Author: Allisonnnnn

Around Christmas time, I get inspired to look for the little things that bring me joy– bad dubbing, racism, sexism and Satan.  Which is why I turned to this movie to help engage my holiday spirit.

In 1959, the blight that is the film Santa Claus was birthed into the world.  Now, we’re going to do a quick side note here to clarify things: Santa Claus was originally a Mexican movie filmed and released in Mexico.  Then K. Gordon Murray swooped in (like he was known for doing) and had it dubbed into English and released in America in 1960.  So add that to your little internal fact-sheet.

I’m not even going to bother trying to establish actors or actresses you might recognize– there’s no point.  There’s some kids, there’s some adults, and then they talk and sometimes words come out that synch up with their lips.  The end.

So… plot.  Plot, plot, plot.  Yes, there was one.  I swear, there was a plot.  Just give me a minute.  Ooookay.  Plot.  

Sexually confused.

Why don’t I just give you the opening narration and launch off from there?  Maybe we’ll be able to find some reindeer droppings and follow them to some rising action.

“Way up in the heavens, far out in space, in a beautiful gold and crystal palace right above the North Pole lives a kind and jolly old gentleman, Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicolas, the best friend of boys and girls everywhere.  But let’s move in for a closer look.  Come along.”

Right.  Santa lives in space.  In a castle on a cloud (Les Mis moment?  Don’t mind if I do!).  We open to Santa setting up the manger scene, where my notes describe him as “laughing like an asshole”.  I assume that means I was unimpressed by his jolliness.

As he’s arranging the manager, he stops to tell little plastic baby Jesus (hay-seuss!) that he has to finish making the toys for all the good little girls and boys.

Yeah, Santa sounds kinda like a tool.

After talking to the inanimate infant, Santa strolls over to a piano and initiates the racism song.  It’s basically a seven minute long song that initiates the viewer into Santa’s slave-labor ring.  The narrator (back to that info sheet: it’s K. Gordon Murray!) accompanies it with lines like: “These little helpers are from Africa.” 

No matter how much he practices, no one will adopt him.

I shit you not, after this line, the camera cuts to a bunch of black kids dancing around in leopard print loincloths with leather drums and tribal war paint.  We also have “helpers from Spain”, “tots from China”, and “boys and girls from England”.  There’s also a “kids from the Orient” section for the weird looking kids that have no real category (?!).

It must have been hell for the people filming this, as it was a bunch of kids dressed up in stereotypical clothing from various nations, who clearing did not want to be there and definitely did not want to be singing.

The song of racism was cut short by Pedro and some other ethnically highlighted kid bringing Santa a Devil toy that, when lit like a firework, caused the cameraman to descend into hell to film the vaguely-synchronized “devil dance”.

Picture men in red leotards, baggy red underwear, red facepaint, bull horns strapped to their head, and red-painted Spock ears glued to the sides of their skull.  Then picture those men frolicking around like they’re competing in some sort of odd tournament for the mentally impaired.  That’s the “devil dance”.

Note to Self: Think of G-rated comment that is not about his goatee. Or blackface.

The delightful(?) devil dance is interrupted when the Devil himself (in the form of a rocky fireplace) orders one of the littler devils, Pitch, to go to Earth and make all the kids do evil.  Then he warns Pitch that failure to do so will result in him having to eat chocolate ice cream, which will give him indigestion.

Which makes it good foresight for him to be wearing baggy underpants, I suppose.  (Did I go there?  Yes, I did.  Why?  Because I have no taste.)

After cringing and making very dramatic declarations to his lord and master, Pitch goes topside and begins to whisper in the ears of various little boys and girls urging them to do bad.  Which means that a good fifty minutes of this one and a half hour film is a re-enactment of the “Goofus and Gallant” feature from “Highlights” magazine.

You’re a wizard, Merlin.

I’m not going to really bother going further with this plot– I need to get this movie out of my head and as far away from me as possible. So here’s a breakdown:

1. Merlin manufactures roofies for Santa.

2. A red-headed stepchild smiths a key that opens any door.

3. Santa begins raping the shit out of people.

4. Number three was totally a lie.

5. A larger version of one of Jonathon London’s dogs chases Santa up a tree.

6. Santa speaks to a large foam vagina… and it tells him secrets.

The Vagina Dialogues

7. The Most Awkward Edit in the History of Film occurs.

8. Santa gets his bartending license.

9. Merlin inspires Monty Python’s coconuttery.

10. A child asks for an atomic laboratory and a machine gun… and he gets them.

The money shot.

And unto the world, really odd lines of dialogue are born:

“Let’s watch the little rich boy’s dream.”

“‘Dear Santa Claus, please bring me a little brother.’  Hahaha, here’s one for you, Mr. Stork.”

“Sure it’s not a bad idea to use spaceships for our interplanetary flight, but to convert my white reindeer to Sputniks?  Noooo, I should say not.”

“Here is a good little boy whose daddy is quite rich.  This mother, on the other hand, is very poor, and this is her daughter Lupita.”

“Pfew, that was close!  He almost ran into the moon!”

“Santa Claus, you love me, don’t you?  Say you love me, Santa.”

“Hurry, Mr. Merlin!  This is no time to play horsey, Santa’s in danger!

Run for the motherfucking hills, Lupita!

This movie changed me.  This movie did things to me.  It touched me in a bad way.  I showered and showered, but I never felt truly clean, no matter how hard I scrubbed.  You should probably watch it.

This Christmas masterpiece is available to kindle your holiday spirit (or excite your gag reflex) on Netflix on Demand.  While I normally do not advocate drug use to enhance one’s movie-viewing, I definitely think this movie may warrant some sort of stimulant.

I sat down on Saturday night to watch this movie.  I was tired, it was late, and about 50 minutes in I realized I could not handle psychotic inside-out fetal cows.

However, once I had another eight hours of sleep under my belt, I felt safe to continue on in my predatory bovine journey.

In 2007, after screening it at Fantastic Fest in 2006 (where it won three awards), FilmFour, Lions Gate Films (always a winner in my book), and the Irish Film Board released Isolation straight to DVD.

Yes, I did say “psychotic inside-out fetal cows” and “won three awards” in direct filmic association with one another.  And these weren’t dinky little awards either (i.e. best inside-out cow dental work or best attempt at mooing like the offspring of a regular-side-out cow and a velociraptor– though had those been awards, Isolation definitely would have won them).

Does it star anyone that the general geekster (don’t hit me for making up that word just now) would recognize?  Probably not.  We have a main cast of five and a bare handful of extras.  

In the five, the most notable to American audiences would be Essie David as Orla (medic Maggie in Matrix 2 and 3… or is that “Matrices 2 and 3“?), Marcel Iures as John (one of the pirate captains in the third Pirates o’ the Carribean movie, Slavo in Layer Cake, and Russian Operative Alexander Golitsyn in Mission: Impossible) and John Lynch as Dan (he was in three episodes of Red Dwarf— yeah, that’s all I’ve got– there’s a big gap between UK-nian and American entertainment as in Americans generally don’t watch UK-nian entertainment).

We start off with some great opening credits harkening back to campy horror movies where a normal picture will suddenly go all contrasty and funkily colored before showing a person’s name, and it’s set to super goddamn dramatic music that already has caused you to grab the closest pillow in case something crawls out of the screen (SPOILER ALERT: inside-out fetal cows do not crawl out of the screen).

We just need Lucy Lawless to start singing and we’ve got a new Xena episode.

Eventually, the color/contrast issue that you did not adjust your TV for stops and the story begins.

We need to note ahead of time that this movie doesn’t believe in character-driven waste.  For the first two-thirds of the movie, we’re seeing nearly as many atmosphere-driven shots as we are seeing shots of people.  And when there are people doing various activities (like, say, loading up some skull-punching gun in order to take down a mad, mutant-calf birthing cow that has launched itself over a fence, four hooves a’flailing (that’s like seven swans a’swimming, since it’s the holidays and I gotta keep things relevant and stuff), angling angry bovine teeth for the woman who recently was shoulder-deep in her cow vag), those activities get jumpily edited, breaking a ten or fifteen second sequence into three or four seconds.

Which makes the whole thing seem kinda maniac and documentary-ish.

You know, if you were making a documentary on what happens when your farm is overrun by crazed inside-out fetal cows.

Back to the story!  Once the opening credits end, we watch the vet (Orla) slowly make her way into the farm via filthy-carmobile.  Once she arrives and gets into the barn (where we meet farm owner Dan), we get to see her arm become closely acquainted with a very pregnant cow.

Puppetry of the Cow Uterus

Once she’s looking like her whole body has been sucked into the cow’s uterus, she suddenly shrieks and yanks her now-bleeding arm out.  The fetus has bitten her.

Suddenly cut to(!) Dan knocking on the door of a squat RV on the edge of his property.  The door swings open to reveal very skittish campers Jaime and Mary.  Dan lets them know they need to get off his lawn, damn kids (inaccurate summary, but the sentiment is slightly there).

Back at the ranch, er… farm, a truck labeled “Bovine Genetics Technology” pulls up and John, an older scientist, gets out.  He hunts down Orla and has her re-insert her bitten appendage into the bovine nether-bits with an ultrasound tool.  They determine that the experimental calf is fine and leave.

Later that night, distressed moos wake Dan.  He groggily gets out of bed and heads out to the barn, where he finds his pregnant cow, now with bloody flanks(!).  The calf is making her bleed internally… and there’s some seepage.  He determines that he can save them both by yanking the calf out.

Dan finds, however, that he can’t get the calf out on his own, so he trudges down to the camper and asks Jaime for help.

Technically, this is potential leather and rope, so someone’s happy.

In this sequence, you learn more about calf-birthing than you ever thought you would need/want to know, complete with the finishing helicopter cow manuever.  It’s just something you have to watch to understand.

Once it’s free of the womb, the calf bites off part of his finger.  Blood (and a dental inspection) ensues.  Orla shows up and it is revealed that the calf has wicked fangs.  And not normal fangs, but gnarled, not-right fangs.  So they get a brain-stabbing gun-thing (Yes, that’s the technical term– I know these things.) and try to put the mutant-calf down.

Please refer back up to the parenthetical remark on the four hooves a’flailing.

Eventually both the mommy cow and the baby cow get brained.  Then the baby cow gets carted off for dissection, and we learn that the baby cow was pregnant with inside-out baby cows that look a bit like spiky doughnuts.  Disgusted, Orla explains that John’s company was trying to engineer a faster growing, more fertile cow, then calls John to tell him that they need to shut the program down and drives off.

Aforementioned spiky doughnut in its uncurled form.

Of course, once she’s heading down the road we see one of the inside-out fetal doughnut cows twitch and squirm off the table.

Really, you need to think of this as the scary bovine version of Tremors.

Mutant hyper-reproducing tadpole inside-out cow fetuses go on carnivorous bovine rampage, infecting humans and cows alike, causing them to reproduce their own inside-out mutant cows.

As silly as that sounds, I only laughed once during this movie– during the helicopter cow birthing sequence.  I also shut the movie off once because I could not deal with exhaustion and a scary ultrasound sequence at the same time.  Too much angry-fetal-cows-with-teeth imagery, but flipbook style like whoa.

This image makes no goddamn sense.

Was this movie scary?  It definitely had moments of “holy crap”ness.  Not so much the leap-out-and-scare-you type as the intensity-building, nothing is sacred, this is edited kinda like a documentary and you KNOW that somewhere in Ireland this very thing is happening (but it probably involves inside-out carnivorous potatoes).

The acting was solid, the setting was great, everything felt very genuine.  The dirt, the cold, the weather, the total isolation of the experience (though I do not believe “Isolation” was the best choice of name for this movie).  The accents were, for me, hard to understand at times.  A bit too rough and jumbled.  But the fear was certainly there.

I definitely suggest firing up ye old Netflix on Demand and giving this weird little movie a whirl when you feel like something slightly different from your average monster-feature.  Birdemic, this is not.

When I started this movie, I was mentally chanting, “Please don’t suck, please don’t suck!”  And while it did not suck, it certainly did not blow either.  …That may have come out wrong.

Wicked Little Things debuted in 2006 as one of the eight horror movies in After Dark’s annual festival, “8 Films to Die For”.

This movie, directed by J.S. Cardone, features a couple of actors you might recognize from various other works.  The main character, Lori Heuring, while lovely and dedicated to her role, is not one of them.  

However, you might recognize the two girls that play her daughters: Scout Taylor-Compton (the babysitter, Laurie, in the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween and Lita Ford in The Runaways) and Chloe Grace Moretz (Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass and Isabella in Hugo).  There’s also the very familiar-looking plumber, Geoffrey Lewis, who has a bit part in what seems to be almost everything EVER and looks almost like an older, haggard William H. Macy (it’s the eyes).  You’ll also see Ben Cross (Sarek (Spock’s dad, hello!  Also, extra points for a parenthetical remark within a parenthetical remark!) from the recent Star Trek movie) as the crazy hillbilly.

We’ve got Baby Spice and Ginger Spice, but I can’t figure out who the tall blonde is supposed to be.

So, no one too major, but the movie is definitely pulling its star-weight for being an independent horror flick.

Story line is as follows: In Addytown, Pennsylvania in 1913, the Carlton Coal Mine was in full swing, using little kids for the majority of its labor as little kids are annoying and so people really aren’t that depressed when they get the black lung.

I should probably rephrase that.  Little kids are the source of most of the mine labor because they are little (hence the title “little kids”) and can get into areas that have not been fully opened in the mine. 

