Author Archives: BloodCrypt Keeper

REVIEW: Underworld Evolution (2006)

Posted on by

4

underworld-evolution

Underworld Evolution (2006): D-

This werewolf/vampire slayer, who also happens to be a vampire, teams up with a half werewolf half vampire dude to battle a gargoyle-vampire elder who is trying to free his werewolf twin brother from a thousand year old casket located in a Romanian cave maze so they can take over the world and turn it into a werewolf-vampire-gargoyle utopia which would probably be a dystopia if you aren’t a werewolf/vampire/gargoyle/werewolf-vampire-gargoyle.

The plot is such a fucking mess. You could watch it on mute and blast some 1990’s techno music and you’d probably understand the movie better than I did. There’s that convoluted vampire/werewolf business and then a bunch of medieval looking dudes who look like the Lord of the Rings elves with their ponytails dyed black. And fucking EVERYONE knows karate. It’s like they used a computer program to write the story, but before pushing “GENERATE,” they dumped a bucket of ice water on the motherboard and sparks started flying everywhere; “bzzz… beepbeep…blip bzzzzzVAMPIRE… bzzzWEREWOLF… bzzzLEATHER… bzzzzzSLOWMOTION… bzzzzzzGARGOYLEWORLDDOMINATION…” and, there it is: Underworld Evolution.

The action in the movie was unbelievable… ly played out Matrixesque unoriginality. It was impossible to take seriously for even a single second. This one dude pulls a rope attached to a helicopter and makes it crash to the ground. The color of the movie was a cold gray the WHOLE time and there are so many contorted CGI attack scenes that rival Transformers 3 that you could base a drinking game on them. You would think with pretty consistent attention-deficit-disorder-levels of editing, the movie would be at least occasionally entertaining but you would be wrong. After the tone is set in the first 15 minutes, you’ll be desensitized to the rest of the film; the whole movie is basically a looping 15 minute action sequence bookended by overacted conversation that is based on some clusterfuck exposition. Unless you have the memory of a fish, you will be unmoved.

REVIEW: Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005)

Posted on by

1

do_you_like_hitchcock

Do You Like Hitchcock? (2005): C-

More like “Do You Like Made-for-TV-Bullshit?”

When a myopic Italian film student named Julio realizes his life is a Hitchcock movie, paranoia and delirium take him over and he becomes obsessed with figuring out what the hell is happening to him. What was he obsessed with before all this? Hitchcock movies! Man, what a mess.

It hurts me to talk shit about Argento. I feel pain while doing it. That’s how much I love this guy. This movie comes from a period in Argento’s career that I refer to as “The Stretch of Time in Which Argento Made Garbage Movies.” None of his trademarks are in this movie except really overt vocal dubbing and a crop of breasts. There is minimal gore. No one crashes through a window. No one with black leather gloves runs around molesting people. It looks like an after school special about not doing drugs where you can just tell all the actors are virgins.

This stretch of bad Argento movies fucking depress me. Imagine your favorite musician spends a decade not playing music. Instead, he just practices getting really good at using those gloves with light-up fingertips to make trippy light patterns that only look cool if you are 16 and at a rave. Makes me sick.

The movie has virtually no signature Argento. But you know what this movie does have? A fucking stupid moped/car chase. Probably the worst one I have ever seen. As far as moped/car chases go, it gets an F.

The movie is a formulaic homage factory. It felt like Argento had a checklist of Hitchcock’s films and he was just powering through them, making all the references he could, just wiggling his fingers in those stupid fucking light-up gloves. I dare you to watch this with your pretentious friend who considers himself a film buff. He will let out so many obligatory giggles to show you how he’s getting all the references.

I will admit there is a dimension of suspense that transcends the straight-to-DVD feel of the film. I somehow hated the characters but still wanted to know what was going to happen next. Maybe this was because I was naively optimistic, but maybe it was because parts of the movie were better than abysmal. I’m the wrong person to ask.

I think they should make a sequel called Do You Like Michael Bay? in which the protagonist believes they are living out the plot of a Michael Bay movie. Truly terrifying.

REVIEW: Punpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes (2006)

Posted on by

0

pumpkinhead_3

Punpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes (2006): C+

Hendrickson was cool enough to do Pumpkinhead 1, then he was too big to do Pumpkinhead 2, then he got washed up enough to do Pumpkinhead 3, which happens to be a SCI-fi original series, which usually means automatic shitfest. PHATA wasn’t that bad, relatively speaking; PH2: “Bloodwings” was so goddamn dumb that I treat it like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Turtles in Time and pretend that it never happened.

