Horror Part 09

The Devil's Rejects - A

A homage to the 70s gritty exploitation road movie that grabs you by the scruff of your neck and drags you straight through hell for 2 hours and strangely you enjoy your trip into the netherworld. The movie starts off with a serious bang as the cops raid the Firefly home which turns into a full blown gun battle. Baby, played by Sheri Moon-Zombie, Otis, played by Bill Moseley, escape and meet up with Captain Spaulding, played by veteran exploitation fave Sig Haig, whose introduction actually tops his amazing and memorable introduction in House of 1000 Corpses. The trio go on a killing rampage across the southwest being pursued by Sheriff Wydell, played the ever intense William Forsythe, and two bounty hunters, Danny Trejo, and the former pro-wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, who for a wrestler does a great job. The movie goes from bloody murder sequence to murder sequence which can make even the most hardened and jaded movie go-er (me) squirm at the level of violence protrayed in the film. For an era of increasing censorship and a tendacy for horror movies to go with safe scares this movie breaks all those conventions to horrify and make the audience sympathasize with the Firefly Clan. This movie also has a host of 70s B-Movie actors to thrill and delight fans of 70s films, from horror stars Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead, to PJ Soles from John Carpenter's Halloween, to Mary Woronov from Silent Night Bloody Night to 70 porn star Ginger Lynn, to several 70s TV stars including Deborah Van Valkenburgh and Daniel Roebuck, they all meet rather messy ends which is kinda surprising that they would go along with this. The soundtrack is also authentic 70s music including Lynard Skynard's Free Bird which is used excellently within the film. While watching this movie I kept thinking this is the horror genre's Wild Bunch, it is brutally violent but yet isn't just about the violence. What really surprised me is that both of Minnesota's movie critics, who almost never like horror movies, and never-ever like violent movies both gave this incredibly high ratings and stellar reviews. This movie shows that Rob Zombie is an excellent director and I am eagerly looking forward to his next project.

Slaughterhouse of the Rising Sun - A

I had heard a lot of buzz among horror fans about this movie, and rather surprisingly it actually lived up to the hype. The last movie I heard hyped like this was My Little Eye which is still one of the worst horror movies ever made. The story follows Jennifer who we are introduced to her while she is staring in a porno movie with a midget. She goes nuts when she sees the spectral vision of her dead sister and she proceeds to claw the horny midget's eyes out. After being released from the mental hospital she hooks up with a Charles Manson style hippie gang who decided to check out the cursed house on Highway 9. Why do they decide to check it out? Well for about the same reason as the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because it is there. In no short order Jennifer get possessed by the ghostly hookers and starts killing her hippie friends off. I was rather surprised by this movie, made in 2005 but every single piece of it looks straight out of 1975 which was the intent of the film. It is a homage to all those gritty horror movies of the late seventies like Last House on the Left, the afore mention Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Don't Go In The Park with amazing results. There is another movie that is making the festival route this summer called Camp Daze that recreates the 80s slasher movies and is supposedly as good as this. Maybe this is the beginning of retro-horror we can't make good horror movies in a modern setting without ripping off Japanese movies so let's go back to when Americans actually made orginal horror movies on their own and celebrate it, if those movies are as faithful as this movie was they will work.

Splatter University - F

I'm not sure if this was meant to be an inept horror movie or an inept comedy. I really have no luck with Troma movies, I knew the movie was going to be rough when the first thing I saw in the film was the word Troma. The movie is about an escaped psycho who kills women at some sorta of university. The scares are lame, all the actors are so low talent it doesn't even count as B Movie. The girls look like tired old strippers from some crappy backwayer New Jersey Strip Club and the guys look like the patrons of the same strip club, they look absolutely nothing like college students, not even close. High school would have made more sense but this is a Troma movie. The deaths are fairly lame, the movie really has a misogynistic feel to it, again this is a Troma movie where women aren't exactly Troma's favorite sex. God it took me three days to watch all 73 minutes worth of movie it was so poorly written, acted, and edited that I couldn't watch more than twenty minutes at any one time without getting itchy to drink drain cleaner. Don't watch this movie it is a burnt turkey.

