been blacking out results in the death of the entire staff via a long, stabby tongue that shoots out of her mouth. Time for that trip to Mexico, for three reasons. One, to escape the law. Two, to meet up with his old science partner to see if he can help stop the transformation. And three, good exchange rate on the dollar.

Forbes McGuire, no longer a practicing U.S. lab guy, has been plying his new trade: clones of dead pets and relatives. He mixes just enough alien DNA with the DNA of whatever he wants to clone, and bingo, insta-copies! He even made himself an overnight slumber party pal with Azura, a mega-hot alien gal.

Miranda, though, is dying and while a DNA stem cell swap with a Mexican hooker appeared promising, it only made matters complicado.

Miranda, driven to date, mate and annihilate, occasionally drops top and sticks her tongue in potential date’s ears. Problem is, it comes out the other ear.

All this happy stuff leads to a showdown between both alien chicks. This is done in the dark, which is incredibly annoying. Build to the big scene and then turn off the lights. Smooth move, Ex-Lax™. Uncle F*ck Up has to make things right and blows the place to confetti. He should’ve done that at the beginning of the flick, because the sex is G-rated, the boobs not nearly plentiful enough (although Miranda is a perfect 10 on any planet), and the premise about as believable as my last lie detector test.

Bookended By Godzilla, Zombie Blood, Alien Park Job

Looking for a Christmas present to buy for me this year? I already took care of your shopping — go to Etsy.com and click over to Mokushop’s, um, shop, and you’ll find awesome, under $70 custom wooden hand-chiseled bookends.

With TV around, I don’t do books, so you’ll have to buy me some to go with ‘em as well. But for a chance to own either the Godzilla and/or Kraken (giant octopus) bookends, it might be worth my time to learn how to read.

These things are “extremely limited”, so you’ll have to hurry, Don’t worry about wrapping ‘em as I’ll already know what they are. Thanks for the thought, though. Very Christmas-y of you.

While I wait for you to ship the bookends to me, here are a few upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not be worth as much as chiseled wood…

CHRISTMAS BLOOD (December 4, 2018)
“Christmas is a time of peace, love and family. But not for Norway as a psychopath dressed in a Santa Claus suit has been terrorizing them for the past 13 years. For as soon as the caroling starts, this demented Kris Kringle dispenses bloody ax blows regardless of whether you’ve been bad or good. As the holiday approaches on one snow-covered town filled with revelers, a pair of detectives work against time to find and arrest this bearded serial killer. Will they manage to stop this demented St. Nick before he kills again?”

As of this holiday season, there are 100,000 horror movies about serial killer/psychopath Santa Claus killers. Know what I want for Christmas for a change? No more of these same-plot movies.

ATTRACTION (December 4, 2018)
“Moscow finds itself on the brink of destruction after a mysterious spaceship crash-lands in the center of the city. While the government seeks to find out what the ship’s passengers want and how to protect the local population, the rest of the city residents break into conflicting factions. Some view the aliens as a threat that should be extinguished, while others hope that the visitors are peaceful and offer an opportunity to learn more about the world beyond. When a young woman finds herself torn between her seemingly normal life and the alluring promise offered by one of the all-too-human extraterrestrials, the fate of the entire world is left hanging in the balance.”

A social commentary on immigrants or a poorly-named sci-fi movie about aliens parking downtown wherever they want? You already know the answer.

JOHNNY Z (2019)
“A half human, half zombie named Johnny, holds the cure to the zombie epidemic. After escaping Nordac, an experimental medical prison, Johnny comes under the guidance of a martial arts Grandmaster named Jonray who agrees under a dying wish to protect and embarks on a journey to find a missing doctor while battling personal demons.”

Sounds like Johnny Z is just another name for Murphy, the half human/half zombie in Z Nation zombie apocalypse TV series on the SyFy™ Channel whose inner gunk holds the cure for un-zombie-ing. Wonder if they’re blood brothers?

THE VANISHING (2019)
“On an uninhabited island 20 miles from the rugged Scottish coast, three lighthouse keepers arrive for their six week shift. As Thomas, James and Donald settle into their usual, solitary routines, something unexpected and potentially life-changing occurs — they stumble upon something that isn’t theirs to keep. Where did it come from? Who does it belong to? A boat appears in the distance that might hold the answer to these questions. What follows is a tense battle for survival as personal greed replaces loyalty — and fed by isolation and paranoia, three honest men are led down a path to destruction.”

They don’t say what it is they discovered. But after a minimum amount of thought, it can only be one thing for a the isolated men on that remote island; a supermodel.

