Return of the Living Dead - 1985

Dan O'Bannon wrote the movie Alien along with Ronald Shusett.  It's just a fact, that's all.  O'Bannon didn't write a whole lot of other movies, surprisingly, and directed even less.  He has 2 movie credits to his name as a director, this movie and Shatterbrain.  This movie is actually almost a direct sequel to Night of the Living Dead in multiple ways.

Wikipedia tells me that they let George Romero keep the right to make sequels if they didn't use those words "Living Dead" and they would keep those words for themselves.  They being whatever company was involved.  So George made Day of the Dead etc, and then this movie was keeping the Living Dead name, hence Return of the Living Dead.  And this is a sequel....in the sort of way where it's twisted from concept, re-imagined....sort of the bastard twin brother of that classic horror film.

This movie is a true horror comedy.  It pushes the envelope in every way, and in my opinion completely defined horror comedies as they are now.  Just as Night of the Living Dead defined zombie movies, this movie is just as influential and I truly wish that more movies had been made with this type of zombie.  These zombies are unstoppable in every sense of the word, they are smart, they are fast, use weapons, and they want to eat your brains.  Yes, this movie started the whole thing that zombies want to eat brains.  I remember when I was a kid pretending zombies were around, we were quoting this movie even though we didn't know it when we made the zombies say "Brains!"

It's completely over the top in every way.  The rot of the zombies, the extreme and excessive violence, the ample full nudity, the mix of classic actors and the thug like punks as main characters.  O'Bannon showed in Alien and in Dark Star that he really could write well for humans.  He knew how to make humans appear to be real, and he could exploit their weirdness, their eccentricity, their base desires.  He also knew how to present situations which force people to react.  It's a great gift to be able to imagine places, situations, that make people react in specific ways.

The best thing about this movie, in it's over the top celebration of everything insane is that it feels so real still.  The movie doesn't feel like a comedy horror.  It feels like just some awesome flick that you could see time and time again.  It feels like the late night, sleeper cult classic that is not self aware, that didn't care about it's long term impact, that was just making fun for the sake of fun.  It never takes itself seriously for a second, and yet is extremely well shot, acted, detailed, high budget, and smart.  It's extremely well balanced.  This is the type of movie you tell people about, that you buy, that you go to a theater to see on Friday night with a crowd.

Enough about my love for this.  I'm not doing a plot synopsis either.  Just leave it to say this is the definition of a 5 star horror comedy, and it is made all the better by Linnea Quigley.

Ghosthouse - 1988

When Evil Dead came out in Europe it was titled "The House" or "La Casa".  The reason I mention this is that then of course Evil Dead II was titled The House II, and then when a few movies there tried to claim they were of the same bloodline they called themselves House!  So there is La Casa 3 through 7, and they are called this because they are all claiming they are part of the bloodline of Evil Dead.  And this movie is La Casa 3.

Obviously, this movie is nothing like Evil Dead besides being a horror movie and having some people that come back from the dead, so this is just like the Zombi series, the Demons series, etc.  Just another "series" made up of unrelated movies, which also connects to what I was saying about the "Don't" series.

Ghosthouse was directed by Black Demons and Nightmare City director Umberto Lenzi.  I kinda feel like this movie goes back to my good ol' days of watching and reviewing Italian trash-o ripoffs.  It's a good feeling.  And this movie did remind me a lot of Demons II specifically.  I don't know why per say, it does have similar feel to it though.  Well produced, decently budgeted yet still a cheap and fast movie.  The action in the movie is very nicely paced, weird enough to please both child and adult, and even a tiny bit creepy.

It's certainly not flawless, in the end of this movie it won't leave a lasting impression or anything.  But what it is, is just a fun little flick.  No complexity here.  It's like a cheap American beer.  You can rip it apart for it's lack of distinction and low production value, or you can just enjoy its simplicity and turn your brain off.  Just relax bro, don't get all bothered.

Basically you just have a killer doll movie, kind of.  There's a mansion that a bunch of random teens are exploring, and there's a creepy little girl in the basement that has an evil clown doll.  The doll is not even supposed to be a mystery, the thing has a fucking row of jagged shark teeth and looks like a pissed off taxi driver.

