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REVIEW: Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

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Freddy vs. Jason: C-

Welcome to a movie that attempts to take the famous chemistry from the Godzilla vs. films and transfer it to the 11th installment in the Friday the 13th (or 8th Nightmare on Elm Street) series. If you sit down expecting to see something revolutionary that doesn’t shamelessly cash in on ideas from the past 25 years, you will be very disappointed.

I remember salivating over the marketing for this film; two of my favorite horror characters were going to face off in mortal combat. It was a horror version of Santa vs. the Easter Bunny. This was when I was really into WWE, so I was basically destined to see this in the theater. The director manages to cram everything Freddy/Jason fans love about Freddy/Jason movies into 95 minutes and the results are anti-climactic. Think about it: Just because I like avocado, toffee, and roast beef, doesn’t mean dumping them down the chute of a juicer is going to make nectar. If you are like me and are a fan of both franchises, you’ll suck it down and believe you love it no matter what while others will be understandably perplexed and bored.

There are plenty of decent looking teenagers misbehaving before they are killed, foggy boiler room dream-murders, “chh-chh, chaa-chaa” Jason noises, and a plot that you could read the newspaper through. There isn’t a minute of this movie that goes out on a limb that isn’t immediately rendered as CGI and lopped off.

At the beginning of the film, fans are already all riled up from the dick-tease ending of Jason Goes to Hell. Freddy is trapped in Dream World because parents of Elm Street have gone to near-Orwellian pains to remove his killing sprees from the newspaper archives and minds of the town. Apparently, Freddy requires mass paranoia and terror in order to operate, both of which have been abolished by the town’s seemingly well-meaning helicopter parents; no sniveling, horrified teens means Freddy has no power. Freddy resurrects Jason and sets him loose on Elm Street, knowing that his murders will result in a renaissance of Freddy-fear, allowing Freddy to kill, kill, kill.

Just like Greek mythology, logical questions about the story have no place here. While some “rules” are set in stone, others are made of Silly Putty. Freddy is weak and can’t kill kids in their dreams, but he can summon dead people from Hell. How can Freddy go to Hell, but not Earth? He is confined to the dream world except when convenient for particular scenes. How is Jason, after so many decades, still so damn quiet and why is his machete five feet long?

The “vs.” part of the film comes in when the movie has about 15 minutes left; a rejuvenated Freddy attempts to eliminate Jason so he can have all the carnage to himself. I won’t ruin it for you, but the fight scenes are what a toddler playing with action figures probably imagines, full of flying jump-kicks, projectiles, and one-liners. Imagine Freddy and Jason as Power Ranger villains and you’ll have the aesthetic of the film correctly pictured.

Objectively, the movie is terrible. But you know what? It is the only movie I have ever seen twice in the theater on the same day. Maybe that means I’m a loser, but maybe it means fuck you, I’m not a loser: C-!

 

 

REVIEW: Nightmare in Wax (1969)

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Nightmare in Wax (1969): UV

Stay away from this movie like your life depends on it. If you have a soft spot for broke-as-fuck grindhouse movies with plots about as consistent as wet toilet paper, maybe you’ll get something out of this, but you should be ashamed of yourself if you do.

Some eye-patch wearing, Scooby-Doo villain looking motherfucker broods around in the back room of his wax museum concocting potions that he can use to turn Hollywood stars into wax statues so he can display them in his museum and get all excited about it. Actually, they don’t even turn into wax statues; the potions just induce a paralytic state that makes these movie stars look like wax statues of movie stars when really they are just catatonic movie stars, frozen like wax statues. He ensnares a few stars who have wronged him in the past and props them up in his museum. The old studio he worked for had a little party at which his boss purposely disfigured his face for life. Instead of just getting over it like a man, he becomes a mad scientist / wax statue ringmaster who wears, what appears to be, clothing from that Devo video and he abducts studio stars/personnel one by one.

I know what you’re thinking: “Oh, sick! Does he, like, molest them, or jerk off on them, or at least lick them like Sarah Connor’s hospital guard in Terminator 2?!” Nope. He just freezes them and then chills in his lab, which is full of bubbling test tubes and weird tubes and whatnot.