On one lovely day in 1913, little Mary is sent into a tiny tunnel in the mine to plant a couple of sticks of dynamite on a long fuse.  Instead of exiting the tunnel after she is done, she crawls off into a side area and collapses.  The adult worker supervising her tells the mine owner’s representative that they can’t blow the new area yet because Mary’s still inside, but the representative tells him to anyway.

He listens and, shortly after Mary collapses, the mine itself collapses, killing all inside… which are mostly little kids.

You think this sounds horrifying, right?  Little kid and doll movies scare the shit out of me more than any other type of movie because little kids and dolls are goddamn scary.  So now we’ve got a pack of angry dead little kids, and that’s almost as good as having a nuclear bomb buried in your backyard.

Enter present day for nuclear bomb-unearthing.

Can only be improved by a mushroom cloud.

After being nearly bankrupted by medical bills trying to keep her husband alive, Karen Tunny (Heuring) is widowed.  While going through some of her late husband’s paperwork, she finds the deed to a farmhouse just outside of Addytown and decides that she and her daughters Sarah (Taylor-Compton) and Emma (Moretz) will go live at the farmhouse until they figure out how to get their lives back on track.

After the introductory 1913 mine scene, we open the standard “hey, we’re in a van with all of our stuff stacked on top” scene.  Which, of course, is followed by the “let’s stop in town and pick up the local color at a store and see all the missing persons flyers” scene.  So that happens.

After their lovely shopping experience, Karen nearly hits a random man (Cross) in the road who, instead of sticking around to yell at her, runs off, leaving a shattered jar of what could be blood on the highway,

Then they get to the farmhouse where no one comments that it’s kinda odd that it looks like the previous occupants fled the place and took absolutely nothing with them.  I mean, the Christmas tree is still up, dishes and toys are out.  

What is commented on, however, is the fresh-looking blood that decorates their new front door.

Pretty sure the blood clashes with their planned color-scheme.

While turning on the electricity in the basement, Karen discovers a small box full of pictures and newspaper clippings.  She looks at one picture of a set of mining children, then finally heads upstairs.

After listening to the eldest daughter, Sarah, groan about the house’s prehistoric state and lack of water, the three finally settle in to bed.  Later in the night, the front door swings open, a mining kid walks in with a pickaxe (and my axe!) and embeds said pickaxe into Karen’s stomach (because nobody tosses a dwarf) while she sleeps.

Just kidding!  It’s a dream, she’s fine.  However, she’s spooked enough that she gets up and checks the front door… which is open.  And the blood on it is now wet.  AND the man she almost hit in the road is running off into the forest by her house.  Normal night.

She goes back to bed.  That’s what I’d do.  Sleep is important.

The next day, the plumber (Lewis) comes to turn on the water and she begins questioning him about the mining kids in the picture and the newspaper clippings.  She learns (sorta) about the mine accident, that there are still various families that are related to the kids that died in the mine floating around the mountains, and that the last surviving Carlton is in the area buying people out in order build a fancy ski resort.

While they are having this conversation, Emma eats breakfast upstairs until she hears laughter coming from outside.  Ditching her breakfast, she runs off into the woods and eventually finds the collapsed mine.

Karen notices her daughter’s disappearance and chases after her, eventually finding her at the mine after encountering a chunk of woodland decorated with dead bunnies.  Even though she stops Emma from going into the mine, the damage is done– Emma now has a “pretend” friend in the form of Dynamite-Laying Mary.  No, that’s not a porn star, that’s the girl from earlier in this article.  Re-read it if you don’t remember, I’m not explaining it to you again.

When you combine Christmas and Easter, you get this.

While Karen and Emma are wandering around the woods, elder daughter Sarah drives into town for groceries.  While there, she bumps into some local kids who tell her the story of the zombie mining children, which she laughs off.

We flash-foward a couple of hours and Karen and Emma are still wandering around the now-dark woods, totally lost.  Eventually they pop out by a janky-looking cabin and go inside (they knock first, because they’re polite people, but no one answered– why are you pressuring me for these details?!).  

Once inside, we get the usual “and now the occupant is suddenly behind you!” routine and we are (re-)introduced to Hanks, the man in the road that Karen almost killed the previous day.  He is a bit of a crazy hillbilly and is incredibly paranoid about anyone being out in the dark and lets Karen know that he’ll keep painting her door with his blood and that there’s certainly no need to thank him for this service.  Yeah.

They decide to leave, and once they get back home they get to hear the story of the zombie mining children from Sarah.  Emma also starts talking about her new friend again, asking if she can come over to play.  (Spoiler: she does.)

This is a unique take on our current zombie movie.  Usually, as you know, there’s a virus, a curse, an Indian burial ground– something that was created by man through scientific or magical means.  In this movie, it is simply the rage of the children at the Carlton family that keeps them going.

Could you imagine if that could work for anyone who died in a rage?  The amount of PMS-ing zombies would be ridiculous.

Play with this stuffed lion while I get you a Midol.

Anyhow, even though they are dead, they still need to eat, and they only eat at night.  Also, it is important to note that they don’t just leap on stuff and kill it– they take their pickaxes and beat whoever or whatever it is into a bloody pulp and then eat the bits like a chunky human-smoothie.

Food doesn’t seem to be fuel for their bodies as much as it is fuel for their rage.  Hanks says during the story that they kill, basically, in order to take sacrifice for all the days they don’t have who they truly want– the last Carlton.

Speaking of the last Carlton, we do get to meet him.  Out of all the threads that undermine (harharhar) this movie’s potential for excellence, this character is a major one.  

First off, he can’t act.  I hate saying it, but he’s awful.  If he studied up on his villainous tone, he did so by watching old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.  I wish I was exaggerating.

secondly, as many great layers of dialogue there are to this movie, undertones that add to it, things that are never explained but don’t really have to be beause it makes the movie a bit more real, the dialogue for Carlton was ridiculous.  Was cliche and trite and like a nine year old added it in with crayon in the script’s margin.  It was so different from the rest of the movie’s dialogue that I noticed it as soon as he started talking.

Thirdly(!), the character was given no depth.  He was a 2-D villain.  There was nothing good about him, no personal characteristics, no redeemable quirks.  The character was a cardboard cut-out of someone’s idea of a “villain”.  He could have been played by a sock-puppet with a handlebar moustache (but no googly-eyes, as googly-eyes would have allowed him more personality than he was allowed).

He was there as a discard character, designed so flat so he could meet his obvious end without emotional issue(and it is obvious– I’m not spoiling anything once you start watching the movie).  His evil nature allows Karen to go against her standard morals without too much struggle and allows the viewer to cheer her on because we can’t see her as doing anything bad.

And while I’m complaining, the lack of body language coaching the kids playing the zombies had was noticeable.  One or two of them had it down, could move like the little creep-factories they were supposed to be.  The rest were just kids in black contacts, white facepaint, and a red milk-moustache.

On the plus side, there were some amazing shots in this movie, shots that took it to an entirely different visual level.  Epic, high-budget shots.  On the negative side, there were probably ten of them in the whole movie, and since they were such a contrast to the rest of the film, they were quite noticeable as better.  Also on the plus side, whoever designed the lighting did some of the most amazing atmospheric work I’ve seen in ages.  Truly spectacular to look at– if only it was taken advantage of a little more often.

See?  It’s gorgeous.  And yellow.  Very yellow.

At the end, we have a movie that had a somewhat original idea and mostly good actors with only one truly bad seed.  The kids could have been coached better and the movie certainly could have gone several steps past where they settled and into a more gothicly romantic front, but they didn’t do a bad job– it was just average.

As always, it is available on Netflix on Demand.  Go forth and view, should that be your desire.

After last week’s review of Thankskilling, I thought I had been put off movies for life.  Who wants to possibly risk their sanity reviewing movies that may or may not contain an evil, ass-raping turkey puppet?

But I steeled myself and dug through Netflix once more, considering seppuku as a possible option should I find myself witnessing another feathery debacle.  (Ever think that you’d see the phrase “feathery debacle” in a movie review?  Probably not.  And you’re welcome.)

Fortunately, I found another IFC release that enabled me to get through at least one more week of reviewing.

The Shrine is a lovely little horror movie produced by Brookstreet Pictures Production that was screened last year (2010 for those of you bad at math… or happen to be time-travelers) at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

It has two actors in it that you may or may not recognize, one Mr. Aaron Ashmore (Steve Jinks from Warehouse 13, Jimmy Olsen from Smallville, AND two bit parts in Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? (whoo!)) and one Ms. Cindy Sampson (Lisa Braeden from Supernatural), as well as the gorgeous Meghan Heffern who has not done much (yet), but I highly recommend you Googling as she’s definitely going to do more.

I’m going to warn you now, the plot I am about to recount sounds like every other horror movie of this type (TITGTASBCIIA: Tourists In Trouble Get Tortured And Sacrificed By Cult In Isolated Area) and, yes, it does feel like that for the majority of the film.  HOWEVER, it ends up being awesome.

Awesomely hot.

Carmen (Sampson) is a journalist who, after making a bad decision in publishing a controversial article, finds herself desperately in need of a good story to redeem herself to the newspaper she works for.  

After discovering news of a tourist that has gone missing in Poland, she does some research and finds that a series of tourists have gone missing in the same area.  She tracks down the missing man’s mother, coldly goes through his returned luggage, and discovers a journal with a last entry focusing on the remote (and fictional) town of Alvania.

She convinces her photographer boyfriend, Marcus (Ashmore), to come to Poland with her and intern Sara (Heffern) to attempt to track down information on the missing man and save her career.

Suddenly driving through Poland, Carmen reads the last entry in the missing man’s journal: an account of the town of Alvania (where we learn the people are unwelcoming and the town is self-sustaining) and mention of a weird hovering dark fog over part of the forest that surrounds the town.

She made an odd garden gnome, but the neighbors loved her.

Marcus makes jokes about the missing man’s hallucinogen intake but, as they start walking through the town, the jokes stop when he sees the dark fog the man had written of.  They wander for a little, getting odd looks from the natives, and are eventually chased out by some of the tougher looking locals.

As they drive out of town, Carmen informs Marcus that they have to go back as her boss told her to work on another story and she and Sara are in Poland without managerial consent– so they will both get fired upon their return.

This, to me, seems like a value issue: hang out with crazy locals in a country whose language you don’t speak in a town known for missing people ooooor go home and lose a job you’re not too fond of anyway.

Marcus, however, is convinced– though he is none too happy, and they pull over onto the side of the road in order to enter the forest with the heavy fog over it from the opposite side.

Then Sara and Carmen go into the fog.  Separately.

This movie is chock full (etiology of the phrase “chock full” anyone?) of moments where you have to fight to restrain yourself from screaming, “What are you doing?  Why are you going in there?  WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING?!  GODDAMMIT!!”  I tried to convince myself that anyone stupid enough to do the things that they did deserved their fate, but I still had to constantly fight the urge to shout at the movie.

Macaulay Culkin has nothing on this kid.

This movie, screaming aside, wins three points with me.

1. The Polish dialogue is not subtitled.  This is great, as it includes the viewer in on the experience of not knowing what is going on, just as the American characters do not.  It’s a great level of realism AND it promotes the fear of The Other– it keeps the anatagonist not quite human.

2. The plot is, from what I’ve seen, pretty original.  The ending was unexpected in the way of having a carpet pulled out from under your feet.  I don’t want to say more because it would ruin the fun for any of you who may watch it.

3. The maintenance of tension was great, though it did not pervade the entire movie.  There were definitely unexpected moments that sent me bolting upright, hanging on the edge of my seat as the movie progressed.

However, there were three things that I did not care for.

1. Parts of this movie looked like they were shot by the SyFy Channel, and the CGI fog was horrible.  Yes, SyFy horrible.

See?  SyFy horrible.

2. The female lead, Carmen, was so unsympathetic that I found myself hoping for her death.  She’s supposed to be a go-getter, at least at the beginning of the movie, but she ends up coming off as a bitch– and normally I love the go-getter types.  This wasn’t a matter of dialogue, but of acting.

3. The ending of the movie, which is so great, is the only part of it that really breaks out from the typical hostage/cult movie.  The pacing was slow and awkward at times, and I know that if I had not had to watch the entire movie for the review, I would likely have turned it off about thirty minutes in and picked another movie– which would have meant that I never would have seen the ending that truly makes the film.

4. Sara, the beautiful, attention-grabbing intern, had next to no dialogue.  Her character was there to serve a purpose (which she did), but the screen writer (or editor) did not allow the movie a chance to develop her character *at all*.  The character could have been replaced by a dog to have the same amount of interaction she was afforded.  Fortunately, Heffern was able to carry this character as well as possible given the circumstances.

Ah, Sara, we knew you for so short a time.

This movie, while good, could have been much, much more.  Do I suggest watching it?  Yes, if you have the free time and don’t mind wading through fifty or so minutes of plot that could have been executed better to get to the meat of the story.  There are definitely better movies out right now, ones that I would suggest over this one.

However, if you’re willing to take the time to watch it all the way through, it does become truly excellent.  Besides, it’s free on Netflix on Demand– take an evening and enjoy.

In 2009, Broad Daylight Pictures released Thankskilling.

In 2011, Jonathon London and Brian Gilmore decided to torture me by asking me to watch it.  I may get around to forgiving them somewhere in the range of five to ten years.

What is there to say about this movie?  How does one even go about explaining it?  So, there’s this turkey (character name: Turkie) and, well… there was some Indian curse and now every five hundred and five years the turkey (Turkie) rises from its grave and takes revenge on white kids for disrespecting the land and its turkeys?

That wasn’t actually that difficult.  

But it gets more complicated than that!  There are these five college kids heading home for Thanksgiving break and they accidentally become the intended targets for the turkey’s (Turkie’s) revenge!  Dear god!  Oh, the horror, the humanity, the bad writing!

