Reel Bad

Are you a fan of Sleepaway Camp? CKY? World Under Blood? Then you're in luck.

2011-07-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

If you're not aware, Felissa Rose of Sleepaway Camp fame happens to be married to CKY frontman, Deron Miller.

The first album from his new metal band, World Under Blood is due to be released on July 26th and if you order it now, the pair has just decided to offer some pretty interesting perks. First of all, you'll get a call from Felissa herself to thank you for the support. In addition, you'll also receive an autographed picture from each of them.

If you're a fan of Sleepaway Camp, CKY, World Under Blood, or just nice people in general, head over to the Amazon page page and pick up the album for a little under $14, you'll definitely be getting your money's worth.

Hobo With A Shotgun Released on DVD and Blu-Ray

2011-07-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

If you didn't get your fill of ~~dangerous~~ ~~explosive~~ fun excess yesterday, you'll be thrilled to find out that Hobo With A Shotgun has come to DVD and Blu-Ray just in time for National Hangover and Tending to Explosion Wounds Day.

The extras on the 2-disc DVD and Blu-ray Collector's Editions include:

Commentary with director Jason Eisener and Rutger Hauer (his first commentary)
A second commentary with the director, producer, writer, and David Brunt from the original Hobo with a Shotgun.
Deleted scenes & Alternate ending
Video blogs & Featurettes ("More Blood, More Heart: The Making of Hobo with a Shotgun", "HDNet: A Look at Hobo with a Shotgun")
Faux Trailer Contest Winner video
TV spots, trailers, and more.

Wrong Subtitles: Galaxy of Rabbits

2011-06-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

Wrong Subtitles: Recalsablanca

2011-05-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

Pot Zombies

2011-04-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Kaufman's Make Your Own Damn Movie is an interesting, humorous, somewhat informational book that has outgrown its pages a bit since its 2003 release. In 2005 it had grown into a boxed package that included a DVD companion set. In 2008 and 2009 respectively, we got books on directing our own damn movies and producing our own movies. 2008 also saw the first of a proposed series of films to come from young filmmakers actually putting Lloyd's teachings to work. It may be telling that we haven't seen another one since. As it turns out, maybe not ALL of us need to make our own damn movie after all.

With a movie named something like Pot Zombies, I was expecting something along the lines of Bite Me!, but with less budget, less everything else, and probably a good bit less enjoyment. After my mercilessly short 60 minute experience was through, it was apparent that my expectations had still been...

...way too high.

The movie is basically five or so different ideas of what could be pitches for a movie called Pot Zombies. None of them are ever explored or fleshed out past that stage, and no attempt is made to develop the characters used in them.

Between these short vignettes we're treated to a bizarre, blown-out, bare-chested joint surrounded by... roaches maybe... it's hard to tell with everything looking so overexposed.

You may not notice immediately with that screenshot against a dark background, but there are 2 unequal black bars on either side. That's just one of at least 3 different aspect ratios that the movie treats us too...

The first sketch is widescreen for some reason.

And... the rest is fullscreen.

I read one interview with the filmmaker, Justin Powers, who basically said that he wanted to see if he could make a movie, so he made Pot Zombies as a way to learn how to shoot, edit, etc as he went along. That makes the end result make more sense, and does embody Lloyd Kaufman's suggestions to just get started rather than sitting on your ass and wondering if you could... but then again, I had a few friends in high school who did the same with their miniscule tax returns one year (money only got as far as the camera purchase) and a cast including themselves, a crackhead who would go on to star in... cutting someone's throat in his front yard, and someone I'm pretty sure was mentally handicapped... and they ended up with something a great deal funnier, with much better digital effects, and most importantly, something that wasn't boring. I'd really rather not just shit on Powers for getting out and actually making something, but when crafting your low-budget disasterpiece, you absolutely cannot let it get boring.

I've heard a few mentions of a potential sequel in the works. I really hope that doesn't happen, but I think the premise might be workable as long as one little tweak gets consideration.

A PLOT!

In an effort to end on a positive note, I will say that I quite enjoyed the low-framerate flash animated blood transitions. Pot Zombies needed more of these.

Now if only George Lucas would learn to tone down his silly screen wipes to something as subtle as that we'd all be better off.

Pot Zombies Trailer:

Search Engine Craziness: Frankenstein Pretzels

2011-04-14T07:27:00.000-07:00

While not quite 100% of my keyword hits are inexplicably sexual, the ones that aren't are often so random that they're even stranger than the others. When I saw "frankenstein pretzels" in the list, I had to go Google it myself to see just what that person might have been looking for. I'm not sure what it was, but I did find this surprisingly appropriate picture.

La Schiava Io Ce L'Ho e Tu No

2011-04-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

I believe this will be the first time I've written about anything from my collection of Italian sex-comedies, but I was recently discussing it somewhere else, had already made screencaps, and I'm pretty sure almost no one else on the internet is talking about this film (especially not in English), so it seemed like as good a place as any to start.

As with many of these rare foreign things, subtitles are often hard to find, or just completely unavailable altogether... The latter was the case for me here, so I had to understand things via Google Translate's interpretation of the Italian Wikipedia page and my somewhat limited knowledge of Spanish.

In any case, I think I've shown that I'm EXACTLY the right person to discuss this movie, so let's get started.

La Schiava Io Ce L'Ho e Tu No is a film directed by Giorgio Capitani that was released in 1972. The plot is pretty simple up until the strange left turn that is the movie's namesake. After that, things get weird.

Demetrius Cultrera (Lando Buzzanca) is a young, rich, Sicilian bachelor who becomes engaged to the beautiful (and also rich) Rosalba (Catherine Spaak), the daughter of a local business owner.

