Shocktober Revisited: Galaxy of Terror

 In my continued efforts to turn left when you're expecting me to go right, I have opted to review Galaxy of Terror (aka Planet of Horrors and Mindwarp: An Infinity of Terror) instead of Ben-Hur. It is true that I watched them back-to-back, and just like you got a write up for Lockout instead of The Cabin in the Woods, we're going to focus on the much schlockier part of a double feature again. The good news is that you don't have to be drunk to enjoy Galaxy of Terror, a Roger Corman produced flick that's just barely different enough from Alien to not be a ripoff.

 The funny thing is that the presence of James Cameron as production designer and second unit director actually lends credibility to the case that Aliens is a ripoff of Galaxy of Terror. It's not a case many people are making, but I'll explain what I mean in a bit. Corman commissioned Mark Siegler and Bruce D. Clark to create a movie about a mysterious planet where something sinister (alien perhaps?) has wiped out an expeditionary crew and is now preying on the rescue team. It's not exactly Alien, but if you were to say "give me a movie that's like Alien but isn't Alien," you might end up with Galaxy of Terror.

 When he loses contact with the last ship sent to the planet Morganthus, the Planet Master (SPOILER HIDDEN) informs Commander Ilvar (Bernard Behrens) that the Quest will be dispatched to discover if there are any survivors. The Planet Master assembles a hand-picked team to land or Morganthus: Captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie), the lone survivor of an older disaster, Baelon (Zalman King), her first officer, Cabren (Edward Albert), Alluma (Erin Moran), a pyschic, Dameia (Taaffe  O'Connell) and Ranger (Robert Englund), engineers, scientists, and medics for the team. Also along for the ride are Quuhod (Sid Haig), a weapons expert who specializes in crystal throwing stars, Cos (Jack Blessing), a rookie, and Kore (Ray Walston), the cook. They find what remains of the crew on Morganthus, as well as a mysterious pyramid that hides their deepest fears inside...

 So the first thing I think I should mention is the cast. If you were reading the synopsis and saying, "Wow! He's in this? She's in this? Holy cats, they're all in one movie?" the answer is yes. It's a who's who of "Hey, I know that actor / actress," including people who would become Freddy Kreuger, Captain Spaulding, Sarah Palmer, and the creator of The Red Shoe Diaries. Or, maybe they'd already been Joanie Cunningham, My Favorite Martian, one of Blansky's Beauties, or uh, Eddie "Green Acres" Albert's son. It's an eclectic cast for a film that's best remembered for a woman having sex with a giant meal-worm.

 Actually, for a film made with very little money (somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million dollars), it has a ton of production value, a pretty good story, some interesting (and gruesome) death scenes, and despite the Giger-esque pyramid design, some neat designs. While Cameron was heavily involved in the look of Galaxy of Terror, I don't want to overshadow other Corman team members: Robert and Dennis Skotak, Alec Gillis, Al Apone, R. Christopher Biggs, Brian Chin, Ron Lizorty, Randall Frakes, Tom Campbell, and Rick Moore. It's interesting that some of the people involved in Galaxy of Terror would go on to work on effects for Aliens, because while Morganthus is supposed to be reminiscent of Ridley Scott's "alien" landscape, it looks much more like Cameron's vision of LV-426 from the 1986 sequel.

 Watching Galaxy of Terror, all of the exterior scenes, either mixed with models, rear projection, or both, is eerily reminiscent of the film Cameron would make five years later. While the interior of the Quest looks like a budget-modified version of the Nostromo and the pyramid has designs "inspired" by H.R. Giger (and, at times, Forbidden Planet and The Black Hole), the exteriors of Morganthus are going to seem more like a dry run for the "game over" scene in Aliens. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an amusing parallel considering that Galaxy of Terror was conceived as a way to cash in on the success of Ridley Scott's Alien.

 Now, it is fair to mention that this is a movie where a giant maggot strips down Taaffe O'Connell, lubes her up, and then has sex with her (and they both seem to be enjoying it). It's a movie undercut by comical sound effects (especially during Bernard Behrens' death scene) and even though the story is more interesting that just being stalked by an alien, the ending is abrupt and anticlimactic. There's a character that, despite clearly still being alive, just disappears before the final confrontation, never to be heard from again. This is, make no mistake, still an exploitation picture, so most of the more intriguing concepts from Siegler and Clark tend to get swept aside for gore and (sporadic) nudity. Corman famously shot most of the "rape" scene because Clark refused to, and both director and writer objected to its presence in the film. In the end, it's such a bizarre scene that I had a hard time being disturbed by it, something I was expecting coming into the picture.

 Galaxy of Terror is a gory, schlocky, occasionally impressive slice of exploitation best enjoyed late at night, after a few beers (well, maybe you do need to be a little drunk) in the company of friends who don't mind their science fiction / horror on the cheap side. It's the kind of movie I'd imagine people who would come to Cap'n Howdy's Blogorium would watch, because why not? Between this and Lockout, it's not even a discussion. Bring on the space monsters!

Shocktober Revisited: The V/H/S Series

 editor's note: the following reviews originally appeared during coverage for Horror Fests VII and VIII, along with the 2014 Year End Recap.

 We decided to kick off Horror Fest with something I've been wanting to see for a while now, the "found footage" anthology film V/H/S. Normally the Cap'n isn't a fan of the "found footage" genre - the only two I've really enjoyed were The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield - but I thought the premise sounded interesting and one of the directors involved was Ti West. As you know, as a fan of The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, I'm on board with anything West has a hand in directing. Also, the Cap'n is a sucker for anthologies.

 The film is broken up into five segments, with a wrap around story that actually advances as the film goes on (which isn't often the case in anthology films):

 "Tape 56" - from director Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die), a group of hooligans who like to videotape themselves exposing women and vandalizing property are hired to break into an old man's house and steal a videocassette. The only problem is that once they get there, the old man is dead and they don't know which tape to steal, so they watch the following stories:

 "Amateur Night" - from director Dave Bruckner (The Signal), three friends head out for a night of drunken sex with camera glasses in tow, but when they bring the wrong girl back to their motel room, the party takes a dark and twisted direction.

 "Second Honeymoon" - from Ti West (The Roost), a couple is sightseeing in Colorado and Arizona when a strange woman begins following them around, and eventually visiting them in their motel room, while they sleep...

 "Tuesday the 17th" - from Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), a young woman brings her friends up to a lake she visited last year, but her plans may not be as innocent as partying and smoking pot...

 "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily when She was Younger" - from Joe Swanberg (LOL), Emily and her husband are separated while he's in medical school, but she's having trouble dealing with noises in her apartment and a strange bump on her arm...

 "10/31/98" - from Radio Silence (Mountain Devil Prank Fails Horribly), a guy dressed as a nannycam bear and his friends arrive at the wrong house for a Halloween party, and instead find something more disturbing in the attic. When they intervene, they realize what they stopped wasn't the worst thing that could happen on Halloween...

 I'd heard positive and negative reactions to V/H/S, and I guess I can understand both. People prone to motion sickness from "found footage" movies may as well steer clear, as you'll be ill from the opening shots and it's not going to get any better. The ways that the stories use videotaped footage are, for the most part, clever, although I'd love to hear anybody's explanation of who would videotape a Skype conversation using a camcorder so that the wraparound story characters could watch it. But, if you're willing to overlook certain logical inconsistencies, I guess that for the most part they work.

 The "video glasses" in "Amateur Night" are probably the most successful because they limit our perspective in such a way that the ending is a surprise and it generally explains the age-old "why don't they just turn the camera off" question. This also works in "Second Honeymoon" and "10/31/98"'s favor, and "Tuesday the 17th" relies on keeping the camera rolling to reveal the killer. It's really just the Skype gimmick in "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She was Younger" that strains logic.

 Like most anthologies, there are a mixture of good segments, weaker sections, and one or two really impressive moments that help others to stand out. The ending of "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily" manages to elevate the story beyond a retread of Paranormal Activity territory. The fact that the characters in "Tape 56" are all loathsome assholes is overcome with the slow realization that watching these tapes are causing them to disappear one by one (although the reason isn't necessarily clear until the end), and great makeup effects and a gonzo ending help "Amateur Night" overcome its otherwise uninteresting protagonists. It will also make you second guess any girl who ever tells you "I like you" after a few drinks...

 I suppose that while I didn't necessarily like how lopsided "Tuesday the 17th" was in setting up the story before becoming an all out gorefest, the way the killer is handled was inventive and made the best use of the "videotaped" gimmick.

 Of all of the segments, "10/31/98" was probably my favorite, which is appropriate as they save it for last, after even "Tape 56" reaches its conclusion. When things move from suggested creepiness to all out special effects bonanza (handled really well considering it needed to be integrated with camcorder level video images), the segment earns the aimless first section, and the conclusion is satisfying and appropriately dark.

 Oddly, while West's "Second Honeymoon" suffers from the least motion-sickness inducing camerawork, it may be the most abrupt story conclusion and compared to the other entries is possibly the least satisfying. The "home invasion" elements are quite creepy, and West builds tension in appropriately slow pace, dropping hints about what's coming, but even more so than in The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, the conclusion is too rushed to be satisfying. I understand what he was trying to do, but the twist comes about so quickly and ends immediately afterward, leaving little time to digest what just happened. It doesn't seem unfair that the guy watching that tape says "what the hell was that?" when it ends.

