I Am A Hero, 2015/ 2 hr 6 min
Hideo Suzuki (Yo Oizumi) is an struggling artist who’s desperate to sell his comic. His wife, Tekko (Miho Suzuki), fed up and tired of struggling, tosses him and his stuff out one night. On the news, there’s talk of an outbreak.
The next morning Hideo goes into work and one of his coworkers is infected. Upon returning home after Tekko calls him, but she doesn’t seem to be home. She is though and she’s not herself. Her body convulses after she throws herself out of bed. She crashes through the door at Hideo and attacks him. She’s rabid! She bites into the door, snapping off her teeth then grabs Hideo and tosses him into the flat. They wrestle, she bites him and after he throws her off, she’s impaled by a trophy, right through the head.
Hideo quickly leaves but then he sees another woman with a bite mark and the air is filling with helicopters. Hideo heads back to work. A coworker is still there but he’s acting strange too. He’s pummeled another coworker to death and batters another with a bat, obliterating his head. Both were infected. Suddenly he changes, he’s been bitten. Still aware, he grabs the box cutter and cuts his own throat. Hideo runs after another coworker comes out, her head is bulbous and deformed.
Outside, chaos begins as newly infected begin to change and attack the uninfected. Hideo runs for his life. He finds a taxi and piles in with 2 strangers, one of them is Hiromi Hayakari (Kasumi Arimura) and they watch the news as they drive. One of the passengers, a bureaucrat is infected and is quickly changing, he bites the driver after calling him a peasant, then leaps on Hideo. Just as they get him out of the car, the driver changes.
It seems like the virus is activated by stress and the infected starts shouting grievances while attacking people.
The taxi crashes and flips but because they are belted in, Hideo and Hiromi, survive. After crawling out of the wreckage, all they see is miles of wrecked vehicles. Before the internet goes down they get more news about the plague and how it can’t live at high altitudes.
They camp out on a porch and Hideo sees a wound on Hiromi’s neck and she confesses a baby bit her yesterday. He points his gun at her and she says it’s ok if he kills her. He decides not too and the plan is to go to Mt. Fuji.
Suddenly Hiromi starts to change while they’re in the forest. Hideo runs and approaches a singing but badly decomposing zombie, his eyes dangly from their sockets. As Hideo fights him off, Hiromi comes out of nowhere and attacks it, she rips it to pieces then helps, a terrified, Hideo to his feet. She has changed but she’s not trying to attack or bite him. And although, she’s barely herself, they continue on together.
On the way, they scavenge for food and supplies. In a clothing store, Hideo is attacked by a zombie employee while Hiromi sleeps in a shopping cart. Another woman, Yabu (Masami Nagasawa) arrives and saves him, this time. And she’s part of a small group led by Mr. Iura (Hisashi Yoshizawa). Hideo joins them and pushes Hiromi through a throng of zombies. Citizens bang pots to lure the zombies away as the group make it to their encampment located on top of a department store.
At night they watch the zombies called the ZQN, they say they’re caught in the living past. One of them, a former athlete, continuously runs, leaps into the air and lands on his head. A woman furiously yanks on a door and a man with a melted face, forever waves for a ride. But some of them are more like insects, scurrying around on their backs on all fours.
The next day, Hiromi wakes up and she responds to a song Hideo sings. Suddenly, Hideo is summoned to Mr. Iura. Him and the others demand his gun or they take Hiromi hostage, which is against their rules and causes mutiny. Hiromi fights her kidnappers off and outs herself as being infected. Hiromi is shot in the head with an arrow and Hideo is stripped of his gun and beaten.
Power is rested from Iura by Sango (Yoshinori Akada) with the help of Hideo’s gun. He’s angry he didn’t get to have Hiromi, who unbeknownst to him is not dead. Iura is added to the group of scouts for the evening.
After entering the warehouse, the lights turn on and as they gather food music begins to play and the building starts to fill with zombies. The scouts are attacked and someone is watching on CCTV. The music gets so loud that it can be heard from the shopping plaza and settlement.
The athlete that does imaginary pole vaults, actually manages to leap on top of the building, right in the middle of the settlement and just like that, the free zone is no longer safe.
Hideo, from his hiding place in a locker, hears Nurse Yabu on the walkie talkie say everyone on the rooftop is dead. Not knowing if the scouts are dead, she appeals to Hideo, who she calls Specs, he is desperately working up the nerve to do something.
He finally manages to leave and he is on his way. Nurse Yabu, with Hiromi on her back, sneaks to the parking garage to meet him. She runs into Iura and though he orchestrated this whole thing, he’s been infected. He gouges out his own eyes then complains he can’t see.
Hideo evaporates Iura’s head after he chases Yabu, who’s still carrying Hiromi. Then Sango and Abe (Yu Tokui) arrive with a horde of zombies behind them. Then they run into another horde, Hideo shoots as many as he can. And the rest do what they can with the weapons they have. It’s not long before Sango and Abe are overcome but Hideo clears the rest of the hordes.
And just before they leave, the bowl skulled athlete makes another appearance. He races and jumps at Hideo who is down to his last shell. But he won’t stay down and goes straight for Hiromi and Yabu. Hideo has to use his shot gun like a baseball bat and hit a home run at whatever’s left of the zombie’s head.
The three of them find a car and drive out of there. Yabu reintroduces herself as Tsugumi Oda.
This film is based on a manga with the same name and it was directed by Shinsuke Sato. This movie is long but doesn’t feel like it. The zombies are fast and vicious, they repeat their last moments over and over until they attack. These zombies can talk but not in a meaningful way, they are not just violent to the uninfected by to themselves. The kills are very graphic and gory in this film.
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Brain Dead, 1990/ 85 min
Dr. Rex Martin (Bill Pullman), a neurosurgeon walks in on Dr. Berkovitz (David Sinaiko) who is supposed to be mapping facial movements of a specimen but he is instead playing with it. When he goes to retrieve another brain, he knocks another on the floor. Dr. Martin reminds him that these aren’t simply specimens but were once people.
Dr. Martin talks to the specimens and refers to them by their donor’s names. Later, he gets a visit from his high school friend, business man, Jim Reston (Bill Paxton). Jim confesses that he may lose his job. It has to do with a company employee, a genius mathematician named Jack Halsey (Bud Cort), who went mad, destroyed all his work at the company and butchered his family and three research assistants, after a psychotic break. He’s pleading insanity and is currently in a mental institution. Reston wants Dr. Martin to get into his brain and see if he’s faking it.
Dr. Martin agrees and finds Halsey doing a puzzle and he does seem very paranoid. Mr. Halsey now thinks that someone is trying to kill him. Dr. Martin asks his permission to do some tests on him. He is indeed found to be paranoid.
Reston tries to convince Rex to operate on Halsey’s brain, citing that his company, Eunice, is funding his research anyway and promises more leeway. Reston would like the company’s secrets to be unlocked from Halsey’s brain and failing that, make it impossible for him to share them.
After the meeting, Dr. Martin is hit by a vehicle with Conklin Mattress Company on the side of it, after being attacked by a homeless man who thinks the brain, the doctor’s carrying, is his own.
Rex comes to in the hallway, to the terrible news that he’s lost his grant and his job, he’s being evicted from his lab and all of the brains fall from their shelves as a man reaches for one.
Dr. Martin wakes up the next day and doesn’t tell his wife, Dana (Patricia Charbonneau) about the accident and can’t really remember when it happened. He revisits Halsey who is more jittery than the last time. Rex asks Halsey to trust him and asks permission to operate on the Halsey’s brain.
Dr. Martin the visits Eunice’s board with Reston and is shown an archaic video of a lobotomy. The board just wants to know if Halsey can be cured and their info recovered. Dr. Martin warns them that the opposite can also happen, his memory can be wiped clean.
In another room, while the board watches, Dr. Martin performs surgery on Halsey. Asking him questions as he goes. Halsey imagines himself in different places and talks to different people, including his family.
Mr. Martin asks if Halsey can see the man who killed his family. He can and he’s there now. The surgery seems to be a success, he no longer thinks he’s an accountant at Conklin mattress company. He remembers he’s a mathematician working on secret projects.
The board claps as Dr. Martin finishes and steps back into the room and Jim Reston pitches them an idea of brain surgery, much like cosmetic surgery. The offer is to surgically change their customers reality’s. As Dr. Martin looks back through the window, he sees a man who shouldn’t be there. He’s dressed in white, maniacally laughing and bloody.
Reston congratulates him and Dr. Martin barges back into the operating room and the bloody man (Nicholas Pryor) is gone. He’s unnerved. On his way out, Rex can’t get out of the gate because he doesn’t have his wallet and someone is following him.
He meets his wife, Dana, at a restaurant and sees the blood man in white again. He also sees some Eunice board chairman and Reston in another booth. But Dr. Martin says he doesn’t know them. Reston is pitching the center names, he comes up with The New You. Dr. Martin, calls them doc-in-the-box and says they’ll be on each corner.
Even on the ride home, the man in white is there, he seems to be everywhere. Rex tries diagnosing himself and when he gets home, the bloody man is there and he shows him his wife having sex with Reston on their dining table. And just the bloody man plunges a leucotome into Reston’s eye, as Dr. Martin walks in. As he steps inside, the bodies of his wife and Reston are still on the table, eyeless. The madman is gone.
The neighbor comes over to complain about noise and finds Dr. Martin holding the bloody surgical instrument.
Then Rex wakes up in the institution and thinks he dreamt the night before. The nurse informs him he’s been there a while and the experiences of the last few days were him in a fractured state. Halsey is not real and the doctor, though he looks like the bloody man, he’s actually his doctor, Dr. Ramsen (Nicholas Pryor).
Rex struggles to reaffirm his reality in front of the man who insists he is his doctor. Dr. Martin looks closer at what looks like his office. But he is informed that he is an accountant for a mattress company and that Conklin (Nicholas Pryor) has been paying his bill there. When Dr. Ramsen’s assistant comes in, it’s Reston! Dr. Martin is relieved to see him but when Reston is not who he says he is, Rex runs for it.
Dr. Martin hides in strange rooms, including a room full of people being tortured. Dr. Ramsen says it’s a museum but when he opens the door again, there are no people, just the implements of torture.
Rex is taken away for shock therapy and afterward, he wakes up again and a bandaged Halsey sneaks in. Halsey cuts him free and warns Rex to be whoever they want him to be. And whatever he does, don’t let them take him into surgery. He later finds Halsey in his closet, eyeless. The Rex wakes up again later and the scene repeats.
Rex discovers he is in a coma with brain damage and he sees himself in a hospital bed and Dana standing over him. Then Reston walks in to comfort her.
And it only gets more bizarre from there.
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Eyeball, 1975/ 1 hr 31 min
Italian: Gatti rossi in un labirinto di vetro (Red Cats in a Glass Maze)
A group of American tourists board a tour bus for a long European trip, first stop is Barcelona. The guide is a jokester and pranks his customers at their stops. The first one, a woman is stabbed by an unseen attacker, she was left on the ground, missing one of her eyes.
Meanwhile, philanderer, Mark Burton (John Richardson), is having marital issues pursues a woman he’s been cheating with who is also his secretary, Paulette Stone (Martine Brochard), to Barcelona. Unfortunately, some of the other guests on the tour knows his wife, Alma (Marta May).
At the next stop, Barcelona’s ‘Coney Island’ it’s raining but it doesn’t stop the tourists from enjoying it. Until, once again, a girl, Peggy (Olga Montes), is killed, this time on a ride and she too is missing her left eyeball. In her hand, she holds a toy spider that the tour guide used to scare them earlier.
The inspector (José María Blanco) believes the killer must be one of the group, which they protest but he does take the tour guide in for questioning.
Later on in their hotel room, Naiba (Ines Pellegrini) has a jealous confrontation with Lisa (Mirta Miller) that ends when Lisa slaps her. Everyone else is uneasy too.
Mark also calls the clinic where his wife should be and finds, she never checked in. So he calls home to Burlington, Vt but no one is home. Paulette tries to put him at ease but you can tell he wonders if his wife is in Barcelona. Then he gets a message telling him his wife is waiting for him at the Hotel Presidente hotel and she’s check in under her maiden name.
He goes to the suite and though the shower is on, it seems to be empty. And he finds a knife of the floor with dried blood on it. Then the phone rings but no one is on the line.
Later, at lunch with Paulette, he’s withdrawn and they argue about where he went and he storms off.
A local woman is killed in the area while tending her pigs and she is also missing an eye, she falls over in the sty. Just before this happened, the priest, who is also a part of the tour group. He tried talking to her and giving her money but she ignored him.
At this point, a few guys are looking suspicious. Especially one with a scratch on his hand, which he got after harassing a girl in a mini skirt. The inspector returns with news of her murder. Gail (Silvia Solar) is suspicious and points the finger at Paulette who was seen cleaning mud off her shoes.
Mark quickly returns to the hotel to see hus wife but is told she already checked out and is heading back to New York. He goes to the airline just to find out she canceled her flight. Then he runs into Lisa there, who is seeing off The Randalls (Richard Kolin and Olga Pehar), who lost their daughter, Peggy. He shows her a photo of his wife and asks her to keep an eye out for her. And someone is watching them.
Mark finally talks to Paulette about his marital problems and there was a killer on the loose, who killed a neighbor, Terry Moon. He says he came home to find Alma unconscious on the ground, a bloody knife in one hand and an eyeball near the other. He cleaned up. But a man was arrested for the murder. And he always suspected his wife, now he believes she’s doing it again in Barcelona.
Later that night, someone in a raincoat, with a knife, sneaks into Lisa’s room, stabs her and searches her belongings. Naiba walks in on before the killer is done but they get away. Mark gets to Naiba first.
Everyone searches the grounds and they find a bloody raincoat. The inspector arrives and questions everyone. Jenny (Verónica Miriel) is asked to try on the raincoat because she arrived just as the culprit gets away. He is informed that they all got standard red raincoats provided by the tour company. They are ordered to turn over their passports until the case is solved.
Back on the tour bus, Jenny finds a roll of film and the priest assumes it belonged to Lisa and takes it.
The inspector receives correspondence from the American Embassy and it’s bad news for Mark. But Mark is brainstorming with Paulette about this situation and he decided to go to the inspector.
Late that evening, the priest tries to meet Naiba at the hospital but disappears before the nurse returns. They call the police. Meanwhile, a raincoat clap person is in Naiba’s room.
Then the killer fled just as the priest returns for his case, he left, before. But it still looks suspicious.
Jenny wanders off to skinny dip in the pool and it’s her turn. She’s stabbed but keeps her eyes and is still alive in the pool. And once again the killer gets away. This is the second attack in 4 hours. And the cops think Mark is the culprit.
The next day, Naiba receives the photos from Lisa’s film and goes searching for Reverend Bronson (George Rigaud). He apparently lost his daughter Martha months ago and he admires young women with her same eye color. Naiba finds him and another girl, dead at the castle. She then spots Paulette.
She’s bent over the girl with a knife, she plucks out her own left eye and then the girl’s. Naiba screams before she’s done.
She says they always drove her crazy and the girl her cost her, her own eye, was never punished. She had the brightest blue eyes. And so did her victims.
As for Mark’s wife, this whole time she was in Florida with her mother.
This giallo slasher was written and directed by Umberto Lenzi. This was pretty good, with the mysterious who-done-it air about it. At some point, almost everyone looked like the killer. This movie was also at times from the POV of the killer where you see nothing but gloved hands, sometimes holding a knife. It’s not gory, the kills and eyeball scenes are not graphic, this feels more like a mystery than anything.
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Riot Girls, 2019/1 h 22m
Potter’s Bluff has been annihilated by a mysterious illness. A strange condition called gut rot, which presents as a blackened abdomen, inflicted the infected, only adults and in a matter of weeks, they were all gone. There is no cure.
The town, now only populated by children, soon split in two, the poor East Side kids stick together and the rich West Side Kids, keep to their own area, now known as Titan territory. Named after their high school mascot and led by Jeremy (Munro Chambers), varsity captain and the oldest kid in town along with his right hand man, Todd (Darren Eisner). You know them by their Titan lettermen jackets and their central location is West Side High School. They are training other west side kids in self defense, to be elevated to Titan.
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Scratch (Paloma Kwiatkowski) and Nat (Madison Iseman), Eastsiders, are out scavenging and Scratch can’t resist a gun, in the now mummified, hand of the former home owner, still in bed with their partner. Nat is horrified as the arm snaps off in the gun retrieval.
Jack (Alexandre Bourgeois), another Eastsider and Nat’s brother, lies in wait, to handicap and rob a van that’s passing by belonging to the Titans. But first, he accidentally hits another kid, outsider, Sony (AJ Friese), who, after Jack rescues him from the Titans, returns to the compound with him.
Back at the East Side compound where everyone lives, Jack regroups and brainstorms, he wants to know why were there two guys in the van when it should have been only one. Both of whom, he killed.
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At West Side High, Jeremy demands that someone do something about their missing van and for the leak in their group to be plugged. Devon (Evan Marsh) has to deal with their resident troublemakers and drug dealers, Madge (Stefani Kimber), led by Caine (Jenny Raven), who’s been selling marijuana without authorization.
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Later, Jack goes back to the van, against Sunshine’s (Robyn Alomar) better judgement, to find out what else was in it. And he couldn’t have chosen a worse time because the Titans are also looking for the van and they find it. With him in it. But just before they arrive, he discover’s what the van is carrying.
