Horror Part 07

Kill Baby, Kill - B

Women are dying in a small Transylvania village and they are found with a gold coin in their heart. An inspector arrives and soon calls a coroner to help him. They find the village is gripped in fear of a young girl who is killing from beyond the grave. The coroner teams up with a pretty girl from the village to get to the bottom of this mystery and soon are embroiled in witchcraft and death. This movie has atmosphere to spare, and uses a lot of inventive colours to depict moods in certain scenes. This is another film by Mario Bava one of the great Italian filmmakers. This movie feels a lot like a Hammer film, being made in the early 60s Hammer was probably a very strong influence on this film as it was on many other horror movies of the time. The acting is solid, the scenes are very good although many reek of being shot on soundstages. It isn't as good as Black Sabbath but it is still a good and creepy tale.

Tombs of the Blind Dead 3: Horror of the Zombies - C+

Two models are sent out on a protype speed boat as part of a publicity stunt for the owner of a sporting goods company but while on the stunt they encounter a ghostly galleon floating in a creepy mist. Of course they promptly disappeared and the owner of the company, the models agent, one of the model's friends, a professor and the owner's lackey go to investigate and become trapped on the ship as well. The movie does have the word Zombie in title, but it is mainly a haunted house movie on a ship. The Templars are here as in the other Tomb of the Blind Dead movies, but their blindness doesn't play into this movie as much as in previous films. This wasn't as good as the first but these sequels never seem able to recapture the spark the first had even though they were written and directed by the exact same guy, Amando De Ossorio. I was kinda surprised over the lack of nudity in this film, it involves models, it is from the 70s, and it is a horror movie but the most we see is every female character, I mean every one is in a bikini. It is kinda surprise to see no nudity in this film. Guess we can't have it all in life huh. Decent enough movie, but it isn't the first Tombs of the Blind Dead

Hell of the Living Dead - D+

A chemical experiment goes horribly awry on the island of New Guinea so a group of soldiers go to clean the mess up. They meet up with a reporter and her cameraman boyfriend and spend the rest of the movie running from and fighting zombies in the jungle. This is about as basic a zombie movie as you can get but it has this really weird politcal message that if we don't feed the world, the world will eat us. Now Night of the Living Dead's message was subtle, they didn't have somebody saying it out loud in the movie. Most of this movie just doesn't work, the acting is too cheap, the writing is horrid, the best thing about this movie is when a woman is killed by a zombie jamming his fist into her mouth and then poking her eyeballs out from inside, now that is a creaive death. If you really are in need of an Italian jungle zombie movie you can watch this but otherwise don't.

The Dead Hate The Living - C+

Aspiring film makers break into an hospital to make a zombie movie which just happens to be the lair of a mad scientist who has a big magical zombie generator which they happen to turn on so the zombies can run amok. This is a pretty standard Evil Dead style zombie movie, sans Bruce Campbell and shotgun of coures, a lot of running, dying and coming back to life. The writing at times is smart but at times incredibly stupid, the acting is pretty decent, the girl who plays Topaz is a really smart horror heroine in her. I like how the zombies aren't created by either voodoo, chemicals, or the end of the world but a big coffin that when fired up makes zombies. Very minimal gun play, most of the deaths are a little more inventive than your usual zombie movie, the best involves electrocution of a particularly large zombie. The cast is a bit small for a film set, there are only three actors, a camera guy, the special effects guy, the director and the production assistant, not really a big film crew. Not a bad zombie flick, but one of the better ones out there.

