Author Archives: BloodCrypt Keeper

REVIEW: Sssssss (1973)

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Sssssss: UV

Not five S’s. Not six S’s. Seven S’s. Sssssss .

I was really tempted to just copy+paste “Sssssss” until it filled up the page and have that be my review for this garbage, but I ultimately decided against it (and it almost went the other way). One of the hardest calls I’ve ever had to make. The movie itself was basically one big “Sssssss.”

Here’s what happens:

  1. An ominous disclaimer fills the screen warning the viewer that ALL of the snakes in the film are REAL SNAKES flown in from exotic locations for the sole purpose of making Sssssss. The disclaimer also thanks the actors for being brave because they had to work with REAL king cobras and pythons. OMG HERO ALERT! Fucking heroes here!
  2. A hunky college bro named David starts working for this guy named Dr. Stoner. Dr. Stoner loves snakes. David looks like a handsome corn-fed character from that show The Waltons and his line delivery rivals a certain garbage day in its awkwardness.
  3. Dr. Stoner shows off his snake collection which includes a cobra, a python, and a black mamba.
  4. Snake footage. All the snake footage you could ever want.
  5. First day of work: Dr. Stoner injects David with a serum that slowly transforms him into a human-snake hybrid. Rough.
  6. Anyone who starts to realize that Dr. Stoner is a Mad Scientist who wants to create a new race of Snake People gets killed by snakes. We’re talking a lot of out-of-context shots they use to make the snakes look like they’re attacking people.
  7. All sorts of Snake Stuff happens. Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss Sssssss.
  8. David becomes a recluse because he is becoming more snake-like kind of like Goldblum in The Fly but the make-up is a billion times worse. Dr. Stoner is stoked and he delivers a passionate monologue about the glorious future of Man-Snakekind.
  9. There’s a mongoose all of a sudden.
  10. Dr. Stoner is bitten and killed by the king cobra and sheriffs blow the snake’s head off. It looks like a piñata filled with grapefruit getting shot with buckshot.
  11. David turns full snake and fights the mongoose. The sheriffs kick the door in and watch David the Snake fight the mongoose.
  12. That’s it. Locked in a bitter stalemate with the mongoose, the frame freezes on David’s screaming girlfriend and the credits start rolling.

 

REVIEW: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula: B+

If you read the description for this movie in the Comcast menu, it says the film is a “highly erotic adaptation” of the classic vampire tale. No kidding! I actually read Stoker’s novel and I can’t recall a scene where Dracula, in half-wolf form, repeatedly gropes/rapes Lucy on a bench while chewing on her throat. I also don’t remember the part where undead Siamese twins give Harker a blowjob.

Whatever; it worked. Everything in the movie is turned up to 11 so when there’s these extra scenes of flamboyant sexual carnage, they fit with the gaudy sets and Victorian costumes.

Anthony Hopkins plays Van Helsing (sit the FUCK down, Hugh Jackman) and he leads a band of do-gooders around 19th century London while they hunt for Count Dracula, played by Gary Oldman. Everyone knows that Dracula can shape-shift into things like bats and wolves and whatnot but few may know that he can also transform from a crusty, yellow old man in a red bathrobe to a sunglassess-wearing stud with flowing locks in a Dumb-and-Dumberesque silly tuxedo. This is some of Oldman’s best work in my opinion. He plays a creepy Nosferatu one second and then a tortured gentleman the next. You’ve got to appreciate an actor who can act through their make-up, especially when they have lines like “vengeance will be mine!”. You feel Dracula’s pain and actually sympathize with him, unlike the Dracula from the book who is a straight-up asshole.

Dracula thinks that Winona Ryder is the spiritual incarnation of his centuries-old true love and he travels to London to permanently establish himself among the populace and rekindle his romance with Victorian era Winona Ryder. I don’t think ANYONE has ever loved Winona Ryder this much! And if you were worried about her acting spoiling things, don’t worry; her BF is played by Keanu Reeves (he of the undead Siamese-twin blowjob) and he waaaaay out-stinks her. It, like, fucking hurts to watch him speak sentences in this movie.

