Hobgoblins Soundtrack

Last weekend I got a copy of the Hobgoblins soundtrack in the mail. Because this isn't the 90's, the first thing I did was rip digital versions of my all my new Fontanelles tracks into iTunes. Unfortunately, upon doing so I discovered that I couldn't find a picture of the cover anywhere online...

So today I hauled out the camera and just took my own picture. Hopefully Google will get itself over here and index it before anyone else runs into the problem I did.

Sleepaway Camp

From the first scenes of Sleepaway Camp it's pretty apparent that we're setting off down the heavily-trodden path to the Friday the 13th cloning summer camp. Pretty soon though, we start to get hints that things are going to be a little different with this one.

First of all there's eerie Aunt Martha (Ricky's mother) who Angela lives with after her father dies. Her character seems to fall somewhere between "Generic high school acting teacher" and "creepiest thing you've ever seen."

Full scene

Soon enough we leave Aunt Martha's house and follow Angela and Ricky to camp. As soon as they arrive, we start to realize that shy Angela, who's been very quiet thus far, is a little odder than your average socially awkward teenager and doesn't talk to anyone... ever.


These are the sorts of things that work pretty effectively to lend us a sense of uneasiness that I wasn't really expecting out of what I'd anticipated to be such a formulaic summer camp setup. The movie progresses along like this, introducing us to the other campers and counselors, and gradually starting to work in a few pretty creative slasher kills.

Notice that the guy who looks like a cross between Lloyd Kaufman and Mel Brooks
gets an appropriately ridiculous death scene.

They're all shot from the killer's point of view so that you can't see who it is and we're obviously being set up for the usual Scooby-Doo reveal ending. Before we get there though, we need to take a detour into the strange sexual aspect of Sleepaway Camp.

Whereas you'd ordinarily just pepper your slasher with a few breasts and call it a day, Hiltzik did things a little differently and cranked the homoeroticism all the way up. First of all there's Aunt Martha. By the end of the film I still hadn't figured out the gender there. Then we have all the male counselors and older campers not bothering with the camp uniform everyone else wears, in favor of these sorts of skimpy outfits.

I'd be willing to doubt the intention of that and just write it off as an 80's dress-anomaly, except the female counselors and all the young campers pretty much just stick to their regular Camp Arawak uniforms. After a while with that, the focus shifts away from the men's bodies and turns back toward the murders... which give Angela flashbacks of seeing her father with his boyfriend.


If these things were all part of some sort of weird, homophobic, "gay people cause murder" message, it would at least make more sense. As it stands, they just serve as more of the strange story anomalies that constantly pop up to defy the otherwise standard summer-camp slasher formula we're working with.

If you've heard vague descriptions of the movie from anyone, they'll probably just be about how shocking it is or how the climax is something that you will never forget... something along those lines. At least, those are the sorts of things I'd heard. But up to this point, aside from the entertaining little abnormalities I've been mentioning, there really hasn't been anything too mind-blowing to speak of and I didn't really see how things were going to suddenly turn around and suddenly fulfill all that had been promised. Soon enough though, the big reveal comes and whether you've figured out who it is or not (you probably have) is completely irrelevant. The execution of the final scene is something that was engineered to be burned into the brain forever, while just incidentally communicating the plot resolution on the side.

The characters catch the killer, the killer turns to face them, and then the characters all just stop what they're doing and freeze in place so as to not distract you from the scene's hypnotic effects until the movie's finished having its way with your eyeballs... not to mention that terrible noise...

The first time I saw it, I was still making that face halfway through the credits.

I'm not willing to give away any more details about the ending here, but this movie is definitely shocking and does turn out to have a conclusion that you'll never ever forget.

If you've not seen it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? Go ahead and give yourself a new favorite slasher.

Available on Amazon: Sleepaway Camp

Mazes & Monsters

Like Reefer Madness, Mazes and Monsters is obviously meant to be a cautionary tale, but is centered on such a flawed and silly premise that its message is just laughable.