Baba Yaga - C

A weird and sometimes confused story about a fashion photographer, Valentina, who meets Baba Yaga, a witch who possesses her camera and then gives her a possessed S&M Doll which slowly takes over her mind. This is a weird movie, at times it wants to be one of those crazy experimental 60s films, and at other times a weird S&M horror movie. At times I got confused on what was actually going on, somtimes I like that feeling, other times it annoys me, it really depends on the film. This one annoyed me, I think it went into two seperate weird directions, the possession hallucinations and the weird advant-garde movie within the movie, don't mess with the head twice in one film it never works out. I like the S&M Doll, that was really unique but I think they needed more physical S&M for it to work. A weird little movie that only could have been made in the 60s.

Valentine - D

After being humilated at a middle school dance, the wronged nerd returns to exact his revenge on the pretty preppy girls that wronged him. Yes I agree middle school can be hellish, and after that kind of abuse you do certainly have a rather large axe to grind. Now they are all grown up and even more repulsive than middle school, nice to know some people never change. Now a guy in a Cherubim mask is killing them in rather uninteresting ways, but the characters are so vapid, self obessed, and egomanicial you really don't care that they die. The ending really had me groaning, it was so telegraphed from the very first moment of the film. David Borenaz or however you spell his last name, he is the killer, this is not a big fucking surprise, the awkward nerd transforms into the studly, rippling, brooding chiseled hunk of the year, really like that happens in life, you really don't change physically that much, I am a few inches taller, have a few more miles on my face but essentially I'm the same smart-ass I was in middle school. The twist ending was beyond moronic, my guess is the writer hoped people didn't watch the movie all that closely or maybe walked in during the middle. I liked Denise Richards in this, she was really cute, a lot more so than the other girls but she was also a bitch and therefore ended up toast. I won't even make any remarks about the scene with the med student and the corpse, if you are going to put that in your film at least get one fact straight about the entire thing. You can tell the writer of this had issues in middle school, and this was his revenge, a really bad slasher movie. This really was the end of the post-modern (God I hate that term) slasher cycle after this tanked slashers returned to the world of direct to video where they had been dwelling before Wes Craven turned them into cheap teen thrills. Depsite all the notable celebrities in this movie it is still a turkey with a few positives to keep it from the F.

Blood Gnome - C-

Think Ghoulies but set in the world of S&M. There is a mad scientist living in a ranch house somewhere in North Hollywood I think who deals drugs which are derived from the blood of these Blood Gnomes who she also uses as her personal hit squad. It is up to a crime scene photographer and an S&M Mistress Divinity played by the movie saving Melissa Pursley. The movie also has a cameo by Julie Strain and the Porcelian Twinz. Seeing the Z in place of an S in any movie really is the kiss of death but Julie and the Twinz are there just to be naked, I know Julie Strain naked in a movie is shocking but true. Daniel, our hero, played by Vinnie Bilancio, seems way too old to be the hero in this movie but then you learn he produced, editted and composed the score for the film and then you go ah yes now we see why he gets the hot chicks in the movie, he is paying for it. The movie really isn't all that great, it is too little horror, too little S&M and too little softcore sex, it lacks in just about every avenue it ventures down. If it wasn't for Melissa Pursley who has that goth hottie look going for her in spades, this movie would have been much, much harder to watch. This isn't great horror, it isn't even great softcore porno.

Berserker: The Nordic Curse - D+

Teens go to party at a cabin in the woods and get killed by a Viking Curse, the Berserker. Okay yes Vikings did land in North America we know that but you really think they packed up a crazed cannibal on this long voyage? Okay probably not but let's not quibble. The kids party and get killed by a guy wearing a bear snout and tears at them with claws. With the exception of the old Berserker backstory which was pretty cool this is a pretty subpar slasher, the kids are terribly annoying but the guest stars Buck Flower and John Goff do a really good job with their roles. They really save the movie from an F. The movie had lots of direction problems, the whole running through the forest mess made the movie hard to watch because the director had a real hard time not just running the camera through trees making the actors completely disappear. The whole inner cutting between a sex scene and the first murder was really different but kinda lessened the impact of both scenes. An rare little horror movie that turned out to be a rock not a gem.