Shark Alarm

In Shark Attack In The Mediterranean (aka, Hai-Alarm auf Mallorca/2004)A helicopter pilot’s wife was sampled by a huge shark, which left him grief-stricken and unable to take his leather coat off in the hot sun. So he moves his supermodel-in-training daughter to the Mediterranean (Mallorca, to be exact, but I don’t know where in the ocean that is) and flies a different helicopter around while his daughter takes tourists on super fun shark-diving excursions.

Then there’s his police officer best friend whose wife is dying of cancer stuff. Then there’s a jet-ski race. Then there’s a supermodel marine biologist who just happens to go for guys who wear leather jackets in the hot sun. She ends up working for a science firm giving enemas to sharks to find out why those mindless eating machines don’t get cancer. (See how this is all starting to tie together?)

Bodies start to wash up on the beach, which makes leather coat man all uptight, especially after he pulls a tooth the size of a hubcap out of a floater. Now all he has to do is convince everyone he’s not crazy by running down the beach yelling, “Shark alarm! Shark alarm!” He does this 11 times (I counted). 

When you do get to see the shark, it’s somewhat impressive (i.e., it doesn’t look too fake). It swims as fast as Aquaman on crystal meth, though, which means if you get in the water you’re gonna end up as ocean lasagna. The mega gripe here is that most of the time is spent on the tedious sub-plots and not what we paid good money to see, which is the giant shark’s digestive system in action. 

Where it gets good for 30 seconds is when Megalodon swallows a jet-ski. Too bad there wasn’t anyone on it, a sea hippie perhaps. And leather coat man? He totally pulls a Batman and hangs from the struts of a helicopter to take a rifle shot at the shark, which doesn’t seem to have a problem launching out of the water like a Crest-sponsored Polaris missile.

So if L-coatman was dangling from the copter, who was flying it? Why, his supermodel marine biologist girlfriend, of course! And you thought they only taught about stinky fish in oceanography school. You must feel pretty dumb right about now. The best line in the whole movie: “He’s young and Spanish — no wonder my daughter is attracted to him.” ¡Conseguido eso la derecha, gringo!

Highway To Hades

Fashion photographer Greg Ross never anticipated killing his wife after she found out about his darkroom goings on with a hot Asian model.

And it’s a fair bet he didn’t anticipate hitting her with his car and turning her into an exploding bag of tomatoes as she was out hitchhiking after she was dead. But how could that be? Her body is in the trunk, being taken up to Black Lake for a proper cement shoes burial.

The first hour of Haunted Highway (aka, Death Ride/2006) is spent looking through the previously clean windshield at the photog’s horrified face as he encounters his dead wife over and over on the road. Yep, that’s pretty flippin’ scary. To make matters worse, the supermodel keeps showing up in his car, looking all spooky and not wearing a seat belt. In a grand moment of inspiration, she utters the line, “I know what you did last summer,” or something to that effect. Then he hears tapping in the trunk and pulls over 14 times to check.

A sign indicates Disposable Body Lake is 90 miles away, yet it takes him all night until daybreak to get there. What, he’s never heard of Google Maps™? Eighty-five minutes long, they could’ve cut 60 of ’em and the movie would still be boring. The only plus: the Asian supermodel is hot.

Once again, however, I’ve been misled by the cover art, my standard reviewing criteria. P.S. Don’t confuse this with Haunted Road (2014). That’s the first exit off Haunted Highway.

Hercules vs. Jell-o

Kevin Sorbo once played Hercules on a TV series where he got to punch people. Here, in Something Beneath (2007), he plays a wussy priest with obviously dyed hair and quotes ancient Indian scripture. Who needs to be punched now?

He’s attending a lecture on environmental issues at a new resort built on land that has no birds, frogs, snakes or stink beetles. What the land does have is a gelatinous sentient creature living in the ground, causing people to hallucinate their worst fears. (For me it’d be watching this movie ever again.) Throw in a cast of asshats — a diva b*tchsnob, a biologist with asthma, a straight cop with a crooked past, and Sorbo as a bible-licker with a roving eye for the resort’s supermodel PR rep — and you have an achingly wrong excuse for a sci-fi movie.

By the time they find the creature, it starts growing wiggly tentacles and is coming out of it’s dirt hole. The supermodel chick, hanging on for dear life over it’s mouth (or butt opening — like I can tell the difference) utters something in ancient Indian (which, as you recall, Sorbo happens to be fluent in), and causes the monster to retreat like me at a non-alcohol party.

Seems this language was a prayer asking the monster for forgiveness and that everyone is sorry for making it mad. The worse part is that it worked! That would’ve been the time for Sorbo to Herc up and start kicking blob. But no, he’s a wuss now and has no time for gladiator pants or punching things. 

I feel as though my entire belief system has been mocked.

