Tag Archives: zombies

REVIEW: Shivers (1975)

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Shivers: C+

Dr. Emil Hobbs thinks that humans have become too civilized and we need to embrace our inner brutality. I’m not sure, but this might be a reference to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who thought that deep down, humans were all ruthless animals.

Dr. Hobbs is conducting some medical experiments to make his philosophy a reality that some might consider unethical; he gets naked, strangles people, cuts them open vertically, and dumps potions on their guts. The potions make cool smoke like dry ice. Also, the potions make these slug-looking parasites grow in the dead bodies. These parasites leave the host body when they are big enough, moving on to infect the living. The infected become zombies who, instead of biting people, hug, kiss, and rape people. If you get raped by a raper-zombie, you become a raper-zombie too. And those are the bad guys in the movie: some sex-slugs and some raper-zombies. I’m not sure, but this could be a commentary on the residue of sexual paranoia left behind from generations of North American Puritanism. Could be.

Anyway, about those slugs. Here’s a breakdown of the holes they can/cannot get into:

  • Eye socket: No.
  • Ear: No.
  • Mouth: Yes!
  • Butthole: Yes!
  • Vagina: Yes!
  • Penis hole: Implied!
  • Belly button: No.

Maybe I’m looking into this a little too closely, but I think these sex slugs might be allegorical symbols for sexually transmitted diseases. Who knows.

Being a raper-zombie looks even worse than being a biter-zombie. Biter-zombies don’t bite other biter-zombies, but raper-zombies do rape other raper-zombies. How exhausting! Biter-zombies get to relax most of the time, only getting excited when there is a non-zombie around, but raper-zombies are constantly raping. I want you to think about that when you see all these good looking women in the movie who have sex-slugs in them. You might think “Oh, well, she can do her raper-zombie thing to me. I’m okay with that!” but just remember, that means you are signing up for a lifetime of grueling rape. I’m starting to think that this might be a thinly-veiled metaphor satirizing the temptation associated with the “Free Love” movement. I dunno. Just a thought.

In the movie, a bunch of people turn into raper-zombies and rape a bunch of other people into their zombie orgy. There is some trademark Cronenberg gore/terror and, this is just a theory, but I think there is also some social commentary in there somewhere.

 

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: The Battery (2012)

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Battery

 

The Battery:  D

The Battery offers three new twists on the zombie genre:

1. It gives us zombies that are so fucking slow and incompetent that you figure that the human race really deserved this shit.

2. It settles, once and for all, just how nice a zombie’s tits could possibly be.

3. It lets us know that surviving the zombie apocalypse would mostly consist of being bored. It does this by boring the shit out of you. Seriously, you really feel the tediousness.

Basically, it’s about a couple of dumb fucking guys who go from place to place looking for food and supplies so they can survive. They talk about stupid, uninteresting shit. They find a walkie-talkie, and they hear some other survivors talking on them. The other people want nothing to do with them. One of the dumbfucks wants to keep trying, and he winds up talking to some girl who’s supposedly part of some colony of survivors. Nothing interesting develops from this subplot. You see the dick of one of the guys. Oh yeah, his balls too. The penis is flaccid.

There are enough good ideas to sustain a 101 minute movie here, but instead of doing something with those ideas, we get the two guys stuck in a car for a really long-ass time.

Here’s how you know when a movie is just wasting time with shit: I saw this movie with several of my Bloodcrypt Brothers. Quite often, one of us would get up to piss, shit, get a drink, or buttfuck a hobo, and when he’d come back, nobody would have to fill him in on what he missed, ‘cause all he missed was time being wasted. One of us, and I’m not saying for sure that it was Dr. Loomis, could have had time to cuddle that poor hobo a bit, but he stupidly hurried, not even giving the bum a reacharound, because he thought he was going to miss something. I probably wouldn’t mind if he didn’t squeeze his secondary cum out into my beer. At least, I wouldn’t mind it if it tasted better.

Oh, and the ending is ambiguous. Sometimes movies do this and it’s cool because it makes you think. Sometimes it happens because they didn’t have any fucking clue how to end it. Guess what the case is with this one?

Come to think of it; I’m not sure how to end this review. Maybe I’ll…

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: World War Z (2013)

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World-War-Z
Grade: B

 

I was sitting in the theater about to watch Tyler Durden take on some zombies when some asshole had to go and tell me that this movie was based on a book. A book? About zombies? That’s about all I wanted to hear, because I hate it when you have to listen to somebody who also read the book after you just watched a movie. They love to tell you all about how the “book was better” and “the book did X differently”. It’s like they’re bragging ’cause they’re reading, but little do they know that all that makes them is a bunch of fuckin’ nerds.