Reefer Madness is a little more interesting in most ways due to it's overwhelming jazz-era kitschiness, but Mazes and Monsters makes up for it as well as it can by starring Tom Hanks.

While I actually posted the cover image from the VHS version that I watched, as it turns out the DVD cover art is even weirder.

Contains: A hedge-maze (not in the movie), a dragon-monster (not in the movie),
and a Tom Hanks from the future (not in the movie).

The movie starts off showing us a few home-life vignettes of our characters. Actually, scratch that, the movie starts off with very long scenes of taxis set to the first song of the awful soundtrack. After that though, introductions.

First, there's silly hat guy. He's wearing something ridiculous in every scene. In his first scene, a man outside his building compliments him on this "hat," but it's the last time anyone even mentions the crazy nonsense he keeps on his head.


Next we meet our token girl-gamer. She has a quick scene which only serves as a setup for her to complain that she "can't be herself," to which her mother tells her to "use her imagination." Sounds like this girl's psyche is ripe for a satanic Dungeons & Dragons reprogramming.

Our next character is a wholesome generic jock type. His hidden depravity is shown by his unwillingness to enroll in the classes in "computers" that his parents suggest, and his suggestion that he'd prefer to take classes about making games... on computers... instead.
The parents are of course outraged.

We finally meet Tom Hanks, sort of. Mostly he just sits in the back while his parents argue about how drunk his mother is.

Funny-hat shows up for school wearing a cowboy hat and quickly meets up with the girl, who he apparently already knows. As an aside, although the film is shot on a college campus and in urban cityscapes, I'm pretty sure this is the only scene that contains a black person in the whole movie, so watch out for that. Anyway, these kids apparently play Dunge... er... Mazes & Monsters regularly along with jock-guy, but at the moment they're stuck looking for a fourth player. This is where Tom comes in. All of them end up at some sort of tuxedo party (with funny-hat wearing a yellow hard hat). And they quickly convince Tom to play with them.

Finally the next scene actually introduces us to the Mazes and the Monsters. The players all gather around a boardgame and light lots of candles. This game ends almost immediately. The movie says that it's because one of the characters has died, but I think it's because there's candle wax oozing all over their boardgame.

That, along with the terrible soundtrack that kicks in again here,
is enough to end any party.

We get a couple of minutes of "college life" montage, hat-guy is passingly referred to as both a college sophomore and a 16 year-old, and then we're back to their next game. This time they decide to step it up a notch, so hat-guy puts on his safari hat and they invent LARPing. They "borrow" costumes from the theater department and head to some nearby caverns. As soon as they make it down there Tom decides to go off on his own.

Since his character is a healer, this makes perfect sense.

Everyone bumbles around a bit, mostly uneventfully, but as soon as Tom gets nearly out of earshot, he runs into a "Gorvil." After a lot of screaming, he ends up killing it with his sword.

About the time of this odd little hallucination, we start to realize that Tom's actually a little bit insane. Things start falling apart for him pretty quickly after this. He almost never completely breaks from his "Bardeux" character and he pretty much spends the rest of the movie either as Bardeux or just sad/confused.

Pictured: Sad / Confused
Note the sad mouth that's so confused that it starts looking happy again...
the undecided popped/unpopped collar...
This guy's obviously had too many RPGs.

They all leave the "maze" for the night, then Tom goes home to commune with the great glowing hallway. The hallway gives him a new quest, to head to Tolkien's "Two Towers," so he breaks up with his girlfriend, and sets off for New York to go to the World Trade Center.

Once he finally gets to NY, he first decides to wander the alleys for a while. Of course, soon enough he runs into a gang member, confuses him with another one of those Gorvil monsters, and stabs him with his "sword" too.

Now that Tom has hallucinated and killed someone, the next important anti-drug-propaganda analogue is going to the top of a building and trying to fly. So he heads to the top of the World Trade Center to do that. His friends find him up there and convince him that he doesn't have enough points for his flying spells, so he comes back down instead.

Nothing seems to happen as a result of Tom having stabbed that guy, so Tom's just taken back to his parents' place, and everyone goes back to their lives. Some time later the 3 friends go back to visit Tom and find him still stuck as Bardeux, presumably forever.

