Category: Movies
The Suckling: The Weirdest Revenge Film Ever!
Damn! I recently found a rare copy of The Suckling (AKA Sewage Baby) from 1990 on vhs and it easily goes down as one of the most controversial schlock horror films of all time. This little weirdo of a movie give us a truly unsettling plot of revenge you’re likely not going to find anywhere else. So what makes this movie any different than any other horror movie? Well the dicey plot is surely going to offend a large number of folks, especially in 2017.
It goes something like this, a young couple considering having an abortion, heads off to an inner city brothel to contemplate this tough decision. Because of course that’s a great place to ponder things like this! Of course things don’t go quite as planned as the loser boyfriend who’s eagerly pressuring his girlfriend to go through with it arranges for her to meet with the head Mistress “Big Mama” to run through the details of the procedure. Well Mama has other plans as she drugs the young woman and orders one of her “employees” to help her go through with it without the woman’s consent. Totally normal stuff there huh?! Well they then proceed to flush the fetus down the toilet and we follow it’s journey as it arrives in the sewer, leading us to a pretty memorable horror movie moment. Pretty goddamn weird huh? I’ve gotta say though, nothing gets too gruesome here thus far as the movie’s clearly spent ALL of it’s money on the monster and that’s a good thing. So no real worries about being grossed out by realism.
To make matter even worse, we then see the fetus is sitting in a pile of toxic waste that’s seeping into the ground from above and quickly begins to mutate into full grown pissed off monster who’s hell bent on revenge from the the people who’ve sent him to his doom. I mean talk about a political statement huh? This one’s definitely NOT for everyone and the filmmaker likely had some strong feelings in the topic? Or maybe they just simply thought it’d be a good setup for a creature feature? Looking at it as a revenge flick, it’s actually got a pretty inventive plot no matter what side of the argument you stand on.
Things get nasty pretty quickly inside the brothel and soon the monster is trapping the people inside with a nasty membrane that begins to grow around any exits the house has. Pretty much everyone in this movie is either a moron or a total asshole, so seeing them get picked off is never all heartbreaking. We got a ton of bad acting, combined with some attempts at decent action scenes & surprisingly solid monster effects that utilize some cool animatronics along with an impressive man in suit monster. That’s the interesting thing here, the creature actually is pretty cool and stands strong alongside some of the best b-movie monsters of the 80’s & early 90’s. I’ve gotta give them props for that.
Yep, the movie’s whole budget likely went into the monster effects & the funniest thing about it all is that on the back of the vhs they say this “THE SUCKLING has been compared to Alien for its claustrophobic intensity and Die Hard for its non-stop action.” Sounds kinda like the best movie ever huh? Well I’m not quite sure who decided to compare it to those because inventive as it all is it really never quite hits the mark of either of those films. Instead though what you get is an enjoyable offensive schlocky monster movie that’s exceeds just with the pure outrageousness of it storyline. This one is definitely not for everyone but if you’re a fan of odd-ball vintage cinema you’re likely to wanna track this little flick down and be fully ready to go full on mystery Science Theater 3000 on it!
Blade Runner: The Force Awakens…I Mean 2049!
Wow Blade Runner is officially back with this brand new trailer for the upcoming sequel! I’m really not too sure how I feel about a sequel to Blade Runner which is easily one of my favorite Science Fiction movies ever. It really doesn’t look like Ridley Scott has had much to do with this either which is a shame. Though I did enjoy The Arrival & Prisoners which were both directed by Denis Villeneuve who’s helming this sequel.
It also though could be the first warning sign that this sequel might not be a real memorable chapter of the Blade Runner mythos. Another thing is the film’s synopsis which sounds like well….The Force Awakens:
“Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.”
It’s become typical that Hollywood is a bit stuck on trying to come up with original ideas, at least this synopsis isn’t the most inspiring. It’s almost like these sequels are just secretly remakes with not a lot in the way of really expanding the stories in new directions. However, this is just a trailer and let’s not forget, we’ve still got Jared Leto to add to the equation. Let me guess though he’s the “Roy Batty” replicant they’ve got to hunt down? I hope he leaves at least his horrible Joker tats and grill in the Suicide Squad!
