This is a really screwed up film... on many levels. Wow, where does one start? First of all this film looks like it was filmed with a home camcorder, the characters are beyond surrealistic and totally unbelievable, the concept is really weird, and the acting is some of the worst ever caught on celluloid. Anyway, the story is about how Satan discovers the amazing qualities of a popular modern item we all know as a DVD. He creates a monstrous cartoon character (mostly played by a guy in a costume) called Dr. Carnage and his sidekick, a ravenous monkey named Max Assassin, and places them on DVD's and drops one in everyone's mailbox (I guess since AOL always did that, he thought could too). Some weird chick with breasts big enough to be classified as weapons of mass destruction, that also looks 35 years old but acts like a 6 year old, finds one in her mailbox and decides to play it out of childish boredom. Meanwhile, her parents (consisting of an obvious man in drag with a voice like John Wayne) are going out of town for the weekend and put her older sister in charge. Somehow as if planned, the "older" sister looks much much younger than the "younger" sister. Anyway, the older sis invites some friends over, some boys, some liquor, what have you, and has a party. Little sister with boobs so big they have separate zip codes, is watching what looks like a stupid cartoon about a mad doctor and his rabid pet monkey. Suddenly, Dr Carnage and Max Assassin leap from the TV and extract very cartoonish (and strikingly gruesome) ways of killing everyone. All the cartoon cliches are used... safe dropped on the head, sawed in half, spine ripped out, TNT explosives, etc. Live action is mixed with cheap cartoon overlay and computer effects, some of which are truly hilarious and deserve really good drugs. As expected this movie is extremely colorful, being about cartoons and all, but this is as gory as can be expected when a safe falls on your head. In a real cartoon, their head came out flat, they blew on their thumbs and everything pops out into place. But here, when a safe falls on you, you're squashed beyond recognition, your guts are coming out and brain matter is staining the wall. All through the night, everyone gets it in a different way. Monday when "Mom" and Dad return, they find the house a mess and body parts everywhere. The drag queen mom goes into a totally hilarious spastic fit that was so side-splittingly funny that it was almost worth sitting through this cheap piece of crap! And, I serious stretch the word "almost".
Shortly after the cancellation of the hit television series known as Twin Peaks, fans still yearned for more. A year after the cancellation of the show, a prequel was made to help tie up some of the loose ends left by the series. Unfortunately, it created more questions than answers. The film didn't do very well, at least not in comparison to the cult phenomenon that emerged from the success of the TV series. It had more than a few strikes against it. A typical David Lynch (who abandoned the show in it's second season, yet returned to film the prequel movie) maneuver was to film as much footage as possible and then piece it all together later on. Over five hours of footage was filmed, yet was cut down to a mere two hours, leaving a tremendous amount of plot holes. Talk is in the air about a re-release of the film with the deleted footage returned. Maybe then, we can make better sense of the movie. Another strike against this film is the absence of all but a small handful of actors that were in the series. Most of them either declined to be in the movie or had other scheduling conflicts. A main character of the show, Donna Hayward, played by Lara Flynn Boyle, cited scheduling conflicts as well, but wide rumor has it that she just didn't want to do the nude scenes to be included in the movie. Therefore, since Donna Hayward was a critical part of the story, the part was recast with Moira Kelly, which confused a lot of people. Being a monster fan of the show, I found the movie quite a work of art and was able to (mostly) understand what was happening. As everyone who's seen the show knows, the story begins with the murder of Prom Queen Laura Palmer. The series builds momentum as the hunt for Laura's killer leads us face to face with the underbelly of the town and about how everyone in Twin Peaks has a secret. The first 17 out of 29 total episodes deals with the Laura Palmer case. The events leading up to Laura's death are slowly but surely revealed. The movie is more or less the last seven days of Laura Palmer's life, verbatim with what was described in the series. Another fault of the movie was that Sheryl Lee was already 25 when she played Laura Palmer who is only supposed to be 17 years old, and when playing out the tawdry secret life she lived, Sheryl Lee could almost pass for 30-something. Another complaint that many people have about the movie was that it was too "in your face", which was a stark contrast to the show where everything was bubbling just under the surface, the allure of everything being so secretive. I never really found this to be a fault though. I mean I loved the secrets of the town and all but this film was supposed to be about Laura's demise, which included drug abuse, prostitution, sexual promiscuity and bondage. So of course it's gonna be tawdry, because that's who Laura was. The audience craved for more information involving Laura Palmer, but when they got it, all they did was bitch about it. I'm positive that this movie could stand alone without having seen the series because that's how I saw it. One night a friend of mine rented it, I'd never seen the show before but was still able to understand what it was about and loved it. Like the show, it was well written and very clever. Granted a few things made more sense after watching the series, but if you don't have an extra 30 hours to watch the series, the movie does just fine.
Even though this movie is rather popular and competes with The Exorcist for the coveted title of the scariest movie ever made, it is still a cult classic. It was shot on a shoestring budget and under deplorable conditions. This was Tobe Hooper's first attempt at film making and does a rather good job all things considered. Through this film he became more and more popular and eventually began to get work on much bigger and better projects, such as Poltergeist which became one of Hollywood's greatest successes. The story goes as such... A series of graves in a local cemetery have been robbed and parts of corpses have been used to create gruesome sculptures. A group of friends, including Sally and her younger wheelchair bound brother Franklin, learn of the grave robbing and decide to take a road trip to the cemetery to see if their grandfathers grave has been one of the graves that were violated. Fortunately it was not, but while in town (hardly a town, it's in the middle of nowhere and has maybe three house and a population of ten) they decide to check out their grandfather's house nearby, which is decrepit and hasn't been lived in for some time. Before reaching the house, they pick up the hitchhiker from hell. Some weird greasy guy with a birthmark the size of Rhode Island on his face (probably the result of several generations of inbreeding). He babbles about working at the slaughterhouse and making "head cheese". He then takes a picture of Franklin, burns it and still manages to take a slice of Franklin's arm with a razor before being kicked out of the van. The group stops by a gas station along the way because the tank is empty. The station is out of gas, but at least they have some righteous BBQ. While visiting Gramps old house they notice strange things, like bird bones hanging from strings (very Blair Witch). Kirk and Pam (part of the group and friends of Sally and Franklin, there's also Jerry who is Sally's boyfriend) go down to a nearby watering hole only to find it dried out (much like everything else in Texas during the summer). They hear a generator and follow the sound to a large house close to Gramps old place. Kirk knocks but gets no answer. He enters the house and gets bashed in the head by a giant man wearing a skinned human face as a mask. When Kirk doesn't return Pam goes looking for him. She enters the house, then trips over something and lands in a disgusting room full of bones and feathers. Human skulls and rotting animals hang from strings. Human bones have been used to decorate everything from walls to furniture. Halfway into shock, Pam pukes and tries to run, but she too gets caught by the huge man with the leather face (even though this characters name is never revealed, he ultimately became known simply as Leatherface). Pam is dragged off and hung on a meat hook, she then has the pleasure of watching Leatherface turn her boyfriend into hamburger meat with a chainsaw. Sally's boyfriend Jerry goes looking for Kirk and Pam. He comes across the neighboring house