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.

Bad Movie Night Recap

 The time has once again come for Bad Movie Night: my shameless celebration of the movies that just aren't quite good enough, but also aren't so terrible they become unwatchable. It's a fine line, and sometimes it's just the right goofy element that pushes it over. Sometimes it's just who you watch it with, and the Cap'n has a fairly loyal crew of masochists willing to descend on Blogorium Headquarters every year. Even though I subjected them to Things last year, they came back. What that says about their cinematic fortitude is up to you, but I'm proud to call them my friends. This year, I opted to give them a less agonizing experience, but not without some serious brain bending. Let's take a look at what you (hopefully) missed out on:

 We started with Devil Girl from Mars, based on the hit London stage play (or, that's what I'd like to believe), and it shows. Despite the fact that a Martian spaceship lands outside of a remote Scottish Inn, most of the motley crew of patrons are concerned with their own stupid problems, leaving time for Naya, the titular character, to enter and exit through the same door, repeatedly. At least it's nice to know that Martians also call their planet Mars. They - well, she - arrived on Earth with her new prototype spaceship, which has organic metal and runs on an engine that creates nuclear reactions that explode inward, creating perpetual motion. Their science is vastly superior to ours, but in the great war of the sexes, all men were wiped out and they need some breeding stock, if you catch my drift. Perhaps if she'd landed in America, rather than Scotland, this would have been an easier task, because the citizens of the United Kingdom are more interested in cockamamie plans to shoot or electrocute her, to no avail.

 Brave newspaper columnist Mike Conner (or Carter, depending on who's saying his name) has the scoop of a lifetime, but would rather his on a fashion model hiding out in the inn. Thankfully his indeterminate accent doesn't bother her, and she even falls in love with him in the two hours between when they meet and when he agrees to join the Devil Girl on her ship. That, of course, is a ruse for him to try to steal the remote control for Johnny, a robot who "looks very similar to you Earth people," in that he looks nothing like humans but instead a guy in a robot costume. Naya has a ray gun that's effective on everything but glasses, constructs an invisible wall that the only scientist in the group somehow runs into headlong, and loves to open the same doors over and over and make sweeping pronouncements about how stupid we humans are. There are other characters, because we clearly care about an escaped adulterer who murdered his wife or some dumb kid, but the innkeeper's husband's name is Jamie Jameson, which is amusing. Also, they sit down to eat dinner at 10 o'clock at night. If only Mike and the Professor had taken the turn to "Loch Something" (actual line), they might have missed this unfortunately duller than it sounds movie.

 Speaking of dull, I hadn't seen Disney's knock-off of Star Wars, The Black Hole, in close to 25 years, so I didn't remember what a bore it was. Fortunately, I also didn't remember a lot of other things about it, like the fact that a 90 minute film had an overture and that all of the music - by James Bond composer John Barry - sounded just like any other Bond music. I did remember the robot with the Texas accent, and that Event Horizon lifted quite a bit from this terrible, terrible movie. When it's not ripping off Star Wars, it's borrowing liberally from the released-the-same year Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Forbidden Planet, and Battlestar Galactica, and pretty much any other vaguely popular science fiction film they could think of. To be perfectly honest with you, we lost interest about fifteen minutes in, started talking about the new music on Star Wars and about The Hobbit, and eventually made some jokes about Ernest Borgnine's libido and the movie Alligator, while pausing to note just how badly one could steal from George Lucas. I might have even said something kind about The Phantom Menace, which might be a first for the Cap'n.

 High School Confidential! eased us out of the "boring" zone of bad movies - hey, I try, but sometimes things just don't land with the crowd - by being entirely too interested in being "hip" and "with it". That works wonders in its favor, because the ridiculous overuse of slang, coupled with what seems to be not even veiled suggestions about incest between Tony (Russ Tamblyn) and his aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren). In Tony's defense, it's mostly one way, and given there's a twist, I guess it's possible that they maybe aren't related, but why would he refer to her as his aunt behind closed doors? There are a number of questionable "bait and switch"-es in High School Confidential!, a movie about Tony moving in to town and taking over the high school drug trade in the course of two or three days. He's tough talking and backs it up, and pops his collar, even when it's on a sweater. Why? Because he's hip, daddy-o.

 There are so many ways to address how hard the writers are trying to sound "cool" and failing miserably: the hip version of Columbus that J. I. Coleridge (John Drew Barrymore) "lays" on his class, or the awful (even for Beat Poetry) performance at a "Jazz Club" the kids all go to. Or the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin, and nothing else. Tony, a "7th year" high school student, immediately starts hitting on his teacher and also moves in on Coleridge's girl, who turns out to be a junkie. The drug kingpins in town are played by Charles Chaplin, Jr. and Jackie Coogan. Yes, Uncle Fester forces Tony to shoot up to prove he's not a narc. But wait, he is! (SPOILER) Tony is really Mike, who works with the cops, and there's a big shootout at the jazz club when a deal goes bad. Fortunately, the leader of The Rangers - played by Michael Landon - is there to help out, even though they're the rival gang to Tony's Wheelers and Dealers. Also, Jerry Lee Lewis begins and ends the film playing the title song, in what appears to be the same shot.

 High School Confidential! picked up the pace a bit, and after a musical interlude, it was time to dive right into Raw Force. It's an almost perfect storm of kung-fu zombie cannibalism interspersed with gratuitous nudity and hokey special effects. And yet, some people were grumbling, perhaps because I oversold the "cannibal monks who raise kung-fu zombies" part of the movie. Yes, most of Raw Force's 86 minutes is devoted to a Kung-Fu cruise to "Warrior Island," where disgraced martial artists are buried. It's also where Hitler sells prostitutes in exchange for jade. Is his name Hitler in the movie? I honestly don't remember, but if he looks like Hitler and talks like Hitler, we're going to go with "that guy is Hitler". The cannibal monks eat the girls because it gives them power to raise the dead, which they use (eventually) for the final showdown.

 In the meantime, there's a lot of showing off of kung-fu skills, coupled with late 70s / early 80s clothes, music, and nudity aboard the cruise ship. Almost everyone on the boat - from the cook to the bartender - seem to know how to fight, and are therefore well equipped to handle Hitler's lackeys. You see, despite the fact that Warrior Island is the home of an illicit human trafficking ring, it's also the subject of its own tourism guide. Because, why wouldn't it? When the cruise ship catches on fire (or, rather, has fire overlaid over the image), some of the passengers escape, and the rest are presumably killed. We never hear from them again, so let's just assume they died. What's important is that the life raft lands on Warrior Island and the monks raise the dead. There's lots of chop sockey, some decapitations, some dynamite, and piranhas. How are there piranhas in salt water, in the ocean? My guess is they couldn't find any stock footage of sharks. So Hitler gets munched on by piranhas (SPOILER).