Seriously though, I don’t wanna hate on this movie too much because it might end up being the next Mad Max: Fury Road which was hands down a modern masterpiece in my opinion. The teaser trailer also looks promising just in the fact that they’re clearly not hiding Harrison Ford in the way they hid Mark Hamill in The Force Awakens. Maybe this will end up the perfect companion to the original movie?
Movie Review: ‘Beyond The Gates’ and its Sinister VHS Board Game…
‘Beyond The Gates‘ is the first feature film from Jackson Stewart, an indie horror movie I’ve been super excited about for a long time. Last night I dropped the seven bones on Google Play to check it out. What originally really excited me about this movie was it’s central focus on a sinister VHS board game from the 1980’s called…you guessed it “Beyond The Gates”. These creepy VHS games were pretty popular back when I was a kid, so of course I automatically dug the nostalgia factor that this one had to offer from the start. I also was quite happy to see Graham Skipper (The Mind’s Eye, Almost Human) as one of the leads and also horror icon Barbara Crampton (From Beyond, Re-animator, We Are Still Here) as the creepy host of the VHS board game.
This one has a lot going for it from the get go and it’s quite an intriguing little mystery. Long story short, two brothers come to find that their alcoholic father has gone missing leaving behind his business, an old video store that he started back in 1992. Ah yes, the local video store, what great memories I have of those. Well as the brothers meet up to box up video tapes, close shop and reminisce about their childhood they discover the old VHS board game in the office.
Things get stranger when they realize the VHS tape from the game was the last thing their father had watched before he disappeared. This begins a series of bizarre events as the brothers and one of their girlfriends decide to give the game a try. I don’t want to give away any clues of the story, it’s a pretty engaging movie and a great dramatic story of two brothers finding peace with each other and their past. There’s a lot in this movie that I can relate to personally and that honestly is the strongest aspect of ‘Beyond The Gates’. It’s got a lot of heart.
I did like this movie, however it could have been one of the best horror movies of 2016 if perhaps it had a bit more of an imagination with the horror side of things and hey maybe a bigger budget? The horror aspect of this one kinda let me down. There were a couple of cool scenes that seemed like they were warming us up for a knock out finale. Sadly that knock out never really arrived, in fact the finale seemed like something that we might have expected to see around the half way mark. The movie had a 3 million dollar budget and personally I think they could have stretched it a bit and really given us a more surreal adventurous final act. I’ve seen movies with smaller budgets go a lot further than this. To me it seemed like a good movie that maybe ran out of money near the end of filming. The potential for some truly crazy stylized 80’s horror was definitely there but it lacked the imagination to give fright fans a truly memorable experience.
Overall I liked this movie more as drama and if I’d have known ahead of time that that’s more of what this was I’d be a little less critical of the horror aspect of things. That being said I still give it a thumbs up for a sweet yet creepy story that knows how to pull at your heartstrings. Check it out!
Ho-Ho-Holiday Horror Movies You May Have Missed!
It’s December 2016 is a time for some serious holiday celebration! Sure I’ll be watching a ton of the usual classics like Santa Claus: The Movie, Elf, Rudolph, Gremlins etc etc. However I’m going to be busting out the Christmas horror movies again this of course and hopefully here I’ll be able to give you a few ideas of some movies to check out if you’re feeling like mixing it up a bit this year. We all know about the classics like Black Christmas, Silent Night Deadly Night, last years instant classic Krampus. Well here’s a few you may have never heard of but you should definitely seek out this season!
3615 code Pere Noel / AKA ‘Deadly Games’ (1989)
A true lost & forgotten gem of a movie. If you search the net for Christmas Horror movies, you for some crazy reason won’t find this one on any of the lists. However this french film, which I first saw last year, is easily one of the best Christmas horror movies of all time. It’s a rare one and finding a version of it with subtitles can be pretty difficult, I got a copy off of Ioffer.com.