with intentions of asking if anyone had seen his friends around. Jerry finds Pam's body in a freezer and is then greeted with tremendous blow to the head, inflicted again by Leatherface. When dusk arrives and no one is anywhere to be found, Sally and Franklin go looking for them. Out of the woods jumps Leatherface again. This time it's Franklin that gets it (by the way, despite the movie's title, this is the only killing actually performed with a chainsaw. Kirk was dismembered with a chainsaw, but was actually killed by a blow to the head). Sally (a damn good screamer!) runs back to the gas station with Leatherface closing in on her and hysterically lands in the arms of the station manager. The gas station manager (a creepy little BBQ cook) explains that he has no phone and goes outside to have a look. Meanwhile inside the station, Sally sees his BBQ turning over a fire. The meat looks suspiciously like human body parts, arms and legs mostly. The manager returns with a broom and beats the hell out of Sally before dragging her back to the house where he lives with Leatherface and the weirder than weird hitchhiker. Upon arriving home, the cook bitches at the hitchhiker to stay away from that damn graveyard (evidently it was hitchhiker that was making the cemetery sculptures). Poor Sally, who has long since passed out from fright, now awakens into a living nightmare. She comes to, tied to a chair, surrounded by the most disgusting dining room ever conceived. There are lamps made of human bones and skins. Rotting meat is all over the place. And all three cretins that we have been introduced to, are all sitting at the table with her, having their "supper". The more she screams, the more the "family" loves it. Creepier still, Leatherface now has makeup on his leather mask. For real, I'm talking frosty blue eyeshadow and ruby red lipstick. Truly bizarre, sort of as if Hannibal Lecter and Divine had a child. Indeed a very good argument for birth control. Anyway, Sally's screams and pleas for release only feed this "family's" appetite for horrification. We soon learn that there is a fourth member of this family of sub-humanoid cretins... a grandfather that though still alive, looks like he's about 175 years old. After wheeling Grampa to the table, Leatherface cuts Sally's finger and lets Grampa suck on it for a while. Apparently Grampa also worked at the slaughterhouse and was regarded as quite a pro at what he did. Forcing Sally to kneel before a bucket, Grampa is handed a large hammer and tries many times to hit her. He strikes her enough times to bloody her head but not enough to kill her. In the midst of the commotion, the hitchhiker goes for the hammer and Sally manages to struggle free. She runs and bursts her way through a window, plummeting into the early morning light, after a night of pure hell. Hitchhiker runs after her, stabbing her repeatedly until she is completely covered in blood. She makes it to the road where a huge semi runs the hitchhiker over. Unfortunately, Leatherface is still closing in on her. The man driving the semi tries to help, he throws a wrench and smacks Leatherface on the noggin', causing him to land on the ground with his chainsaw gnawing on his leg. Another truck comes by and with all the strength she has left, Sally manages to crawl into the back of the truck and screams for the driver to go go go. The movie ends with Leatherface wildly swinging his chainsaw in the air, showing frustration at having lost his prey. And poor Sally is in the back of the truck, hysterically laughing her way to the nearest funny farm. This film actually has the prestige of being accepted into the official Museum of Modern Art. There is also a plethora of great trivia surrounding the making of this film. To name a few... the meat in the dinner scene was real and rapidly making all the actors sick with it's atrocious stink of decomposition. As Sally runs through the woods in search of help, we see that her clothing is torn and she has bloody cuts all over her. This wasn't faked, she actually ran through the woods and all the bloody cuts were real. When they slice Sally's finger in order to feed Grampa, the fake blood tube in the knife got clogged and rather than fix it, they actually sliced Marilyn Burns (Sally) finger. To keep with the continuity of the film Gunnar Hanson (Leatherface) was not allowed to wash his clothes and therefore began to smell so badly that the other actors would stay as far away from him as possible when not filming. This film was made in August when the heat in Texas is almost unbearable, making strenuous acting difficult and causing the meat on the table to rot much faster and stink much worse. Almost every actor in the film said that if offered another acting job working with director Tobe Hooper, they would most assuredly turn it down. This film, along with Psycho, is loosely based on the actions of serial killer/cannibal/necrophiliac/all around weirdo Ed Gein. This lead to the boasting that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was actually based on a true story, though only about 5% of it was taken from the Ed Gein case. The rest is purely fictional. Regardless, this movie is a masterpiece and is very effective at installing pure terror into it's viewers.
Yet another "video nasty" filmed in Greece that has been relatively unknown for years (at least in english), until a recent DVD release. There aren't many gore scenes, but when you get to them, they are extremely effective and worth waiting for. The story is for the most part is a psychological thriller dealing with the results of the disintegration of a decent family man into a cannibalistic monster. Generally, the story is this... A young couple are seen on the beach of a Grecian island, the girl goes swimming while the boy starts jammin' with his headphones. The girl comes across what looks like a boat adrift with no occupants. Upon inspection, she lets out a horrendous scream and is attacked by something under the water. Subsequently, her boyfriend has his head split open with a machete by an unknown wet, blood dripping entity. Meanwhile, on a cable car ride, a young girl named Julie (played by Tisa Farrow, Mia Farrows sister, I'm not for certain, but their likenesses are so close that I would bet money on them being identical twins) makes friends with a group of young people touring the Greek Islands. She explains that she babysits a Greek couples blind child during the summer and in return the couple pays for her vacation. She asks if she can tag along since some friends of hers are missing (the young couple that were slaughtered on the beach) and she doesn't have a ride to the island. Since the group's tour will bring them in close proximity of the island in question, they happily agree to help her get to her destination. A woman in the group named Carol is a Tarot card reader and quickly discovers that danger lurks ahead. A pregnant woman named Maggie gets her cards read, only to find that she has all blank cards (no future). carol also predicts that death is imminent if they set foot on this island. They arrive at the island. Maggie sprains her ankle and has to stay on the boat and rest, the others leave to explore the island which seems totally deserted with the exception of a mysterious woman that warns them to go away. Meanwhile, on the boat, poor Maggie pulls a bucket of water from the side of the boat, only to discover that it contains a severed head, she screams and is dragged away by "someone". After finding the island deserted, they inspect Julie's friends house. It also seems deserted, but upon inspecting the cellar, they find the couples daughter Ariette hiding in a wine barrel, stabbing at anything that comes near. She talks of her parents being killed and that she knew where "it" was because "it" smelled of blood. As the others are looking for signs of what happened, the guy watching Ariette is attacked and has a chunk bitten out of his neck by an unknown monster. Upon exploring the island, the group comes across a large house that belonged to a prominent family on the island. Flashback sequence: a man, his wife, and their child are in a lifeboat that has gone adrift. The child has died from exposure and dad begins to see him as dinner. The mother is repulsed by the idea, the father loses it and kills her. We are lead to believe that he eventually ate them both (this is no doubt what the female swimmer in the beginning of the film was screaming about). They find a diary about the incident written by the father's sister who has gone insane because of "what happened" (we are given hints that "what happened" isn't necessarily the boating incident where her brother ate his family). Mystery woman hangs herself from the top staircase of the large house that the group is now taking shelter in, we soon learn that the mystery woman was actually the sister that had written the diary. Julie and Ariette decide to stay at the house while