After their wedding, Rosalba's attitude changes when she decides to try turning Demetrius into the modern sort of husband she'd like. This causes a problem, as Demetrius prefers sticking to what he sees as more traditional gender roles. Despite her constant attempts, Rosalba's persistent attempts to convert him to the rituals of high society, and to her "enlightened" and/or feminine tastes do little more than annoy him.

Strongly determined to build a stable relationship with a woman who can fulfill his visions of peaceful married life, he leaves for the Amazon, where he is offered the opportunity to choose and buy a new wife as a slave.

The choice falls on the beautiful and docile Manua (Veronica Merin).

He takes her back to Italy, then starts working to clean her up and train her to act as the kind of subservient wife he was looking for.

Finally he takes her to get her hair straightened, revealing that the Amazonian native actually looks like a brown Shannon Elizabeth.

Once all that's done. He starts taking her out to proudly show off his creation to friends...

and also to use her for manual labor.

Even when he's back at home, he's constantly inviting over dinner guests to witness his ideal wife. By this time the two actually seem to have a little chemistry between them, but that doesn't mean she's graduated to sitting at the same level as the men just yet.

It does earn her several head-pats though.

Once he's impressed and inspired all of his own friends. He takes her out to parade her past his ex-wife to try making her jealous. This is of course done by hooking her up to a rickshaw and having her pull him around the city until he finds Rosalba.

He finds her soon enough, and seems satisfied, but the ex-wife ends up only looking mildly intrigued and confused.

Things wrap up quickly after that, and the film cuts to a closing scene showing us the couple many years in the future. The new wife is now adept at making Demetrius drinks, lighting his cigarettes, and giving him massages. Surely she's graduated to chair sitting by now...

Not quite, but at least he's still petting her.

Sex comedies aren't generally written from a very feminist perspective, but this one's got to be about the most extremely and exuberantly misogynist example I've ever seen. Strangely enough, it's still strangely watchable and even enjoyable. Lando Buzzanca and Veronica Merin have an odd, inappropriate chemistry between them that always makes seeing them together pretty fun... for as long as you can ignore the weird contexts of everything they're doing.

There are only a few (uneventful) video clips of this film I've found on Youtube. Good luck figuring out what's going on in them.

Dracula Has Risen From The Dead to Steal Your Drugs

2011-04-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

I've watched a lot of short films today. I'm going to write about Dracula Has Risen from the Dead to Steal Your Drugs because it was the worst.

It is also however, the only one I've seen 4 times now, so that probably counts for something too. Mostly I think I'm just perplexed by its existence. While I can sort of enjoy it for what it is, it's also bizarre enough that it keeps leaving me feeling like Christopher Lee is playing some sort of weird Belgian dadaist joke on me.

I'm pretty sure that's what it is.

The story is simply that a few friends go out to a secluded graveyard in a wooded area to smoke some marijuana. Dracula, who's not only buried there, but had apparently been recently exhumed...

... gets a whiff of their smoke and pops out of his coffin to investigate.

Actually, "pops" probably isn't the right word to describe how he gets out of that thing. First of all it takes him a full minute and a half to get out (of the 10 minute total running time). Are you wondering why it took him so long? Well, apparently Dracula really likes Madonna's music. Justify My Love starts playing when his coffin opens and he just really gets into it.

a lot.

Madonna's music might seem like an odd choice in a short that's based on Dracula, but it's best not to dwell on that because you're just going to have to get used to it.

These are the real music credits.

After the song he turns into a bat and flies away to the other kids. I'm not sure why he transforms, it must've only been a couple of feet. The kids are smoking in the middle of the graveyard and there are only about a half-dozen tombstones there. Anyway, he reconstitutes himself such that he smoothly appears in their smoking circle and sneaks in on their rotation. Once he starts smoking the joint and making those faces in the first screencap though... people notice.

a lot.

It may look like that guy was over-acting a bit, but this was a dramatic moment. One that can only be demonstrated by making faces like that... or by the magic of dance.

I'm going to upload the thing to Youtube, but I can't imagine it'll stay there for long with that track list.

I can't really recommend it too strongly, but it is at least better than Pot Zombies.

Enjoy.

Wrong Subtitles: Church Story

2011-03-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

Enter The Void

2011-03-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

I went into Enter The Void, in pretty much ideal circumstances. I'd seen the trailer, but only once and long enough ago that I couldn't remember anything except that Gaspar might be using his flying disembodied Koyaanisqatsi-cam from Irréversible and that it was essentially a story told from the first-person perspective. As far as the plot was concerned, I could have been going to see Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up stretched out over two and a half hours.

What I wouldn't have guessed going in was that having spent a good portion of my college years dabbling in psychedelics, having read the DMT-related hypotheses of Jeremy Narby and Rick Strassman, and even reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead would turn out to be useful in understanding the film as well.

Strassman's hypothesis, which the movie touches on in the brief amount of vocal exposition we're given, is that the hallucinogen DMT which some studies show exists endogenously in mammals, not only exists in the pineal gland of the human brain, but is also released in great quantities at the onset of death (and possibly at birth). This is used to explain why users of synthesized DMT report experiences very much like near-death experiences, and why it is that when in a near-death experience, subjects generally do not feel panicked but are instead incredibly calm.

The scientific evidence supporting that hypothesis seems to boil down to the presence of an enzyme that's specifically used to break down DMT that's found throughout the body. There's nothing else that implicates any specific concentration of the chemical actually being in the pineal gland or anywhere else. So the idea's not exactly on firm scientific ground, but it is interesting enough to make a make a movie about... especially with Noé's having his character fill his brain with DMT manually before death as a way to avoid leaning too heavily on needing this strange hypothesis to actually be true.

Enter The Void opens by dropping us into Oscar's (Nathaniel Brown) perspective in what seems like a fairly ordinary night as a means of introducing us to the two main characters, Oscar and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). Linda leaves almost immediately and Oscar pulls out his DMT pipe to introduce himself and the audience to what exactly a DMT trip looks like from his perspective.