The captured stars are frozen statues, trapped on their respective podiums… or are they? Just when you think you understand the STUPID concept of pretend-wax incapacitated movie stars, all of a sudden they are robots or zombies or hypnotized or something and they follow the orders of the villain. Basically all of them act like an obedient Keanu Reeves. This potion makes the date rape drug look like Tylenol.

The characters are ridiculous and the writing is some of the laziest I’ve ever seen. They try to work in a little sexiness and are not very creative about it. Our hideously scarred villain, who looks like he is made of Michael Shannon and William Shatner DNA, makes out with this girl he is chasing OUT OF NOWHERE before shanking her. One minute she is terrified, but she succumbs to his (un)sexy advances.

The cops get a little suspicious and have inexcusable incompetence, even for a grindhouse movie. They fucking INSPECT the statues and still take forever to piece together what’s happening. There’s a snore-inducing car chase and no gore. The ending is (SURPRISE!) an anti-climactic cop out.

REVIEW: Blood Mania (1970)

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Blood Mania (1970): F

There is very little blood in Blood Mania. It would be like changing the title of Halloween to Coat Hanger Mania because of the one scene where Michael Myers is batting coat hangers out of the way when he’s trying to catch Jamie Lee Curtis in the closet.

This turd from the tail end of the grind house era begins with a blond woman with a noose around her neck running through the woods. She is in a nightgown that shows off her nipples and she’s running from some solemn motherfucker who appears to be walking after her, even though she’s running full blast. She falls down, screaming, and the opening credits conclude. The scene is never referenced again and we never learn who the fuck those people were. No blood by the way.

When the actual film opens, we see that this spoiled and very sexually hungry babe named Victoria hates her life because she spends all her time caring for her terminally ill dad, who is a total bedridden asshole. When she isn’t spooning him warm milk or whatever, she’s trying to get laid. She somehow fucks this up despite being an aggressive and reasonably attractive woman. In this one scene, she jumps in the pool topless and tries to seduce the pool boy, who runs away frightened as if she was a rattlesnake. Show me a pool boy who would do this in real life and I’ll eat my hat.

She has this really creepy fixation with her dad’s doctor, this Hasselhoff looking fella named Cooper, who also avoids her advances as he avoids trimming his sideburns. Cooper needs money because he’s being blackmailed for performing some illegal abortions back in the day. So Victoria comes up with a plan: Cooper bones her whenever she wants and she’ll poison her dad, inherit the estate, and give ol’ Coop the money to pay off his blackmailer. All the poor guy has to do is take the money, bang this wealthy heiress, and call it a day.

When Victoria, kills her dad, there is a little blood, but not “mania” levels. She makes him smell some poison in his sleep and then she, probably excited by the impending Cooper penis, chills in her dad’s room fondling her exposed breasts while he writhes around and dies. His mouth is red. That’s the blood. He dies watching his treacherous daughter twist her nipples right next to his bedpan. Bummer. Mania.

Zinger on Victoria: Her younger, cuter, not crazy sister inherits all of dad’s stuff. Cooper still needs that money so he starts banging the sister on the side and gradually ignoring Victoria, which leads to all sorts of obligatory grind house topless scenes, 60’s porn music, and more mania-less blood; Victoria smashes her little sister’s skull open with a lamp and then starts working on a painting. The gore/violence is, of course, cheap, unconvincing, and all around unpleasurable for everyone involved.

Cooper comes home and sees what’s happened. He starts to dispose of the corpse and then in the span of like sixty seconds, some crazy shit happens. We see that Victoria’s painting is of Cooper holding a skeleton and, suddenly, the ghost of the dead sister appears in the corner of the room. End of film.

