Monthly Archives: July 2013

REVIEW: Cat’s Eye (1985)

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Cat’s Eye B+

Would you like to see a cat fight a troll? And James Woods fight addiction? AND Ted Striker fight a pigeon? AND Drew Barrymore fight the changes in her growing pre-teen body?

Well then have I got a movie for you. It’s three three three movies in one and it’s all made from Stephen King’s short stories.

The first story is about James Woods trying to quit smoking and is really good. Remember when he tried to quit doing blow in The Boost? Well he’s even worse here. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just tell you what this story has going for it:

* James Woods yelling

* James Woods being scared

* James Woods giving a doll to a retard

* James Woods desperate for ice cream

* Animal torture

* Person Torture

* James Woods telling a guy to shove it up his ass

* A mob guy

* Funny music during both types of torture

* A guy named “Junk” making out in a convertible (with a girl!)

* A disfigured person.

* James Woods begging for mercy.

How can you not want to watch that?

The second story is about Ted Striker from Airplane trying to steal this guy’s wife. The guy is a gangster, though, and wants to make a dangerous scary bet with Ted Striker to see who wins the wife. I can’t say no more without spoilers, but let me tell you that the gangster is played by that guy who wanted to slip it to Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. He’s scary here too.

This movie also has Drew Barrymore at an awkward stage. Not only was she becoming a woman, it’s obvious that her off-camera lifestyle was catching up with her. She looks real tired and she’s all bloated and puffy-kind of like John Bonham right before he died.

There’s this troll who lives in her wall that wants to sit on her chest while she’s sleeping and suck her breath out of her mouth.

So this cat has to save her.

Personally, I think the troll represents adult sexuality and he’s trying to suck her out of her child’s life into the sex-drenched hell of adulthood.

Which is why she grabs and hugs her “cat” so much. She wants to protect it and it in turn protects her.

So it’s really about female empowerment. So show this to your daughters so they don’t go out banging too much. And your sons can watch it too and they might not start smoking.

REVIEW: Lifeforce (1985)

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Lifeforce: B

I’ll give you one guess what this evil trio of space-vampires feeds off of instead of blood…

If you guessed “lifeforce,” good for you; it’s lifeforce. What is lifeforce? It’s blueish lightning inside of you that you apparently need in order to live. It also dumps out of your eyes and mouth if a space-vampire feeds on you. They suck it out of you and then it makes them stronger. What happens to the lifeforce-less you? You look like a shriveled mummy version of yourself and you wander around like a space-zombie feeding off of the lifeforce of others.

A space crew finds three human-looking, naked aliens – one sexy female and two sexy dudes, in suspended animation on board an abandoned space vessel. I say “abandoned” but maybe that’s not the right word. The ship is littered with shriveled up corpses and a single escape pod is missing. The space crew takes the sleeping aliens on board their own ship. Big mistake…

If you liked the movie Species, where naked sexy-alien Natasha Henstridge stalks and massacres a bunch of dudes, you’ll love the next several scenes of the movie. During the autopsy of the sexy female alien, she wakes up (totally naked) and starts draining everyone’s fucking lifeforce one by one! She’s really good at it too. She just walks from room to room, staring at members of the crew, and they enter into a hypnotic trance. Then she starts to make out with them. The guys are probably thinking “Alright, me! I still got it! This babe is really into me! Yeah!” Then the blue lightning stuff happens and the guys turn into skeletal slim-jims. No more lifeforce!

These scenes I just described scared the piss out of me when I first saw them. I think I was seven. The make-up is great. The drained guys look fucking freaky.

Holy shit now the movie gets nuts. The dude aliens turn everyone in London into lifeforce zombies. It is revealed that they transmit all of their acquired lifeforce to their sexy-alien female leader and she beams it to their spaceship so they can, I don’t know, travel the universe and eat more lifeforce, I guess. There’s shape-shifting, martial law, zombies, telepathic bonds, impaled people, naked people, impaled telepathic naked people, CGI lifeforce all over the fucking place, and St. Paul’s Cathedral is destroyed.

The makeup is real nasty. The effects are some 1985 shit, but whatever; it’s just lifeforce lightning. The ambition is impressive. The plot is batshit crazy but totally fun. This movie is way better than a lot of the other “in space” movies out there. It’s like Species meets 28 Days Later meets Independence Day. It’s Tobe Hooper’s movie, by the way. I dug it. 

REVIEW: The Gate (1987)

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The Gate: B-

Introducing… Stephen Dorff! That’s right! Before America’s favorite tweed-wearing e-cig salesman acted in such gems as Fear.com and Immortals, he made his debut in this little flick about as young boy who accidentally opens a gate to another world, allowing a cornucopia of evil creatures to enter our dimension.

The film is about little kids fighting monsters in white suburban America. It’s a little more serious than Monster Squad but way goofier than Lost Boys. Little Dorph comes home one day and finds a magic rock by his tree house. He and his annoying asshole friend Terry bust the rock open and read the magic runes inside. Typical white people. Weird stuff happens after their reading. Little Dorph’s dog dies and his house stretches and compresses like the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland.

