Poseidon Rex - 2013

I had my SyFy friend over this last weekend again.  Please see my reviews of Killer Bees and Axe Giant.  I couldn't tell you how and why we ever decided to watch SyFy original movies .  This movie, Poseidon Rex, wasn't made by SyFy, but it felt so much like it that it's gonna get lumped into that group.  To make matters even worse, this was directed by the guy that did the Schwarzenegger film Commando.  From a great, classic 80's action flick to fucking CGI fest SyFy BS.  Tragic.

In case that wasn't clear, this movie is a CGI fest of BS and bad acting.  The actors in this are a whole new level of horrendous.  I wondered if they had come from porn backgrounds, but no, somehow they hadn't.  Actually, the lead actress who I hated the most was a completely fake looking bleached blonde who used to be a cheerleader for the NFL.

Plot I guess.... So, you got some divers who accidentally release a dinosaur that was trapped in the bottom of the ocean.  That's about it.  It's an aquatic T-Rex basically, they explain later that it was a very late dinosaur that was part of the bridge in the gap between reptile and dinosaur.  Like it matters?  No, of course it doesn't goddamn matter, and you'll be wondering how much of this shitfest is left once you're ten minutes in.

I watched Gantz.0, The Condemned 2, and this flick with my buddy.  This one was the worst by far.  The Condemned 2 was just a very average action flick, nothing much to say about it.  Gantz.0 was badly dubbed and never explained jack shit about what was going on, but the monsters were awesome.  This one, well, I don't have much to say about it either, but it is more in line with the blog I guess....?

Anyways.  This one hurts.  It has no inherent entertainment value.  It's a overly long, really poorly CG-ed giant T. Rex movie, and the only thing it made me question was how in the world I used to watch these types of things.  Now that I have been watching more 60s, 70s, and especially 80s movies, I feel like the intentionally bad movies that come out around now are waaaaaay worse.  I'd take one of those awful movies off the Sci Fi Invasion boxset literally any day over this fucking bullshit.  It's not even so bad it's good.  I was tired, I was also drunk, but I still feel like I was aware enough to see that this was below Z grade entertainment.  Zero stars.

Amityville: The Evil Escapes - 1989

Final Fantasy 10 has some long ass cut scenes.  What's worse, there's a lot of them.  I'm not made for these types of games where you can't skip the cinemas.  I put on From Genesis to Revelations, I mute the TV since I'm playing it on PS2, and every time there's a cut scene, I fucking take to the internet.  It was my plan to write this review during cut scenes, that's why I mention this.

Amityville 4.  I've seen some of these, I don't remember which ones.  I watched maybe two of them a few years ago in what was I guess a mini Amityville marathon.  This one, I didn't see so this doesn't count as a rewatch or anything.  At this point in the series, it had already gone gimmicky, since part 3 was the 3D one.  It was never a popular series anyways, pretty much for die hard fans only.  Haunted house movies aren't that interesting, it's one of those life facts.

So for the big #4, they pulled out all the stops by....making it be a TV movie.  Yeah, they were admitting this was in the fucking barrel, sitting on the bottom of it, by putting this shit show on TV only, and also having the main villain presence be a lamp.  Yes, you heard that, an evil lamp was the best they could come up with I guess, and it's you know, not that cool?  How could it be, amiright?

Generic movie family #389 or whatever we're up to at this point is living in bliss until they receive an evil looking lamp as a joke gift from their grandmother's friend.  The lamp is clearly evil, because soon as it arrives the daughter character Jessica starts seeing visions of her dead father.  Soon enough, bad shit starts happening in the house, in form of people getting injured and killed.

It's your average C grade build in a made for TV movie.  There is exactly one project that was NOT made for TV in the entire filmography of director Sandor Stern.  That would be the 80's flick Pin which I have been wanting to see for a while, and I still will.  It's just funny (to me) that he was only in the realm of TV his entire IMDb life.  Without a project for over 15 years, it's clear that his mark (on TV) has been made, and his time is over.

The flick plays out like the tired 4th installment that was made for TV that it is, that's why I dwell so much on these little facts I've been spouting out.  The highlights are the idiotic people getting hurt, it's definitely too light on the kills for it to be fun though.  Most of the time, you're watching little girl Jessica being a brat, the mother character getting frustrated with everyday life, and the grandma character watching her life turn to shit.  All that is kind of fun in a way, but it doesn't keep us gorehounds or even those looking for a sub-par demon movie happy.

So the evil escapes in the form of a lamp?  And the evil's big plan is to kill off this family, but will apparently be stopped by destruction of said lamp?  Sorry, but that's just kind of weak.  Also, why the fuck is the evil in the form of a lamp anyway?  I was reminded a bit of the evil tree from that one short in that horror serial I saw, but other than that brief moment of reflection, this was just boring.  And not only because I was in a bad mood.  I give it a 1.5 star rating I guess.

Starship Invasions - 1977

11 years before he scored a favorite for me by directing The Brain, Ed Hunt was directing this sci fi almost comedy film, which when I first saw the trailer for it, I thought was a Star Wars ripoff like so many others.  It's not really, and I rescind my earlier assumption that it was.  It's actually, like I said, an almost comedy about aliens screwing things up on Earth.