Oddly adorable.

What the horror actually is in this movie is the acting.  Which is expected for what it is marketed as (please refer to the DVD cover a few  paragraphs above, thank you very much).

We’ve got the dumb-looking fat kid, the all-American jock, the brainless hottie slut, the sexually awkward geek (I’M LOOKING AT ALL OF YOU RIGHT NOW), and the sweet girl who has never had good sex in her life.  Ever.  Really, like ever.  Not even in the movie.  Also: she doesn’t masturbate (this is an assumption– I’m running with it and you are too or I am going to hunt you down and make you pay).

What are these five drastically different kids doing together?  Well, they all got detention and are stuck together in the school’s library on a Saturday with this essay assigned that… oh, wrong movie.

These kids decide to carpool home for Thanksgiving in the jock’s keep.  There’s a scene at the beginning that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it gets them all together.  And the fat kid tears his shirt off.

He sounds his barbaric yawp.

Side note: This movie opens on tits.  Now, before you get excited, there’s not a lot of tits in the movie, just the occasional one.  But it’s pretty great because you’re in dramatic subtitles and then suddenly TITS.  So you’re staring at the screen going, “Hey, tits!”  And then the turkey (Turkie) kills the owner of said tits.

It’s very tragic, I know.

Back to the plot!  On the way to their respective homes, the jock’s jeep blows a… gasket?  Springs a leak?  Catches fire?  Comes unleashed?  SOMETHING HAPPENS AND THE CAR CEASES TO WORK.  So they decide to camp out in the woods.

Before this camping expedition, we are introduced to the hermit (character name: Hermit) whose dog, Flashie, is quickly dispatched by the dread turkey (Turkie).  Intent on revenge, the hermit (Hermit) sets off into the woods with his shotgun.

The turkey isn’t the only one with the Magickal Powers of Disguise.

While the kids make camp, the sexually awkward nerd tells the tale of the terrible turkey (Turkie) and the Indian curse, complete with vaguely sepia-looking flash animation.  The kids mostly laugh it off but, after a solo encounter with the turkey (Turkie), the prude gets a little on edge.

When the hapless campers wake up the next morning, the fat kid finds turkey droppings on top of his sleeping bag and the hermit (Hermit) sitting next to him.  They are informed that, sometime in the night, the turkey (Turkie) visited them and the hermit (Hermit) protected them.

The kids disregard this news, of course, and set back out on their journey home.  The turkey (Turkie) follows them.

And by follows them, I mean he hangs out by the side of the road until a turkey-loving furry decides to pick him up for turkey anal-sex and the turkey (Turkie) then blows his furry little brains out with a shotgun blast to the head and steals his car.

Dr. Turkie needs you to bend over and cough.

The movie goes downhill from there.  What, it can go more downhill?  Yes, yes it can and it will.

Highlights!

-the turkey has sex with the bimbo

-the prude’s father dresses up like a turkey

-there’s some awkward conversation with the turkey over coffee

-a not-quite Real Genius research montage

-an alien chest-burster turkey(!!)

-a radioactive turkey

-a turkey in disguise

-the turkey tosses his own salad

-lines like: “Now that’s fowl play!”

Aforementioned radioactive turkey (Turkie)

It’s not good.  Is it fun?  Yes, it’s fun.  It’s a rolicking turkey adventure if there ever was one.  Tits, murder, a glowing turkey, cheesy dialogue, bad acting– it’s everything you need in order to get through an awkward family holiday.  

Thankskilling 2 is slated to come out in 2012.  Will I watch it?  Probably.  Will I enjoy it?  Quite possibly.  Will it inspire me to pick up farm animals on the side of the road for molestation purposes?  Probably not.

As always, this avian-centric masterpiece is available on Netflix on Demand.  Go forth and cause untold psychological damage to your little cousins this holiday season.

Last Monday, I wrote about the connection that girls have with Twilight’s Bella— for them, she embodies the dream of being desired for who one is. However, this connection is magnified tenfold if these girls also connect with Bella as a person.  

In nearly all aspects, Isabella Swan is the goddess of mediocrity.  Average looking, yes, she is (murky wardrobe and scant make-up: check).  Socially awkward, oh, just a gigantic bit.  Should be kept away from anything that might be called a “sport”– including miniature golf. Can she dance?  Of course not.  Can she keep herself upright on any surface that isn’t 100% flat? Definitely not.  Why are her “normal” classmates so interested in her?  No idea.  Her defining word is “bland”.

What, then, causes Edward to notice her?  Two things.

One: she smells good.  Not good like flowers or mid-afternoon sex, but like “nomnomnom” good.  She smells like his favorite turkey dinner (insert stuffing joke here). 

Loves Thanksgiving.

Two: he can’t read her mind.  Guess what?  This isn’t a positive thing.  “What’s bothering you?” “Nothing.”  “You look upset.”  “I’m fine.” “Did I do something wrong?” “What could you do wrong?” (For those of you who I just induced traumatic flashbacks in, I’m sorry.)

He’s intrigued because he can’t tell what she’s thinking.

(Also: welcome to the rest of the world’s male/female interactions.  Enjoy your stay.)

These two factors are what inspire Edward to potentially blow his cover in front of the entire school. The overwhelming smell of turkey induces the cringe-inducing line: “Your scent is like a drug to me, you’re like my own personal brand of heroine”.  Edward travels to sun-drenched Arizona and kills another vampire out of love of the single woman whose mind he can’t read.

These enticing(?) traits are innate to her character– she’s done nothing to earn them.  If she was athletic, she would have spent years practicing and honing her skills.  If she was beautiful and dressed well, she would have had to put effort and money into maintaining her appearance.  If she was in academic clubs and honor societies, she would have had to study hard and really work for it.  These would have been character establishing traits of motivation and perseverance.  

Instead she sits around with her mouth open while psychically shielding herself and emitting the smell of turkey.

Exhibit A

This is typical of the current young adult paranormal romance.  The male character is this all powerful (and, of course, deeply tormented), dangerous werewolf/angel/vampire/demon/civil war re-enactor, and the female character who catches his eye has some odd feature about her: a family curse, ESP, a weird blood type, an immunity to powers, or the ability to boost the male lead’s powers.  The initial connection between the angst-ridden yet powerful male and the beautiful but odd female comes because of her unique ability or trait, just as it does in “Twilight”.

The difference is that, in the other books, the female lead also has a personality.  There’s some spunk about her, some quirk, some redeeming personality traits like bravery or total loyalty to her even more quirky friends or a traumatic past that creates a character with depth, possibly someone for the young female reader to look up to.  There’s no real depth with Bella.  

While this lack of depth works in her favor for the girls who see themselves in this average character, it fails to provide anything for the rest of us to become interested in.  She almost becomes the antichrist of role models, stepping up for girls around the world and telling them that it’s okay for them to not try to improve, not try to grow, and that, if they do this for long enough, their own personal Edward will whisk them away from their dull life.

If Edward had never shown up, who would Isabella Swan be?  What would her life be like?  I see long hours at community college, a career that, like everything else, she is apathetic about, and a series of boys that are absolutely fascinated with her due to a deep-seated psychological need for validation.  And don’t bring up the “what about Jacob?” bit either– that wouldn’t have been an issue if she hadn’t rebounded so desperately off of Edward.

God, I sound like a 90210 fan.

The point is, Bella is nearly featureless and certainly soulless without Edward to activate her, and that’s what she’s teaching her readership to be.

However, she does have one very strong and defining personality trait.  We’ll get to that in a later article.

For today’s article, I was planning on doing a collection of the most freakish looking Twilight tattoos available.  However, upon looking for pictures of said tattoos, I found this one.

That’s devotion.  Evil devotion, but still devotion.

I’m going to take a guess and assume that many of you are cheering and in admiration of such a hardcore Star Wars fan.  Why wouldn’t you be?  It’s Star Wars!  A major movie franchise that has made billions upon billions of dollars, has conventions, cosplayers, a dedicated following, and merchandise of every description.

So does Twilight.

Yeah, I just did that.  What, you wanna fight?  Bring it.

What makes Star Wars fans better than Twilight fans?  Why is it infinitely more acceptable to have a Boba Fett tattoo than a Edward Cullen tattoo?  (Did you just cringe when I compared Fett to Cullen?  C’mon, take it like a man.)

Why, when Episode One came out, was it considered cool to have a ticket to a midnight showing months in advance, but an adult can’t even admit to seeing one of the Twilight movies in theaters without being subject to ridicule?

Star Wars was an epic saga tracking the growth of a whiny boy into a man, complete with political commentary.  It has lightsabers!  They’re glowing laser swords and they make “whoosh” noises!  And people can move things with their minds!!  Twilight is just about some pale girl with dark hair falling in love with an older man.  It’s stupid.  

In every fanverse, there are going to be extremists.  There are going to be those beyond socially awkward creatures that inspire future conventions to instigate a Febreze rule.  There are going to be those people who spend every last available dollar on a doll that has the most inconsequential defect on it.

So what about the hardcore fans? You certainly can’t compare them!  Twilight fans are silly young girls that shriek and buy anything with Edward’s face on it while writing endless amounts of scary fanfiction, while Star Wars fans are… well…

This argument isn’t going too well for the Star Wars fans.

For some reason, the geek community has decided to turn its backs on it’s budding little sister geeks, the TwiHards.  These are girls just as obsessed as the next nerd with their topic of choice.  These are the girls that, in a few years, are going to start popping up at conventions even more than they are now and begin changing the face of the fandom.  

Girls like the TwiHards and the Harry Potter nerds are going to help level the skewed gender ratio at conventions, and it’s happening already.  Our younger geeks, men 26 years of age and below, are likely going to be dating a TwiHard or an ex-TwiHard sometime in the future.  You may cringe now, but think of how lovely it would be to date someone who actually wants to go to the conventions with you, who shares not necessarily the topic of your passion, but the simple overarching nerd passion that we all possess.

If these girls are able to get so into “Twilight”, think of how much they’ll enjoy other parts of the fandom they’ve been neglecting out of unintentional ignorance.  Think of how you could introduce your favorite comic book series to a girl and have her love it as much as you do.

So stop mocking the Twilight franchise and the girls that love it and, instead, reach out a hand.  Help unite with your fellow geeks and  try not to be so elitist about the things you love.

Me?  I love this.

There’s some pretty unnerving “Twilight” merchandise roaming the internet as the release of “Breaking Dawn” looms and you’re probably quite overwhelmed by it all.  Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.  I’ve assembled a collection of my, uh… favorite products so you can assemble your Christmas wish-list early.

Edward Cullen panties.  Because you know you nothing attracts the boys like associating sharp teeth with one’s “lady bits”.

Maternity Shirts. Of course.  What lovely young lady wouldn’t want a “Twilight” maternity shirt?  If having Edward’s baby isn’t enough for her, you can always buy her a shirt indicating her baby’s a primal parasite that’ll likely kill her with the Little Nudger t-shirt.

Once your “little nudger” (AKA: death parasite) is out of your system, you can dress him in this t-shirt, making sure to start that Oedipus complex early on.

A shout out to the bronies in the audience, you too can join the “Twilight” fandom with this set of ponies customized to celebrate the marriage between Edward and Bella.

As if a million voices cried out in terror…

For the “Twilight” fan who likes looking good, you can spend $30 on a hairdryer that someone has applied a “Twilight” sticker.  

This blows.

…Jacob Black embryo pendant.  So you can wear your favorite character as a fetus around your neck…?  I’ve got nothing, absolutely nothing.  Someone please just buy me this.

Please?  It looks so happy.

That special person in your life certainly needs a life-sized stand-alone cut-out of one of the Cullens, just as I certainly need more hyphens in this sentence.

Need a shirtless Jacob Black action figure?  So.  Covered.

Uncovered, that is! *rimshot*

Now that you have your shirtless Jacob Black, you probably want this sparkling dildo (link is, obviously, NSFW) to help you get your raging desires under control.  According to the website, “The Vamp” is designed to maintain temperature, so you can pop it in the fridge and get your Edward-induced necrophilia on.

Once you’re spent, you can curl up on your Edward body pillow.  Wait, no, you can’t.  They’re sold out. :*(

Dear god.

Then, for the rest of us, this kit just might come in handy…

I will, somewhat reluctantly, admit to being a “Twilight” fan.

I will, somewhat ashamedly, admit that I have probably listened to the “Twilight” movies for background noise while working somewhere near, oh hell, sixty times.

Sixty.  Maybe more.  It’s not like I have a scorecard for this stuff.  Don’t even bother asking me how many times I’ve used the Harry Potter movies for my working soundtrack.  Or “Elvira”.  Seriously.

I know that these movies are so overhyped that it makes the rest of the world near homicidal.  I know that we mentally put the franchise’s fans alongside furries, “Rocky Horror Show” performers, and Gleetards.

The merchandise that has been produced for this movie is somewhat scary at times.  The Edward silhouette, for instance.  You, too, can have the famous self-loathing bloodsucker (no, not Louis from “Interview with a Vampire”) watching over you while you sleep.  That’s not creepy at all, no sir.

As much as so many of us cringe, myself included, at the shrieking fans, the ridiculous merchandise, and the movies themselves, something about them makes millions of girls worldwide absolutely rapt.  As of this time last year, the first movie alone sold over 10.5 million units.  That’s a decent amount of zeroes.

What is it about this movie that caused it to become such a phenomenon throughout the female population?  Why are these girls of all ages so willing to buy any merchandise that might possibly be associated with the Twilight franchise?  Sure, Robert Pattison/Edward is considered a “dreamboat” by many, but it takes more than just a hot male lead to pull a movie this high.