You can’t have high expectations when you watch something like this. If you are ever in the mood to watch soft-core pornography with a ghost of a plot, check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_g6cb30_tM

REVIEW: Monkey Shines (1988)

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Monkey Shines C- (D if you like monkeys)

I know what I like and I know what sells. And what doesn’t sell is a “monkey shine”. Because what the fuck does that even mean? And on the poster, the monkey has cymbals, but doesn’t use cymbals as a weapon in the movie. The movie monkey mainly uses fire. Why the hell didn’t Hollywood put that on the cover? If I were in charge of Hollywood, I would have named this movie “Pyro Monkey vs. A Cripple”. That would have killed at the box office.

So anyway, there’s this cripple and he’s all fucked up. He can only move his head. He gets a helper monkey named Ella from his friend who does science. That friend has been doing science on Ella. He injected human brain tissue into her brain. This has made her….telepathic. I think. But he doesn’t tell the cripple.

Now, this cripple- whatever his name is-he still manages to get action while he’s confined to his chair. He somehow meets a female doctor who is (luckily) an expert in both quadriplegics AND primates. And they do a cripple-bang scene which I found interesting in a mechanics sort of way. This makes Ella jealous because the cripple used to spend his time listening to music with Ella. Now he’s having cripple sex with a regular person instead. So Ella starts burning people up and that’s pretty good.

But I hate this movie. You know why? It’s because all of Ella’s dialogue is fucking dubbed! By a human dude! What possible reason could there be for that?

It’s fucking infuriating. Let the monkey do her own dialogue. It’s racist. Who wants to hear a human doing monkey talk? He doesn’t even know the language! And there’s some monkeys that really talk good and are obviously fluent. And once, I seen a monkey doing sign language! Give the monkey a chance at least, Hollywood.

And shit, they must have had to pay the dude to do the voice-over! What kind of business sense is that, Hollywood? You had a fluent monkey right on set. Poor use of resources.

By the way, the monkey who played Ella- her real name is Boo and I can’t find her on IMDB. So they must have fucked her out of credit and probably all her royalties too. I’ve always said that if you cheat a monkey-it means you’re trash. And I still believe it. Even if you are Hollywood.

At the end Ella gets killed by a tape recorder. And the cripple’s still crippled. So what the fuck? And then there’s a dream sequence that might have happened.

Watching this movie is like being crippled. I understand those people now.

REVIEW: Dracula 3000 (2004)

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Dracula 3000: D

This is the epitome of early 2000’s straight-to-DVD bullshit with an ensemble of Z-level actors shamelessly coming together for a quick cash-in.

The year is 3000 and a space crew made up of Casper Van Dean, and his lackeys Coolio and Tiny Lister, are on an intergalactic rescue mission which leads them to a secret nest of deep-space vampires who are hiding on a spaceship, trying to make their way back to Earth. When I heard this was what the movie was about, and heard that Coolio raps in it, I was sold. The movie has nothing to do with Dracula 2000 but is instead just another horror “In Space” movie.

The cover for the movie says “IN SPACE THERE IS NO DAYLIGHT,” which makes no fucking sense at all. Aren’t there stars/suns fucking everywhere? Also, the movie is rated R. I seriously don’t see how. There is no gore/nudity and barely any profanity.

The nonsensical tagline on the cover art is a representative of the entire script. A good three quarters of the dialogue is comprised of foreboding one-liners that either make no sense or are elementary puns. There is some typical “in space” stuff. There’s some nonsense with the airlocks, computer controlled doors, and a self-destruct sequence.

The film names everyone after vampire mythology. There is a Van Helsing, Orlock, Mina, etc. Coolio’s name however is 187. What a fucking G. He is bitten, becomes a vampire 3000, and says a dope little rap about sucking blood as he prepares to attack a couple of the human crew members. This is so clearly the best part of the movie and it stands out at a ridiculous level. The rap scene was like a loud thirty person orgy interrupting a muted black and white marathon of Andy Griffith.

There is way worse straight-to-DVD stuff out there and your friends and you can get a fun watch out of this one but don’t expect to see any new ideas or believable acting.