 Rather than launching into the "Luc Besson Presents an Affront to Science" double feature as promised, I gave them the option of getting the Trappening out of the way, which they decided was best. What they didn't know was that this year's mystery feature wasn't just a Bad Movie - it was a Great Bad Movie. By no stretch of the imagination could one call Commando a "good" movie, but I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most fun films to throw conventional cinema out the window. Continuity errors? Check. Bad one liners? Yessir. Gratuitous nudity? Well, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fight scene, so yep. The mall from Chopping Mall? Sure is! Arnold Schwarzenegger killing an entire army, single-handedly? You know it.

 To get Alyssa Milano back, Arnold will plow his way through David Patrick Kelly (John Wick), Bill Duke (Predator), Dan Hedaya (Alien Resurrection), and finally The Road Warrior's Vernon Wells (Weird Science) for the mother of all bad puns. Oh, and his name is John Matrix, because Rambo is a pansy. I firmly believe that Commando is what everybody thinks all action movies from the 80s are like (that, and First Blood Part II), and why they hold the admittedly average Expendables series to an impossible standard. Matrix is introduced hauling a log down to a cabin (on his shoulder), and then eats ice cream and feeds a deer with his daughter. Because he's tough, but sensitive. Until you steal his daughter, and then he just kills you. Rae Dawn Chong's Cindy isn't even developed enough to have Stockholm Syndrome when she assumes the role of "new mom" at the end, having been kidnapped by Matrix less than twelve hours before. Commando is all killer and no filler, but I asked attendees to give it the same scrutiny as any of our other howlers, which is exactly the point at which you realize the many logic gaps and inherent flaws that make it technically "Bad." Now that everybody was in a great frame of mind, it was time to throw common sense out the door and let Luc Besson insult our basic intelligence...

 I've been hosting official fests for nearly a decade now, and in all that time I have never heard the phrase "wait... what?" as many times as I did during Luc Besson's Lucy. Perhaps the mini-review in the "Worst Of" recap didn't quite convey just how painfully cavalier Lucy is with the concept of "science," but the reactions were hilarious. During the film, at least one large bottle of Kraken was consumed, and descriptions of what they'd seen ranged from "an atrocity" to "amazing." A friend of mine whose dissertation is on Philip K. Dick insists that it's not science fiction at all, but rather a brilliant example of "slipstream," a newer iteration of magical realism. The entire room erupted with laughter when Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) explained that she could "feel her brain" in what's supposed to be heartfelt scene over the phone with her mother. The comical, video-game-esque use of brain percentage "unlocked" was also a source of enjoyment, but nothing stood out quite as much as figuring out how long it took for Johansson to "say this horseshit with a straight face." One viewer worried that she could no longer take Morgan Freeman's Through the Wormhole seriously after seeing him in Lucy. I freely admit that Lucy is a bad movie, but it's a very entertaining one, and it was somewhat validating to see the baffled reactions as they tried to take Besson's affront to science seriously.

 That said, I made a critical mistake in putting Lockout after Lucy, because by comparison, the former is just a "run of the mill bad science fiction film". It's true that after you've heard Scarlett Johansson explain what it's like to feel your bones growing, or to become the monolith from 2001, a high speed unicycle chase just doesn't have the same impact. Even my favorite line of awful science, "the gravity should keep you floating" just can't compete with Besson's double-down on Insane Clown Posse-like disdain for science. Lockout is still a bad movie, and it's insistence on identifying everyone and every location on screen (repeatedly, in the case of the latter) is amusing, but it just wasn't the same head-scratcher that it was in 2012. On the other hand, the outcries of mental anguish reconciling what Lucy was saying vs. what they knew to be true was more than worth it.

 By the end of Lockout, just about everybody was ready to go, but a few stragglers felt like they had one more Bad Movie in them. Despite the fact that it meant Cap'n's Choice - I hadn't planned on anything past Lockout - they were willing to suffer through another one. Being that it was late, or comparatively late (we can't do movies until sunrise anymore), I opted to go short and show Cranpire a "Cranpire Movie": Sorority House Massacre II. As I'll be writing about that and the first Sorority House Massacre soon (and possibly Hard to Die), I won't go too into detail about it, but he enjoyed it. There's barely a plot, and most of the first half of the movie is devoted to showing as much gratuitous nudity as possible, followed by another 30 minutes or so of women running around a house in their nighties and going out in the rain for no good reason. Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall) even takes a pointless side-trip to a strip club to shoehorn in more nudity under the specious logic that one of the characters from a flashback is now dancing topless. Classy stuff.

 For the immediate future, I think I've hit my quota of schlock (although that doesn't rule out watching Furious 7). There's enough time to reload the queue in time for Summer Fest, where I think 80s cheesefests Without Warning and Deadly Eyes are going to be a hit. Thanks to everybody who made it, and to the folks at home who didn't, you now have a roadmap for your own Bad Movie Night. Just have alcohol and a good support system of friends nearby. And whatever you do, don't watch Things.

Quick Review: Leviathan

 On a whim, I decided to watch Leviathan a few days ago. While I'm pretty sure I never saw it on video, there was a sneaking sense of familiarity that crept in as the film played out. Normally I'd attribute that to the fact that Leviathan is a transparent knock-off of John Carpenter's The Thing, crossed with Alien for good measure, but parts of the movie (particularly the ending) rustled up a few memories. Maybe I saw it on television, years ago, and forgot about it. That's both good and bad, because while Leviathan is not what you'd call a good movie, per se, it is exactly the kind of flick that would take Summer Fest by storm.

 Released in March of 1989, Leviathan had the unfortunate distinction of being the third underwater-based thriller, and it landed between the much worse Deepstar Six and James Cameron's The Abyss. In fact, if you remember Leviathan at all (and haven't seen it), you're probably thinking of Deepstar Six. I wouldn't say that Leviathan isn't memorable, but because it isn't as terrible / great as the movies that came out immediately before and after it that are, roughly speaking, the same kind of movie, it went largely forgotten. Directed by George P. Cosmatos (Cobra) and written by David Webb Peoples (Soldier) and Jeb Stuart (Lock Up)*, Leviathan isn't quite bad enough to be really fun, but not good enough to rise above its derivative nature. It's entertaining enough, but that's about it.

 Somewhere off the coast of Florida(?), a crew of deep sea miners are closing out the end of their 60 day shift two miles** below the surface, when they make a strange discovery: a sunken Russian vessel called, appropriately, Leviathan. It appears to have been deliberately sunken, but records indicate that Leviathan is an active ship in the Baltic sea. The corpses of the crew have unusual deformities, and the ships log (a videotape, by the way) indicate some kind of "infection." When the crew members foolishly decide to partake of the vodka pilfered from the Leviathan, strange things begin to happen, and the company they work for backtracks on their promise to extract the team. Can they save themselves, or will the fate of the Leviathan be theirs to share?

