Author Archives: BloodCrypt Keeper

REVIEW: Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987)

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Silent Night, Deadly Night 2: B-

This sequel picks up shortly after the conclusion of the first film and follows the homicidal misadventures of Billy’s younger, sweater-wearing brother, Ricky, who is also a traumatized lunatic because of a killer Santa murdering his family.

The guy who plays Ricky is somehow a worse actor than the guy who played Billy. His fucking facial expressions, intonation, and head movements surpass Shatner levels. Just this guy abysmally sucking at acting so bad for 90 minutes while keeping a straight face was enough to earn the movie a C. Look at the picture I posted up there. That’s him looking “edgy.”

Ricky is in a nuthouse at the beginning of the movie. It seems he has committed his own string of murders (“PUNISH!”). We get some flashbacks from SNDN1 in the form of original footage and refurbished scenes that include Ricky as a more active participant.

The flashbacks evolve into a frame story that show Ricky murdering some “naughty” people. This is B-movie slasher GOLD. Anyone who has seen the movie will tell you straight up that the “GARBAGE DAY” execution is a magical achievement in low-budget horror (please see the end of this post). He does all sorts of crazy stuff. He chokes a woman with a car antenna and jumper-cable electrocutes a guy. He also shoots lots of people, many of who don’t seem very naughty at all.

Ricky keeps killing and killing until the frame story ends. Then he breaks out of the insane asylum and keeps killing and killing some more. Remember the nun who used to beat Billy with a belt because he was a sinful little shit? Ricky finds her and gives her the ax.

Lots of goofy carnage and anti-acting. Funny music and an impressive body count. Worth your time.

REVIEW: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

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Silent Night, Deadly Night: B

This movie has one of my favorite horror characters: Billy.

Poor Billy had a really shitty Christmas one year. First, grandpa is mean to him, promising that Santa is going to come punish him for being “naughty.” Then, next thing you know, a guy in a Santa outfit cuts Billy’s mommy’s throat right in front of poor Billy! As if the psychological threat of Santa always watching him and cataloging his naughty/nice behavior along with grandpa’s demented ramblings wasn’t enough, now Billy has to grow up with this twisted self-hate yule-tide complex because St. Nick butchered his parents.

Billy goes to a Catholic orphanage that totally fucking sucks. Why does it suck? First of all, it’s Catholic! You can imagine that the last thing Billy needs is more guilt but, sure enough, he is repeatedly reminded of what a bad little boy he is. Secondly, one of the nuns just happens to love torturing little boys. She tries to “help” Billy by subjecting him to Christmas-based psychological exercises. He has to sit on Santa’s lap, draw pictures of Christmas cheer, etc. When he invariably screws these things up (by punching Santa in the jaw, for instance), the nun thinks it best to whip Billy with a belt. Makes sense. Now he totally won’t grow up to be a psycho killer.

Billy spends his childhood being beaten by a nun and having nightmares about Santa. When  we see him all grown up, he is a prosperous stock clerk at a toy store (and the guy who plays him is a charmingly wretched actor. The robotic manner in which he delivers ALL of his lines makes the final act of the movie so fucking funny). Things are looking up for ol’ Billy! That is, until his boss makes him dress up as Santa and do the kids-on-lap thing. Not a great idea.

Billy does okay. He doesn’t hut anyone; he just promises little kids he will punish them. No big deal.

But then, Billy goes to a staff party after the store closes. Dressed as Santa. He sees his coworker, whom he has a crush on, making out with some other dude. Time for the movie to get awesome! Billy screams “PUNISH!” and attacks everyone with a huge fucking ax. He puts the big “PUNISH!” on everyone; they all die. If you don’t understand why he did that, I don’t know what to tell you.

Billy goes on a pretty righteous ax-murder spree dressed as Santa. So many “naughty” people to kill! Fantastic 80’s slasher carnage ensues at an impressive pace. I won’t tell you how it ends, but there is a GREAT setup for the sequel. You have to see it.