With guns pointed at Jack, the Titans take him back to Jeremy at West Side High. Luce (Jordana Blake), who hid out in Jack’s truck, alerts the others and Nat, Scratch, and grudgingly, Sony are going to bring Jack back. Sony admits to being a former Westsider, so Scratch and Nat admit they need him to navigate the west side.
Meanwhile, it looks like Jeremy is aging out of his ability to survive the virus, he’s hiding evidence of rot gut. While confronting Jack, Jeremy blames Sean (Chris Mark) for the leak and has him killed.
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Scratch has a connection for a car, a ten year old named Bacon (Joseph Curto), who lives on his own and has a collection of vehicles. After twisting the kid’s nipple, they get the best he’s got, an SS 350 1967 Chevy Camaro. Scratch, Nat and Sony pile in and head toward Titan territory.
Meanwhile, at the school, Jack is looking for a way to escape.
At a checkpoint, the trio are stopped by Titan Guards who tell them they can go on through buy they take Nat. Scratch ends their days with the gun retrieved from the mummies. Then they continue on until the car dies and they ditch it for bikes they got off of the Titan guards.
They arrive at Sony’s house and have to regroup with Madge and Caine. They make a plan to locate Jack and while they wait, they hit the bong and talk.
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Back at the school, Jeremy confronts Devon, his cousin, about Jack’s escape and the only thing keeping him alive is the fact that he’s family. Devon then gets the report of the three dead Titan guards and their missing bikes ridden by outsiders.
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Meanwhile, there is a rift between Scratch and Nat. Nat is upset that Scratch has been killing their attackers and called her a thoughtless psycho. Scratch is devastated and Sony tries to smooth it over, just in time for the Titans to pull up. Sony, Nat and Scratch sneak out and head toward Sony’s parent’s house.
Caine and Madge go outside to confront Devon who has a knife to Fish’s (Nicolas Aqui) throat. Soon, two out of three of them are dead and some of the Titan’s look confused as they force Caine into their vehicle.
Back at the school, Devon finds he’s on the outs. Even after killing a little kid and a girl, it’s not enough to get back into the inner circle, he gets the news from Todd, who seems thrilled about it but Devon’s devastated.
Inside, Jeremy confronts Caine, who could not care less. She’s thrown in the school ‘brig’ with Jack.
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Back at Sony’s parent’s house, he tries to kiss Nat, after Nat tries to make up with Scratch. After putting all that aside, they load up to rescue Jack and Caine. They break into the school, just in time for the strange pep rally/public execution that will soon be taking place in the gym. The Westsiders are not yet full on board with this cruelty. When it’s all said and done, the Titans will have new leadership.
This indie film was directed by Jovanka Vuckovic and it is fun. It has that post apocalyptic teen coming of age film feel plus some super graphic and violent deaths. There are some very good child actors in this film, it’s paced pretty well and has a solid ending. Well
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Mad God, 2021/ 1 hr 23 min
A brutal tower stands center of a dark hellscape. Twisted metal, barbed wire and devastation. Cannons fire at a masked being, descending from the sky in a one man tube, attached to a cable. Passing layers or carcasses and hundreds of stone statues, into a hole, in the bowels of the city.
The capsule finally lands in a post apocalyptic landscape and the Assassin exits. Among the wreckage lives monsters and tiny gnomes which are immediately crushed under his boot.
He had a map and binoculars and seems to spot what he’s looking for, a house on a hill. Violent images shine through the windows and a ghastly monster comes out at the sound of a trap being set off by some twisted, unrecognizable creatures. The monster yanks the creature up and hacks it to pieces with a cleaver.
Meanwhile, the assassin, yanks a chord and the ground opens up and he drops inside. It looks like the rusted bowls of a ship but a hatch opens into what can only be a lab. A lab with more disturbing creatures inside. He closes the door and keeps going down the hall to a room full of giant ‘people’ who are being executed. Under their giant chairs their bowels empty and below them is another ghastly creature, consuming the excreta.
The assassin boards an elevator that passes through it’s cavernous body, a chamber of bladders fill as the creature swallows.
An ancient machine, below, stamps out an army of beings, drones. That are equally workers and grist for the mill. Many build, haul and clean as just as many are tipped into the fire as fuel or crushed under and ground in machinery. Many land in a huge piles, just to be scooped up and carted off.
A factory processes giant larvae and grinds them into paste. Massive meat monsters are strapped down and processed. Everything is covered in filth and cruelty drives everything. Everything alive, is a hideous monster. Over the loud speaker is baby talk. On the monitor is a hideous mouth, mouthing the sounds coming out of the speakers.
And the assassin, makes his way through all of this and through another trap door. Down a long and steep flight of stairs, it’s pitch black. More putrid creatures live here and inexplicably, piles and piles of suit cases, one of which is full of dynamite. As the assassin sets the timer, a huge monster attacks him and drags him away.
In a theatre, an audience watches as the assassin is stripped behind a screen. Below are untold numbers of rooms, each with a victim who is currently being tortured or already dead.
A surgeon, enters one room in particular and bisects the assassin, brutally ripping open his chest and obliterating the organs. The abdominal cavity is full of treasure, coins, jewelry and notes, gore is splashed all around. They seem to be searching for something in particular. And they find it, some kind of monstrous hairy larva.
Afterward, they drill a hole in the assassin’s head, and drop a camera into the hole. With the monitor on, the surgeon watches and there’s a whole other world and it’s winter. A human man with very long nails looks over a map that was created by stooped and gnarled witches.
Walking through a room full of ‘soldiers’ he hands the map off to the one in the capsule. The capsule is then lowered and the man sends a message over telegram.
The capsule lands in a post apocalyptic nightmare and the assassin follows the map through the wreckage. The assassin finds random old vehicles and traverses his way through the maze of wreckage, blight, war and monsters.
Fields of crosses topped with skulls and a still very active war is happening as the assassin drives through active bombings and storms. The assassin arrives to a gate that leads to a road that spirals down into the Earth.
Back at the newly born hairy pupae, it is hand delivered by a nurse to a giant tattered monster wearing a hat behind a massive metal door. As the monster walks, doors slide open ahead and close behind and through the hall of statues it goes, the creature crying the whole way.
A twisted and bent alchemist, stops two giant ogres from fighting, tends his psychedelic worm garden and tidies his lab. Just in time for the tattered hat monster to arrive with the crying larva. He takes out a tome and the larva is put into a mechanical press and squeezed, the fluid is then fired in a kiln, transformed into a gold bar and ground into a bowl of glitter. Which is handed off to the tattered hat monster, who then tosses it into space. The cosmos are born.
All of society is rebuilt but then a couple kids detonate dynamite during a war and everything is destroyed again. The cycle of rebirth and destruction continues.
This film was written, produced and directed by Phil Tippett and it took 30 years to create. It is a stop motion, experimental horror and everywhere you look is something disturbing. Amazingly grotesque and graphic monsters and creatures. Graphic violence and death. Everything, even things that would be considered neutral, is graphic, over the top and serves the post apocalyptic atmosphere well. I can see why it took decades, there was an incredible amount of work put into this.
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Cube, 2021/ 1 hr 49 min.
After a man (Tokio Emoto) enters a room through a hatch, he finds more of the same in other rooms, in the last one, he is impaled by a huge cookie cutter like spike that shoots out of the wall. It takes a square chunk out of him, the size of a big book, when it retracts, he falls over dead.
Three others, Yuichi Goto (Masaki Suda), Shinji Ochi (Masaki Okada) and Chiharu Uno (Hikaru Tashiro) two men and a boy, also wake up in an unfamiliar room with no memory and no personal effects. While they sit and think, a hatch overhead opens, a boot flies in and an injured man, Ide (Takumi Saito), drops in behind it. You can tell he’s been in the Cube a while. He ignores the trio and the cube shifts. He climbs up to the top hatch over head and the man who died from impaling, falls through including, the giant block of him that was carved out.
Then a woman, Asako Kai (Anne Watanabe), enters through yet another hatch. None of them know each other or how they came to be in this place.
When Ide tosses his boot into another room, flames shoot out of a wall. The newcomers are quickly learning, this place is dangerous. Ide teaches them to check each room before they enter.
The newly formed group move on through the maze together. They work out that they were all kidnapped while they were asleep or they’re dreaming. Ochi wonders if they are on a tv show and starts screaming for help, after Ide shuts him up, they keep going. Goto soon realizes each hatch has a series of numbers, they think they’re like IP addresses and some hatches do not open at all.
But in one room they find an older man, Ando (Kōtarō Yoshida), he says he’s a company executive who found himself alone there. He’s confused as to why a child is in the Cube and mistakes the group for a rescue team. He’s upset to find them captives, just like himself.
They make a misstep and end up in a room with a drop down ceiling full of blades spinning like propellers, Goto was supposed to have cleared the room. And now they can’t get any of the other hatches to open, at the last minute they get the floor hatch open and drop through.
They’re all traumatized by the last room and retreat into their own corners of the next one. All except the very shy and withdrawn, Chiharu, who’s getting closer to Goto, who saved his life. But Chiharu has a fear and hatred of adults. With a spare button, on the floor, he works out a math problem and figures which rooms are safe. Trap rooms have prime numbers.
Goto jumps into a room with an even number to prove to Chiharu that he trusts him and that he is right, after Ando doubts him.
Then they arrive at a crossroads, a room where all the rooms, except the one they came from, have traps. And when they attempt to go back, the hatch, is locked. Ando demands the numbers be checked again. While doing just that, they find a room that deploys the trap, with sound. But if they make no noise, they might be able to make it. Goto goes first. Once he makes it, the others follow.
But then Ochi drops his boot and deploys the trap, Ando is last and is yanked through the hatch at the last second before he’s flayed into chunks. But he does get a scrape and he’s pissed about it.
Ando is becoming more unhinged and suddenly thinks Ochi is a plant to get him killed. He lashes out in anger. And Ochi is not taking it well, he’s starting to lose his grip. Then Shiharu figures out the cube’s dimensions and number. Suddenly the room fills with gas. But it’s not deadly.
The next hatch they open, they find a room they’ve already been in. On the floor lays the corpse missing a cube of flesh. But it makes no sense, they were traveling in a more or less, straight line.
When the cube shuffles again, Shiharu falls into a trap room because he was sitting in a hatch when it happened, Goto dives for him. He’s having flashbacks of a suicide he witnessed. In the room, there are lasers and Goto and Shiharu take turns pushing eat other out of the beams path. Until Ide, jumps in and saves them both, costing him his life.
Next, they work out the math and it looks like they are 4 rooms from the edge of the cube. But Ochi is in despair and has given up. Ando is holding a grudge against Goto, no matter how hard he tries. Ando wonders if the cube is punishment. Which brings back flashbacks of Goto’s abusive childhood.
Ando opens up about not being a good person and being irredeemable and he’d deserve it if it is punishment. Then bars shoot up from the floor, splitting the room in half, Ando and Ochi, on one side and Shiharu, Kai and Goto, on the other. Ando chooses suicide by entering a trap room. Then Ochi makes the same choice.
Goto, Kai and Chiharu continue to what they hope will be the edge. They get to the second to last room and Goto’s memory is projected onto the wall. With him trying talk his brother off the ledge of a building. It’s hard to watch.
Meanwhile, in another part of the cube, Ando and Ochi didn’t die in that room. But Ando is horrible to Ochi and Ochi snaps and that’s how Ando meets his end.
Shiharu questions Goto about why he stopped himself from saving his brother. And reiterates that’s why he doesn’t like adults. Shiharu opens the floor hatch and jumps in, Goto dives for him and catches him. As Shiharu bawls in Goto’s arms, Kai opens the last hatch. It opens into empty space, in a giant building.
They see a few rooms moving outside of the cube. And Kai knows of one that does, the room with 999 at it’s center. On their way they find Ochi and not only is he acting different, they notice he’s covered in blood but he lies and says a trap killed Ando. Shiharu is rightfully scared of him because Ochi has a big grin on his face when he says it.
Shiharu later asks what happened to Ando and gets the same lie. So Shiharu tells Goto he thinks Ochi is lying. Ochi attacks when they try to get away and he confesses. Since he wants to die anyway, he might as well kill.
Just as Goto is winning the fight, the ceiling hatch opens and skewers Ochi from all different directions. As he and Shiharu try to leave the room, the revolving room moves again before he can get in. He’s left behind. Kai and Shiharu find the exit but they wonder if the world out there, is any better or even worth it.
Back in the cube, Goto is torn up but still alive. For now… And there are a new batch of players.
This was directed by Yasuhiko Shimizu and it is a reimagining of the original. The characters loosely match the archetypes from the first film: Goto - David Worth, Kai - Joan Leaven, Ochi - Dr. Helen Hathaway, Chiharu - Kazan, The first victim - Alderson, Ide - Rennes and Ando - Quentin McNeil.
But they, thankfully, do not match perfectly, they are evolved to fit and tell a new story. I enjoyed the different take. There’s somewhat less gore and violence than the original and some of the traps are different but awesome. The end was different but is a different kind of unknown and scary. This one also has quite a few sad flash backs.
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Peninsula, 2020/ 116 min
During the beginning of the zombie outbreak, Jong-seok (Gang Dong-won) and his family try to get to the safety of Busan but it was too late. It only took one day for the Korean government to lose all control of the situation. Jong-seok and his sister (Jang So-yeon) and nephew Dong-hwan (Moon Woo-jin) make the transport to Japan but the virus has made it onto the ship. It’s not long before chaos ensues and Jung-seok's nephew and sister do not survive.
Jong-seok and his brother-in-law, Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon) survive because his sister close herself and other infected in the cabin, protecting the rest of the ship. NATO and the US quarantine Korea and refuse to take anymore refugees, four years later Jong-seok and his brother-in-law take refuge in Hong Kong where they are recruited by Chinese mobsters.
They explain the plan to send a group back to South Korea to steal a fortune. The area is patrolled at sea but they pay the Coast Guard off to send boats through. He says there’s a truck full of cash, $20 million. The group stands to make $2.5 million dollars a head. He convinces them by saying there are no guarantees they’ll get that they’ll get refugee status so this is their chance to control their own future.
South Korea’s infrastructure is in rapid decline and decay. But the group has 3 days to get out alive and back to the boat. They are warned not to waste time trying to save each other and to not fail.
The refugees paddle through a graveyard of wrecked ships at Incheon Port and it is in such a state of decay that it is unrecognizable. Wrecked, abandoned vehicles are scattered everywhere and going to the weeds that are overtaking civilization.
The group jump a car and navigate through a trash and boat strewn, dead city. Inside many decrepit buildings they are jam packed with zombies. So crowded in that they’re pressed against the windows.
They find the location, a refrigerator truck full of US currency, the zombified driver still sits behind the wheel. But the migrants make too much noise, blowing the horn and call the horde. There only chance is to distract them and run. Two of them take the truck and follow the others in the car.
They are almost home free until another militia uses fireworks to redirect the zombies toward them and they wreck both vehicles, Jung-seok is saved because he’s ejected out of the windshield. The others aren’t so lucky but Chul-min hides inside the truck.
As he fights, a teen, Joon-i (Lee Ri) with her little sister, Yu-jin (Lee Ye-won), were watching and comes out of nowhere and expertly drives them away from the horde through the ruined city. She uses her vehicle like a half race car/ half battering ram and after the rough ride, Jong-Seok passes out in the back seat. When they need a tunnel cleared, Yu-jin takes out a remote controlled toy car to lure the zombies away so they can pass.
When the rogue militia known as Unit 631 arrive and kill those still alive.
Jong-Seok wakes up being dragged inside by an older man, Elder Kim (Kwon Hae-hyo) who thinks he’s still in the military. There’s a woman there too, the girl’s mother, Min-jung (Lee Jung-hyun) he recognizes her from the beginning of the outbreak.
Meanwhile, Unit 631 recover the truck full of money and Chul-min in the back when they arrive back at the compound. He is taken captive, strip his shirt off and spray paints 61 on him. His is kept in a container with other men, who also are numbered.
The inner sanctum of the compound is decorated with hanging corpses. Unit 631 was a military unit, originally sent to rescue civilians but after years of sending SOS signals and getting no response, they went crazy and rogue.
Min-jung tells their story, that no one ever came, no more rescue efforts were made. Now she wonders what the militants want with cash which is worthless to them.
Back at the compound, the numbered captives are corralled into an arena, surrounded by a crowd. There is a clock counting down, then zombies are released. They have to survive the zombies as the clock counts down, it’s just a dangerous spectacle for entertainment.
The satellite phone rings and the mobsters are waiting for the money. They don’t care who has it but offers freedom to who every arrives with it to the rendezvous point, Incheon Port.
Captain Seo (Koo Kyo-hwan) needs to distract Sgt. Hwang (Kim Min-jae) who wants the money for himself. Jong-Seok also needs that money to escape. Min-jung also wants to be at that port for a chance to get her daughters to safety, so she decides to sneak into the compound and steal the truck herself.
Min-jung and Jong-seok get the truck but hope to get the satellite phone from Ming jung and he asks to come with them. But Captain Seo arrives while Jong Seok was off rescuing Chul-Min and attacks them but at least he has the phone on him.
A huge horde of zombies enter the complex and the place is in turmoil. Chul-min doesn’t make it, he gets taken out by Sgt. Hwang. Min-jung saves the day when she crashes in with the truck and rescues Jong-seok.
Joon-i does more of her masterful driving in her car while her mom takes the truck, with and Unit 631 hot on their heels and zombies raining from the sky, as they leap from over passes, they all speed toward Incheon Port.