 Is V/H/S going to be for everybody? Probably not. It is a better-than-average anthology movie, which I count as a plus, and as I said mostly makes the best of the "found footage" gimmick, but not all of the segments are good enough to sustain the runtime, even if some of their conceits help keep audiences engaged. I can't really say that it transcends either the "found footage" or anthology subgenre, and it's going to make some of you feel very queasy well before "Amateur Night" kicks into high gear, so consider this a conditional recommendation.

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V/H/S 2 is a marked improvement on just about every aspect of V/H/S, and this is coming from someone who enjoyed the first film. It’s a weird point of cognitive dissonance for me, because I love anthology films but mostly hate “found footage” films, so V/H/S had to overcome its conceit with interesting segments and succeeded half of the time (I largely prefer the first and last entries in the film – the bat-creature and the haunted house). That said, it was too long, stretched the “frame” story too far, and is something I “liked” more than really “enjoyed.” I haven’t seen it again since last year and don’t know that I will any time soon.

 On the other hand, I've already seen the second film twice this year; V/H/S 2 drops the segments, cuts down on the length, and provides a more satisfying overall experience, which is critical for any anthology. The “frame” story, “Tape 49” is more focused and streamlined while still loosely tying in to the first film, and three out of the four “tapes” are winners, with the other one an inspired effort. Let’s take a look at how the film breaks down:

 “Tape 49” – from Simon Barrett (the writer of You’re Next), follows a dubious private investigator and his assistant as they break into the house of a missing college student, only to find a familiar setup involving VCRs and TVs in the living room. A laptop video from the missing student suggests that playing the tapes “in the right order” will change you, and they seem to be having an odd effect on the investigator’s assistant.

“Phase I Clinical Trials” – Adam Wingard (The ABCs of Death) directs and stars as an accident victim who receives an experimental artificial eye which is, for research purposes, filming everything. Things seem to be going well until he notices strange goings-on in his house, and a stranger turns up to warn him that the longer he can see dead people, the more they can interact with him. How does she know? Her cochlear implant has the same effect, and it may already be too late for both of them…

“A Ride in the Park” – from Eduardo Sánchez and Gregg Hale (The Blair Witch Project), a biker has plans for a nice ride through the woods when he runs into a familiar horror monster, and thanks to his helmet camera, takes us on a first-person journey through the “eyes” of the undead.

“Safe Haven” – from Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption) and Timo Tjahjanto (The ABCs of Death), a documentary crew is allowed access to the compound of a cult promising “Paradise on Earth.” Little do they realize that their spy cameras will do more than expose what’s going on behind closed doors – their arrival signals the beginning of the end…

“Alien Abduction Slumber Party” – from Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) comes, well, exactly what it promises. Teenagers put up with their obnoxious preteen brothers and friends, until invaders from another world decide they want everybody, including the dog.

 The “frame” story benefits from stripping down the main characters to two (there were too many people in the first film) and keeps the in-between segments shorter and to the point. While you might miss it the first time, there are quite a few references to the first film and the “mythology” behind why somebody would collect these tapes. I would imagine this will expand as the series goes on (it’s hard to see why there wouldn’t be more), so it doesn’t feel intrusive and people who hadn’t seen the first V/H/S didn’t feel lost in the meantime.

 Every one of the entries is an improvement over the first film, not simply because they’re shorter (“Safe Haven” is the longest of the four and deservedly so). While it’s still hard to argue why anybody would transfer this footage tape, let alone circulate bootlegged copies, there’s nothing as credibility straining as the “Skype” segment from V/H/S. “A Ride in the Park” manages to take the overdone (if still wildly popular) zombie story and present it from a perspective you haven’t seen before and mixes in other camera angles in a fairly clever way. “Phase I Clinical Trials” makes good use of a limited perspective “first person” camera and builds some tension with creepy imagery.

 If there’s a weak link in the lot, it’s probably “Alien Abduction Slumber Party”, and mostly because it comes after the truly fantastic “Safe Haven.” Evans and Tjahjanto’s tour-de-force is an almost impossible act to follow, and “Slumber Party” is good, even when you consider that Eisener breaks three cardinal rules of movie-making (don’t work with children, don’t work with animals, and don’t kill either if you do). His novel use of the camera attached to the dog makes the frenetic chases near the end more interesting and explains the “why are they still filming this?” problem inherent to “found footage.”

 The undisputed winner is “Safe Haven,” for reasons I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t seen V/H/S 2, because you should see the film if for no other reason than this segment. It’s an ominous buildup that turns into a rollercoaster of “holy shit!” with a perfect final line that’ll make you chuckle. I didn’t even realize I’d missed the last line until the second time I saw it, which caps off an already impressive exercise in ratcheting up the stakes for a film crew in far over their heads. The rest of V/H/S 2 is icing on the cake, which is not to diminish Eisener’s effort or the conclusion to “Tape 49,” which is more satisfying than the end of V/H/S.

Before we watched V/H/S 2, the Cap’n screened “Incubator,” a short I saw last year at Nevermore, and “One Last Dive,” another short from Eisener that shows just how much you can do with one minute. While I enjoy Hobo with a Shotgun to a degree, Jason Eisener has to this point really impressed the Cap’n with the short films he’s directed, edited, and produced. Not to bag on his feature length endeavor, but he really knows how to pack a punch in a short film.

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Remember how V/H/S was too long and only had a few good segments, but the frame story was fairly interesting even though why would you tape a Skype conversation and put it on a tape? And then V/H/S 2 was a marked improvement in every way, because it was shorter and the vignettes were more concise and creepier, even if the frame story was kind of a mess? I guess when the time came to make V/H/S Viral - which might as well be "3" based on the end of the movie - everyone involved from the producers to the writers and directors forgot that.

 The wrap around story makes almost no sense until the very end, and aside from an amusing cookout gone wrong, there's nothing but gore for gore's sake until the mysterious van that causes people go turn violent is shoehorned into the V/H/S mythos (such as it is). If clips from the first two films weren't crammed in as cutaways, you wouldn't even know it was supposed to be part of the same series. The "tapes" are abandoned completely, leaving us with a combination documentary / found footage story of a magician whose cape gives him real powers, a trip into another dimension that, initially, looks like ours but really, really isn't, and twenty minutes with the most obnoxious skaters you're likely to meet, who are eventually killed by zombies or eaten by a demon the zombies are summoning.

 Of the segments, the second one - "Parallel Monsters" - by Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is the only one worth watching. That said, it's so over the top that you're liable to start laughing at the "reveal" of how the alternate universe is structured. The Day of the Dead / Skater video only gets remotely interesting near the end, when it's clear they can't kill the cult members in Tijuana. Everything else is an absolute waste of time, and I worry that trying to turn the series from a Videodrome-like vibe to a "viral video" ending (think The Signal or Pontypool, but much worse) isn't going to serve V/H/S well.

Shocktober Revisited: Mini-Reviews!

 Sometimes, horror movies get rolled up in other quick reviews, and accordingly can be missed. The following quick takes are from various points over the years, so the quality of the review(s) can vary wildly:

Die, Monster, Die! - Based on H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space in the same way that The Haunted Palace is based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (loosely), this AIP production has some effective imagery, but finds a way to drag on long enough to make 78 minutes feel like two hours. It's not lacking in atmosphere, and Boris Karloff certainly gives as much as he possibly can (which is saying something, as the actor was in poor enough health that he spends most of the film confined to a wheelchair), but I had trouble remembering much about the film hours after finishing it.

 Lovecraft's town of Arkham, Massachusetts, is relocated to England so that American student Stephen Rinehart (Nick Adams) can travel to the Whitley manor on the outskirts of town. Nobody in Arkham wants to talk to him about the Whitleys, nor will they provide him with any means of transportation, so Rinehart has to walk. It gives us the opportunity to see the desolate lands on the outskirts of the manor, and what looks like a huge crater, surrounded by dead trees that crumble to dust when touched. After dodging a bear trap at the gate, he enters the Whitley manor to find himself unwelcome by its patriarch, Nahum Whitley (Karloff), despite having been invited by Nahum's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer).

 Something is obviously very wrong at the Whitley house, and Nahum's wife Letitia begs Stephen to take Susan away (they were students at an unnamed university in the U.S.), against Nahum's objections. Letitia is bedridden and refuses to let anyone see her, and Nahum is opposed to taking her to a doctor in town. Their maid went insane and lurks around the grounds under a black veil, and their butler Merwyn (Terence de Marney) is barely capable of lifting silverware without collapsing. A strange glow is coming from the (locked) greenhouse, and it's rumored that Nahum's father, Corbin Whitley, practiced black magic (because, you know, it kind of makes it sound like it's connected to The Haunted Palace, maybe?), which seems to be confirmed from the artwork scrawled in the cellar of the mansion.

 Unfortunately, for all of the mystery surrounding the Whitleys and what writer Jerry Sohl cobbled together from The Colour Out of Space and more topical concerns (circa 1965) about radiation, Die, Monster, Die! is mostly a movie about wandering around a spooky house with candles until something jumps out. Audiences who bemoan "jump" scares in modern horror films will roll their eyes at no less than three such moments in Die, Monster, Die!, all of which have the bad form to continue well after it's clear they aren't scary. There are some nice images - the matte painting of the meteor crash looks very good, and the "zoo" of deformed creatures / aliens (it's never very clear) in the greenhouse "shed" make an impression, but the pacing of the film drags on endlessly.