The film has shape-shifting, telepathic bonds, decapitations, boobs, Tom Waits eating bugs, and computer generated energy force fields. The sets are crazy-detailed and the cinematography is mouth-watering. Dracula steals the show, as he should. Really visually satisfying and evil. I recommend it!

REVIEW: Friday the 13th (2009)

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Friday the 13th (2009): D-

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always thought the purpose of movie reboots was to do a “fresh” retelling of a familiar story/franchise. You take the mythology and characters and tweak or “reboot” them using up-to-date special effects, relevant actors, and modern filmmaking conventions. The product is a re-imagined take on an old favorite, right?

Wrong.

The 2009 turd titled Friday the 13th did not do this. It’s a reboot for the sake of making a reboot and selling products. Nothing “fresh” is really brought to the story. Jason is in the woods and he kills teenagers who are just trying to have unprotected sex, swear, and drink beer (only the brand-partners for the movie, of course). No Mrs. Voorhees. No exploration of supernatural origins/powers. The movie sucks out anything unique about Jason and leaves us with a hollow murder machine you could find in any slasher-in-the-woods movie.

I love Jason mindlessly murdering people, but why reboot the franchise to show ONLY that? There’s the same ol’ gang of teens humping and drinking light beer right up until Jason hacks them up one by one. This film has a cast of physically flawless androgynous teens (and some of the most ridiculous hair I have ever seen). They don’t bother making them camp counselors which would, you know, make sense. They’re just dipshits who go to one of the kid’s parents’ lake house. I wonder how long the parents have owned the house and if Jason has ever attacked it before or if he’s just doing this on a whim. Seems like quite a coincidence.

Every “actress” is totally gorgeous even after getting a machete to the neck or harpoon in the face which, I guess is an achievement in the film? I don’t know.

The product placement in the film is off the hook! This happened:
BRO 1: Hey bro did you bring the Heineken?
BRO 2: What Heineken?
BRO 1: I told you to bring the Heineken! Where’s my Heineken?
BRO 2: Sorry bro.
BRO 1: What’s this: Pabst Blue Ribbon?
BRO 2: Have you never had a Pabst Blue Ribbon?
BRO 1: What the fuck is Pabst Blue Ribbon?
BRO 2: Dude, you can drink all the Pabst Blue Ribbon that you want!

And, this seriously happened:
BRO 1: Crystal Lake? Sounds like a water bottle. Like ‘Crystal Geyser.’ Every water bottle has ‘crystal’ in the name. Bet you can’t name one that doesn’t.
BRO 2: Aquafina. I win.

No one wins with this movie. Avoid it if possible.

REVIEW: Village of the Damned (1995)

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Village of the Damned: C-

This is a variation of The Brood and Children of the Corn that features telepathic blonde kids who have long-term plans for world domination and short-term plans for hurting/terrifying rednecks.

There’s this little town with a population of 2,000. One day, everyone in the city limits passes out for a few hours. There’s a real Under the Dome vibe as law enforcement even paints a border around the coma zone, marking lines that, once crossed, cause people to faint. When everyone wakes up, ten women are pregnant, several of whom have legitimate excuses for how they couldn’t have gotten pregnant.

Some weirdly autonomous, chain-smoking government agent, Kirstie Alley, shows up and takes a creepy interest in the immaculate coma-conceptions. She convinces the women to carry the mystery kids to term and then even personally helps in the delivery room (all the births happen at once), punctuating the ordeal with her nihilistic wise-cracks and power-smirk. You can tell she isn’t to be trusted because she smokes, wears sunglasses indoors, and always wears black.

Nine kids are born and one is still-born. SPOILER: The dead baby looks like an alien fetus and Kirstie Alley keeps it in a pickle jar in her basement so she can look at it and, I think, ponder her own cosmic insignificance.

Then something stranger than any of the coma-pregnancy alien fetus stuff happens: the film flashes forward several years to show the nine kids, all Aryan looking toddlers, existing as acknowledged telepaths with a dominant choke-hold on the town. No one openly fucks with the kids because they will telepathically make you jump off of a cliff or telepathically stick your arm in boiling water. Why wouldn’t they show us the townsfolk realizing that they have creepy telepaths on their hands? Why wouldn’t they show the power-plays the kids must have used to take control? THAT sounds like an interesting story. Instead, the rest of the movie is the kids being mean to / killing people and fucking Kirstie Alley smirking.