Girls love this movie, and it isn’t just the romance, the sparkly chests, and the sharp white teeth.  It isn’t the acting which, while not bad, certainly isn’t Oscar quality, nor is it the mostly stellar soundtrack.

There is a personal connection that these girls are making with this movie, one that gets so deep into them that they begin to view this movie as integral to their self-concept.  They buy the clothes to dress like the characters, they search for their own personal Edward, and get large and elaborate tattoos.

This is a lifetime commitment for them.  But why?

It’s not because of Edward at all, it’s because of Bella.

Isabella “Bella” Marie Swan, the seventeen year-old high school junior.  In the books she’s physically nondescript and, in the movie, she’s average-looking.  The director of the first film, Catherine Hardwicke, certainly did not attempt to make Kristin Stewart the class beauty.  Her make-up is near nonexistent– Robert Pattinson wears more lipstick that she does, and her wardrobe is murky at best with jeans, flannel, and various bulky jackets.  Her ugly orange truck fits right in with her style with dents and scratches decorating its hull.  

While it would be kind to say that she isn’t very social, it would be more accurate to say that she’s socially awkward.  She’s withdrawn and hesistant, she stutters.  She’s not atheletic and prone to what I call, in my own life, “acts of klutzery”… it means she falls over and drops things a lot, though usually not at the same time.  

Among her girlfriends, she’s the sexless one.  There’s no drop of femininity in her, at least in the first movie.  She doesn’t want to shop with them, she’s never interested in boys (until she meets Edward, of course), she can’t dance, and she’s much more concerned with studying.  She’s not really good at anything but homework.

So what do you have for the sum of this equation?  A socially awkward, plain-faced girl in unflattering clothing who doesn’t really fit in at her school, isn’t good at sports, and doesn’t care about “normal” girly things like the *gasp* the big school dance… but she’s smart.

This describes my high school experience perfectly and, from fan reaction, I’d assume the high school experience of hundreds of thousands of other girls.

A lot of us blur high school in our minds.  It becomes that place where our worries, looking back, were so minimal.  Things that stressed us don’t compare to our current daily struggle.  Most harassment, feelings of exclusion, and awkwardness is eventually forgotten or repressed.

But many of the “Twilight” fans are still in that stage of their life, or were when the movie released.  Some of the “Twilight” fans may be far out of high school but never quite got over their teenage experiences– some things never really leave us.

So think of the typical glorifying high school movie that was intended for girls.  For my age group, it was films along the lines of “She’s All That” and “Cruel Intentions”. I know that, during the last decade, Disney has cornered the market on the female-focused high school movie by creating things like “High School Musical” and “A Cinderella Story”.  

While these movies had awkward characters in them, those characters always ended up being accepted by the “popular” sphere.  How?  They transform.

“She’s All That” – Magical transformation from angry art chick to campus hottie due to bet between two popular males.

“Cruel Intentions” – Magical transformation from slightly retarded and sexless prep school girl to poised, sexy student due to bet between main characters. 

“High School Musical” – Not so magical transformation of already majorly beautiful and well-dressed nerd due to singing ability and star basketball player’s interest.

“A Cinderella Story” – Magical transformation from broke waitress to loaded valley girl while being romanced by star quarterback.

Now look at “Twilight”.  Even with the dance at the end, when Bella comes down the stairs in her dress– a major point in any high school movie, she’s wearing a somewhat passable dress, leggings, a bulky cast on one leg, and a Converse sneaker on the other.  Make-up?  Still not really there.

There’s no transformation.  The friends she made before she met Edward are still her friends, her clothing and lack of make-up are still the same, and she’s still hovering at about the same status level that she was at before.  And unlike in “She’s All That”, Edward wanted her as she was when they first met.

Let’s lift that chunk, shall we?  “Edward wanted her as she was.”

Isabella “Bella” Marie Swan was wanted for who she was.  She didn’t have to undergo a radical make-over and wardrobe overhaul.  She didn’t have to perform in a talent show to show what an amazing singer she was or find a lost inheritance.  She was desirable as the socially awkward, average-looking girl with no real talents other than getting a decent grade in biology.

That’s what these girls are looking for, that’s what they’re fantasizing about: a man who wants them as they are.

Of course, if he’s perfect looking and glitters in the sun, that helps too.

Another week, another Netflix movie review… only this one has special powers.

I’ve been craving a good haunted house movie– those are my favorites.  Nothing gets better than the maze-like mansion in the “The Haunting” (1999 version, yo), but if you toss in a haunted house with an atrium with some broken windows and an on-the-property family cemetery, I’m pretty much in.

The house in “The Skeptic” does not have an atrium, or even a garden.  What it does have is amazing dialogue, a suck-you-in plot, and some damn fine acting.

Released in 2009 by IFC Films, “The Skeptic” features such actors as Zoe “take-me-now” Saldana, Tom Arnold (yes, I know, but he does a great job), Edward Hermann (does that name sound familiar?  He’s the villain from “The Lost Boys”.  He’s done some other stuff, but we all know what’s important), and Robert Prosky (“Last Action Hero” and “Gremlins 2”, bitches!).

Also: Tim Daly.  Now some of you might be “whoa!” and geeking out a little, but for the rest of you, Tim Daly is the voice of Bruce Timm’s Superman.  He’s done some other stuff but, hey, Superman.  Can’t beat that (unless it’s Batman).

I’m going to need a few minutes alone with this house.

Mr. Daly plays this movie’s male lead, one Bryan Beckett– an active, hardcore, and (of course) skeptical lawyer whose estranged (and angry) aunt dies, leaving him (or so he thinks… bwah ha ha), her wonderfully spooky, atrium-less house.

This inheritance comes at a good time for Bryan, as he and his wife are having marital issues.  See, she thinks that he’s got emotional issues (as in he has no emotions) and he thinks that she married him knowing that he had no emotions, so she shouldn’t be surprised at his continued lack of them.  So he informs her that he’s going to take a few weeks and stay at his dead aunt’s house.

Proof that I was too busy watching the movie to take good screen shots.

While all this plot-movement is taking place, we get a few scenes with Bryan and his partner-in-law (See what I did there, with the whole “law office partner” thing?  I’m so freaking witty.), Sully (Tom Arnold), in order to establish character.  See, Bryan is one of those types who doesn’t believe anything that isn’t grounded in scientific fact and Sully believes in the Loch Ness Monster and aliens, making for some highly amusing and well-written dialogue.

It is during one of these scenes in Bryan’s newly acquired house that something possesses Sully and communicates a message to him about something being in an upstairs closet.  Sully doesn’t remember the incident and drinks what looks to be a Capri Sun, which I totally support.

Not quite Large Marge, but she’s trying.

Then strange things start happening– most of which Bryan is able to explain by various practical and occasionally scientific ideas, but when his aunt’s priest warns him about the evil in the house and Sully shows up with some paperwork showing that his aunt actually left the house to a doctor at a technical institute who studies paranormal phenomenon, Bryan starts to crack around the edges.

It is at this institute that we are introduced to the highly strung psychic prodigy, Cassie (Zoe Saldana).  Cassie manages to worm her way into Bryan’s house in order to verify the happenings there and the house starts to actively, unmistakeably come alive in response to her investigations, showing Bryan that his explainable haunted house isn’t so explainable anymore.

This all makes the movie sound very typical of the genre and, I will admit, the starting plot supports that idea.  But this movie goes from the expected into the unexpected as information about Bryan and the house slowly gets unearthed, which changes this movie into an entirely different beast.

Superman senses the interrupted feng shui of the dining room.

Not only that, but the tension in the movie is wonderful.  My notes have such things like, “…AND THE DOOR IS OPEN.  JESUS CHRIST, THE DOOR IS OPEN.”  This movie isn’t about things jumping out at you, though there is the occasional “HOLY SHIT” reactive visual, but more about the psychological maintenance of fear.  I would say “fear of the unknown”, but once the haunt’s origin is revealed, you’re still at the same level (or higher, in my case) of “fucking terrified”.

I also loved the breakdown of the skeptical Bryan.  There are several scenes of Bryan wandering through the house at the beginning, totally at ease, exploring his new surroundings.  Unlike the characters in most movies, during these scenes, Bryan doesn’t talk to himself.  He is alone and he is thinking– but we don’t get to hear it.  About two-thirds of the way into the movie, that external silence has broken down and he’s mumbling to himself things that we can barely understand.

There are scenes in this movie, certain phrases, particular shots that you don’t really think about in relation to the plot that, upon a second viewing, suddenly add several layers of depth to this film.  It’s beautifully constructed with the director, Tennyson Bardwell (who is also the writer and, really, someone I would mock for that choice of pseudonym much more if this movie hadn’t been so enjoyable) showing an eye for detail in all aspects of his work.

Superman goes into the light with Carol Ann.

My only real criticism of this movie lies in its camera work, as a large chunk of it lends itself more towards that of television than that of a film.  This movie could have had an epic quality about it if only it had been shot in a different style.

Even with the camera work not doing justice to the film, I highly recommend taking the 88 minutes needed to view this movie and queuing it up on Netflix on Demand– it’s well worth it, especially if you like a good chunk of mystery in your horror.

I knew if I watched enough Netflix horror movies, I’d find one that didn’t make me want to slowly bleed out in a clawfoot bathtub.

“Shiver” (Spanish title: Eskalofrio) premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008 and was produced by the same people who brought us “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Orphanage”.

(Do you remember “The Orphanage”?  I do– that damn movie prevented me from getting a full night’s sleep for a several months.)

“Shiver” also shares the same production designer as “Pan’s Laybrinth”, Pilar Revuelta, which means this movie is gorgeous in that overcast and rainy sort of way. The camera work really compliments her designs, making me realize the amazing amount of crap I’ve watched in the last few weeks.

He must’ve watched “The Orphanage” before bed.  Bad move, kiddo.

This wonderful foreign horror film tells the story of Santiago, a teenager with what the translator called “photophobia” but is actually a bit more severe than just light-sensitivity.  Santiago, “Santi” for short, experiences pain and blisters when exposed to the sunlight, enough so that the doctor warns that he may have to undergo skin transplants if his condition worsens.

And he is slowly growing fangs.  

Hey, hey, don’t worry– this isn’t (exactly) a vampire movie.  No sparkling here.

With encouragement from both the doctor and her son, Santi’s mother decides to move to a small village mostly hidden from sunlight in a deep tree-filled valley in northern Spain.

When they arrive to their new home just outside of the village, Santi and his mother meet their landlord, Dimas, who gives them a tour of the house before they settle in for the night.

A man walks into a store with a sheep and says to the store-keeper…

Of course, that night a sheep is slaughtered by some unseen beast and the angry one-eyed shepherd (because every movie needs an angry one-eyed shepherd) rushes out with his gun and fires into the forest.

The next day, while Santi experiences his first day at his new school, his mother gets to witness aforementioned angry one-eyed shepherd tote his newest gutted sheep carcass into the town’s grocery store and complain that this is the third slaughtered ewe and he’s taking manners into his own angry one-eyed shepherd hands.

After school, one of Santi’s newly acquired friends, Tito, encounters the same unseen(ish) beast from the previous night and tells everyone at school about it the following day.  Santi, Tito, and the class hotshot, Jonas, decide to go into the woods and hunt down the beast.

FATALITY

Things happen, Jonas ends up having his blood sucked out of his neck and dies.  (Not a vampire movie, I repeat, not a vampire movie.  Really.)

Jonas’s death causes the introduction of Inspector Cifuentes, the father of Santi’s potential love interest and classmate, Angela.  After interrogating Santi and taking a spit swab, the inspector determines that Santi is not the murderer.  Unfortunately for Santi, the village people (not the band) continue to believe that he killed Jonas.

Another murder with Santi nearby later, the villagers start to get aggressive.  However, at this murder, Santi sees the thus-far-unseen beast and figures out what it is– except no one will believe him.  With the adults and police being no help, Santi decides that he’s going to have to go into the woods and gather evidence himself.

Better at keeping the camera steady than those damn Blair Witch kids.

Reading the above, this movie sounds a bit more like a detective flick than a horror flick.  Kid has to prove his innocence while avoiding stoning by suspicious townfolk.

But it doesn’t feel like that upon viewing.  It felt like, to me, what would have happened if Goonies went horribly, horribly wrong.  And was in Spanish.  (Don’t give me any of that “Mouth speaks Spanish” crap either, because all of them would need to speak Spanish, not just Mouth.)

I really enjoyed it.  It wasn’t as good as “The Orphanage” (I am easily going to be able to sleep tonight), but it is definitely the best horror movie I have reviewed thus far.  It’s more than worth queuing up on Netflix Instant– just in time for Halloween.

I thought “Kiss of the Vampire” was the bottom of the barrel when it came to having an incoherent, nonsensical storyline, but it seems as though the barrel is a bit deeper than I thought.

That’s where “Kenneyville” comes in.

Released straight-to-DVD this month, it comes with the tagline “PsychoIS MANufactured” and encouraging quotes such as: “a shocking predicament of violence” and “a white-knuckle horror thriller”.  Don’t believe them.

Doris was a regular escapee of the senior center.

I actually had to stop this movie about halfway in and take a break before I could continue watching it.  And I love crap movies, I really do.  Every time Matthew Kelly writes about a movie for his Guilty Pleasures column, I’m right there with him.

This movie exceeds my tolerance levels.  I think this movie would exceed Matthew’s tolerance levels.  But enough bitching already, let’s start kneecapping this filmbeast.