This is a standalone sequel to Train to Busan written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho. The post apocalyptic setting is excellent, the driving makes this movie really fun. The women and kids are awesome in this movie and they aren’t just victims or supporting characters. This is a zombie flick but it’s really a story about the survivors of the outbreak so there is not as much zombie activity as in Train to Busan. And the zombies are still fast and terrifying.
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The Lifechanger, 2018/ 1 hr 24 min
A suspected serial killer, Drew (Bill Oberst Jr.), takes the form of his victims, complete with their thoughts and memories. After which he cuts the body up, bags it and buries the remains. All in his new identity. The current identity, Emily (Elitsa Bako), is a woman people worried about and looked after, so three days later, a friend and the cops arrive to check on her.
Both friend and cop are killed and one of their identities were taken but as usual, clean up has to happened before Drew moves on. He is now a detective named Freddy (Steve Kasan).
The newly minted Freddy heads to a bar and chats up a woman, Julia (Lora Burke), that he knew in a past life and identity. He surprises her with his personality and uncanny knowledge of her. They hit it off but Freddy becomes ill again and desperately needs a new body.
The bodies that Drew/Freddy swaps into, rot, and it is happening faster than normal. He has to take drugs to slow it down because once the bodies decay, he has to find a new host quickly. Also, when he’s injured, the injuries do not follow him to the next body, until now. It forces him to get a new host out in the open and before he’s ready.
He finds a man in the parking lot and after shooing off his conquest, Freddy takes a new body. This time, that of a married letch, a dentist named Dr. Sam Richardson (Sam White).
As Dr. Richardson, he sees Julia on the street after a year and is desperate to see her again. Playing the part of his ‘host’ and keeping up appearances is draining to the spirit. He’s really only happy when he’s with Julia, so he returns to the bar, gets drunk and chats her up. She tells him about her former husband and son who died, years ago.
When Sam wakes up at his hotel and finds himself decaying, he calls up his dental assistant, Rachel (Rachel VanDuzer) and asks her to come over and she does. Then Drew, formerly Freddy and currently Sam, is now Rachel.
That night, Rachel goes to the bar for a drink with Julia and introduces herself as Drew. Julia is writing book and invites Drew to her office if she ever wants to talk. When a guy cuts in Julia leaves to talk to another guy at a nearby table. Then Drew/Rachel leaves with the guy at the bar and after some aggressive making out and sharing some coke, he goes for some sexual assault that turns into a physical altercation and Drew kills him. She quickly changes and leaves until the police activity dies down. She’s already showing signs of decay.
She decides to confess the truth of who she is to Julia and on the way to her office, sees her and the guy from the bar. Drew/Rachel follows him home and she swaps places with him. Drew/Rachel goes from a 20 something year old woman to a bearded, silver fox with a top knot named Robert (Jack Foley). He immediately calls Julia for a date tonight.
Robert feels very familiar to her and the date goes well, they spend the night together and he wakes Julia up with breakfast. But Robert needs to get home and despose of his last body.
But the next day on the news, they’re reporting on a dumping ground and Julia recognizes some of the victims plus it’s nearby. Julia is unnerved. And Robert is fighting back the decay and losing the battle.
After becoming ill in the bathroom, Robert finally decides to tell Julia the truth and she takes it as expected, not well. She’s confused and afraid, it doesn’t make any sense to her but he tells the story from the beginning.
That he’s older than he looks, and that he takes people and their lives but that’s not all, he’s known her a lot longer than she knows. He confesses to being Drew and he’s met her a dozen times before. He saw her with Richard, her husband. He saw their love and wanted it for himself and he had it.
She is so upset she tries to leave and he confesses to knowing where Richard is. Robert tries desperately to convince her that he isn’t a monster and that it was all necessary for his survival. She lashes out because he won’t let her leave and in the tussle, Robert accidentally swaps with her. Robert is now Julia and she’s devastated.
Julia returns to the bar for one last drink and goodbye before the decision is made, Julia will not resist death this time. No more body swapping, this will be the end. And that night, in bed, there is no resistance but death does not come as expected but something does. On the bed, instead of a corpse there is a cocoon. What hatches out of it is unexpected. Maybe there is no end, after all.
This horror/thriller was directed by Justin McConnell. This was a well thought out and interesting body swap film. It builds into a kind of gut wrenching end and he narrator is perfect. It’s not particularly graphic but you get just enough. Also the swaps are pretty quick, we do not have to wait long before the character changes which also means I really needed to pay attention to keep up. Because when the swap changes, everything changes and it’s easy to get lost.
If you enjoyed this, Justin McConnell was a guest on my podcast, Macabre…ish Cults, Classics and Horrors Podcast, find it here or wherever you get your podcasts!
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The Hive, 2014/ 1 hr 33 min
Adam (Gabriel Basso) wakes up in a barricaded cabin, confused, with no memory and infected with something. He’s covered in black bile that fluoresces under UV light and his body is sprouting some kind of boils. “Remember” is written on the wall with pictures below it. There’s also a taped sign that says, “Don’t Let Anyone In. No Matter What.”
He checks his wallet and the contents trigger his memories. He remembers, he wrote all the notes around the cabin. After opening a closet door, he finds a woman’s corpse, her head, wrapped in plastic wrap. After unwrapping her head, he remembers her and it triggers memories. Adam gets around.
Meanwhile, a bunch of memories pop up that seem to belong to someone else, an older man in the 1980s, a brain surgeon called Dr. Baker (Sean Gunn) and a Russian scientist Dr. Yuri Yegorov (Elya Baskin) doing experiments on subjects in an attempt to connect their brains in a kind of hive consciousness. Adam notes it on the wall in chalk. And little by little, his memories return.
He and a friend, Clark (Jacob Zachar), got jobs at a summer camp, Camp Yellow Jacket, he remembers he and his friend having a water balloon fight with the kids, being chastised by their boss and he caused a girl, Katie (Katherine Prescott), to have to get stitches. Adam likes her but she knows he gets around. Katie is not the girl who’s remains were in the closet though, that’s Jess (Gabrielle Walsh).
The cabin Adam is holed up in, tells him he’s still at camp, specifically the infirmary, and something terrible happened there.
While Katie and Adam were out for the evening, they watched a plane crash and contacted the ranger station. Adam, Clark, Jess and Katie can’t resist and drive to the crash site, there’s a fiery debris field but they can see the tail has a seal on it. They find an arm with a brief case cuffed to it, inside the case the contents are covered in black goo except something that looks like a card. Then a zombified pilot (Todd Christian Hunter), still wearing a parachute, approaches. They jump in the truck to leave after the zombie grabs Clark and they wreck their truck.
Flashback..
The Russian Scientist, Yuri, finds success with his experiment. The virus that he infects his subjects with are communicating telepathically but there are awful side effects like severe vomiting, their arteries turn black and their bodies sprout black boils.
And Dr. Baker wanders home after a surgery but he doesn’t seem happy about it. He writes an equation in a notebook, an equation recited by a dying eight year old patient, Kayla (Talitha Bateman). An equation she shouldn’t have known.
•
Back in the cabin, Adam writes that equation on the wall. And continues to have flashbacks.
He remembers waking up in the crashed vehicle and Clark is freaked out, Jess flew out the window, she’s seriously injured and when the zombie pilot finds her, he vomits black bile into her face.
Ignoring Clark’s warnings Adam and Katie bring her back to the vehicle, it doesn’t start so they all walk back to camp. Jess is violently vomiting and Adam notices black slashed on the walls in the infirmary. Nurse Tessa (Sonya Eddy) isn’t there. It spooks him and he blocks the door with a bench. Then Jess seems to die. But then she wakes up, announcing, “We Can See You All!” and her voice is different, it sounds like more than one voice coming out of her.
Then she vomits in Clarks face and Katie knocks her out.
•
Back in the 80s with Dr. Yuri, Subject 14 (Elaine Kagan) warns him that the hive cannot be contained and that other subjects are being released and they are coming for him. In 30 seconds they will enter the room and they do.
Clark, Adam and Katie talk about a plan of escape, Clark says they should abandon the 150 kids that are at the camp and just leave. But Adam and Katie are against that. Then Jess speaks for the hive and warns them. Adam and Katie head to the radio to contact police and Clark stays with the seemingly raving Jess, who’s tied to a chair. The hive taunts him and tells Clark that Jess had sex with Adam. And Clark is not ok.
On the radio, Adam and Katie are not getting the sense of urgency they were expecting. But they go to get the kids and they are all infected, them and their cabins covered in black vomit. They’re too late.
Soon Clark changes completely, he chases Katie down just to vomit in her face. She tells Adam to run.
Outside, Clark wants in the cabin and inside his head, Adam can hear him/them loud and clear. Adam lets Clark in and he looks very different, Adam wants to know where Katie is. Clark/The Hive taunts him. Tells him to embrace his anger but he won’t. He does however have a message he wants Clark to deliver to the hive. Adam strikes Clark in the head, over and over, with a baseball bat. He watches the black infection retreat as Clark dies.
Adam discovers he can tap into anyone’s mind. And discovers he is disconnected but still one of the hive. Which only happened because of a glitch caused by a memory with a strong emotional attachment.
•
In another life, Dr. Yuri tries to tell Dr. Baker that the virus is actual evil but Dr. Baker shrugs him off as a quack, then Dr. Yuri pulls out a gun.
•
Adam remembers where Katie is, in another room of the cabin, he hopes to use what he’s learned, to save her. And the hive, slips up and Adam sees his way in. If he can kill her, the virus will die, just like it did with Clark. Then, if he can resuscitate her, she can come back. Then they can all come back.
After, they are both resuscitated Adam and Katie try to escape to the van but they have to get through a potential gauntlet of kids and the pilot.
•
Dr. Yuri came for the virus to stop what he knew was coming but he inadvertently became the cause of what he tried to stop. The arm that was attached to the brief case was his arm. And a vial leaked in Dr. Baker’s lab. Before Yuri left the building, it was already too late.
•
Adam knows there is nothing out there, nothing’s left but Katie doesn’t know and so he spare’s her and leaves her, her hope.
This horror/sci fi movie was directed by David Yarovesky and it was excellent! The story is really good and intricate, with very little filler. This is not a zombie movie per se but it’s also not, not a zombie movie. I think it is a welcome change and spin on the zombie genre and an exciting twist of a viral outbreak genre. I would love this to get a physical release.
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Renfield, 2023/ 1 hr 33 min.
At DRAAG (Dependent Relationship Anonymous Addiction Group), a support group for people in unhealthy relationships, including Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult). Who is also in a destructive relationship, a long one, with his boss. Once upon a time, Robert was a real estate attorney and was in the middle of a life changing land deal, what he got instead, was a life changing job as the client’s assistant and after a while, he became a familiar. This happened in the 1920s and he became a servant to Dracula (Nicolas Cage).
Unlike vampires who’s powers come from human blood, familiars’ power come from consuming insects. Robert does whatever his master bids, including help kill the last of the vampire hunters, when he was caught. Regularly, Dracula goes on a blood thirsty bender, the good guys show up and Robert cleans up the mess. They move city, Dracula is nursed back to health and the cycle repeats itself.
And in the mean time, Robert likes to go to a support group. But not really for help, for victims, he helps get rid of the support groups’ monsters by giving his monster, what he needs.
He hunts them down, this time he’s looking for Mitch, Caitlyn’s (Bess Rous) man. Who, with his mates, stole a fortune in drugs from a drug dealer. They are aware of a hitman looking for them and they think it’s Robert, it’s not but the hit man is right behind him. A violent and bloody fight results in Robert being disemboweled and the hitman’s head being punched off and landing across the street.
After the decades of moving and dwindling resources, Dracula and Robert moved into a dilapidated hospital. Dracula looks horrible but Robert has taken him the hitman’s headless remains along with a few other victims. But Dracula is unimpressed, he needs pure victims like nuns and teens to return to his former glory. He punishes Robert by ripping his bowel open again and reminding him of his place as a servant.
And unfortunately, there’s a witness, another member of the Lobos drug cartel, Teddy (Ben Schwartz) and he spilled his guts at the police department. Ofc. Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), who lost her dad to the Lobos’ is eager to break the case. But he lawyers up and has to face the boss when he gets out, his mother, Bella (Shohreh Aghdashloo).
She’s worried that he is not feared enough in town and needs him to prove himself. So he plans to terrorize a restaurant, but specifically the cop, Ofc Quincy. Also in the restaurant is Robert, after he dropped his container of spiders, he goes for a nearby fly and then tackles Teddy. A very aggressive and gory gun fight breaks out.
The fight was amazing and both Robert and Ofc. Quincy was impressed by the other’s skill. When Robert returns to the lair, Dracula is talking world domination, so he can live like a God, instead of a rat. Dracula and Renfield, together forever. Alarmed, Robert seeks help at group therapy to get out of his toxic relationship.
And he spills his guts, in so far as he can and Renfield leaves that meeting and gets his own apartment and starts to focus on himself. He also decides to give a statement about the restaurant incident and flowers to Ofc. Quincy.
Meanwhile, the Lobos’ uses facial recognition software to find out who Renfield is and where he was last seen. So they take a crew to the dilapidated hospital that is stacked with fly blown corpses and serve themselves up to Dracula. Leaving Teddy for last, Dracula confronts him and then Dracula is off to find Renfield.
Renfield is caught off guard by Dracula sitting at his dining table. And Dracula hit him with all the low blows about abandoning his wife and child, chasing wealth and power because he, himself, is only a husk.
At the same time, Ofc. Quincy happens upon a couple of women, both who happen to have missing partners, both, a part of the same support group. Which is located inside the church that is responsible for the self help book that inspired Renfield to leave Dracula. And Dracula is going to destroy it. He arrives at the support group and now everyone is in danger and Renfield can’t do a thing to stop it.
Afterward, Dracula promises to unleash suffering on the entire human race in a consequence of Renfield’s betrayal. Then the police arrive and behind them, The Lobos’. They also want Renfield. Backed by the crooked cops in the department, The Lobos’ almost get what they want but Ofc. Quincy takes off with Renfield in the back of a squad car.
Dracula wants to make a deal will Teddy and The Lobos’ to help with his plans for world domination.
The next morning, Rebecca, wakes up in Robert’s house while he’s making cookies. It’s a weird morning and conversation as he tries to defend himself and tells the story. Just in time for evidence of his decades long crimewave is verified by the lab.
As Robert and Rebecca leave his house, the place is overrun with cops and gangsters. And he needs to find some bugs, quick. He finds spiders just in time and the cops and Lobos’ that aren’t there, watch through camera feed as Renfield rips everyone to shreds.
And as Capt. Browning (James Moses Black) quits, Teddy, brings Dracula to his mother to talk business. And it involves Rebecca’s sister, Kate (Camille Chen) who is being used as bait. Rebecca and Robert are going to the Lobos’ but first they need weapons and a whole lot of bugs. They arrive to find the entire Lobos organization are now familiars.
They fight their way to Rebecca’s sister and Dracula makes Rebecca an enticing offer. Not enticing enough because in the end, he ends up in concrete ice cubes in the sewer.
This horror was directed by Chris McKay and it was fun! The acting was good and it was funny, Nicholas Hoult’s narration was excellent! The was very gory and graphic but they managed to make the gore and splatter more cartoonish than realistic. Nicolas Cage transformed a lot but he really is the only one that really transformed.
]]>Arcade, 1993/ 1 hr 25 min
At Dante’s Inferno, the local arcade, a new virtual reality game, called Arcade, is being tested and the CEO of the of the company, Difford (John DeLancie) is also there. He’s handing out home versions of the game, for free. His job at Vertigo Tronics, depends on this test working.
After therapy, troubled teen, Alex (Megan Ward), who lost her mother (Sharon Ferrell) to suicide and has an alcoholic father, hangs out with her friends where they talk about the new game, Arcade. They make a plan to check it out after school.
At Dante’s, they find out the new game, is not like any other game. It’s not just VR, it learns and adapts with each play. There are seven levels and they’re all different parts of Arcade’s universe until you reach it’s brain.
Unfortunately, the loser is imprisoned inside the virtual world by the in-game villain, for real. First to play is, Nick (Peter Billingsley), and he’s the best gamer. Next is Greg’s (Bryan Dattilo) turn and while he’s playing, everyone else is off getting their own home versions of the game. While they are all gone, Greg loses and disappears. His friends, including Alex, all assume he left and they all go home.
At home, Alex, hooks up her new gaming system and she’s welcomed by The Villain (Jonathan Fuller), who calls her by name and informs her that her boyfriend, Greg, lost and is still in the game. She doesn’t last very long before she bails out of the game. She’s still worried about Greg and calls around looking for him, meanwhile The Villain taunts and threatens her and announces that Greg is with him and that he is everywhere. She unplugs her tv and goes to Nick’s house.
When she arrives, he is deeply engrossed in the game and Alex tells him she think’s the game is alive, somehow. But Nick assures her the program is brilliant but not alive.
Meanwhile, Nick’s game turns itself back on and Alex’s certain it’s listening to them. She asks Nick to call their other friends. But even though it is after 1 a.m., every single one of their lines are busy.
As Alex is leaving, she asks Nick not to play the game again. The next day, Alex meets up with her friends at their regular place and time and only Nick and Stilts (Seth Green) are there. She lets them know that she tried to call everyone but the phones are still out of order. So she and Nick goes to their houses to check on them. At Laurie’s (A.J. Langer) house, they see her through the window, entranced in front of her tv. She’s staring into static and claims to see angels.