This film is more like the first film in that there is a small town and a “deal with the devil” setup that summons Pumpkinhead to get his vengeance-based killing spree on.  Just like before, when the townsfolk start to realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, ol’ Pumpkinhead is well into his massacre and they see that they can’t do anything about it except hope that he doesn’t give them a back-breaker.

They actually get a dude dressed up in an elaborate costume to slaughter people instead of rendering a CGI PH for the whole movie, which was good. The CGI parts look CGUgly. Which was bad. Like “how did they have the audacity to show us that?” bad. There is this one scene where he’s climbing up the side of a church and it looks like a Windows ’95 screensaver.

The make-up was really good for a made-for-TV flick like this and the gore was unrelenting and surprisingly graphic. You’d have fun watching it with people. He’s called “Pumpkinhead,” why? His head doesn’t look like a pumpkin. If anything, it looks like the head of a rancor with a little extra skull space. In PHATA, they make him smile a lot like he is really into all the slaughter. So, a happy rancor.

REVIEW: Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (1974)

Posted on by

1

bloodorgy

Blood Orgy of the She-Devils (1974): UV

Oh, wow! The title is awesome! What could go wrong with this movie? I’ll tell you exactly what could go wrong and it is going to be too fucking easy to do so.

First of all: There’s no Blood Orgy. The movie is rated PG, something I noticed on the VHS sleeve after viewing the film. The entire thing is just some idiots in a haunted house in California where a sorceress threatens over and over to sacrifice them and she does some voodoo to some guy who looks like Joe Spinell’s clone. Does she subject them to a depraved blood orgy? Nope. Well, how about a regular orgy? No. How about anything sexual at all? No, sir. Not even so much as a kiss. Instead, people get endlessly threatened and the audience drowns in who-gives-a-fuck exposition about ancient witchcraft lore that sounds like it was written by a ten year-old who just learned the word “orgy”. Some professor says the words “The Blood Orgy of the She-Devils” and that’s about as close as you get. The next time you feel disappointed in a movie, just remember some asshole made Blood Orgy of the She-Devils and there isn’t any blood, orgies, or blood orgies in this PG-rated garbage.

Next, let’s talk about the She-Devils. Again, the title and grindhouse cover art would lead one to believe that the She-Devils would be at least mildly sexual and perhaps provide, at the very least, some brief ocular relief from this dumpster fire of a film. Wrong. They don’t do shit. They stare at people and vanish anti-climatically to cheesy Bewitched style blips and sparkles while what looks like a dozen flashlight beams zig-zag on the wall. They are barely in the goddamn move at all and when they are, you barely notice. Their big scene is one where they sit on the floor and chant together while one She-Devil dances. Maybe this is the blood orgy? I dunno.

The kills are pathetic. We get: a CGI burning at the cross, a weak as FUCK strangulation scene, and some other kills that will make you wish you would soil yourself so you could have an excuse to get off the sofa.

There is sub-Dolomite production quality and acting. The only thing this movie would be good for is melting several copies down, forming the plastic into a hammer and then using the hammer to break every remaining copy on Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DVqEPMsuNU

REVIEW: Evolver (1995)

Posted on by

1

evolver

Evolver (1995): C

Another VHS gem that I scored for 99 cents. The guy who directed this movie, which should basically be called “What if Johnny-5 from Short Circuit Wanted to Kill Us All?” went on to direct some abysmal Hillary Duff movies that blow worse than this. I watched like one minute of the trailer for one, so I can stand behind the preceding statement. Evolver’s plot could actually be the plot of a children’s movie and work just fine.

A nerdy, friendless computer geek uses his hacking skills to win at a laser tag videogame and he scores a free robot (Evolver) with whom to play laser tag-like games with in real life. He never saw Weird Science so he didn’t know that hacking leads to abominations of technology. The robot looks just like Johnny-5 only clunkier and shittier to fit this clunkier, shittier film. Each time the robot is defeated, it used super-advanced AI to “evolve” and deduce the vulnerabilities of its opponents so it can hopefully exploit weaknesses and win the next round of game play, kind of like an ex-girlfriend.

Evolver is programmed to never lose, so it starts using weapons to murder the children who try to play with it, believing this is the only way to truly “win.” Some weapons are improvised while others have been inside of Evolver all along including a flamethrower and some serious hydraulics. This results in some hilarious B-movie kills as Evolver starts assuming every person with whom it comes into contact is an “opponent”. There is always some monotone robotic narration preceding the kill. My favorite is when a jock gets a metal ball shot through his skull at 100mph while he fucks with Evolver in the locker room.