It's obvious that the ending is meant to be a somber look at a sad and serious situation, but the whole premise is so ridiculous that it doesn't even come close. The moral of the movie is supposed to be that role-playing games are evil, will take over your impressionable children, and can only get them hurt or killed. Unfortunately for the movie, this idea is so silly that to even make it work in the story the character has to be given a serious preexisting mental-illness to make any of the things that happen remotely plausible... and that of course cancels out any point the movie could have hoped to make.

This thing is basically a failure all around, but Tom Hanks' trademark likability really works wonders for the film, so it ends up not being completely unwatchable. You will need to keep your mute button readied for that soundtrack though...

I didn't see a trailer on Youtube, but this is probably better:

Zombie Nightmare

Alright, so we've got a horror movie about baseball, heavy metal, and Canadian voodoo... I think we're in for a real treat.

The story starts, eventually, with one large guy getting run over by a bunch of kids speeding through town. The guy's mom shows up pretty much immediately, is understandably distraught, and immediately takes him right to the hospital... and by hospital I mean the local Canadian voodoo priestess, Molly Mokembe.

Fact: Canadian clowns are much scarier than American clowns.

The voodoo priestess reanimates his corpse, with a quick mention that he'll be looking for some sort of revenge later.

Soon enough, the zombie kills one of the random kids from the speeding car after we watch them play tennis for a painful two or three minutes.

97 to 134. Approximately halfway through the game.

When the police arrive, we're introduced to the captain (Adam West) and a couple of investigators.

Wait a few minutes and I'll call someone "Batty." Seriously.

The older investigator talks sort of like a duck and teaches the younger guy (Frank Dietz of The Lost Skeleton Returns Again) the ways of being a bad investigator: ignoring evidence, pinning crimes on convenient bystanders, etc. The younger guy doesn't really seem to like this method of policework, so he goes off to his house to brood and leaves us to watch Adam West have a very cryptic audio-only flashback. I can't imagine who thought this was a good idea to stick in the film, but it wasn't.

Around this time we meet another couple from the car that hit the zombified kid. Amy (Tia Carrere of Wayne's World) opens the scene by calling her boyfriend and telling him that she's worried that the guy they hit is trying for revenge and they'll be next. Her boyfriend hangs up and she goes back to clutching her teddy bear.


She and her boyfriend meet up and start running around to get away, but they don't end up getting very far.

Even with such evasive maneuvers as... standing still, hiding behind glass.

Adam West goes after Molly Mokembe to find out what to do. And pretty soon the Frank Dietz, Adam West, the voodoo priestess, and the zombie all end up at the cemetary. Adam West tries to shoot everyone, gets everyone but Frank Dietz, and then... Twist Ending!!


Another zombie pops up and pulls him into its grave to mercifully end the Zombie Nightmare experience.

Unless you're some sort of Adam West completest, you should steer clear of this one. It's almost never bad enough to be funny, and almost always bad enough to be painful.

To end on a positive note... In that last minute or so of the film, we did finally get one of our first good looks at the zombie and I was actually surprised at how good the two zombies looked relative to the rest of the movie.

While they're not excellent, they're certainly not Zombie Lake-bad.

Doom Asylum

I bought Doom Asylum a week or so ago, specifically because I saw that Patty Mullen starred in it. I didn't expect much out of the movie, but still bought it just because it's the only film she's done aside from Frankenhooker. As an added bonus though, it turns out that Doom Asylum is actually pretty great.

Doom Asylum was made for only about $82,000 and shot in a dozen days. The director and producer explain on the DVD that it was just a sort of stab in the dark to try to make a little money from the booming VHS horror market. Somehow instead they managed to strike gold accidentally anyway and produce something with so much charm that it has no problems getting past its shortcomings.

To start with, the movie was set in an actual abandoned asylum, the Essex Mountain Sanitorium (which has been completely demolished and turned into a public park as of 2002).