Suddenly, Greg pops on the screen and begs to not be left alone. Then The Villain threatens to come play in their world. Nick breaks the tv to make it stop and The Villain speaks through Laurie before she vanishes.
Nick finally believes Alex and just wants to go but Alex suggests they go to Vertigo Tronics to see Mr. Difford. Once there, Nick threatens the receptionist (David Sederholm), with calls to the media, to see Difford.
They act like they just want some tricks to win the game and Difford lets them meet the programmer, Albert (Norbert Weisser). He’s an anxious man and clearly is also been influenced by the game. He offhandedly says it keeps changing the rules. Then he shows the teens the game’s schematics and shows them the doorways in each level, along with six keys that unlock Arcade’s heart which makes it possible to escape it’s brain and reenter, reality. Except no one’s been able to do it yet.
They also find out each level gives you progressively less time to complete it. If you collect the 4th key, you get a free life, you have no hope of winning the game without it. The next half of the game takes place in the brain and it’s hard.
Vertigo Tronics is keeping some disturbing facts about the game to themselves, like how they are using a few hundred human brain cells for The Villain. The idea was to make it more realistic but it goes awry because the cells are from a deceased abused kid and his cells are still aware and vengeful.
The programmer’s best advice is to avoid the game altogether. But they can’t, because The Villain has their friends. So Albert gives them the schematics to help them out.
So Nick and Alex head back to where it all began, Dante’s Inferno.
Nick has to play, he’s the best gamer and he’s the only one of the two of them who has a chance of winning. The Villain welcomes them and tells them their friends are there and both Alex and Nick vanish into the game. Alex luckily wrote the schematics on her arm and so they play the game and do pretty well. But also, if you get hurt in the game, you get real injuries.
Alex sees, one of their friends, a very injured Benz (Brandon Rane), sinking into a sinkhole, holding a key. She doesn’t get there in time but has to jump into the hole herself to escape a creature as Nick disappears. Turns out, Difford manually activated the escape sequence which fried the interface. Nick is back at Dante’s, leaving Alex alone, in game and cannot easily return.
Alex sees two other friends, Lori and Stilts, who are now a part of the game. Alex successfully navigates the levels on her own and gets a key and an extra life when she rescues a new player, a little boy (Humberto Ortiz).
Nick is watching Alex’s progression through the game on the console as Difford works to fix the interface. The game takes quite a creepy turn as it works hard to convince the players to die which would mean an eternity of playing the game. But Alex out plays The Villain.
This film was directed by Albert Pyun, the story is by Charles Band but written by Stephen S. Goyer. The same Stephen S. Goyer who is best known for writing the screenplays for several superhero films, including “Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (1998), the Blade trilogy (1998–2004), Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). He has also directed four films: Zig Zag (2002), Blade: Trinity (2004), The Invisible (2007) and The Unborn (2009).” (Wikipedia)
Arcade is super nostalgic with the recognizable faces of Seth Green and Peter Billingsley. The gaming FX and CGI are very of the time (90s) and still pretty entertaining. This is more of an adventure flick than anything. It’s not too bloody or gory and it’s a quick and easy, sci fi b rate movie moment. I enjoyed it!
TW: Suicide, child abuse
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Extinction: Patient Zero, 2014/ 1 hr 20 min.
Scientists are to go beneath the ice to a hundreds of thousands of years old lake, in the South Pole. They hope to discover unique life forms. Well, that’s how it started. When they finally do find something, the mission changes.
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Drs. Jennifer Harding (Rebecca Blumhaven), Robert Cooper (Nick Stevenson), Malcolm Simmons (Corin Nemec) wake up on the floor of their safe room with alarms blaring around them, they had 20 seconds to clear the room before it locked down but they missed that window.
Now they have 70 minutes to evacuate before the room is filled with pure oxygen, then napalm and ignited. Everything, down to the cellular level, will be destroyed. Dr. Simmons, is out cold and there’s someone else, Army Corporal Carver (William Coleman), he’s out and has been shot but he soon wakes up.
The room is in a bunker, in lock down because of the containment protocol, so they can’t just walk out. They need two independent codes to get out and Simmons has one of the codes. But there might be a way out, Simmons, once said that only one code is needed if it is used outside the safe room.
Then Dr. Harding remembers the virtual personal network that can be used to contact someone within their network. So she sends out an S.O.S. and soon they get a response from someone known as Mr. Lang (Fabian Martinez), he explains there was an outside breach and security leak. He says there is contamination and he’s being very vague about whether or not they are going to be let out. Which thoroughly freaks Cooper out.
Dr. Cooper confesses to Carter that they create viruses. A weapon that could potentially leave an enemy’s lands uninhabitable for a few hundred years. It was meant to be a nuclear deterrent and now it’s a cheaper alternative to WW3. A designer, smart virus. And it looks like the cat’s out of the bag.
Mr. Lang calls them back with bad news, the facility was the target of a terrorist attack and teams are there investigating. Dr. Harding was warned, by text, that Carter is one of those terrorists. She is ordered to disarm and contain him. And she does.
When Mr. Lang calls back, he’s less than helpful and suddenly doesn’t sound like he knows what’s going on at all. Harding decides they’ll try to escape on their own. She wants to try to wake Simmons and see if she can get his code. They wake him up with smelling salts.
And Dr. Simmons has bad news. He says there’s no way to leave the room, they’re contaminated. He tells what he remembers about the gun men in the lab, shooting everyone. He tells them the only reason the alarms would go off is if it detected contamination.
But he knows what the gunmen were looking for and he still has it on him. Deadlier than ebola, there’s no cure, the little vile contains the extinction strain. A cholera, smallpox, botulism and bubonic amalgamation who’s sequence was completed 2 weeks ago by Dr. Simmons. The vial contains enough plague to kill three quarters of Earth’s population. This was a top secret program, within the program. He also has the only antidote.
Harding and Cooper helped to create it and never knew. But they work for a weapons manufacturer and probably should have known.
So Simmons, with 20 minutes left, decides they are going to stay and be evaporated with the virus to keep it contained. In an act of desperation, Cooper grabs the gun and demands the code. While they wrestle with the gun, Cooper is shot. Then Harding grabs the gun and shoots Simmons, demanding the code. She gets it and leaves. Leaving Simmons and Harding to fight each other and die in the safe room.
Once Dr. Harding’s outside, she starts to cough up blood and black fluid and calls her sister to say goodbye. But before she dies, some good samaritans arrive and call an ambulance. Just like that, the virus is out and spreads like wild fire.
This thriller was directed by Joe Eckhardt and has only four actors for most of the movie. And takes place in mostly one room. The actors were very good but this is more about the story because most of what happens is told to the audience, rather than shown. Not bad for what it is.
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Hunt Her, Kill Her, 2023/ 1 hr 28 min
At a furniture factory, janitor, Karen (Natalie Terrazzino), is waiting to start her new job. Glenn (Larry Bunton), her day shift counter part, shows her around and explains what her job entails.
Glenn leaves and the building is supposed to be empty but Mickey and Rusty (Scott Lane), old buddies of her ex husband, Danny (JC Oakley III). Mickey (Trevor Tucker) is oddly angry about their divorce and antagonizes her. They leave and Karen locks the door behind them. She shuts down the rest of the place and gets to work.
Later, while taking the trash out, she notices a truck parked out in the parking lot. Karen is spooked and her terrible babysitter, Tina (Georgia Kate Haege), is calling, she can’t get Lily (Olivia Graves) to stop crying.
After lunch, someone starts beating on the door, a delivery man drops off a package but it seems off. After getting back to work, Karen hears a door opening and tools moving around. She checks it out and she chases someone but all she can see are doors closing behind him.
Karen returns to the package and opens it, inside is their door stop. Suddenly she knows she’s in danger, she looks up and sees four armed, masked men walking toward her. They chase her down and when she tries to leave through an external door, she finds that they’ve chained it shut. She runs and closes a bay door behind her and they pry their way through. So Karen hides while she thinks.
The men are combing through the place searching for her and she barely gets under an internal door to escape, she is cut and stabs one of them in return. Again she hides and they intruders disconnect the phone and get weapons to use on her.
She hangs from a platform and though they can’t see her, one of them stands on one of her hands. She gets lucky and falls just out of their eye sight. While they can’t find her, they’re going through the building, cutting the phone lines and searching for the breaker. And because they are struggling to find her they begin to shout out threats to torture her longer, unless she comes out.
Karen gets an idea to use grease to try to squeeze out of an external door but one of them catch her pulls her back in. She fights back and escapes. But he’s on her heels as she crawls through racks and hides again. He finally catches her, dragging her toward him by a strap and hook that’s tied around her ankle but once Karen untangles herself, he falls backward, down a flight of stairs, striking concrete with his head. She looks under his mask and recognizes his face, it’s the guy who delivered the package. His name is Eddie.
She puts him on the pallet jack and deploys it. That’s how the other’s find out Eddie (Phillip Zimny) is dead.
Once again she hides until they find her when her blood drips on a drum, so she runs for it, and loses Eddie’s knife. Her hiding game is next level, even when she’s near them, they can’t find her. She eventually finds bolt cutters and try to cut a chain but once again she’s caught, but this time from outside. The guy takes the bolt cutters right out of her hand. So she hides in a bathroom. One of the intruders break in and cuts her good but he gets a broken plunger handle in the chest for his trouble and bathroom cleaner in the face. That’s two dead. This one is named Bobby (Reece Griffin).
Karen sustains a deep cut from him but at least she has his knife. She sneaks away to the stairwell and makes it to the lunchroom and nurses her wounds. It’s not long before the intruders, including Vic (Stephen Polson) who’s supposed to be keeping watch outside, enter the lunchroom. Karen retreats under a table.
When they finally leave to check the offices, that they have keys for, she sets up a trap and uses herself for bait. One of the intruders chase and run right into it. It’s a spool of wire, stretched across a two racks, at neck level. He bleeds out at the neck and she helps it along, pushing on his back as he lays on the ground. Afterward, she dresses in his clothes and mask and works on luring the last one out.
In the meantime, she has the keys and is searching for a door out. Just as the door opens and she gets out, so does the fourth intruder. Karen fights for her life. With an extension cord and a pipe, she kills him. This one is Mickey. She grabs his cell phone and notices Danny calling. But he’s not just calling, he’s there. Karen takes off back inside the building. He corners her and beats her up. And it’s bad. He takes pleasure in hurting her.
Suddenly, Lily is standing right in front of them, as Karen’s being pummeled, calling out to her. Danny grabs Lily and runs off. Karen runs after them. Danny locks Lily in an office and returns but Karen is not waiting. She has a plan. She runs around turning on machines and while he turns them off behind her. Karen is busy mixing chemicals, and Danny promises to kill her quick like he did, Tina.
Karen executes her plan, she traps him in a room with a little homemade mustard gas. But wait, there’s more, while he’s coughing and trying to escape, she tapes a hammer to one of her broken hands and goes in for more.
It seems scorched lungs and a hammer buried in the back of his head isn’t enough. While trying to choke her to death, she pries the hammer out of his skull and goes to work on this abusive monster. And she doesn’t stop until he stops moving.
When she and Lily open the door outside, the sun’s up.
This film was directed by Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen and this is a little bit on a slow burn. Lots of running and hiding but the violence is pretty graphic. The violence definitely builds as the movie goes on and the most violence is saved for last. I really appreciate that Karen was a fighter and not just a victim.
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Domain, 2016/ 1 hr 37 min
There are reports of a flu outbreak known as the Saharan flu, that is beyond containment. The World Health Organization is reporting that it could be a world ending event, scientists warn that mortality rate could be 100%. Riots have broken out and people rush to secure bunkers. The WHO are building half a million underground bunkers. The bunkers will be assigned through a lottery system.
There’s an estimated three billion dead and there is no way to know if the bunkers, which will be buried 30 feet underground, will be built in time.
People lucky enough to get a bunker interact with each other through monitors on a live, open feed, an information and social network platform known as Domain. These people, rather than using their names, they call each other by the locations they hail from. It’s been over 5 years and one of them, Orlando (Kevin Sizemore), who is located in a bunker in Florida, confessed to murders and is antagonizing the group. The other six in their cluster are horrified.
Many in the group want to vote to ban him, meaning cutting off his feed, which one if them figured out how to do that by studying the code. Phoenix aka Kimberly Miller (Britt Lower), Denver aka Dean Atkins (Ryan Merriman), Atlanta (Sonja Sohn), Houston (Nick Gomez), Chicago (Cedric Sanders) and Boston (William Gregory Lee) struggle to vote but overwhelming get to a consensus. Cutting him off means banishing him to isolation for the next few decades.
Eight months later, the electricity starts to glitch. And the network that’s monitoring and neutralizing the flu particles outside say that their time left in the bunker is 19 years until, presumably, it’s safe to go outside again. And the bunker population decreased by 8 over night to 489,573. They also have biometric monitoring that keeps track of their health.
Some of their terminals begin to glitch out and die which really freaks out Houston, most of the worst glitches are happening in his pod. Phoenix suggests that maybe banning Orlando caused this but Atlanta and Boston protest. Which upsets Phoenix, she later confesses that she has been struggling with the past. She was in prison when she won the bunker lottery and she was there for killing her mother over a suspected drug theft. And now she has nightmares about her mother.
So Denver works on unbanning Orlando and he does it. But his pod is empty. Denver checks the logs for info but there are no updates. So they tell everyone else about it and they aren’t thrilled but get to work trying to figure out where he might be. They wonder if the glitch might have unlocked their doors. But no one is willing to check because no one wants to risk contamination.
Boston is concerned about Phoenix and Denver, who are in a relationship. He thinks something is wrong with Denver but Phoenix brushes his concerns off.
Phoenix wonders if Orlando could have made some private videos, maybe there’s some information about what happened to him. There are some, hundreds of them, mostly of him working out, but there’s one from a few days ago. The screen is staticky and they hear him screaming ‘Leave me alone.’ then the static disappears and his door is open. Five hours later, the door swings shut.
They update the group and come to the realization that they are not safe, based on what they saw. Now they need to decide what to do. Phoenix searches her bunker that evening, looking for clues. Then they all hear Houston banging his head, bloody, into the wall. His lights still violently flickering around him. Then his starts maniacally laughing and then screaming. As his feed fails, they watch a figure come through his door and grab him.
That same night, Phoenix wakes up and not only is the monitor glitching hard but someone is in her pod. She quickly plays sleep but is then awakened by the others telling her not to move but to look down. There’s a giant rat in her bed, it apparently entered through a wall panel. She asks if they have the same panel and they do. Which puts into question, where are they? How can they be 30 ft underground and how do they have vents where dirt should be.
Phoenix is ready to find a way out because it no longer makes sense. Atlanta breaks her food powder tube and finds a big empty space on the other side of the wall. Suddenly her door is opening and her feed turns to static, then she’s gone. Then Chicago, who’s been starving himself, hangs himself with his blanket, from a beam. And the others can do nothing but beg and watch.
Meanwhile, Denver, has been working on finding something on the Domain. He found other people but they can’t communicate with them. Many have committed suicide. He says instead of there being 500,000 feeds, there are only 1000. Meaning, there are only 1000 bunkers, they were lied to.
They make a plan to escape and then pick a rendezvous point to meet. Denver decides they’ll meet at City Hall in Phoenix. Boston, the odd man out, decides to go it alone.
Outside their doors’ are ladders but the ladder is a door that leads to a corridor and the three of them step out, into it.
This film was directed by Nathaniel Atcheson and it’s a good story! It’s a sci fi thriller with a little violence and a few graphic deaths but the story is the star and this movie has quite the ending. Well done! Also in this is, Beth Grant.
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Nekromantik 2, 1991/ 1 hr 51 min
This film begins where the last one left off, starting with a flashback of Robert Schmadtke's (Daktari Lorenz) truly horrifying suicide. As the credits roll, a woman retrieve’s Robert’s remains from his grave. The woman’s name is Monika (Monika M.) and she manages to sneak his corpse into her apartment, unnoticed. There she unwraps it from the body bag.
Monika found out about Robert’s existence and then death from a newspaper’s headline and article. She undresses the corpse and has sex with it, unable to orgasm, she goes to the restroom and is disgusted and struggles to not vomit.
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Meanwhile, Betty (Beatrice Manowski) (remember her?), Robert’s girlfriend arrives at his grave and is disappointed to discover, his remains are not there.
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Monika cleans Robert’s corpse and takes polaroids of it and herself, cuddling.
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A man named, Mark (Mark Reeder), for a career he dubs adult films, adding in the sounds of sex over the visuals of the movies. He is going to see a movie with a friend but when she’s late, he offers the ticket to a stranger walking by, it’s Monika and the evening goes well. So they decide to date which means Monika has to ‘break up’ with Robert.
Once at home, she cuts up the corpse, put the pieces in trash bags, minus the head and genitals, which she keeps in her fridge. She throws Robert’s remains away and attempts to return to a normal life.
Later, at Monika’s apartment, she and Mark look through her photo album of dead relatives, he spends the night and the next day while looking in her fridge, he finds genitals and putting that together with the strange corpse-like photos she likes to take of him, he doesn’t think this relationship is going to work.
Some time later, Mark talks it over with his friend while Monika has a movie night with her equally perverse, necrophiliac friends. They are watching a seal dissection and on the table is Robert’s head.