Terry winds up being the “wise elder” character even though he is like fucking twelve years old. He plays a metal record backwards while reading the lyric book and concludes that the magic rock is a relic that can open portals to demonic planes and all that is needed to complete the process is to dump a sacrifice in the hole from which they extracted the rock. How does Terry know all this? Oh, you know, comic books, heavy metal, a serious lack of friends, and (probably) tons of jerking off.

Some idiot buries little Dorph’s dog in the hole and the Gate-shit really hits the Gate-fan. We get zombies, shape-shifting demons, gremlins. Terry becomes a zombie. Little Dorph is caressed by a demon and an eyeball grows on the palm of his hand. Nothing seems to slow the monsters down except… The Bible! Typical white people. Little Dorph reads some Psalms and eventually chucks the Bible into the Gate/hole, but all it does it temporarily repel the monsters and piss them off. They storm the house and really fuck it up.

In the end, little Dorph launches a toy rocket that his sister was going to give him for his birthday at the head demon. The rocket represents love, family, and blah-blah-blah so it kills everything and little Dorph wins. The eyeball on his hand is gone; Terry is alive and well, ready to go home and masturbate; even the fucking dog gets resurrected! The Gate/hole has been sealed. The end.

Is it scary? Not really. There are some charming stop motion effects and some legit looking make-up. The CGI looks like the effects from the first Ghostbusters. The creature design is unique enough. This is more of a “fun” horror movie where the little kid winds up saving the day. I’m probably biased because I remember watching it a lot as a kid, but it’s a fun ride (a goofy-as-fuck ride, but fun) and worth a view.

REVIEW: The Lords of Salem (2012)

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The Lords of Salem: F

I like Rob Zombie. I liked his Halloween remake and Devil’s Rejects. I thought House of 1,000 Corpses was interesting and I would even call myself a White Zombie fan. That being said, I don’t know what the fuck he was going for with The Lords of Salem. I respect that he is challenging himself as an artist to create something a little different but this film was not fun to watch.

If you think you would like a slow moving, relatively unoriginal story punctuated with Zombie’s sensational carnival/sacrilege vibe, maybe you’ll dig it.

Oh, and are you a fan of hallucinatory dream sequences that climax as the protagonist suddenly wakes up? You are? You’ll love this movie!

What starts out as a semi-creepy ghost story quickly reveals itself to be a Rosemary’s Baby ripoff. By the end, we were convinced the title of the movie should be I Love My Wife: A Film by Rob Zombie. Zombie’s wife plays Heidi, a radio DJ who lives in Salem (Basically 3/4 of the movie is close-ups of Mrs. Zombie looking sexy/nauseous/confused). She unknowingly plays a song on the radio that casts a hex on all native female Salemites and appears to summon some witches (who were actually fucking witches, wtf?!) who avoided execution during the famous Salem witch trials in the 1600’s.

Okay. Seems legit. There are some naked nasty witches stalking Heidi in her apparently haunted apartment complex.

Then that stuff all stops and the story shifts to focus on a Satanic conspiracy to impregnate Heidi with the anti-Christ. Aaaaaaand: Cue Rosemary’s Baby plot. Tenants of the apartment complex are secret Satanists aiding in the pregnancy plot. Heidi’s health mysteriously declines. Anyone who is suspicious is tricked or murdered. A hallucinatory love scene between Satan and Heidi occurs. Heidi wakes up panicked multiple times.

Zombie garnishes the unoriginal story with some over-the-top imagery. There are demented bishops jacking off. Close-up of Zombie’s wife crying. Topless nuns escort a demon through the halls of a temple. Close-up of Zombie’s wife screaming. A dying priest gets a blowjob. Close-up of Zombie’s wife suddenly waking up. Some of this stuff was interesting to watch but it seemed like Zombie was trying to sprinkle in the perverse in an attempt to make up for the entire movie being poop.

Yawn. The pace was slow. The characters were boring. Nothing new to see here.

REVIEW: Season of the Witch (2011)

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Season of the Witch: B+

I originally wanted to give this movie an F-, but after thinking it over, I realized I was entertained and was basically laughing the whole time.

Nic Cage looks awful; every scene literally looks like they roused him from an overnight coke binge, threw him in a costume, and had him deliver his lines. Perlmen looks better but clearly cares so little about the movie it looks like he is having sexual fantasies the whole time while acting.

Needless to say the story was predictable, lame, full of plot holes, and uninteresting. Its sad attempt at political and religious commentary was so weak and transparent that the few lines that were delivered in this vain fell on deaf ears. The CGI was abysmal, lurking in Spawn level indecipherability, and in the end, Cage beats up a CGI Satan. Pretty whack but see it anyway; it will not disappoint.

REVIEW: Looker (1981)

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Looker D+

Hi there. The Clown is back. Sorry for the layoff, but this movie gave me fucking writers block.

In Looker, Albert Finney plays a plastic surgeon who usually works on “television models”. Most of them keep coming back to get more surgeries because they think they’re not perfect enough. But he has ethics so he’s all “No, you look great already”. And you can tell he means it because there’s an obvious subtext that tells you he’s most likely banging these models-or at the very least whacking it to their surgery reference pictures.