House of Wax - C+

This movie should have been titled the Florida Wax Massacre because it is more akin to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre than House of Wax. A group of college kids are driving to a football game in Gainesville Florida from someplace, I would assume Miami but they never really do a good job of telling where we are, I think they mention Gainesville once and that is in Florida so maybe they're driving from Atlanta or the Moon. Well they camp out for a night, and meet a crazy local. You never camp anywhere in the South, nothing good ever comes of it. The next morning they find one of the cars has been disabled so they get a crazy inbred local to drive them to the nearest town Ambrose. There is a giant House of Wax, which is literally all made of wax. They soon learn the entire town is made of wax and there is a reason why they look so lifelike, they are real people. Now they have to survive the crazy wax making hillbillies from hell. I'm not sure if I liked this movie or not. When it was good it was really good but when it was bad, I was clawing at everything in sight wishing it would end. The first twenty minutes are some of the most annoying, aggrivating, and utter shit I've seen in a while. It takes another twenty minutes for it to get good and when it gets good it really gets good. There is a level of brutality that surprised me, at a time where toned down PG-13 horror is the order of the day to watch the main character get the tip of her finger cut off is a nice surprise. The movie gets is C+ from the fact that the movie really follows the first rule of horror movies, Anybody Can Die At Anytime. Paris Hilton doesn't do a bad job, in fact I liked her character although the whole pregnancy subplot which they talk about twice really was another product of the first twenty minutes which really is F quality crap. Elisha Cuthbert was also very good, she could have screamed less but she was still very good. Every male character in the movie was a colossal asshole especially the jackass with the video camera. That is something else I could have done without not every horror movie has to have some ass with a hand held camera. It was decent, but it could have been better if they had better writing in the beginning and tried not make every male character so impossible unsympathetic this would have been great.

Oasis of the Zombies - B-

In an oasis in the desert lies 6 million dollars in buried Nazi gold the only catch, it is guarded by a horde of Nazi zombies. Think Zombie Lake only in the desert. This movie and Zombie Lake do share historical inaccuracy but these are zombies movies not historical documentaries. Well two groups of treasure hunters go to the oasis and both meet the standard fate of anybody going to loot zombie guarded Nazi gold, they become Zombie Buffet. This is a Jess Franco film but most of the time it doesn't feel like a Jess Franco Film, a third of the story is consumed by two romantic plot lines and another third is like a North African Travel Log, only a third of this movie feels like a zombie film, let alone a Franco film. But the zombie third is very good, especially the makeup on the half skeletal zombie. While this movie isn't a full of nudity and insanity as other Franco films, it still has the gore and it is good gore. This is a better than average Euro Zombie flick although not one zombie gets shot in the head during the entire movie, they are just set on fire, which always seems to work on zombies and makes for cool effects. Not Franco's craziest but one of his better because it actually seems to have a decent plot and follows it most of the time.

Camp Utopia - C-

Kids go into the woods where a hippie massacred his commune pals in 1969 and get killed one by one by an invisible foe. The movie has a good twist at the end, it is the only reason why it got a C-, the first hour is D to D- material. This movie like a few others I've seen recently almost go out of their way to justify killing the characters by making them world class assholes, this doesn't help us associate with them and thus makes us not care about their demises. One character is a big time football quarterback although it isn't clear if he is actually going to college, his girlfriend who is a snotty bitch, the weed smoking wannabe stock broker who although dies first dies about twenty minutes too late, his girlfriend who is also a snotty bitch and the good girl who just became their friend and we also have the Southern Hillbilly pervert park ranger. The movie was really saved in the 4th quarter by the surprising twist which I rather enjoyed. The writing on this movie was incredibly weak, it was bad but lots of girls get naked and the movie hits you with a good curve ball so all in all it isn't a total loss.

I Know What You Did Last Summer - A

Four teens after a night of partying accidentally hit a guy on their way home and decide to hide their crime. A year later they all meet back up much worse for wear and start getting threats that somebody knows what they did last summer. Now he chases them and starts killing them. Basically a standard slasher that boasted several big name stars for the top four roles, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Geller, Freddie Prinz Jr, and Ryan Philippe. This was only possible in the first couple of years after Scream when slasher movies were ultra hot again. The movie is good, the acting is strong, but it lacks the originality or gore to make it a good slasher. For years I always though this story was something Lois Duncan would have thought up and when I watched it again to write this review I found out, yes she did write the original story behind this and hates the movie like poison. In middle school guys had Steven King and girls had Lois Duncan. I have never read any of her book, I've thought about it but never went the distance and read one. The plot has a few thin moments, the entire reason for them doing what they do is a little shaky in my logic but I'm not them. My favorite character is far and away Jennifer Love Hewitt's Julie, she is the most realistic of all the characters and probably one of the most realistic characters in all of slasher films. It is not as sharp as Scream, you can tell Kevin Williamson was just riding the wave he created by this point but although the idea was Lois Duncans you can really tell it has the stink of a horror episode of Dawson's Creek all over it. An above average slasher that at least wasn't a satire of slashers like Scream was and stayed true to its roots.