the others go check on Maggie. Julie continues reading the diary and reads how her (the nutty sister) brother became "the beast". Apparently, after having to eat his wife and child he went completely insane and once rescued and returned, he began to kill and cannibalize the entire island. His sister who has now become quite a nut too, has tried to hide her brothers depravity by hiding all the victims (only some are partially eaten, most were drained of blood) in the large house. A reference made in the diary hinted that the bodies were hidden in the foyer of the house. Julie finds a large mirror that seems to be covering a door. She smashes the window and finds a room containing the dead population of the islands occupants. On the search for Maggie, the group discovers that she isn't on the boat. They spread out looking for her. Maggie's boyfriend finds her hiding in a cave and she tells him about the severed head she found in the water. While in the cave, "the beast" descends upon them and pushes Maggie to the ground, reaches up her skirt, rips out her baby and takes a bite out of it (very effectively achieved with a skinned rabbit). After killing most of the group, He (the beast, the man who ate wife and kid and then proceeded to continue with his newly found taste for blood and insanity) chases Julie and Ariette up into the roof. Stupidly thinking that they're safe, he rips through the roof and grabs Ariette by the hair, scalping her and tasting her hairdo. Julie makes it outside and is on the watch for "the beast". Unbeknownst to her, he's hiding in a well that she wanders a little too close too. Instead of pulling her into the well, he uses her to climb out of the well. David (the last surviving member of the group of people who befriended Julie in the beginning) comes out of nowhere and hits "the beast" in the gut with a pic axe. He looks down at his bloody guts, pulls out some organs and starts munching down, looking quite happy until he slowly died of blood loss. The End. Usually when a hard to find movie is released on DVD, one would expect it to have some improvements. Not here. It's a great story, but has some serious flaws. Not because of the story, acting (which actually wasn't that bad) or scenery, but from the sound quality which sucked in multiple forms. First of all, the original language that the movie was filmed in was Greek and in the making, didn't have a great sound quality to begin with. Second, the english dubbing is deplorable, with talking when no mouths are moving, and no dialogue at all when people are obviously having a conversation. I was also disillusioned when I discovered that the optional subtitles don't match a damn thing. The words displayed aren't in the slightest bit associated with what's being said. Oh well, very few movies can boast perfection. This film actually does have a great story line and a relatively original plot. Pretty impressive, with the exception of the audio. By the way, in case you didn't get the title, Anthropophagus is Greek for "human consumption"
This is another of those little italian horror flicks that director Joe D'Amato came out with that were very cheap to make, are extremely hard to find these days and was categorized as a "video nasty". Video Nasties were usually films that could not be rated (if so, they would have gotten an X rating which would have given it an incredibly limited release) and were usually pretty gory. For the most part, his films had a very good plot that was poorly executed with bad acting, not enough action, boring dialogue (made all the worse by the terrible english voice dubbing) and not enough gore. Thankfully, Buried Alive was re-released on DVD a few years ago under the new title "Beyond the Darkness", (which makes it a little easier to acquire, but harder to identify due to the title being changed). I've seen the VHS version and I can say for certain that the DVD release has acquired a bit more footage that wasn't on the VHS version. These extras made this film ten times better. Apparently, several minutes of gore footage was removed and then replaced for the DVD version. Well worth seeking out, now on with the story. Frank is a weird little guy who's hobby is taxidermy, who's parents have recently died, a housekeeper named Iris (who is madly in love with Frank) and his beautiful girlfriend Anna. Iris is extremely jealous of Anna, so she has a Voodoo priestess stick some pins in a doll and kill Anna with a curse, so that she can have Frank all to herself. Anna dies, Frank is deeply grieving and only has Iris to comfort him. He decides that this is not enough (did I mention that Iris looks like a horse?) so after the funeral he digs up Anna, with intentions of using his taxidermy skills to keep her near (and not smelling too bad). Unbeknownst to Frank, Anna's twin sister Elena has arrived in town to pay her respects (obviously played by the same actress). On the way home from the cemetery with Anna's body in the back seat, Frank picks up a pothead hitchhiker. The female hitchhiker gets real stoned and takes a nap in the truck. Frank brings Anna's body into his "house of horrors" taxidermy studio and proceeds with prepping her for the keep. First he pulls out all her guts (deliciously disgusting) and replaces her eyes with glass replicas. He kisses her, tongues her, and when he can't hold his passions back any more he pulls her heart out and eats it (yum, that formaldehyde goodness). The pothead hitchhiker comes out of her stupor long enough to catch Frank embalming his girlfriend. She runs, he chases her, she trips over a bucket of guts, he holds her down and proceeds to pull off her fingernails one by one with a set of pliers, then strangles her. Being the ever dutiful keeper of pretty much everything, Iris helps him hack up the body and dissolve it in a bathtub full of acid. Frank puts Anna's body in bed and leaves her there. With the fake eyes Anna looks like she has drank about 17 pots of coffee, so lying in bed looks even more ridiculous. Bored one day, Frank goes jogging and befriends a young female jogger who has just sprained her ankle. He convinces her to come back to his place where he can tend to her ankle. She comes onto him and he fucks her in the same bed that Anna is lying in. Eventually the smell reaches her, she discovers the body and freaks out. She doesn't get far before Frank catches up with her and bites a chunk of flesh out of her neck. While she lays there dying, Frank really enjoys chewing on the hunk of neck while watching the female jogger die. Dutiful Iris helps Frank dispose of the body in the incinerator. Why they didn't do that with the hitchhiker is beyond me, it just seems that an incinerator would be much less messy than a tub of dissolved guts would be, but I digress. For some reason Frank allows Iris to convince him that marrying her is the way to go. He must have at least some interest because he sure sucks on her tits a lot. Some detective comes snooping around with questions about Anna's grave being desecrated. Iris comes out from under her hangover from the previous night's wedding festivities and finds the detective looking around, so she stashes Anna in the closet. The detective eventually opens the closet, Anna's body falls out, and for some reason the detective doesn't look very surprised and whips out his camera to take pictures of Anna's corpse. Meanwhile, Anna's sister Elena shows up at Frank's house because she knows that he was Anna's boyfriend. Elena hears her sisters voice and the lights go out (either Anna's ghost calling or Iris is throwing her voice to trap the sister. I'm not sure which). Elena sees her sister sitting in a chair, so she goes over to her and Iris comes out of the darkness with a knife and intentions on killing Elena (for obvious reasons). Frank sees Iris about to stab Elena and attacks her, Iris stabs him, he grabs the knife and kills her. The detective returns and sees that Iris is dead, he goes to the basement and catches Frank burning something in the incinerator. The detective shoots and kills Frank when he sees that there are human body parts in the incinerator. He also sees a body on the table. Since they are twins, we don't know which sis was cremated but we are lead to believe that was Elena, probably to get rid of her body in the same manner as all the other victims. The movie ends when at the mortuary,when "her" coffin is about to be nailed shut and Elena pops out alive. Apparently Frank had cremated Anna. I guess since Elena (a live version of Anna) has come along, he decided that he no longer needed Anna's corpse. Of course no one knows this but Frank who is now dead, leaving poor Elena to almost be buried alive (hence the title). Sounds fascinating doesn't it?!?! For some reason, it's not. You have to watch it a couple of times to be able to completely understand what has happened, but very few people have enough patience to do that. Once you get it, it ain't so bad.