The clown causes all sorts of mishaps and deaths, and the deaths here are adequate.  Nothing to really pop out at you or to make you say "cool".  This movie was pretty interesting in a few ways, at least the pacing was good and the music was good.  The acting was passable and the real props and effects all were average in appearance.  I'd say this one is genuinely pretty good at times, it's just that like I said, it is the American macro-brew of movies.  But hell dude, at my BBQ I had last weekend a friend showed up with a 12 pack of Budweiser, and two of them later I wasn't complaining (for once).

This movie would be an excellent choice to get super stoned during, drinking perhaps some fine wine.  It's also great riff material, Bill Mike and Kevin tore it apart on Rifftrax, in what I'd say is their funniest video yet.  It's on Hulu, check it out.

Not a ton more to say about it, let's wrap the review with 3 stars.

Night of the Demon - 1980

Bigfoot vision.  

As you can see, they see delicious Smucker's Strawberry Preserves everywhere they look.

So in keeping with weird movies I added a long time ago to my Amazon instant queue I watched Night of the Demon.  I had actually been looking for the cult horror film Night of the Demons, to add that to my queue, but stumbled on this and this was a Bigfoot movie, so of course I added it.  But I truly had no idea what I was getting into with this one.

This one starts in the classic way:  a bunch of people sitting around a campfire telling stories.  Ah, how original.  Of course once they begin to talk we are taken there, shown the things they discuss - Bigfoot in this case, as he preys on backwoods people and kills them.  But he doesn't just show up and clobber a dude and move on, no!  He is fucking savage, he mutilates the fuck outta people, he even rips off some guy's penis!  That scene in particular got this film in quite some trouble, rightfully so in my opinion since they show more than you'd probably care to see.

The scenes in this movie are completely outrageous.  Called a "video nasty" and censored by multiple places, this insane movie will either redefine a bad movie for you, or it will make you laugh out loud with it's sheer preposterous nature.  How it exists despite everything it did wrong, poorly, and with absence of any brainpower at all, is still a mystery.  Bigfoot rapes a girl, he uses weapons, he looks like some guy in a hairy body suit....  In one scene he rips out a guy's guts (they used real animal guts and it actually looks pretty good) but then he just flails them around here and there, completely ignoring some other dude who's trying to get the jump on him!  With all the rules about Bigfoot they were breaking, I half expected him to have dialogue, or smoke a cigarette, or something else retarded like that!

And what the FUCK was with the music in this movie?!  Now, having no skill in music aside, if you are going to DIY the soundtrack to your movie, just do it minimal at least.  Don't go way off the deep end with something because it "sounds weird".  I'd be willing to lay down solid cash that's why they did the soundtrack in the way they did.  It sounded weird.  They clearly just had a weird synthesizer hooked into their electric piano, and just sat there making shit up to go along with the movie.  No score I've heard is this random, jilted, uneven, and horrendous.

But oh my god is this film memorable, insane, fun, and trashy!  It's like a day old fast food cheeseburger you find wedged next to the milk jug in your fridge.  Crushed, a little soggy, gross and stale, but still got that delicious greasy salty fattiness you love.  You microwave that sucka for like a minute, sit back with a tall boy of something cheap and gross like Schlitz, and you wolf that burger down.  Part of it is still cold, part of it is too hot....you forgot to take off the lettuce so now the lettuce is warm....the bun got soggier since you microwaved it....but FUCK if that ain't like the best burger ever.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have if I'd seen it all in one sitting, while high and drunk and with friends.  This one is definitely a party movie.  If you're alone like I am, then you're a loser like I am.  Go out, see the world.  Talk to girls.  Get a life.  Go to school.  Or, watch Night of the Demon alone on a Thursday while you're at work.

I have to say that Amazon Instant Play usually has decent quality, it is not normally the DVD quality, but then I can't really say because I haven't watched movies on that website that are well known or even on DVD.  But the quality here on this movie was awful (as in awesome).  It was clearly, CLEARLY copied from some battered old VHS, it had tracking and vertical hold problems, it was grainy and shitty quality, the audio had dilapidated quite a bit....all in all these sort of things just make me like the movie more, but this is fair warning to anyone not like me.

For being relentlessly trashy, the ultimate bad movie night movie, and something that I'm super surprised isn't a huge cult hit in line with Birdemic and shit for "worst movie ever" I give it a near perfect rating.

Nasty Scale: 5/10

Hands of Steel - 1986

AKA Fists of Steel, Atomic Cyborg, and Vendetta from the Future....