At this point it must be said that the effects studio, BUF, did a great job at rendering these strangely organic, yet geometrically crystalline looking hallucinations that are so hard to accurately portray in film or anything else for that matter. The ones shown in this film are among the best I've seen.

The fact that this feat must have presumably been pulled off by artists who hadn't all started their shifts with an early morning cup of ayahuasca makes it even more impressive. As Jason Shankel put it in his piece for io9, "Oscar's DMT trip is rendered so realistically that watching it while high would just be a waste of drugs."

After a couple of minutes of seeing Oscar in screensaver mode, his phone rings and takes his attention away from the visuals. As it turns out, he's got to go down to a place called The Void to drop off some drugs with his primary client. His friend Alex (Cyril Roy) stops by just before he leaves, so he comes along with Oscar to give us one of the movie's most direct exposition sequences. After explaining a bit about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Oscar heads into the club and gets himself killed while hiding out in a Japanese squat-toilet.

It's here, with the death of our protagonist, that the movie really begins.

As he lies on the floor dying, Oscar begins experiencing overwhelming hallucinations along with time dilation. Alex had touched upon time-dilation earlier when he mentioned that when on something like a DMT trip, to us that what seems like hours may in reality only be occurring over a matter of seconds or minutes. Some films like Spun or Requiem for a Dream make attempts at showing what a time-compression experience might look like by dropping frames and speeding up the film speed. Noé gives us a time-dilation experience by showing us 2 hours of hallucinations which take place in the final moments of Oscar's brain's life.

The idea that the entire movie really is as simple as that seems to elude some people, who insist it's a first-person account of a reincarnation process or just a story about ghost incest or something. But no, it isn't, and it doesn't have to be to be satisfying. This is one of the very few times when at the end of the movie you can realize that the whole thing was essentially a dream and that's actually appropriate rather than just being a lazy and enraging plot device.

One interesting thing to notice as you go through the story is that, as a result of his experience being generated by his brain, the experiences' strangeness varies inversely to the freshness and familiarity of the memories they're based on. Those that nvolve the very familar and recent, such as the "post-death" experiences in the bathroom where he dies, are all very realistic and clear. Those that involve things from more distant memories begin to look a little stylized and hazy. Those involving places he's never been are completely generated by his mind and are often based only on tiny scaps of known information and are therefore almost entirely left up to Oscar's creativity. The love-hotel he visits towards the end of the film is in a place he only knows from seeing an artist friend's dayglo, blacklight-illuminated model, so this is all especially clear there.

The experiences Oscar has seem to bifurcate and begin following seperate paths at some point. He follows his sister's reaction and how her life might unfold from the very beginning, but eventually Oscar begins reliving memories and traveling back through the lives of he and his sister as well. This leads to a potentially confusing ending where the backward and forward paths almost overlap and come to an end. At the love-hotel Oscar sees Linda having sex with his friend Alex. If we've learned anything from the flying disembodied camera by this point it's that it flies into any holes it finds, so of course it ends up shooting into Linda's glowing vagina.

By this point we've travelled back through many of Oscar's early memories of his parents and his childhood, one of which was seeing his parents have sex, so this sparks another memory in which we see a very basic birth memory, followed by an infant Oscar with his parents at their home. This memory is very hazy, and the mother's face is especially blurred out, so this progression isn't obvious to someone looking for a reincarnation angle. What they're likely to have seen was ghost-Oscar shooting into Linda's vagina, followed by him being born again and deposited in a new baby belonging to his sister. If it isn't enough that his sister had just had an abortion and probably wouldn't have loaded a new egg in the chamber just yet anyway, Noé has directly refuted any possibility of something like that being intended by those scenes, stating "It's not Oscar's sister, it's Oscar's mother..." and "It's not the story of someone who dies, flies and is reincarnated, it's the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream."

There's lots of talk about there being pretty heavy incest themes throughout the movie, and that's kind of understandable (I am using Oscar shooting into his sister's vagina as a segway after all). If Oscar is just seeing what his brain wants to show him, why does end up traveling around watching his sister at work (she's a stripper), after work (perhaps a prostitute?), and in her free time (having sex again) the way he does? This suspicion isn't exactly discouraged when we see how comfortable Linda is being nude around Alex and how she seems to prefer staying that way most of the time... but I don't really think any of that actually has anything to do with incest.

At the most direct, maybe Noé doesn't do anything to really disqualify the idea as a way to leave it open in order to provoke people's reactions to incest taboos. But Oscar relives his recent memories of his sister, along with their relationship as children and teenagers and he never really shows any sexual interest in her at all. So while I admit that Noé does have a tendency to use everything available to make his audience feel uncomfortable, in the end I really think it's just that Oscar and Linda have a relationship that doesn't include some of the taboos that many people's relationships with their siblings do. I get a little of that myself, having a younger sister that I can talk directly and honestly with about sex or other such taboo topics if they come up. That alone seems to sometimes be enough to make other people's skin crawl. Some people had a hard time seeing how I could ever hang out at her place when she dated an old friend of mine for a while... but those sorts of social taboos just aren't things that bother me. If she was the sort to spend most of her life naked, then if someone saw one of those conversations about sex or porn or something I'd probably find myself under the same sort of scrutiny as Oscar.

One of the biggest things that shows that theirs is a nonsexual relationship is just how childlike it is. Oscar and Linda are seen in flashback-type memories over and over, so we see how their close relationship was and is maintained as they grow up. After the early death of their parents, they attach to one another and become even closer. Later when we see Linda as an adult, she's often acting so much like a child when alone with Oscar that any potentially sexual situations still seem innocent because Linda appears to have regressed to a sexually-naive and taboo-ignorant child.