 Lovecraft fans will, in all likelihood, not enjoy the explanation given to why the meteorite causes strange and horrible things to happen to the vegetation (SPOILER - it's Uranium) or the way that Die, Monster, Die! devolves into a "we have to fight the monster before we escape," wherein Boris Karloff is replaced by a stuntman wearing a glowing prototype of the "Green Man" outfit under his suit. I honestly can't remember if they even explain what happens to the maid after she tries to attack Stephen and falls down, but it's not the kind of plot point I'm even worried about following up on. While I've seen worse adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I'd be hard pressed to say I've seen one that's more of a slog to get through than this one.

Terminal Invasion - Cranpire's love of this film used to vex me. Admittedly, I'd only seen it in pieces on the Sci-Fi Channel and it looked like their run of the mill crap, just with Bruce Campbell. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I can understand why he enjoys it so much. Kind of.

I'll give credit where credit's due: director Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th) is a more competent director than most of the "Sci-Fi Original" stable of no-names. Terminal Invasion is a cross between Pitch Black and John Carpenter's The Thing, with a small dose of Assault on Precinct 13 thrown in for good measure, and Cunningham rises to the occasion. For what's essentially a ripoff of other sci-fi / horror movies, it's pretty good. There's certainly no fat on this movie, so every scene exists to set up something later.

The story takes place on a snowy night while a small band of travelers are trapped in a charter plane lobby. Campbell is a criminal being transferred who ends up in their midst, along with some nasty alien invaders disguised as humans. You can figure out where it goes from there if you've seen any of the movies above.

What I appreciated about Terminal Invasion is the way it sets up twists in the story based on things you assume to be true at the beginning. While I was pretty sure I knew who was an alien and who wasn't (and was mostly right), there's at least one genuine surprise halfway into the movie. Cunningham uses the limited geography of the terminal to telegraph plot points later, which I find to be rare of Sci-Fi Originals.

That being said, this is still a made for TV movie, and it shows. Most sets are over-lit so that shooting can commence from any angle, so even the dark scenes are pretty bright. The cgi, while used sparingly, is still five or six steps below the early Nasonex commercials. At least twice during Terminal Invasion, the movie "Fades to Commercial", and it looks silly without actual commercials.

However, most of these are acceptable if considered in the context of how Terminal Invasion came to be. The unfortunate cost cutting exercise comes during "attack" scenes involving the aliens. The camera is normally pretty stable, but when the aliens attack there's a postproduction "herky-jerky" effect that just looks dirt cheap.

Still, with expectations set properly, Terminal Invasion is pretty good for what it is, and I'd probably watch it again. Bruce is pretty good despite having to play the "stoic" type for most of the movie. Not many wisecracks to be seen here, but there is some decent gore and Terminal Invasion would be good times with a six pack and your buddies.

Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie - Tim Burton continues along his path of "things you recognize, re-imagined by a director you really used to like" by adapting the long running gothic soap opera Dark Shadows and his own short film, Frankenweenie, but this time it's stop-motion animated and three times as long.

Are you ready for the shocker? I actually liked Dark Shadows more than Frankenweenie. Nobody else did, but Dark Shadows isn't nearly as horrible as I expected it to be, and instead of nonstop jokes about the 1970s, it's a surprisingly atmospheric and violent meditation on family ties. That said, it has too many characters, superfluous cameos that really don't move the plot forward (Alice Cooper, I'm looking at you), and while it's better than I was prepared for, that doesn't mean it's even close to the best Tim Burton is capable of. I suppose after being disappointed by Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride, the idea of a marginally entertaining Tim Burton film was refreshing. That said, everybody else seems to hate it, so be warned.

 Frankenweenie could be better if Burton could figure out how to stretch a 30 minute short film into a full narrative, but he didn't. Basically the structure of the original Frankenweenie has been elongated and stitched together with a clever pastiche of Joe Dante-esque "monsters run amok" - including the best (and possibly only) Bambi Meets Godzilla reference I can remember. Unfortunately, the first forty five minutes drag so much that it's more of a relief than a delight when the reanimated pets wreak havoc all over New Holland. I will say it was nice to (hear) Catherine O'Hara, Martin Short, and Winona Ryder return to the Burton-verse, but ultimately Frankenweenie overstays its welcome before it has the chance to be any fun.

 Zombeavers - I didn't go into Zombeavers expecting it to be any good. This sounds counter-intuitive with what I said earlier in the recaps about trying to avoid bad movies, but I didn't watch Sharknado and this seemed like it might be an acceptable substitute. I mean, it couldn't possibly get better than the poster, or the inherently stupid premise, right? It would quickly get lazy and then I would get bored, like I normally do with Syfy Originals or movies that look like that (*coughTheAsylumreleasescough*).

 So imagine my surprise to discover that Zombeavers is a (slightly) higher budgeted version of a movie like Blood Car or Rise of the Animals. True, this is not a scrappy, home made production - how could it be with a "From the Producers of American Pie, Cabin Fever, and The Ring" on the poster? - but it has the same anarchic spirit of those movies. At times, it's actually as bad as those can be, but what helps Zombeavers (a lot, actually) is that every time you think it's not worth sticking through, something you wouldn't expect either happens or comes out of someone's mouth. Either the film takes a truly unexpected turn - which it does - or one of the characters has a line that evokes a "wait, what?" and you don't mind sticking around.

 I felt like I was in pretty good hands during the prologue, which features Bill Burr and an unrecognizable John Mayer (yep, "Your Body is a Wonderland"'s John Mayer) as drivers hauling around chemical waste and shooting the shit, often in increasingly strange ways. They eventually hit a deer, which leads to a barrel of said chemicals rolling down into a stream and to (dun dun DUUUUNNN) a beaver dam. Because, yes, this is a movie about zombie beavers. Or Zombeavers, if you will. Also, there are three college students: Mary (Rachel Melvin), Zoe (Courtney Palm), and Jenn (Lexi Atkins), who are having a "girls' weekend" in order to forget about Mary's boyfriend Sam (Hutch Dano) cheating on her. But he shows up anyway, with Tommy (Jake Weary) and Buck (Peter Gilroy) in tow, so it becomes a slightly uncomfortable couples weekend. With Zombeavers.

 You might struggle through the "set up" part of the film, and I nearly turned it off while the girls were on the way to the cabin, but some of the lines are so out of left field that I stuck with it. The tone is borderline surreal, from the "is this serious" hunter (Rex Linn) that they run into, to the neighbors near the cabin (Brent Briscoe and Phyllis Katz), who turn out to be way more savvy about kids than you'd expect. And there's a bear, but mostly, it's the Zombeavers. Which look like nothing more than marginally articulated puppets and are hilarious. You see, sometimes a cheap looking monster can elevate a B-Movie from "that was okay" to "that was amazing," and the titular zombified beavers are worth the price of admission. It doesn't hurt that Zombeavers gets even weirder when the "rules of infection" kick in, but the monsters are the stars of the show. Stick around after the credits - which include a song about the movie that puts Richard Cheese to shame - for an even better zombie related pun. If it sets up a sequel, I could be onboard with that, but if not, well played, Jordan Rubin...

 John Dies at the End -This is a faithful adaptation of David Wong's novel by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), at least for the first half. The film gets to about the halfway point in the book, and then realizes it has thirty minutes to wrap up the rest of the story, so liberties are taken. Honestly, I didn't mind them, because I knew what was being condensed and most of the spirit is kept intact.

 That said, I totally understand why people who haven't read John Dies at the End don't like the movie. There's a sense of context that's missing from the film as it hurtles towards its conclusion that further confuses the comedy / horror tone and probably loses a lot of people. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't watch the movie at all. You're going to hate it because of how it collapses in the last thirty minutes. If you have read the book, know Coscarelli mostly made sensible changes (not going to Vegas, diminishing Amy's role in the overall story, dropping certain elements of Korrok's plan), and made at least one I don't really understand (changing Molly's name), and two I don't know how I feel about (no Fred Durst and John's band doesn't sound nearly as bad as I thought it would). I dig John Dies at the End, and if it ever happens, I'd watch This Book (Movie?) is Filled with Spiders, although with what they had to do on a low budget here, I can't imagine that ever happening. That's a shame.

 World War Z - One could suppose that if Warm Bodies was a zombie movie for teenage girls, then World War Z is a zombie movie for people who vaguely know the word "zombie" in popular culture. It's not even really a horror movie - more of an action / disaster hybrid with a redesigned third act that inches towards suspense but still ends up like a tamer 28 Days Later. And I watched the "unrated" version, for the record. I can only imagine how toothless World War Z must have been in theaters. Still, it has a scrappy, amiable charm for a big budgeted blockbuster studio "tent pole" movie.

 Based almost not at all on the book of the same name by Max Brooks, World War Z is the story of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), a retired UN investigator living with his family, until the zombie outbreak begins, that is. Then the Deputy Secretary General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) brings him back in to travel around the world and see what caused the outbreak, from South Korea to Israel and eventually to a World Health Organization research center in Ireland. Separated from his family, and with continually dwindling support, Gerry finds that the zombie outbreak is capable of overcoming even the most fortified of cities, and unless they can find a cure, humanity is doomed.