 According to IMDB (and, I guess, the credits), the crew of Tri-Oceanic Corp's mining facility have names, but to be honest you're only going to remember them by their nicknames (handily written on their suits, for some reason). Names like "Six Pack," "DeJesus", "Doc," and "Becky," given to the commander of the crew, a geologist with a demonstrable inability to lead. In no particular order, they're played by Peter Weller (Screamers), Daniel Stern (C.H.U.D.), Hector Elizondo (American Gigolo), Ernie Hudson (The Crow), Amanda Pays (Spacejacked), Michael Carmine (Invasion U.S.A.), and Lisa Eilbacher (10 to Midnight), with a special guest appearance by Richard Crenna (Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell) as "Doc." Doc is notably absent when Beck (Weller) is overseeing a routine mining operation that goes bad. DeJesus (Carmine)'s suit malfunctions and almost implodes, and Beck has no idea how to help other than to insist he's fine. He is, in fact, fine and comes back safely, but it's clear nobody trusts Beck's leadership skills. Doc doesn't really have an excuse for where he was or what he was doing (he makes some joke about "golf").

 Early on, Leviathan does its best impersonation of Alien: the crew is just a bunch of blue collar stereotypes trying to get along on the station for "three more days." We're treated to some uninteresting exposition and "character development" in the broadest sense possible: SixPack (Stern) is horny all the time, Jones (Hudson) hates bad weather, Bowman (Eilbacher) has big boobs, Willie (Pays) is British and training for NASA. Eventually Willie and Sixpack find Leviathan, and in his infinite wisdom, Sixpack steals the ship's safe, conveniently the one with all of the medical reports, captains logs, and vodka. Think of it as the "exposition trunk" from Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II. The vodka is spiked, of course, because how else would you trick Russian Naval crew members into being genetically altered?

 Yes, genetically altered. Into fish monsters. (SPOILER) That's about as good of an explanation as Doc can come up with for what happens to SixPack and Bowman, and they just barely get their fused corpses (?) out of the station before all hell breaks loose. Unfortunately for them, a tentacle breaks away and two worm-like monsters grow out of it. Also, Cobb (Elizondo) gets raked across the chest, so he also changes, and uh, yeah. Look, rules stop being important at a certain point - Leviathan kind of turns into The Thing, but without the benefit of the "who's really real and who's infected?" angle. See if you can guess who the last three people to make it to the surface are. Then guess if all three of them are rescued or not. If you've seen Deep Blue Sea, you'll have a rough idea.

 I'm not convinced that Leviathan takes place in the future, because while there weren't any deep sea mining expeditions / stations to my knowledge in 1989, everything from the technology to the fashion inside the station screams "Late 80s" and when the survivors surface, there's nothing about the rescue copter or the base they land on that similarly makes the case it wasn't contemporaneous. But then again, there's all sorts of gear used for mining underwater (including the suits) that seem suspiciously high tech in a low rent way. It's not really addressed, so you can speculate as you watch Leviathan, I guess.

 What Leviathan has going for it is that the goopy, gooey monster effects (that also remind you of The Thing) are courtesy of makeup vets Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis (every Alien movie after the first one) and a willingness to be pretty gross. That's good, because other than rampant profanity from Weller and Hudson late in the movie, Leviathan is pretty tame. I can easily see how it can be cut down to air on television, although I have no idea how they get away with the last shot on broadcast television. The ending, in fact, is the reason I'd really recommend Leviathan - it's a one-two punch (almost literally) of "no, they aren't really going to do that" moments guaranteed to elicit laughter when it really shouldn't. One of them moves Leviathan into "also ripping off Jaws" territory. The other involves the shady Tri-Oceanic Corporation representative, played by Meg Foster (They Live). Both of them involve Peter Weller doing things I did not expect him to in any movie.

 To be honest, Leviathan isn't really anything remarkable, but it's charming in a lowbrow way. It has just enough going for it to keep you interested, but you probably won't remember a lot of the movie thirty minutes later. You'll have fun if you pair it with a few cold ones and some like minded friends, but it's hardly the sort of movie that's going to make or break your weekend. If you happen to like The Abyss, Jaws, John Carpenter's The Thing, and want to see what it looked like if the "B" team had a go at it, Leviathan is right up your alley. It's really the kind of movie that Syfy should be making, the kind of "B" movie that used to be more prevalent. Nowadays it would look a lot cheaper and be crammed on shelves with other lousy CGI "spectacles" and "mockbusters." So on that level, I guess it has an edge. So that's something Leviathan has going for it: it's the kind of "B" movie that you'd like to see more of these days.



 * Yes, that's a totally unfair representation - Cosmatos also directed the much better known Tombstone and Rambo: First Blood Part II. Peoples wrote or co-wrote Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys, Unforgiven, and Ladyhawke. Stuart co-wrote Die Hard and The Fugitive. That said, it's a stretch to say Leviathan is anywhere near those movies.
** If you want to get technical, the opening text states the team is 16,000 Mikes Below the Surface, which is more than two miles, but at one point Jones says something about being "two miles" away from escaping.

Summer Fest Recap: Day Three

 Summer Fest 6 has come to a close! It was a fun ride while it lasted, but now boring things like work have to come back and assert themselves. Still, it was nice to spend the weekend in a hermetically sealed dome of B-Movies with willing victims participants. Despite a brief technical hiccup that cut our list of movies from four to three, I'd say things closed out with a bang. Let's take a look, shall we?

 From Hell It Came!

 Year of Production: 1957

 What's the Haps, Cap?: On a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific, science collides with tribal practices (badly), and it's going to cost Kimo (Gregg Palmer) his life. When the American physicians fail to save the tribe's Chief, Kimo's father, from infection, witch doctor Tano (Robert Swann) and new Chief Maranka (Baynes Barron) seize the opportunity to accuse Kimo of betraying his people and sentence him to death. With his wife, Korey (Suzanne Ridgeway), conspiring with Tano and Maranka, Kimo has no hope and vows to avenge this injustice from the grave. He will become Tabonga, the resurrected spirit of vengeance!

 Who's the Hero: I guess it would be the American scientists, although they really make things worse, if you ask me. Not by failing to convince the tribe to let them help with inoculations, but by removing Tabonga from Kimo's grave, nursing it back to health, and shooting it with an experimental drug that makes it stronger! Oh, I suppose I should introduce these geniuses of "science": there's Doctor William Arnold (Tod Andrews), Professor Clark (John McNamara), and Eddie (Mark Sheeler), an Army Sergeant who helps with the radio and protection. Eventually Doctor Terry Mason (Tina Carver) arrives, but don't think you're going to get some impressive show of gender equality here. This is the 1950s, and Dr. Mason is strictly in the movie so that William can try to woo her away from her life of science and instead marry him and move back to the states. Tellingly, Mason is the one who foolishly helps nurse Tabonga back to life after they accidentally kill it, and is (SPOILER) inexplicably also dragged away near the end of the film. That'll teach you to be interested in work instead of housewife-ry, young woman!

 Hold On, Tree Monster?: Yep. The primary appeal of From Hell It Came is that the monster is a dude in a tree outfit. It has a face kind of like the trees in The Wizard of Oz, but with all the mobility of, well, a tree. The legs kind of work, but whoever made the suit didn't bother to put in arms that function above the elbows, so Tabonga comically grasps at anything and barely manages to make contact. Because of the limited visibility in the suit, Tabonga is constantly hitting branches with its head, and when it isn't shaking people to death, it casually drops them in quicksand.