They show this over and over, sometimes almost literally.

As for giving this movie a real review, there's little to be said aside from heaping praise on Noé for making a two and a half hour self-indulgent art film that's somehow not only still watchable (impressive in itself) but also completely enthralling. The watching experience isn't exactly always comfortable , but you still can't ever look away.

If at any point you break from it's spell for a moment,

you'll feel yourself making this face.

Gaspar Noé's films seem to generally keep out of the mainstream due to their experimental and potentially offensive themes, but Enter The Void is perhaps his most accessible and maybe even his most pleasant, so make sure you don't pass over this one. It's available for streaming on Netflix so there's really no excuse to not see it.

RoboGeisha

2011-03-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

RoboGeisha is a collaboration between Noboru Iguchi and special effects man Yoshihiro Nishimura (i.e., the director of Tokyo Gore Police and co-director of Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl).

With a team like that you sort of know what to expect going into this one... but as with their other titles, knowing the sorts of things you can expect does not mean that everything you're about to see isn't still going to be completely mind-blowing.

The story opens by introducing us to Yoshie (Aya Kiguchi) and her older sister Kikue (Hitome Hasebe, Battle Royale II).

Kikue is a an ambitious geisha while Yoshie is her supposedly "uglier" younger sister who is basically just a servant in the house where Kikue works. Kikue is hoping to impress the young head of Kageno Steel, but as it turns out he actually prefers Yoshie... So of course the conflict between the sisters just escalates rapidly from this point on.

Both girls eventually end up at the young guy's rural home, which is where he's apparently been essentially kidnapping and brainwashing young girls into a personal army of cyborg ninja geisha assassins.

The girls begin training there and competing for success as assassins. This quickly leads to both of them getting mechanical enhancements of their own and it's here that things really take a turn for the wacky.

Exhibit 1: Killer socks

Exhibit 2: Breast-cannons

And, last but not least,
Exhibit 3: Ass-shurikens.

Apparently Iguchi was asked to tone down the violence and gore a bit for this one, so the weapons are a bit more ridiculous and cartoony than usual, and all blood effects are done in CGI. CGI blood almost never looks good... or even remotely passable... and this case is certainly no different, but then the silly cartoon blood is not exactly pulling you out of an otherwise believably realistic scenario, so it bothered me less than I expected it to.

Yoshie eventually emerges as the top "clockwork cortesan" and at this point decides to abandon the robogeishas in order to stop the evil steel corporation and save Japan from them.

With a name like Yoshie, this understandably has to happen by way of a Mario Kart battle.

The final showdown, the climax of the movie's absurdity, is a battle between Tank-Yoshie and a robotic building with an atomic bomb necklace, during which blood spurts from destroyed bystander-buildings in a way that it absolutely should have been doing in monster movies since the very beginning.

If you're a fan of the sort of surreal absurdist gore that's come from Noburu Iguchi in the past, you're likely to enjoy RoboGeisha. Even if you've been hesitant to see the more extreme things like Tokyo Gore Police, this is a pretty tame introduction to his style. While the premise does start to stretch a bit thin at times, overall I still really had a lot of fun with this one.

Trailer:

Galaxy of Terror

2011-03-11T18:56:00.001-08:00

Galaxy of Terror is one of Roger Corman's many sci-fi efforts, and one that most often seems to be summed up (and passed by) as simply an Alien rip-off. While that's a reputation that might be earned, it's also an oversimplification that sort of misses the point. Galaxy of Terror is superficially like Alien, but only to the extent that Carnosaur is superficially like Jurassic Park. On first glance it might just look like a shittier version, but it's actually an interesting reinterpretation that's been passed through Corman's lens of exploitation and turned into something really unique.

A Jurassic Park clone would've been terrible if the only difference was that Corman replaced the dinosaurs with a silly looking sock puppet, but when you add things like mutant chickens, laughable decapitations, and women giving birth to giant dino-eggs, you have a viewing experience that's altogether different.

Similarly, if Corman had just copied Alien, but used a rubbery-looking monster and dropped H. R. Giger's biomechanical xenomorph stylings for cardboard corridors, that wouldn't be interesting at all. But what we have here includes such things as Joanie from Happy Days in a tentacle head-crushing scene, gratuitous use of exploding lasers, and a bestiality-rape scene starring a giant maggot.

Just in case your interest isn't piqued already, you'll also find the credits scattered with names like:

Robert Englund (Nightmare on Elm Street)

Sid Haig (House of 1000 Corpses)

Ray Walston (Of Mice and Men)

and even James Cameron, working as second-unit director and production designer shortly before his directorial and screenwriting debut, Piranha II: The Spawning.

The story has our crew on a rescue mission to a crashed space station. They're supposed to be looking for survivors, which is strange considering that anytime they see anything unexpected they all panic and shoot it with lasers.

Pretty soon, Private Cos (Jack Blessing) splits off the group to check a dark corridor on his own. He is quickly dispatched by a very strange creature that we can only see a little of, but which apparently has one of each sort of limb imaginable. We see a tentacle, a couple of different kinds of crab pincer-like things, a hooked claw, etc.

Alluma (Erin Moran), the crew's resident psychic, senses some sort of distress signal coming from a spooky pyramid nearby, so the rest of the crew heads that way.

The crew splits into two groups, both ascending the pyramid from different angles. Commander Ilvar starts acting strange, then stops his group to go explore a hole...

and is immediately devoured by space-leeches.
( Video )

The commander's death leads the busty blonde, Dameia (Taaffe O'Connell), to announce "Ugh... I hate worms."

This turns out to be pretty much her only character development, in part because it's foreshadowing her own end. From here on, that's pretty much how most of the characters are treated.