Maybe you are wondering why the robot, that some nerd won because he’s a nerd, has super-advanced artificial intelligence, sci-fi style weapons systems, and homicidal programming. After you have been wondering that for most of the movie, the little boy computer nerd starts wondering too and goes to the Cyberdynesque company called Cybertronix that created Evolver. Turns out, there is no conspiracy, just human incompetence. The super-powerful killer robot was just an accident. “Okay, thanks!” the nerd basically says and then he goes home to battle Evolver.

Then there are lasers and a final battle. The kid does the Fistful of Dollars trick. There is some very physics-defying destruction and an abrupt end. This movie reeks of 1990’s clichés, so prepare yourself; cowabunga, dude. All in all pretty entertaining.

REVIEW: Elves (1989)

Posted on by

6

elves

Elves (1989): C-

I really wrote a longer review for this because I’d like to officially be the person who has written the most about Elves on the internet. After about 2 minutes of research, I think I am. I finally accomplished something.

Like most Christmas films, this movie follows the story of a few close friends and their inadvertent involvement in a neo-Nazi plot for world domination. Turns out, Hitler didn’t really want a blond, blue-eyed master race. He actually envisioned a world populated by elf-human hybrids. And just to be clear, the elves we get in the movie are not Aryan-looking sexy elves like Legolas; the elves in this movie are monsters that look like a mixture of Gremlins who eat after midnight and the monster that Shatner saw fucking up the plane in The Twilight Zone. Actually, there aren’t any elves. There is just a single elf. He materializes when a young girl named Kristen spills her blood in the woods on Christmas.

Kristen has the misfortune of being the last pure-blooded Aryan virgin in the world who accidentally takes place in a Satanic blood-ceremony on Christmas. She also has a Nazi grandpa who, through some Nazi-encouraged incest, is also her dad. Don’t ask me why this was a straight-to-VHS release that never got pressed to DVD. It’s like a Days of Our Lives meets Critters Christmas special with R-rated gore and incest. Jeez, the acting is rough too; I’ve seen better stuff on those mattress commercials where some lady cringes and rubs her hunched back for a while because she has been sleeping on an inferior mattress.

The elf who was summoned during the accidental blood-ritual (these things happen) murders a Santa at the mall and an alcoholic, freshly evicted (from the trailer park) Grizzly Adams becomes the new Santa. See, every cloud has a silver lining. There is a great scene where he brushes his teeth while holding a cigarette, taking a shot right after, so you know what kind of a dude he is. No one is going to believe this poor bastard once the elf-Nazi shit hits the elf-Nazi fan.

Some pretty boring and sometimes mildly amusing stuff happens. There are some elf shenanigans punctuating the characters’ feeble attempts to comprehend this fucking mess of a back story. I don’t get how they do it, but Grizz and Kristen figure out what’s going on and they team up with her incest (grand)father, who is now a good Nazi, to battle the elf and  the bad Nazis. The bad Nazis want the elf and Kristen to bone and have a baby so they can use the offspring to start that elf-human hybrid world domination thing. The bad Nazis and Elf lose but there is a closing shot of an Elf fetus just in case you felt like you knew what was going on for a second.

I bet if they made a sequel to this movie today, it would be about “terrorists” trying to get the girl to make an elf-“terrorist” baby so they could populate the world with elf-“terrorist” hybrids. Then a bunch of people would see the movie and claim that it’s a war on Christmas or something and then certain theaters wouldn’t carry it and they would probably just have to release it on VHS because most of the people who would want to see it are the same people who still watch VHS movies like the original Nazi-based Elves who were also hoping for some closure from the whole fetus thing. Plus, they would probably release the original Elves on DVD to get people excited about Elves 2: Elf-“Terrorist”. So, I guess it’s a good idea that there are no plans to make a sequel. I dunno. I just confused myself.

REVIEW: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990)

Posted on by

3

henry

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer: A

Apparently, the director of this movie was commissioned to make a run-of-the-mill exploitation slasher flick with a budget of $110K and less than a month for shooting. What he made instead was a profoundly twisted psychological study of the mind of a murderous sociopath. People who watch this movie expecting to see meaningless carnage and boobs are going to be surprised to find that it is an actual movie… with carnage and boobs.

