Devil Story - 1986

 I have so many movies left to watch.  The fact that this exists and I have never heard of it...is confounding.

The immediate comparison I made in my head was to Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies.  It has been years since I saw that but in my head it's this slow hazy nonsense movie with vague zombies and basically no plot, and if that doesn't describe that movie well it certainly does describe this movie.

Some French production originally called "Once Upon a Time...the Devil", this the last movie by director Bernard Launois.  It consists of what I will guarantee you are more sounds than words and more specifically noises made by a horse instead of dialogue.

A ship crashes into a hill, a horse bucks around whinnying like mad, a mummy walks around, a undead zombie creature goes around killing people, and all these things are maybe linked, but definitely not clearly linked as our main heroine runs or hollers or fails to react at all.  Like I said, there's not even much dialogue in the movie and a lot of scenes play out with nothing said, explained, understood or communicated whatsoever.

Devil Story I guess has a cult following, in that hallowed hall of movies claimed to be the worst.  In the end, another inexplicable scene happens and it doesn't even make you blink.  This movie like no other trains you to just sorta take it in stride, blink, say uh huh, and just sorta detune yourself one more step and step outside of reality a little more.

There is value in this, its hard to define, but I do like it, and I give it about 4 stars.

Winterbeast - 1992

 There's many levels of cult film, some of which I am still discovering.

Winterbeast is some amateur as fuck, completely non-narrative Z grade bamboozle fest fucking weirdo movie that is basically not a movie at all, but rather a collection of things which are honestly not related, but pretend as if they are.

Directed by Christopher Theis, this slab of nonsense is some sorta who knows what of nondescript nothingness paired with insane wtf which will have you instantly wondering "is this a movie"?  The short and real answer is no.  I would challenge anyone who says it is.

Play the first few minutes for someone and introduce them to weirdness.  The problem is that you would not want that first 2 minutes to continue for about 75 minutes.  It would get boring, nonsensical and repetitive.  Of course, they don't exactly repeat it.  There's claymation in this movie, original music, bizarre actor moments, and even some local small town almost sightseeing nonsense?  

Basically this looks like someone was shooting their vacation footage and decided to add a horror plot.  I have rarely seen a movie where it was more obvious that within the same sequence or scene they cut away from the actor to a different actor, completely somewhere else, responding as if they were in the same scene.

 They had some ingenuity, an uncle into claymation for example.  I have no idea what this is, but I will say I kinda liked it.  I give it 3 stars.

The Stranger - 1987

 One puts on the blandly named movie The Stranger with hopes - after all it is basically described as a slasher adjacent mystery movie - and then one gets bogged down in irrelevant dialogue.

Also side note the ENTIRE move I was saying to myself "that's Bonnie Bedelia" and then I would convince myself it isn't.  It IS Bonnie!  Bedelia stars in this shit.

This is possibly also one of the critical few movies where the plot revolves around a song someone remembers?  I mean really, there's a few of these and they are mostly bad - this one doesn't buck the trend.  Bonnie has these phantom memories revolving around an ad jingle from the sound of it and she has vague memories about a murder and I dunno what the fuck else happens in this movie.

The detective character is good and I liked him.  The rest of this....I mean...  One star is generous.

Tokyo Joe - 1949

 I have been on a mostly unreviewed Bogart fest.  I watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and rewatched The African Queen as well.  Good movies!

Tokyo Joe I put on without a second thought, feeling kinda sick and high on edibles while I recovered from tonsil surgery.  Humphrey Bogart stars in this film noir sorta drama, and I had no idea what to expect.

What I could never have predicted was how unintentionally hlarious moments of this were, as well as how bizarrely influential to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom!  Seriously, what a strange duo of things for this movie to pull out of it's ass, but I mean seriously!  

First we meet Bogart's daughter he didn't know existed.  The uber-wooden, awfully scripted, overacted part is pure comic gold.  The little girl never blinks and delivers hyper adult, unrealistic dialogue as she doesn't move and inch and bores a hole directly into Bogey's face.  Tried to find a quote of hers from the IMDb page but nothing doing, take my goddamn word for it brah.

Then we have the place sequence where first off all I notice Bogey is dressed like Indiana Jones and then the sequence in the plane, while not being from an action movie, really reminded me of the sequence in Loa Che's airplane at the beginning of Temple.

I scoured IMDb and Wikipedia, no work on those about the connection to Indiana Jones.  What a bizarre thing though!  I mean it's not a 1:1 but watch those movies and tell me they're not loosely connected.

This is a weird one and one that sticks out.  Sometimes that's all it takes!  I give it 4 stars.

Sleepstalker - 1989

 The first movie about the fairy tale character of the Sandman came out in 1933, the most recent in 2017.  Obviously a character of some status, this little known horror movie also is sorta about the character.  Sorta.

Sleepstalker reminds me of those 3-4 middle Hellraiser movies that were barely about Pinhead and instead some stupid other story with Pinhead shoved in there in the end with 4 lines of dialogue.  It's also about the level of quality of those movies.

We begin with Griffin's family being murdered and the killer bing put on death row.  We get a priest who comes to the man on death row and gives him the ability to come back as living sand, which he obviously uses and comes back to murder some more.  Along the way some cops get  involved or whatever and some mild weird "scares" happen.

This is one that took me a long time to get through.  It moves at a glacial pace and is an hour 45 minutes which is probably about 45 minutes too long for what it is trying to do and how thin the storyline is.  Character have bad dialogue, stand around, plan things, discuss things, have zero chemistry or charisma.  It's a fucking dull, dull movie.

Then we eventually get to the priest who unveils what we already know, and cablam, final confrontation.  I dunno.  This movie is not good.  I'll give it like half a star. The effects are good, the few times they happen. It might deserve higher.  But ya know.