Two eccentric old aunts are having a birthday party. All the party guests are family members that are just after the old bat's money and intend to use the birthday party to both make themselves look better as well as making each other look as bad as possible. The oddball family ensemble consists of a bumbling cowardly priest, a married couple with obnoxious kids, a fat cousin with a very young stripper wife, a female cousin with her lesbian girlfriend, a horny dipstick in a Trans Am and a frigid old cousin that is so conservative she makes Mother Theresa look like a 2 dollar whore. As the aunts start receiving their birthday gifts, a knock at the door sounds the arrival of someone else. The cook's helper answers then the door and there stands a gothic looking grandma with a gift sent by the black sheep of the family, a nephew that was banned from the family and written out of the will for becoming the leader of a Satanic cult. Through the note on the gift he shmoozes the aunts by saying that he wants forgiveness, he knows his presence is not wanted but still desires to give them a unique gift for their birthday. They open the package which contains a pretty box. Thinking that it's a lovely gift, they open it and some demons come out and possess the aunts, who then begin attacking all members of the family and most of the relatives are killed off in various comical ways. The frigid cousin and the lesbian are like the only two people left. They guess that if they destroy the box that they can destroy the demons that came out of it. It works and the aunts return to normal (borrrrrrring!). The next morning police arrive and start collecting the bodies. One of the two kids (the other got torn apart by one of the aunt/demons) wants to go live with the lesbian, because even though his mother survived, she's now a basket case in a straight-jacket. In the last scene, Bertha the frigid cousin starts puking up green slime in the cab ride home, then gets all possessed looking and tears off the cab drivers arm... the end. I have to say that the first half of this movie is slower than dial up internet, almost enough to give up on it before the fun even begins. The second half of the movie picks up with some gruesome special effects and some pretty bloody murders. Well worth the wait. Don't try and make too much sense out of the story, it's relatively insignificant. The only fun in this film is watching two demons run around in flowery dresses killing people in comically terrifying ways that are very reminiscent of "Evil Dead". Ironically, despite the title, the grannies in this film are the victims of demon possession and the rabies virus is never even mentioned. An enjoyable flick... if you have absolutely nothing else to do.
Snuff is a terribly disappointing movie. Because of it's appearance and marketing, it gives you the impression that it may actually be a snuff film (for those of you who do not know what a snuff film is, it's a film that depicts what appears to be an actual murder caught on film just for the fun of having it, usually occurring after a sex act). But alas, instead we are left with a movie that is slow, stupid, obviously fake and has few surprises. The bulk of the movie is a very jumbled plot that after watching this movie three times, I still cannot figure out what was what. Upon seeing the ending, this may have been done on purpose. Anyway, the story is basically about a gang of hippie biker chicks that are also apparently followers of some dork calling himself Satan, cleverly pronounce as "Suh-ton". He controls these brainless broads with boobs in a Manson-ish type of way. Anyway, a porn actress and her manager/director arrive in Chile' (?) to make another movie. While there, she hooks up with an old boyfriend. Old boyfriends current girlfriend (or sister, it's never really specified) is part of this hippie biker chick gang. A plot is set in motion to slaughter them all which does eventually happen. After the last person is finished off, we see cameras and sound people and a director yelling "cut!". Apparently it was all just a stupid movie being filmed (that's why I say that the story really doesn't have to make sense because it wasn't really happening and could have been hypothetically shot only in part or out of sequence). After the bulk of the people leave the set, a cameraman seduces the actress that still laying on the bed on the set. Camera and sound crew draw nearer. Cameraman attacks actress, stabs her, cuts off fingers and hands, and eventually rips her guts out. He holds them up and gives a tribal scream. The screen then looks like the camera has run out of film, but you can hear sound people saying "Did we get it?" and "I think so." This movie somehow got a rumor started about it, that it actually was a snuff film. After seeing the "snuff" scene, it's painfully obvious that it's totally fake. Also, this movie has tribal drums as a constant soundtrack. No music, no beat... just really loud obnoxious drumming. During the sex scenes, the drums will convince anyone listening that you are watching a terribly cheap porno. And if no one's around, then there's only you to drive crazy by having to listen to them non-stop for an hour and 20 minutes. Personally, I found this movie to be very boring and I don't recommend it, but it does have a huge cult following, mostly due to the "is it real" factor. Well, for anyone who has even the slightest doubt whether it's real... It's not!!!!!!!
Even though this movie has a few relatively mainstream actors, such as Karen Black and Oliver Reed, even including the legendary Ms. Bette Davis in one her later roles that actually had some genuine acting on her part and not just some half ass performance just for the paycheck, for which she was so famous for doing in her last years. Burnt Offerings is one of those movies that you have to watch at least twice to fully grasp what's happening. This alone gives it the cult following that grants it permission among my inventory. Anyway, the movie starts out with a young couple that are looking for a house to rent, they happen upon a mansion that is being rented out for the summer at a suspiciously low price. The elderly and eccentric brother and sister that own the house have bestowed upon the couple one inconvenience... Their elderly mother lives in the attic bedroom and doesn't ever leave. This woman is to be left 3 trays of food every day and that's all. Despite this incredibly odd situation, they rent the house anyway because the wife just won't shut up about it. After a while, it seems almost to possess her. She becomes more and more interested in the old lady's hobby of collecting photographs. One odd aspect of the photos displayed is that not one of the people in the photos are smiling, in fact they look pretty miserable. Their young son has also come along for the ride and when he is seen accidentally falling and hurting his knee, moments later a seemingly dead plant has some new live growth on it. Pain seems to heal the old and somewhat decrepit mansion in some way. When the father cuts his finger on a champagne wire, a light bulb that originally did not work before now works fine. The Mrs. embarks on a cleaning frenzy that Joan Crawford would have been proud of, but is growing increasingly worried about the old lady upstairs because she's not eating the food that is being left for her. One day while restoring the old pool out back, the father is overcome with the desire to drown his son and nearly succeeds. The son manages to get away and the next day, the shabby old pool has now become a sparkling oasis with fountains and statues. As the mother grows more and more obsessed with the old lady upstairs, the meals have resumed consumption. The mother also starts to lie in order to keep anyone from being suspicious of the house. She notices the change in the pool and takes