Next up, Quuhod (Sid Haig) breaks his crystalline Krull blades while using them to prop open a giant door and, when offered a laser gun like everyone else, replies "I live and die by the crystals!" Of course immediately afterwards, Quuhod's left alone to guard the door. His crystal blade reconstitutes itself, but then breaks again when he picks it up. This sends a large shard into his arm, which then starts working it's way upward towards his torso.

( Video )

Quuhod quickly concludes that his best bet is to cut off the arm altogether, so he does just that. Unfortunately for him, it falls to the ground next to his other blade, which it immediate tosses into his chest to kill him.

By this point Dameia has decided to go back to the door to check on Quuhod. When she arrives, she finds his body, and while burning it with spacefire startles herself by nearly stepping on his disembodied arm which is now covered in spacemaggots (just in case we'd already forgotten her thoughts on "worms").

She starts lasering that arm into ash too, along with the maggots, only she ends up missing one.

It limps off and retreats to plan its revenge.

Dameia, rather than returning to her group at this point, wonders further away on her own, so we know she can't have long left. What we don't know is that the maggot is back already, and this time it's a giant rape caterpillar.

She wonders back into the doorway and basically just backs into the thing. In a matter of seconds it's managed to rip off and/or dissolve her clothing. The worm has its way with her for quite a while, then leaves her on the floor covered in rapeworm slime.

( Video )

Afterwards we jump back to Ranger (Robert Englund). Strangely enough, while exploring alone he runs into an evil version of himself.

Here we get to see a young, pre-Nightmare Englund developing his trademark sneer.

He eventually realizes that evil Robert Englund is actually a nightmarish character in his own head that's feeding off his fears and only has power as long as he's afraid of him.

Wait... what?

Meanwhile, a few surviving crew members get offed quickly to start wrapping things up. One is killed by this ridiculous thing:

Then Alluma (who's claustrophobic) finds herself having to squeeze into a small, increasingly shrinking tunnel. Just when you might start thinking that's she's going to be crushed or something like that, the tunnel comes alive with tentacles.

After the rape-caterpillar, this is where I assumed we were headed...

The scene ends up staying pretty tame up until the last moments though, when a couple of tentacles wrap around her head and crush it.

( Video )

Cabren (Edward Albert) and Ranger have now both figured out that it's their own fears which are manifesting as the means to their ends. Kore (Ray Walston) appears inside the pyramid with them now and reveals himself to be a "Planet Master." Cabren follows him, and then learns that the pyramid is used as a test to choose Planet Masters by finding those who can conquer their fears. Cabren, having done that, now has to fight all the pyramid critters... while doing a lot of flips apparently. Afterwards, he's faced with space-zombie versions of all his dead crew-mates.

Most look like they're in horrible zombie makeup,
but of course Dameia's just slippery and naked again.

Cabren manages to get rid of them all somehow. I'm really not sure how, he tosses a few of them around, then gets tossed around himself... then he takes a nap.

When he wakes up he only has to fight off Alluma. Once he does, he then kills Kore and finds that he'll become Planet Master himself now. So... by winning he's now stuck managing a barren planet forever.

At this point we fade to credits. No one cared what happened to Robert Englund apparently.

Galaxy of Terror is certainly an odd little film. It starts with a pretty straightforward space mission sci-fi setup, but then includes weird supernatural and fantasy elements. It explores all sorts of sideplots, some of which are dead-ends, without ever seeming like it's dragging on too long. It just keeps the strangeness coming at a rate that eliminates any possibilities of getting bored. Somehow it even takes 5 minutes to invent the plot of Nightmare on Elm Street and actually has Robert Englund play the part.

The practical effects alternate between being bad but amusing, and just being legitimately good. Nothing ever really looks so absurd that it totally takes you out of the story.

Also, where else can you see Joanie from Happy Days cutting her tentacle-porn career short with an accidental head explosion?

Corman's filmography is pretty daunting... and full of plenty of duds, but as far as I'm concerned, Galaxy of Terror is not one to miss.

Trailer:

Search Engine Craziness: Chipettes

2011-03-04T18:25:00.000-08:00

chipettes costume pattern

The only thing better than seeing strange overtly sexual Google keywords in my stats is seeing the extremely tame family-friendly ones. I really love the thought of someone searching for tips on their kids' Halloween arts & crafts project costume... only to end up at a page about Doom Asylum where they got to see Kristin Davis get her face cut in half by a surgical saw.

Half Moon

2011-03-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

Time to settle in to watch that movie named after a phase of the moon, filled with slow breathy dialogue, and starring a muscular werewolf named Jacob... No, not that one... This one's called Half Moon and is seems to be an elaborate ruse to gauge whether the success of the Twilight stories was completely due to every aspect of those stories aside from the vampires.

Judging from the title, tagline, and everything else about this movie, it might be tempting to believe that it is going to be a movie about werewolves... but it really is much more literally "Twilight without the vampires" in that there's only one sequence featuring a werewolf that only lasts a couple of minutes, while the rest is two characters quietly talking about things that an audience will not find interesting.

Half Moon is the story of Rose (Tori Black), a woman with an ordinary job albeit with a boss that engages in what most would consider "sexual harassment."

So she's a sad prostitute... or at least one of her two personalities is a sad prostitute. Strangely enough, Rose seems to be composed of one part Tori Black-styled real person, and one part ghetto-caricature.

Ghetto-Rose seems pretty much resigned to her life and accepting of the way things are in her world. Tori-Rose doesn't seem nearly as satisfied and seems much more worried about the threat posed by her dangerous pimp.

Ghetto-Rose also uses a ridiculous accent that I'd really rather blame on Tori Black trying a little too hard, except that I've unfortunately actually heard a few people use it. So maybe it's a perfect rendition of what she was going for, it's hard to say.

