Tag Archives: reviews

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: Stay Alive (2006)

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Stay Alive: F

Released in the mid 2000’s to try and hitch on to the popularity of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill train, Stay Alive presents a premise that is both boring, unoriginal, flawed, and basically awful. The movie begins with some hardcore gamer who is beta testing a new game called “Stay Alive.” While playing the game his character dies by being hung from a chandelier, and about six minutes later, fuckin surprise, he dies in real life by being hung from a chandelier.

Soon we meet the main character “Hutch” and his GF “October” who is the hot video game playing emo chick designed to suck in all the lonely Everquest players who have never seen a pair of tits, and 12 year kids. Hutch’s crew also consists of a drug ravaged Frankie Muniz and another hot blonde whose name I have already forgotten. While sitting around one day, Hutch receives a copy of “Stay Alive” in the mail so he and his crew start gaming and soon they are trapped in the video game world of Count Elizabeth Bathory, and they learn the awful truth that if you die in the game, you die in real life.

From here the internal logic of the movie is shattered repeatedly as characters that do not die in the game, do die in real life and characters that do die in the game do not die in real life. Other ridiculous flaws include Hutch being investigated by the city police force, and despite the fact that he is around all of the victims as they perish and he has no legitimate alibis he is not once even brought in for questioning let alone marked as the prime suspect.

Eventually Hutch and the nameless Blonde chick somehow find out that the origin of the game is the home of Liz Bathory in Louisiana, so they go there to solve the mystery yet all we get to do is watch Frankie Muniz’s video game character run around in PS2 quality graphics while Hutch digs through old dressers.

About 1/8 of the movie is video game screen shots that look outdated for 1996 let alone 2006. The PG-13 rating also means that we get a lot more digital gore then actual gore as most kills are either implied or done off screen. Overall this movie is absolute garbage.

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.