 World War Z is essentially a travelogue designed to show off various big action set pieces, which director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) does fairly well, and which Brad Pitt responds to with a reasonable sense of urgency. The zombies are sometimes people in makeup but are usually great swaths of CGI mayhem, particularly during the siege of Jerusalem. The movie makes an abrupt turn in the section in Ireland, due in large part because the delay in World War Z's release had everything to do with the third act not working, so they scrapped the original ending in Russia and went with a more sparse, claustrophobic ending. It works, although you can see loose threads of plot line in the film as a result - the main example is Matthew Fox's UN soldier who doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to help move Gerry's family around, but who in the original version "takes" his wife and daughter as his own. Now it just seems like an oddly high profile casting choice for a minor role at best. Doctor Who fans already know the prescient casting of Peter Capaldi as the WHO Doctor (that IS how he appears in the credits).

 There's not really much else to say about the movie. I thought it was watchable, if mostly average. The story behind the movie is more interesting than the finished product. The survival bits near the beginning and towards the end are good, but have been done better before. All of the big action sequences are bombastic and if you like explosions and zombies and some degree of violence, the unrated cut is certainly worth your time. It's popcorn fare through and through, which is fine and dandy every now and then, but I can't imagine that I'd be all that enthused for World War Z 2.

The ABCs of Death 2 - is like V/H/S 2 in that it takes everything that worked about the first film, jettisoned most of what didn't, and was more fun to watch. The premise is still the same: twenty six directors each receive a letter from the alphabet, and have free reign to come up with a 2-3 minute short film that conveys a word and, in some form or fashion, death. The ABCs of Death had some interesting entries ("Unearthed" was a good one), but leaned heavily on scatological humor ("F is for Fart" was the tip of the iceberg, it turned out), and then there were the "oh, I didn't need to see that, not ever" letters. Like "Libido" and "Pressure." It turns out there are things you might want to un-see, and several of them are in The ABCs of Death.

The ABCs of Death 2, by comparison, has nothing as traumatic, and I would suspect it would play a lot better with an audience than the first one did. Watching that one at Nevermore, there was a lot of... shall I say, stunned silence as the film went on. There are certainly some "what the hell was that?" parts in the sequel, but nothing you're going to apologize for exposing someone to. The only thing that comes close is the last segment, "Z is for Zygote," which is centered around an already unforgettable image that closes on an even more disturbing note. I know that people don't like "P is for P-P-P-P-Scary!" but I thought it had an unhinged quality, somewhere between the weirder Betty Boop cartoons and Black Lodge-era David Lynch, that worked for me.

 As with the first film, you'll find highlights ("A is for Amateur") and lowlights ("V is for Vacation"), but there's nothing in The ABCs of Death that comes close to 2's "M is for Masticate," a slow motion gross out with a wicked joke at the end. There's also "D is for Deloused," which reminded me a bit of a Brothers Quay short. I'll leave most of the discovery for you, but if you kind of liked the first film, I strongly suspect you'll enjoy this one more.

 Horns - I feel like there's a better movie somewhere in Alexandre Aja's Horns. Maybe it got lost in the editing, or maybe it's just inherent in the adaptation of Joe Hill's novel, but the finished product just don't quite work. It's as though Aja made a bitterly funny, black comedy, and also made a more generic, teen-friendly story of good and evil, and then smashed them together at the worst possible junctures. For the opening twenty minutes of Horns, you're probably going to think the movie is great: it has a wicked mean streak, Daniel Radcliffe is spot on as a guy everyone thinks is a murderer, that embraces the horns he grows and the power that comes with it. The way people react, first telling him their darkest fantasies and then acting on them when he says they should, is often hilarious.


 And then we hit the first of what turn out to be several, lengthy, flashbacks, giving us the backstory of Ig (Radcliffe) and Merrin (Juno Temple), leading up to her death - the one everyone assumes Ig is responsible for. Everyone, including his family - played by James Remar, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joe Anderson - is positive he did it and that he's lying, with the exception of his friend, Lee (Max Minghella). The "whodunit" is pretty easy to work out for yourself, even if Aja, Hill, and screenwriter Keith Bunin throw in a number of red herrings. I bet, without telling you anything else, you can guess who the real killer is. That's not the problem, so much as the flashbacks that put the mystery together. There's a massive tonal shift from black comedy to slightly tragic story of temptation and of good and evil (on a biblical scale), and for some reason, ne'er the twain shall meet in Horns.

 I can understand how it might have worked in Hill's novel - which I haven't yet read, but plan to - but as a film, the structure of the story is at times jarring and disruptive. Maybe there was no way to properly balance the two in a film, because Horns alternates between wicked and bland, between clever and obvious, without ever finding a good middle ground. There are some fantastic moments sprinkled throughout the film, and the cast is game for anything, playing both the best and worst versions of themselves as they encounter "evil" Ig, but Horns gets away from them. It's never quite the movie that it could be, so I'm left feeling ambivalent with the end result.

 The Innkeepers - From Ti West, the director of The House of the Devil, comes another slow burn horror film where tension continues mounting and the sense of dread is palpable. Instead of replicating the horror of the early 1980s, West's "haunted hotel" follow-up is set squarely in the present, and he's just as adept at creeping you out with slow tracking shots, suggested noises, and believable characters you relate to. Sara Paxton's Claire is a young woman without much of a clue what she want to do or be, who becomes way too interested in Luke (Pat Healy)'s hobby: ghost hunting. She's fixated on finding the spirit of Madeline O'Malley, a bride who killed herself in the hotel in the 1890s.

 On the last weekend that the Yankee Padler hotel is open, Luke and Claire trade off shifts, watching over the last remaining hotel tenants - former actress / new age guru Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and a mysterious Old Man (George Riddle) - while they hunt for evidence of O'Malley's presence. West doles out the scares slowly but surely, and only towards the very end do things go the way most horror films go. In fact, if there's any fault to be found in The Innkeepers, it's that what comes before and after the climax of the film are undermined ever so slightly by what we know HAS to happen, even if the subtle clues of why it happens don't always add up. Without spoiling too much, I can say that the film is an example of the kind of movie 1408 could have been, one that eschews cheap histrionics and trickery and deliberately ratchets up the "willies" factor.

 Fans of The House of the Devil are going to find a lot to love about The Inkeepers, but if you like your horror fast and relentless, this may seem a little slow for your tastes. For me? Let's just say I had to watch something else after I finished it, because I wasn't going to bed.

Summer Fest 7 Recap (Day Two Part One): Without Warning, Tremors, Deadly Eyes, and Blood Car

 We kicked off Day Two of Summer Fest 7 by watching Without Warning, which is Predator before Predator came out. I guess that's a SPOILER if you somehow found yourself watching Without Warning (or It Came Without Warning) and didn't see the cover art or read the back of the case. Or look slightly to the right of this paragraph. But since I'm SPOILING it anyway, it's a tall alien, also played by Kevin Peter Hall (Harry and the Hendersons) who hunts humans for sport, or food, or... something. He keeps them in the "Department of Water" shack out by the dam outside of, uh, *mumblemumbletown* and uses starfish-like projectiles to kill his prey. They attach to you and pump you full of yellow liquid that kill you, or something. Hard to say, because you can survive it if you cut one off quickly enough, as we learn not once but twice. As for how they operate, thing of a cross between a Nerf Disc Shooter, a Facehugger, and that yellow embalming fluid the Tall Man uses.

 Without Warning is mostly notable for the fact that it features "paycheck" performances from Martin Landau and Jack Palance, who are a long way from Mission: Impossible and Shane here, and would be another decade or so before they were picking up "you're still alive" Oscars for City Slickers and Ed Wood. Fortunately, both are playing different variations of gonzo in the film: Landau is a veteran of, uh, the Korean War, I guess. He says at some point he'd been in the military for 27 years, and this is 1982 we're talking about, so he'd be a little old to have gone crazy in Vietnam. But he's crazy, and he's already seen the alien, so nobody believes him. Also he later kills the Sherriff for no apparent reason and steals his car to prove the alien is real. Hey, I told you all SPOILER warnings were done with, here. He eventually blows up the alien in the shack.

 By comparison, Palance is just playing creepy as the hunter who owns the only gas station in town that our presumed protagonists are visiting (two of them are killed, leaving the "backup" couple to be our heroes, I guess, but they're so vanilla that you're happy to have Palance and Landau chewing the scenery). He's not afraid of the starfish weapons because he cuts them off with a knife (both times) and also keeps one in an empty jar he has on his desk. I'm not sure if it's creepier to imagine he just has an open jar of formaldehyde or that he puts the starfish in his moonshine. Either way, it gets loose and that is in no way brought up again. It's okay, because Palance is menacing and growly and Landau is near hysterical for most of Without Warning, which is pretty much what you'll need to get by.

 Without Warning adheres to what I'd call "The Boogens" rule of not showing the monster until the very end, not because it successfully builds tension, but because you'd never be able to watch the movie seriously if you saw it earlier. If we're simply ignoring the fact that the primary antagonist of Without Warning looks like every "alien" costume you've ever seen in Party City, you're still going to laugh at the fact that it appears to be wearing a combination of mesh and a fishing net. I guess most of the budget went to the starfish, because the alien has a very limited range of facial expressions (at times it looks like a leftover from a cheaper episode of The Outer Limits), and for most of its onscreen time, it stands next to the shed, doing nothing. However, the explosive finale made it clear to me that I had seen this movie a long time ago on television, probably without much context, because the image of the stationary alien next to the exploding shed is a familiar one. I really didn't recall Cameron Mitchell (Raw Force, Deadly Prey) being in the movie for, oh, five minutes, nor did I remember the dumb Boy Scout subplot that was vaguely reminiscent of Beware! The Blob, however...