What people who use that accent don't usually do though is switch between using it and not, over and over... sometimes in mid-sentence. Also, when that person is talking to someone who looks like the spawn of Colin Farrell and Javier Bardem and asks him "What's wrong with the way I talk?" he will never respond the way he does in Half Moon, which is "Well, you don't have an accent."

Pictured: A deaf man.

After having received important advice from her pimp such as "Listen... If I call you, make sure you answer the phone on the first ring... unless you got a dick in your mouth," Rose hits the street.

She quickly meets up with a friend, holds her bag while she pees in an alley and gets herself arrested, then answers the woman's phone when her john, Jacob, jingles her phone. Contrary to her pimp-rules, Rose decides to head off to meet the guy herself in his motel.

For what seems like at least the middle third of the movie, Rose and Jacob sit across from each other and exchange strange, mostly uninteresting dialogue about such erotic topics as Pete Rose, themselves as children, and the Tom & Jerry cartoons. Apparently though, those are exactly the things that get Rose worked up into a sexual frenzy, as she leaps up at the end and starts giving him a lapdance...

...that he's not into at all.

He was really connecting to Rose when they were talking and now that she's acting like she's at work again it seems to ruin it for him. He fixes that by having sex with her.

Regardless of how the rest of the movie went, I kind of expected the inevitable sex scene to be pretty natural looking considering it's in the hands of an award-winning professional. It actually kind of starts out that way, but it immediately gets pretty strange.

First of all, while they're writhing nondescriptly, they start taking turns reaching out with their right hands and squeezing each other's left breast.

That's followed by Jacob gradually slipping off the side of her until it looks like he's nearly perpendicular to her and almost off the bed... while she just lays on her back and keeps wiggling up and down like nothing's changed. It's really bizarre.

When that's all over, Rose goes into his bathroom and finds a bag with things like rope, duct tape, and a gun in it. She thinks she has found his "rape kit," so now that most of the movie is over we've hit our first real story conflict.

Pictured: Conflict

Pictured: Conflict (personality #2)

There's a struggle, Jacob gets sedated, the pimp comes over, and Jacob ends up tied to a chair. I found it pretty amusing that the pimp was doing such a horrible job at tying up the guy, but Tori Black seemed to know exactly how to properly tie a person up to a piece of furniture. She worked quickly and neatly and was done almost immediately. In the next shot the pimp's rope has fallen off already and is just draped over Jacob's torso but Tori's is still going strong. I have to be honest, I'd never really considered all the secondary skills a porn star could bring to the set like that until I saw that scene.

At this point we're just a few minutes from the credits and the werewolf-angle is introduced to the story. It's apparently very important that Jacob get to his werewolf-doctor (veterinarian?) before the moon turns him into a monster. Rose is quickly convinced and unties him, but then the pimp comes back, sees that happening and beats up Rose for a while.

While he was busy with that, Jacob was doing this:

A werewolf movie with a transformation sequence that makes the Toxic Avenger's transformation look cutting-edge is just not prioritizing properly.

The werewolf stiffly lumbers a step or two towards the pimp...

and clumsily high-fives his hand off before turning to Rose.

The scene fades out, then back in. The doctor has arrived now and is now treating Rose with his special anti-werewolf medicine.

From what I saw, anti-werewolf medicine involves dropping brown M&M's into Kool-Aid that's mixed in the cut-off bottom of a plastic water bottle. As you might imagine, that sort of anti-werewolf medicine is bullshit, so we're left with a shot of Rose back on the street, presumably looking for a victim to prostitute herself to, then eat... or maybe not. It's never too clear what the werewolf does to it's victims in this movie. There's a long intro scene where we see someone who's apparently the last girl to spend the night with our werewolf and there's not really any indication that he did anything to her at all.

Except maybe give her the ability to sleep through the
sound of someone vacuuming in the morning.

That girl is Tori Black's fellow Penthouse-pet, Shawna Lenee by the way. I believe the casting was done by L.A. Direct Models, so pretty much everyone in the movie is from the porn industry.

In the end, nothing is really resolved, nothing really even happens, but we're treated to one last shot of the moon.

I haven't mentioned the moon shots until now, but we see them between every major scene transition basically. In what may be the most puzzling thing about this movie, they created a ridiculous CGI cityscape and glowing moon rather than just pointing the camera up.

One thing you probably can't help but noting is that that's also not a "half moon." I don't believe that phrase is ever even said in the movie. As far as I can tell the movie is in no way related to the title.

I might not have held the bad CGI skyline against a film like this, except for one thing. In a werewolf movie that's only really made interesting because of its cast of pornstars, we're presented with more shots of that silly moon than we are of the werewolf or the pornstars. I really can't imagine what niche audience that prioritization might have been meant for, but I'm guessing that this film isn't going to make it to them.

Tori Black does about as well as I'd expected in her role. She's doesn't really have the acting abilities to pull off most emotional extremes gracefully, but when she's not in a ridiculous character and is acting like a regular person her real personality pops out long enough to charm you completely. If you ignore the strange little performance hiccups when she unnecessarily ventures outside of her range and into some weird extremes, you'll find that she does actually make for a believable and genuinely likable character... something which I can hardly ever say about actresses filling the generic role of pretty-girl-protagonist in even the larger-budget horror movies.

This movie was advertised as Tori Black's breakout mainstream role, and that's probably the reason most people will see it. If you were interested with seeing her in a mainstream role though, you'll probably find that you still are after seeing this movie, because that's not really what this is. This is just what happens when a pornstar directs a porn movie and leaves out all the sex.

I'll leave you with this screen capture of the beginning of the credits. Yes, they start with a misspelled word... and that pretty much sums up the whole movie. It's made by a guy who didn't care enough to bother proofreading.