R Point - A

A South Korean Army Unit disappears during the Vietnam War in a place called R Point, six months later they start recieving strange radio messages from the missing unit. They send a second unit lead by Lieutenant Choi, who had the bad luck to be at a brothel with one of this soldiers when the soldier is shot by the cleaning girl who was VC. It is not a widely known fact that South Korean had troops in Vietnam along side the Americans with Australians. The group goes to this area and starts to search for the missing unit. They run into a VC bunker and engage in a spectacular fire fight in a bamboo forest and after blowing the bunker they find only one girl who is mortally wounded. They leave her and continue on to R Point where they find this huge mansion, plantation building, big ol' creepy place. They setup camp and start searching for the missing unit. They start having supernatural experiences and things go downhill from there. They encounter ghosts from the past including an American Squad and they recieve radio messages from a French Colonel, although they never actually meet the French soldiers, probably too hard to get French Actors in South Korea. This is a really great film, a little war movie, a little ghost story, the acting from everybody is top shelf especially Lieutenant Choi, and Sergeant Jin, I liked Jin a little more because he really read psycho war machine, it wasn't anything he did or said it was just in his movements and the looks he gave everybody, it was like I am planning to eat you all. A lot of people compare this to Apocalypse Now, which really isn't a fair comparision, this is genuinely about going to hell, Apocalypse Now was about going into madness and there is now whale like Marlon Brando in this film. The primary villain in this movie was a big plus for me, it is actually a ghost not just some stupid twist that they were all dead already and this was just them living in hell that had already been done in the British World War I movie Deathwatch two years earlier. I also liked how the film was shot in Cambodia, most Vietnam Movies were shot in the Phillipines, Apocalypse Now and Platoon being two, which looks like Vietnam but isn't exact, Cambodia is just about the real deal as you will get outside of actually going to Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket on the other hand was shot entirely on soundstages in England, now that is about as far away from Vietnam as you can possibly get. My only little quibble with the movie involves the French, a whole, judging by the graveyard, a shitload of French were killed at R Point but you never get to meet them or learn their story, but again it was probably impossible to get French actors for a South Korean movie. An excellent scary movie and an excellent Vietnam period piece from a slightly atypical source, the Korean Army. This is an excellent example of the kind of high quality films that are being produced in South Korea these days and a good time if you're a fan of horror or war movies.

Christina's House - B

Christina lives in an old creepy house that makes more noise than a fat man's lawn chair on a hot summer day. She has a creep for a boyfriend, creep for a brother, creep for a handyman, and her dad is also super creepy. So her life is basically is creepland, population her. She keeps finding these strange little signs that maybe the noises the house is making aren't just house noises but it is somebody living inside the walls, she finds a half eaten oreo, a sandwich that nobody made, people keep disappearing around her. She fears she is going to end up like her mother, a complete loon or maybe she isn't dreaming it all, maybe it is real. It is a pretty solid teen life in a creepy house movie, Allison Lange is really hot in that girl next door fashion but the best role in the movie is her dad played by character actor John Savage, who is best known to me as Hank Scutter from the HBO show Carnivale, who play her dad, who at times is the hardworking all American father and at times creepy uncle of the year. The prick of a boyfriend was such a collosal ass that I really hoped he would die. The ending of the movie was a little telegraphed but when it ended it really ended creatively with the house turning into the machine of death. A good little unknown flick, it is a good spooky thriller thant is paced well and has a real cute final girl too.