 

REVIEW: Dreamcatcher (2003)

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Dreamcatcher (2003): D

This is a movie based on a Stephen King novel, so you already know it has about a 75% chance of sucking pretty bad ass. Guess what? It doesn’t beat the odds. Dreamcatcher was a fucking nightmare in which several talented actors are trapped in a convoluted mash-up of old Stephen King ideas, PG13 action movie cliches, and CGI aliens that crawl out of rectums.

Some childhood friends get together for a snowy weekend of male bonding in a secluded cabin. No rectums involved yet, but just you wait! It is slowly revealed to the audience that the buddies share a telepathic bond.

The testosterone and wasted movie minutes really start to flow and then some stranger covered in a weird fungus shows up and dies, really bumming everyone out. Even worse, a worm-like alien organism slithers out of the corpse’s butthole and starts killing the friends. The butthole alien, which resembles a three foot long hookworm with rows of shark teeth, kills Jason Lee and some other guy and then lays eggs / farts fungus all over the cabin. For a few minutes, it is trapped in a toilet, which I guess is supposed to be ironic because it came out of some dude’s asshole. How clever!  Luckily, the cabin gets burned down later, cooking the alien/fungus/larva to death and saving dozens of human buttholes from future shredding and saving the movie from something possibly exciting happening.

Then some larger alien calling himself “Mr. Grey” possesses the body of Sgt. Brody from Homeland, who narrowly avoided being slaughtered by the anal eel back at the cabin. Mr. Grey wants to contaminate the water supply in Boston with worms and have a big sphincter-shredding party. Sounds good to me at this point because so far, not much has happened.

As Brody’s Mr. Grey-controlled body treks to Boston, Brody has an internal struggle with the alien in a metaphorical mental “library” that houses all of Brody’s memories. Mr. Grey is rummaging around in Brody’s head looking for a specific memory. You find out later what it is. It has nothing to do with buttholes. Or dreamcatchers.

The military gets involved, some people get infected with the fungus and get “quarantined.” Many of the infected are exterminated because this secret branch of the military is familiar with the fungus which matures into the angry butthole worm. “Angry Butthole Worm” would be a pretty cool band name, by the way.

Come to find out, one of the friends was secretly an alien… a good alien disguised as an autistic dude! Not some cavity eel that sprays moss everywhere and bites people. We learn that Mr. Grey was looking for the memories associated with this benevolent alien friend, who also gave everyone their telepathic powers. At the last minute, good alien reveals himself, battles Mr. Grey at the reservoir, and stops the water supply / butthole murder plan. The CGI fight scene thankfully lasts just a few seconds.

If you were already at the end of your rope with this messy shit, sorry: The product of the CGI alien fight is a big CGI explosion that looks like a dreamcatcher and there’s no more butthole stuff.

The fraternal childhood bond, flashbacks, and subversive alien plot remind me of It, Tommyknockers, and Stand By Me. The direction was nothing special and all of the worms look like that really liquidy CGI from the late 90’s.

REVIEW: Link (1986)

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Link (1986): D+

“For years man has enslaved the ape. Now the tables have turned!” promises the original subtext on the VHS cover for this mushy simian fecal matter. Not really. There are no enslaved humans in the film. Sorry. The updated DVD cover reads “An Experiment in Terror.” Experiment failed. It’s about as terrifying as most made-for-TV creature features.

Thanks to some unethical and typically arrogant experiments, this ape named Link has super-intelligence. In his spare time, he likes to stalk/torture/kill small animals and commit random, minor acts of arson, like all super-intelligent organisms do. So, it’s no surprise that the professor in charge of the experiments that gave Link his intellect decides Link should be euthanized despite his many years of service as a ridiculous, cigar smoking monkey-butler. Mysteriously, the professor vanishes shortly after making his intentions known like an idiot. I WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM.

Link does some charming monkey antics like wearing a tie and smoking. Actually, not “some”; he does A LOT of circus-comedy antics and is wearing cute little monkey outfits for most of the film. These are intended to be consolation moments for the glacial pace of the film, I suppose. “It’s okay nothing has happened in 25 minutes! Link ate a cookie with his foot!” you exclaim as you watch Link alone all by yourself.