Robert Vaughn plays Allen Duncan, a ufologist and believer in aliens.  Well, let's actually say he's a scientist and finds aliens to be fascinating, but is on the fence about whether he believes in them or not.  He gets a call from a grizzled old farmhand who claims to have been abducted by them.  He then goes on national TV and informs the world he believes that the Earth is being visited by aliens.  That's when the calls start coming in to him from all sorts who claim similar experiences.

Aliens are real in this, in fact, there's many different kinds.  The main evil alien is played by horror regular Christopher Lee.

Lee, who has never looked more dignified.

Christopher Lee plays the alien Ramses, who leads a group of telepathic tights-clad aliens in a mission to take over Earth because their planet is dying.  He is the one that's been abducting Earthlings, including the farmhand mentioned earlier.  They go to a secret alien hideout at the bottom of the ocean, where other alien races (the good guys) maintain a presence on Earth.  It's explicitly said that Earth is protected by the good guys, so pretty soon Ramses and his aliens start to bring the fight to the good aliens.

This movie wasn't what I thought it'd be about.  It's actually kind of cool to have two alien species warring over Earth, it reminds me a bit of the plot behind The Day Time Ended.  I was expecting it to be more human focused I guess.  Humans are involved, soon enough.  The good aliens need help fighting the baddies and they abduct Allen Duncan and his mathematician friend.  Meanwhile, the bad aliens (these alien races coulda had names, I don't fuckin remember) have a ship in orbit around Earth that's shooting a ray at Earth that makes people kill themselves.

It's a really cool sequence when the humans are killing themselves, and it's also a cool idea to have the aliens fighting each other all over outer space.  Idea sounds better than execution, however, and I'm not gonna curb stomp this movie, but something about it just wasn't all that interesting.  It's got the actors, it's got the ideas, but somehow it all felt very low-key, slightly bland, and like nothing was really happening in the flick itself.  Hard to describe I guess, maybe it was just me.

I'll give a middle of the road 2.5, and I'm a bit less excited to see Ed Hunt's other movies.  It's kinda cool though that he got to work some real actors at least once in his pretty short career.  

Blood Beat - 1983

Thus we come to another edition of "watched at work".  I will first apologize for being away for a little while there.  Celebrating 31 years old as of March 30th, I went camping.  I did take with me a little iPad like device with tons of bad movies on it, however the piece of shit had no battery power and I didn't get to watch a single one.

Blood Beat is an extremely obscure horror film from 1983.  It's in the realm of holiday movies, though I couldn't tell you why they decided to have this be set around Christmas time.  It's anyone's guess, they basically just needed any reason to have a bunch of older kids coming home to their parents, and I guess Christmas was a good excuse as any.

The title comes up and immediately you'll notice the awesome soundtrack.  Done by the director and his brother, the music in this movie is fucking great.  It's loopy, but also really good at times, and it's definitely 80's synth weirdness in it's full glory.  Like I said, kids are coming home for Christmas.  Ted and his girlfriend Sarah come to Ted's house, and Ted's mom immediately notices something weird about Sarah.   Ted's mom, Cathy, is not so normal herself.  It seems she goes into regular trances, paints bizarre pictures, and might be psychic.

Soon Sarah is afraid of Cathy, Ted's caught in the middle, people around the area are starting to die, and in the meantime Sarah finds an old samurai outfit near her bed.  That's when things turn ugly.  There's a few confrontations which boils to a head in an awkward family living room scene.  Also, some things are filmed in ways where you...can't quite tell what's going on.  It is accompanied well with dialogue that fades in and out and isn't mastered well with the music.  Scenes you can't see, words you can't hear!

It is easy to follow though, and soon there's a samurai warrior in the house, hunting everyone.  The samurai is linked to Sarah, and more specifically to Sarah's sex drive.  Cathy is intent on painting, and shuts all her family out.  Innocent family members Gary, Ted, Paul and Christie are all seemingly at the mercy of this samurai.  About 20 minutes before the end, they randomly up Cathy's powers as well.  Soon enough she has glowing hands, and it also turns out her kids have psychic power.  Well, two of her kids do.  Her son Ted doesn't seem to have them.

If the plot sounds vaguely confusing, that would be because it is.  It's not terrible, it's just that there isn't explanation of anything.  And I mean ever.  There is literally never anything explained in this movie.  Why is Sarah controlling a samurai?  How is she linked to the samurai?  Spoilers I guess, we do gather the Cathy and Sarah are related, possibly linked through stock footage of World War 2 (?) and then Sarah kills Cathy.

I find the making of the movie to be an interesting untold story.  The sole feature of director Fabrice Zaphiratos, he was a French director filming in Wisconsin, about a killer Japanese samurai.  There simply must be a story here, but who knows what that story is.  I wonder if any other French directors did any horror movies in Wisconsin in the 80s?  Good question, right?

Although I guess it does explain why a rural Wisconsin home has a "France" poster.

It was what I would describe as "oddly watchable".  It's the kind of movie that moves quickly enough and has enough weird qualities to make you keep watching.  The ending is a cluster-fuck, but that's the only let down.  All in all, it's a weird romp in definite riff fodder, and would be a fantastic weed film.  3 stars.