The movie starts with a series of shots from a hand-held video camera.  A countrified Canuck in flannel is being interrogated and slapped around by the camera-wielder.  Then we cut to the opening credits and accompanying song by Carnival Moon, which was the best thing about this movie.  

We suddenly shift to a nondescript office, where we are introduced to private investigator Hank Venture.  Uh, I mean,  Patrick Kennedy.  With Mr. Kennedy is one Megan Desmond, a 23 year old blonde and one of the only people in this movie that has any acting ability.

Patrick has been hired to investigate the disappearance of a missing girl, Kim Whyte.  Why does her last name have a “y” in it instead of the usual “i”?  Probably because the evil scientist’s name is Adrian Black and someone mistakenly thought they were being subtle.

I’ve had mornings like this.

Anyhow, back to the… plot(?).  Megan and Patrick are suddenly driving on a highway, hand-held video camera in action.  Yeah, there’s a small chunk of the hand-held in this movie.  I know it’s overdone, but at least this movie isn’t predominately hand-held, even though there are some moments where you are wondering where the hell the character even got a camera (i.e., the opening scene).

Patrick decides that the best option for potential stealth is to abandon their car on the side of what looks to be a well-traveled highway and pretend to be hitchhikers.  You know, because no one is going to notice a nice looking abandoned car sitting for days on the side of a highway.

As they are hiking into town (they apparently decided they were going to be regular cross-country hikers instead of hitchhikers somewhere off camera), they come across Ben and Victoria, who claim to be brother and sister (clearly untrue).  Even though Victoria (the only other actual talent in the movie) is channeling her inner Bellatrix LeStrange, Patrick decides it would be a great idea to follow these two to their Canadian hovel.

She killed Sirius Black.

This is when the movie starts to show signs of tearing at the seams.  I’m going to use this as my favorite example of a recurring issue of plot incoherency in this movie.

STEP 1: Once Patrick and Megan arrive to Ben and Victoria’s cabin, Victoria makes a phone call (within earshot of Megan) telling Dr. Adrian Black that he is in luck, there is now an attractive girl at their hovel.  Dr. Black tells Victoria that he will send Marshall to get her and hangs up.

STEP 2: Shortly after his chat with Victoria, Dr. Black receives a phone call from random government official saying that they need two girls ready for pick up the next day.  Dr. Black freaks out, angrily questioning where he will get a second girl (he already has the first one, Kim Whyte).

STEP 3: After kidnapping her from Victoria’s cabin (where Dr. Black sent him), Marshall delivers a hog-tied Megan to Dr. Black, who then asks Marshall where he found her.

Is this an editing issue, a script issue, an epic fail on all levels that permeates the entire movie, or all of the above?  I’m thinking the latter.

I don’t know where they got the Virtual Boy, but I’m jealous.

We learn, as the movie sloppily unfolds, that Dr. Black has an estate in the eponymous Kenneyville where he kidnaps women and brainwashes them “Clockwork Orange” style so they become perfectly submissive and devoted sex slaves.  In an interesting(?) twist, a government agency (though which government, we can only assume) has comissioned Black to make sex slave assassins.

(Which I will admit is pretty bad ass.  I’ve seen some hentai with this theme and it was freaking awesome.  But that might be too much about my personal life for you, so I’m just going to continue on with the article.  That okay?  Great, we’re moving on.)

Plot inconsistencies aside, I have several complaints about this movie.

The naming.  All the characters have names that are too much.  Marshall, Donovan (the countrified Canuck I mentioned earlier), Adrian, Kennedy, Benjamin, Victoria… these names don’t happen in such groupings.  Sure, people are naming their kids over the top things like this now, but all these kids are still in single digits.  We’re looking at people in their twenties to forties.  They sound like soap opera characters.

The emotional reactions.  Total failures.  Especially Hank Venture, er, Patrick Kennedy.  Bad writing plus bad acting… it didn’t work.  

The fight scenes.  Iffy at best.  But what killed me was that Patrick, who was easily floored by Marshall when he went to kidnap Megan, must have leveled up in brawling when the camera wasn’t rolling because he went from totally pussy to vaguely badass warrior.  Maybe he re-rolled his character.

The case didn’t go as well as Hank had hoped.

The title.  This movie is called “Kenneyville” because the whole town is supposed to be in on this operation.  Except they aren’t.  Except you only see the “whole town” in a bar for a single scene.  There is no town involvement, there is no explanation of why the town allows the operation to continue, there is absolutely no sense of conspiracy.  NONE.  The town was entirely unnecessary to the movie, so to name the movie after the town was an incredibly poor choice.

There’s so much more to rant about, but it really needs more of a Rifftrax play-by-play.  I don’t suggest purchasing it as there is potential danger of frying your brain if you view it in one sitting.  I shudder to think what could have happened if I hadn’t taken a break midway through.

I accidentally watched a made-for-TV movie for today’s feature, which is bad enough on its own, but upon further research, I discovered it was a made-for-Sci-Fi-Channel movie… which explained the CGI quality.

In the Spider’s Web premiered on Sci Fi in August 2007 as the second in the still ongoing “Maneaters Series” put out by RHI Entertainment.  And it’s not very good.

Of all the actors, the only one you may recognize is Lance Henriksen, who has a laundry list of geek-related media he’s been somehow part of.  We’re looking at things like Aliens, Terminator, Millennium, AVP, Mass Effect, The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the Pumpkinhead movies, and the wonderful Super Mario Bros. movie of ’93.

Hey, I own it.  Don’t pretend that you didn’t like it and certainly don’t pretend that you didn’t fantasize about Samantha Mathis (Princess Daisy) because we all did.

And while I’d love to sit here and rhapsodize about Ms. Mathis, we all know that I’m just avoiding talking about this full-screen movie.

If you think that this looks like she’s being blown away by a blast of spooge, you aren’t alone.

The basic plot is as follows: some tourists (whose names really don’t matter) are on a trek through a jungle in India.  A day’s walk outside of their destination, one of them gets bitten by a deadly spider.

Her reaction to the bite is quick, and soon she’s sprouting pustules around the bite, turning pale, talking about burning sensations (no, not like that).  Her fellow trekkers (no, not like that) decide that it would be quicker to get her to a nearby village where there is rumored to be an American doctor in residence, rather than try to get her to the next town.

They show up to the village, where legend tells that the inhabitants worship spiders, and find the doctor (as played by Mr. Henrisken).

Now let’s take a moment to discuss this doctor guy.  The writer decided to go the route of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights and name this character in accordance to his shortly-to-be-revealed true profession: Dr. Lecorpus.  Le corpus.

Really?  Couldn’t just whip out a phonebook and pick a name?  Had to be all “clever,” did you?  

Holy fuck, it’s awesome!

Anyhow, the doctor takes the bite victim into his amazingly cool looking spider-shaped hut and does his “OMG-I’m-an-evil-spider-worshipping-occultist” voodoo and makes the other trekkers leave the tent where they see the doctor’s brother.

Said brother is a deformed mutant who walks around the village with caul of spiderweb around his head and a large saber in one hand.  Just a little FYI.

More FYI: a “caul” is a cap or hat of net formerly worn by women.  Insert “the more you know” rainbow here and send me thanks in the form of Amazon gift cards for educating you on outdated fashions.

While they mill in the village, the remaining trekkers decide to split up: three will hike to the nearest town and try to get medical supplies sent to the village for their friend and two will stay in the village with her.

The two that stay decide that, hey, while our friend is dying in a spider-shaped hut, why don’t we go to a spider-shaped temple? 

So these two brainiacs run around with a handheld video camera in this temple just packed full of deadly CGI spiders and intense webs that Spiderman would be proud of.  Until, of course, they get squish a spider, get separated, and then are taken out by deadly CGI spider assassins.

The other three trekkers have arrived in the nearby town and discovered that, at the police station, the walls are loaded with missing persons flyers.

Whoever heard of that in a horror movie?

She chose down?  She chose down!  Aaaaaa!

After discussing the situation with a seemingly apathetic sergeant, the trekkers check into their hotel and spend a lovely night not being eaten alive by spiders.

Not as apathetic as he appears, the sergeant sets out with a pack of supplies the very next day, only to discover a shiny new helicopter touching down in a field where Dr. Lecorpus is directing his manual laborers to hand over creepy metal ice chests to the helicopter crew.

Soon it is revealed that Dr. Lecorpus is using spider venom to paralyze his victims to harvest their organs to sell them to some unnamed organization who, in return, bring him spiders from all over the world.

You’re the sergeant.  If you decide to scurry back to your town and get more firepower, turn to page 18.  If you decide to go guns ablazing into the fray, turn to back 7.  If you don’t have a choice in the matter because they totally spotted you way before you ever spotted them, go to the next paragraph.

Not as awesome as the spider-hut.

At this point, the movie continues its very simplistic path through the trekkers coming together with the sergant, defeating the evil Dr. Lecorpus, and running from the scary CGIpders.  Er, CGI spiders.  Eventually, the Indian police come in and save everyone who hasn’t already died.

Except for John.  Who’s John?  One of the trekkers.   He’s a dude that treks with other people that trek and that’s all you get to learn about him.  Or any of the other characters.  This movie is pure, sludge-like plot.

I suppose that I’ve been spoiled by recent SyFy movies like Sharktopus, but I really wanted a “good” creature feature with this viewing and I felt let down at the movie’s completion.  Most of the spiders in this movie weren’t real– even the ones descending on strands of web were plastic toys being lowered in front of the camera.

Yeah, that bad.

My childhood would have been so much better if my parents had bought me one of these.

While it did have plastic toy spiders and even a magical “spider web bridge” across a chasm, you might be wondering what didn’t it have.

What It Didn’t Have

• Boobs
• Hot lesbian action
• Awesome knife fights
• Amazingly wonderful giant mechanical spiders (or mechanical spiders of any size, for that matter)
• Kissing (what horror movie doesn’t have some stupid desperate kiss near the end of it?)
• Boobs
• Realistic spider webs 
• Actual Indians playing the Indian villagers (hello obvious South America filming location)
• Good greenscreening
• Gore.  Like, anything beyond a spider bite.  Srsly.
• Personality (for the characters and for the movie itself)
• Boobs

Is the movie boring?  No, not really.  Is it bad?  Not any more than an early episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.  It’s pure fluff.  This is the mindless stuff you put on when you’re feeling sick and fading in and out of consciousness and you don’t want to watch anything that would actually make you really want to stay awake.

Which is exactly what I recommend this movie for.  Have the flu?  Have a bad break-up?  A stressful day at work?  Want to just shut down for a while and not be subject to too much stimulation?  Get on your Netflix account and fire this baby up.

Welcome back to a new edition of “Allison found another crappy movie!”  

Carved: A Slit-Mouth Woman (Japanese title: Kuchisake-onna) had its theatrical release in Japan in 2007, then was picked up by Tartan Films for DVD release in that same year.

The quote is a lie.

A Slit-Mouth Woman (oh, the jokes I am not making right now) was (very) loosely based on the Japanese legend of the Kuchisake-onna, a woman who wears a surgical mask to cover the graphic cut of her mouth.  She appears at night and asks children, “Am I beautiful?”  Depending on how they answer, she either kills them or gives them facial scars to match her own with a deadly pair of scissors.

It’s a neat horror myth that has been around for hundreds of years, with the sleeve of a kimono being the original cover for her facial cut, which was given to her by a samurai lover who caught her in an act of infidelity.  

This movie should have been fairly terrifying.

It started out strong.  The opening credits were lovely, with a pair of scissors flying around, slicing up the screen as eerie music played and the beginning shots were stacked well with various children that would later come into play in the film talking about the Slit-Mouth Woman’s rumored reappearance after a thirty year absence.

The series of opening shots is cut off by an earthquake that releases SMW (if you don’t know what this abbreviation is for, please review the movie title) from her “prison” of a wooden closet and into the public, where she immediately appears and snatches a mouthy little boy.

He deserved it.

Now, this snatch scene is the beginning of a theme where bad things happen to someone in the movie and all the other characters that are witnessing the event either a) scream, b) run away very fast, or c) stare with their mouths open while brutalities are committed on their friend.

Also of importance, Mika, a little girl, is introduced in a scene where her mother tells her that she wishes that the SMW would come and take her away, and then throws her daughter to the ground.

There’s a lot of child abuse in this movie.  It’s basically the fuel for the plot.  Kind of a downer, I know.  Here’s a joke to cheer you up:

What do you get when you cross the Atlantic with the Titanic?

About halfway.

Continuing!  The movie moves into the social impact of the boy’s kidnapping and we’re shown scenes of a school assembly where children are instructed on safe practices and then teachers walk all the students to their various homes.  Yay for safety!

Mommy only beats you because the bruises are so pretty.

Mika, the beaten little girl from a few paragraphs up, is the last student to be dropped off by her teacher, but when her teacher attempts to hand the kid off to her abusive mother, Mika starts pouting and says she doesn’t want to go with her mother.  The teacher offers to walk her around a bit more and Mika agrees.

It turns out, in a flashblack, that the teacher herself is a child abuser.  So when Mika reveals that her mother beats her, the teacher freaks out and defends Mika’s mother and Mika runs off.

You know that theme I mentioned earlier, about the bad things happening and how all the characters suddenly become pussies?  Well, mid-flight away from Teacher Nutbag, Mika gets snatched by SMW while the nutbag sits and gapes.

Insert stereotype here.

Driven by guilt (and free time due to suspension from the school she teaches at for letting one of her students get kidnapped), Nutbag pairs up with another teacher to hunt down the SMW and rescue Mika (or her corpse).