So, I don’t know nuttin’ about no book readin’, but I do know a thing or two about zombie movies. Maybe one day I’ll get around to reviewing some of the classic ones, but right now, you’re going to have to settle for this. Basically, this one doesn’t give us too much that’s different. They’re fast zombies, which we’ve seen in 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. They seem to have a scientific/natural cause, as the scientific method is what’s used to beat them. Also, the entire planet has been taken over by them, which is pretty typical.

 
What’s different with this one is that there’s a bit of a sense of hope at the end, whereas zombie movies usually leave you thinking: “Yeah, the good guys got out of that scrape, but they’re gonna be dead tomorrow.” It’s not like this movie ends with the zombies and the humans walking hand-in-hand, as they’ve gotta leave some room for a sequel, so you’re thinking: “You might survive the next day, but man, it’s gonna be pretty damned tough.” Am I giving away too much for those of you who get all butt-hurt about spoilers? I hope not, but if I did, feel free to lick my butt.

There are also some pretty cool visuals in this one, and the cgi is done well. This is probably the first time I’ve seen a zombie movie where I can totally buy how quickly it spreads. A lot of times, you get thrown into the action after the really bad stuff has gone down, but you actually get to see it all descending into mayhem – a couple of times, actually.

Gore-fans are going to be disappointed, as the PG-13 rating makes this more of an action film than a horror film. You see more grotesque stuff in the average episode of The Walking Dead than you see in this entire movie. There are a few good “gotcha!” moments though, and it’s all pretty danged entertaining. The nearly-two hour run time whooshes by like one of them running zombies.

REVIEW: The Stuff (1985)

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thestuff

 

The Stuff (1985): B

“Are you eating it or is it eating you?” B-movie gold!

Some old codger finds a puddle of white goo seeping from the earth, so he does what any of us would do: He tastes it. Turns out, it’s not molten bird shit or house paint or toxic waste; it’s a DELICIOUS yogurt like substance! “I can sell this to people!” the old goo-eater exclaims.

The mystery goo is marketed as “The Stuff” and is sold to consumers as an ice cream alternative. The Stuff has no calories, is satisfying, and is addicting like crack. What sucks is that The Stuff is also a sentient parasitic life form. If you get hooked on The Stuff, your body is controlled and then eventually eaten from the inside out. There are tons of scenes where people are orgasmically enjoying tubs of Stuff with shit-eating grins on their faces. Later, The Stuff fatally dumps out of their stupid mouths.

In addition to turning people into Stuff zombies, The Stuff can also maneuver around like The Blob and attack people, making for some hilarious 80’s CGI sequences.

The ice cream industry, suffering from the popularity of The Stuff, hires a hot shot PI to investigate the Stuff company. The PI forms a little Anti-Stuff detective league with an 8-year old kid and a fashion mogul. They do all sorts of shenanigans like blowing up a lake of Stuff, infiltrating a Stuff factory, and fighting hordes of Stuff zombies. These fights are great. Punch a Stuffy in the face and half their skull cracks off, revealing a Stuff geyser.

Paulie from Goodfellas plays an Army general.

There are elements from many of your favorite horror/sci-fi movies: The possessions by a foreign organism like in The Thing; the creepy food product like in Soilent Green; the few unlikely heroes who know the truth and set out to enlighten the public like in They Live. You could also read the movie as an allegory for marketing to middle class America, diet crazes, or the war on drugs. Mingle all this with B-movie charm and non-stop action, and you get The Stuff.

 

 

REVIEW: Dead Snow (2009)

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Dead Snow, Grade C+

How offensive.  Apparently, the makers of this movie felt as though Nazis weren’t bad enough, so they had to go ahead and make the Nazis into zombies.  What was the pitch like for this movie?  Did the screenwriter go to the studio for a film that featured Nazis as the bad guys but the producers replied:  “Nazis?  As bad guys?  What else have you got?”  Then, off the top of his head, the writer said, “Umm…what if I make them zombies?”

This film takes place in a land called “Norway” which is, from what I can tell, one huge glacier. The people there speak what sounds like German if you’re only vaguely familiar with what German sounds like.

The story involves some young people blah blah blah Nazi zombies.  The one good thing that this film has going for it is that it’s not taking itself too seriously, and it’s entertaining if you’re watching it with a bunch of friends.

Some of the highlights of the film include an outhouse scene and a guy using a large intestine as a rope.  The one scene that really stood out in my mind when I saw this was when a dude gently inserted his penis into a woman’s vagina.  Yeah, that was a totally different movie, but one of my friends said that apparently there was a porn on Netflix.  We checked it out, and at first it seemed pretty tame with nudity but no actual penetration.  We then fast-forwarded it, and you’d better believe there was some full-on ruttin’ going on, but in a classy sort of a way.  I don’t remember the name of that movie, but I totally remember those two people doin’ it better than I remember anything from this Nazi zombie film.