by ·Comments Off on Dance of the Dead (2005, Tobe Hooper)

Pretty awful Masters of Horror episode, continuing Tobe’s long streak of pretty awful movies.

A perfectly good backstory about the deadly acid rainstorm that turned most of the world into zombies is wasted on a crappy movie about Jessica Lowndes meeting Jonathan Tucker from the Pulse and Texas Chainsaw remakes, and daring to venture away from her protective mother to attend a club run by Tobe’s old bud Robert Englund. This has got to be the most boring “extreme” nightclub in any horror movie.

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It’s all downhill from there, as Englund drinks the blood of the elderly to stay alive, and the entertainment of the club turns out to be watching zombies “dance” (the, um, dance of the dead) by shocking ’em with cattle prods. Jessica finds out one of the dancers is her druggie sister, who was sold to Englund by their mom… gets revenge by killing/selling the mom. Whatever.

The movie was bad enough before the SHOCK EDITING, which is unrelenting. Besides the usual quick-cut-crap, they keep blurring and sliding the picture with staticky sound effects to add “energy” to the movie. Ugh.

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Loud music by Billy Corgan, I might add. Credited cinematographer and editor have both done other (decent) MoH episodes, so I have to blame the flash editing entirely on you, Tobe.

MOH trademarks: just the naked women.

Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it. I wouldn’t have blamed her.

by ·Comments Off on Dreams in the Witch-House (2005, Stuart Gordon)

A novel plot (and supposedly based on a Lovecraft story, so no wonder). Ezra Godden (of Stuart Gordon’s Dagon) is a poor physics student who rents a room in a very crappy boarding house. After some fun about studying the angles of his walls, a hot nude witch appears with her rat-creature pet to take over his mind and make him do weird things like sleepwalk to the university library and kill his next door neighbor’s baby. After he’s arrested for the baby-killing, the cops find the remains of all the other babies that past residents of the room have killed, and the rat-creature sneaks into prison to bite our hero to death. Oh and the crazy old man downstairs kills himself.

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A lot better than the plot description sounds. Ezra is pretty convincing and the weirdness and atmosphere and pacing are all well held.

MOH trademarks: naked women, eye gouging (the witch’s eyes / ezra’s fingers), and our hero looks like Edward Norton most of the time (and Ben Affleck the other times).

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Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (2005, Don Coscarelli)

Fun, memorable Masters of Horror episode. Woman runs off the road, sees other car with trail of blood towards guard rail, follows trail and insane creature leaps out and chases her through the woods. Flashbacks to her survivalist husband and the lessons he taught her, she fights back for a while but is captured along with the woman from the other car. Creature takes them to house where Phantasm‘s own Angus Scrimm is locked up laughing and yelling. Woman takes control, escapes, kills the monster, kills Angus, and in flashback, kills survivalist husband whose body is still in her trunk, and drives away.

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Pretty good looking movie. I was sucked in. Standard super-baddie with a Hostel-referencing eye-drill. Some surprises (traps that don’t go according to plan) and a not-bad-at-all ending. More, more!! Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it.

Creepy Tall Man:
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MOH trademarks: eye gouging (see above).