Then there's Patty Mullen herself. I'm not sure what it is about her, maybe just the fact that I've seen her wonderful performance in Frankenhooker already... but there's just something so endearingly weird about Mullen's characters. Here, Patty actually plays two characters. One of them is Kiki, an odd young girl who calls her boyfriend "mom," and the other is Judy, Kiki's mother. The DVD case might have Kristin Davis's name all over it, but Patty Mullen is definitely the real star actress here. I certainly hope we get to eventually see her in another role. She's got a couple of kids these days, but surely she's not that busy.

Next, there's Kristin Davis... but once again, you'll be very aware of that fact if you have the DVD; her name is plastered all over the packaging now that she's gotten famous.


She's actually more enjoyable here than I was expecting, but then I've never really seen her in anything else. The director talks about how he could tell that she was very talented and was going to go far... but I think he's probably just saying that because that happens to be what actually happened with her. The other actors aren't all great, but there are several shots where Kristin's smiling or laughing (not that I blame her) at what's going on while serious things are supposed to be happening, and she's the only one I saw doing that sort of thing.


Also, whoever did the costume design for Patty and Kristin must have used the chipettes from Alvin and the Chipmunks as inspiration.


I would really like to believe that that didn't happen by accident. Just look at those glasses... and they're even wearing the same colors...

On to the killer, nicknamed "The Coroner." He never actually was a coroner, in fact he's an ex-lawyer. He just hangs out at the asylum so he has access to all the medical instruments to use in his killing.

It seems like it's pretty hard to come up with an original slasher villain that isn't just another guy in a mask, but his faceless thing actually works for me. Still though, out of all the slashers, he's got to be the worst at slashing.

Bad Slasher.

He hardly even tries to go after anyone. His victims have to either walk right up to him, or just stop, sit down, and wait to be killed. Take Kristin's death scene for example.

The death scenes all pretty much follow that sort of pattern. This killer's got no advantage except that his victims are all such eager volunteers.

The teens all spend a great deal of time wandering around the complex corridors, and this would ordinarily serve to build tension, but it never does because we know exactly where the killer is the whole time. You see, he only slashes part-time. While the teens wander around, he just goes back into the tunnels and watches TV.


As if that wasn't enough, when we cut back to him to see what he's watching, his screen is actually shown full-screen on ours for minutes at a time. As it turns out, when they finished their first cut of the movie, it just wasn't long enough, so they then spliced in all the footage of the killer watching classic (read public domain) horror movies.


Although there are a few minor annoyances, and sometimes the movie just seems to get so caught up in its own fun-momentum that it forgets that it's supposed to be going anywhere at all with the story, in the end this doesn't really matter because Doom Asylum is just so damn charming and entertaining.

The DVD isn't too hard to find right now, so if you've not seen Doom Asylum yet, I'd suggest you remedy that right away.

Available on Amazon: Doom Asylum (Uncut)

Chopping Mall

Using the taglines, "Where shopping costs you an arm and a leg!," and "Shop 'til you drop... DEAD!"... How could you refuse?

Unfortunately the title is actually a bit misleading, this isn't quite the teen slasher film it seems to imply that it is. The original name was "Killbots," and that's what it's actually about, a mall with crazed security robots. Not that that's bad, it's just a little unexpected.

The film starts off by showing us a demo reel of the robots and their uses for protection. We then get a pitch from the salesman about how installing security robots in the mall will make it the safest mall around. Also, we're assured that we shouldn't worry; nothing can go wrong.

Soon enough, we find out that the robots have indeed been installed at the mall. We're taken up to the "computer" room where the robots and excess mall scientists are stored.

The scientist doesn't really seem to have any particular task to do up there though, which is a fact that doesn't take him too long to figure out... so he promptly whips out the porn.

Too bad for him, a thunderstorm is brewing outside. The computers take 2 lightning strikes without consequence. But as anyone who knows anything about computers will tell you, once your computer takes 3 lightning strikes, it's may start acting a little funny.

Pictured: A little funny.

We cut back to the kids who we saw working at the mall, who have stayed late in order to have some sort of late night party after work in the Furniture King store.

