Snaring Zombies, Memory Bots, NSFW Horror

If you’re a musician, you probably know about Reverb.com, a marketplace for people to buy, share and trade a myriad of music instruments, gear, accessories and broken rock dreams. It was here I found a custom George Romero/Night of the Living Dead-inspired snare drum, a novel way to pound on zombies.

This 6 lug, 14-inch “drum of the living dead” will set you back $149.99 plus $32.00 to ship it from Manchester, NH. Not sure if you play it with drum sticks or a machete or a machete shaped like a drum stick.

Before you go all marching drum on the undead, here are a few available now/upcoming horror/sci-fi movies that may or may not keep a beat…

DERELICT (available now)
“Three friends find themselves fighting for their lives when their urban exploration goes horribly wrong.”

These guys go into an abandoned building covered in graffiti that looks like it was done by an artistic seagull with diarrhea. Then, for no reason whatsoever, they encounter a gas mask wearing killer with a hay baling hook and leather pants. Now we know what happened to all those law-breaking graffiti artists. Damn punks.

HAVANA DARKNESS (available now)
“Traveling to Havana, Cuba, to investigate the origins of a mysterious manuscript supposedly written by acclaimed American novelist, Ernest Hemingway, three friends are thrust into a terrifying game of cat and mouse when they find themselves trapped inside an abandoned building nestled in the center of the country’s vibrant capital. With time running out fast the threesome must maneuverer through a maze of deadly traps to find a way out of the building before they’re hunted down.”

Other countries have abandoned buildings and serial killers, too? Who knew?

VIOLENTIA (available now)
“A nano-tech engineer finds a way to recreate memories using nanobots. But when his daughter is killed in a school shootout, he enlists in a secret government program to find a cure for violence using a psychopath’s memories as testing ground. This leads him down a dark path where the lines between reality and memories begin to blur.”

If that guy stuck nanobots in my head to extract memories, they better be outfitted with hip-waders.

TERROR 5 (April 5, 2019)
“While most of the residents of a small Argentinian town attend a funeral procession following a tragic building collapse, the few who do not will face terrors of their own in this mash-up of urban legends. Bondage, torture, zombies, governmental corruption.”

The trailer shows a scene of a guy wearing Gene Simmons/KISS makeup while riding wildly on a motorcycle. It also shows some sex and bare naked nudity. Not sure which I like better.

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.

Reverse Torture Porn

An egotistical horror film director is casting for his new movie and invites Meadow (if that’s her real name) over to his house for further “screen testing.” Sounds on the up and up to me, too.

Levi the “director” is so greasy you wanna keep a moist towelette on standby while watching him try and seduce this seemingly innocent “actress.” But a conk on the head with a lead pipe kills the mood. He regains consciousness  to find himself constrained in the very same vise used in his last torture porn movie.

Meadow invites her Russian girlfriend over, another actress who failed to pass Levi’s “audition.” Sliced arm, stapled wounds, bacon frying pan bonk on the head, tic-tac-toe games played on his torso with knives, a cucumber jammed down his throat, (though a carrot would’ve been easier to fit in there).

Then they discover Levi’s stash of “audition” tapes, with him sexually abusing dozens of girls. Uh, oh. Meadow severs his finger, puts it in a blender and makes a hand slushee. (I thought she was gonna make him drink it, but she just poured it on his shirt. Up to that point is was a really nice shirt.)

More torture, more begging, a little vomit, a lot of blood. Eighty of Call Back’s (2009) 90-minutes is nothing but Levi getting the sharp end of the stick. Meadow may not make it as an actress, but she definitely has a career in blender sales.

Krampus: Sad Tidings

Hot on the hell heels of Krampus (2015) and A Christmas Horror Story (2015) comes Krampus: The Reckoning (releasing November 3, 2015). This is the third one in a row to feature the mythological menace. How did a German-speaking Alpine folklore anti-Santa go from being a near complete unknown, to rise to the top of the holiday horror hit list? He must have a good publicist.

Here’s what you’re getting for Christmas: “Zoe is a strange little girl, with a not so imaginary friend the Krampus who is the dark companion of kindly old St. Nicholas. The Krampus has been unleashed upon a small town and the legendary demon will seek out all the naughty people to punish them at Christmas time. No one is safe as the Krampus hunts them down, tortures them and then drags their helpless souls to the depths of hell.”

Seems like a nice enough fellow, though unlike the first two Krampus themed movies, Krampus: The Reckoning features a computer-modeled creature instead of a real Krampus. Talk about a lump of coal in your stocking. But hey, the holiday season can always use more demon creatures from beyond to put some much-needed balance to all that “glad tidings” crappage.