Searching this one out is totally worth it though as it plays out like the ultimate 80’s Amblin style “Home Alone” hybrid of a film. It screams of the 1980’s and features a super cool kid obsessed with action movies who lives in a gigantic castle style mansion. During a snow storm on Christmas eve, he finds himself home alone with his grandfather where the house becomes under siege by a crazed maniac who is convinced he’s Santa Claus & is hell bent on punishing all those who’ve been naughty. This one deserves a proper release and then it rightly deserves to be a new addition on ALL Christmas horror lists.
The Christmas Tale (2005) Continue reading
Movie Review: ‘Night of Something Strange’ – Horror Potty Humor at it’s Worst!
I’ve been looking forward to checking out the new horror comedy “Night of Something Strange” for quite some time and finally this week I decided to check it out via rental on Google Play. From what I’d heard about it and seen in the trailer, it looked liked a super fun homage to splatter flicks of the 1980’s with an unhealthy dose of comedy splashed in for a good time. I’m all about a good indie horror comedy, in fact the horror comedy is easily one of my favorite genres. However ‘Night of Something Strange’ just really didn’t do it for me. I give them a serious ‘A’ for effort but when you’re making a movie like this it’s extremely important to nail down the comedy aspect of the horror first. That can be a hard task & precisely where this movie really falls flat, at least for me.
This one is all about grossing you out in every middle school way you can imagine. That’s perhaps who this movie’s comedy might truly appeal to. For me though gross out poop, pee and sex humor gets old real quick. NOSS is jam packed with potty humor and as the movie plays on it continuously tries to top last the poop, pee-pee, gross out sex scenario with something more “outrageous”. It simply tries way too hard to get a reaction, kinda like if Seth Rogan wrote the script for this when he was thirteen years old but with “gross out” dick jokes and zombie rape scenarios sprinkled throughout. Yeah the movie has a lot of undead raping & it’s not really the kind of stuff that’s offensive, since clearly it’s incredibly unrealistic looking and it’s actors aren’t exactly out to win an academy award with their performances. So none of it will stick with you for days or scar you as the scenes aren’t even the least bit convincing. That’s a good thing, because I’m not a fan of the rape-y horror movie. It’s all just too damn stupid, and though I do like me some ridiculousness this one tries way too hard.
This flick is essentially an 80’s horny teen throwback movie with even more horny undead creatures roaming around the grounds of a spooky motel. There’s a few scenes that are actually pretty well done and the practical effects here are at times actually pretty impressive. It also looks pretty nice too, it just suffers from a ton of stale comedy. I don’t know, maybe when I was twelve years old this would have been funny? However it’s just trying way too hard to gross us out with farts, poop, dirty tampons, boners & nasty sex humor around each & every corner. It’s also maybe about 20 minites too long. I haven’t got much else to say about this one, (I really like the poster art at least) but if you dig this kind of mega excessive potty humor then hey, this movie delivers the goods and then some!!
Revisiting: Demon Knight, Dead Calm, Chatting With Billy Zane & V-Force!
I recently decided to watch some classic Billy Zane movies, why you ask? Well a little while ago he filmed a scene for a new movie in my store Hollywood Babylon in Portland, Oregon. Yeah, I was pretty damn excited to arrive at the shop to find out that he was there fully ready to get into character. I actually really like a handful of his movies a lot, but I’d admit it’d been too long since I watched any classic Zane….
First on my list was ‘The Phantom’, which came out twenty years ago. I’ve always thought this was a great comic book movie and dusting off my dvd reinforced just that. Yeah the movie is admittedly totally cheezy but it’s like a superhero version of Indiana Jones: pure pulp, cool sets, great practical effects and a ton of classic action. It apparently didn’t do well at the box office so we never got a sequel, but here Zane shines as a good guy for once. Normally he plays a villain, and always a damn good one so it’s nice here to see him playing the classic comic book icon The Phantom in all of his glory. The movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it just delivers a perfect saturday matinee popcorn movie. Give it a watch again, it’s aged quite well. Continue reading
Child’s Play 7: Chucky Goes Back To His Roots?!