Unexpectedly, Mark arrives with a pizza and that brings the party to a sudden end and Monika quickly hides the head. Mark insists on knowing what they were doing so she turns the movie back on. Mark is disgusted and angry that they could watch that for fun. And it leads to an argument.
The couple talk on the phone later to discuss getting together to talk. They make up with sex, sort of, because at the moment of his climax, Monika decapitates him and replaces his head with Robert’s. She then has her own.
The movie ends with a doctor congratulating her on her pregnancy.
This sequel is also written and directed by Jörg Buttgereit, the original title is Nekromantik 2: Die Rückkehr der Liebenden Toten (The Return of the Loving Dead). Again, these movies are not for the faint of heart, you need to be a fan of underground horror, gore and enjoy graphic FX and probably erotica too. Life the first movie it is very graphic and gory. This one is also German language but it does have English subtitles.
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Grotesque, 2009/ 1 hr 13 min
A mad man (Shigeo Ōsako), kidnaps a couple, Kazuo Kojima (Hiroaki Kawatsure)and Aki Miyasita (Tsugumi Nagasawa) and brings them back to his lair. He ties them up face to face so they can be tormented by the torture of the other. He first takes his time sexually assaulting Aki and then Kazuo.
He later moved them to a pair of operating tables where he ties them down and cuts off Kazuo’s fingers, leaving his thumbs, with a chainsaw and then strings them on a chord like a necklace and puts it around Aki’s neck. Then he uses the chainsaw on Aki, he cuts the fingers off of one hand, leaving the thumb and cuts off her other arm. He ends this torture by cutting off her nipples. He bandages his victims’ wounds because he wouldn’t want them to die before he’s ready.
And like before, he strings her fingers on a chord and puts them around Kazuo’s neck. This monster then puts one of her fingers in Kazuo’s nose. Afterward he tells him that he is going to torture him now, as long as he endures it, he won’t torture Aki anymore. He announces that he will be pounding nails into Kazuo’s testicles. These nails are like 8 inches long and with a mallet, he drives the nails deep into the table.
Afterward, he digs out one of Kazuo’s eyes and as he moves on his penis. Aki objects but with a butcher’s knife, the mad doctor continues one. Once the penis is detached, he announces that they win and he’ll bandage them up, he says he won’t let them die.
All cleaned up and in a sterile recovery room, he says they’ll stay until they recover their strength. As a thanks for the excitement they gave him. But Kazuo and Aki are chained to their beds. The doctor says he’ll liquidate his fortune and compensate them and take them to the police himself. He is apparently, a solid doctor and wealthy, even if he is a deranged sadist.
During their meal, the couple talk about having a future, even if they are disabled now. The mad doctor seems to be devoted to their care and recovery. Soon he announces that in 2 or 3 days they should be able to leave barring complications.
But it’s a trick. They wake up in the same place they started. Hanging in a plastic wrapped room. He says they excited him so much that he wants more. He says that since they’ve recovered their will to live again, it’ll be fun taking them all they way back to despair.
He insists that he hasn’t broken his earlier promises, he just wants more fun.
Starting with Kazuo, he wants to open his abdomen and pull out his intestine, he’ll cut it at the end closest to his anus. Then the plan is to make him walk toward Aki, with the end of his intestine tied to a hook and unraveling. Kazuo has to cut his intestines with scissors to make it the rest of the way to her. If he can make it to free her, the doctor will let her go. But it will cause his death.
If Kazuo can’t make it, the doctor asks if he should rxpe her again and chop her into pieces until she dies as an inducement. So he picks himself up and then the most painful and saddest trek across 15 feet of floor, I’ve ever seen. He almost succeeds but appears to die before he can because the doctor put a wire in her restraints.
So the doctor drags him away and turns on music and asks Aki to show him her last will to live. Aki raises from her catatonia with a palpable rage and spits in his face. Then she calls his mom a fat whore and laughs in his face. She tells him no woman, including his mother ever loved him. That all the sex he’s ever had, he had to pay for. And she ends this epic shade by telling him he stinks like a skunk. And while she murders his ego, he simmers with rage and it gets her a violent but quick death. He’s cheated out of his torture of her. But she makes sure he doesn’t go out unscathed.
This Japanese horror was written and directed by Kōji Shiraishi. This is an underground exploitation horror and it’s probably not for the casual horror viewer. While they do not show everything, they show way more than viewers usually see. It’s like Hostel but so much worse because there’s almost no break. Just horror after horror until it’s over. And the one break there is, makes the rest of the movie harder to watch.
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Fright Night 2, 1988/ 1 hr 43 min
It begins with Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) ending his three year relationship with his therapist, Dr. Scott Harrison (Ernie Sabella), by rejecting what he knows to be true for a more palatable lie. Jerry Dandridge was not a vampire but a serial killer and he and Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) have the same memories because of group hypnosis.
Charlie has been avoiding Peter’s calls but is thinking about reconnecting with him. So Charlie goes home and tosses all of his vampire tools, weapons and protections.
Meanwhile, Peter Vincent is still hosting Fright Night and convincing people that monsters are real between horror movies. Charlie shows up on set with his girlfriend, Alex (Traci Lind), to reunite with Peter. They spend the evening listening to Peter rehash past events that Charlie has worked hard to reject ever happened at all.
While there, Charlie notices movers moving in casket sized boxes, into the building. And a limo parked out front. That, Charlie, also rejects, he and Alex leave. In the foyer, the occupants of the limo enter, they are a mysterious looking group. Charlie can’t not stare. He tries to forget about it and continue with his date but a vampire gets in his head and ruins it.
After unsuccessfully getting Alex as she walks home, Belle (Russell Clark), settles for one of her neighbors, he skates her down and feeds on her while she’s tying her shoe.
Also out hunting is a werewolf, Louis (Jonathan Gries), he is much less successful and falls when a window in slammed onto his claws. He falls several stories and lands in a bush. Bozworth (Brian Thompson), waiting down below, mocks him.
Back at Charlie’s house, the mysterious woman, Regine (Julie Carmine), knocks on his door, he recognizes her and quickly reminds himself that there are no such things as vampires. He hurriedly tidies up and invites her in. A quick flirtation turns into making out, then as she’s about to feed, he screams and wakes up…to someone knocking on the door. It’s Alex. They make up and she stays until Charlie falls asleep.
Outside in the limo, Belle and Louie are sharing dinner and Bozworth is outside the car, eating bugs.
Charlie returns to therapy because he’s concerned and now he’s light sensitive and sleeping during the day. Plus a cut on his neck will not stop bleeding. His therapist recommends bowling. And so, Charlie goes bowling.
On campus, once again Charlie sees the limo and the mysterious people, with them is his friend Richie, so he decides to follow them when they drive away. Charlie completely forgets his date with Alex, who ends up going to the show with Louie the werewolf.
Outside the residential building, Charlie can see through the window, Richie is being fed on by Julie and Belle. And he immediately knocks on Peter’s door who is not as helpful as he expected, in fact, he’s acting just like Charlie’s shrink. Peter says his resistance is because those people are his neighbors. But Charlie, insists he’s going, so they go to the neighbors’, who also happen to be having a party.
They find Richie on the couch, who is kind of out of it. Charlie checks for neck bites and finds none. Just as they’re about to leave, Belle and Regine enter the party and Charlie can’t resist dancing with Regine. She changes and fully mesmerizing Charlie. The spell is broken when everyone claps. Regine is a performance artist and everyone at this party seems to know that but Charlie and Peter. So that convinces Charlie that he was wrong and he leaves.
But Peter witnesses guests being fed on. So he does a mirror test and some people fail. When he flees, Regine appears in front of him. Every direction he runs, she appears in front of him.
She wants to talk about Jerry Dandridge, her brother. Who was a thousand years old when they killed him. She promises Peter death, but a quick one, unlike the death she has planned for Charlie. Then she transforms and flies away.
Meanwhile, Charlie finally remembers he had a date and misses the entire thing but don’t worry, Louie walks Alex home after the show is over. That night, while Charlie is sleeping, Regine comes to him and feeds.
Peter nervously waits until morning to talk to Charlie again and tell him about last night. But in the mean time he runs back to set to warn everyone just to discover he’s been fired.
The next day, Charlie begs Alex for yet another chance and promises to bring her dinner in the library tonight. Peter arrives just in time to warn Charlie but once again, one believes, while the other does not.
By lunch time, Charlie he is discovering he has a blood lust and a new aversion to garlic. That freaks him out and when he runs to his therapist’s office, the news announces that Richie’s remains have been found.
Just like clockwork, Charlie believes in vampires again. He happens upon the vampires lair and finds Belle asleep in his coffin. And Bozworth, lurking around, identifying and eating spiders. When Charlie finds Regine in her coffin, she mesmerizes him as he’s about to plunge a broken chair leg into her chest. He seems to sleep walk out of the building and into the middle of the street. He doesn’t remember the last half hour.
That night at the library, Alex is studying and Louie finds her there, he promises to come back if she’s stood up again. While the monsters wait, they go to the bowling alley, they bowl and kill and eat some employees.
Meanwhile, Charlie does make his library date with Alex and they find out that Regine has taken Peter’s spot as host of Fright Night. She uses the job to mesmerize the viewers. And it has quite an impact of Charlie.
Louis returns to the library and harasses Alex and Charlie, it quickly turns into a werewolf playing with his potential food. When Alex stuffs her dozen roses down Louis’ throat, it lights his mouth on fire and scares him away. Finally, Charlie does not believe it’s group hypnosis. That definitely just happened.
And when Peter sees Regine doing her dance on his show, he arrives on set to kill her and ends up locked up in a mental facility. Alex reaches out to Charlie’s therapist and discovers, he’s also a vampire when he tries to attack her. She stabs him with train track wood and he calmly makes it worse and kills himself.
After that, Alex masquerades as Peter’s therapist to spring him from the hospital. A dedicated Peter Vincent fan and believer, who’s also a patient, helps break him out.
With Alex, Peter prepares for war. Charlie is currently in the clutches of Regine, being prepped for an eternity of torture.
The rescue is messy but it’s not long until Regine is the only one of her group still alive. She claws her way through the building to get to her coffin in the basement. But Alex, Charlie and Peter stay in the fight and her end comes from sun reflected off of a shard of mirror.
This sequel was directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and did not get the fan fair and is not as beloved as the first but it’s still very entertaining and follows the same framework. This one has more humor in it and the writing is solid and makes sense, it does a job continuing the story from the original. Regine is very like Jerry in a lot of ways, the way she’s written does a good job convincing us she’s his sister. They use the same techniques and their insistence on tormenting their victims was each of their downfall. The only thing that annoyed me is Charlie constantly changing his mind about vampires and what his own eyes
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Nekromantik, 1987/ 75 min.
Robert Schmadtke (Bernd Daktari Lorenz) has a bizarre and disturbing obsession with human remains, in every form of decay. He has this grotesque fetish in common with his girlfriend, Betty (Beatrice Manowski). Who, it can be argued, is far more into it than he is. Their home is lined with jars of body parts preserved in formaldehyde.
For Robert’s part, he works for an organization that cleans up the aftermaths if car wrecks and recovers remains. And some of those remains come home with him. On one specific job, a man deep in a state of decay, is exciting enough for Robert that he sneaks it home as a gift to Betty.
The blackened, moist and partially skeletonized remains are laid in bed and retrofitted with a broken off chair leg, to serve as a penis. A condom is then added and Betty uses it like a phallus. And just like that, the rotting corpse is transformed into a sex doll.
The next day, Robert loses his job over too many absences and the stench emanating from his suit. Betty is annoyed and scolds him over it. So she packs up the corpse and storms out. Robert breaks down and kills their pet cat and bathes in a bath of it’s blood and entrails that evening.
Robert drinks and takes pills which causes him to have a vivid dream of being a partially decayed corpse and playing with a decayed head. Also there, is a little girl, dressed in white. When Robert wakes up, it’s still dark so he goes out in search of a prostitute.
He takes her to a cemetery, hoping he’ll be able to perform but fails. When she laughs at him, he strangles her in a rage and after she’s dead. He sexually defiles her corpse. He falls asleep there and is startled the next day by a grave digger.
So Robert makes everything worse by taking the man’s shovel and decapitating him with it. And he flees back to his apartment. Then Robert commits suicide in one of the strangest and most disturbing ways. He stabs himself in the abdomen, while simultaneously masturbating and ejaculating, until he’s dead.
Later on, at his grave, a woman, seemingly there to pay her respects, starts digging up Robert’s grave.
This film was directed by cult filmmaker, Jörg Buttgereit. He is renowned for his controversial films. This is a German language film and it is very graphic and gory, uncomfortably so, sometimes. This movie, like his other works, are not for the faint of heart.
]]>Tammy and the T-Rex, 1994/ 82 min
Tammy (Denise Richards), reluctantly has a new boyfriend, Michael (Paul Walker), but she’s worried what her violent ex boyfriend, Billy (George Pilgrim) will do. And she finds out after practice when Michael and Billy end up in a violent altercation that draws a crowd. The fight ends with them squeezing each others testicles and refusing to let go. The cops arrive to break them up and drag Billy away. Tammy, visibly upset, runs away.
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Meanwhile in a warehouse, Dr. Wachenstein (Terry Kiser) and his assistant Helga (Ellen Dubin), interacts with a robotic tyrannosaurus rex and is impressed with it’s strength. The doctor wants to give the creature life, immortality even, he wants to implant a human brain inside of it to give it consciousness.
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Tammy calls Michael to apologize for leaving and asks him to sneak over to her house. He no sooner arrives at her house when Billy and his goons are summoned by some girls, who see Michael climb into Tammy’s window. Billy forces his way in and Michael leaves the way he came. Billy and his crowd chases, beats him then tosses him into Billy’s trunk, bound for the wild animal park. Inside the park, Michael is dumped near lions, unbeknownst to him. He is cornered and mauled but saved by the game warden.
Tammy and her best friend, Byron (Theo Forsett), arrive at the hospital to visit the unconscious Michael. Also in the room is Michael’s guardian, his drunk Uncle Bob (John Goff), fast asleep. As usual, Billy arrives with Weasel (Sean Whalen) as back up. He assaults Tammy but they fight back and Billy leaves.
Dr. Wachenstein arrives at the hospital with the invitation of Dr. Rosenthal (Roger Lodge) to visit Michael but instead of helping him, Helga unplugs his life support and immediately removes his body. They want his brain for the dinosaur. But outside, Michael awakes from his coma and they knock him back out and load him into their car.
Back at the warehouse, just before they perform surgery, Michael wakes up again. They knock him out again, open his head and after after playing around with his bodily functions, removes his brain. The doctor hooks the brain up to the T-Rex’s ‘nerve’ endings and it works.
While the doctor is away, the T-Rex/Michael gains consciousness while the doctor’s body guard, Karl (John Edmondson) and assistant, Bobby (John Franklin) eat pizza and disrespect Michael’s body. The T-Rex bites off Bobby’s head and looks in a mirror before it turns on Karl. He kicks Karl through a wall and crushes him to death.
T-Rex/Michael then uses the pay phone to call Tammy. His message is a growl. But Tammy is currently at a party, depressed and inconsolable. Billy and his goons soon arrive to ruin the party. Tammy leaves the party but Billy stays and soon the T-Rex arrives and scopes Billy out, dancing with a blond. Weasel finds the dinosaur and urinates on it, thinking it’s a statue and is disemboweled.
The T-Rex goes to Billy’s car and finds him and the blond having sex. He yanks off the blond’s leg, then chased Billy and bites off his head. After which he tramples and crushes Billy’s gang. The T-Rex, picks Byron up, dusts him off and lets him go.
The cops arrive to help but hardly takes it seriously as they crack jokes about body parts and snack. Byron’s dad is the sheriff (J.Jay Saunders) and he doesn’t believe the story about the dinosaur.
The possibly insane Dr. Wachenstein talk to the crass, Helga about investors and being a revolutionary, while rolling up, what’s left, of Karl, like a sleeping bag.
Meanwhile, T-Rex/Michael goes to Tammy’s house, kidnaps her and takes her to a barn. After she wakes up, he chews a yellow rose, just like he did the day Michael and Billy fought. It takes a while but the dinosaur manages to communicate with her by playing a game of charades. Tammy returns home while her dad and the cops try to figure out what happened. And Dr. Wachenstein and Helga lurk, they too are looking for the T-Rex.
Tammy tells Byron that Michael’s still alive and his brain is inside the dinosaur. They make a plan to recover Michael’s body from his funeral. T-Rex also lurks at his funeral and so does the dynamic duo, Dr. Wachenstein and Helga. Tammy and Byron open the coffin to find Michael’s face mangled and covered in maggots, it’s too decayed to use. They wrestle with the doctor and his assistant and tie them up. Michael needs another body, so they go to the morgue to search for a suitable replacement.
Tammy and Byron hold corpses up to the window so Michael, who’s in the back of the truck, can choose. But before he can, the cops arrive and the mad doctor and his weird assistant escape. Byron and Tammy go on the run with the dinosaur and wreck the truck they’re driving. Byron is arrested by his dad and Tammy rides away on the T-Rex.
Some time later, Byron tracks them down at the barn by bicycle. Ofc. Norville (Buck Flower) are tracking them and call in the calvary.
Wachenstein and Helga also arrive with a tranquilizer gun and they’re given permission to take Michael down. Instead, the mad doctor is bitten in half and the police open fire.