Puppet Master - A

This little movie about killer animated puppets has gained quiet a cult following as well as about eight sequels. This was the first real big hit for Charles Band and his soon to be infamous Full Moon Pictures. These were small budget horror movies that at least for a few years in the late 80s and early 90s really filled the gap in horror after slashers died. The story involves 4 psychics, who are each special in their own ways who are investigating the death of an associate of theirs in a big creepy hotel where in 1939, Andre Toulon, played by the human skeleton William Hickey, kills himself so his formula to turn puppets into living creatures doesn't fall into the hands of the Nazis. The puppets are still alive and they aren't happy with people looking for their secret. The biggest strength of this movie are the puppets, they are instantely memorable, from Blade who looks like Jack the Ripper, to Tunneler who has the drill bit for a head, to the Leech Woman who enjoys some of the kinkiest sex in film history in this film. This is an original and very fun little horror movie that I fondly remember from my childhood, if you can find it check it out.

Puppet Master 2: His Unholy Creations - A

One of the few sequels that is better than the first but the first Puppet Master is still a better film, I like this one a little better. This time Andre Toulon is brought back from the dead by his puppets just as a second paranormal investigation crew arrives at the hotel to look into the weird going-ons from the first movie. The group gets picked off one by one by Toulon's puppets, Blade, Pin-Head, Leech Woman, Buzz, Jester, and the newest puppet Torch, the oddly Nazi-esque guy who shoots fire. These movies really aren't about the human actors, you can see real people in any horror movie but the Puppet Master series has some of the coolest stop motion puppets of death in movie history. My favorite in this movie is still Blade, he just looks so menacing and cool. I'm rather happy they haven't made more of these movies since CG came around I think it would ruin the magic of the stop motion puppets that so freaked me out as a kid. The idea that your toys can come to life and pay you back for the abuse you inflicted upon them like Torch and the kid with the whip in the movie is always creepy. Great fun, lots of puppets killing people and people killing puppets.

Hacked Off - B

You know you are entering dangerous water in movies when the movie you look it up in IMDb and there is nothing. This is a short little movie, only 80 minutes and the first fifteen or so are kinda wasted on filler but once it gets going it is really good. A group of friends go a remote farmhouse in Normandy for the weekend but a psycho has escaped from the asylum near by and is loose. It is a pretty basic story that is as old as slasher movies themselves but like Halloween it is all in the execution (pun intended) of the story that makes the movie good. The cast is 100 percent British nobodies but they all do an excellent job with the material. The gore is excellent for such a small budget, the location is really out in the middle of total nowhere. The killer was good, he really had that look like instead of hiring an actor they just sprung a mental patient from a real asylum. I had some real reservations about this movie when I first started watching it, I was fairly certain I was going to be eating a turkey sandwich here but after the credit sequence, which running 15 minutes probably is a world record for a low budget film the movie is competantly shot, well written, and well acted which really made me happy I watched it. Hopefully these film maker will do more, there is certainly talent there.

Saw - B

Two men awake up chained inside a germ freaks worst nightmare possibly the filthiest industrial bathroom imaginable. They find a tape recorder than explains to them they are prisoners of the Jigsaw, no not the Punisher villain (wow talk about scoring mega-nerd points there), but a serial killer who forces his victims into terrible situations where they have to harm them or other people to stay alive. One of these two men has to kill the other in order to make it out alive. The back story about Jigsaw and the men's invovlment with him is told through a series of flashbacks which other than show the others murders really fail to help us understand the mystery of Jigsaw. I went into this movie expecting more a thriller like Seven which was obviously a serious influence upon this film. It is definitely square in the horror genre rather than the thriller genre. The ending is certainly a humdinger but it leaves you wanting a little more closure after such an emotional roller coaster. This is exactly the opposite of the film above, Hacked Off, I went into Hacked off expecting a low grade slasher with maybe some boobs, and hopefully some gore what I got was an above average slasher that while not breaking new ground didn't fail to entertain. Saw on the other hand I went into expecting the next Seven but it failed in several key areas but the ending definitely helped it. A good start for James Wan and Leigh Whannell hopefully they go on to bigger and more thoughtfully written things.