There’s been some rumbling lately from director Don Mancini about the next installment of the Child’s Play/Chucky horror franchise and it’s sounding like it might go old school and get personal. From some photos shared recently it’s looking like the Child’s Play 7 is touting the tagline ‘Chucky is finally coming home’ in a recent tweet. What many are speculating is that Chucky will be squaring off against his old nemesis, an all grown up Andy Barclay. In the recent tweet he tagged Fiona Dourif, Brad Dourif, Summer H. Howell & Alex Vincent with a picture of Mancini with an old house in the background along with the tagline.
In the post credits scene of Curse of Chucky we saw Andy Barclay get a mysterious package sent to his house, of course inside was good ol’ Chuck!! What we then saw was Andy ready with a shotgun firing a shot at Chucky when the screen suddenly goes black. So what the hell happened? I’m guessing this next movie will give us the gory details. What I’m hoping for is that the two to finally settle the score on screen in an epic battle that ties all of the movies together. Child’s Play full circle.
There’s even a rumor we might see Chucky’s son Glenn/Glenda back in action. But given the tone of the last movie perhaps he’ll either end up being an ally of Barclay or a more well rounded, psychotic menace. We’ll see, but count me in as the last movie was hands down one of the best of the series. I loved the horror aspect being front and center along with a much more seriously scary tone.
Could part seven be the series finale? If so I hope it delivers the goods because Andy & Chucky need some resolution in their lives!
Batman vs Trump!!!
Wow, whatta week it’s been here in the good ol’ US of A. We’ve had a truly bizarre moment in our country’s history where it feels like we’ve seen the rise of a real life super villain whose taken office as our leader. Yes Trump is somehow our President despite his ego maniacal, sexually repulsive and downright villainous demeanor.
He has risen to power seemingly as a real life Lex Luthor type of character. Which leads me to this cool little video- Batman V Trump! What if Batman was there to try and take down Trump? Wouldn’t that be awesome, well check out this trailer as it shows Trump in a classic showdown with Bruce Wayne!
Then there’s this for a good laugh…
A Lonely Nerd vs. Psychotic Artsy Hipsters on Halloween in ‘MURDER PARTY’!
Here’s a good recommendation for a cool Halloween movie that a lot of people haven’t ever heard of or just haven’t given a fair shot. ‘Murder Party’ is a great dark horror comedy from 2007 that’s perfect viewing for Halloween night! If you’ve seen the director, Jeremy Saulnier’s more recent movies like Blue Ruin & Green Room then you know this one is likely to be an interesting event. It also features Macon Blair who appeared in those movies as well.
Murder Party follows a lonely socially awkward guy who receives an odd invitation to a halloween party in Brooklyn, New York. Deciding he’s got nothing else to do he constructs a cool costume from some cardboard boxes and heads off into the night ready to mingle. Well to his surprise he quickly realizes this costume party is clearly not going to be a good time as he’s taken captive by some crazy art students who intend to make him into a murderous piece of art.
What happens next is a zany fight for survival – nerd vs. artsy hipsters in a ridiculous bloody battle! Things get pretty crazy and even with a micro-budget there’s some pretty impressive practical effects to behold and plenty of laughs. This one has largely gone under the radar, but it quickly grew a bit of a cult following over the years track this one down, it’s a great option to the usual classics like Trick R’ Treat & Halloween!
Best of VHS Box Art: Prophecy!!
Have I ever mentioned how much I love monster movies? Well being a huge fan of the creature feature I thought I’d showcase one of my personal favorites. Prophecy from 1979 is a damn good movie that still holds up quite well even in 2016. It’s a monster movie with a message, don’t pollute the rivers cuz if you do you just might end up with a wildly mutated pissed off monster grizzly bear in your forests! Yeah John Frankenheimer does a wonderful job bringing this twister creature feature to life and the box/ poster art is one of my favorites check it:
It really doesn’t get too much better than this as far as awesome cover art goes and also having a movie that’s actually as cool as it’s poster art in this era can at time be a difficult task. As a kid this cover always stuck with me from way back in the video store days. If you haven’t seen this one then make sure this Halloween you track it down, you won’t be disappointed!
Universal Dork 