Later, Michael’s brain is relocated into a bowl and hooked up to a computer in Tammy’s bedroom. He can talk through it and see through a camera. They are still looking for a body for him.
This film was directed by Stewart Raffill. This movie started off strong with the 80s/90s teen drama that includes a dangerous abusive ex-boyfriend that travels with a pack. Then we know it’s gonna get crazy with the appearance of Terry Kiser and the bizarre stories he’s known for and he does not disappoint. This movie is very violent and gory and oddly hyper sexual with performance by Ellen Dubin, who plays Helga. The super supportive gay best friend, Byron, eases us into the epic shark jump that is the end of this bonkers movie. It is very entertaining, highly recommend!
Lots of recognizable faces in this one such as John Franklin (Isaac from Children of the Corn) and Roger Lodge (Host of Blind Date).
]]>Death Tube 2, 2010/ 1 hr 43 min.
A woman screams while tied to a table with Christmas lights and an unknown naked man, wearing a bear’s head, throws knives at her head. It’s streaming live on Death Tube.
•
A girl in her school uniform, Nozomi, wakes up on the floor, in a room with weapons and a laptop showing 7 other people. They are in identical rooms, soon the music plays as the animated bear on the monitor, Ponkichi explains that they are playing a game.
They have 3 minutes to find and open the hidden door. They’re still not certain they are on Death Tube until one of the women are killed with a wrecking ball.
Nozomi finds her hidden door behind her monitor, she clicks a button and her room door opens. She informs the others and tells them to look behind their monitors. They open their doors and follow the arrow upstairs, the doors close behind them with less than 20 seconds to go.
A celebrating player is executed because he exited his room with his left foot, everyone else used their right.
Ponkichi introduces his little brother, Pontaro and warns them, he will shoot. The second game is musical chairs. Nozomi stops them from beginning the game, she surmises that if no one plays then there will be no odd one out. Another player, Mr. Kakizaki says that Death Tube always had a way for everyone’s survival. But some of them struggle against the urge to not play. But Ryuuta reminds them that only one person can survive Death Tube. So it’s pointless for all of them to clear a game.
They break out into a fight over it. Mr. Kakizaki aka Old Guy stops Alice from jumping into the game. But they fight to keep everyone out of the chair until the music stops. Most decide they would like to try to clear every game together and hopefully find a way out. Only Ryuuta is defiant.
The next games include Kendama, hula hoop, a guessing game etc. Every once in a while, Pontaro comes in just to be a menace. Meanwhile, the viewers are bored. And the captives are busy looking for a way out between games.
Because they keep clearing the games, a crying Ponkichi, promises to let them go and they rejoice but he’s then taken over by a furious Death Tube room manager. The games are about to get a lot harder. Pontaro then comes in a remove two players, Masai Baba and Sachie Mizusawa, then the game begins.
This game is done in pairs. In a room with a monitor, two desks and two laptops, the pair open the laptops to see their loved one’s tied to chairs. Sachie sees his daughter, Miki and Masai also sees her son, Kazuhiko.
The rest of the group watch in horror via projector screen. The challenge is to commit suicide within 3 minutes and their child will be saved. But whoever kills themself to save their child will kill the other’s child. If they run out the clock then all four will be killed.
There’s no way out, Sachie slits his own throat and a distraught Masai tries to stop the bleeding. Afterward, a man in a bear suit beheads her son, Kazuhiko and a devastated Masai sees it and slits her own throat.
The rest of the players are horrified as they wait to hear their names called. Nozomi Shindo and Ryuuta Kido are next. Ryuuta doesn’t want to die, he decides to kill the 5 of them to save himself. He turns on Nozomi who is a more than formidable opponent and he takes a knife to the neck.
When Pontaro arrives to collect the body, Ryuuta sits up with the knife that was ‘in his neck’ and attacks him. Nozomi jumps into the fray, kicking Pontaro in the head. But Ryuuta ends it, stabbing him to death. Ryuuta and Nozomi’s act worked, the door is still open and they all go through it.
Nine flights down and they’re still in the building. They become more frantic, the lower they go. But when they get to what should be the first floor, it keeps going. Seeming to repeat the second floor over and over. Then they happen upon a man in a bear suit, sweeping the floor. They run back upstairs. Soon there’s another bear, coming from upstairs.
Nozomi notices someone’s been changing the floor numbers. She rips one of the curtains down to reveal an unlocked door behind it. They enter a room to rest and bandage their wounds. It’s the final room in the last movie, complete with red blocks and the laptop and webcam.
Nozomi tells the others her parents were killed in a robbery and wonders if it’s connected to Death Tube. She also remembers the killer reminded her of Ryuuta. Meanwhile, the room is still streaming and the bears are still looking.
Mr. Kakizaki finds the laptop and opens it. They see a bear near the entrance to their location and they hide. So the bear enters into what appears to be an empty room. Alice distracts him and the rest lays in wait. They attack, tie him to a chair and reveal his face. He says he’s forced to do it or he’ll be killed by the device around his neck.
The former bear begs for his life and Ryuuta puts his gun to his head but Nozomi steps in between them and asks if he knows where the exit is. He does and shows them and for a man who is in fear for his life, he talks a lot and is super chipper. They arrive at the door and it’s locked. He says Pontaro, the bear they killed earlier, has the key.
Nozomi volunteers to go back and get the key. Ryuuta offers to come with her. They leave the gun with Alice and Mr. Kakizaki but take the laptop. The creepy bear guy laughs and makes them uncomfortable. He informs them that the game is inescapable and shows them proof.
Once again, Ryuuta kills another bear who was laying in wait this time. But Nozomi doesn’t like how easy it is for him to kill.
Meanwhile, Alice shoots Mr. Kakizaki after he loses it from reading the Death Tube playbook. And when Nozomi and Ryuuta return, she shoots at them. Ryuuta spots the book on the floor but then grabs Alice and stabs her after Nozomi calms her down.
They walk into another room with a laptop on a table and a bear to welcome them. He warns them that the building is swarming with bears, there’s no escape. Then three bears start dancing to Thriller.
They are also warned that only one of them can win. Before the game can end they get a lot of revelations that might impact the outcome of the game.
This sequel was also directed by Yôhei Fukuda. It seems to be a direct sequel and it is a little less gory than the first one. It has fewer challenges and more interaction with the bears. These players are more fierce than the last and willing to take more chances. It’s doesn’t feel as bleak and hopeless as the last one.
]]>Death Tube, 2010/ 1 hr 56 min.
A man lying in a bed, screams as an unseen person lowers a huge blade to his neck and starts sawing. Blood sprays everywhere. This is being broadcast on a site called Death Tube and Inouye is certain it’s fake. He talks about it to his friend, Mr. Tamai on the phone who insists it’s real. But Inouye is certain, if it were real, the police would be investigating.
But Mr. Tamai says it’s impossible to trace because it’s only live a couple times a year and only for a week. And it goes through a number of overseas servers. Why do that, if it’s fake? The friend says he’s just joking and gets off the phone.
Meanwhile, a new show, prompt comes up and Inouye can’t resist watching. A man screams into a camera that he doesn’t want to die. There seems to be an answer he is meant to give to survive and he chooses wrong. As he bleeds out, Game Over, flashes on the screen.
Inouye misses it to chat with his fiancee, Tomoe, about photos.
The next day, Inouye, wakes up in the same room as the person he was watching on the internet. There are games and weapons placed around the room and instruction. A Rubix cube with script and numbers on the squares is next to instructions “Complete the sentence puzzle in ten minutes or die.” So he flips open his phone and finds there is no signal. Then he tries to force the doors and the lift open. He opens the laptop on the desk and sees himself on the site. The room he’s in is streaming live and the “Real Time Show” prompt is flashing, viewers taunt him in chat. He finally understands he’s on Death Tube. And the clock is counting down.
Inouye realizes he is not the only one. There are 7 other live shows and one of the players solves the cube. Someone else is destroying the room, suddenly his time runs out and a net drops over him while he tries to light a cigarette. His feed goes down and then returns with the man now tied to a chair and a drill coming toward his head. The bit goes deep into his skull and his game is over. Suddenly, the other players fiercely tries to solve their cubes with under 2 minutes left on the clock.
Everyone who completes it gets a greeting from Ponkichi. Represented by an animated bear with a mustache, he says he’s the manager of the Death Tube rooms.
Another player asks if they’ve watched Death Tube and tells them there is no way out except to complete and win the challenges. He also says no one has ever played their way out, everyone has died by the end so far. While they wait for the next challenge, they try to figure out why they are there.
The next challenge includes the sentence on their cubes, which are all different. It has to be adhered to the entire time they are there, if they can’t, the punishment is death. They are told to remove the sheet from the table behind them. On the table are seven challenges. Each person has an hour to do theirs and failure to complete any of them will result in death. Failure to do a challenge will get you death but failing within a challenge, not necessarily, will. If they all clear four challenges, then no one will die.
So they all decide who will do what based on skill level and confidence to give everyone the best chance at survival. They do not get all four cleared, so they have to complete the last three.
After the fifth challenge, their doors slide open. They think the game is won and they’re in the clear but then, the winner of the last challenge is killed and the surviving captives are distraught. They finally step out of their rooms and meet each other in the hall, then their doors slam behind them. The game isn’t over.
There’s a red ‘line’ on the floor and a sign telling them not to cross it. Ponkichi announces game three over the loud speaker. It’s an obstacle race and it’s hosted by a physical ‘Ponkichi’, a man in a bear suit, standing next to a laptop. One of the captives has a knife and charges at the bear, who raises a gun and shoots him. After which, the bear acts out their obstacle course. The last one to the glass of water dies. They have 3 minutes. One of the contestants, Mr. Maekawa has a plan but the hysterical woman ruins it.
This is going to be a very long process. Only one of them can win and Ponkichi invites them to kill each other to speed it up. It’s up to them. He tells them as he drags out the current victim.
Mr. Maekawa think that the games can be cleared without anyone dying, if no one tries to be the sole survivor. If they work together, they can win.
•
Back at Inouye’s apartment, an inconsolable, Mr. Tamai wakes up, Tomoe and tells her that Inouye’s on Death Tube.
•
The group hangs out getting to know each other and trying to figure out what they have in common. Then two bears march in like a bride and groom, dressed as a girl and boy. Game four is about to begin.
•
Tomoe tries to call the police but the call is intercepted, she looks up and a giant bear with a gun is in her apartment, pointing a gun at her. She’s raped and becomes a prop in the game.
The challenges are getting much harder. They start playing mind games and out right murder to survive the next few challenges. Inouye is the last one standing but he still has to succeed at one last challenge to be set free.
This Japanese thriller was directed by Yôhei Fukuda. This movie has somewhat gory teasers but it’s not as gory as you might expect. It’s more of a mind game than gore fest. The pacing is pretty good and for a nearly 2 hour movie, it doesn’t feel that long. It is bleak and some times bloody.
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Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey, 2023/ 1 hr 40 min
Christopher Robin (Frederick Dallaway) meets anthropomorphic animals in the forest and he befriends them and began feeding them. After he grows up and goes to medical school, abandoning them, his friends began to starve over the winter. Out of desperation they killed and ate Eeoyore, the abhorrent act traumatized them and they became feral and developed a hatred for humans, specifically Christopher. They renounced their humanity and swore to never speak again.
Years later, now an adult, Christopher (Nikolai Leon) returns to the Hundred Acres Forest with his new wife, Mary (Paula Coiz). He wants her to meet his old friends but the forest is desolate and Mary is afraid. Christopher continues his search and finds their shelter abandoned. But then someone comes in and the duo hide, soon Christopher wants to investigate, against Mary’s better judgement, and they run into Piglet, who strangles Mary despite Christopher’s pleas.
He’s then cornered in a cave by Piglet (Chris Cordell) and Pooh (Craig David Dowsett) and after tearfully and profusely apologizing for abandoning them, he’s dragged back into the forest, they burn Mary’s body and show Christopher what remains of Eeyore.
•
Later, a student, Maria (Maria Taylor), rents a cabin in the Hundred Acre Woods to help heal her trauma. So she takes her friends, Jessica (Natasha Rose Mills), Alice (Amber Doig-Thorne), Zoe (Danielle Ronald), and Lara (Natasha Tosini) on a tech free holiday. Tina (May Kelly) gets lost on her way to the cabin and she pulls over and unsuccessfully calls the others, who’ve already put away their phones. Spotting Pooh, she runs and hides in an abandoned workshop. Pooh who pounds her head to a pulp against a wood chipper and pushes her in, grinding her up.
Back at the cabin the friends support Maria, who is struggling. She shares her stories of being stalked in front of the fire.
At Pooh’s treehouse, Christopher Robin, hangs from one if his ceiling hooks. Christopher tries to connect and appeal to Pooh’s ‘humanity’. Pooh struggles with memories of the past and in a rage, he trashes his house, grabs Eeyore’s tail and whips Christopher, bloody. Then Pooh props up what remain’s of Mary in front of Christopher and pours her blood over his head, just to torture him further.
At the cabin, Lara is taking selfies in the jacuzzi and catches Pooh, lurking in the background of a photo. He slips into the darkness and once she thinks she’s alone again, she returns to the hot tub. Then Pooh and Piglet incapacitate her, hog ties her in the middle of the street and slowly drives a car over her. Lara’s screams alert Maria and Jessica who find her body in the street, her head, obliterated.
They return to the cabin to call for help and the door is open. They need to alert Zoe and Alice, who have no idea anything is wrong. The four of them wander around the dark house, looking for weapons as Winnie and Piglet search for them, they separate into pairs. Unfortunately, Alice and Zoe are cornered in the pool house. Alice is knocked unconscious but wakes up just in time to see Pooh, in the pool, slam a sledge hammer into Zoe’s head.
Jessica and Maria see Pooh and Piglet abduct
Alice and decide to follow them into the forest.
Back at the treehouse, not only is Christopher there and Alice but another woman, Charlene (Danielle Scott). She’s been tortured, her face is horribly disfigured and upon seeing her face, she wants revenge. Her husband was killed by Piglet before she was brought here. Jessica and Maria release them all.
Charlene arms herself and challenges Piglet so she can kill him. Instead, Pooh subdues her, covers her in honey and is mauled to death by Piglet. Meanwhile, Alice, Maria and Jessica look on in horror. When Pooh comes for them, they fight him with fire.
Not Alice though, she hangs back and gives Piglet a taste of his own medicine. He’s placed in Charlene’s chains and bludgeoned with a sledge hammer. She does well until Pooh arrives and stabs her in the mouth, pinning her body to the wall via her neck.
Maria and Jessica run for the road, flagging down the car coming toward them. The women express that they are in danger but instead of leaving, the men want to confront Pooh. And for all their postering and bluster, Pooh takes everything they got and then painfully obliterates each of them, one by one.
Meanwhile. Jessica and Maria, desperately search the vehicle for keys and find them at the last second. They manage to run Pooh over but all it nets them is another passenger. As they careen down the road, he tries to punch his way in until they crash. Then Maria wakes to Jessica being dragged away and decapitated and just as she’s about to meet her end, Christopher Robin comes out of nowhere in another vehicle and hits Pooh, pinning him between both vehicles.
It’s still not enough, he extricates himself and comes for them. Christopher begs for their lives. But it doesn’t work. Pooh slices Maria’s throat. Pooh, in a rage, brutalizes Maria’s corpse as Christopher looks on in horror.
This British Independent slasher was directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield and it is a daring and horrifying retelling of beloved characters and story. I really enjoyed the multimedia aspect of the film and the concept. This is super gory and aggressively violent. I wish it wasn’t so visually dark. There were moments of just pitch blackness and other moments that were so dark that while it was not pitch, it was still too dark to really see the scene. It’s also very graphic but again, some of the scenes were less so because it was so dark. This movie was good and bleak! I can’t wait for a sequel!
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Pieces, 1982/ 1 hr 26 min
Ten year old Timmy Reston (Alejandro Hernández) is abused and raged at by his angry mother (May Heatherly) who finds him doing a puzzle of a nude woman. She rages about his father and destroys his room looking for more ‘inappropriate’ material. After telling him to go get a trash bag, he returns with an axe and kills her, then a saw to hack her up. Meanwhile, downstairs, a woman obsessively rings the door bell, she enters with the police and finds the bloody bedroom, Timmy’s mom’s head is in one closet and a seemingly hysterical, Timmy, in another.
•
Forty years later, a black clad person opens a box containing the bloody clothing and shoes of Mrs. Reston. Another box contains the puzzle of the nude woman and he begins to put the puzzle together.
A woman skating down the road, slams into a large mirror carried by movers and flashes to the mirror breaking during Mrs. Reston’s murder.
On a university lawn, a student doing homework is decapitated by a man with a chainsaw. Her body was discovered by the gardener, Willard (Paul L. Smith), but not her head. The police think it was probably done by a staffer and they interview the school faculty.
In the library, a girl, Susan, passes a note to a guy, Kendall (Ian Sera), inviting him to the pool later. The killer recovers the letter and gets to the pool before Kendall and while she’s swimming, he grabs her with the net and before she can completely recover from almost drowning, he returns with his chainsaw.
The man in black hauls a bloody bag of body parts to a freezer where he keeps his trophies.
Kendall, after being reminded about his date, runs to the pool. But Willard arrives to do his job and finds the bloody chainsaw and body parts minus the torso. The police also arrive and runs into Willard and a brawl breaks out before he’s contained and arrested.