credit for cleaning it herself. She also becomes less and less receptive to her husbands advances and ultimately finds him repulsive. To console herself, she constantly returns to the old lady's sitting room. Soon she starts dressing like the "old-timey" women in the old lady's photo collection, even to the point of getting gray hair. Meanwhile, the aunt (Davis) who is usually so vibrant and witty has become a worn out old lady. She seems drained of all her energy, her hair turns gray and she's got enough luggage under her eyes to go to Europe. Soon after that, she becomes deathly ill. The father seems to be slowly losing his grasp on reality and keeps seeing a creepy smiley hearse driver that scared him as a child at his mothers funeral. The boy is almost killed by a mysterious gas leak in his bedroom, with all the windows and doors locked. As mom fakes calling the doctor when it looks like the aunt is gonna die any minute, she immediately withdraws into the old lady's room and starts eating her din-din. In a very simple but effective scene, the smiley hearse driver shows up instead of the doctor and shoves a casket at the aunt, next scene is her funeral. We also start noticing more changes to the house. The greenhouse that was originally full of dead plants is now full of beautiful plants and flowers. The house itself seems to be draining or consuming people and renewing itself with their pain and sorrow. After the aunts death, the mom doesn't even go to the funeral because she has to keep the old lady company. In fact, the mother is now fully gray, her wardrobe and hairdos are strictly 19th century and she has become extremely over protective of the old lady that apparently only she ever sees. When dad actually sees the house changing, the roof shingles, the floorboards, the tile, all falling off and being replaced with new ones, he decides the time has come to leave. Too bad the trees have decided otherwise. They block the road and attempt to drag dad off into the woods. Mom comes to the rescue and brings them back to the house. Some time later, the kid is swimming and the pool attempts to drown him. This even convinces mom that it's time to vacate. As they're leaving, mom decides that she can't leave without telling her favorite old fart that she's going. In a creepy conclusion, the dad gets tired of waiting for mom, so he goes back into the house after her. He goes into the old lady's room looking for mom, sees the old lady sitting by the window and swings her around to face him. When she turns around, it's mom with a possessed looking face, dressed as the old lady. Soon we see dad plummeting to his death from the attic window. He lands on the car containing his kid, the kid freaks and runs. He is then crushed under the rubble of a falling chimney. In the next scene we see the house, restored to it's prime time glory. Upon their return, we also hear the oddball brother and sister bragging about how beautiful it is and how happy they are that their mother has been restored to them. The camera pans through the old lady's photos and there are some new additions... dad, kid and aunt. The mother is missing from the photo. OK, so what the hell does it all mean? I assume that the house is being rented out to unsuspecting families who then become the spiritual battery that recharges the old mansion like sacrifices, hence the title "Burnt Offerings". What's the story with mom and the old lady? I assume that there never was an old lady. I think it was a ploy to get the mom interested in and ultimately possessed by the spirit of the old lady. That's why the food was not at first being eaten, but resumes when the mom becomes obsessed with her. This is confirmed when we see the mom grubbing on the old lady's supper. Since the mother is not among the photo collection at the end, it's my assumption that she was always destined to be part of the house. Great mystery flick that requires some thought to figure it out. Great mysteries are like puzzles without a box top to follow, only through a slow piecing together can we see the full picture.
Dolls... I hate dolls. They're creepy enough without being in a horror movie. Despite having a terribly tight budget, this horror movie is remarkably well done and very effective. Judy is a little girl about 8 years old, traveling with her dad and stepmother (two total assholes). Judy also has an amazing imagination. When her bitch stepmother Rosemary throws Judy's teddy bear away, she envisions teddy coming back as a huge fanged bear that tears Rosemary to pieces. Great kid, huh. Anyway, while traveling they get caught in a storm and seek shelter at an old house just down the road. The owners of the house at first greet them with a shotgun, but after seeing that they have a child with them, they have a change of heart. An old couple named Gabriel and Hilary live in the house and Gabriel is a dollmaker. His creepy dolls are all over the house and when he sees that Judy does not have a doll (since Rosemary ditched her teddy) he offers her a jester doll named Punch (remember Punch and Judy, they were a pair of puppets that beat the hell out of each other to make kids laugh, circa 1960's). Out from the storm arrive three more people. A guy named Ralph (a giant kid) and two young female hitch hikers (Madonna look-a-likes named isabel and Enid) that he picked up. At first they plan to steal Ralph's wallet, but when they see all the antiques around the house, they decide to rob the old couple instead. Meanwhile, Gabriel's creepy ass dolls occasionally blink, smile (when they smile, fangs are present) and whisper to each other. During the night, Isabel goes on a five finger discount hunt for "antikies". She is accosted by the dolls who smash her head into a wall repeatedly until her face is mush, then drag her into another room. Judy witnesses this and tells Ralph that fairies killed the girl. Poor Ralph is accused of killing Isabel and being a pervert for having bonded with Judy. After way too long of a wait, Rosemary is finally killed by the dolls, bloody but otherwise boring. She deserved a much more gruesome death. Enid sneaks out to find Isabel and catches the old woman pushing a bunch of dolls in a baby stroller... creepy. She eventually finds Isabel, but something is terribly wrong with her. She's huddled in a dark room whispering to Enid to get away. Enid persists only to find that Isabel is being transformed into a doll, complete with googly doll eyes that occasionally fall out. Enid runs away only to be shot by an army of toy soldiers. Rosemary is found with half her head missing and again poor Ralph is blamed. The old couple turn out to be witches (duh) and Judy's father goes on a doll smashing spree, including Judy's new doll "Punch". When the dolls are smashed, their doll faces crumble and fall away to reveal green slimy gremlin faces underneath. As a punishment for smashing the dolls, Judy's father is reduced down to another Punch doll to replace the one her father smashed. Ralph and Judy wake up and are told some cock and bull story about how Judy's father and stepmother have ditched her and left with the two hitch hikers. They are also told that a plane ticket has been left for Judy to return to her real mother and a second plane ticket for Ralph to make sure that Judy gets home safely. As they are driving away, Judy asks Ralph if he ever wanted a daughter and that he'll like her mom... awwwww. All the people that were killed during the night are seen as dolls on the mantle. Apparently, Judy is not killed because she is a child and relates to dolls and Ralph is saved because he is a kid at heart. As the credits roll, another car is seen getting stuck in the mud, eluding to the fact that the dolls were all real people that had accidentally happened upon two weirdo witches with a doll fetish. Great 80's fun with a true creepiness to it.