Urban Legends III: Bloody Mary - D+

It wasn't as bad as Urban Legends II, but it really wasn't up to snuff shall we say. Three girls disappear on Homecoming Night only to come home a few days later after being drugged and dumped in an abandoned mill. Apparently they unlocked the ghosts of the conviently named Mary Tanner who starts killing the kids of the jocks who caused her death in 1969. I say apparently because it is never really explained well why or how she was brought back. The killings occur as the lead girl and her brother investigate the crime that happened in 1969. The end was rather a strange reversal, it is a human killing these kids not the ghost of Bloody Mary. This strange combination of a Ring style rip-off and a slasher really didn't work because the two types of movies have totally different killers and you can't make the audience believe its one then switch to another. Another problem the homecoming dance in 1969, some of the characters looked like they belonged in 1956 and others belonged in 1976, namely the black girl with the afro, then again there really aren't that many blacks in Utah let alone would have gone to a homecoming dance with a white boy in the 60s. Another problem our lead girl, who looks like a red headed version of Hillary Swank, has three friends that after the initial prank completely disappear from the movie, they were a complete waste of character. The really pathetic attempt of stringing this movie to the other two Urban Legend films by having the stupid teens die from urban legends was really out of place. I liked the first like twenty minutes of the movie where the girls disappear but after that the movie just became a tired slasher that tried to steal from of the Ring's popularity by tacing one the spooky dead ghost girl really was transperant from the get go. Let's just hope this is the last Urban Legends film they really have done this to death.

House of Exorcism - C+

This is basically the same movie as Lisa and Devil which was made in 1972 but in 1974 when the Exorcist came out the producer of the film Alfredo Leone decided to re-edit the film to capitalize on the success of the Exorcist and it resulted in House of Exorcism which came out in 1975. He added about twenty minutes worth of Elke Sommers in a hospital possessed and a priest comes in to exorcize the devil, Telly Savalas. I mean they stole everything from the Exorcist from pea soup to foul language. They also added in a sex scene that Mario Bava had shortened to remove some of the excess nudity but then Alfredo removed a lot of Elke's nudity that was in the original film. I didn't like this version, despite the extra nudity, compared to the original. This one was just a generic rip off of the Exorcist but with boobs. The final verdict is watch Lisa and the Devil you will see the movie Mario Bava intended and that really is the way it should be watched.

Sleepover Nightmare - C

A bunch of college kids are having a party in the same area as a psychopath has gotten loose after an accident. Psycho killers must have radar to know exactly where to find sexy teens having a party, they always seem to find them. Well a few wander away from the main group and get offed until everybody decides to leave except for 4. This was the first little problem I had with the film, I was lead to believe there would be a massive body count by the sheer number of people in the film. But unfortunately most escape alive and the four remaining people are terrorized by the psycho until they manage to kill him. This felt a lot like an early 80s slasher which made up for some of the flaws in the film. Another flaw was the unusual lack of nudity, there are two sex scenes, two almost threesomes but there isn't a drop of nudity. It was kind of surprising that the film makers would suddenly become uptight about this, Boon Collins the writer and director was responsible for one of the last serious exploitation films in the 80s Abducted but I guess now that he is older he doesn't want to see naked girls. The movie was shot well, especially the underwater moments usually in this grade of film if there is any underwear footage it looks like crap but they do it pretty good here. The acting was pretty standard, everybody is a nobody but they manage to at least get through the lines with a certain level of competancy. If you are in the mood for a return to the 80s slasher this is a good film for you.