Horror That Gives You Wood

When a ventriloquist dummy is sent to a newly-wed couple’s apartment with no return address on the package, they think its a cool, though unusual wedding gift. But when the husband returns home from the store to find his wife sitting up in bed with a huge hole in her face and her tongue ripped out, he gets all sad. (No big loss — she wasn’t that good looking.)

The cops think he did it but can’t prove it just yet. So the sad guy traces the dummy’s origins back to his haunted home town to get to the bottom of the brutal face-holing. His estranged rich dad still lives there in a dark mansion and is confined to a wheelchair and oxygen tank due to a recent stroke. But he has a young supermodel for a wife who married him for his charming personality and not his vast amounts of cash.

The town, though, has lived under the never-ending curse of Mary Shaw, a theatre-caliber ventriloquist who was murdered and her tongue cut out because they thought she murdered one of the sad guy’s great uncles 50 some odd years ago. As the legend goes, she had a lot of dolls and something about not screaming if you see her…I forget.

Anyway, the journey for the truth takes the guy to the old theatre where Mary Shaw used to perform. This place looks like Dracula’s grandma lives there. The cop, though, has followed the guy to the small town and is there to arrest him for taking case evidence (the creepy ventriloquist dummy) and burying it in the cemetery. That it keeps coming back is just one of its special abilities. The other one is when he poops his pants, sawdust comes out. (Not really, but that would be really funny.)

This is all where the story, created by the same guys who did the brilliant Saw movies, gets downright wicked. The two men discover 99 dummies encased in glass. This almost matches up with the 100 missing bodies in the cemetery. The ghost of Mary Shaw is present and what she does to/with the dummies is awesomely gross. You’d think the big face-off (no pun intended) with Shaw would be the end of the movie. But you’d have to be punished harshly for even thinking such a wrong thought as Dead Silence (2007) takes a wonderfully sick turn.

If you’re gooned out by demonic ventriloquist props, rotted old ladies that are capable of painting entire towns with evil (looks like red, but is redder) don’t be a dummy and watch this movie, you big wooden wuss.

Enlarged Crocogator

There’s several things should know about 1979’s Italian-made The Great Alligator. First is that the alligator, while not quite great, is actually a crocodile. Secondly, the movie has been released by many nom de plumes, like Il fiume del grande caimano, Alligators, Caiman, Big Alligator River and The Big Caimano River. And third, the great CROCODILE has more body count credits to its resume than just about any other oversized marauding reptile this side of Godzilla. 

So stop me if you’ve heard this before: a rich entrepreneur is opening a tourist resort on a river-fed African lagoon. The subsequent tourists p*ss off the neighboring low-tech Kuma tribe that dresses up in leaves and backward, bamboo alligator head masks, and worships the island’s big boy croc that makes them consistently stain their leaves. A nighttime booze cruise with the tourists on Tarzan’s Raft (not making that up) and a relentless attack by “The Great God Kruna,” aka the title character. This “all you can eat buffet” has a quickly escalating scorecard: Croc: 46, tourists: zero.

A photo journalist and a supermodel (later kidnapped and tied to a bamboo barge as a sacrifice to Kruna) try to warn everyone, etc. No one listens until they become Cheese-Nips™ for the crocodile. (When he bites you underwater, you can hear the crunching sounds. That’s oddly satisfying.)

A missionary, who years earlier came to the island to force his religious beliefs on those godless natives, lives in a cave, fearful of leaving should he end up meeting their god instead. Beyond that, the ensuing  tourist slaughter rodeo is impressive if the plot is not: the tribe attacks the surviving tourists jumping off the flaming Tarzan Raft booze cruise and as yet not taken out of the win column by the crocodile. Bodies are shot with flaming arrows and spears, hung, stabbed, and pretty much made unable to get a vacation refund.

A bridge collapses. A van turns into a submarine. More regional burning arrows. Some dynamite, a wide open croc yap and a big ka-BOOM later, and it’s gator burgers for tonight’s luau. In all, despite the cheesy effects, The Great Alligator is a laughable, dubbed waste of time.

Expensive UFOs, Ghost Selfies, Fear of Fear

Found some really cool Close Encounters of the Third Kind art (by artist Daniel Keane) on the Internet. (The term “world wide web” is so Netscape 3). This got me thinking about that recently released Navy jet fighter footage of a UFO pretty much outmaneuvering them as if playing paranormal dodgeball.

Made public (finally) by the Pentagon last December, the footage was shot back in 2004 and was so convincing the Pentagon emptied the collection plate for $22 million to study the “40-foot-long Tic Tac” and its relatives. And yet we can’t come up with a few hundred bucks to fix that @#$%! pothole on the street in front of my house? I already did the research — it’s definitely a hole. It’s so big, you could put other holes in it.