 Bad Science: Not satisfied with Tabonga just being a native superstition / supernatural form of vengeance, our "scientists" surmise that its existence could be a side effect of atomic bomb testing (like in Attack of the Crab Monsters). Sure enough, when they put the ridiculously over-sized tree monster on the operating table, his blood is "highly radioactive," and yet they make no effort to avoid direct contact. Mason's experimental serum has never been tested on anything larger than small animals, but she's wanted to "try it on a human," so a tree monster is basically the same, right?

 Other Bad Ideas: Other than the tree monster? Well, most of the "tribe" is comprised of white actors pretending not to be. The Witch Doctor's Brooklyn accent is hard to miss, but then again his ability to throw a spear at Tabonga should also be hard to miss, but he's off by a mile. There's the persistent casual sexism, which is almost as bad as Dr. Chet Walker's ass slap in Creature with the Atom Brain. Almost everything that happens in From Hell It Came seems like a bad idea.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Geiger Counter, Casual Sexism, Tropical Setting, Questionable Science, Monsters That Hate Radios, Movies Made in the Same Year.

 Final Prognosis: From Hell It Came is the sort of movie that makes it clear from moment one that you're in for a half baked movie. It's goofy, filled with inconsistent logic, and has one of the goofiest monsters you're going to see. If you don't mind the sometimes astonishing level of patronizing sexism on display, it can be an enjoyable romp as a B-movie.


 Zaat!

 Year of Production: 1971

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Mad Scientist Dr. Leopold (Marshall Grauer) is planning on taking over the world by transforming all living creatures into Catfish, starting with himself. Who will stop him? Will he find a Bride of Catfish Man? Will he at least stop wandering around and do something? Will anybody stop wandering around and do something? Will you watch this movie in the non-MST3k version (The Blood Waters of Dr. Z)? Should you?

 Who's the Hero: We spend the first, oh, thirty minutes with Dr. Leopold as he walks around - the beach, his lab, some buildings outside of his lab - and then he turns into Catfish Man, and we follow him some more. But he IS the villain, so I guess our heroes are supposed to be Sherriff Lou Krantz (Paul Galloway) and the INPIT Team of Martha Walsh (Sanna Ringhaver) and Walker Stevens (Dave Dickerson). Those are probably not porn names, if you ask me, but I might be wrong. Anyway, I prefer to think of our hero as Rex (Gerald Cruse), who is a marine biologist inexplicably working for the BFE, FL police department. The Sheriff is perfectly content to sit on the job, and the INPIT investigators don't show up until an hour or so in. Of course, we don't actually know Rex's name until the INPIT team gets there, or maybe I didn't hear the Sheriff say it. He's the only person making a concerted effort to put the pieces together about the mysterious murders and appearances of Catfish all over town.

 Bad Science: Oh goodness, where to start... I'm still not sure exactly how Dr. Leopold's serum turned him into a Catfish Man, and why he can turn anything else into a Catfish by using a spray bottle(!). But that happens. Only his attempt to turn "Girl Camper" (Nancy Lien) into his first bride fails miserably. Everything else seems to go according to his very clearly written out circular calendar. But moving away from that, I'd like to point out that at the end of the film, when apparently the serum involves some radiation, Walker Stevens holds a Geiger Counter out like a metal detector into the air, assuming that will lead him to the source. And then he gets it wet, and is bitten by a water moccasin, but continues walking. I'm positive that in one shot he was right in from of Dr. Leopold / Catfish Man, but then he just keeps going. Oh, and the title refers to elements Za and At, which are the catalysts for Leopold's stupid transformation.

 Other Bad Ideas: Never hire a secretary as your lead female protagonist, unless you really want to show off her shorthand note taking. It's better than her line delivery, for sure. Generally speaking, don't have everybody just wander around for the entire movie, often with interior monologues that would make HAL 9000 sound thrilling by comparison. Never have chase scenes where nobody bothers running, ever. Seriously, this makes the car chase in Mitchell look like Bullitt. I'm pretty sure the drugstore that Catfish Man breaks into was deserted, but whatever works for you. And then there are the hippies and casual racism in 1970s Florida, which leads me to...

 What the Hell Did I Just See / Hear?: Let's cover the hippies first. So the Sheriff has locked down town, declared Marshall Law, etc. He gets wind that some hippies are having a stupid hippie jam session and goes to clear it out, but when he gets there, the stupid song about Jesus wins him over. He taps along in what's clearly a different location while the hippies sing and have a flute solo, and then the merry gang marches back to the police station, still singing, and the Sheriff locks them up, "for your own safety." And they let him do it! But that's not the strangest moment in Zaat. There are plenty of strange moments, but the one that stands out for me is what has to be an unscripted bit of dialogue caught on film where a citizen refers to the Sheriff as a "n****r lover". Oh, did I not mention that Rex was black? The only black character in the entire movie? Well, he is, and nobody in the movie seemed to car at all except for this one guy. If that's unscripted, it's bad, but if, by some chance, somebody wrote that? Wow. I mean, just, wow.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Evil Scientists, German Doctors, Geiger Counter, Questionable Science, Boring Main Characters,

 Final Prognosis: Zaat! is a very leisurely movie to be so liberal with its exclamation points. I'd be hard pressed to call anything in this movie "exciting" or even "slumber rousing," although more people made it through this than Destroyer. If you can get past the beginning, where Dr. Leopold is meandering around his lab, beyond the interminable voice-overs, the transformation is pretty funny, and the spray bottle is really funny. Then it kind of gets boring again, but the casual racism in INPIT help mitigate that. The climax of the film takes 20 minutes, and most of that is people walking through a swamp. I'm really not sure how Dave Dickerson didn't end up being bit by that water moccasin. The ending is surprisingly dark, but by the time you get there it's more of a "what?" reaction than anything else. Oh well, the hippies seemed to be okay with being arrested. Good job, hippies.


 Sleepaway Camp

 Year of Production: 1983

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Angela (Felissa Rose) has been living with her aunt Martha (Desiree Gould) and cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) after her father and brother were killed in a boating accident. Aunt Martha is insisting that both cousins attend Camp Arawak this summer, and despite her obvious misgivings, the mostly silent and totally withdrawn Angela goes along. Camp Arawak is, it turns out, a melting pot of perverts, bullies, and sleazeballs, and as Angela navigates the hierarchy of summer camp, someone is killing the people who wrong her, one by one...

 Who's the Hero: It's kind of hard to call Angela the "hero" of Sleepaway Camp: she's catatonic for the first half of the film, and only speaks when Paul (Christopher Collet) shows interest in her. Ricky is kind of our dual-protagonist, and other than them, camp counselors Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo) and Gene (Frank Trent Saladino) are the only non-sleazebag characters. Everybody else, from scumbag owner Mel (Mike Kellin), child molesting cook Artie (Owen Hughes), and tag team "Queen B's" Judy (Karen Fields) and Meg (Katherine Kamhi) have "kill me" signs hanging from their necks. And boy, oh boy, do they get theirs.