House on Haunted Hill (1959) - A

The great William Castle schlock horror masterpiece. Vincent Price is a wealthy industrialist who throws a party at a haunted mansion for his wife but she ends up dead, not exactly the best party ever thrown. But she isn't dead, she is trying to get one of the guests to shoot Price in an elaborate plot to get his fortune. But this is Vincent Price and nobody gets him that easily. This is a really fun movie, and has one of the best scares in all of horror, when our heroine encounters the hag in the basement, it still makes me jump and I've seen this movie a bunch of times. Aside from Vincent Price, who I don't think has ever done a bad job in any film, the best character in the movie is Eliah Cook Jr who plays Watson Prichet the owner of the house, he really eats up his role. The movie is a lot of fun, it was made by William Castle who back in the late 50s was the king of the gimmick movie, the most famous gimmick was from the movie the Tingler, where he wired the theatre seats to shock the audience at given times. In this movie when the skeleton appears in the movie, a big inflatable skeleton would fly across the theatre. Most of William Castle's other films haven't aged nearly as well as this movie but this is still a solid horror classic.

Fright Night - A

What would happen if a sauve vampire moved in next door and you caught him having his midnight snack? Well that is the question facing Charlie, our hero in this classic vampire comedy. It came out in 1985 right after John Landis made An American Werewolf in London where classic movie monsters were now ripe for satire. They didn't make many of these type of movies and even less of them worked but when it worked it was an instant classic. Charlie doesn't know what to do but thinks that the host of the local late night monster movie, Peter Vincent, played by Roddy McDowall, can help. What happens next is some of the funniest vampire combat around. I really love how it takes a couple of tries for Charlie and Peter Vincent to get this whole vampire killing thing down. Chris Sarandon is the sauve next door neighbor vampire who seduces Charlie's girlfriend, played by Amanda Bearse who is best known for being on Married With Children as the next door neighbor. This is a great and funny movie, it feels like the Night Stalker movie, how would rational people act if there was a vampire in the modern world. This movie is built around Roddy McDowall he really over acts like an old actor would. I also like Chris Saradon who plays the heavy, he does a great job of playing villains like in Princess Bride or the Sentinel. One of my all time favorite vampire movies and also the funniest, check it out.

Darkness - C-

Teenage girl and her family move into an old house in Spain that 40 years ago a Satanic Cult tried to call something in the house with by using 7 innocent children. The story moves along day by day until the big lunar eclipse when whatever the cult tried to call up 40 years ago. The dad of the family has a connection to what happened and now he is starting to have flashbacks because he has come back to the house. Dad basically goes nuts and this is the problem that Dad being crazy takes up over 1/3 of the movie. I didn't really enjoy the first 45 minutes of the movie but once Anna Paquin starts playing Nancy Drew it gets good but it takse way too long for that to get going if your movie is 90 minutes long. The movie sorta wants to be like the Shining but with a Satanic Cult thrown in for good effect. The ending left me a little puzzled and all in all this wasn't a great haunted house movie, the ghosts didn't do enough. There were a few good moments, Carlos' photographs were definitely my favorite but for a haunted house movie they really didn't do much with the house. They use the same scares one too many times. Anna Paquin does a good job with what she has but it doesn't go the distance. A funny note, the version I saw is the 'Unrated' Version and it has several signficant cuts in it. This movie was made in 2002, Dimension acquired the domestic rights and like all movies they get they left it to rot on the shelf for two years and then cut nearly twenty minutes out of the movie so it could get a PG-13 rating. So when they released it as 'Unrated' I thought they must have put all the stuff back in, well no they didn't. All they really did was put the word 'fuck' back everything else in the European Edition, all twenty minutes worth is still gone. What is the point of calling it 'Unrated' if all you do is put the word fuck back three times? I went looking to see what was gone, one of the key plot points was cut out, namely the sacrificing of the six children by the black eyed cultists. This is another prime example of Dimension either intentionally butchering European Horror movies or being so incredibly stupid that they ruin them without realizing it. I'm going to see if I can track down the European copy of this film and watch it again, I have the strange feeling this movie will actually be better.