In a “crazy” reveal, we learn that the teacher Professor Nutbag pairs up with is actually the SMW’s son, and hears the phrase “Am I pretty?” whenever his mother is going out to kidnap another kid… and he can somehow locate said kid based off of those voices.

If you’re like me, you might be looking at the convoluted couple of paragraphs above this one.  So some guy is the son of a (un)dead serial killer who mutilates kids’ faces and/or kills them and can hear voices in his head and locate kids that haven’t yet been kidnapped based on those (internal!) voices’ approximate volume?  And this teacher who beats her daughter has decided to team up with this guy who listens to the voices in his head so she can return one of her students to a mother who abuses her?

She’s definitely not getting adopted now.

Most of that doesn’t make sense.  And, if you watch the movie, it falls apart even further.  The legend that it was “based on” is barely used.  The origins of the SMW don’t even remotely mirror those of her namesake, and the asking of “Am I pretty?” only ever occurs in the male teacher’s head.

Watching this movie has a psychological process similar to Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief that I’ve outlined below.

THE STAGES

Stage 1: Confusion.  You find yourself asking questions like, “If this woman died and was trapped in a closet until she was recently released by an earthquake, how did she kill all those kids thirty years ago?” and “If this woman and her three children all went missing, how come her house was never searched so her body was never found?”

Stage 2: Bewilderment.You stare at the screen, watching perfectly healthy and able characters watching other characters die because..?  Everyone in this film repeatedly engages in deer-in-the-headlights tactics when they weren’t even the characters in the symbolic headlights.

Stage 3: Anger. You end up shouting at the screen because the characters learn two-thirds of the way through the movie that the SMW can be killed by chopping her head off, but none of them seem to be willing to do so and instead prefer to stab her in the stomach, back, or side.

Stage 4: Resignation.  You give up on the movie entirely when it is shown that the SMW is possessing the neighborhood mothers and, instead of immobilizing the mothers, the main characters keep killing them and then crying that oh no they’ve killed another one.

Stage 5: Seppuku.  As the credits roll, you take your life with a frisbee.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, don’t watch it.  Well, unless you feel like following around characters that have no realistic adult reactions, emotional states, or personal agency.  Or if you like shouting at your television.

As always, this movie is available on Netflix on Demand.  Watch at your own risk.  Hopefully next week I’ll find something that doesn’t make me feel like someone vomited into my skull.

Well, kids, we’re back to digging through crap… but I’m learning to love it.  Just imagine me cracking my knuckles before getting down to this week’s flaming pile.

“Kiss of the Vampire” was released straight-to-DVD in 2009 under the name “Immortally Yours” and has a couple of names you may recognize… if you’re a giant geek.  Not that that’s a bad thing or anything.  Continuing past that awkward moment…

We’ve got Daniel Goddard in the male lead role, who you might remember as Dar from the “Beastmaster” TV series and Costas Mandylor from the “Saw” movie franchise.  We also have one Mr. Martin Kove who you may remember was John Kreese from the “Karate Kid” franchise and Eric Etebari from the “Witchblade” TV series.  We also have Phil Fondacaro, legendary(?) “little person” actor from such movies as “Willow”, “Return of the Jedi”, and several episodes of “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”.

One big name you will definitely recognize is Matthias Hues, who played Klingon General #2 in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”. (I bet I just made some of you trekkies feel really insecure right now.)  There’s also a randomly appearing iguana.

I bet you’re all raring to go now, aren’t you?  With such a star-studded cast, who can blame you?

How do you say “fucked” in Klingon?

So, this is the part of the article where I tell you what this movie is about in effort to either entice or dissuade you from watching it.  I’d really like to tell you which way to go, but the plot is just a bit too disjointed.  By “bit,” I mean “fucking” and by “disjointed,” I mean “disaster.”

I’m going to try anyway.  If it doesn’t make any sense, it’s not because I currently have the death (AKA bronchitis) and am curled up in bed with “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” playing in the background. It’s because the movie was written by a woman with the emotional and cognitive IQ of a house elf.  

Just imagine, if you would, Dobby pounding away on a laptop trying to write the next “Twilight” while “The French Connection” plays in the background on one TV and “Days of Our Lives” plays on another and he happens to be wearing a tinfoil hat as he’s trying to prevent the Illuminati from accessing his brainmeats.  Oh, and he’s decided to write it in German.

That’s the summation of this movie.  But we’ll go more into that later.

We open with some nameless man being chased by vampires that sound like the harpies from “Xena: Warrior Princess” or, possibly, pterodactyls.  At the same time, we follow the female lead, Estelle, as she progresses from her snazzmobile to the opera with her family and two-dimensional drunken fiancee.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome is serious business.

At the opera, Estelle has a magic moment where she locks eyes with vampire Alex Stone (the Beastmaster… insert joke about pussy-taming here) and, as they head to their cars after the opera, the fiancee punches Estelle’s father in the face. Then Alex, who desperately wishes he was Stuart Townsend, steps up and distracts the drunken idiot long enough for the security guards to haul the guy away.

This point, about five minutes in, is where we realize that Dobby has no grasp of human emotions or interactions.  Once Estelle’s father is helped off the ground, he offers Alex any favor he could possibly give in exchange for his help.

Because distracting a drunk is incredibly difficult and only can be done by the most bravehearted of noble folks.

Alex asks for dinner with Estelle, which he bails from after about five minutes of conversation for reasons that the viewer cannot quite comprehend.  This is when the stellar dialogue begins to shine through, as Estelle uses such words as “whilst” and Alex says things like, “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be your knight in shining armor.”

I wonder if she’s his own personal brand of heroin, as well?

A still from Depeche Mode’s latest music video.

We shift to a club scene (because no vampire movie can really be considered a vampire movie without a club scene) where most of the extras are kinda incredibly unattractive and we are introduced to the token asian vampire chick who walks like she was in the middle of a DVDA scene with four John Holmes clones.

She’s not actually important, I just found her walk astounding.

The movie falls apart from here.  Not that it was that great to begin with.

How does it fall apart?  Well, Dobby attempts to jam in as many genres and separate plot lines as he can.

Let’s do a breakdown.

We have the shitty vampire romance between Estelle and Alex, who only go on two very short dates in a month before Alex determines he is willing to give up his immortality for her.

We have the comedy cop-duo with vampire hunter Marshall Pope and some little douchebaggy actor who wishes for god knows what reason that he was Jay Mohr.

We have a medical drama as doctors scurry about trying to find a source of immortality.

We have the female badass cop who is desperately trying to prove herself.

We have the drug cartel smuggling cocaine and selling XTC inside the dance club.

We have the high class beauty spa acting as a cover for the Illuminati.  (Insert: !!!??!?!?!?! here)

Hissing: Because it’s easier than choreographing a fight scene.

We have the vampire politics story as Alex’s fellow vamps think about staging a revolt.

We have the vampire hunter (as mentioned above) who is tormented by his wife’s death and travels the world seeking revenge against those who killed her.

This could be okay, though a little convoluted, if Dobby had developed past the mental state of a four year old.  Instead it comes off as a vomited mess that couldn’t have been saved even if its budget was in the billions.

Normally I’m not so quick to blame the writer, being a writer myself I know how much can get lost in translation from the page to the screen, but this was entirely the writer.  A typical example of this movie’s dialogue:

Estelle: “Let my father continue here and in exchange he will provide you with immortality.  But only if Alex agrees.”

Evil Illuminati Dude: “Whether or not he agrees is irrelevant.  He has no choice.  But nevertheless I’m willing to allow you to continue your research and give you ten million dollars if and only if he gives us what we want.”

The entire movie is made of stuff like this, where Dobby wrote in a language that he did not have full command of.  It’s truly awful.

So, in spirit of vaugely journalistic research, I checked out the writer.  Kat Hawks.  Seems familiar.  Is it Katherine Hawkes, the actress who played the female lead, Estelle, who produced this movie?

Oh, it is?  Shocking.

He can’t believe it’s not butter.

This movie was a vanity project.  This woman wrote and produced a movie so she could star as a woman so amazingly desirable that a vampire would give up his immortal life for her after two short dates.  It doesn’t take a psychoanalytic critic to see what is going on here.

And it’s obvious that no one was honest with her about the script or was allowed to touch it to translate it to something that would actually make sense in English.  This movie is an epic failure of poorly written narcissism.

The ending?  I’m just going to show you an image of the ending so you can see how this woman decided to wrap up the part of the movie that didn’t pertain to her character.  

Wait, what?

Stepping away from the script, this movie is supposed to be classified as a horror movie but there isn’t a single tense or horrific scene in it because the vampires are so pathetic. Whenever confronted with anyone with a weapon, they hiss and sway.  That’s it.  There’s a complete lack of competence and predatory instinct that I entirely blame the director for.

My recommendation: don’t watch it unless you want to become a misogynist.  Seriously, if I was male, this movie would make me hate women just due to witnessing the writer’s fantasy world.  This is “The Room” with a budget.

It is, as always, available on Netflix on Demand.  Don’t do it.  I’d rather watch “Vampegeddon” five times in a row than watch this thing again.

I almost find myself sorry to be confessing that I actually enjoyed this week’s movie.  I’d gotten so used to the weekly helping of crap being served up that this little gem caught me off guard.

Don’t judge this movie by its cover.

Left in Darkness is a horror movie (yes, another one… I can’t help myself) released in 2006, staring the lovely Monica Keena.

Quick break!  This is the same Monica Keena from Night of the Demons!  YES!  Okay, back to the review!

The male lead is played by Mr. David Anders, someone you might recognize from Heroes, Alias, The Vampire Diaries (no one over 15 watched that, I know), or 24.  So he’s got a little bit of a TV resume.

The movie opens with old home-video footage of Celia (Monica Keena’s character) as a child, on a beach.  The credits roll and a fairly gorgeous mood-setter of a song plays.  I really dug the slight wobble of the camera and not-quite-centered shots that gave it that home-video feel, so props to them.

Gramps, we need to talk about your prostate.

We shift to an older Celia, probably 11 or so, sitting in a cemetery, talking to (what appears to be) no one.  Her grandfather crouches to talk to her about her dead mother and she runs off in a fit.  Unfortunately, this fit leads her to a busy street.  Fortunately, she now has a Magic Ghost Friend to yank her a good five feet into the air like a little rag doll.

Flashforward to a 21 year old Celia, leaving her apartment with her best friend to go out for her birthday.

Personally, I think she should trade in for a new best friend, because her BFF’s idea of “birthday celebration” involved taking her to a frat party to get gang raped.

So her friend didn’t know about the gang rape part, but still… a frat party?  Can’t we import a mail-order friend from Russia for poor Celia?

Back to the gang rape.  Celia gets drugged (By the guy her BFF introduced to her!  This girl fails!) and gang raped by the frat members, then dies from being overdosed with whatever date-rape drug they used.

This frat house was obviously not recruiting chemistry majors.

Most of us have had nights like this.  Just admit it.

Apparently they decided to dump her body in the bathroom and go back to partying, as she wakes up with her jeans down and her feet hanging out of the shower.

Once she wakes, she freaks out about the rape then, when she sees her dead body, freaks out even more.  And don’t pretend that you wouldn’t freak out in the same situation because you totally would.  Have some empathy, jeez.

Eventually she makes her way out of the bathroom and into the rest of the house, where she encounters her (un)dead grandfather, who tells her to get out of the house and run like the dickens.  (He didn’t actually say “dickens,” but he’s old, so I’m going to go for it.)

The results of an unchecked prostate.

So, stuff happens.  Turns out that it isn’t her grandfather at all, but a “soul eater” that has consumed her grandfather’s soul and can thus assume his form and has access to all of his memories.  She learns this from Donovan, a man who says he is the ghost who saved her from the rushing car nearly a decade before.

Donovan is there, at this point, as a rule-layer-outer (it’s a very technical term).  He lets us, and Celia, know the functioning boundaries of the undead world while pushing Celia to take some actions she isn’t comfortable in taking.  (No, not that.  Sigh.  She was just raped.  Really?  Don’t even pretend you didn’t go there, because I know you did.)

They run around, Celia gets other information from other (un)dead sources that aren’t necessarily trustworthy, and learns that she has approximately two hours of safety before the soul eaters can truly go after her.

As more information continues to present itself, things begin to unfold and Donovan begins to develop as a character with his own motivations in regards to Celia.

“My mom’s Nicole Richie?  NOOOOOOOOOO!“

More things happen.  The end.  No, I’m not going to spoil it for you.

I’m going to get my two complaints out of the way before I start talking about how much I enjoyed this movie.

The Complaints

1. Non-violent scenes involving two characters in close physical proximity apparently inspire the director to weave about the characters like a drunken sailor with the permanent spins.  It’s nausea-inducing, so much so that I had to pause the movie to let my stomach settle.

2.  With the amount of “rules” brought forth by Donovan, not all of them were clearly followed or explained.  I was a bit confused at one point and completely lost at another– and this isn’t common for me.  The rules were so clearly laid out that I can only assume that there was dialogue that was cut from the movie explaining certain features.

Now for The Love:

1. I loved the aesthetics of the undead world.  Celia was basically confined to the frat house where she died.  However, it wasn’t quite the same.  All the walls were now white, most of the furniture was gone, there were bits of trash and drywall about, giving it this feel of a rushed move and years of neglect.  Whoever was running the art department did an amazing job in bringing this together.

The awkward Madonna music video insert.

2. Mirrors function as windows into the living world.  It was visually wonderful to have Celia standing in this abandoned white-washed world looking into a colorful mirror packed with people.  Also, Celia could touch the mirror and “enter” the living world as, what we would consider, a more traditional ghost (albeit invisible) with the ability to influence inanimate objects.