 Bad Science: I'm pretty sure that, even if you were seriously allergic to bees, what happens in that bathroom stall could never actually happen to someone. I'm not going to weigh in on the hair curler kill - if that's enough to (SPOILER) kill Judy, then fair enough. Also, while I'm not going to spoil the ending, I'm just going to point out that, like everybody else, Angela is wearing short shorts throughout the movie. If you know how it ends, you know what that means.

 Other Bad Ideas: While watching Sleepaway Camp again, I forgot that most of the people in this movie are roughly the age they're playing, which makes it all the creepier that we're watching 13-16 year olds in various states of undress. To be fair, most of the skin in Sleepaway Camp comes from the older (male) campers, who were probably 18, but it's hard not to feel a little uncomfortable watching the movie. Remember as well that the final scene (again, not SPOILING here) involves 14 year old Angela. 14. That some "To Catch a Predator" shit right there. As to actual, in movie, bad ideas, let's just say that Aunt Martha takes the cake and leave it at that. Her "plan" might be the worst idea in the many Bad Ideas of Summer Fest. I suppose you could argue that making a slasher movie that's mostly just about summer camp is questionable, but it works in its own way. But killing the little kids? (SPOILER) Not cool, Robert Hiltzik. Not cool.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Gratudity, Vehicular Chicanery, Flashbacks, Space Cockroaches (nah, just kidding - there weren't many recurring themes this time around).

 Final Prognosis: Speaking as a fan of Sleepaway Camp, there's no arguing that the ending is the only reason horror fans remember this film at all. It's kind of like Meatballs with random murders interspersed throughout, which isn't always a bad thing, but you're definitely better going with The Burning for summer camp slashers. I mean, we did at Summer Fest III. Sleepaway Camp has a decidedly off-kilter tone, which keeps it strange enough to get you through the softball scene and the capture the flag scene. Everything with Aunt Martha is so bizarre that it skates right up to the edge of "camp" (no pun intended). In retrospect, it's easy to forget that this movie is about really young teens and pre-teens, which makes things more disturbing. Why would Meg have the hots for Mel, who is easily three times her age (at least)?  Still, it's miles better than Sleepaway Camp 2 and 3, which are better as slasher movies but not really anything else. Not offense to Hiltzik, but I'm going to refrain from mentioning Return to Sleepaway Camp. The only reason I haven't SPOILED Sleepaway Camp as I do so frequently with other movies is that if you're going to see it, it's better not to be prepared for the last scene. I'm just saying, is all.

 Overall, I'm going to give Summer Fest 6 a "Pass" in the "Pass / Fail" grading system implemented by Cap'n Howdy. There were low points, and there were high points. Fortunately, the high points outweighed the lows, or most people slept through the real stinkers. Please don't ask me what Cranpire was thinking during Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II, or why he insisted I include that tidbit in the review. You'd have to ask him, and I bet he's already forgotten.

 I'll see you all in October for Horror Fest IX: Howdy Goes To Hell!

Summer Fest Recap: Day Two (Part One)

 We're heading into the second stretch of Summer Fest movies for Saturday, but before that happens, let me catch you up on what we've been enjoying (or, enduring) so far...

 Attack of the Crab Monsters

 Year of Production: 1957

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Scientists land on a remote island in the Pacific, where they predecessors mysteriously vanished. In fact, there's nothing on the island other than seagulls and crabs. Almost immediately after setting ashore, the Navy plane that transported them explodes during takeoff and they find the radio isn't functional. Oh, and something in the water decapitated a seaman with almost no effort. They'd better find out what happened before the constant earthquakes reduce the island to nothing... and that's the least of their concerns.

 Who's the Hero?: Well, everybody takes turns being incompetent or simply not interested in the bizarre circumstances surrounding them, but the last three alive are Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson), Dale Drewer (Richard Garland), and Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan). They represent the "radio engineer" and "biologist" divisions, respectively. There's also the botanist, Jules Devereaux (Mel Welles), the nuclear expert, Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), and Dr. James Carson, who, uh... I don't remember. I think he's the one with the severely cleft chin. It doesn't much matter, because director Roger Corman is moving at such a breakneck pace that only the audience seems to know what's supposed to be happening on-screen. The characters sure don't seem to care: Weigand tells the others that he has a theory but doesn't want to tell them "right now."

 Oh, there are also a couple of other seamen who are in charge of the dynamite and grenades:  Ron Fellows (Beach Dickerson)  and Jack Sommers (Tony Miller). One of them embodies the stereotypes about men "in the Navy," although nothing is ever mentioned about it. I guess that would fall under the "surprisingly progressive" category, if Attack of the Crab Monsters had anything to be surprisingly progressive about otherwise.

 Bad Science: Where to start? Well, it is suggested the titular monsters have inherited the ability to become mercurial in composition, and thusly can't be harmed by conventional weapons (unless it's convenient for Corman). They also consume their victims and absorb their memories, which allows them to communicate via radio signal into anything metal. This is how they draw the otherwise sensible scientists to their doom (when they aren't doing that themselves). They hate electricity for some reason - the explanation is a doozy - and there's lots of mumbo jumbo explanations for how any of this could happen. Most of it is tied to the fact that the island is south of Bikini Atoll, and that the nuclear fallout caused the crabs to "evolve."

 Other Bad Ideas: Generally speaking, if you tell your fellow scientists not to climb the rope DOWN into a hole created by earthquakes, you shouldn't ask them to climb UP the same rope ten minutes later. Maybe that's just me. Also listening to the disembodied voices of your colleagues who only contact you in the middle of the night and want you to go to the caves is not smart. And this is after they know that the crabs are in the cave. Corman is known for shooting fast and loose, so it's almost pointless to continue listing decisions that are in direct contradiction to characters just saw / experienced. Instead I'll point out that Attack of the Crab Monsters has some very good gore for 1957 - the first death is by decapitation, and later the botanist (with his outrageous French accent) loses a hand - all on camera.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Geiger Counter, Monsters That Hate Radios, Questionable Science, Using the Dead for Nefarious Purposes, German Doctors, Crab-related Chicanery, Surprisingly Violent.

 Final Prognosis: Sure, it would be very easy to pick apart the many things about Attack of the Crab Monsters that don't make sense. The lazy screenwriting, the lapses in judgment by just about everybody, or the crab monsters, but the movie is so much fun you don't really mind. Even as a young filmmaker, Roger Corman knew how to deliver the thrills with a good gimmick, even if it didn't make a lick of sense. The kills are pretty violent and the ending is pretty dour. What's not to enjoy?


 Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

 Year of Production: 1987

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is a wild child, even for 1957: on Prom night, she drops by the church for "confession," and prepares for her inevitable crowning of "Prom Queen." When her boyfriend, Billy (Steve Atkinson) finds Mary Lou making out with Buddy Cooper (Robert Lewis), he takes his revenge by ruining her crowning. Unfortunately, his stink bomb sets her on fire, and Mary Lou is never crowned. But that's not going to stop Mary Lou from finding a way to come back and take revenge...