Satan's Slave - C+

While going to visit her Uncle in his country estate Catherine and her parents get into an accident. She escapes just before the car explodes killing her parents. She is staying with her Uncle Alexander and his creepy son who has the hots for her, and she is his cousin which is just kinky. There is a problem, aside from incest, it is that Uncle Alexander is a cultist with designs on Catherine. I was surprised that Satan wasn't featured more heavily in this film with a name liked Satan's Slave you would think the old horned one would make at least a cameo but it is more about a long dead witch from their family but there is a couple of really cool cult scenes complete with a guy wearing a goat's head mask. That is something I really think they need to bring back to horror movies, the cult that is led by the guy wearing the goat mask, it really looks cool there is just something spooky about a bunch of people wearing big cloaks so you can see their faces being led by a guy wearing an animal head. The movie is a good British Exploitation fare, the creepy mansion, chicks with hot accents, and some good crazy people. The movie doesn't really stand out from the rest of the Satanic Cult movies of the era, aside from a little incest it adds nothing new to the mix. The only notable star in the movie was Michael Gough, probably best known to American audiences as Alfred the Butler from the first 4 Batman movies. He never really got the name recognition that the other genre stars of the day like Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, or Donald Pleasence got but he probably starred in an equal number of British horror movies from the 50s to the 70s. Not a bad cult movie but doesn't really break any new ground either.

Murder Set Pieces - F

Sven is a fashion photographer who is also a Nazi loving serial killer in Las Vegas. God this was a world class pile of shit. It ran only 105 minutes but I swear it felt like I had been watching it all week. This movie is disturbing, lots of girls are raped, and killed but it happens too many times in the movie. Every ten minutes or so we have a couple new girls and he photographs them and kills them, sometimes he rapes their corpes, sometimes he eats them then he has a nightmare and it starts all over. I'm not sure if it was the repetition, over and over of the killings, or the rotten acting or what but I never was that shocked or horrified, I was mainly bored. The biggest problem I had with the movie was the music, it was so loud that while watching with my headhphones on I had to keep the volume at the lowest level so I didn't immediately get a headache. This movie does kill a young teenage girl but again the bad acting made sure I felt no connection to her. This movie is the cheapest knock-off of American Psycho I have seen, it traded intelligence for boobs and fake blood. I was surprised to see some genre stars in what is an obviously no budget, no talent movie. There is Gunnar Hansen and Edwin Neal from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tony Todd from Candyman, and Cerina Vincent from Cabin Fever, why they agreed to star in this was beyond me. This was an uncomfortable experience for me, not because of the murders and gore like it was intended but from the wretched music, god awful acting, and bad film making. This is a rather useless piece of shock, if it was interesting gore hounds would like it but it is almost pointless and there is no average movie go-er who could sit through the first ten minutes so what director Nick Palumbo has done is make a film for no one save the sickest perverts in the world that think that Sven, the man with the silliest sideburns ever, is some sort of hero and those people should be checked into prison immediately because their serial killing careers are about to begin. I had heard a lot about this movie and was fairly interested to see it, once again the hype machine completely misled me again.

Demon Town (Evils City) - D

A group of college journalism students go in search of this mysterious town called Acheron where everybody disappeared from. The movie starts off competantly enough with an interesting mass murder where the students confront the wacked out killer. But then the movie falls apart, the characters are poorly definied I had a hard time figuring who was who. There is a scene that totally throws the movie off involving a drunken car accident which I think was an after thought or ment to be a big surpriser at the end but the film makers decided to put it in the middle. Another weird problem was the introduction of the military guys, at first it is like they are looking for a guy called Paco who I thought was the last survivor of the town but then they say they are looking for the college kids. The college kids look like their all at least 35 especially the main guy, which made me think they were some crappy run down TV Station at first but then they say they are college kids. This movie really needed to have somebody look at the script before they shot it, they needed to make the plot more coherant, make at least one of the girls be less of a bitch, it helps to make them sympathetic when not being nasty the entire time. The movie has a few decent moments that reminded me of the video game Silent Hill, I think the filmmakers were a little influenced by that game, I don't know the fog, the deserted town, hideous creatures, pacts with evil forces, let's say they were, but the rest of the movie was so bungled I couldn't really enjoy it.