3.  The sound effects were lovely.  The house had the constant distant chatter of the frat party, giving it that eerie feel that you get in other horror movies except in reverse, as she was dead and hearing the living, while the characters are usually the living hearing the dead.

Jesus Christ, it’s a lion!  Get in the car!

4.  This was a puzzle movie, which I love.  They feed bits of information to you as Celia goes along, slowly figuring it out as she does.  At some points, yes, you know that certain characters are probably going to go a certain way, but you aren’t sure of the how or the whys, just the end result.

5.  The acting was great.  This movie wasn’t driven by thrills or sex, it was character-driven and, without the talents of the actors, it would have been a tremendous flop.  Keena knows what she’s doing and has the most perfect eyes for a terrified horror movie lead.

It’s like they aren’t even attached to the upper lids.

6.  It didn’t rely on the scare tactics to keep tension, like so many horror movies do.  They maintained the constant pressure of the deadline (har de har har) so well that the monsters were more like a push for her to make a decision while providing a source of needed information than anything else.

Yes, the plot was a rehash of the generic “trials to save one’s soul,” but it was done in such a way that I was greatly annoyed at my need to take screen-shots and to write notes.  I did not want to stop watching at any point, nor at any point did I get that sudden realization that I was watching a movie– you know, that feeling you get when something is poorly paced and you drop interest without realizing it.

This was a tumble down the rabbit hole sort of movie, an undead Alice with no hope of escaping Wonderland.  I highly recommend it if you want something a bit different from your run of the mill monster-chaser.  It is, as always, available on Netflix on Demand.  

See you kids next week; same bat time, same bat channel.

We’re taking a quick deviation from the usual “This Week in Netflix” to review a DVD anthology.  You’re going to take it and like it, or I will hunt you down and spoonfeed you babyfood until you puke.

Now, the anthology in question is George A. Romero’s “Deadtime Stories: Volume 2“, which was released yesterday.  Yes, I know, I’m late. Blame the US Postal Service, as I certainly will continue to do so.

This is a collection of three 30 minute long(+/-) shorts distributed by Millenium Entertainment and retails for around $25.  (If you aren’t in the know, “+/-” means “plus or minus” and can be translated to “give or take.”)  

Being an anthology which, really, I feel should be called a triology in this case, I’m going to review the shorts individually.  No, I’m not asking permission, I’m simply warning you in advance so you don’t go into spastic fits at any structural surprises you may encounter.

DEADTIME STORY#1: THE GORGE

Three friends go caving (AKA: spelunking).  Two, Donna and Gary, are engaged.

Now, if that knowledge wasn’t enough to make you think that these two are going to be brutally separated like a fox from its trapped leg, the very first line in the movie is Gary saying, “I love you, you know.”

Fucking.  Doomed.  

They go deeper into the cave (like you do, you know, when you’re caving) and there’s a cave-in.  Donna and platonic-friend Craig (AKA: the creepy ginger kid) escape mostly unscathed, but Gary isn’t so lucky– his foot gets a bit pulverized.

Now, this could be redeemable, but then he starts telling Donna about how they’re going to get married and you’re left wondering why he doesn’t just eat the business end of a gun and save himself the pain of being eaten alive.  Because you know that’s what’s going to happen.  If it’s not his two buddies, it’s going to be aliens, giant rats, or a pack of wandering cave-hobos.

Aliens and giant rats stretch the special effects budget a little too far, so it’s left to Donna and Ginger to eat him once they are driven mad with hunger on Day 27 of being trapped in the cave.

They eventually get rescued and things get all freaking adorable as Donna goes into a psychotic rampage.

My problems with this short are twofold: first, the background music was set so much higher than the dialogue that I had to turn on subtitles to know what was going on with the characters.  That should never happen.  Second, it was shot like daytime television.  It took the edge off of the entire short, meaning that even if I had been able to hear (and care about) the characters, I couldn’t take it seriously because I was waiting for John’s long-lost twin brother to come forward and dig up Susie from the grave so they could betray Billy and Gloria.

Highlight: Ginger rips the head off of a bat all Ozzy-style.  Rrarr!

Riding the crazy train.

DEADTIME STORY #2: ON SABBATH HILL

Dr. Weaver is a humanities professor at some prestigious-looking college.  He has a beautiful wife, two little girls, and a devotion to rountine and order that makes him look more than a little OCD.  He’s also a bit of a dick, kicking out kids if they miss class, insisting that there be no absences.

Minerva Mink, how I’ve missed you.

He’s also sleeping with one of his students, a gorgeous little blonde named Allison (Allison’s a great name, by the way, and you know that if someone’s named Allison, you should read all their articles because they’re inherently awesome).  She confesses to him that she’s pregnant and Weaver isn’t pleased because his routine might be violated.  She asks him what he wants her to do. He tells her that she just shouldn’t miss his class.

So she shows up the next day, tells him she’ll never miss, and scatters her brains across her fellow students (talk about awkward).

Her ghost starts haunting him– showing up to class, bleeding all over the place and giving birth to their undead baby.  Moaning his name in the hallways.  Rearranging his pens.  Okay, not that last one, but if she had, he would’ve gone totally nuts.

The ending was wonderful.  1970s horror movie inspired on all sides.  It was shot gorgeously, like a regular movie.  This was the obvious baby of the anthology.  The budget was higher, the locations were better, and there were actually extras.  Lots of extras.  The soundtrack was fannnntastic, strongly reminding me of “The Exorcist.”  If you love the old 70s horror flicks, this short is something you’ll want to see.

DEADTIME STORY #3: DUST

George is a security guard for a scientific testing facility.  Alex is a scientistic at said facility.  Audrey is George’s way-too-hot-for-him wife, who is dying of leukemia back at George’s house.  That’s the entire cast for this movie, by the way.  There’s one extra in the form of another security guard.

One night, Alex excitedly shows George some orange dust from Mars and tells him that he thinks it can cure leukemia– but George can’t have any, neener neener neener.  Well, not so much on the “neener”s, but that it isn’t open for public consumption, sorry about your dying wife, George.

George waits for Alex to go on break and steals some dust, then goes home and administers it to his wife.

Side-effect of Mars dust is, we discover, uncontrollable sex drive.  She rides him until he’s secretly applying ointment to his rubbed-raw junk.  Oh, and there’s tits in this.  For those of you who are anxiously wanting to know.

When she starts backsliding into leukemia, he confesses what he did and she tells him to get more.  So he goes back and gets some but Alex shows up and George hits him with… something.  Something so mighty that, even on a weak swing, Alex’s eyeball pops out and he dies.

Exhibit #1

Yeah, I didn’t get it either.

He drags Alex’s body home, gives the dust to his wife, gives the deep dicking to his wife, ointments his junk, and goes back to work.

When he comes home again, Audrey is cheating on him with Alex.  Things go downhill from there.

This short was shot akin to early “Tales from the Crypt” and was obviously pretty low budget, but if you like that feel, then you’d enjoy this one.  My major complaint, other than thinking this was written to be a morality play (Yes, I caught your apple symbolism– yick), is the camera work.  When the camera moves, you’re incredibly aware of it.  It jolts you straight out of the short and into “WTF is the camera guy doing?” mode.  Repeatedly.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this DVD gave me mixed feelings.  I certainly wouldn’t watch “The Gorge” or “Dust” again, but I would definitely watch “On Sabbath Hill” and snag some of my horror movie friends to join in.  

When you check the credits, you’ll see that all three shorts have total inbreeding of writers, producers, directors, etc.  There’s even some family members in there as extras, so you know that this was something that people did as a group, put a lot of work into, and had fun with.  As someone who hangs out on the occasional low-budget set, I can appreciate this sort of creative environment a lot, and would love to support a third Deadtime Stories.

I wonder if he does mall appearances on Halloween.

Also, George A. Romero does the closing bits to each short, Crypt Keeper style.  All I can think of when I watch him is: Why the hell isn’t he my grandfather, and how much would I have to pay for him to let me curl up in his lap and read me horror stories? 

Last week, I ended my review of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl with a prayer that the next week’s movie would be better… you know, without girls screwing arms to their heads.  Maybe one that had a male lead that looked less like the Asian version of Tommy Wiseau.

It didn’t work.

Sure, there were no women with eyeballs for nipples, no blood drops bringing repressed nurses to orgasm, and the opening credits weren’t set to a “vampire girl” drilling into a girl’s vaginal orifice with a giant sword.  But I’m not sure that I feel particularly blessed by this.

“Vampegeddon” (Yes, that is the title.  No, I am not making this up.) is a horror(?) movie released in 2010 by the same writer who brought you titles such as “Return to Yucca Flats: Desert Man-Beast” and “The Rainbow Avenger” and was directed by the producer of “The Death Factory Bloodletting.”  (Names have been omitted because, really, it’s not like you’re going to know who they are anyway.)

Now, you may be asking yourself, “What prompted her to click on, and actually watch, a movie titled ‘Vampegeddon?'”

Honestly, I saw the title and the cover and assumed there’d be loads of tits and blood, and maybe even blood on tits.  I counted seven pairs of tits (Undead tits: 4; Real tits: 2; Really fake tits: 1) and a mild amount of blood. I still feel shortchanged by the whole viewing.  But let’s get started.

The opening scene, at a location I can’t even begin to rant about, depicts a man and woman walking dramatically through a “ghost town” (again, not going to rant) while a narrator informs us that, once Stoker’s Dracula was published in the late 1800s, vampires began to flee Europe as the public’s level of “vampire awareness” had risen too high.

One “Master Giovanni” decides to take his vampire posse to America and settle in Arizona.  In the desert.  Because they wanted to work on their tans, you know, like vampires do.  (Christ, these people can blow me.)  One “Mr. Longshank” decides to pursue “Giovanni” to the “desert” and “fight.”

Vampires… in… spaaaaaace!!

This fight is one of my favorite scenes in the movie because they go into (what attempts to look like) outer space. 

They battle, they both die.  There’s a tragic greenscreening incident.

Flashforward to present day (if anything in Arizona can be refered to as “present day”), we encounter Mel and Mona, two goth girls that have wardrobed in everything Hot Topic has ever made, and we listen to them complain about the “normal” residents of Arizona and how “they don’t understand us.”

Then we’re introduced to the other characters (one who is picked up from a “Chicken Shack,” whose motto I can only assume is “All the cock you can eat”) and we follow them around their Arizona hellhole as they get all gothed out and lament their gothy lot in life.

This sounds like a normal day with goth kids, I know (trust me, I KNOW), but Mel (described as a gorgeous, goth, lesbian, college student in the movie summary– ALL BASES = COVERED), has decided to turn to the dark arts to escape Arizona.  Her escape plan, well, it involves her growing a pair.  Of fangs.

FUUUUUUUUUUU!

Which means that she whines and bitches at the other characters until they agree to put on $5 capes from Party City and sit out in the desert and chant things that begin with such phrases as: “Let the coming of the night provide a cover for the Nosferatu, we invoke your power in blood and desire,” and the much-loved, “The time of the pagans is at hand, persecution has necessitated the need for this tome, this canticle, this ship breaching the ether, the pale light of the penumbra glows feebly and we are weak.”    

And then they drink each other’s blood.

The flying stake of justice.

Now, this movie could have gone on forever, cycling as Mel and Mona put on more and more weight and start working at the local hair salon, bemoaning their sad, isolated existence, but Mel happens to find a book at a garage sale that contains a spell for summoning vampires.

It’s actually a little more complicated than that.

See, she was angsting away, walking down an alley, and a garage door swung open.  This man she has never met starts giving her shit about how she walked by his closed garage and didn’t come inside to look at his stuff, and he pressures her to come inside.  She says, “Oh, okay.”

“Oh, okay”??  How easy is it to get goth girls in your garage like this?  (If you have any experience in this matter or want to temporarily loan me your garage so I can, uh, experiment, send me an email at garage_rape@gmail.com.)

Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it well.

After she leaves, vampires spring up and the last time we see him he’s in orgasmic throes of passion, being sucked dry by four topless pale chicks.

…so that happened.

Now, before I launch into the lessons learned in this movie, I’d like to comment on how 75% of the dialogue is dubbed.  There are lips moving and nothing is coming out, then there are lips moving and not matching the words, then there are lips moving and the person is… whispering?  And the volume levels are all over the place like nobody’s business.  I was constantly having to adjust the sound on my computer.

The sound effects, when there are any, are also dismal.  The soundtrack is a mix between Drowning Pool and Disturbed, with a little bit of Linkin Park thrown in.  Meaning that none of it is actually good, but all of it is so appropriately stereotypical that it… works(?).

Technical, sound, acting, plot, writing, wardrobe, and make-up aspects aside, there are five very important lessons to be learned from this movie.

5 Very Important Lessons To Be Learned From This Movie

LESSON #1: The only way out of Arizona is to become a vampire.

Listen!  LISTEN!!

LESSON #2: Don’t blow your entire special effects budget on a glowing blue light.  This isn’t Ocarina of Time.

LESSON #3: Vampires can totally Falcon Punch.

LESSON #4: Vampires actually shit pentagrams.  And flames.  PENTAGRAMS AND FLAMES, PEOPLE!

LESSON #5: Bitches can’t be trusted.

Bitch, please!

While I believe these lessons are truly valuable, I’m not sure if actually watching the movie is worth the knowledge they impart.  Yes, there were several times where I was provoked into surprised laughter, but each of those times had to do with the movie reaching new levels of crapfestivity.  

As always, this movie is available on Netflix on Demand for your viewing pleasure(?).  My deeply personal recommendation: get your art film critic friends to watch this movie so you can watch their eyes bleed.  I already have my intended victim all lined up.