Here’s how the government rationalized the fund folly — retired Cmdr. David Fravor told CNN’s The Situation Room the money spent on the program was a drop in the bucket relative to the military’s over half-a-trillion-dollar annual budget. Pffft — I would’ve done the legwork for 82% of that amount.

On that promissory note, here are a few just released and upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that the military may or may not spend a million billion dollars to study…

IRRATIONAL FEAR (available now)
“Six therapy patients are brought together at a secluded cabin to confront their strangest fears. But these fears won’t just hurt them…they will kill them.”

My strangest fears include never getting to ride in that Death Proof (2007) Chevy Nova™, invisible dog poop on visible sidewalks, and getting bitten by a radioactive spider and webbing my pants in front of the Green Goblin. That would be embarrassing on so many levels.

MALICIOUS (Summer, 2018)
“When a young college professor Adam and his pregnant wife Lisa suffer a traumatic event, they find themselves along with Lisa’s sister Becky haunted — and connected — to a malicious entity. It is only when Adam calls upon Dr. Clark, a professor of parapsychology at the university, that the true horror of what they have encountered becomes clear.”

Lots of movie gals getting knocked up by evil these days: Restraint (2018), The Lullaby (2018), Still/Born (2018), Prevenge (2016), Shelley (2016), Devil’s Due (2014), Delivery (2013), The Clinic (2010), Grace (2009), etc. And let us not forget Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the gold standard for crib horror. (Honorary mention: It’s Alive/1974.) Why, there’s enough pregnancy-gone-wrong movies to fill up 40 weeks. Heh. For a really lurid take on this genre, try Inseminoid (1981). If the title doesn’t fill your diapers, the plot will: “A space-team member goes berserk after being impregnated by something on another planet.” It appears somethings on other planets don’t practice safe sex. I bet they don’t even pay child support, either, those losers.

AURA (November 8, 2018/UK— 2018/2019/US)
“Said to revolve around the concept of photographing your own aura, known as Kirlian photography.”

So you take a selfie of yourself sucking in your cheeks in like an anorexic/narcissistic supermodel and a ghost demon shows up in the photo? Just as it’s not making that two-fingered “peace sign” dealie behind my head, I’m okay with the photo-op. Ready for my close-up.

200 HOURS (2018)
“It’s 1986 and a group of graduate students are close to discovering a cure for sleep using an experimental new drug, but something goes terribly wrong with a test subject. After their department is shut down, the team moves forward in secret — only this time on themselves.”

Sounds like a rip-off of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987) and Flatliners (1990/2017). More rip-offery: The movie’s logo rips freely from Stranger Things (2016). And the bra that gal is sporting? I’m wearing the same one!

Bigfoot’s Big Butte

In Sasquatch Mountain (aka, Devil On The Mountain/2006) — his third role in a Sasquatch flick — the legendary Lance Henriksen is the go-to guy for movies about Bigfoot. They should just start calling him “Hairy and the Henriksen.” (OK, now THAT was pretty darn clever.) Lance, though, is way more cooler as a hardened mountain man than I would’ve been. Hard to sell yourself as a believable outdoorsman while wearing a KISS T-shirt that smells like Bounce™.

A gang of bank robbers steal money from Lance’s small town bank and kill a cop in the process. Making a frantic getaway, they’re involved in a car crash with a supermodel with a low top who was making her getaway from a lousy marriage. The criminals take the supermodel hostage and head for the hills. Guess who lives there — Lance…and Sasquatch.

The mythical (ahem) beast is the reason Lance’s wife was killed 12 years earlier. No one believed him, so he kinda became that guy who “saw a UFO” type dude. While the criminals run through the woods, so doth Sasquatch, snapping in half the good guys because hey, Sas can’t differentiate between those that point guns at him and those that flee.

The cops follow and it turns into a stand-off until Sasquatch balances the scales of justice. Now the criminals and the cops have to work together to escape Sasquatch’s fuzzy wrath. Lots of character development with colorful dialogue. But it’s Lance who outshines them all. (He even calls one of the criminals “Pumpkinhead,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to his other mythical beast movie.)

Sasquatch, though, is overly hairy and looks like a heavy metal King Kong, but not as tall. He has a great howl, that will make your butt hairs stand on end — your REAR end.

Craig Wasson, who plays the lead criminal, hasn’t changed his hair since Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors(1987) And that was 20 years ago. Then again, I haven’t changed my hair since birth. Sasquatch Mountain has its flaws (unlikely cop and criminal behavior patterns/situations), but hey, what Sasquatch movie doesn’t? Until I star in one, anyway.