Christopher Reeve is the only one who has any success blocking the kids’ mind-reading so the town nominates him as the kids’ special tutor and he decides the best course of action would be to suicide bomb them. Mark Hamill is a priest who is bothered by everything.

The kids reveal they are aliens with similar telepathic colonies set up elsewhere on Earth. Kirstie Alley reveals that the government knows all about it and that she has a little alien fetus in her basement. John Carpenter reveals that he is a badass with belligerent synth music but inept as fuck with an acoustic guitar.

Not horrible, I guess.

REVIEW: Zombie Hunter (2013)

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Zombie Hunter: F

In a near-future post-apocalyptic wasteland, zombies with varying degrees of intelligence roam the earth feasting on the flesh of the living. Unfortunately, they don’t feast on our rugged anti-hero protagonist, Hunter, a guy with a perpetual 5 o’clock shadow and forced-as-fuck gritty voice. He must have gone to Michael Biehn’s Acting Academy.

If you like voice-overs where some loser is trying as hard as he can to sound tough, maybe you should stop reading this now and just go buy this movie. Hunter can’t stop talking about himself. For every fact he narrates about zombies, he has to follow it up with an annoying fact about himself to remind the audience of what an anti-hero nomad he is. “Some of the zombies are smart” is followed by “I love tequila.” “It all started with this street drug called Natas” is followed by “I can’t let go of the past.” You are expected to sit through this while he mashes along dirt roads in a Camero, squinting like Paul Walker, while a soundtrack of emotional alt-rock blares.

I swear to God I’m not making this up: The fucking alt-rock and dirt roads actually go away for a minute… so he can run over a zombie with his Camero and… as he hits the windshield wipers… the alt-rock blares and he peels out on another dirt road.

While I could write a fucking thesis about why Hunter sucks as a character, and the over-use of dirt roads and alt-rock, I need to focus on the movie’s style/aesthetic as a whole. This film tries SO HARD to emulate a neo-Grindhouse (like from Death-Proof and Machete) feel and it fails SO FUCKING BADLY. There’s artificial grit and blips arbitrarily added to a bunch of the cinematography. Sometimes a whip sound-effect happens and large block letters pop up on the screen to show the name of a character to the audience. “CRACK! – HUNTER.”  “CRACK! – FAST LANE DEBBIE.” There are two-dimensional female characters in jean shorts. All the contrast is cranked like your ex-girlfriend’s Instagram filter. The execution of EVERY EVENT is so fucking corny; the whole film has the timing of a kid’s cereal commercial.

They got Trejo to show up in the movie, and they feature him prominently on the cover art, but their budget only allowed him to deliver a handful of sentences and do some disappointing slow-motion shirtless axe-wielding.

I recommend this movie for dirt road enthusiasts.

REVIEW: Terror Tract (2000)

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Terror Tract: B

This day will go down in history as the day you learned that you can watch a horror anthology movie where John Ritter tells a story about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey.

I’ll let that sink in….

And one more time: John Ritter tells a story about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey.

What are you waiting for? Go watch this.

Terror Tract liberally borrows from the Creepshow playbook (even to the point where there is a Water-Zombie story) and the result is a goofy and enjoyable anthology movie about a shitload of unfortunate events that occur in the homes that jittery real estate agent J-Ritt is trying to slang to some hesitant suburbanites. “Full Disclosure” laws prompt Ritter to reveal the sinister history of each house and these histories give us our stories in the anthology.

There’s a story about a cheating wife who has a crazy husband. Put them together and apparently you get Water-Zombies. There’s another story about a dude with uncontrollable psychic powers that force him to unwillingly endure 1st person slayings committed by a serial killer who wears a granny mask and says “COME TO GRANNY!” while he stabs people. The killer is called the “Granny Killer.”