In the credits we also see that Tori Black gets the Executive Producer credit too. According to Jason Toler, Tori "agreed to co finance part of the budget of the film on the condition that ... she be repaid her investment from the gross receipts when the film received distribution." Judging by her Twitter feed she's now owed quite a lot of money and hasn't been repaid for this little masterpiece.

If you're interested in picking this up on DVD, you can head to Breaking Glass Pictures and enter the code "halfmoon" at checkout for a $7 discount.

Tori Black Boycotts Half Moon

2011-03-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

I just got a chance to watch Half Moon, the werewolf movie most notable for starring the porn star and Penthouse model, Tori Black, a couple of nights ago. There will be a review up soon, but until then, some interesting news. The film's theatrical premiere was last night, but Tori Black spent yesterday speaking out against the movie, boycotted the premiere, and urged everyone else to do the same.

Taken from Twitter:
"I have no involvement with the movie Half Moon, and I will not be attending any premier. I starred in the movie however have not been treated properly and refuse to promote a project I felt compromised my wishes. I don’t want anything to do with the film after a terrible experience with the director. I starred in the movie however have not been treated properly and refuse to promote a project I felt compromised my wishes. Simple breakdown: director, Tee Reel doesn’t pay his dues, lied to cast and crew and handled business upside down and the wrongs have yet to be righted. Boycott with me lovers and friends!"

I for one found Tori Black's performance to be the most interesting... maybe the only interesting thing the movie had going for it, so I hope this doesn't keep her from trying out better roles in the future that don't strictly involve orifice plugging. But even if that's the case, she seems to be doing just fine for herself in her own industry.

Search Engine Craziness: Natalia Rod-Riding on Cam

2011-01-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

It looks like some poor guy searching for "Natalia rod-riding on cam" ended up here instead.

Surprisingly accurate and relevant for at least one scene in the movie, but still not at all what they were looking for I'm guessing...

ReelBad, defeating erections one movie at a time.

Larry Blamire Announces 3rd "Lost Skeleton" Film

2010-11-18T09:09:00.000-08:00

Larry Blamire has just announced that he is starting on a 3rd entry into the Lost Skeleton chronicles, titled "The Lost Skeleton Walks Among Us."

While Blamire has spoken against chaining a bunch sequels onto a franchise, he also seems to be a fan of great ideas, so for now I'll just trust him on this one.

More info as it becomes available...

I sleep now!

Best Worst Movie Released on DVD

2010-11-16T13:51:00.000-08:00

If you missed out on the excellent and award-winning documentary, Best Worst Movie, as it toured across the country, now's your chance to fix that.

You might not expect the stories of the creators and cast of Troll 2 to be extremely interesting and engaging, and if that's the case, you'd be wrong.

While it may not mean much to say that Best Worst Movie is better than Troll 2, it's definitely true. Be sure to not let this one pass you by.

The Human Centipede now available on Netflix Instant Watch

2010-11-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

As of today, The Human Centipede: First Sequence is available on Netflix's Instant Watch. If you haven't seen it yet, you've hardly got an excuse now... unless you've eaten recently. Enjoy.

Troll

2010-10-25T21:56:00.000-07:00

I'm always amazed at just how many Gremlins "inspired" movies came out of this period. At some point people figured out that when you make your monsters the size of children and kind of cute, you can make them appeal to a much wider audience than your run of the mill creature-feature. Gremlins proved this to great effect in 1984 and a year later, Ghoulies proved that this was indeed a winning formula. After a few Ghoulies sequels, the guys behind that film decided to try something with a fantasy angle, and what we ended up with was Troll.

I'll do my best to run through the odd plot quickly. As I recall, Troll is a Harry Potter fan-fiction about a time in the 80's when a middle-aged Harry Potter (Michael Moriarty) moves his family into a new apartment building.

As it turns out, the building's full of little singing monsters...

...and naked Julia-Louis Dreyfuses...

...so it doesn't really turn out to be a smooth transition for anyone involved.

Luckily, Potter's son, Harry "Atreju" Potter Jr. drops by to save the day with his golden spear and the help of Eunice, his elderly accomplice... but only after he gets beaten up by a little girl.

Pictured: Action-heroes

If that sounds awesome, it's because it is. Troll turns out to be much better than it has any right to be. The main reason is the great ensemble cast and the array of truly likable characters that they manage to portray here. I find most child actors to be almost unbearably bad, and the two kids are actually the main characters here, but these guys really do a fine job.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus appears here in her first feature-film role, as "pretty girl living in apartment" but does a great job of making her background character real in a way that a lesser film (especially in this genre) wouldn't have bothered to do.

Also, it cannot be overstated that... this.

I remember seeing this while Seinfeld was still on the air.
Teenage-me was never able to look at Elaine the same way again.

The villain is played ably by Phil Fondacaro, to the extent that he can express anything at all using only body language... but Fondacaro actually pulls double-duty here and also plays the role of Malcolm, a dwarf with cancer, in a tragic side-story.

The character of Torok the troll is taken in an interesting direction. He's not played for straight-comedy like the Leprechaun, but he's not really scary either... he just is. The only real conflict is that he and all the tenants of the apartment building must share the same space, but require different environments. The movie seems to go out of its way to make him not be scary actually... But since he does go ahead and turn people into trolls (or things that would better fit in troll-world), and that's probably a bad thing for those involved, the movie takes several measures to redeem him afterward. First he turns Malcolm into an elf in order to cure his illnesses and give him a chance at a life where he can be normal. As if that wasn't enough, when the time comes for Harry Potter Jr. to kill the giant monster at the end (and he fails), Torok goes ahead and kills him for him... thereby defeating himself. If that doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry, there's an easy explanation. At some point Torok must have simply decided that it would be easier to get a fresh set of clothes, change his name to Hoggle, and head out to the Labyrinth to work for David Bowie.