Piranha - A

The military developed a mutated version of the piranha that is aggressive, multiples like aquatic rabbits and will eat anything that moves. Of course the secret government lab that is holding them can't hold them and they escape. It is up to an alcoholic mountain man and a female bounty hunter to stop them before they devour the happy campers down river. This is the first paring of director Joe Dante and writer Jon Sayles. This was before both became big times stars when they were working for the B-Movie god Roger Corman. They would late team up on the werewolf classic the Howling. Being a Joe Dante film of you, of course, will find Dick Miller playing a character but you can also find Paul Bartel, another Corman regular, Euro-horror star Barbara Steele, as well as a cameo by once famous movie actor Richard Deacon. This movie is an excellent mixture of horror and comedy, the tongue is firmly in the cheek in this movie despite children being eaten by these nasty mutant fish. This a great creature horror movie so many creature features are cheap and poorly written but like Jaws this movie suceeds and entertains and really what else could you want from a bunch of man eating piranhas? Other than them not eating you.

Red Riding Hood - B

Jenny's father, a judge is killed and her mother runs off with a new boyfriend leaving her alone in a nice apartment in Rome with no needs. Her life is good until her grandmother comes to take her back to New York. Jenny wants nothing to do with that, she is happy living in Rome with her best friend George, a six foot tall man wearing a wolf mask, black cloak, and red rain boots. Together they travel through Rome punishing the wicked they encounter in a wonderful collection of gory ways including my absolute favorite torture by peanut butter that was great. The girl of course is the only killer there is no George outside of her imagination but he just looks so cool you don't care. Think of this as the preteen version of American Psycho, the girl who plays Jenny is wonderful but at times she does overact but it helps to overplay a total loonie. I personally think Jenny should have worn a red cloak to be Little Red Riding Hood some more but that is just splitting hairs. This was a good, gory Italian slasher movie it is nice to see Italy is still able to make the gore fly, they don't make the volume of movies they use to and many of the ones I have seen lately lack that sparkle that their stuff from the 60s and 70s had but this one rekindles my belief that Italy still knows how to make good horror movies. Another great feature of the movie was the soundtrack, lots of violins, opera music, but the best was Que Sera at the end of the movie it had me rolling on my bed laughing. I had a couple of little picky problems, they spent too much time with the grandmother and Jenny. It was the only time I thought the actress who played Jenny did a bad job, and I wanted more murders and less of them discussing movie to New York. But all my picky problems were fixed by the elaborate and inventive murders.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires - A

Hammer Films and the Shaw Brothers, two of the greatest production studios in hisotry team up to combine kung-fu and vampires with good result. The leader of the 7 Golden Vampire cult in rural China comes to Transylvania to seek the help from Count Dracula to regain his power and sway over the locals. Dracula agrees and consumes the body of him so he can go to China where his archenemy, Dr Van Helsing has come to study Asian Vampires. Van Helsing is played by Peter Cushing who basically owns that role, every actor before or since has been totally in his shadow. Hsi Chang comes to Van Helsing to ask help in defeating the vampires in his village. His grandfather killed one of the 7 Golden Vampires and now his 7 grandsons and 1 granddaughter need his help in defeating the remaining 6 now blostered by Dracula. What follows is a lot of great Shaw Brothers Chop-socky and vampire-socky. I like this movie, the combination of Shaw Brothers Kung-Fu and Hammer Horror is just too good to resist. Peter Cushing does a fabulous job, I really believe he is the most underrated actor of all time, he brings such a feel of legitimacy to everything he does, he also is so natural even in a Kung-Fu movie. I like they use Asian vampires, there is very little neck biting but there is a lot of peasant stealing and village ransacking. The little problem I have is too many different nationalities trying to speak English, there are a lot of heavy accents and the DVD I watched didn't have the best sound quality so at times it became difficult to understand what they are saying. The final fight with Dracula and Van Helsing was a little short but you can't really have Peter Cushing having a knock down drag out fight at his age. This is a great combination of two unlikely genres with a little help from Peter Cushing is a lot of fun if you are fans of either genre.