 Who's the Hero?: Unfortunately, it's not Mary Lou. Nope, it's Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon), who may go down in film history as the most boring protagonist in horror films. During the film, one Summer Fest attendee asked "why did they put a blank sheet of paper on the screen" during a close up of Vicki. She's so boring that even when (SPOILER) Vicki opens the "trunk of exposition" and is possessed by Mary Lou that you can barely tell the difference in the character. There's only one reason I can think of that the producers and director went with Lyon, and I can boil it down to three words: full frontal nudity. I suppose that Michael Ironside as the adult Bill might also qualify - it does, at least, explain why a high school senior has such pronounced balding patterns.

 Bad Science: Not really that much. Maybe when Josh (Brock Simpson, who is somehow in all four Prom Night movies) is killed by electricity coming out of the monitor of his computer. It's hard to say, because Mary Lou is using her evil powers to punish him for changing the votes. Mostly, Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II doesn't bother with "science."

 Other Bad Ideas: Trying to make a sequel to Prom Night that has nothing to do with the movie Prom Night is probably the one I should mention first. Hello, Mary Lou is more of a rip-off of Carrie, but with strong, persistent references to the Nightmare on Elm Street films (of which Part 3 would be coming out roughly around the same time), but other than including Brock Simpson, there's nothing beyond the title to suggest it's related to Prom Night. I hate to continually pick on Wendy Lyon, but she has such a lack of presence that it's actually a relief when Mary Lou bursts through her body (shades of Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and takes over for the end of the movie. The shower scene where Vicki prances around naked makes Gratudity seem tame by comparison, but it doesn't make Vicki any more interesting. Also, technically speaking, it rips off the end of Scanners by way of the ending of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

 Unusually Progressive Moment: An integrated prom in 1957. I'll chalk this up to the film being made in Canada, but I'm guessing it's supposed to be somewhere in middle America, so that was notable. Also, Mary Lou apparently swings both ways, if the school shower sequence is any indication.

 Something Cranpire Asked Me to Tell You: He wants you to know that, following the surprising inclusion of an integrated prom in the 1950s, he decided to count all of the "black people" in Hello, Mary Lou. There were 26.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Religious Imagery, Gratudity, Vehicular Chicanery, Flashbacks, Killing the Most Interesting Character Off Too Early, Boring Main Character, Psychic Powers, Fake Out Dream Sequences, Attempted Exorcism.

 Final Prognosis: There are a lot of great kills in Hello, Mary Lou: Prom Night II, including a fake-out, Final Destination-esque murder of Vicki's friend Jess (Beth Gondek), moments after we find out she's pregnant. The aforementioned naked Mary Lou crushes a girl with her locker, which is a nice way to close out that scene. There are some good visual effects, but wow is Vicki a walking piece of toast. It's hard to recommend this movie, even as silly and campy as it can be, because you have to spend most of it with a protagonist that sucks the life out of every scene she's in. Approach with caution - the 80s cheese is frequently off-set by Vicki.


 Suburban Sasquatch

 Year of Production: 2004

 What's the Haps, Cap?: A sasquatch is roaming around the woods outside of a suburb, killing people because that's what they do. A reporter teams up with a Native American warrior to stop him. Arms are torn asunder. Bad acting prevails.

 Who's the Hero?: I guess the reporter and the warrior. We gave up on the plot after about 13 minutes.

 Bad Science: Probably? Again, after 10 minutes of excruciating amateur acting, we skipped around to the sasquatch kills and then moved to the next movie.

 Other Bad Ideas: Making this movie.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Surprisingly Violent, Choosing a Movie Nobody Wanted to Finish.

 Final Prognosis: Look, I wanted to give Suburban Sasquatch the benefit of the doubt and watch the whole thing. Summer Fest has long been home to the no-budget, backyard splatter films. Sometimes you get an instant classic like Blood Car. Sometimes you get a more ambitious, but less successful, good try like Rise of the Animals. And sometimes you get Suburban Sasquatch, that tries to cram long dialogue scenes in with people who can't act. That conversation in the "newspaper office" that goes on forever was the straw that broke the camel's back. The "sasquatch" (guy in the ape costume) and the extremely violent kills very funny. The awful "day for night" at the beginning was pretty funny. But it wasn't enough to keep us from getting bored very quickly, so Suburban Sasquatch joins ThanksKilling 3 in the "Fest Killer" pile.


 Creepshow 2

 Year of Production: 1987

 What's the Haps, Cap?: The sequel to George Romero and Stephen King's Creepshow tells three tales - "Old Chief Wood'nhead," about a Native American statue that avenges the death of his owners, "The Raft," which follows four college students who go swimming in the wrong lake, and "The Hitchhiker," about a woman who can't seem to shake a pesky hitchhiker, even after she accidentally kills him.

 Who's the Hero?: I guess Billy (Domenick John) from the live action / animated prologue, who reads Creepshow, and maybe The Creep  (Tom Savini, and voice of Joe Silver), who provides us with Tales from the Crypt-esque transitions between stories.

 Bad Science: There's no way a car would run after the abuse Annie (Lois Chiles) puts it through in "The Hitchhiker." Also, if you drove 50 miles to the abandoned lake and left your car running with the doors open and music blaring, there's no way it would still be on the next morning.

 Other Bad Ideas: Making a sequel to Creepshow where Stephen King is minimally involved and George Romero isn't directing. Oh, and story-wise, spending the first twenty minutes of the film setting up the characters of Ray and Martha Spruce (George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour) in "Old Chief Wood'nhead" and then killing off the villains in a five minute montage to close out the segment. It really stops Creepshow 2 dead in its tracks before it has time to get going. The other two segments aren't that bad, but the first one takes forever to go anywhere and then skips right through the best part. Story-wise, almost everything everybody does is a bad decision - why try to swim back to the shore farthest away from you when there's a much closer option that also has a path leading away from it? Why drive your car into the woods twice to shake an undead hitchhiker? How did you get to the raft without getting that joint wet?

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Gratudity, Movies Made in the Same Year, Vehicular Chicanery, Southwestern Locations, Surprisingly Violent, Using the Dead for Nefarious Purposes.

 Final Prognosis: There's a reason that most people don't talk about Creepshow 2: it just isn't very good. Cranpire realized halfway through the first segment that he'd never seen it, and by the end I'm not sure he was better off having experienced the film. Everything about Creepshow 2 feels low rent, from the animated segments to the story structure to the "well, I guess we're done" ending. There's almost no point to having Tom Savini play the live action Creep, because you can't hear him, and the animated version looks nothing like the makeup. If I hadn't shown Creepshow at an earlier Fest, that would have easily taken the place of Creepshow 2, the definition of "the law of diminishing returns."


 And now it's time to launch into a double feature of action schlock, followed by some kaiju action, a surprise Trappening, and then we'll close it out with a slasher flick that looks like another Shocker. Well, a Cap'n can hope, right?