Henry, played by Michael Rooker, whom everyone likes to J-O over since his role on The Walking Dead, is a wandering serial killer who currently lives in a shitty apartment with his prison buddy, Otis and Otis’s sister Becky. Early in the film, we are given clues about how great of a serial killer Henry is. The film opens with a montage of freshly murdered corpses rotting in broad daylight in various locations, suggesting that Henry has been crafty enough to pull off a string of daytime killings in various locales without being caught. Oh, all the corpses are women, by the way.

The film then shows us two sides of Henry; when Henry hangs out with Otis he is an evil fuck. He commits a double murder in front of him which simultaneously worries and fascinates Otis. Henry then begins mentoring Otis as his serial killer understudy and they go on a super-wicked killing spree together. When he is with Otis’s sister however, he is apparently frail and kind. The two bond over childhood traumas and soon grow attached. Lots of tasty daddy/mommy issues here as well as neck-vein inducing tension; we keep remembering the montage of dead girls every time Henry and Becky are alone. Giving us this vulnerable side to Henry and juxtaposing it with his reptilian personality make him a really memorable round character and it creates a lot of suspense in the film.

Otis gets REALLY into murdering. Henry shares with Otis (and the audience) all the tricks to efficient killing and avoiding detection/capture. The most important rules seem to be 1) maintain a nomadic lifestyle and 2) ensure each killing has a different apparent motive / type of victim. The matter-of-fact way in which an efficient method for killing is explained, like the steps to a cake recipe, is chilling. Maybe the most famous / fucked up scene in the film is where Henry and Otis murder a family, film it, and then kick it and watch the footage and react as if they are watching Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, really hammering home the point that the most important “ingredient” for this recipe is a sociopathic inability to feel remorse.

The ending is so fucked up and great. I have no problem ruining shitty movies for you. For example, in Devil, the old lady is the Devil. See? Who cares? In Dark Skies, the older brother was the one whom the aliens had been visiting and intending to abduct. Fuck it. You have to check out Henry, though. I won’t spoil it.

REVIEW: Carnosaur (1993)

Posted on by

1

carnosaur

Carnosaur (1993): C+

If, back in 1993, you came out of the theater after seeing Jurassic Park going “meh, that was alright, but I wish there was more dinosaur-carnage,” or “’clever girl’ and then an implied off-screen kill? Weak,” then Carnosaur is for you.

It was released months after Jurassic Park, but that’s totally a coincidence. To even suggest that Carnosaur is a blatant rip-off of the most popular dinosaur film ever is just plain wrong.

See, in Carnosaur, the dinosaurs are bred using viral transmission and chicken DNA, which is radically different from splicing them with frog DNA like in Jurassic Park. Duh. Also, there aren’t velociraptors in Carnosaur, you idiot! The dinos are mostly deinonychus, which are the exact same thing as raptors, only a couple of feet taller. As if this wasn’t evidence enough of Carnosaur’s integrity, consider that in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs all get loose and start fucking up the humans. In Carnosaur, the dinosaurs all get loose and start fucking up the humans.

Gotta love the premise for this: Some asshole scientist hates people and loves dinosaurs so she plans to use her resources as a geneticist at a poultry plant (not a typo; poultry plant) to resurrect some dinosaurs so that they can take over the planet and eat all the people. What she plans to do with herself, being a human, during the genocide isn’t addressed but Carnosaur isn’t what you’d call a “logical” film.

It’s like a bad, Kevin Bacon-less version of Tremors for people who like dinosaurs.

One thing I have to give this movie credit for is the limited CGI effects. There’s no glitchy polygon-looking dinos feasting on CGI gore like in Raptor Island. They instead have fucking HAND-PUPPET dinosaurs chomping up people. That takes balls! To make a feature-length dino-horror film and have most of the kills be carried out by hand-puppets, and expect your audience to watch, is gutsy and I would actually rather watch Carnosaur any day over the endless clones of CGI-based dinosaur horror films. Sure some of the kill scenes look like an elaborate oven-mitt flapping around on a tarp full of pig guts, but it still looks better than a LOT of B-movie horror gore I’ve seen.

Think about how many other movies could have been improved with the utilization of hand-puppets. Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 2, Jurassic Park 3, and Schindler’s List, just to name a few.

Stay with this gem if you pop it in because you get to see someone die giving live birth to a dinosaur and an epic T-Rex vs. bulldozer duel complete with prolonged side-profile  camera shots like you are watching a game of Street Fighter II and some seizure inducing strobe effects. Spielberg didn’t give you that, now did he?