7 Brothers Meet Dracula - D

This shortened, basically incoherant butchering of the film The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is basically ridiculous. The movie runs 73 mintues from the original 89 minutes, what did they remove you ask? Basically if it was dialogue it was either shortened or removed all together. It moved scenes around, the beginning is taken from the beginning, and end of the original film so they could have a lot more action from the get go. The best joke in this film is they kept all the sex and nudity, some of the nudity is shown twice, some three times but for the third time they just flip the film. It is so bloody incoherant and hacked apart it becomes hard to watch unless you have seen the real version and you want to laugh your ass off at the huge amount of nudity and incoherant chop-socky. This ruinious hacking up of the film was made for American Audiences who populated the grindhouses of the late 70s who wanted ass kicking and boobs not this thing called plot and that was what they got. Too bad to, the un-butchered version is one of my favorite vampire kung-fu movies of all time.

Voodoun Blues - B

This is a collection of three short films by Seduction Cinema Star Misty Mundae and friends. The titular (he-he tit) short was done by Misty herself, the other two Sour Milk and Whorror Whopper were by two of Misty's pals. The three shorts are black and white silent movies that are weird, you won't understand what is going on and if you try you will probably being to bleed from your eye sockets. Now there are those out there that maybe be shocked when I say that I like weird things and sometimes I like things just because they are weird, this is one of those cases. They were short enough that the weirdness didn't become annoying. Each of them reminded me of a Tool or Nine Inch Nails Music Video. This is not for everybody, you have to be willing to watch stuff that makes no sense and just looks weird which I was able to do and I rather enjoyed it. There are times that I really enjoy looking at something I don't understand what is going on in some sort of artsy way. The oddest thing about this entire disc is Misty doesn't get naked, for a girl whose entire career thus far as been playing naked chicks in softcore horror or comedy you have some level of expectation but seeing that she was behind this whole thing I bet she wanted to keep her clothes on for once to really make this disc singular. Weird but yet enjoyable.

LD 50: Lethal Dose - C+

A group of animal rights activists get a mysterious message from a member who was arrested a year earlier when a raid on some sort of animal testing lab went wrong. They decipher the message and find he is being held in an empty factory in the middle of nowhere. But when they arrive it become apparent he isn't exactly being held. There is something itchy loose and his friends have become infected when trying to spring him. What follows is a smaller, cheaper 28 Days where the animal rights people have become rats in this little maze. This isn't a bad movie, it is a good time waster probably wouldn't see it again. One of the former Spice Girls, if you are old enough to remember that band plays on the activists, Melanie Brown, I have no idea which Spice she was but she does a pretty good job. The gore was pretty good for such a low budget film, especially the afore mentioned Melanie's face into the metal door death. I liked that, wasn't expecting her to die. The other known face was Katharine Towne, she has been in a few movies of note, Go, Mulholland Drive, and Trepassing. Not a bad little movie but nothing all that special.