I’m staring at my laptop trying to find words to describe this… thing.  “Thing” is a good word for it, really.  Other attempts at description might include such phrases as “oh fuck, my eyes” or “psychically raped.”  But let’s get down to it, as I’m all about including others in my quest for mental violation.

Vampire Girl V.S. Frankenstein Girl is a Japanese gore flick released in 2009, based off of a manga by the same title written by Shungiku Uchida.  

This is now the point where things cease to make sense.  Please step off the ride if you are pregnant, wish to become pregnant, or engage in LARPing.

The movie opens with a western theme– heat waves rising off asphalt as a pair of high school students stagger through a nearly deserted city with tumble-weed music backing them.  They are stopped short in their travels by three identically dressed gothic lolita Frankenstein Girls.

It’s showdown time.

The boy tries to battle, but is swiftly flung out of the scene with an oddly placed refrigerator. The girl steps forward and bites the nose off of one of the Frankenstein Girls and UNRAVELS HER HEAD by using the nose trapped between her teeth like a loose thread of a sweater.  

After punting the now tissueless skull and killing a second Frankenstein Girl, the girl bites her wrists with *gasp* vampire teeth and forms dual swords out of the blood.  She cuts off the arms of the remaining Frankenstein Girl and then proceeds to DRILL INTO THE GIRL’S VAGINA WITH HER SWORD, spewing bits of girlmeat everywhere while the opening credits roll to a Japanese love song. 

Then we flash to the past, the set-up for this grisly scene.

It’s Valentine’s Day at Tokyo High School and the girls are all atwitter (yes, “atwitter.”  It’s what Japanese girls do in manga-inspired movies. They twitter.  Fuck off.).  We center in on Jyugon, an attractive(?) male high school student.  He has emo-like hair and a stalker in the form of one Ms. Keiko, a fellow classmate and daughter of the school’s vice principal.  Their teacher is raiding their personal belongings for Valentine’s Day candy, citing the strict school policy of no items allowed on campus that aren’t school-related.

Some girls just can’t handle that much penetration.

All the girls’ chocolates get taken and Keiko throws a fit, summoning her father to the classroom to handle the problem.  Unfortunately, her father is a nail-biting sissy and quails under the (incredibly over-acted) rage of their teacher.

After class, the recent transfer student, Monami (ah, it’s funny because it’s French!) pops up, having saved her chocolate from the inspection, and offers it to Jyugon, then runs off, doing that weird shufflerun.  You know what I’m talking about.

He eats it.  There’s blood in it.  Shocking.  Simply shocking.  Monami is titular the Vampire Girl and she’s giving the dubiously attractive male lead blood-infused chocolate.  Totally from left field.  Then he starts sparkling in the sunshine and moves to Washington to romance a piece of driftwood disguised as a high school girl.

That might have been a deviation from the actual plot.

Anyhow, I could go step by step through the movie, guiding you like a seeing-eye dog, but that would get tedious for the both of us.  Here are ten things you need to know about this film:

10 Things You Need To Know About This Film

1. Keiko’s father– totally an undercover mad scientist.  Goes by the name “Furano Kenji,” the self-subtitled “Mystical Majistrate of Calculaaaaaaation!!!!”  Dresses Kabuki-style.  Has his sidekick nurse kidnap students for him so he can kill them, cut them up, and then try to reanimate them.  

2. There’s a character named Kiriko.  She’s the president of the school’s Wrist Cutters Club and she has big aspirations.  She wants to compete in the upcoming “13th Nationwide High School Student Wrist Cut Rally” and claims “I’m gonna be the best wrist-cutter in the whole world!”  She leads her club in exercises to strengthen their wrists so they can cut longer and harder while chanting about cutting.  I think the whole thing is amazing.  You do too, I can tell.  We’ll bond over it later.

For yooooooooooou!

3. There’s another character named Afro-rika.  Now, I want to write poetry to this girl.  She’s the president of the Super Dark Girls Club (motto: “As black as they come!”) and is very strict about food consumption.  They can only chew black gum and they have to drink their coffee black.  Now, these aren’t actually African girls, but Ganguro girls.  Google Image it if you haven’t heard of it.  Really.  Right now.  Stop reading this and scar yourself for life.  Anyhow, Afro-rika dreams of being the “fastest supertan girl to run the one hundred meter dash.”

Likely the most amazing thing you will see all day.  Send me thank you notes.

4. The first time we witness mad scientist Kenji cut up a student and reassemble him, it turns into a four minute long music video of him thrashing on a spine-guitar while his nurse sidekick poses provocatively for the camera with a pair of eyeballs.  Kind of a cross between Cannibal: The Musical and “Addicted to Love.” 

The end product advises against Robert Palmer.

5. There’s a scene when Monami rips out the throat of some businessman in the park and dances in the rain of his gushing blood.  That man must’ve been hooked up to some sort of supply because he Rainbirded for two or three minutes.  In fact, every bleeding person in this movie had some sort of condition that caused a major excess of blood.

What big prosthetics you have, grandma.

6. A single drop of roaming vampire blood gives the sidekick nurse a (admittedly weak) orgasm while some male high school students watch.  

7. Monami has a hunchbacked man for her servant.  Only… he’s not actually a hunchback! (BIG REVEAL!!!!!!!!!)  He’s a stooped man who keeps a ribcage on his back that can pop someone’s head like a grape if he gets it in Proper Facehugger Position.  No, not that thing that your wife did the other night.  No.  Ew.

8. A man has a gunhat.  A hat… that is also a gun.  With what seems to be unlimited ammunition.

9. The nurse sidekick also gets turned into a Frankenstein Girl.  One of her “superpowers” is that, instead of nipples, she has fingers sticking out… holding eyeballs.  These launch like missiles.  LIKE MISSILES.

They were part of the nipple relocation program.

10. Once Keiko is transformed into Frankenstein Girl, she gains the ability to use an electric drill to separate her arm from her body and then reattach it to the top of her skull so she can spin it and fly around the city like a helicopter.  I’m going to repeat that:  she attaches her arm to her skull with an electric drill and spins it so she can fly through the city like a helicopter.

And, as a surprise(!), here’s an extra shocking tidbit:

11.  When the line is spoken: “Thus began the epic battle for love between Vampire Girl and Frankenstein Girl,” they’re battling over this guy:

Oh, hai doggie.

In sum, this movie hurts me and it’s not a good hurt.  I’d recommend this movie for PVO (Party Viewing Only).  This is not a date-night movie, this isn’t a “sit around with one of your friends and make fun of it movie,” this is a “you need as many people possible around to survive it” movie.  You don’t want to give it your full attention.  It will suck out your eyes in an attempt to get at the meaty parts of your brain.

However, I do suggest bombing all your friends with copies for Christmas.  It’s going for about $10 on Amazon.

If you don’t want to pony up the cash, it’s available on Netflix on Demand.  Go forth, my children, watch it as I have watched it, suffer as I have suffered, and pray as I will pray that next week’s movie won’t be as bad as this one.

“She stuck her lipstick into her boob and it fell out of her pussy, okay?”

Last night I sat down to watch “House of the Fallen” for This Geek in Netflix. As far as I can tell, the titular house’s only telling trait was a curse where everyone that occupied its space was forced to communicate solely by screaming and overacting every line.

After being deafened by what may be the most mind-numbing, convoluted movie I’ve watched in some time, I tried to redeem the evening by selecting another movie.  A better movie.  A movie that didn’t have its dialogue edited like a TV soap opera.

I found it.

“Night of the Demons” is a lovingly crafted remake of a 1980s horror movie with the same name.  Skipping over the totally unneeded theatrical release, “NotD” went *coughcoughcough*straight to DVD*coughcoughcough* last year.

I’ve been babbling about this movie to everyone since I watched it last night (which made today’s bridal shower a bit uncomfortable…), so just stay with me and ignore the “straight to DVD” thing I just mentioned, ‘kay?  Great.  Moving on.

Maddie has decided to go to a Halloween party with her two friends, Tits #1 and Tits #2.  (Their names have been changed to hide their identities and accurately describe their… buoyant personalities.)  They settle on a party hosted by Angela, a wild goth girl that might look familiar (Shannon Elizabeth of “American Pie” fame, anyone?), that is being held at a supposedly haunted New Orleans mansion.

I say “supposedly” but, really, it was haunted.  “Supposedly” makes it sound better or, at least, have its ghoul-factor status in doubt so you’re motivated to watch it.  Or something.  Whatever.  Shut up.

So Tits #1&2 get all skanked up and drive out to said party with less skankified Maddie, where they bump into Man With Questionable Sexual Orientation (henceforth known as MWQSO) and, his friend, Male Character Included Simply For Demon Fodder (AKA: Fodder).  (Their names were not changed to hide their identities, their names were simply forgotten repeatedly and really not worth keeping track of in the first place.  Again, shut up and let me work.)  Because we need our genders to be a bit more balanced, Maddie’s ex-boyfriend, Colin (played by Edward Furlong of John Conner fame), attends the party as well. 

Early into the alcohol-fueled night, the party gets shut down by some very unsympathetic cops and the above (sorta) named characters find themselves trapped on the grounds.  During some house exploring (AKA: searching for the drugs Colin hid by dropping them into a vent), Angela and Colin break into a hidden basement room and discover six skeletons.  Angela, being a freaky klepto intent on sexy goth badassery, decides to yank a gold tooth out of one of the skulls.

It bites her (OF COURSE IT BITES HER!) and transfers demon-plague (or whatever) into her, causing her to be possessed by some sex-starved, pale demon.  Not too much unlike her normal self, really, making it no wonder that no one notices the change. 

During an oh-so-risque game of spin-the-bottle, Demon-Angela makes out with MWQSO and infects him with the demon-plague.  He, in turn, infects Tits #1, while Angela infects Tits #2 during one of the best horror movie lesbian scenes I may have ever seen.

The remaining three characters, Maddie, Colin, and Fodder, run through the house trying to survive this demon outbreak, uncovering clues as to what really happened to cause the demon-infestation in the first place.

I suppose you can guess what happened to Fodder.

Yes, that’s right.  He hangs out in the attic eating M&Ms.  No?  Okay, you caught me.

While I was watching this absolutely wonderful movie that I may actually order on Amazon after I write this review, I made a list and some notes.

Notes:

BAD THINGS OUT OF MIRRORS: 1

TITS, BARE: 5 (Yay, strippers!  Work it, work it, work it!)

DRUG DEALERS RECEIVING BLOWJOBS: 1

LESBIAN SCENES: 3

HALLOWEEN SKANKS: (I had the infinity symbol drawn here but I’m not going to look up what font will give me the symbol because that takes way too much time so just picture it already, jeez. You people are so goddamned needy.)

ALLIGATOR-HEADED MEN: 1

GIANT DANCING PENIS: 1

BITING SKELETONS: 1

WINE BOTTLES BEING THE RECIPIENTS OF YEARS OF REPRESSED SEXUALITY: 1

SEX: 1

DEMON SEX: 1

DEMON ANAL SEX: 1

DEMON ANAL SEX W/ TENTACLES: 1 (This scene just kept getting more and more amazing.)

HOVERING LESBIANS RIPPING OFF TITS: 1

TITS #1 JAMMING LIPSTICK INTO NIPPLE, FISTING SELF, AND PULLING SAID LIPSTICK OUT OF BLOODY VAGINA: 1

(It was at this point, as I was rewatching this movie, that I shouted up the stairs to my sassy gay roommate, “HEY!  HEYYYY! KENNNNNN! PUT YOUR PANTS ON! I’M AT THE VAGINA FISTING LIPSTICK SCENE!!”  He was very excited to witness said scene and I was very excited to be loudly shouting the phrase “vagina fisting lipstick scene.”)

ODD CRAWLING THING: 1

TRAPDOORS POSSIBLY GOING TO HELL: 1

ATTACK BY PLANTLIFE: 1

TENTACLES THAT COME OUT OF NIPPLES: 2

DEMON THREESOMES WITH EROTIC HORN SUCKING: 1

MIGRATING FURNITURE: 1 (BUREAU)

SELF-OPENING DOORS: 1

BLEEDING WALLS: 4

MONSTERS PUNCHING THROUGH SAID BLEEDING WALLS: (I started making little slashes here to count, but then it got overwhelming because there was a lot of punching going on so it ended up looking like a little haystack at the bottom of my notepad.  Disclaimer: no farming happened in this movie.)

STOMACHES RIPPED OPEN: 1

BATHTUBS FULL OF BLOOD THAT YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN’T BE STICKING THINGS INTO, DUMBASS: 1

FLOORS THAT SHOULD BE STURDIER: 3

CLICHED ONE-LINERS AT FINALE: 1

The Verdict

As you can see, this movie had almost everything that is required of a demon-themed horror movie that doesn’t feature exorcisms or other religious rites.  Personally, I feel it went beyond the call of duty with the overage of tits and lesbian scenes, so that’s just extra points.

All of the above awesomeness aside (alliteration, anyone?), this movie really did it for me. It took all the standard little demon-horror tropes and used them, yeah, and the movie ends exactly as you would expect it to.  But the acting, especially for a straight-to-DVD flick, was solid, the budget was there (or at least used wisely), the art direction was freaking wonderful, and the soundtrack, with some Type-O Negative and Concrete Blonde tossed in, was great.  It was fun without being campy or condescending and several of the scenes took me by surprise (though I’ve ruined the surprises for you guys– sorry).

It is, of course, on Netflix On Demand.  Watch it, love it, tell me how right I am and how much your life has been improved by viewing this movie. Or tell me I’m nuts and that I need to stuff a tube of lipstick into my nipple. Either or.