These stories are all fun enough but there’s one that eclipses them: the one about Bryan Cranston hiring Buff Bagwell to assassinate an evil knife-throwing monkey. Before he was the one who knocks, Cranston was the one who gets upset about his daughter’s pets. It’s the same story as Tina the Talking Doll; Cranston’s daughter finds an adorable monkey and brings it into the house and only Cranston realizes the monkey’s secret homicidal intentions. He knows that monkey is up to something but his fucking wife and daughter just won’t listen! Cartoonish violence escalates at Roadrunner pace; you half expect Cranston to blow up his own house with a missile from Acme. Did I mention that Buff Bagwell shows up out of nowhere and Cranston pays him to fight the monkey? There are dead animals, corpses dissolving in barrels, a monkey throwing knives and shooting guns, Cranston channeling Heisenberg against the monkey (and his whimpering daughter), and some of the most high-brow comedy there is: a monkey in a baby carriage.

REVIEW: Gacy (2003)

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Gacy: F

Who would have thought that the homoerotic killing spree of an overweight clown would be so un-fun? The guy who plays Francis in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure plays Gacy, an overweight clown who goes on a homoerotic and un-fun killing spree. If reading those two sentences back-to-back annoyed you, don’t watch this movie because you obviously have a low threshold for annoying shit.

Gacy appears to be a model citizen. He hosts BBQ’s, drinks scotch with everyone, dresses up like a clown and does magic, and playfully wrestles with the misguided young boys he hires at his construction business. His favorite thing to do it not the stuff of model citizens; the guy loves to lure male drifters and other unfortunate boys to his house so he can rape/choke them to death. His basement starts to stink really bad because of all the raped/choked boy corpses he hides down there.

That’s what the whole movie is about. Gacy pretends to be a swell guy in the public eye but when no one is watching, he gets his rape/choke on. He just does this until he gets caught. The end.

Oddly, the actual movie isn’t made up of a bunch of murder scenes; it’s mostly scenes of Gacy being frustrated because he isn’t raping/choking people. I’d say a good 90% of the movie is him huffing and puffing because a dozen bystanders at his BBQ are keeping him from strangling some cute blonde boy. The film is also punctuated with uninteresting flashbacks of his dad being really mean to him.

Watching this was an overall unpleasant experience. Maybe they were trying to make this a sort of character study instead of a gore-fest but who wants to watch a 90 minute study of a guy who gets high blood pressure because he can’t murder-molest dudes?

REVIEW: The Contractor (2013)

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The Contractor: F

Someone who loves Cape Fear but hates original ideas made this movie about a family of well-to-do white people, one of whom is a lawyer who looks like a malnourished Greg Kinear, who hire Danny Trejo to fix some stuff around their house. Trejo scowls a lot and so did I while watching this fucking excuse for a horror movie.

If you manage to maintain consciousness during the first fifteen minutes, you’ll figure out the entire conflict and “twist” of the movie and you can wave goodbye to any hope you had of being surprised/entertained. Trejo was wronged by Greg Kinear so he’s developed this crazy vendetta that inspires him to infiltrate the guy’s house with a plan to ruin his life.

You have to sit through several scenes of Trejo brooding over a computer creating counterfeit documents which he uses to incriminate Kinear and several scenes where literally nothing happens to further the plot.

The WASP’s figure out that something fishy is going on so they dismiss Trejo, who then starts aggressively stalking the family. I forget how many there were exactly, but I’m gonna guess there were five scenes where he hides in their bushes. There is a really out of place, really long scene where the family has some kind of fundraiser/party at their mansion which Trejo watches from afar.

Kinear sends some armed goons to rough up Trejo but, of course, he beats their asses.

Trejo is defeated; he gets no justice. There is some cartoonish running/hiding and the husband out-maneuvers and overpowers Trejo (who, again, dispatched two huge hired goons). I sincerely don’t remember how Trejo is stopped; I was looking at pictures on my phone of Mel Gibson all roided out.

The family of whites move from their mansion to another large home. Greg Kinear is wearing a sweater and he promises to spend more time with his family. The wife gets good news: That benefit dinner or whatever was really successful and some hospital is naming a wing after her. The daughter promises to use her asthma inhaler. They hug a lot and pose in front of their house/Lexus in a genuinely bizarre ending where the director mistakenly believes that the audience gives a modicum of a fuck about any of the characters.