Bram Stoker's Dracula - A

My second favorite Dracula story, aside from the 1922 German Expressionalist Nosferatu. This movie was originally panned and canned by every critic big and small, they all hated it, and I mean like Battlefield Earth hatred. But I was always a big fan of it, it is visually stunning, everything was done with care and detail by Francis Ford Coppola, the acting with the exception of Keanu Reeves, who always acts like a tree stump, is fantastic, especially the extremely yummy Winona Rider and Sadie Frost. Gary Oldman, one of the best character actors in cinema history does a good job with such a high profile characters, many have tried, only a select few have every suceeded and Gary is one of them. There are a lot of great camera tricks especially with Jonathan Harker in Transylvania meeting Dracula. Really the only real flaw is Keanu Reeves, he is so amazingly wooden that you could carve a bust of him and put it in the scenes and you would never know the difference. This movie is also the first major appearence of one of my favorite actresses, Monica Belucci who plays one of Dracula's vampire harem. Despite Monica Belucci being in the movie the yummiest person in the film is hands down Winona Rider, this was at the height of her yumminess before she started stealing and staring opposide Adam Sandler. Anthony Hopkins and Carey Elwes are fantastic in this movie, Hopkin's portrayal of Dr Abraham Van Helsing is second only to Peter Cushing who was the finest of all the Van Helsing characters. The final chase is a really good variation on the usual find Dracula and put a stake in his heart setup. If silent movies are too quiet for your taste then this is certainly the best Dracula movie for you.

Deep Red - A

An English Jazz Pianist witnesses the murder of a Lithuanian Psychic and teams up with a Italian Reporter who drives the most beatup broken down Fiat 500 in history to investigate the murder. The murderer stays one step ahead of them by removing those who holds the pieces to the puzzle. This is a little more straight forward than Suspiria, less metaphor and more cat and mouse. There are some amazingly suspenseful scenes, my favorite scene involves the pianist being stalked and he knows the killer is in the house and keep playing the piano so the killer doesn't suspect anything. I love the children's song that is the key to the killer's motive and identity, it is really haunting and creepy to listen to especially on surround sound. This is a wonderful film, the suspense is razor sharp, the murders are just graphic enough and creative enough that each killing has the same raw power as the first. I like this one more than Suspiria because I have a better feel for what is going on, while it isn't nearly as colorful, the little shots of the individual items gives the movie enough artistic flair to make it feel like more than just your average slasher/giallo movie. This movie is a giallo film but it is less mystery and more murder so that is why it made it into the horror section. Probably Dario Argento's best, the woman who plays the reporter has been his girlfriend for many decades and is the mother of Asia Argento.

Dead Birds - B-

After a Wild Bunch inspired bank robbery opening a bunch of bandits hide out in an abandoned plantation that hides a deep dark secret that involves children with hideous morphing faces. The first 1/2 of the movie is bad, the characters are so poorly developed that I really can't say much about any of them because they all are lumped together. I think they were Confederate Deserters or maybe just bandits disguised are Confederates they never really do a good job of setting the story up. It is rather obivious that they were much more comfortable with the scary action rather than any character development or back story. I originally had this at C- moving towards a D until the halfway mark when the scares start. The scares were really, really good. The whole morphing child faces into hideous monsters was a great gimmick that even made me jump after the first time I saw it. Another great gimmick was the invisible beast disembowling a slave girl was really gory too. This movie scores well in the gore and scares departments, the bank robbery was good blood sparying event. But, there always seems to be a but, the story is paper thin attempting to cover the scares and gore. I wish they had put more effort into crafting an at least half ass story that would have made the scares more worthwhile.