Another weird Terminator rip off, and, damn am I like the only one that didn't know there were this many Terminator rip offs?  It seems like all the sudden I'm tripping over these things left and right.  This is much more in line of a Terminator rip off than Shocking Dark, since that was mostly an Aliens rip off anyway.  Directed by Italian horror-meister Sergio Martino, who did Torso and some other 70's-80's Italian horror flicks.

This movie has that classic low-rent feel to it.  It seems like the sort of a thing that children would love.  I think I would have loved this movie had I grown up with it.  In the end as I finished it last night, I actually was sad I hadn't paid it more attention.  I put this on last night, despite the fact I have like a dozen other movies I shoulda been watching instead, and I was really tired.  I just wanted something comforting and stupid, and so I pulled out my trusty Sci-Fi Invasion boxset and slammed a DVD into the player.  No drinking, no smoking, just tired ol' me sitting there with a bread bowl of chicken tortilla soup and my loving cat.

I was not equipped to handle this movie though, and for the first time in a long time I'm going to say I need to see this movie again.  This movie isn't one you want to ignore or be tired during, or to not be impaired by a substance.  You want to be high energy, feeling comedic, riffing, smoking, making out with a hot chick, just doing anything during.  Some movies, especially those old black and white monster flicks, are just made for the exact night I provided in that scenario:  tired, hungry, just-want-to-not-care type situation.

The thing is the plot is actually kind of important, and my brain was just not turned on enough to watch it.  Did I mention it was like 10:00, I had gotten like no sleep the night before, had been up since 6am, and was physically worn out from doing laundry all night?  Need to know info.  Complete the picture in your head.  Needless details aside, I still did enjoy this movie - this movie is difficult to NOT enjoy.  What's better than that, is this was a movie I'd wanted to see for a long time, and I didn't even know that when I started it.

Mid way through this I Googled the movie to see what other movies the main actor Daniel Greene has been in, and I immediately recognized the poster.  Much like Def-Con 4 this movie poster sticks out and I had definitely run across it multiple times on IMDb, movie lists, blogs, etc:

I know alternate names are nothing new, but I just love it when IMDb lists the movie as something and the poster lists it as something else.  You just KNOW that's quality.  Better yet, this movie takes place in the hugely futuristic year of...1997!  1997!!  

The guy up there is Paco.  He has robotic arms.  In fact, he's 30% robot and 70% human.  I wasn't paying attention enough to tell you what else is robotic besides his arms, but maybe I'll rewatch the movie or something and revisit this blog later.  Yeah, right.  Probably not for a long time.  Paco is a mystery, he doesn't say a lot and we at first don't know too much about him.  He rolls into a hotel after escaping some guys and stays there for a little while.  While his relationship with the hotel keeper Linda grows, he gets into a conflict with a local gang, and in the meantime his old boss John Saxon tries to track him down.  

Story lines in this move along quick enough, there's a lot of characters and screen time shared, and all the actors were real and decent.  For some rip off of Terminator with an identity crisis, the effects and the story and the music especially, are all really good.  Movies like this are looked at as amateur more often than not, when truth be told everyone in this movie had long and storied careers before and after this.  They knew what they were doing.  Don't blame it's gritty amateur feel on it actually being made without skill.

Because I need to re-watch it, I'll give it 3.5 stars for now.

Hell Comes to Frogtown - 1988

Rowdy Roddy Piper passed away pretty recently, at the end of July this year.  He had battled cancer several years ago and I had actually thought he'd died in the late 2000's, but he ended up beating cancer and then dies of a heart attack...  Geez, that sucks.  Well, he will ultimately be known for his wrestling and his movies, such as the immortal They Live, but this movie too is pretty well known in terms of cult films.

It's my opinion a movie like this became well known because of, initially, it's name.  People, it is a good tactic to name your movie something that sticks out.  I mean, sometimes it doesn't mean much to name your movie something really cool, but then again, I've seen movies based entirely their name.  You have a name like Hell Comes to Frogtown, a wacky actor like Roddy Piper, and a plot that involves the post-apocalypse, you are really guaranteeing yourself a cult following.  I'm just saying, it's like a formula.  You collect a list of things that make cult, and then just check 'em off.  But also, don't be self aware.