Summer Fest Recap: Day One

 Greetings, virtual Summer Fest-ers! Welcome to Cap'n Howdy's handy recap-o-rama-rama, covering all of your Hyde Park Summer Fest Massacre Part 6 needs!

 This year I'm going to try something a little different in covering the films watched during the Fest. Instead of full write-ups that take much longer and give away too much, I'm going to appropriate the structure of "Hamlet Week" from a few years ago to give you some idea how these movies work in tandem with each other. Fest entries often have some shared elements, and you'll find that many selections this year overlap in the most unusual ways.

 We started the Fest with:

 Creature with the Atom Brain

 Year of Production: 1955

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Gangster Frank Buchanan (Michael Granger) wants revenge on men who betrayed him, so he forces ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gay) to reanimate the dead using radioactive blood and electrodes implanted in the brain. They are controlled by Buchanan's voice and take vengeance on his enemies. Police are baffled and eventually declare Marshal Law on "Our City."

 Who's the Hero?: Dr. Chet Walker (Richard Denning), who works in the police laboratory, along with his brother(?) Capt. Dave Harris (S. John Launer). They try to work out the source of the radiation and the common element between murders, until (SPOILER) Buchanan kills Dave and uses him to get to the targets in police custody. Dave also shows up at Chet's house, confuses his wife, Joyce (Angela Stevens), and daughter Penny (Linda Bennett). Zombie Dave breaks Penny's doll, presumably because, in death, he's a jerk.

 Bad Science: Chet mixes up a radioactive concoction in the police laboratory using chemicals on his desk to prove that the blood they found wasn't blood. Buchanan and Steigg's highly radioactive lab is accessed through a plastic tunnel that's open on both sides and is attached to a door that anybody could open at any time. Planes specially rigged to detect high amounts of radiation repeatedly fly over Steigg's "shed" and never find anything. The device that controls Steigg's zombies kinda looks like The Tingler.

 Other Bad Ideas:  Chet jumps out of a car moving at high speeds and shows no signs of injury. He also shares confidential police investigation information with Joyce, who then tells Zombie Dave / Buchanan everything needed to kill men in protective custody. Nobody notices the obvious scars from brain surgery. Buchanan's suit is too big. Never give your producers a role that requires them to say more than one line of dialogue. Other characters calling Dr. Chet Walker "Joe" throughout the film.

 Unusually Progressive Moments: Penny gives her girl doll a boy's name, and argues with Dr. Chet Walker when he protests. This is offset by Chet's casual ass-slap of Joyce when he comes home from work. The Ex-Nazi scientist objects to Buchanan's plan and wanted to use his experiments for good, although it's not clear how.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Geiger Counter, Questionable Science, Using the Dead for Nefarious Purposes, Marshal Law, Monsters That Hate Radios, Explosions in Close Proximity to Actors, German Doctors.

 Final Prognosis: Creature with the Atom Brain starts off with a bang, becomes a boring procedural, and then has a surprisingly violent conclusion. Lots of bad science and examples of 1950s casual sexism. We're continually introduced to characters by seeing their name and job title on an office door. It wasn't clear that Dr. Chet Walker was the hero until about halfway in, but the ending kind of makes up for the lackluster mid-section. It's always nice to start the Fest with some Bad Science.

 Remote Control

 Year of Production: 1988

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Aliens are using a videotape called "Remote Control" to beam a signal to Earth. Anyone who watches the tape is driven to murder, and only two video store clerks can save the day...

 Who's the Hero?: Cosmo (Kevin Dillon), Georgie (Christopher Wynne), and later on, Belinda (Deborah Goodrich). Jennifer Tilly appears briefly as Allegra (with a truly 80s hairdo), but is killed by Victor (Frank Beddor), Belinda's boyfriend. Oops, SPOILER.

 Bad Science: Ummmm the aliens also try to send their signal through a plastic antenna in the "Remote Control" store display?

Other Bad Ideas: Cosmo kills a police officer, steals his car, and wonders why people are chasing him. When our heroes discover the company responsible for Remote Control (run by Asians, plus the grandpa from TerrorVision) has a truck full of tapes with a delivery list, they follow the list but don't destroy the tapes inside. Cosmo tries to woo Belinda by watching a dubbed version of Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, and it doesn't work out for him. Never give Cosmo a gun - he's a terrible video store employee, but a great killer.

Uniquely 80s Moments: Other than everything about Jennifer Tilly in the movie? Well, Remote Control is about video stores and tapes, so if you tune out of the movie, there are many opportunities to get lost in background details. Posters and VHS artwork are just about everywhere in the film, and director Jeff Lieberman (Squirm, Satan's Little Helper) and his production designers have a great eye for finding weird juxtapositions. In what other movie would you find a copy of Tess next to the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice? Also, every video store in Los Angeles had the poster for House, according to this movie. Make sure to check out the Retro club, which for 1988 is anything but.

 Wait, Did You Say All the Villains Are Asian?: According to the IMDB trivia, Lieberman did this as a tribute to Japanese sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 60s, so I guess that's... okay? I should point out the Main villains are Asian - lots of possessed people are just normal 1980s Caucasians.

Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Aliens, Films Released in the Same Year, Explosions, Mind Control, Killing the Most Interesting Character Off Too Early, Boring Main Character, Vehicular Chicanery.

 Interesting Sidenote: During Remote Control, not a single person could name one other movie Kevin Dillon had been in. I forbade the use of IMDB until after the film was over, at which point we realized how many he had been in that we had seen. Still, without looking it up, name one.

Final Prognosis: Remote Control is an amusing sibling to TerrorVision. It's not quite as campy, and Kevin Dillon has about as much charisma in this film as a toaster, but it moves at a brisk pace, is unusual enough to keep you invested, and has a ton of background details to smooth over the bumps. The only way to get it at the moment is to order it from the director (like I did), but if you like TerrorVision, it's worth considering.


 The Visitor

 Year of Production: 1979

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Uh... Well, have you ever seen The Omen? It's kind of like that, except not.

 Who's the Hero?: Well, I guess maybe the title character, played by director John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). He's from outer space, and after interrupting Space Jesus (Franco Nero)'s story about the evil General Sateen, he flies - via Eastern Airlines - to Atlanta to hang out on rooftops with a bunch of bald dudes. Eventually he starts stalking Katy Collins (Paige Conner), the improbably Southern daughter of Barbara Collins (Joanne Neil) and Dr. Sam Collins (Sam Peckinpah). Katy is also somehow the progeny of Sateen, and has psychic powers that she uses to mess with basketball players and people ice skating. Oh, and she has a pet falcon, that she keeps inside of their apartment.

 What the Hell is This Movie???: I know, right? Nothing about The Visitor makes any sense, and I'm not even halfway through the setup of the plot. Barbara is divorced from Sam and is dating Raymond Armstead (Lance Henriksen), who owns The Atlanta Rebels basketball team and is also part of a secret cabal of Sateen worshipers run by Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer), who want him to impregnate Barbara with a boy, because that would be better than Katy. Also, when Katy accidentally(?) shoots her mother in the spine during a birthday party, a nanny / housekeeper (Shelley Winters) comes in and slaps the living hell out of Katy. Detective Jake Dunham (Glenn Ford) is investigating the shooting, until Katy calls him a pervert and the falcon causes some serious vehicular mayhem. Did I mention that most of this paragraph happens before the halfway point of The Visitor?