Monster Man - A

'I'm A Corpse Burrito, Dude!', this is a great horror comedy road movie. Adam is driving across the trackless desert of either Utah, Nevada or Eastern California trying to get to the wedding of the girl he has spent his entire life pining for, Harley is slacker buddy tags along for the ride, and later he confesses he wants this chick too. They have a series of bizarre and strange encounters like all good road movies have, including a headless body in an RV and a bar full of amputees. Also like every good road movie they pick up a sexy hitchhiker who makes a man out of Adam in one of the funniest Star Wars Sex Scenes in history, also probably the only Star Wars Sex Scene in history. They are pursed by a creature in a monster truck that looks like it belongs in a Mad Max movie all the while having some funny conversations and hilarious dialogue. I had absolutely no idea what I had gotten myself into when I started watching this, everybody in the cast are total unknowns although every one of them has at least 5 roles in major films and countless TV appearences. I loved this movie, it was a real funny, gory and scary ride. The best scene is probably the Star Wars Sex Scene but the runner up involves the monster truck, Adam, and the villian, I don't want to spoil it but let's just say over-over-overkill. If you like to laugh, if you like horror movies, and if you like road movies you must watch this. I am a big fan of both road movies and horror movies so when they take everything to the extreme it is hilarious. I also love the departure from the road movie formula, in just about every road movie the car being driven is some sort of hot flashy vintage sports car, a Cuda, a Mustang, a Camero, something that every man would die to have, what does Adam drive in this movie? Mid 70s Red Cheverolet Station Wagon it really introduces our main character as a total wuss. Wonderful movie, this is why I take chances with movies, true 7 out of 10 times the movie sucks but those three times are golden and once and a while you strike the motherload like this movie.

Jeepers Creepers - C

Brother and sister are traveling home from college and they run into a creature in an old Ford Panel Truck who eats people every twenty years. It isn't a bad movie, but it really isn't a good movie. I liked it the first time I saw it but when I saw it again I was much less impressed by it. The only really interesting feature of the movie is that it is basically a road movie and in every other road movie the main character is a guy but this one the main character is a girl, a bit of a screamer but not nearly as bad as her brother who after the first viewing really began to grind on me. He is more effeminite as his sister. The creature looks good, especially the whole wings thing. This movie came out at the same time as another road horror movie Joyride which made it look like they were going to start making more road movies but this dried up almost as fast as it appeared. Not great, not bad, just is. Some people really hate the director of this movie Victor Silva who years ago was accused of molesting a young boy on another movie. It is clear he likes the lads, a rarity in the straight horror movie world, if you look at the brother he is clearly not ment to be straight, down to his rose tattoo on his navel, no straight guy has a tattoo like that.

Forsaken - C-

I do not like vampire movies made after 1993, it is just a general rule of thumb I have. In 1993 Interview With A Vampire turned vampires into puffy shirt wearing, sexually ambigious, losers who spend all their time pining away from their lost humanity and then Buffy the Vampire Slayer further castrated vampires by making them the living embodiment of teen angst. Into this world of castrated vampires comes Forsaken a rip off of the 1987 movie Near Dark but this time instead of taking the vampire's point of view it is of the vampire hunters. Of course we have a clueless guy who wanders into the middle of it and a girl who takes her shirt off several times who falls in love with the guy while the moody second guy is out to kill the vampires. I sorta enjoyed the movie, its biggest problem was all the plot holes the movie kept stumbling over, the lost wallet which just comes totally out of nowhere, the fact that the vampires can only be killed by sunlight or decapitation yet the hunter carries a gun and the like. The acting is Dawson Creek level, a lot of overblown emotions and guys who can't act but look good without their shirts on, and the main character was a regular on Dawson Creek. If you want a good vampire road movie watched Near Dark, now that is a good, deep, violent vampire road movie, this is a victim of the castrated homo-erotic mess that the vampire genre has sunk into.

Cabin Fever - B

College friends go into the woods and contract the mother of all flesh eating bacteria and movie turns into a homage or knock-off of John Carpenter's The Thing, with bacteria instead of aliens. They get paranoia, they get angry, things go down hill from there. The story is about paranoia, and do we really know our friends which is a really good idea for a horror movie like John Carpenter's The Thing or this movie, although I like The Thing a lot more. The movie has some good points, the gore effects were spectacular, Eli Roth the director and actor was really good, I listened to the commentary track and really enjoyed his love of horror movies, he also plays a world class stoner, he is the guy with the dog, Grim. I liked how some characters who you wouldn't think would die did. What I didn't like was the twist ending, that was not really necessary but I guess made sense, the big problem I personally had was I kept comparing it to The Thing and I liked The Thing more because it didn't have a big loud mouth drunk guy with a gun that everybody yells at and acts like a jackass. But those are little problems, I enjoyed the movie more than I expected, I really felt the joy of horror movies coming through the film from the director, Eli Roth, who I think has the potential to be the next Sam Raimi, but hopefully he won't sell out and make Spiderman Movies too. Excellent gore flick in the vein of the Thing.