But he’s also a father figure. You can tell the way he looks across the desk at the model in the first scene. He’s all concerned about her self-esteem, and she looks back at him, needing his approval. Now, this daddy-issue psycho-sexual confusion subtext would be a total turn-on, but you get pulled out of it because of the words the people say when they’re acting.

Anyway, these models won’t take no for an answer. They keep asking, telling Dr. Daddy they need the procedure, and they need him to give it to them. So he’s all, “Okay, fuck it” and he gives it to them and then is like “Here’s your bill.”

Then a bunch of these models start killing themselves because this guy has a ray gun that makes them do that. And then Dr. Daddy realizes that all these models look the same due to his procedures and suspects there’s a connection. So he goes to find Lorie Partridge, who is a model too. He thinks she is the next one to die. So he tries to save her…by taking her to his lake house. And she’s totally into him too, because if you remember, there was never a Mr. Partridge-just that manager guy. Daddy issues.

They start to investigate what’s up and then the ray gun guy comes after them. And you find out the ray gun can do other things like make people forget the things that are about to happen. Which is interesting, I guess.

And it all has something to do with James Coburn, who owns the modeling agency that represents all these girls. He also owns everything that goes on television and wants to hypnotize people so they’ll buy shit they don’t need. And it’s up to Dr. Daddy and Lorie Partridge to stop him and save America from commercials. And yes, Dr. Daddy has to fight the ray gun guy, who is big and has a mustache.

I’d give this movie a straight unwatchable. But I’m a fair man, and I have to recognize it’s got some stuff going for it. James Coburn. A ray gun. And….

…natural boobs. Yep! And right up at the beginning too! Like the opening credits. So at least watch that part.

REVIEW: The Howling (1981)

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The Howling: B

Other than An American Werewolf in London, this is probably the best werewolf movie.

The film moves very slowly but the payoff is so worth it. This woman Karen is stalked by a psycho killer named Eddie. The cops use her as bait to catch the guy but the experience is so traumatic, Karen develops amnesia. The scene is pretty fucked up; the cops stick Karen in a porn theater where some rape/snuff is playing. She has to watch it while Eddie creeps up on her and fondles her a little bit. Then he gets capped.

Her shrink sends her to a little retreat called The Colony out in the cuts. Bad news: everyone there is a werewolf (one motherfucker is REALLY obvious; he looks like fucking Sabretooth from X-men). They all have this feral “Lost Boys” kind of vibe.

A half dozen strange occurrences and some explicit werewolf action lets the audience realize what’s up as soon as Karen gets to The Colony. Karen just don’t get it, though. She sniffs around for answers and not a lot happens. There is all sorts of implied shapeshifting and distant/mysterious howling. Her BF is bitten and becomes a werewolf who has werewolf sex with another werewolf.

Finally, in the last few minutes of the movie, the Colony folk reveal themselves in what are some of the most impressive werewolf transformation scenes I have ever seen. The effects are on par with (maybe even better) than Carpenter’s The Thing. You have to sit through about and hour of 80’s perms, mustaches, and backwards-ass reasoning, with very minimal action/effects, but the werewolves are so fucking dope. No CGI garbage like most other werewolf movies. We’re talking real snotty/furry make-up and all sorts of crunching, stretching prosthetic limbs and snouts. One of the werewolves is that asshole Eddie from the rape theater, but he catches a silver bullet shortly after his terrifying transformation.

Karen escapes and just when you think the film is over, there is one last shapeshifting scene. It’s Karen! Fucking idiot tries to shapeshift on live prime-time news so she can warn the world about werewolves. Someone caps her with a silver bullet and various viewers believe they have just witnessed an elaborate showcase of television special effects.

This film has spawned my sequels which all deteriorate into shittiness with each new release. One sequel has a “werewolf vs. vampire” theme. Another features a werewolf on roller-skates. See the first Howling and I promise you won’t regret it.

REVIEW: Big Bad Wolf (2006)

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Big Bad Wolf: B-

Surprisingly non terrible werewolf movie that actually had a semi interesting mystery, and a somewhat different take on the classic horror beast. Trevor is kind of a nerd who for some reason hangs out with the cool kids. One weekend Trevor tries to impress the dudes he is hanging out with and steals the keys to his mean stepdad’s cabin so they can party there. However once the party gets rolling, a lewd, surprisingly well done werewolf appears and kills everybody except Trevor and his punk rock girlfriend. Once they are back in town Trevor and his chick start to suspect that Trevor’s stepdad may be responsible for the killings by realizing that he is “on a business meeting” every full moon.

From here the mystery unfolds as the stepdad continues to transform into a werewolf once every 12 minutes or so, to tear off a head or gash open a neck. The kills in this movie were surprisingly well done as decapitations of limbs and heads is the main vehicle for demise. We also get several shots of very nice boobs and some hilarity as the werewolf spews one liners such as “Are you ready for some bestiality!?!”

Overall a solid horror film as the piss-poor acting was thankfully over shadowed by a good pace, and some good gore.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TT8in-fmkM