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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: 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: Satan’s Slave (1976)

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Satan’s Slave: D

A lot of Grindhouse films use this tactic of showing a totally insane, out of context prologue scene before or during the opening credits in order to cultivate some buy-in from the audience. That way, people will hopefully sit through all sorts of low budget garbage with the hopes of finding an explanation/resolution for the prologue or seeing something like the prologue repeated. Usually, the proverbial budget/action “wad” is blown during these introductory scenes and what makes up the other 98% of the movie is semi-torturous in its lameness.

This movie has two intro scenes:

1. A dude in red robes and an awesome looking goat mask leads a Satanic ritual in which a panicking blonde is stripped naked and sacrificed to Satan. All these Jawa looking motherfuckers hold torches and chant around him.

2. This dickhead yuppie named Steven tries to rape some babe in his bedroom. When she successfully repels him, he acts like everything’s cool and walks her to the front door. Then he slams her head in the door until she dies. Lots of red corn syrup and synth stabs.

The credits end. The movie begins. 19 year old Catherine is out for a nice drive with her mom and dad. They are going to visit her Uncle Alex (played by the same guy who was Alfred in the Michael Keaton Batman movies) at his beautiful home out in the country. The car crashes and her parents die.  Wah-wah!

Uncle Alex finds the traumatized, physically unscathed Catherine at the scene of the crash and takes her under his wing. He drives her home and gives her a tranquilizer so she will stop her stupid whining about her stupid dead parents. She wakes up and we find out that Alex’s son, Catherine’s cousin, is that door-slamming asshole Steven!

The movie is a Rosemary’s Baby rip-off. Catherine thinks she is Uncle Alex’s guest, but really, she is his prisoner; Uncle Alex is keeping her doped up on tranquilizers and grooming her for a Satanic sacrifice (like the blonde-Jawa-torch scene from the beginning) which is scheduled for a few days later on her 20th birthday. Steven is in on it too. While he seduces Catherine for some cringe-worthy cousin incest action, Uncle Alex uses voodoo to kill her BF who is just minding his own business back in the city. Fucking asshole, Alfred! I mean, Alex! There are other cultists helping them out as well.

The sub-plots are off the hook. Catherine has an inconsistent Shining-like psychic power. Steven’s mom was the sacrificed blonde from the prologue. Catherine’s ancestor was molested/tortured/murdered by Puritans. Catherine’s dead dad was in on it the whole time.

There aren’t anymore door-related deaths. There’s an eyeball shanking and ol’ Steven stabs some woman in the mouth with a piece of mirror. The movie is pretty boring, low budget Grindhouse with all the goofy music and shitty acting you could ever wish for.

REVIEW: Hatchet 3 (2013)

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Hatchet 3: B

So, there’s this guy with a hatchet. A demented, redneck, indestructible guy with a hatchet. He likes to chop people up with his hatchet and this is the third movie in which he gets to.

This was a  really fun horror film that reminded me of early 90’s gore-fests I used to watch as a kid. It probably had something to do with the fact that Kane Hodder, the guy who played Jason in a LOT of the Friday the 13th films, plays the very Jason-like murderer, Victor Krowley.

Like said gore-fests, the actual plot only bookends the film. Some sheriffs go to investigate a murder in the swamp in Louisiana. Victor is there and he kills everyone. They send in backup and Victor kills everyone. They send in the SWAT team and Victor kills everyone (in one really incestuous-horror kill scene, the SWAT leader, played by the same guy who was Jason in the Friday the 13th reboot, is killed by Victor, who played Jason in a lot of the original movies). It only takes about twenty minutes of plot to deliver an unending supply of cops for Victor to slaughter and then you get a solid sixty minutes of gore. Then Victor’s supernatural origin is exposed and he is finally defeated in the final ten minutes.

The make-up and production value was really impressive. The villain is basically identical to Jason Voorhees but sometimes all a movie needs is cool make-up and a silent killing machine.

The kills are brutal and remind me of stuff I used to watch 20 years ago. Someone’s head is cooked with defibrillators, spines are ripped out, someone’s head is sanded off with a gas powered sander, and there are all sorts of hatchet-related deaths. They even shoot someone with a short-range missile. There is heavy metal music, screams and bone-crunching noises, and all types of physics-defying murder. Every internal organ imaginable is exposed and mutilated. One guy’s spine AND HEAD are ripped out THROUGH HIS STOMACH. How? Shhh. Hatchet 3.