Mother's Day probably has the most ironic title of any movie ever made. Instead of just slapping a corsage on her chest and letting her order whatever she wants at the local pancake house, Ike and Addley have a special way of showing their motherly affections with rape, murder, and torture. All under her strict guidance of course. The brothers are your typical Deliverance/Texas Chainsaw Massacre dimwits that only know what Mommy has taught them and what they see on TV. Speaking of TV, another irony in this film is that a cheap yet very disturbing movie such as this one makes a quite real and truthful statement regarding the influence of violence in movies and television. Anyway, the story is rather simple, yet still quite effective and goes as such... Three woman form a close bond in college and decide to get together for a ten year reunion. To celebrate, they go camping (?). The two brothers ambush them, bring them to their dilapidated house containing the Charles Manson of all mothers. All three girls are tortured under the strict teachings of their deranged mother (y'know like weight loss exercises). These teaching sessions are weirder than weird. First she gets the sons to make one of the girls sit on a bench and act like she's reading a book so that they can be taught how to properly attack a woman in a park. Then they make her dress up like a little girl so that one of the sons can be trained to attack and violently rape her. This torture is intended for all three girls, but after the first one dies from their violent training exercises, the other two escape, gear up like Rambo and extract their revenge. They manage to kill the brothers and suffocate mom with a pair of inflatable tits. The end. A side story that never really made any sense to me is that the mother often refers to "Queenie" who is supposedly mom's twin that was born deformed and covered with hair, but is still alive, living in the surrounding woods. After the girls kill their captors and escape, they are attacked by the elusive Queenie, who clearly looks like a man covered in moss or something. Made in 1980, this film has some very interesting trivia to it. First of all, it was being filmed on the other side of the lake at the same time that the original "Friday the 13th" movie was being made. They expected Mother's Day to achieve a better success than Friday the 13th due to it's being much more graphic.... they were wrong. Also, the house that was used for the main part of the film had been vacant for about 15 years. When the film makers decided to use it, they discovered the dead body of the owner of the house inside, having been murdered. Even more gruesome is that the body was actually used as a prop in the making of the film!!!! Hey, you gotta save as much money as you can when making a cheap 80's slasher film. There just wasn't much room in the budget for props, I guess. This movie was is every video store when I was young, but finding it these days is a little difficult, but well worth the effort.
This is a great cult classic from the late 60's that has been on a steady rise to fame over the past few years, mostly due to a decently clear print of the original 16 mm transfer being released on DVD about four years ago. It's a great campy little flick that is pretty evenly split into half comedy and half horror. The legendary Lon Chaney Jr. plays chauffeur to a family of inbred weirdos called the Merrye Family. The movie begins with an introduction by a family member from the non-inbred half of this clan, telling us about a disease. A disease so rare that it only affects the members of one family, the Merrye Family. The story then jumps back a few years when an innocent postal delivery man gets hacked to pieces by a teenage looking girl that thinks she's a spider and that this here mailman is a nice juicy fly. None of this really bothers their caretaker, the families chauffeur Bruno (Chaney), he cleans the mess and carries on with his daily duties. It appears that there is just Bruno, Virginia (spidergirl), Elisabeth (a boring extra) and Ralph (a young and rather disturbing Sid Haig). All have a disease brought on by massive inbreeding that causes them to slowly degenerate into childlike and even cannibalistic behavior. There seem to be some missing relatives that aren't necessarily accounted for... yet. Anyway, a couple of greedy members of the non-inbred side of the family have come to run them out of the rather large house they live in and sell it for their own greedy gain. To make them even more irritating, they've brought their own lawyer with them. They barge in and start giving orders and demanding to stay in the house. Well, this doesn't sit well with the three retards that Bruno is caring for, so they start killing off their stuck-up family. Virginia (played by Jill Banner, an actually quite beautiful actress that was dating Marlon Brando when she was accidentally killed in a car crash a few years after this movie) is the scene stealer in this film. She not only acts like a spider, she also has pet spiders, eats spiders, and likes to throw nets on people, calling them beautiful bugs and then eating them. Which ironically leads to the original title of this film... "Cannibal Orgy". I wonder what Lon thought of that title. Soon we learn that the missing "Dad" (I must use quotes for this family because with inbreeding, you never really know who's who) is a corpse in one of the upstairs bedrooms and the rest of the fam are in the cellar (a creepy bunch of googly eyed, hairy faced nuts). More people are sure to come looking when they discover the others missing, so Bruno decides to end this chaos here and now. He lights up some dynamite and blows himself and the Merrye Family to bits. Jump forward again to the dork reading the book that apparently catalogues this incest disease that has plagued the "other" side of his family. In walks his "weird from the get go" daughter. She looks like one of the Children of the Corn, so immediately you know that something's up. She asks to go play outside and is instantly entranced by a tree spider. I guess the moral of the story is that if you are descended from a completely inbred family, you're gonna hit a few bumps down the road when having kids.
LSD + Rabies + Satanic hippies + deplorable acting = I Drink Your Blood. Filmed in 1970, it earned the title of the first film to be given an X rating based on violence alone. Thankfully, it has now been released uncut on DVD, so now everyone can enjoy this piece of cinematic shit. A gang of Satanic hippies are traveling around in a van (going... somewhere?). They break down in a town with a population of like 12 people. Horace Bones, the extremely eccentric leader of this gang of total acid heads that worship Satan and vow to die and kill for Him, blah, blah, blah. No one except Horace really takes this crap seriously, most of the members are a (somewhat) normal band of misfits that are basically decent people who just like to trip out. Anyway, a young girl accidentally sees them performing a ritual sacrifice of an unfortunately real chicken (hope they ate it afterward) and screams and runs. They catch up to her and attack her. She stumbles home and Grampa vows to get revenge on these hooligans that have moved into this vacant town in a run down hotel full of "yummy" rats (Don't ask, they look frighteningly real too). A slightly younger version of John Boy Walton is part of the family of the attacked girl and beats Gramps to the punch by offering the satanic hippies some meat pies that he has laced with Rabies that he got from a mad dog he had killed earlier. All the hippies start to get sick and foam at the mouth. Unfortunately, It looks like they just sprayed whipped cream on their mouths, making them appear totally unscary and instead they looked like rejects from those "Got Milk?" commercials. The extremely diminutive population of this desolate town band together and shoot all the hippies. It's a little gory here and there... a pregnant woman stabs herself in the belly, a man is beheaded, some guts spill from here and there, nothing my readers won't enjoy. All the hippies are killed off in variously cheap ways. The acting is truly a spectacle, it's so bad that I absolutely must include this in the comedy section of Cultarama, absolutely had no choice. There's a plethora of weirder than weird characters in this film. I love the title, but the sequel title is even better, aptly named "I Eat Your Skin" I highly recommend both films, their what true cult is all about.