Professor Brown (Jack Taylor) is asked his opinion about the manner of death because he’s an anthropologist. The police want to put undercover female police on the staff to possibly lure the killer out since he’s hunting women.
•
Later, at a women’s dance class, the killer lurks. After one of the dancers takes a bathroom break, the killer, follows right behind her. He is thwarted by an unexpected guest and changes his mind.
•
A former tennis star and current undercover cop, Ofc. Mary Riggs (Linda Day), will become the school’s new tennis coach. With the aid of Kendall, they will keep an eye out and try to catch the killer.
Meanwhile, every night, after every kill, the killer puts a little more of the puzzle together. Then he heads back to the dance studio and there, his original mark, is dancing by herself. And as she dresses to leave, he lets himself in just as she leaves through another door. She doesn’t see him but she’s spooked and runs for her life. Unfortunately, she’s cornered in the elevator and the man in black, saws her arms off.
But this time, Kendall and security hear the screams and break into the building. And it’s not too late, she lays armless but alive but alone in the elevator, the killer’s already gone. The police are getting desperate to find the culprit and ask Kendall to keep an eye out and protect the undercover cop, Mary Riggs.
One night, Kendall sees someone lurking outside behind Mary and hurriedly gets dressed to catch up to her. He’s following Ofc. Riggs who gets attacked by Chow (Bruce Le) the Kung Fu professor, Kendall arrives shortly after on his motorcycle after it’s mistaken for a chainsaw.
But another woman is also out and as Kendall drives off with Ofc. Riggs, the man in black approaches her with his chainsaw. She enters a building and he traps her inside, attacking her on a water bed with a knife. She fights hard but he overwhelms her, her lifeless body floats in a flooded room.
•
The killer returns to his lair with his puzzle, both the regular one and the woman he’s piecing together.
Later the next day, after tennis practice, the killer cranks up loud music over the intercom and goes for the tennis player, Suzie (Leticia Marfil), while she showers in the locker room. Half dressed, she runs away but she’s locked in and she takes refuge in the restroom where he saws her in half, at the waist) taking her legs with him.
Willard takes Ofc. Riggs to turn off the music and Kendall hangs back at his office and looks around. He finds Suzy’s remains and he and Mary assume it was Willard who killed her.
Back at the killer’s freezer, he dresses a body up, that’s hanging on a wall, in Mrs. Reston’s bloody clothes but the shoes don’t fit.
Kendall, with Sgt. Holden (Frank Braña), researches the university faculty members to see who could be the culprit. And they figure it out!
Back at the dean’s house, Ofc. Riggs meets with him and he’s acting strange. While she drinks her coffee, she talks to him about Prof. Brown. She warns him that if they don’t find something soon, they’ll have to get a warrant, which makes him nervous and he keeps making her spiked coffee.
The dean (Edmund Purdom) once had his name legally changed, his name was once Timothy. Kendall rush off the rescue Riggs who is becoming paralyzed by the drug that’s in her coffee. The dean wants to cut her feet off so they’ll fit in his mother’s shoes.
The police kick in the door and the dean is gone but Mary is still on the couch, paralyzed. She desperately tries to signal with her eyes where he is. The dean jumps out and Kendall fights with him while Mary tries to fight her paralysis. The cops, one of them, Sgt. Holden, return to put a bullet in the dean’s head. They search the property while Kendall tends to Mary.
While looking over the puzzle, the bookcase spins and a patchwork corpse falls from it’s hook on the other side, right on top of Kendall.
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Alive, 2018/ 1 hr 31 min.
A man (Thomas Cocquerel) wakes up in a hospital, and he seems to have been horribly injured and bandaged up. After disconnecting himself and falling on the floor, he has flashes of memory. He crawls into the hall of a dark and dirty corridor, this is no normal medical facility. A ‘doctor’ (Angus MacFadyen) finds him crawling and returns him to his bed. The man talks to him as he repairs what he damaged while trying to leave.
Later on, the doctor returns and there’s another patient in the room, she’s also in various states of disrepair and unconscious. When she’s wheeled out, the male patient tries to escape again, he gets caught this time and medicated.
When he wakes up, days later, the female patient (Camille Stopps) is back and awake. She talks to him, neither know where they are or why they’re there. She asks him if he knows who she or he is and because he can’t speak, he shakes his head ‘No.’ She can’t remember either. And in the corner, in the dark, sits their ‘doctor’, listening.
When the male patient wakes again, the woman is out again and the doctor says he’s been helping her. As he mops pools of blood off the dirty floor. He then tries feeding them some horrible looking gruel with herbs in it. The woman eats willingly but the male patient is forced and he’s furious when he spits it out and spits in his face. The woman chokes after a flashback of her attack by a man in a mask and has to be revived.
Afterward, they are both moved to what this ‘doctor’ insists is physical therapy by forcing them to exercise. As usual, he insists that pain is good and means they’re alive. But it looks like torture of already terribly injured people. The woman begs the doctor to stop hurting the male patient.
Later, the two patients wake up outside. They notice the windows are boarded up and the building is derelict. There’s also a dog penned up out there. The woman wants information and advocates for her and the guy to go home. But the ‘doctor’ just acts weirder and more threatening. Insisting that this is home.
With shears the crazy doctor tries to make the male patient stab the female patient. They struggle to stop him and the male patient finally manages to speak. They are then gassed again and wake up in their room. They talk and try to remember what happened. She thinks she might be a mother. She wants to wait for rescue but he is determined to escape. And that day’s meal is dosed with a paralytic, as a result.
Then the male patient is put into a bath tub to nearly drown while the doctor creepily gives the woman a sponge bath in his lap. The patients take the opportunity to try to escape when he leaves them alone in the bathroom. While searching for a way out, it’s bleaker than expected. There are rooms splashed with blood, entrances and exits are totally blocked off, some are even bricked up. All the windows seem to be boarded shut.
They end up in a nursery and suddenly the female patient knows she has a daughter.
The doctor taunts them over the intercom and turns out the lights. He warns them that there’s no way out.
In a lab they find polaroids of themselves on a tack board and many others in a file. They hear him coming with his dog and unfortunately they do not get very far. Once he has them under his control again. He tries to make a deal with the woman to spy on the guy and tell him what he says.
He wants to hobble him permanently, the options are blind him, silence him, castrate him or kill him. But it’s up to her, she chooses silence. The doctor gifts her earrings, forcing them into her unpierced ears. Then he gasses her while he silences the male patient, sewing his mouth shut. But he doesn’t think it’s enough, he wants to cut off the male patients legs but she convinces him to settle for a toe. Before she attacks him. Slamming a glass vase into his face, gouging one eye and then besting him in a fight.
She releases the guy and he cuts the sutures sealing his mouth shut. And they get back to looking for a way out. They find the freezer with other human remains inside and rooms full of bloody tools and puddles of blood, everywhere. The bottom of a stairway, is covered in blood and a good collection of body parts in different stages of decay. But there is a door to outside and on the other side of it is the doctor and his dog, who he unleashes. They go back inside and hide in the freezer with the corpses.
The doctor enters the freezer searching for them with his dog and they best him again and lock the door on their way out. Outside, they find this place to be a sprawling complex surrounded by forest and mountains. But there is a road and cars to flag down.
Finally someone stops and it’s the doctor, again! They run into the forest past two graves and stop at a cliff, the male patient is shot but they get one more try to end this guy and take it. While the male patient starts to succumb to his wound he tells her to call him Joe and she chooses Elizabeth. They hear voices and stumble over to some campers.
Once again, Joe opens his eyes in a hospital room and Elizabeth is there too. A doctor (Gerrick Winston) and a detective (Chantal Perron) comes in to talk to them but want to do it separately. They took blood and fingerprints. They say the finger prints on Joe’s left and right hands don’t match and belong to other people. And same with her. Plus Elizabeth’s daughter (Zoe Marlette) comes in but she saw her die when she was younger. It’s not what either of them thought, not by a long shot.
This was directed by Rob Grant and it’s been a long time since I’ve been surprised by a movie! This was well done. It is very gory, bloody and often painful to watch. And the cast is extremely small but the right people were cast. The tone of this movie is bleak and eerie and cause the watcher to prematurely assume where this is going but most will be wrong. Good job!
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Baskin, 2015/ 1 hr 37 min
A child is awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of his mother and her abrupt silence. While he’s in the living room, a bloody arm reaches for him from his bedroom and he screams for his mother’s help.
•
A bucket of meat is delivered to a cafe by a hooded person, dining in that evening are five police officers: Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu), Arda (Gorkem Kasal), Yavuz (Muharrem Bayrak), Apo (Fatih Dokgöz), and Seyfi (Sabahattin Yakut) and they’re sharing tales over their meal. Seyfi, who’s been feeling unwell, finally runs to the bathroom to be sick and screams in the mirror, he says he felt like he was losing his mind. Meanwhile, Yavuz starts an unnecessary fight with the owner’s son.
The cops get a radio call to a town known for it’s mysteries. Suddenly they can’t get any signal, and then someone runs across the road. When they are out looking for the culprit, something hits the side of their bus, hard. And there’s a huge number of frogs on the side of the road. Seyfi then has a disturbing vision of a bloody person, materializing in front of the van and after he runs them over, they veer into the lake.
Arda (was the child from the beginning of the story) was taken in as a child by his, now boss, Remzi, after his parents died. He tells him his childhood story about Coskun and how it was in his room and then later, hit by a car. He explains how he always feels like he’s dreaming. And it’s always the same dream. Then Remzi asks if Arda sees anyone in the room, other than them. First, Arda sees nothing, suddenly someone’s there, a hooded figure. Remzi says Arda is the first person to ever see it other than him. Then fluid starts flooding the place and Arda opens his eyes underwater and he’s being hauled out of the lake.
Now stranded, the cops make their way to Inceagac. They head to an abandoned building that happens to be the site of the distress call. It’s an old Ottoman era police station and they are immediately freaked out. They find an empty cop car and inside the building, they find the driver, in a catatonic state.
In the corridor, they find a clutch of bloody eggs on the muddy floor which causes one of them to vomit. The catatonic officer is in a room, beating his head on the wall. When asked about the rest of his unit, whining, he lifts his arm and points to another door that leads down many flights of stairs.
Seyfi stays behind with the traumatized cop but then leaves him to follow a frog into another room. Inside are cells with bloody, bound and masked people performing what can only be described as extreme sadistic bondage to possibly willing participants but it’s hard to say. They rush to Seyfi and over power him and in the other room, the catatonic cop laughs a pitiful, sad laugh.
The other cops make it down to a room with candles and strange erotic images on the walls. Around the corner is the other unit, nude, covered in blood, wrapped in cloth or plastic and hanging like sides of beef. Further down the hall is another pile of bodies and a nude and bloody person eating and hacking up a body on a table. And that’s besides the barely alive woman in the cage.
One of the wrapped, chained bodies is alive and holding a huge sledge hammer and cracks Apo in the head. Arda shoots up the room and he and the others take off running with bloody occultists chasing them on all fours.
Ardo loses track of his colleagues when he looks behind him, he sees his young self in his old house. The arm reaching out to him and pulling young Arda into his bedroom. Then adult Arda coughs…
…and opens his eyes back at the cafe with Remzi. He’s confused and doesn’t understand what’s happening. Remzi says everything isn’t so easy to understand. They are at a crossroads and he doesn’t know how it will turn out. He says they were summoned to that location and that there was no radio call.
Then Arda returns to a ritual being performed and he and his team are all tied up while frenzied, muddy occultists rally. Someone descends the spiral staircase, the hooded figure, known as Father (Mehmet Cerrahoglu), he is attended by a large milky eyed man (Sevket Suha Tezel). Yavuz protests their treatment loudly, yelling that they can’t do this to law men.
Apo hangs limply, chained to the wall, Father rips open a wound in his gut and yanks his large intestine free. Rolling them up like a cord around his hand. Father, then walks up to Yavuz and standing on a stool, questions him. And with a knife, Father relieves Yavuz of his eyes. Like so many of the congregants, Yavuz is now blind but still alive. He’s been initiated and welcomed into the fold.
Then a blind woman with an animal skull on her face is led out on all fours and Yavuz is place inside of her and forced to perform as he cries. When it’s over he slumps down dead and a spider crawls out of his mouth. Father announces that his heart wasn’t fully open.
Arda is next. Father licks that bloody knife and touches his forehead. He then goes to Remzi, thanks him for raising Arda, then cuts through his throat. Father bathes himself in Remzi’s blood as Arda cries out in anguish.
Then Arda opens his eyes at that cafe again but this time he seems to be alone. But he’s not, Remzi, is on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Father walks in and as he does, Remzi says he has one thing left for him and Arda pulls a key out of the gash in Remzi’s neck and he stabs it through the keyhole in Father’s skull. Ardo opens his eyes back in the Ottoman building, Father’s down and Arda is free of his chains. Arda grabs Father’s stool and beats the little man to a pulp with it.
The congregants bow and scatter as Arda leaves. He exits out of his old bedroom door and out of the front door of the Ottoman building, laughing maniacally. And as he hobbles down the road, a police van comes toward him, he waves it down and is run over. The van veers into the lake.
This Turkish surrealist horror was directed by Can Evrenol. This movie eases you in slowly into graphic terror and ritual murder, torture, cannibalism, male and female rape and debauchery. It is bloody, gory and disturbing. The physical effects are very good. You’re gonna need a strong stomach for this one.
]]>Bug, 1975, 99 min
In a full church, just as the pastor preaches about hell and brimstone, there’s an earthquake. The building is being torn apart as the parishioners hold on for dear life as the floor ripples like waves below them. Outside a huge rift has opened in the ground and giant roaches make their way out. They can rub their legs together and start fires. As proven when a truck with two men in it, catches fire and cooks them to death.
The insects even hitch a ride in the tail pipe of another truck and catch it on fire too, on their way out. Gerald Metbaum (Richard Gilliland) hears the insects making a lot of noise outside and sees them, picks one up and it lights a fire in his hand. Another crawls on a cats face and lights the cat on fire. Then the dry grass in the field is also lit on fire by the insects.
Gerald takes the now charred cat to Professor James Parmiter (Bradford Dillman) and asks him if there are any insects that start fires. Then Gerald takes the professor to the smoldering field and they collect specimens. Upon closer inspection the insects have no eyes and eat ashes. And all around town, random fires are breaking out. Big fires too, buildings are burning to the ground.
Professor Parmiter sounds the alarm on the insects, informing Professor Mark Ross (Alan Fudge) about these creatures and later his car becomes infested and are trying to light it up. He stops them by burning a newspaper, luring them out and putting them in a jar.
After a funeral while the widow is packing, a roach is hiding on the phone’s handset when it rings and as it attaches to her ear, it strikes a fire and does enough damage to put her in the hospital.
Jim figures out the insects carapaces are air tight, once pierced, it explodes. The insects, he surmises, are under immense pressure on land and that’s why they are so slow. And that oxygen is poisonous to them, as long as they remain on land, they will die off. But now, he wants to breed them and tries to figure out how.
That evening, Carrie (Joanna Miles) (Professor Jim’s wife) burns when a fire bug crawls into her hair and lights it on fire. She runs for help but instead, sets her living room aflame, when she takes off running. At the school, Jim is inconsolable, he destroys the biology lab in anger. And Mark arrives to console him.
The next morning at the site of the pit, most of the fire bugs seem to have died but Jim hears’s one clinging to life, he collects it and puts the specimen in a pressure chamber made from an old diving helmet. He insists on continuing with his breeding experiment. He adds a male common cockroach to the chamber and it’s a success but the male is dead.
Jim transfers the egg case to it’s own containment and later that night, he hears them hatching, burning their way out of the casing. He has bred fire roaches that can now live in our atmosphere. Professor Jim puts their dying mother in the hatchlings’ habitat and they kill her.
Meanwhile, Mark is having a hard time reaching Jim, his wife Sylvia (Patty McCormack) suggests they pop in on him but Mark says no. They should have though because Jim’s creations escaped their habitat and after eating his steak, they start eating him. That freaks him out so the culprits are put in the pressure chamber and euthanized. And the ones in the habitat know it and react to it. They are evolving very quickly, they even learned to communicate with him by spelling out words. And they are breeding.
Mark’s wife, Sylvia, turns up to check on Jim and find the entire house covered in bugs and Jim is nowhere to be found. She’s quickly attacked and makes her way to the shed before she succumbs. When Jim returns, all the bugs are gone and Mark arrives later when his wife doesn’t return. He is concerned by Jim and the condition of the house.
After Mark leaves, Jim finds Sylvia’s remains and when he tries to call for help, the phone line’s been cut. And outside he hears that familiar chattering, the roaches have repopulated and now they can fly. In no time, they are pouring out of the hole and his car is set on fire.
Jim takes refuge in the house and they crash through the windows, setting him on fire. When blindly running outside, he falls into their pit.
This was directed by Jeannot Szwarc and it was a pretty good bug horror! The story moves pretty face and there’s not a lot of filler. The bugs are in most scenes and there are a lot of them. There is also a good amount of bug action and human and animal kills. The effects are also pretty good. This isn’t gory or bloody but there’s a pretty intense cat scene so be warned.
TW: Graphic cat death
]]>Even Lambs Have Teeth, 2015/ 1 hr 19 min.
Two friends, Sloane (Kristen Prout) and Katie (Tiera Scovbye), are drugged and abducted by their ride to a farm. They wake up in shipping containers in the woods, set up with lights and a cot. The two guys who abducted them also brought camping equipment and clothes for them. It seems that this is a family business.