Cursed - C-

Brother and Sister hit a Werewolf on Mulholland Drive and in the process of rescuing the third person in the accident get attacked by a werewolf. Of course if you are attacked by a werewolf, you? Class? Becoming a werewolf. Before anything else I want to clarify my grade, it is really a D movie, this movie sucks, but I can't in all good conscious give any movie with Christina Ricci a D so it really a D movie if you don't like Christina Ricci. I had high hopes for this movie, Christina Ricci, Werewolves, Wes Craven, I guess even Kevin Williamson. I thought it would be Scream meets the Howling, well ah nope it wasn't even close. What this little train wreck of a movie turned out to be was nothing but a bad Halloween Episode of Dawnson's Creek. Kevin Williamson it appears spent too many years writing crappy teen angst drama TV shows and not enough writing horror because there is a lot, I mean over 2/3s of the movie is relationship angst and how it sucks to be in high school. This was supposed to be a werewolf movie not a teen angst high school drama. The werewolf looked like crap, but for some reason they all do even with all these big fancy CG effects we have these days they can't seem to make a convincing werewolf. The killings are really light, like I said before it is 2/3s teen angst, in the first one hour and fifteen minutes there are 2 killings and then only 2 more in the big climatic conclusion with the big shocker ending which if you even paid the slightest bit of attention to the movie you got a good twenty minutes before the movie ended. Other than Christina Ricci everybody does a rotten job especially her brother who I guess was supposed to be the star Jessie Eisenberg. I'm not sure if it was the writing which sucked or his acting which sucked I could stand the least but he drove me crazy from the first moment you saw him. This movie is packed full of B level talent, including Scott Baio playing himself, Shannon Elizabeth, Portia D'Rossi, Craig Kilborn, and Joshua Jackson. I think all these poor saps thought this was going to be the next Scream and they would all become famous, I'm sorry to say this wasn't close to Scream and even further away from a good horror movie. I still have yet to find any werewolf movies aside from the first Howling that I like that were made by Universal in the 1930s. If not for Christina Ricci this movie would have probably gotten a D- or F but she is cute and a very skillful actress and I do like her so it gets a C- but it really doesn't deserve it.

Silent Night, Bloody Night - B-

The truly forgotten slasher movie which came out 1 year before Black Christmas, considered by most hardcore slasher fans as the first slasher, and five years before John Carpenter's Halloween which made slasher movies a household name. But this movie is all but forgotten all together. This movie is a little too slow paced and quirky ever to be mainstream hit. The story is a little murky at times but the gist is there is this house some place in New England where the original owner died mysterious some time ago. The house stood empty until the grandson/nephew it was never really clear decides to sell it. At the same time a lunatic escapes the local asylum and makes a beeline for the house. We learn the house was once an asylum where the inmates all escaped. There is incest, crazy people, a creepy house, but no real coherant plot line, the facts of the story jump around way too much and I found myself very confused several times over dates and people. The movie is rather creepy but the quality of the version I watched was in dire need of remastering, it gets so damn murky at times you can't hardly tell what is going on. The flashback at the end of the movie was done pretty good, it has that washed out silent movie feel to it. The inmates that you see during the flashback are like the movie totally unknown today but in the 70s they were all cronies of Andy Warhol who made the New York scene in the 70s. If Andy Warhol's people are involved you know it is going to be esoteric and quirky and I think that kills the movie, it is too quirky. Possibly the first American Slasher movie but if it is considered a slasher then the first real slasher movie was made ten years before it in Italy, and that movie is Blood and Black Lace. This movie is more akin to a Gialli than a slasher. I strange little movie that if you can find it it is worth a watch.

Girl In Room 2A - B+

A girl is released from prison after being jailed for being at the wrong place at the wrong time gets an apartment in an old house where a cult is lurking about. The girls in room 2A seem to have a problem staying alive long. It is up to Margaret and the previous tenants's brother to find out what is going on before it is too late. This is kinda like a Gialli but with a cult not just one killer. The cult's main enforcer looked like a red caped masked Mexican wrestler which is really creepy. I love the twist at the end of the movie, wasn't expecting that but liked it. This is another of those movies that blurred the lines for me, it is Gialli in style, but it is also a Cult movie along the lines of Rosemary's Baby or the Tenant. This is probably impossible to find, I managed to find my copy on E-Bay. I had never heard of this one and decided to take a chance. I am rather happy I did, I love these hidden gems. The movie was directed by William Rose, who was a 60s sex comedy director and this was his last film in 1972. It is odd that an American Director would make an Italian Gialli. Good movie, the film quality was a little rough in spots everything goes inky black but I was very pleased with the film itself for being a total unknown it was a lot better than most of the other forgotten or unknown films I have watched.