He is an orangutan but the filmmakers dye him brown and pretend he is a “chimp.”

They edit together 1st person camera scenes of Link-carnage and footage of him knocking on windows and screeching to make it look like he is actually “turning tables” as promised on the cover. When this timid student fully grasps that Link has killed the professor and has other homicidal tendencies, Link holds her prisoner. For a good chunk of the movie, she is trapped in a house in the remote countryside with a murderous animal lurking around outside, just like the woman trapped in the Pinto in Cujo. All she can do now is wait until Link decides to murder her and juggle some oranges while doing a handstand or something.

While this girl is sniveling and pleading, “Please don’t turn the tables, Link! Please stop this experiment in terror,” Link inspires the other lab monkeys to break free and act like wild assholes like him. There is some full scale monkey-pandemonium, or rather, random shots edited together to create the illusion of an ape-revolt. Not enough poop-throwing in my opinion, which brought the film down from an A to a D.

I have to give the movie this: There some funny-as-fuck kills. My favorite is when Link rips some guy’s arm off through the mail slot.

I won’t say exactly how it happens, but Link suffers a long fall into a flaming abyss at the end of the flick. The effects for this are totally fucked; it is ANIMATED. Like, a cartoon. Link’s cartoon silhouette rotating in slow motion as it descends into a pit of fire looks like a scene from Disney’s Fantasia. Check out the image for this review and you’ll see what I mean. There is a “twist” at the end that you’ll see coming from miles away. I’ve smelled farts with more mystique and integrity.

You can watch the whole film for free on Youtube if your curiosity is just that morbid.

 

REVIEW: Event Horizon (1997)

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Event Horizon (1997): B-

The guy who directed Mortal Kombat, some Resident Evil movies, and that terrible Three Musketeers movie directs this one which is, in my opinion, his best work.

One of my close friends, who used to work at a video store with me, claims this is the scariest movie he has ever seen. For fun, coworkers and I used to cue up gruesome scenes from the movie and play them on the TV’s in the store just to mess with him. He would get really upset. There’s a great scene where all this gore dumps out of this guy’s eyes; it would make yelps (and maybe a little poop) dump out of my friend.

In the future, Sam Neil (who has some impressive horror credentials, by the way) and Morpheus take a crew of people to investigate this missing spaceship called the Event Horizon. The ship uses some fancy black hole creating technology that makes it move really fast. Sam Neil explains it to the crew using an extremely condescending diagram on paper. He folds the paper in half to demonstrate how space-time bends in the artificial black hole, allowing the ship to basically teleport. “Now the opposite sides of the paper are touching! Yay! I understand physics!” you say to yourself. Yeah. Just like you understood Chaos Theory when Jeff Goldblum dribbled water onto Sam Neil’s hand in Jurassic Park. You have seen some version of this scene in probably a dozen movies and it is all you get to legitimize the sci-fi technology and batshit intergalactic demonomania of Event Horizon.

It is discovered that the ship traveled to a foreign dimension where it was contaminated by evil spirits and gained a malevolent and homicidal sentience. Now it is back in our universe and it gets its jollies by torturing/possessing people on board. I liked this idea. It is a haunted house / exorcism movie about a spaceship and it doesn’t totally suck like some “In Space” movies. It’s a cross between Solaris and The Shining but directed by the guy who did Mortal Kombat.

The “rules” are sort of blurry. Is the ship possessed by a single consciousness or are there spirits automating functions of the ship? Is the ship a demon now? Does the ship have feelings? Why does it hate this crew of people? How are crew members getting possessed? Which things on board are hallucinations and which are real? What exactly happened to the original crew?

Some token “In Space” elements stick around. People are blasted into space, airlocks are manipulated, and black holes are a threat. Instead of a self-destruct sequence, we get the black-hole drive activated by the possessed ship which threatens to teleport everyone to the shitty dimension where the evil shitty spirits come from.

Not much in the “answers” department but the scares/visuals are creative and it was refreshing to see a space/horror movie that didn’t totally blow.