When Uncle Jason (Michael Karl Richards) calls Katie’s phone, one of the abductors respond to him, for her and incorrectly uses her safety protocol. So her uncle, who’s with the FBI, will be alerted to danger. The sheriff arrives and they think they’re saved but he’s a customer, taunting them.
A parade of creeps arrive to take their turn. Meanwhile, Jason goes to the sheriff to report them missing after contacting the farm they were supposed to be at and finding out, they never arrived. He finds out what vehicle they were last seen in and who it belongs too. It belongs to Boris (Patrick Gilmore).
This warped family decide to discard Katie and Sloane because they don’t want to risk the cops snooping around. The quicker their bodies are found, the better. They’ll just replace them with girls off the next bus. But Katie overhears them and takes the first opportunity she can to attack. She bites the neck of the look-out and her first rapist (Graem Beddoes) and kills him. And they escape their restraints.
The sheriff (Craig March) alerts the family and demand Boris destroy the truck at the same time he kills the girls because it was recognized. When he arrives and sees the dead man, the girls steal his car and escapes. Still covered in blood, they go to the hardware store and load up on tools. They’re not going home just yet, they ask the cashier (Robert Corness) where they can find Boris.
At this point, everyone is looking for Boris. Katie and Sloane find Boris at home and ties him to his dining table, he tries to buy his way out with money, so the girls take the money and now they are going to make him pay. And jam a nail tipped club up his butt. He bleeds out after Uncle Jason arrives minutes after the pair leave in Boris’ truck.
Jason calls his niece’s phone again and it rings in the sheriff’s pocket. The sheriff takes him captive with a gun in his face and ties him up at an old bed and breakfast where he brings the new captives.
At the church, Sloane and Katie find the Pastor (Christian Sloan) is one of the brothers. Katie swings a home run at the back of his head and chains him to the back of the truck. After dragging him around town, they dowse him with fuel and light him on fire.
Sloane and Katie sneak up behind the sheriff in the b&b while he’s molesting the new girls. After tying him up, they play some russian roulette with him. But he’s the only player and he loses. Afterward, they free the new girls and tell them to free Jason, who’s still tied up in the other room.
Next on the list is, Lucas, Jed (Garrett Black) and their mother. She drugged the girls and was drugged in turn. They tie her up and makes her watch them beat her son, Jed to death. Then they tell Lucas beat his mother and if he doesn’t, he gets a bullet. And once again, the duo are offered money in return for her life. So they take the money and her life. It’s a death by weed eater.
Katie and Sloane return home and head to New York to live but at the airport they see someone they recognize holding up an Eco Field Organic Farm sign and they take a detour.
This horror film was directed by Terry Miles. It is a revenge horror not unlike I Spit On Your Grave but with humor and not as bleak. It is a girlfriend flick with a revenge spin and satisfying ending. This is graphic and some what gory. The kills are graphic but the trafficking part is not but it’s still tough to watch.
Trigger Warning: Sex Trafficking, rape
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The Astral Woods, 2023/ 1 hr 22 min
Liz (Alexandria Payne) is talked into an insurance scam, the plan is for her to disappear for seven years, while her husband, Shawn (Marvin Ritchie) puts on a good show at home. It has to be her because she has no family and doesn’t work, it’ll be easier if it’s her rather than Shawn. They will have help with this and it’ll only cost them 10% of the $2 million they are expecting to receive if they pull this off. The plan is, he will visit her once a year once a year and she will live in seclusion, eating MREs and taking supplements. There will be a phone but only for emergencies.
When Shawn connects with the guy (Keekee Suki) who’s supposed to be helping with this, he changes the deal, 40%. The next morning, Liz, is woken up early and she tries to back out of it but Shawn informs her that they will be killed if she doesn’t. Shawn brings her tea and she is knocked out.
Liz wakes up in a bag, outside of a remote cabin. Inside, a phone rings and she is warned by a man that she is to never leave the property for any reason. The lights will be turned off at 8, rations will be delivered every month and she’s allotted only one emergency phone call a year, meaning she must be dying, there are no other emergencies. Then the phone goes dead.
•
Meanwhile, Shawn is home dealing with police and insurance, setting up the story and starting the clock on their seven year wait. Doug Wallace (Jason Skeen) is doing his own investigation for the insurance company and brings up the fact that Liz had a male friend, Jay Giles, that she texted a lot and he notices none of her belongings are missing from the house. This infuriates Shawn and he assaults Wallace. The man believes this is an insurance scam and there is no changing his mind.
Later that night, Shawn hears someone in his house and it’s the shadowy guy that is ‘helping’ them pull this off. He puts a gun to Shawn’s head and reminds him that if they find out or the insurance money isn’t paid out, he and Liz will be tortured and killed.
•
A year passes and Liz languishes in solitude, she now hates Shawn. She thinks about the many times he’s brought up this plan and how he sold it to her. It’s an extreme plan to get out of poverty, but it’s his plan, not hers.
One night, Liz realizes the bible is actually a little safe and she figures out the code. Inside is a geiger counter and cassette player with tapes recorded in 1982. It’s another man’s voice who warns the listener that if you are listening, it’s already too late.
The deal is not real and the land is not just woods. This stranger mapped out the place, left a geiger counter and recordings to help the next victim survive what will happen next.
He explains that this area is some kind of native grounds and every seven or eight years, creatures come out to feed. They are shapeshifters that only come out at night and they like to tease and torture their prey. Then something knocks on her window, the phone that never rings, rings and then Shawn comes out of a closet…then Liz wakes up.
Outside, one of her rings is off her finger and sitting on the rail of the porch.
•
Wallace pops up on Shawn who is on the phone with the contact, wondering when he can see his wife, it’s been 3 years. Wallace tries to convince Shawn to give it up and tells him to look up insurance scam/families killed. But Shawn stays strong and after he goes to work, Wallace breaks into his house, bugs it and goes through his belongings.
•
And in the cabin, Liz is listening to the tapes, and the man tells her to follow the map to a specific point, a metal box by a tree. She’s to open it and there’s a skull with something attached to it. You can touch it and go anyway, the future or back in time, he says. After Liz touches it, she travels through time but seems like no time at all and when she returns, it is dark. Something is lurking nearby. Listening to the tape, the voice apologizes for what she had to experience and says he made the tape for her and he used her name.
•
Shawn receives a box and inside a phone rings. He is warned that someone bugged his house and possibly his phone. And that they cleaned the house already. Also, inside the box are photos of Liz. She has been there for six years. The contact offers to facilitate her death if he’d like. He impresses upon Shawn that what he did to her was terrible and she’ll probably be angry at him when she returns.
•
Back at the cabin, on the tape, the man says Liz can ask him anything and the tape will answer. She asks how many fingers is she holding up. He answers correctly. And she is struggling with this. He says he’s probably dead right now when she asks if he can hear her now.
He explains that he arrived there the same way she did. And his wife and son were killed when they went to the police for help when the terms kept changing. He didn’t survive the guilt. He says the people who operate this place are descendants of the land and they bring people here to feed the beings that live here.
•
Once the seven year mark arrives, the man on the phone wants to change the deal again. He tells Shawn to keep the money but to kill Wallace because he knows too much. He is ordered to bring Wallace’s body to a specific location. The man has already summoned Wallace to Shawn’s house so he can do the deed. Wallace is angry he couldn’t catch him and prove the fraud and that makes it easy for Shawn to complete his end of the deal.
•
Liz tries to use the phone and it almost worked. She finally records her own message on the recorder. She plans to try to hike her way off the property. After a long day, she wakes up back in the cabin and Shawn is there, cooking. They argue about this situation. She then tries to explain that there is evil in the woods but he doesn’t believe it. She says she has seen his plan to kill her and keep the money. They fight and Shawn ends up wounded and Liz leaves him there.
•
On her way off the property, she finds human remains, that she presumes belongs to the man who made the tapes. And she plays the tape she finds in his pocket and talks to him, he says he helped her by removing the bullets from Shawn’s gun. He asks her to remove his bones and give him a proper burial, so maybe he can be free of this place too.
This indie film was written and directed by Isaac Rodriguez. It’s a thriller with a slow burn and many good twists and unexpected end. It’s a tiny by perfect cast. There is some blood and a few remains but this is not gory or very graphic.
]]>Kids vs Aliens, 2022/ 1 hr 15 min
Friends, Jack (Asher Grayson), Miles (Ben Tector) and Gary (Dominic Mariche) who are minding their own business and fully engulfed trying to make a home movie. When teens, Trish (Emma Vickers), Billy (Calem MacDonald), Dallas (Isaiah Fortune), while looking for a place to throw a Halloween party, bully the the other kids. It only stops when Billy notices Gary’s older sister, Samantha (Phoebe Rex), who just so happens to have a crush on him.
Later, Samantha opts out of recording the next scene and an unsupervised Gary breaks his arm during the wrestling scene which gets Samantha grounded because it happened when she was supposed to be watching him. No phone, no friends over, no Halloween party. Then the parents go on vacation.
Billy still hasn’t found a place to have the Halloween party and so he plans to woo Samantha and convince her to let them have the party there. Upon his arrival to the house, he runs the kids’ props over while they’re in the middle of filming a scene.
Billy pretends to take an interest in Sam and while they’re making out, her brother and his friends bust in her room. There’s a loud noise and really bright lights outside which Sam dismisses as more of the kids’ antics. After they are kicked out of Sam’s room they investigate the light outside and spend the night in the barn.
The next day, while hanging out at the lake with his friends, Billy convinces Sam to let him have the party at her house and introduce her as his girlfriend. She relents.
During the party, Billy and his friends purposely trash the house and when Sam tries to eject the troublemakers, Billy physically threatens her.
Gary, Jack, and Miles snoop on the party with a drone and then interrupt the party by hijacking the TV to broadcast a message to Sam, confronting her about her personality change to appeal to Billy. Plus they broadcast a recording of Billy and Trish, messing around, making fun of her and (Billy) urinating in Sam’s room. Sam is humiliated and Billy becomes irate. When Billy and his crew assault Gary, the bright light flairs up again outside. And an alien stands in the doorway, charging at the kids.
The aliens scatter the partygoers when they start grabbing some of them and dragging them away. Sam finally comes out of hiding once she realizes everyone is gone, including her brother. So she puts on her scuba gear and dives in the lake, where the light is emanating from.
She swims to what looks like a giant scull and climbs inside. Buried in a corpse is a sword, Sam grabs it and searches for Gary. She finds the kids in some kind of room and Trish is pinned to a slab and what can only be described as digestive juices pour down onto her until skeleton remains are left, she’s been melted down for fuel. And then they move on to the next kid. Some of them get a different treatment, Dallas, gets a helmet with some kind of green bile that turns him into a super strong monster.
Sam fights the aliens with the sword and frees her brother and his friends. The cowardly Billy flees without them, taking Sam’s scuba gear and escaping into the water. The surviving aliens are right behind them as they make it to the dock. Sam comes last, carrying and unconscious Jack and she has to resuscitate him while aliens and Dallas are gaining on them.
They get back to the house and Billy has them locked out. The new, more dangerous terrifying Dallas is unleashed on them and he goes right for Billy. Meanwhile, the kids grab their bikes and head to the woods.
While the kids hide in the woods, the bright light goes out but it’s a trap. The light returns and the aliens are right on top of them. But Sam goes to work with that amazing sword. They escape to the barn and Billy is there, in his desperation, he’s more dangerous than ever. The kids threaten to scream for Dallas if he doesn’t let Sam go, as he has the sword to her neck. The trio swarm and attack him. And Billy stabs Jack with the sword and it does all the way through, then the light returns and so does Dallas.
Billy has a vendetta against Sam, Gary and friends and he tries to kill them. After Sam punches him out, he begs Dallas for mercy before he chews through his throat. After Sam kicks Dallas through a wall during a fight, the hole left behind is like a vacuum and they struggle to not get sucked out.
Jack, barely hanging on, tells miles about something he made for the finale of their film, a fireworks display and Miles lights the fuse and launches it. With the help of the sword, Sam handles the aliens and they rush back to Jack’s aide.
As they carry a dying Jack to find help. They are suddenly totally surrounded by aliens but they aren’t alone. Mysterious men in a big truck, shoot all the aliens down and after putting plastic over the kids faces, smothering them, loads them all up in the back of the truck.
•After the credits•
The drone is still in the house recording and catches an alien walk down the hall and their mother (Jessica Marie Brown) right behind it. She spots the drone and screams at the kids through it about the state of the house.
The alien returns, grabs her head and vomits in her face. It’s the same green fluid that turned Dallas into a monster.
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The Outing aka The Lamp, 1987/ 1 hr 45 min
Three criminals break into a rich elderly woman’s house and burglarize it as she sleeps. But they are looking for money and can’t find it. When they accidentally wake her up, Harley (Hank Amico) violently demands money then commences to hacking up her walls looking for it.
What he finds instead is a chest with a lamp in it. After Harvey kills the lady, a bracelet unlatches from her wrist and falls to the floor. Then Harley works on prying the lamp open, when that doesn’t work, he rubs it then laughs at the foolishness of that. But something does happen.
The stopper, a little hand holding a jewel, spins and smoke escapes the lamp. The woman with the axe, still buried in her head, wakes up when a green light enters her and she grabs Harley as he reaches for the bracelet. Ramming his head into the other side of the the axe.
Meanwhile, the other two turn on some music, have a good time, drink and end up in the pool. While in the pool, that green light enters the water and wraps around Max (Brian Floores), killing him. Faylene (Michelle Watkins) runs upstairs and ends up getting killed, herself by the same entity.
When the cops arrive the next day, one of them puts the stopper back in the lamp. And it goes to a museum. When Dr. Wallace (James Huston), teen daughter, Alex (Andra St. Ivanyi), is left alone with the lamp and all the other artifacts, she finds the bracelet and puts it on but then can’t get it off. Once again, the lamp starts to unscrew the stopper. But before it opens completely, Alex and her dad leave.
The next morning she’s sees a genie in a lamp on a cartoon, that bracelet she’s wearing sparkles. So does the lamp that’s still in the museum. The Wallaces are having a rough start this morning, dad starts a fire and Alex gets run off the road by her crazy ex, Mike (Red Mitchell). Then at school he assaults her, her new boyfriend, Ted (Scott Bankston), and assaults and is beaten up by a female teacher, Eve Ferrell (Deborah Winters). It’s the final straw, he’s ejected from the school by the principal (Christopher Wycliff).
The next day, Ms. Ferrell’s class goes on a field trip to the museum where Dr. Wallace works. He and Ms. Ferrell are dating. While there, Alex sneaks away to look at the lamp again and is possessed by the jinn. But it doesn’t stay in her, it comes and goes, wreaking havoc where it pleases. Afterward, Alex convinces her friends who are also couples, Babs (Charity Merrill) and Ross (Barry Coffing), and Gwen (Tracye Walker) and Terry (Raan Lewis), to secretly spend the night at the museum. Violent bully, Mike finds out about it and intends to show up with his toady, Tony (André Chimène) and be a menace.
During Dr. Bressling’s (Danny D. Daniels) research he discovers the lamp in a photo that was also found in the elderly woman’s house. The lamp is in the photo with a woman and her child, the little girl is the elderly lady. It originates from Iraq and during the family’s journey abroad, everyone on the voyage died except the little girl.
An invisible entity, the jinn, travels through the building, narrowly killing people with artifacts, and Ms. Ferrell can feel it’s presence. It ends in Dr. Bressling’s office, causing him to levitate and be carved up by his ceiling fan. Upon finding blood in the doctor’s office, his remains falling on him from the fan, the opera singing security guard, Jeff (Coy Sevier) is killed by a spear that moves and is thrown by itself.
The teens sneak in with the help of Alex distracting a security guard, the plan is to spend the night in the basement. Oh and Mike made it in too, the possessed Alex makes sure he can get in. When the jinn leaves her, she has no idea why they are all here and her friends are concerned. But they settle in for the evening to have a good time.
In the specimen room, Ross is torn in half before the jinn releases poisonous snakes who bite Babs to death. And all the while Mike and his lackey lurks looking for opportunity and rope. While Terry, looks for drinks, he is locked in the room by the duo, and discovers Ross and Babs’ dead bodies. He doesn’t notice when a viper climbs up his trousers and bites him to death.
Gwen is alone playing dress up when a nearly naked and masked Mike and Tony arrive, while Mike rapes her, the jinn spins Tony’s head 360 degrees on his neck. And uses his horned mask to impale Mike.
When Alex and Ted goes looking for everyone, they find three of their friends locked inside and dead in the specimen room. They run for help but they are locked in and the phone’s are out. So they look for a security guard and find Bob (Roy Alan Wilson), dead at his station. Then a human specimen, is animated and the corpse bites Ted to death.
Meanwhile, Alex’s dad is on a date and after proposing to Ms. Ferrell, calls to check on Alex. They head to the museum and at first are locked out, then the door swings open. After running right into Alex, the Jinn shows itself. And since Alex wears the bracelet and released the jinn, she made an offhand wish and it intends to make it come true. She wished her dad was dead. The Jinn leaps toward Dr. Wallace, chasing them down. They need to find a way to destroy the lamp to stop the jinn.
This was directed by Tom Daley and it is somewhat expected 80s horror fare. I was surprised at the level domestic violence and rape in this, especially considering the perpetrator is a teenager. The physical effects and CG aren’t spectacular but they do the job.
TW: Teen domestic violence and rape
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