On the planet Pluton, a nuisance creature disposal unit vaporizes unwanted creatures and shoots them into space. Unfortunately, one of the discarded aliens has landed on Earth. More precisely, the Putterman families new satellite dish. The Putterman family is weird enough without extraterrestrial influence. Stanley and Raquel Putterman are sexual swingers and their entire house is designed to look like a porno palace. Suzy Putterman is a teenage Cyndi Lauper clone, complete with multi-colored hair and makeup that could scare a clown. Grampa Putterman is a military obsessed peddler of lizard tail jerky that lives in a fallout shelter in the basement. 12 year old Sherman Putterman is like the only halfway normal member of the family. The new satellite dish doesn't seem to be working very well, at least until the space creature lands in it. Then miraculously it works, with the exception of two channels. One just shows a googly eyed slimy alien and the other channel is a different looking alien that seems to be pleading with humankind over something. Armed with a remote the size of a small car, the Puttermans explore the wonders of satellite TV. Mom and Dad go out clubbing, Suzy has a punked out date from hell aptly named OD, leaving Gramps and Sherman alone for the evening. Soon lightening and tentacles come out of the TV and eats Gramps. Mom and Dad come home with another couple to have sex, Sherman complains about a monster and Mom gets mad about him disturbing their orgy and throws him in the fallout shelter. He calls police, they of course don't believe him. So he calls the only person that might believe him. An Elvira wannabe named Medusa, that has her own horror show on TV. She doesn't believe him either. Meanwhile the monster has eaten the entire orgy. Suzy and OD come home from their date and find the monster and thinks he's kinda cute. They at first treat him like a pet, then decide to exploit him on TV, so they call Medusa and see if she's interested in a real monster for her show. She scoffs at first, then says that she "might" come over. Unfortunately, the monster gets spooked when he sees the other alien on TV and eats OD's head (no big loss there). Armed with machine guns and grenades, Suzy and Sherman decide to try and kill the monster who is sitting in the indoor pool watching satellite TV. They throw the monstrous (pardon the pun) remote into the pool in an attempt to fry him. The other alien comes through the TV and apologizes for the inconvenience of having unknowingly transported someone's unruly pet into space, specifically into their satellite dish. Suzy and Sherman tell him about how the monster has eaten their parents. The "good" alien says that their parents DNA can be extracted from the monster upon capture, unfortunately they'll have to live in specialized aquariums from now on. He vows to help them in any way he can. Medusa shows up and sees the alien with a raygun pointed at two kids. She assumes it's an attacker and smashes his space helmet, causing his head to explode from the pressure. With good alien out of the way, the monster proceeds to consume everyone that's left alive. The last scene is a half Medusa/half monster telling her chauffeur to "C'mon C'mon C'mon, I'm in a hurry" (on the show, she sounds sexy and sultry, but in real life she talks like a Jewish harpy). Everybody dies and the monster escapes. Perfect ending to a less than perfect movie. This film doesn't have much in the way of good acting or sharp humor, but makes up for it with cheesy slapstick jokes and situations. Worth a watch, just to see all the laughable eighties cliche's.
This is probably one of Vincent Price's best and most memorable performances. He plays Frederick Loren, a man with money, a gorgeous wife, is very witty and eccentric and steals the show in every scene in which he is featured. His drop dead (pardon the pun) wife Annabelle (played by the fabulous Carol Ohmart) is every bit as eccentric as her husband. They actually seem to have fun in trying to kill each other. She poisons him, he tries to kill her with a champaign cork, y'know the typical richer than rich husband and wife shenanigans. Anyway, they decide to throw a haunted house party, so Frederick collects a wide variety of five or six people, a cross section of sorts, consisting of Doctor to Typist and from Drunk to Jet Pilot. They have only one thing in common... they all need money. Apparently just for fun, he sweetens the deal by offering anyone who stays all night a hefty prize of $10,000. They are given the option to leave before the caretakers leave for the night, but due to the caretakers mysteriously leaving early, everyone becomes a prisoner in a house with steel bars on the windows, no electricity, no phone, and a door that locks like a vault. The owner of the house is one of the party guests, a staggering drunk/tour guide named Watson Pritchard. He pretty much sets the scene by describing the murders in the house and the violent ghosts that now reside there. All deaths in the house are strange and unusual. One owner of the house was an experimenter with wines, but his bitchy wife thought it was no good, so he filled the wine vat with acid and threw her in. One of the guests, a screaming panicky mess named Nora Manning is being driven to the point of absolute hysteria by strange occurrences. She's warned by Annabelle Loren to watch her back because she's in danger, she is choked by an unknown person in the dark, and a bloody head appears in her suitcase. Due to the safety factor, all guests are given guns as party favors (absolutely brilliant idea). A few hours into the night, Annabelle Loren is found hung by a rope over the staircase. It's at first presumed a suicide, but since there is nothing she could have climbed up on and jumped, it's deduced that it was murder. Clearly being the only one with a motive, Frederick is instantly accused, yet it doesn't truly seem to bother him much. After seeing a very creepy ghostly appearance of Annabelle in Nora's window, Nora freaks and runs. In fact, Nora does an awful lot of screaming and freaking out so be prepared for a girl with a glass shattering scream in this film. While Annabelle is lying in state in one of the bedrooms, the Doctor walks in and starts talking to her as if she were alive. Soon Annabelle sits up and says "Get me out of this damned hanging harness". We soon learn that Doctor Trent and Annabelle Loren have been having a torrid affair and are planning to kill her husband Frederick before he kills her (she is his fourth wife, all of which turned up dead of mysterious undetermined causes). The plot is to frighten Nora badly enough and to make her believe that Mr. Loren has it in for her. It works, she shoots him the very next time she sees him, doing their dirty work for them. Upon inspecting the scene to see if their little murder plot worked, Doctor Trent is tossed by somebody into the acid vat. When Annabelle hears the shot from the basement, she goes to see how it went. Soon a skeleton emerges from the acid vat, speaking in Frederick's voice he vows to kill her and take her with him. Scared shitless, she stumbles and falls into the wine vat of acid. Soon Frederick comes out from behind a door, revealing the skeleton to be a marionette puppet. He simply says to himself "Little did you two know that when you entered this game of murder, that I was playing too." When this movie premiered in theaters, a lighted skeleton would swoop over the audience when the skeleton in the movie is trying to kill Annabelle. Strangely, though the inside of the house has the perfect haunted house feel, the outside shots of the house reveal a very non-threatening, very modern geometric design. Oh well, the movie worked anyway. A true classic.
You'll probably find this movie in the horror section of your local video store, but that doesn't mean you're gonna get any screams out of it. Made in 1972 with a very young Sam Elliot (almost unrecognizable without his handle bar mustache) and an equally young (pre-cosmetic surgery disaster) Joan Van Ark, playing her normal bitchy self. The movie starts out with a very ominous feel, with young photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliot) taking pictures of the tremendous amount of toxic waste that's being dumped into the nearby swamp. Due to a boating accident where Smith's canoe is almost run over by a speedboat, Smith is taken aboard the other boat. Apologies all around for nearly killing him, the people in the speedboat invite Smith to their island mansion where their cantankerous grandfather is having a (very dull) birthday party. Grandpa hates everything, especially frogs. Therefore he poisons the whole swamp, hoping to rid himself of their endless croaking. The theme of toxic waste turning frogs into killers never really happens, instead people are bitten by poisonous snakes, eaten by crabs, etc. There's even a scorpion or two (technically a goof, because scorpions don't like aquatic environments like swamps). It's strange, I never thought of frogs being all that scary or malevolent. They don't bite, they don't sting, and if you pick one up, the worst that could happen is it would pee on you. Anyway, as the story goes, Grandpa's bratty kids and dingbat wife are killed off by something in the swamps (always snakes, leeches, spiders, etc, never the frogs). Despite the death count, Grandpa is determined to have his birthday celebration, even with the frogs jumping in and out of his birthday cake, which is by the way, the only gross or disturbing scene in the film. Smith, a few kids, and a blonde hottie manage to make their way out of the swamp and to the road. A lady motorist with her kid stops to give them a ride, even though Smith is carrying a huge rifle (smart move, Mom). Aside from common sense blunders, there's also enough movie goofs to qualify as an Ed Wood production. Day turns to night and back again many times in one scene as it switches from the cheap stock footage of swamp critters to the actors reaction to the cheap stock footage of swamp critters. Many of the frogs that "jump" into the scene land on their backs, letting us know that the frogs were actually thrown into the scene. Supposedly dead bodies are clearly shown to be breathing, etc, etc. In the end, Gramps is "attacked" by frogs that manage to get into the house. His death isn't shown and I suppose he has a heart attack, since frogs are harmless. No scares, no chills, just lots of unintentional humor. A funny side note to this movie is that most of the 500 frogs used in the film escaped during production. It also has a great tagline, "Today the pond, tomorrow the world!!".