Really, is there a difference?

One last thing that I almost forgot is the troll chorus. It was composed by Richard Band, brother of the producers, but this whimsical tune could've easily come from Danny Elfman.

Troll is always more fun than I remember it being, and it's probably tame enough to be appropriate for even the youngest kids.

As an added bonus, the only DVD version I've ever come across is a double-feature disc that also includes the unrelated but wonderfully awful, Troll 2.

Search Engine Craziness: Humanoid Mating

2010-10-05T22:22:00.000-07:00

humanoids mating in the deep

When I copied this from my keyword stats tab, I forgot to make note of which page this search actually leads to. I'm split between the obvious Humanoids from the Deep,where the humanoids mate, but only after leaving the deep...

...and James Cameron's underwater opus, Piranha II, which in the first few minutes actually does feature humanoids mating in the deep. The world may never know.

Pictured: That James Cameron movie where everyone's blue.

Troll 2 DVD Released

2010-10-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

20 years after it's debut, Troll 2 has finally gotten the DVD release it deserves.

While it was previously available on a double-feature disc along with it's namesake, Troll, the two films don't really have anything to do with one another and both stand on their own as enjoyable, albeit entirely unique experiences.

One of these is not like the other...

I was just talking to a few friends last night who have somehow never gotten the chance to see this classic bit of well-aged cheese. After today's DVD release, I'm guessing I'll be changing that for them very soon.

Four Viral Clips Released for Paranormal Activity 2

2010-09-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of days we've had 4 new promo clips for Paranormal Activity 2. These are very short clips, short enough in fact that the last 2, which are ad-supported, feature ads longer than the clips themselves.

Viral Clip #1

In the first clip, we see a camera feed from the home-surveillance camera in the living room where we see the baby standing in the middle of the living room doing the creepy-Katie staring-into-space thing for a few seconds before the feed goes crazy and starts flashing all sorts of things. Since the things shown flash by very quickly, I'll screen-shot them to pieces so we'll actually be able to see what there is to see.

After we see a couple of seconds of that, a few nondescript closeup shots of furniture pop up very quickly along with this shot of a person:

After that, the baby just walks away, exit stage right. Not much to see here really.

Viral Clip #2

In this second clip, we see a different camera's view in the baby's room. The baby moves a bit in its sleep, then the camera blurs and flashes several quick images again. First we see a frame of the baby standing at the door...

... followed by a couple of frames of a very Katie-esque person standing at the door.

It flashes back and forth between those two a couple of times, and then goes back to the normal camera view, which now shows an empty crib. The video is time-stamped, except while it's flashing through the crazy stuff, but there's no crazy missing-time gaps in the numbers or anything like that. While this second clip does have a little more interesting material in it, we didn't really see anything new, in fact a lot of that came from the first trailer. Next.

Viral Clip #3

This clip starts off with the baby at the top of a stairway turning backwards to climb down them. While the baby is on his way down, we get more of those quick flashes.

First we see a quick frame of the baby sitting on the ground out in the open somewhere, followed by a couple of frames showing a person coming from outside the frame to the right and reaching for the child...

And then a last quick image of someone holding the baby while apparently crying.

Afterwards we go back into the video of the baby crawling down the stairs backwards. I've seen a few comments about people thinking that it's strange and creepy that it's crawling down backwards, but I think those people have just never seen a little kid trying to get down stairs... Next.

Viral Clip #4

In this last clip we first see a man laying the baby in the crib with the dog hanging out in the room once he leaves... quickly followed by more of those quick flashes.

First we see one where the door the man left through is now closed, but a second to the right is open, with the baby and dog looking pretty intrigued.

But don't worry, it was apparently just a haunted boxing glove...
or something...

The next image is kind of hard to see as it flashes by, but it's a creepy black and white shot of the baby crying and... whatever else is going on here.

After that we're back to the baby's room, where we see a brief glimpse of a woman taking the baby out before it flashes again and leaves us with the camera feed showing the baby still asleep but the dog getting the hell out of there.

While there's not a whole lot of substance to these clips, they do show that several things are different, the creepy-house tone has been kept and even improved upon. Although I didn't particularly like or care about the characters in the first Paranormal Activity, and after the cartoon ending I wasn't particularly interested in seeing the sequel... it looks like an evil baby might be just what I was looking for to get my attention again.

Search Engine Craziness: Ghostgasms

2010-09-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

women with sexual phantasms

As with most search engine terms that lead people here, I can't even imagine what this person was trying to find. A list of haunted vaginas perhaps?

Not as unlikely as you might think apparently.

Over 3 million. Apparently 1 out of 100 American vaginas are haunted... who knew?

Or maybe it was just Slimer trying to figure out how to pleasure the ladies...

Pictured: Slimer attempting to pleasure the ladies.

The strange sexual search terms are always the most interesting, luckily for me, they're always strange and sexual.

Elvira's New Movie Macabre Intro Now Available

2010-09-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Elvira's long-awaited return to television is nearly upon us, but until it airs, here's a brief teaser by way of the show's new intro.

After taking all that in for the first time, let's take a closer look at a few things.

What I first recognized was the theme music, an instrumental version of The Black Belles' song, What Can I Do. I'd been thinking that The Black Belles were creating an original song for some reason... but the instrumental track actually works pretty well on its own.

Probably the most surprising thing about the intro is that a character from Peaches Christ's film, All About Evil, pops up about 15 seconds in...

Initially I wasn't too sure that this was really an exact match, but upon my second viewing I decided that this probably wasn't just a coincidence.

Take note of the cast listings up there...

As for the other featured one-sheet on the right, I have no idea what it might be. If you happen to recognize it then by all means, leave me a comment below.

For a list of TV stations with Movie Macabre syndication, check for your city on the PDF file from Elvira's official site.