Hell Comes to Frogtown succeeds because of what it still has:  practical effects, enough of a budget to make the practical effects look cool, a neat desert looking location, kooky characters, good ol' camp feeling to it, and no self aware mood killer.  This movie is self aware, but for some reason that didn't used to mean they would make fun of themselves.  The movies that are self aware now are poking fun at their own fucking movie - it's like fucking Charles Band shit, naming his movie Killer Bong and having the CG villain break the fourth wall and talk to the audience....that's the kinda shit that just pisses me off.

It's again post-apocalypse, which destroyed all buildings and most hints of civilization (again except the strange cars) and most men and women are sterile.  Roddy Piper plays Sam Hell, a wasteland warrior who keeps to himself and does his own thing.  The remains of the government find him and ascertain that he is in fact not sterile.  By having him impregnate the remaining fertile women, the government can have more people which will give them a stronger position in the ever ongoing wars with other nations.  A female group of government workers attaches a steel fixture around his groin, keeping him as theirs, and goes around trying to find females.

One group of females is being held captive by a race of mutated frog-people, the Frog Men, who live in the titular Frogtown.  So now it's up to Hell and the government women to rescue the fertile women from the Frog Men.

It does work, it is cult, but for me it wasn't a great movie.  It runs okay, it doesn't hurt, but it's mostly unremarkable.  It's not classic in that like "must see" kind of a way.  I'd seen it before, years ago, and I remember thinking that same thing then.  For some reason, it just didn't stick with me.  I've seen a whole lot of cult films in my day, and this might be one that I honestly don't understand.  I'm not saying it doesn't deserve to be cult....or maybe I am saying that.

I just don't know how to really say that it wasn't a great movie other than that.  Maybe I had my expectations too high.  I am not that sure why.  I'll give it 2.5 stars.

Aberration - 1997

I first became aware I'd previously seen Aberration about 4 minutes in.  These sort of things happen, especially it seems to me.  I mean, number one, I'm not going to go through Netflix and look up every movie I want to see to see if somehow I've already given it a rating, and number two, half the movies I've rated I don't fuckin remember shit about.  Creepy lizards in a cabin in the woods?  Wtf?

I must have previously seen this on Netflix.  I checked, and I have rated it there.  Hell, I could've also seen it there this time round, it's on watch instantly.  But yeah.  Whatever, the point is that I remembered having seen it before, I remembered that I had enjoyed it enough, and I decided to give it a second whirl.  And I'm still pretty glad I did.

Aberration is the type of under-the-radar kinda movie for which I started this blog.  Independent, not really high budget, but shot very well and competently handled, good acting and good effects, decent tension and atmosphere, shot on location, well paced, interesting plot that is at least semi "realistic", this movie pretty much has it all.  I'm going to have to justify it's eventual not-getting-5-stars, cause truth be told it is not a 5 star movie, but from how much I build this up in the review, you'll probably rightfully expect 5 stars.

Aberration starts with a girl on the run.  We don't know she's on the run in the first few minutes, but pretty soon she pulls out a big wad of cash and hides it under some floorboards in the cabin she's staying at, which is way up in the woods somewhere.  This movie was filmed in New Zealand, and the scenery is great.  We never see the broad scope of where they are, and that to me makes this setting feel isolated.  We see later there is a store not terribly far from the cabin, but it's one of those stores where only one woman works there, and everyone that comes in is a regular.

The woman, Amy, came to the cabin with her cat.  Pretty soon her cat is acting slightly off.  The cat food is disappearing when he's not at home, he is hissing at things, he feels uneasy at the home.  We see hints of something, but nothing is quite shown for a while.  Eventually though, evil shows it's little head - a buncha 12 inch or so long lizards with spines and sharp teeth.

The lizards in this movie are great.  They are shown just the right amount, usually are puppets, but made well and shot in a way to appear dangerous.  They are intelligent, and they are evolving.  When Amy later tells the local store owner something is eating her cat food, etc, local researched Marshall overhears this, and he knows something about it.  It turns out he knows of the lizard infestation, and he comes to her cabin to help eradicate them.  But it turns out their eggs are all over the place, and some of them are invulnerable to bullets, some of them can communicate with each other....they are in constant states of evolution.

The movie plays the lizards as the threat very well.  But it also handles the relationship between these two really well.  The dialogue is realistic, humorous, well written.  This movie keeps the danger tension and the sexual tension going for the majority of the flick.  Pamela Gidley as Amy is smart, sassy, attractive, and dangerous.  Simon Bossell as Marshall is the geeky guy who has a hard side to him, and wants to get with the hot femme fatale.  