 In the planning stages of Summer Fest 7, somebody asked me if Tremors had ever made it into the lineup before, and for some reason the answer was "no". I don't really know why, because it is a great fit for a Saturday afternoon - a leisurely, funny movie about giant worms in the desert that wreak havoc on a small town. The kind of movie they don't really make anymore - unless, I guess, you count the three (soon to be four) Tremors sequels - one where the protagonists are a couple of knucklehead handymen (played by Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon). It's an amiable sort of film, the kind that plays for years and years on TNT or TBS, and at least two people at the Fest knew it so well they were quoting lines before they happened. To be honest, I don't think I had seen Tremors in years, but I remembered most of the beats of the story (such as they are), and was able to enjoy small surprises, like forgetting that Victor Wong (Egg Shen from Big Trouble in Little China) was the opportunistic owner of the only store in Perfection (Population: 14).

 Tremors is the kind of movie that's so much fun that you don't really notice how quickly everything happens. I mean, there are giant, blind, albino worms that somehow have "worm vision" - or at least, a camera angle devoted to showing us its ability to move through dirt - and we just take it an go with it. There's a seismologist, so good enough. Valentine (Bacon) and Earl (Ward) aren't especially good at doing anything (as is evidenced by the fact that Bacon is having a hell of a time hammering wire into a fence at the beginning of the film, but they're so fun to follow around that you don't much care. Almost all of the "killing people we don't know" is dispensed in the first thirty minutes. Other than Walter Chang (Wong) - SPOILER - that is. But it doesn't even matter, because then we get to spend some time with the Gummers - Heather (Reba McEntire) and Burt (Michael Gross, who has been in every sequel to date). They're gun loving nuts who manage to kill one of the Graboids (actually name) with the comically massive arsenal of weapons in their basement. But they listen to Val and Earl and leave their fortified home to hide on rocks in the middle of the desert, where they can go dynamite fishing. And then stampeding. It all works out in the end, practicality be damned. It doesn't really matter, as I said, because Tremors is so damn fun to watch.

 After Tremors, it only made sense to continue the "nature gone wild" trend with Deadly Eyes, which is one of the strangest movies you're likely to see. Not because you haven't seen dogs playing "giant" versions of rodents before (thanks, Killer Shrews), but because so much of the movie is obsessed with being a romantic comedy about a high school gym coach and an EPA inspector. In between seeing Dachshunds bounding around, pretending to be giant rats that eat Scatman Crothers (SPOILER), there's uncomfortable flirting between the coach and one of his students, the "meet cute" in the hospital where her son (a star basketball player) ends up after a rat bites his hand, and the "misunderstanding" about whether he's porking the cheerleader who wants to jump his bones. Oh, and he's divorced and has a young son who is in the living room while all of this is happening. It doesn't matter in the end because they're all eaten by rats, in one of the bleakest final shots this side of Frank Darabont's The Mist.

 Hey, I said "SPOILER"! But seriously, the focus in Deadly Eyes is all over the place, as the film tries to develop every character at the expense of the fact that there are giant rats in the New York City Subway (or is it Toronto?). Yes, they look suspiciously like happy Dachshunds with "rat" costumes, but why do I care about the scene where the cheerleader comes into the locker room and finds the coach just coming out of the shower and he nakedly discusses why they can't do anything? If I followed the film correctly, there's not really a reason the rats are growing to enormous size, because the rice they've been eating at the dock wasn't irradiated or anything - it was just not up to safety codes. I clearly missed the part about Scatman Crothers working for the EPA as a narc who takes jobs working for serial polluters, but again, it doesn't matter because the rats eat him. Like they eat everybody else. And they cut the power on the subway. How did they cut the power? Game over, man.

 And then there was Blood Car. I'm not sure what to say about Blood Car that hasn't already been said here and here, other than maybe to mention that there's a Last Tango in Paris reference that I'd somehow forgotten about. It's been a while since I watched Blood Car, which isn't okay, now that I think about it, but sometimes you get caught up with other movies, you know? Luckily for the Cap'n, less people in the room had seen it than I thought, which absolutely made up for that. I particularly liked the question "is he always this crazy or did something happen before I got here?" directed at the protagonist. It's also much funnier watching Blood Car since Veep has been on the air, because in a lot of odd ways, Anna Chlumsky's character lays the groundwork for her part in the show. Or maybe I'm projecting... yeah, that must be it.

 Okay, so it's time for The Trappening... and only I know what it is! Stay tuned, masochists!

Blogorium Review: Under the Skin

 At the outset, I'm going to warn you that the best way to watch Under the Skin is to know as little about the film as possible. The film's trailers are deliberately vague precisely because Under the Skin is meant to be experienced rather than explained. By necessity, in order to review it at all, I'm going to have to be more specific about the narrative (such as it is) than you might want to know about going in. From here on out, consider everything covered to fall under MILD SPOILERS.

 I've waited a long time for a new Jonathan Glazer movie: after Sexy Beast in 2000, he took four years to follow-up with Birth, and ten years later, we have his third film. I hope this is not indicative of a Donna Tartt-esque pattern of project gestation time, but if Under the Skin is any indication, the wait may be worth it. Not too long ago, I mentioned that Spider Baby might be the strangest film I've seen in a long time, precisely because of how matter-of-factly it treats the bizarre Merrye family. Under the Skin is not necessarily "strange," but it has its share of haunting, surreal imagery that still floats in and out of my head. The trailer has been described as "Lynch-ian," and the movie lives up to that promise (it reminded me of parts of Eraserhead more than once), but I want to clear up a certain misconception about what the term "Lynch-ian" means before we go any further. It's relevant to Under the Skin, which is why I'm including it in this review.

 There is an assumption, mostly by people who know David Lynch third hand or by a dissociative reputation, that "Lynch-ian" just means "weird." They believe that his films are weird for weird's sake, that his editing techniques and use of juxtaposition serve no real purpose, and that Lynch is just interested in being as strange as possible for no other reason than he can be. If that seems far fetched a claim, watch something like "David Lynch's Return of the Jedi" and tell me that's not exactly how the creator of that video presents the film as "re-envisioned" by the director. In truth, David Lynch's Return of the Jedi would probably be more like David Lynch's Dune, which may or may not be a good thing.

 Are Lynch's films abstract at times? Oh yes. Do they rely on seemingly random imagery presented without context? I wouldn't argue that's the case at times. Is it, at times, difficult to suss out what the intent of this imagery is? Of course. Lynch doesn't help by dodging questions about meaning, or by attributing it to a byproduct of Transcendental Meditation, but the amount of time and effort he puts into seemingly "random" and "weird" imagery points to means to an end, even if we aren't sure what the ends are. Maybe he isn't either. Maybe he is, and he's just playing coy. At any rate, weird for weird's sake is either a total misunderstanding or a cynical dismissal of what makes something "Lynch-ian."

 This brings me back to Under the Skin, which is filled with visual tics and images that suggest, but often never explain. Glazer seems content to introduce a concept in the film and explore it in its bare minimum, instead leaving much of the heavy lifting to the audience. If you like films that are puzzles, ones that present the pieces but don't tell you how they fit together, Under the Skin excels at that. Perhaps reading the book by Michael Faber would help with interpreting Glazer and Walter Campbell's adaptation. Perhaps not. I haven't read the book, although I'm certainly more interested in doing so now. At the moment, I'm still digesting what I have seen, what tantalizing clues I'm not putting in the right places. Here is, from a first go, my "reading" of Under the Skin, such as it is.

 At bare minimum, we know this from the beginning of the film: aliens are on Earth, and they're using our skin to infiltrate and conduct experiments. Well, maybe the second part. They're definitely using Scarlett Johansson's character (unlisted in the credits - most of the characters say their names, but I'll go with Glazer's preference) as a decoy to draw in men, take them "home," and sink them into a black oil-like substance. We get one glimpse of what happens after that, and given the reveal at the end, I have a pretty good idea what we're seeing. She has a mission to collect men who are single, who have no families or close friends, and who won't be missed. When she's found the perfect specimen and lured him into her "trap," a motorcycle riding "clean up man" takes care of the loose ends.

 Glazer does an interesting about face, particularly considering the amount of nudity from Johansson in the film I wasn't expecting. The"male gaze" is on display near the very beginning - when Johansson either takes over for the last "agent" or simply removes the clothes of a dead woman - slowly gives way to another sort of gaze. I hesitate to call it "feminine" because she's clearly not playing a human, and it implies that the male objectification operates in the exact same way that the "male gaze" does. It's more of an "alien gaze," although her entire purpose is to draw men in using their "male gaze" - critical in drawing them to follow her into the Black Room and by extension, their doom.

 As the film goes on, it becomes clearer that the aliens, or at least Johansson, don't really understand humanity past a utilitarian purpose. Beyond the parameters of her mission, she has no idea how to react to people, and becomes visibly uncomfortable when included in a group of women heading to a club. Unable to leave the building, she becomes frantic, and only settles down when she accidentally meets her "target." At other points, she seems confused about tripping on a sidewalk, attempting to eat food, and the sight of blood. The meaning of that scene, in particular, isn't clear until the very end of the film, when the title finally makes sense.