Faceless - B-

A film by Jesus Franco that really doesn't feel like a Jesus Franco film. The story is about a mad plastic surgeon who uses the blood of kidnapped women to make the rich and famous of Europe young again. He kidnaps the wayward daughter of a big time industrialist, played by Telly Savalas in one of his last roles who hired a private eye, Sam Morgan, talk about a cliche named, who is played by Chris Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's 2nd son. The actions is divided between Sam Morgan's hunt for the missing girl, and the mad plastic surgeon who wants to use Telly Savalas' kidnapped daughter's face to graft back on his sister/lover? who was horribly burned with acid two years previous with the help of his evil nurse played by Brigitte Lahaie. The mad plastic surgeon enlists the help of a mad Nazi doctor to help cut the flesh off women's faces to graft on his sister/lover? The movie really moves at a good pace although not a Jesus Franco pace, mainly there is almost no nudity although there are a few sex scenes. The story is strong which is also something atypical in a Franco movie, in a normal Franco move the story is just there to tie the sex and nudity together. I really think this was a work for hire by Franco, because of the flow of the story and the fact that Franco's regular players aren't in it, namely is wife Lina Romay. I really think the high calibre actors in this movie is what keeps it from sinking into the C realm, the story is good but not all that great, I did like the villain was a mad plastic surgeon, that isn't a typical mad scientist role and he also had a good purpose for draining women of blood and letting his disfigured Igor style assistant cut their heads off and do God only knows to their bodies before dumping them. Good movie, but just didn't have what it took to be great.

Massacre - D

This movie limp, hobbled, and dragged it self through its 90 minute run time. It is a fairly cliched story of a bunch of actors making a horror movie and find out they are living in one too. This movie was made by Andrea Bianchi who Lucio Fulci was grooming to be his replacement at the end of this career, sadly Lucio must have forgotten to teach him how to make a movie. We have one death in the first five minutes and then nothing but a god awful seance and some bad acting for the next 45 and then we kill everybody as fast as we can, kill them in bunches too. They also truck in people just to be killed, that works in the first twenty minutes but not 55 minutes into the film, you get confused that maybe who had fallen asleep during all the talking and bad acting and just didn't notice them. There were a few plot lines that really came from nowhere and went nowhere which also aggrivated me, if you are going to put something in a movie at least follow through. The deahts were okay but they felt generic like they were taken from another unfinished movie and glued in to this one. A very sad movie that Lucio Fulci had the guts to attach his name to, don't let it fool you this is no a Fulci film by any means.

Asylum of Satan - B

A woman wakes up in a mental hospital where she is told she has had a nervous breakdown. The doctor informs her that she can't leave until she has been cured by his special 'treatment'. She is introduced to the other patients in one of the creepiest scenes I have never seen in a movie. They are sitting at dinner in this room, an old woman in a wheelchair, a mute, and a blind girl, everybody else is wearing these huge white cloaks with big hoods so they look like furniture covered with dust covers. Nobody says a thing, it is totally silent and really creepy because you expect these cloaked figures to descend on her at any moment. Her boyfriend becomes suspicious and goes to check up on her but the doctor says no visitors. So like Nancy Drew but with a Y Chromosome he looks into the good doctor. He learns the doctor has been involved in strange goings-ons for nearly 85 years but doesn't look a day over 40. He enlists the help of a detective who takes him out to the asylum and they find it all boarded up and the old caretaker says it has been empty for decades. The truth is the doctor is a Satanist and wants to sacrifice our buxom young heroine to ensure his continuing eternal life. I really liked this obscure horror gem, the makeup was a little cheesy and Satan's guest appearence at the end was laughable but this movie was made in the 70s in of all places Kentucky so it is safe to say this is the best devil worshipping movie I have ever seen from Kentucky. It is really hard to find, I saw it double billed on a DVD with some utterly horrific Satan Cult movie made in Florida. The 70s really was Satan's Time, he must have had a good agent because basically from 1968 when Roman Polanski made Rosemary's Baby to 1978 when John Carpenter shows that average men in Halloween Masks were a much more realistic and frightening threat than a guy with a tail and hooves the Devil was the main villain in almost every horror movie. We really need to get the Devil a screen test or a better publicist, he needs to start working again, he is a universally recognized villain.