This was one of the more clever slasher movies of the mid-80's in the fact that it very effectively psyches you out and truly lives up to it's title with one of the greatest endings ever made. The story goes something like this... Muffy St.John ("Valley Girl" actress Deborah Foreman) is a popular and somewhat rich and eccentric college student who has invited eight friends to come and enjoy spring break at her newly inherited island estate. Being that it's April Fool Day, the jokes are aplenty. It starts when two idiots fake a knife stabbing accident while on the ferry to the estate and a few people have to dive into the water to save him. Everybody has a chuckle, but when one of the men that jumped into the water is accidentally crushed between the ferry and the dock, the hilarity is instantly turned to panic and remorse. He's rushed to a hospital, which leaves everyone on edge because he really looks like he ain't gonna make it. Muffy greets everyone and tries to lighten the mood with the commencement of their spring break festivities. Continuing with the April Fool's Day tomfoolery in a much calmer fashion, the jokes include endless dribble glasses, exploding cigars and a trick chair that flips you backwards when you sit in it. After the party when people start retiring for the night, they all find strange things in their rooms. Drug paraphernalia, bondage equipment, newspaper clippings of grisly car accidents, just to name a few. The next day, Muffy is not quite the same. She's all of a sudden very shy and timid. She looks disheveled, confused, and is wearing a drab outfit and nurses shoes. She also keeps getting her close friends names wrong. To make a long story into a shorter long story, everybody starts disappearing or showing up dead. The last two people left, a romantic couple named Rob and Kit discover certain clues such as a photo of two female twins in the father's study, a letter addressing the family that "Ms. St.John" has escaped from an asylum. They know Muffy hasn't been in an asylum because she's been at Vassar College with all her friends. When they sneak back into the house through the basement, they notice height measurement marks on the wall, like the ones used to measure a child's growth rate. Only there's two height measurements side by side, labeled Muffy and Buffy. They see a painting with the eyes cut out and real eyes staring from behind the painting. They pull the painting away only to have Muffy's severed head fall into their laps. It's now quite clear that Muffy has an insane twin sister named Buffy, who has escaped an asylum and has murdered her twin sister Muffy and assumed her identity and that she's the killer. Kit is cornered in the dining room by Buffy, brandishing a huge knife. Then, while trying to fend off Buffy's knife attacked she manages to open the dining room door and stumbles into another room filled with all her supposedly dead friends just sitting around hanging out like nothing has happened. Buffy enters the room, lifts the knife and plunges it into her hand and then retracts it, revealing a fake knife. Kit is less than amused as everyone shouts out "April Fools!". Evidently, everyone got sucked into it and was only a part of it after they had been killed off. As it turns out, Muffy has received the estate as part of her inheritance, that's true but only if she can prove that it can carry itself. She wants to turn it into a country inn, but not some ordinary "run of the mill" country inn. Instead, being one that specializes in a once in a lifetime whodunnit weekend, and she needed a rehearsal so she suckered all her friends into it. It's a totally unexpected ending because the movie has every indication of being a typical 80's slasher flick with a typically predictable ending. This has always been one of my favorite movies and it's gained quite a cult following in recent years. Truly an enjoyable 80's classic.
Pieces is a great shlocky flick from the early 80's. It's spanish and (hopefully) dubbed into english. I had seen this a long time ago and thought it was great. Then one glorious day, I managed to find it on DVD and was thrilled! The sound was much better and the dubbing is only obvious just now and then. It's been restored pretty successfully and is definitely worth seeking out. Anyway, it begins with a little boy putting together a porno puzzle of a naked lady. His mom walks in and catches him and freaks out, tearing his whole room up. Little boy grabs an ax (well, doesn't every 10 year old keep an handy?) and slaughters mom. When police arrive, they assume there was an attack and kid goes free. Fast forward a few decades. A college campus is starting to have some problems with young women being butchered to pieces by some unknown maniac. We see from the killers point of view that it's definitely the kid that long ago developed a personal relationship with his ax and even still has the porno puzzle. Only this time as the pieces of the puzzle fit together, someone comes up with some missing parts. It appears that the killer is possibly recreating this puzzle in real life. Who dunnit, you ask? Well, we're given several suspicious characters to choose from. There's Willard the grounds keeper, an ape of a man, wielding his chainsaw all over the place (the most obvious attempt at diversion possible). There's a few suspicious students at the campus, there's a weird police lieutenant, a sexy tennis player, etc, etc. No real clues are ever given and it ends up being the Dean of Students, whom you rarely see throughout the movie. As a final shocker, there's a double climax at the very end. When someone leans on it, the Dean's bookshelf slides backwards revealing his human jigsaw puzzle he's been working on. Then out of nowhere, the puzzle corpse reaches up and grabs one of the students by the crotch, yanking off his beany weenies. The movie is actually pretty good and the ending alone is worth giving it a go.
This is a cheesy little horror flick from the mid 80's that never really picked up at the box office but made a killing in the world of VHS home video. It starts out with a demonstration by mall security, showing their latest and most efficient security system ever. This new system consists of steel doors that close and don't open till morning, plus three bulletproof robots that are ridiculously over armed. They have lasers that can cut through steel and can shoot poison darts and from time to time employ some explosives as well. The demonstration ends with those famous last words... "Absolutely nothing can go wrong.". First of all, what mall has such a bad crime rate that they have to have solid steel bank doors and three murderous robots? Second of all, that line "Absolutely nothing can go wrong" pays homage to (is stolen from) the last line to a famous movie called Westworld, another film about robots going berserk. Lightening strikes the robot recharger and causes the Killbots (I mean, the Protector Series 101) to malfunction. It just so happens that on this very night, a bunch of stupid mall employees decide to have a late night party (orgy) in the furniture store. They plan to disperse before the doors lock, but the robots keep them busy and before you can dump this movie in the can, the doors close and they are locked in for the night. This pack of teens seems to be able to destroy at least two Killbots before all the kids are killed off, yet one lone survivor named Allison lives and there's still one Killbot left. A funny side note to this is that every time that a robot kills a kid, the robot says "Have a nice day." Allison has an idea, she makes a big mess in the paint shop with paint and turpentine, lures the Killbot inside and throws a flare at him, but not before saying "Have a nice day!". Another strange similarity in this film is the lead actress Kelli Maroney. She played Samantha in the movie "Night of the Comet", and in that film her dad was a Marine and had taught her to use firearms. In this film, she's a crack shot and when this is noticed, she says "My dad's a Marine." Plus, there's a cameo of Mary Woronov near the beginning of the movie. Mary Woronov also played a prominent character in Night of the Comet. One thing that kept me laughing (the only thing) throughout the film are the painfully obvious stunt doubles. Cheap wigs that bear little re
