Ugh.
I thought I remembered this was a good movie. Bad 80’s music and bad 80’s hair and clothes and effects and acting and story and whatever. Even the bookend old-man-eating-razorblades story sucked.
Things I forgot: Angela’s not so bad until infected by demons, the black guy doesn’t die first (or even at all), the dialogue is terrible. There’s naked girls, though. The director later made Witchboard II and Pinocchio’s Revenge.
Katy wouldn’t have liked it.
I recognized Michael Rooker as monstrously morphing Grant Grant (the TV producer with the dirty handshake in Mallrats) but it took me forever to notice that good-cop lead actor Nathan Fillion was the guy from Serenity. Guess it might be time to watch those Firefly DVDs.
Rooker gets an alien shot to the chest, impregnates a local girl with thousands of mind-controlling slugs, and morphs quickly into a room-sized ugly mess of alien. It’s up to Fillion, Rooker’s wife and a girl they pick up along the way to save the day. It’s a love story! Hilarious and wonderful throughout, gotta see again.
Katy caught brief glimpses and seemed disturbed.
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2025: This holds up. I still haven’t watched those Firefly DVDs. Gunn followed up with Super, then has made exclusively superhero stuff. You don’t see Elizabeth Banks enough. “His arm was all bendy, mayor.” Forgot that the Zs share a consciousness and projectile-spit acid. Wondering if police receptionist Shelby (Pam from The Office US) is referencing Lucy from Twin Peaks, or if the whole concept is referencing Night of the Creeps. Our birds got very upset when Michael Rooker blew up.
Cameraman Masuoka (played by Shinya Tsukamoto, director of Tokyo Fist, Tetsuo & Haze!) is obsessed with fear. He catches a guy looking terrified in the subway stabbing himself in the eye, and Masuoka is off on a goofy adventure to find out what scared the old man to death. On his way home, he’s often annoyed by a kooky neighbor claiming to be his wife, ranting about how their daughter is missing. Masuoka can’t be bothered with this – he needs to explore the magical subterranean wonderland beneath the city, where he evades monsters long enough to find and rescue a young naked woman, who he brings home. The woman doesn’t respond to much, acts like an animal, etc. Still being harassed by the kooky neighbor, Masuoka finds a way to kill her without being detected. He probably has sex with the young woman too – if he does explicitly, I’ve blocked it out already. Either way, she of course turns out to be his daughter, and of course he murdered his wife and there you go.
The movie is shaky and ugly and lo-fi and annoying all of the time, often being filtered through our protagonist’s unsteady videocams. Except when the guy goes underground and finds his daughter – really nice looking few minutes in there. Not so bad overall I guess. From the director of all seven Ju-On The Grudge movies.
Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it one bit!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Katy didn’t watch this one. Katy wouldn’t have liked it.
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.
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:
MOH trademarks: eye gouging (see above).
Sissy Spacek is tormented daily (most memorably in a shower-room scene full of naked high-school girls), then just when she’s made to feel special (via rigged prom queen vote), down comes the pig’s blood and out pours the psychic rage (school fire), which later also takes out her tormentors (car crash) and her mother and herself (collapsing their house). A classic for obvious reasons. Spacek was memorably nude in Prime Cut also, and probably in Badlands but I don’t remember. She was 26 in this so it’s okay to get naked.
Initial bad signs:
Characters live in a universe where the hellraiser movies exist, wear hellraiser t-shirts.
The story centers around an online game
Lance Henriksen is the special guest star
Amazingly it isn’t the not-even-clever inside references, the netspeak or the video game nonsense that sinks this movie right into the crapper… it’s the stupid story and corny acting. Never since Blair Witch II has there been so much teen-actor mugging in a horror movie! The story falls into the twilight-zone groove of Inferno, but not as good… Lance very obviously drugs their drinks and they’re asleep the whole movie. Two kids get rescued by the cops, and Lance gets chopped to bits by a cenobite for mis-using Pinhead’s props for a lame it-was-all-a-dream ending. Possible Aliens reference:
So… super underground investigative journalist comes across videotape of death cult. Girl shoots herself in head, comes back to life. Journalist follows story to Bucharest where, coincidentally I’m sure, it’s much cheaper to film a horror movie than it is in the States. Finds a nearly-dead girl with a hellraiser box in her hand
Gets the box. Solves it in about seven seconds.
But that was maybe a dream. Lotta people are in some kinda state of dead or living and maybe dreaming I’m not sure. Also the reporter has occasional flashbacks to her abusive father. Eventually, Pinhead ain’t putting up with this bullshit anymore, shows up, kills everyone.
And the twist: the reporter’s boss (also her ex boyfriend or husband) hires… yes, ANOTHER REPORTER! I don’t get how that’s a twist, but the movie seems to think so.
Whole movie has stupid jerky editing including, get this, the bootleg videotape of the death cult! It’s all grainy and low-light but shot with a buncha cameras and edited by the same spaz who did the rest of the movie. Unbelievable, that. Pinhead has little to do except summon a few chains and say some catchphrases. A confused buncha nonsense overall, not even a tight little small-thinking twilight-zone story like the last few. Makes me think Inferno and Hellseeker were actually kinda good.