 Under the Skin has a few genuinely disturbing moments resulting from the alien "disconnect" from emotions. One in particular is still unnerving: while chatting up a potential victim, the vacationing swimmer notices a family being pulled into the rough tidal waters. He tries to save them, and, failing that, at least bring the husband back to shore. He brings him back, but is too winded to stop the man from swimming back out to his doom. Johansson stands there, dispassionately observing the tragedy, and while the tourist is struggling to stand, she knocks him out with a rock. As she drags him back to her van, mixed in with the roar of the ocean are the screams of the family's toddler, sitting by himself a few yards away. Johansson never acknowledges the child - he's not essential to the mission, and when the cyclist turns up later to remove the evidence, he also leaves the crying child. The last time we see the toddler is as the light is fading and the tide advances. It's a rather bleak view of humanity's worth from the eyes of outsiders.

 Her first moment of what could be called "pity" involves a man with severe facial deformities, although I'm still not exactly sure what the aftermath of that sequence suggests. Johansson lures him in, as she has with every other man in the coastal region of Scotland they've set up shop, but there's a hiccup. I think. I'm not sure, but it's the first and only time we see one of the aliens until the end of the film, and the cross-fading (reminiscent of the beginning of Eraserhead) suggests its communicating with Johansson. She leaves and is startled by the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, presumably noticing "herself" for the first time. When she goes outside, he's no longer ensnared, but is standing outside of her flat, naked. As he walks through the brush to get home, the motorcycle alien is dispatched and they meet, to an unhappy end. Was her selection rejected by the higher-ups because of his face? Did she have a moment of doubt and free him? It's up to interpretation, but clearly the situation required a hasty clean-up.

 That scene is the catalyst for the last section of Under the Skin, which anybody who has seen a movie about aliens pretending to be human will have some idea what follows. It's the only point where I began to question exactly where Glazer was going with the film (mostly when she's in the woods), although the role reversal between Johansson and the logger quickly became apparent. The use of a specific music cue makes it clear, but that, in and of itself, is a setup for a bigger misdirect. In the final moments of the film, at least one mystery makes much more sense (hint: it involves what the title specifically means) and explains the sudden ending to her fascination with actual sexuality - rather than the temptation of it as a means to their ends. Despite slight misgivings, I think the final moments make Under the Skin more potent and illuminate some mysteries and deepen others.

 If you take to Under the Skin - and some may not - it's almost certain it won't be a "one time" movie. I'm already looking forward to watching it again, to pick up on additional clues that point towards the end of the film, as well as to pick apart the symbolic images that make up the pre-title sequence. After more people have seen it (and I hope, if you read this far, you at least saw it beforehand), this review might merit revisiting and a more openly SPOILER-friendly discussion. But, for now, I'm going to avoid getting to specific, and allow audiences to discover Under the Skin for themselves. It's a striking film, visually, and one open to interpretation. "Lynch-ian" in the best sense, or is it "Glazer-ian"?

War of the Blogorium Monsters: Godzilla on Monster Island vs. Godzilla (2014)!

 Okay, gang! The time has come to discuss the King of the Monsters, Godzilla, and because it's not fair to compare the original Gojira with Gareth Edwards' reboot-quel, we'll go with the only other frame of reference I have (because I just watched it): Godzilla on Monster Island (aka Godzilla vs. Gigan). Is it a fair fight? Probably not, but I'm in no mood to talk about Godzilla: Final Wars, Godzilla 2000, or G.I.N.O. (Godzilla In Name Only, aka Godzilla '98), so we're going with the really silly one from 1972 with the Godzilla Tower. It turns out they have a few things in common.

 If you've never seen Godzilla on Monster Island, I am not surprised. I had never seen it, and while I am no authority on kaiju movies (as discussed in my Pacific Rim review), I did know that it follows Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster (Hedora), which I might have seen. This one continues the environment message (kinda) but is mostly a very silly movie. (For the record, I watched the film in Japanese with English subtitles, so please don't jump to the comments to criticize me for watching a dubbed version. I may be approaching this review from the point of general ignorance, but at least I stuck to the rules). In Gojira, the titular character is frightening and a metaphor for nuclear weapons, etc. We all know this, so I don't feel like I'm blowing your minds or anything, and besides, by Godzilla on Monster Island, that really has no bearing on Godzilla as a character.

 The Big G isn't even messing around with Tokyo at the beginning of the movie; he's chilling on Monster Island with the other monsters, many of whose asses he kicked in previous movies (that must be awkward at cookouts), specifically Anguirus (from Godzilla Raids Again). Like most of the Godzilla movies I've seen, it's not really about the monsters for a while, and instead is about a comic book artist named Gengo Kotaka (Hiroshi Ishikawa) and his girlfriend Tomoko Tomoe (Yuriko Hishimi), who, uh, knows Judo. That's the only information about her I really remember, mostly because it's the only thing we find out about her that has any bearing on the story.

 Gengo is having trouble getting jobs with Manga companies because he draws stupid things like "The Monster of Homework" and the monster of "Disapproving Mothers" or something like that which has a resemblance to Tomoko, and you'd better believe she doesn't like that. She sends him on an interview to World Children's Park, a theme park devoted to peace that also features a giant Godzilla Tower. The director, Kubota (Toshiaki Nishizawa) and chairman, Suda (Zan Fujita) of the World Children's Foundation think his dumb monsters are kind of cute, so they hire him. Gengo almost screws it up on his first day when he runs into a woman hightailing it out of the building. She drops a tape and he picks it up, but Kubota and some goons are looking for her and the tape. Gengo lies, which seems like a poor way to make a first impression.

 Meanwhile, the audience is wondering what this corporate espionage has to do with Monster Island, because we paid good money to see a Godzilla movie, dammit, and instead Gengo runs into the girl, Machiko (Tomoko Umeda) and some dude that looks like a hippie, Shosaku (Minoru Takashima) who are out to prove this corporations plans for "peace" are anything but. And, of course, they are right: (SPOILERS) Kubota and Suda are Space Cockroaches using the bodies of dead humans to take over Earth. Why? Well, the planet they come from has been destroyed by pollution and while Earth is also on that path, they're Space Cockroaches and they figure they can curtail it, or something.

 That part of their plan isn't really covered in depth - mostly the film is concerned with the part of their plan that involves killing Godzilla. The tape is one of two parts that, when played, controls Gigan and King Ghidorah in space and will bring them to Earth. But not to kill Godzilla. Oh no, that would be too simple: (MORE SPOILERS) they use them to lure Godzilla to the Godzilla Tower at World Children's Park to shoot lasers at the Big G, because they love technology.

 Gengo, Machiko, and Shosaku play part of the tape and obviously can't understand it (it's in monster), but Godzilla hears that shit and sends Anguirus to check it out. If you don't remember Anguirus, I wouldn't blame you, but he's the kaiju that looks like a spiked armadillo, and is notable for the fact that you feel bad for the "Man in Suit" who has to crawl around and be mostly submerged while swimming to Japan from Monster Island (by comparison, Godzilla is mostly head above water). He kind of sucks and when the Japanese military attack him for trying to come ashore, he says "forget this" and swims back to Monster Island. I can't blame him - he was just doing what Godzilla said to do, nobody said anything about rocket attacks. Sheesh.

 Speaking of which, when Godzilla and Anguirus come back to Japan later in the film, the head of the Defense Force says they "escaped" but it didn't look to me like there was anybody guarding Monster Island. It just seemed more like they kick it on the island, not bothering humans, and come visit if they feel like. I honestly wasn't that familiar with the concept of "continuity" in Godzilla movies, so I apologize if this is a plot element from one of the other eleven movies I forgot about.

 Unlike Anguirus, Godzilla is totally welcome when he gets to Tokyo, or maybe the Defense Force is just too worried about King Ghidorah and Gigan destroying everything to notice. Gigan is the new threat in this movie, and he has metal claws and feat, a metal beak, and a buzzsaw in his stomach so that he can do fly-by's and really ruin someone's day. Godzilla, specifically, but I imagine that it wouldn't be fun for other kaiju to be in his path. Because Anguirus is useless when it comes to almost everything, the Big G has to take on both of the monsters and the Tower, and I'm not going to sugarcoat this: he gets his ass kicked. There's some serious bloodletting here, which was impressive in that I wasn't expecting (SPOILER) to see Gigan fly by and slice Godzilla in the neck with his blade, or the accompanying arterial spray. It's pretty brutal stuff.

 Fortunately our stupid human heroes (SPOILER AGAIN) blow up the Tower by putting dynamite in the elevator behind a drawing of them (good job, Gengo, I guess?) and getting the goons to shoot it. It sucks to be the Space Cockroaches, even though they get an emotional death scene about their hubris which is amusing because you're literally looking at two cockroaches with flames superimposed over them. Their grand plan was for naught, but now that they're no longer controlling Gigan and King Ghidorah, the fighting just becomes about who is the bigger kaiju badass. If you think Godzilla will prevail, you might be right, but not before he gets his ass handed to him some more.

 At some point, Anguirus remembers that he can propel himself backwards and into King Ghidorah, which might have come in handy, oh, any time during their fight, but what are you gonna do. Godzilla has Ghidorah in a three head lock, and he motions for Anguirus to do the only thing he does best, and then to do it again, and then again. I guess they follow the "comedy rule of threes" in kaiju movies, because Godzilla then gives Ghidorah three "belly to neck" suplexes until the King and Gigan decide they've had enough of a whupping and fly back into space. The Big G and Anguirus swim back to Monster Island while a lounge singer extolls their heroism. Godzilla even looks back when Tomoko yells "Thanks!" and kinda waves.