Bad Science: Take a look at the first two entries. See anything that sounds remotely plausible in there? I guess after Raymond fails and Dr. Walker sends him away, the cabal stages an "alien invasion" that results in Barbara being pregnant (how she drives while paralyzed and without hand controls isn't even addressed), so she has to go to Sam for an abortion. Peckinpah was so drunk that most of his scene is dubbed, with random cutaways to cover points where they clearly had no usable footage. I guess the worst science involves Huston, who stands on the roof and makes lights appear. He also takes a plane from outer space to Atlanta, and can't seem to walk down stairs in a timely fashion.

 Other Bad Ideas: Well, when the Italian producer and director decided they didn't like the screenwriter's rip-off of The Omen, they continued changing it and eventually fired the writer. The music is jarringly inappropriate for almost every scene, but my favorite is what we dubbed the "walking up the stairs" theme for the titular character. It's so bombastic and juxtaposed with, I kid you not, walking up stairs. Nothing else. We couldn't wait to hear it again. The final scene, where pigeons and a few doves attack Katy, features one of the fakest looking plastic birds I've ever seen. The Visitor is pretty much just one Bad Idea after another.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Aliens, Evil Scientists, Animal Related Mayhem, Psychic Powers, Southern Accents, Vehicular Chicanery.

 Final Prognosis: I'd be hard pressed to call The Visitor a good, or even competent movie. It's almost impossible to follow in any way, so you're better off not trying to figure out what's happening or why. However, as movie watching experiences go, there's really nothing quite like The Visitor. It starts out like a realized version of Jodorowsky's Dune, and just gets weirder from there. Just be prepared to say "What?!" a lot, and collapse into fits of uncontrollable laughter.


 Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight

 Year of Production: 1995

 What's the Haps, Cap?: Brayker (William Sadler) is a man on the run. He's somewhere in New Mexico, in a high speed chase with Billy Zane (Billy Zane) in hot pursuit. Brayker runs out of gas and decides to bring a gun to a car fight in the middle of the road, which works about as well as you would think it might. But somehow both of them survive and Brayker sneaks into Wormwood, NM, where he tries to steal a car, but some dumb kid (Ryan Sean O'Donohue) rats him out. He has some wino booze with wino "Uncle" Willy (Dick Miller) and decides to crash at a motel that used to be a church. He meets the owner (CCH Pounder), a prostitute (Brenda Bakke), a mailman (Charles Fleischer), and Jeryline (Jada Pinkett), who is on work release and cleans the stoves (badly). When Billy Zane and two cops (Gary Farmer and John Schuck) show up shortly after Roach (Thomas Haden Church), we hit the magic number on Brayker's palm, and... demons.

 Who's the Hero?: I guess that'd be Brayker, although nobody seems to agree with that until almost everybody is dead. One could make an argument that the Cryptkeeper (John Kassir) is our hero, since he's presenting this here movie, but if it's not Brayker, I guess it's Jesus. SPOILER if you say that out loud 45 seconds before the first flashback, like Cranpire did.

 Wait... Jesus?: Yeah, but not Space Jesus. Just regular old crucified Jesus. His blood is what the first Demon Knight captures in a "key" to the universe that Demons want. The blood protects you and prevents Demons from crossing thresholds. Demon blood, on the other hand, makes more Demons. Or, at least, Billy Zane blood does anyway. It's the same color as what I imagine the radioactive blood in Creature with the Atom Brain would look like.

 And You're Saying Billy Zane Plays Himself?: I can understand your confusion, but we can all pretend he's more like the boring characters he plays in Titanic or The Phantom if you prefer. I'd like to think that the dude who is practically gnawing on the scenery in Demon Knight is the REAL Billy Zane, and that he had one opportunity to let loose and just be himself. Even if the rest of the cast weren't a "who's who" of "that guy!" Demon Knight would be a no brainer just to watch Zane own the screen.

 Bad Science: None that I can think of. Maybe Brayker surviving the car explosion. I get why Billy Zane survived, but not so much Brayker. Demon Knights are surprisingly when it comes to injuries. Also, when Zane punches through the Sherriff's skull (SPOILER), his arm gets stuck, which seems more plausible than when Jason Voorhees does it. Roach also lets someone hook jumper cables to his nipples - that doesn't seem safe.

 Other Bad Ideas: Well, Billy Zane uses his demon powers to lure people into doing his bidding - also known as turning them into Demons who try to steal they key. Uncle Willy is lured in by Zane as a bartender and surrounded by topless woman and at least one porn star. Since Willy is a lush, I don't even know why he needed the women, but Gratudity sells, right? Roach doesn't even try to make a deal, he just gives the damn thing to Billy Zane, because Brayker is "kinda bossy." At least we get to see Billy Zane pop a sponge out of his mouth. I can't leave this section without mentioning how unhygienic Jeryline is for (SPOILER) covering herself with the blood in the key just to kill Billy Zane's buzz when she (DOUBLE SPOILER) takes over as Demon Knight. I mean, yeah, Jesus and stuff, but that's blood going back millenia. Gross. Also, it came from (TRIPLE SPOILER) Brayker's heart, and (QUADRUPLE SPOILER) Demon Possessed Kid's Gene Simmons Tongue had been all up in there. Not very sanitary, if you ask me.

 Uniquely 90s Moments: The opening credits / car chase play over Filter's "Hey Man, Nice Shot." If there's a better time capsule of something that was cool for one year and one year only, that'll do it. I guess there's another post-grunge song that plays during the credits, but I already forgot what it was.

 Recurring Summer Fest Themes: Gratudity, Vehicular Chicanery, Mind Control, Using the Dead for Nefarious Purposes, Southwestern Locations, Religious Imagery

 Final Prognosis: As Tales from the Crypt movies go, I still prefer the Amicus version from the 1970s, but if it's post-TV show, I'm going with Demon Knight over Bordello of Blood. This is far and away the best thing Billy Zane ever did, and he owns every moment he's on screen. It's cool to go back and see a pre-Big Willie Style Jada Pinkett take control of the movie, or that someone built a film around William Sadler. The cast is so much fun because you don't usually get to see any of them showcased, let alone all of them (this was almost ten years before Sideways, and if you say "I liked Thomas Haden Church on Ned and Stacey," you're lying. Maybe Wings - I know Cranpire likes Wings.) Anyway, Demon Knight is just fun, and if you somehow think "Ernest Dickerson... why do I know that name" after the "directed by" credit, it's because he was Spike Lee's cinematographer. The director of Demon Knight shot Do the Right Thing. And that's a good thing.


 Join us tomorrow for even more Summer Fest madness, gang! We have so many movies to come...