Presumably, they pick the Furniture King because that's the store with lots of things to have sex on. The start taking advantage of this pretty quickly... but by now the killbots have noticed their presence and are making their way to them.

While they're on their way, one of the girls decides she wants some cigarettes from the vending machine. So the gum-loving jock gets sent off to buy her cigarettes as his prerequisite payment for sex. He does remember to bring his employee I.D. badge in case of robots, but these thrice-lightninged killbots don't care much about those anymore as he'll soon find out. When he does get down to the vending machine, he seems to take a while to figure out how it works for some reason, long enough to let a killbot sneak up on him and demand to see his badge.

His response is just great. "Klaatu barada nikto, OK?" a reference to the 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. In that film, the human must speak these words to the robot, Gort in order to keep him from destroying the humans. It's not quite as effective here.

Next, his girlfriend goes to investigate and abruptly comes to her end as well in a sudden surprising head explosion shot that is reused at the end of the movie when her character is credited.

Everyone starts to realize that something is wrong now, and the rest of the movie is pretty much them running to one room, stopping and waiting for the robots to make it to them again, and then running to the next room.

Some time during that, the most annoying surviving blond girl starts to really crank up the whininess.

Odds are, right about now you're thinking "I hope she dies next, preferably in a fire."

Well guess what!

Thanks movie!

After that, we have another 30 minutes or so of everyone running and all the guys firing guns at the robots, even though this has proven to be be completely ineffectual thus far.

Eventually, everyone bumbles around long enough that the first two killbots are actually taken out in ridiculous, almost accidental ways. The last killbot gets his dramatic Terminator 2 style, fiery thumbs-up death and the credits roll.

While Chopping Mall doesn't really bring anything new to the table (or any actual chopping for that matter), it's still a lot of fun and definitely worth picking up.

Ninja Terminator

"The police say he was found with pieces of metal in his back. That definitely means someone wanted him dead."

Ninja Terminator is an absolutely terrible kung-fu movie. But if that's exactly what you're in the market for, then this is a real gem.

Basically, there's a "golden ninja warrior" statue that is divided into three parts: the chest/head and two arms. Whoever possesses the full statue gains the power to be impervious to blades (also, the power to laugh maniacally).

The Ninja Empire master owns the statue, but three of his students steal it, taking one piece each.

Up until now, Ninja Terminator has gone along pretty much like any standard martial arts movie. There's a little more eyeliner and wigs than usual... but nothing too crazy. As it turns out though, after we get that bit of backstory out of the way, things quickly descend into madness.

This is what it looks like during the movie's "normal" phase.

The rest of the movie consists of the Ninja Empire trying to get it back, while the students try to get the rest of the pieces from each other. This leads to there being enough conflicts to have a fight about ever two minutes. Even so, the movie awkwardly forces a fight to happen at this frequency even when the story doesn't provide one.

"I'm looking for a restaurant."
"You're looking in the wrong place. Around here... THERE ARE NO RESTARAUNTS!"
(Fight)

I should probably mention that the above scene is set to Pink Floyd's Echoes.

Pictured: Music for ninjas.

Things deteriorate pretty quickly into a bombardment of utter chaos and nonsense. We suddenly have ninjas teleporting from place to place, but apparently they can't go very far, so they just teleport about 6' over and over.

They also have some inexplicable ability to disappear while wearing street-clothes and then suddenly reappear wearing their ninja outfit.

Here's a basic timeline for the important plot points in the rest of the film.

12:04 - Random violence against a melon.

13:40 - Random violence against a crab.

36:50 - Asian guy's dialogue dubbed to a hilarious redneck accent.

39:15 - Ninja Empire's most threatening "death message" delivery.
50% toy robot and 50% Garfield phone

In the end, there's a final showdown. They all teleport the sheaths off of their swords and then teleport back and forth poking at one another.

Eventually the mustachioed, camouflage-suited ninja gets all the statue pieces and we find out the movie's secret.

It's been channelling Troll 2 the whole time.

You can watch Ninja Terminator here.