 This idea of Godzilla being less of a threat and more of a "monster we can count on to beat up other monsters" seems to be the prevailing theme in Godzilla on Monster Island, which is also how we seem to view him in the considerably higher budgeted version from this year. Director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, not the sequel to the Charlize Theron movie or the prequel to Monsters University - a pre-prequel, I suppose) doesn't really make any effort to reintroduce Godzilla's origin story to us, and nor should he. The opening credits cover some of the imagery associated with Gojira and uses a clever redaction technique, and later in the film there's a very quick "here's how we know that Godzilla exists" exposition scene from Project Monarch's Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (KenWatanabe) and Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins).

 What's much more interesting about that scene is Serizawa's total faith that Godzilla exists as a natural balancing force when monsters get out of hand. Since Pacific Rim already used "kaiju" in an American movie from a foreign director, Edwards opts for MUTO, or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism (I had to look it up because I forgot the "massive" part). It's a good way to get people to remember what to call them instead of "thing that looks like the Cloverfield Monster" and "other thing that looks like the Cloverfield Monster, but with wings." They feed on radiation and are using echo location to tell each other it's time to get it on. Godzilla is listening in on this (from under the sea, not Monster Island), and will have none of that. No monster scrogging on his watch, thank you very much. Think of him as the Jason Voorhees of kaijus.

 Anyway, as one MUTO heads from Japan to the West Coast of the U.S. to meet the other one, Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn) and his fleet follow, with Godzilla swimming along, sometimes in between the ships. It is an admittedly very cool visual, and I like that Edwards conveys just how big Godzilla is in relation to the ships with the water displacement. It plays a major factor when the Big G gets to San Francisco and (SPOILER for X-Men: The Last Stand, Pacific Rim, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, and this movie) destroys the Golden Gate bridge. In Godzilla's defense, he was a little pissed off that the Navy opened fire on him so that he wouldn't destroy the bridge. I guess that's ironic? Maybe?

 Like Godzilla on Monster Island, we spend the lion's share of the movie with people we couldn't care less about; in this case it's Kick Ass's Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Marcy Martha May Marlene's Elizabeth Olsen, who display the necessarily sibling chemistry that will no doubt be needed from them in The Avengers: The Age of Ultron,when they play Quicksilver and The Scarlet Witch (no relation to Magneto by ruling of 20th Century Fox, thank you.) The problem is that they're supposed to be married and he spends most of the movie trying to get home to her, and yeah, can we please get to Godzilla fighting the MUTOs, thank you very much.

 I am only partially kidding there, because while neither of them are that bad or boring, I really didn't care about either of them. Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche have more chemistry in the five minutes they're on screen together as Taylor-Johnston's parents than he does with Olsen in the entire film. Hell, Watanabe and Hawkins have more chemistry, and they aren't even a couple as far as I could tell.

 Speaking of Bryan Cranston, I hate to tell all of the Breaking Bad fans who were telling me that he was the reason they were so excited to see this some bad news, but here it is: he's not in much of the movie. (STORY ARC SPOILERS) Cranston is in the beginning of the movie, during the meltdown at the nuclear plant he and his wife (Binoche) work at (Janjira) and then he is regarded as a "conspiracy" nut fifteen years later for being convinced it wasn't a meltdown. He is, of course, right, and his son is with him when the first MUTO hatches at the plant, and then he dies... after the walkway he's on collapses. Not even a cool way to go, and then he just dies on the helicopter ride out of there. So yeah, maybe Kick-Ass fans should be more excited to see this, because he's in most of the movie.

 Taylor-Johnston is Lt. Brody, whose job description is "guy who disarms bombs for the military" and who can command the respect of soldiers without providing any credentials at all. He ends up arming a nuclear missile with old fashioned technology that EMP's the MUTOs can release won't knock out. That was weird because the arming mechanism resembled the one I saw the night before in Goldfinger, so head's up if you're planning to watch Goldfinger in the same time frame as Godzilla 2014.

 I'm not really sure what the position on nuclear weapons is in this film, as it's both bad (the MUTOs feed on it and steal the missile) and good(?) (if what I think happened at the end did happen, then that's what maybe saves Godzilla from the epic beat down he endured). Anyway, I guess it's okay that Brody got the bomb out to sea but didn't disarm it and was somehow far away enough from the shore that nobody gets massive doses of radiation while outside the following morning. And Godzilla got enough of a recharge that he was good to go when everybody thought he died. Haha, fooled you guys!

 But in all seriousness Godzilla 2014 is pretty good stuff. I give it some grief but generally speaking the monster fights at the end are worth the price of admission. I liked that Edwards decided to show most of the MUTO mayhem from the perspective of the people on the ground, where they lose sight of monsters in the dust or are falling from a carrier plane and can see part of Godzilla as the descend through the clouds. It's a good visual hook for the film and does convey the sense of carnage better than the obvious miniatures in Godzilla on Monster Island. Although those miniatures are pretty funny looking and are actually being smashed (or being burned with a flamethrower, in the case of tanks) I did chuckle every time Strathairn said "Godzilla," which wasn't nearly as often as I'd hoped.. In most ways, the newer film has the better budget and conveys the power and size of Godzilla better, but it also doesn't have Space Cockroaches.

 And let's be honest here, if you had your druthers, if I offered you a Godzilla movie with your choice of "Cloverfield Monsters" or Space Cockroaches, I think I know which one you'd take. Either way, you're not going to regret it, but Space Cockroaches. I mean, come on.

Bad Movie Night 2014 Recap (Part Two)

 Picking up right where we left off, Dr. Strange ended, and so began the bathroom and smoke breaks that rob every fest of precious movie time, but for those who stuck around, I rewarded them with Crispin Glover's bizarro video for "Ben," his bizarro version of the already bizarre Michael Jackson song. You might have heard it - it's apparently part of the Cirque de Soleil tribute to Jackson - but maybe didn't know it was a love song to a rat. The title song, in fact, to the sequel to Willard, and not the one with Crispin Glover (that was a remake). Later, I played the video again with Glover's commentary, where he speaks without taking a breath for three minutes and gives you more information than you can possibly process about what the hell his video is about. And that, my friends, was the prelude to A Talking Cat?!?

 For years, people have been asking me if I'll show The Room at Bad Movie Night, and for years, I've had to explain that I don't enjoy The Room, even in an unintentionally funny level. I think it's boring in its amateurish execution. Sorry. It just doesn't do anything for me. I understand that many comedians I respect love the movie and extol its virtues, but when I saw it for the first time, I couldn't wait for it to be over. However, it doesn't stop people from asking, so I opted instead to give them what I'd heard what the "Family Movie" equivalent of The Room: A Talking Cat?!? In execution, it's fair to compare it to The Room, but there's something charmingly awful about this stupid little movie that melted our frozen, bitter hearts.

 Maybe it was reusing the same establishing / transitional shots over and over again (including the one where the camera starts shaking), even when they didn't make any sense. Why does the camera cut to the beach when all of the characters live near the mountains? Good question. Is one of the houses clearly a rental, possibly where porn shoots happen, and one that took all of the family photos off of the walls, leaving nails inexplicably featured? Most likely. Does the other house get two, completely different, exterior shots, one that can't possibly be the same house? Yes indeed. And that's just the technical aspects. If I were to tell you that David DeCoteau (pretending to be "Mary Crawford"), director of Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, was behind the camera, all of that would make sense. But I suspect that most of you are wondering about the talking cat.

 The top billed "name" in A Talking Cat?!? is Eric Roberts (Chicks Dig Gay Guys) as the voice of Duffy, the titular character, and it's clear from the moment he starts talking that he recorded all of his voiceover via speakerphone, probably while on the toilet. How much of it is scripted and how much is just Roberts rambling is up for debate, but Duffy (Squeaky) does a lot of narrating and not a lot of talking. That's because he can only talk to a person once. He says he didn't make the rules, but who would have? Anyway, the people at Bad Movie Night were confused because it certainly seems like Duffy is responding to questions before he actually talks to them (kind of like Garfield), but I explained they'd know when he was talking, because of the crude, reverse Clutch Cargo style animation superimposed over his mouth.

 Duffy has a plan to bring two families together and wanders between their houses talking to these weirdos one at a time. There's the single father (Sigmund and the Sea Monsters' Johnnie Whitaker) with his son (Justin Cone), who is clearly gay but is shoehorned into an awkward romance with a girl (Alison Sieke) that is using him to get out of reading her English texts. The other family has an overworked mother (Kristine DeBell, of Alice in Wonderland: An X Rated Fantasy) with a daughter she won't allow to go to college (Janis Peebles) and an idiot son (newcomer Daniel Dannas) who doesn't think he has an imagination. And he probably doesn't. To be honest, I was distracted by the duct tape covering the Apple logo on the daughter's Macbook (not to be mistaken for the Macbook that also has duct tape covering the logo that the single dad has). Oh, they all have names, but you won't care what they are.

 For a long time, we thought that maybe A Talking Cat?!? was about coming to terms with being a closeted teen, especially when the two sons get in the pool together and the one with no imagination teaches the other one how to swim, but apparently not. To be honest, I don't know what the point of A Talking Cat?!? is, other than to give you something new to laugh at in every scene. It's either one of the most poorly executed family films ever, or a work of secret brilliance. There are so many awkward, silly, and stupid moments that you never get bored, which is a plus. The room was howling with laughter towards the end, which should never be the case when a cat is hit by a car, let alone a talking one, but when you see the terrible way they convey that Duffy is "comfortable but not doing well," it's hard not to chuckle. I feel like people who love The Room are really going to take to A Talking Cat?!?, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the better of the two at not achieving anything it sets out to do.