Gore Gore Girls - B

The godfather of gore, Hershal Gordon Lewis, is back with a gruesome and when I say gruesome you know it is gruesome tale of a psycho carving up strippers and the private eye and reporter who on their trail. The acting is still amateur but the gore makes up for the rather bad acting. This movie has a few of Hershal Gordon's best and most disgusting murders including a meat cleaver to the face, meat tenderizer to the ass, throat sliting while a girl is chewing bubble gum and the bubble fills up with blood, iron to the face, and diping a head in boiling french fry oil. Let just say this movie is sleazy, really sleazy but what do you expect more than half of the movie takes place in a strip club but this is a 60s strip club so you get to see lots, and lots of tassels twirling. This movie feels a lot like a giallo but really, really sleazy. I don't know why I liked this movie, it is bad but it is a lot of fun in a weird 60s crazy way. I liked this much more than Blood Feast and Bloody Feast 2. I do like Abraham Gentry as the weird pseudo-British Private Eye who is droll and has enough dry wit to fill a desert. There is a certain level of ghoulish glee that seems to fill the screen and I think it is that glee that makes me like the movie so much. But be warned this movie is really sick and gruesome, if you can survive the first attack you may be able to make it all the way through, maybe.

Lake of Dracula - B-

First off this movie has nothing to do with Dracula, the original title of the film was Bloodthirsty Eyes which actually is a good title for the film, when it was brought over to American they slappped Lake of Dracula on it so American audiences would feel more comfortable with it. It had an even more ridiculous title on some American released, it was called Japula, I shit you not. The story is about Akiko who is an art teacher who has come to vacation at the same lake she use to vacation at as a child. But she is having all these strange dreams and flashbacks to something that happened once before at the lake when she was younger. The vamp she had encountered as a child is back in town and is now looking to add her to his stable of long hair pale face beauties. Can her sister and her doctor boyfriend save her from the fate of living death? I liked this movie in a weird 60s Japanese kind of way, it did have a few problems but it also had some interesting touches. I do like when the vampire turns a girl into one of his minions they become pale faced with long hair, which reminds me a lot of the Ringu Style movies of recent years where the ghosts are all pale faced and have really long hair. The subject matter is treated without any campiness, they set out to make a serious vampire movie, something that wasn't so common in the early 70s. I also liked how there wasn't some vampire hunter who swaggers in and tells them how to fight the vampire, they are totally on their own when it comes to figuring out how to kill him. The plot was a little predicable but what vampire movie isn't? The vampire doesn't do a lot other than walk around and stare at Akiko with his crazy yellow eyes. The logic in the film, especially with the doctor boyfriend stumbles a little, at first he is I don't believe in vampires and then all of a minute later, I believe but nobody else will. It is kind of weird to see this creepy gothic manor in Japan, Europe okay, North America, maybe, but it really seems so out of place in Japan. This guy is a Japanese vampire, should he be in a Japanese style mansion? Also they never really fight the vampire, they run from him a lot and then he dies in a household accident. My biggest complaint has nothing to do with the film, it is the bloody thrice damned subtitles. There is one scene with the doctor boyfriend where he says at least three complete sentances and what subtitles do we get? 'Good', that is it for three entire sentences. These subtitles really don't do the movie any justice at all. This is the middle movie of a vampire trilogy but I have never found the other two, maybe one day because this wasn't all that bad.