 The bar was set pretty low with A Talking Cat?!?, but met in its own dumb way. Knowing what was to come, I scheduled a movie that seemed like a surefire "winner" - an alien invasion movie made in Texas in the 1980s, with top to bottom bad acting, sets that don't make any sense, and special effects that are anything but. And in that regard, I guess Mutilations succeeded. The rest of the crowd didn't agree, but compared with what followed, it's a charming failure.

 Mutilations is the little movie that couldn't: despite the best efforts of the cast, crew, and visual effects team, there's not much about the film that works. But they're trying so hard to make a good movie that you feel sorry for not enjoying the film. It gets and "A" for Effort and a "D-" for execution. Even at 67 minutes, it feels like the middle goes on for too long. There's a promising set up involving some hobos being, uh, mutilated by a quaint little spaceship and its passengers, done mostly from the alien's perspective. I personally enjoyed Professor Jim McFarland (Al Baker) and his students, each of whom struggle to deliver even one line correctly. Even the guy who seems to be playing Stephen King's character from Creepshow. They're likable losers, and I guess characters, too.

 McFarland, his assistant Ann (Katherine Hutson) and astronomy students travel to a remote country area to study meteorites and / or possible reports of mutilations. How that fits into their field of study is better not to ask, because the first thing they find is a stop motion, inside out cow that the cast is rear projected behind. And there's no mistaking that's what it is. They end up in the house of a hermit when a UFO crashes outside and must find a way out. Now, I could point out that this is the largest "shack" I've ever seen, but the geography of the caves beneath it (bootleggers owned it before the crazy, Harlan Ellison looking dude who has a history with the aliens) is mind boggling.

 Once they get down there, you do get to see the rest of the aliens (prior to that point, it's a set of legs and one arm), and they, um, don't disappoint. The lizard-y things are also crudely stop motion animated, but using some miniatures (why would a bootlegger own a harpoon?), there's a vaguely convincing battle between human and alien. And then we learn flashlights are their weakness. And that 60 year old dynamite takes a very long time to explode. And then it's over. Some people live, some people die, and they gave it their all. I guess Mutilations has the benefit of looking better by comparison to what came next. Because then there was Things...

 Before I tell you about my experience with Barry J. Gillis' low-fi-North of the Border monstrosity, here's a brief sampling of what people who experienced the film Things had to say about it.

 "Things is proof that some independent movies should never be made." - Sarah M.

 "I watched Things and I am not a better person for it. This movie is so bad it may have caused permanent damage." - Patrick C.

"Things. It was definitely a thing. I wish it wasn't." - Neil W.

 "Things is a high-tension roller coaster through your own brain as you question why you thought it was a good idea" - Zak M.

"Things pushes the boundaries of what defines cinema... but not in the way you would hope." - Chris H.

 "Feel like Canada took a shit in your brain? You have just experienced Things." - Matt E. 

I've spent more than my fair share with bad movies over the last twenty years (at least). It's not as though I don't know what I'm getting into here. Usually, the Cap'n has his line and it doesn't get crossed: for example, I've seen exactly one and a half Uwe Boll movies (Blubberella and In the Name of the King), and only two and a half Asylum movies (Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, plus the tail end of Crocosaurus vs. Gatoroid or something like that). There are things I simply know better than to get involved with. I don't know that I'll ever finish Horror of the Blood Monsters / Vampire Men of the Lost World, and I'm okay with that. Sometimes only making it twenty minutes is good enough after four tries.

 That still pales in comparison to watching Things. And I finished Things. Twice. I heard that it was the kind of movie that hurt to watch, but that if you planned on seeing it, you needed to at least watch it again with people who hadn't seen it. Then you could see what it looked like when you watched it. I'm not exaggerating when I say it broke my brain for a while the first time, in a combination of frustration and "what the fuck am I watching" that I haven't experienced since a friend went temporarily insane after the one-two punch of American Wedding and Gigli. Like I said, I know my bad movies. I watched The Happening four times in one year.

 Things is unlike any bad movie I think I've ever seen - a deliberate exercise in not giving a shit about being a horror movie and instead putting the monsters in the background while two guys (Gillis and Doug Bunston) dick around with each other. It was three, but then one of them (Bruce Roach) was "sucked into another dimension" (was not available for filming) only to mysteriously reappear later with a chainsaw, and then be eaten and turn into a talking skull. Bunston's character (also named Doug) dies at least twice and comes back, but the last time might be a dream, unless the whole movie is a dream (which it might be), in which case who knows. The titular characters come as a result of a deal that Doug makes with Dr. Lucas (Jan W. Pachul), in order to impregnate his wife (Patricia Sadler) through some sort of evil ritual or something. There's an evil book and tape recorder in the freezer, as well as Don (Gillis)'s coat. That's where you put it, I guess.

 Anyway, Susan dies and the things come out (they look like big ants with teeth out of Alien) and Fred disappears and Don and Doug (who are brothers) pour alcohol on each other and put bugs in their sandwiches and distract each other from using the bathroom and watch horror movies on TV. Our only respite from this are news reports (?) from porn star Amber Lynn (herself). Half the time she's talking about news that has no bearing on the story, but every now and then she'll mention something that suggests Don and Fred are dangerous people and have been on the run for two weeks, which is either meant to cast doubt on what we're seeing or is just a poorly done example of breaking the fourth wall. Maybe it doesn't matter.

 Confounding the situation is the fact that Gillis shot Things on 8mm without sound, and rerecorded it all in what feels like one go with a single microphone. All the voices are done with one microphone, and many of them sound like the same person making voices. All of the sound effects are one the same way (a sink turns into him pouring water from one cup to another), complete with the muffled sound of the microphone scraping against hands, clothing, etc. To cover this up, there are a series of different music cues from his friends' bands, many of which only make Things more baffling.

 I hated Things the first time I watched it, and I saw it alone, with no one to help ease the mental anguish. The second time, during Bad Movie Night, I decided to sit next to the TV, facing the people who could leave at any time (remember, the door was unlocked) but who subjected themselves willingly to a movie that only wants to infuriate you, to dismantle your brain bit by bit. One person watched the movie with a pillow pressed firmly against his face. Another repeatedly gave me the finger. Many, MANY times I heard the phrases "what?", "what the fuck?", and "fuck you, movie!" as time wore on. Things is a maddening endurance test for even the most hardened bad movie-phile, but when it ends and you hit the title card that says:

 Well, you feel like you earned it, whatever that's worth. And based on the reaction, not much. As an apology, I saved Samurai Cop for last, because if you want a bad action movie to close things out on, this is near the top of the bottom. For reasons beyond me, I was not aware of Samurai Cop, which is a shame, because it beats Bionic Ninja or whatever the name of the movie I tried to show at Bad Movie Night many years ago was. (That ended up being a case of one title being used for many different movies on home video, so the film I thought I ordered in no way matched what we started watching, and that was a shame considering the clip from YouTube).

 Samurai Cop is every bad action movie you've ever seen distilled to the ultimate formula, and then botched horribly in execution. I know that everyone keeps calling Detective / Officer Joe Marshall (Matt Hannon) "samurai," but there's really no evidence of that in the film at all. He has a few bad looking chop sockey fights, some truly awkward sex scenes (I'm not sure that Marshall knows how "sex" works), and a sped up samurai sword fight with Yamashita (Robert Z'Dar) at the end, because they clearly didn't want to really use those swords against each other. Otherwise, it's a lot of gun fights, some explosions, car chases, home invasions, and line delivery that even a robot could improve on. And you love it the entire time.

 Is it fair to assume that Hannon's partner, Frank Washington (Mark Frazer) is high throughout the movie? Maybe not, but he sure looks like it in every reaction shot. Does Robert Z'Dar hide inside of a laundry basket with a trash can in order to cut off someone's head in a hospital? He does, and when he emerges, he's wearing a doctor's coat and credentials, so we can assume he'll just walk out, right? Nope. Back to crouching in the hamper with the severed head in the trashcan. If, for some reason, you're reading a recap of something called Bad Movie Night and you don't know how tall Robert Z'Dar is (or what he looks like), may I suggest looking at this? Now you know why the imagine of him crouching back into the hamper is hilarious.

 There is a precision to action movies, even the terrible ones, that Samurai Cop seems to lack. Maybe it's the fight scene in a garden that abruptly cuts to a different location where Hannon is unmistakably wearing a wig. Yeah, that's probably it, since that happens again. Personally, I kind of liked the little details, like a dog in somebody's yard chasing Hannon and Frazer as they run past, a reminder of how little concern went into making this look like a real movie. But then again, compared to Things, Samurai Cop looked like Lethal Weapon, and A Talking Cat?!? looked like The Godfather*. Even Mutilations looked less crappy in comparison. To be fair, Samurai Cop is endearing in the same way Andy Sidaris movies are, which from my perspective is a compliment. And that ought to be good enough.

 Due to time considerations, we had to skip Battle of the Damned, Suburban Sasquatch, and Destroyer, but all three will make appearances during Summer Fest in July. Stay tuned...

* - Neil W.