I just realized in this photo it looks like he's checking out her breasts, which are quite nice.

Why am I not giving this movie 5 stars?  I am not asking you as a lead in to an explanation.  I'm asking myself right now.  I don't know.  I guess in the end this movie just feels too forgettable.  Like too much of the same thing we've seen before.  Because this movie has no following, it has no "reason" to be known.  I mean, it's not like I'd buy it on DVD or anything.  But shit, I wonder why, like honestly.  It's actually really good.  It has a great idea, a lot of things happen in this movie, and as a monster movie, it ranks right up there with anything.  But sadly, it has to remain at 4 stars....just cause, it's one of those reasons that's hard to explain.

Don't Look in the Basement - 1973

I'm not the first to point out there's a plethora of movies that begin with the warning/advice "Don't".  Like the recently reviewed Don't Answer the Phone, a lot of these titles were even changed after production, for some reason, to include the word "don't".  Like this movie was originally called The Forgotten, which makes more sense than Don't Look in the Basement.  In fact the director of this movie also directed a film called "Don't Open the Door"!  And he worked briefly with Larry Buchanan.  To give you an idea of what we're dealing with.

I think in a way it's kinda cool now that I think about it.  It's almost like creating a horror movie series that's not related, like related through theme only.  Plenty of horror sequels took the original idea and made a huge mess of it, keeping no plotlines or characters or anything from the first.  So why not take advantage of that?  Why not have a horror film franchise that only connection is that people are dying and they all start with the word Don't?  It's like, they could be about anything; be it supernatural, spree killers, demented pyschos - as long as it says Don't and there's a body count.  Hell, even throw one in there where it's a psychological mystery and there's only like 1 kill, as long as it still kinda fits the criteria.  It's the art of making your movie into a legacy, which since I'm talking this much about it, it kinda did!  It kinda succeeded.

If you were unaware and the internet hadn't come along, might you not assume that Don't Answer the Phone, Don't Look in the Basement, Don't Open the Door, Don't Go Near the Park, Don't Go in the House, Don't Look Now, Don't Go in the Woods....etc....are all related?  And I'm only including ones made in the 70's and one from 1981.    It's actually a neat idea, and it's sort of even implemented today by companies like The Asylum who make movies with titles close to the ones they're ripping off - Transformers becoming Transmorphers, etc.

This is your average "insane asylum" flick wherein a new nurse comes to the asylum.  She was brought there by the recently deceased Doctor Stephens, and apparently she knows absolutely nothing about the asylum itself.  The asylum has it's array of wacky weirdos:  the old lady who can't speak, the ex-judge who still thinks he's a judge, the giddy guy who plays jokes on everyone, the sex-starved nympho, the guy who thinks he's a sergeant during the war, the guy who has the mind of a child, and probably others I'm forgetting.  Surprisingly, most of the actors in this actually had other movies they were in and despite some over-acting in this movie, it works out ok.

The thing about this movie for me though, was even approaching it with an open mind and trying to make the best of it, it just wasn't very entertaining.  It's a very dry movie.  There is no real depth, explanations, or even scares.  There is a handful of people die in it (and two in the pre-credit sequence!) but the kills are so spaced out through the 90 minute run time that when the kills aren't happening it's all a lot of filler, dialogue, and relatively needless repetition.  It's like they seemed to think that just by showing us some people acting a little bit crazy we'd settle at that being scary and not need anything else.

Oh, and obviously, need I even mention that I don't think there even was a basement in the movie?  Okay, I think there might have been one on second thought.  I do think there was ONE basement scene.  But nothing was in the basement, no kills happened there, and there was ultimately no reason to not "look in the basement".  It comes down to a easily forgettable, easy to pass over, very distraction-prone film that I'm only going to give 1.5 stars to.

Shriek of the Mutilated - 1974

I'm listening to the omitted song "Popcorn" by the band Hot Butter as I read this.  Early Moog songs have a kind of simplicity to them.  This track is definitely a forerunner to techno music, disco, Kraftwerk, etc.  It may not have been the first, but it was probably one of the first real hits.  I guess.  So Wikipedia tells me.  This song was omitted from Shriek because of rights issues, obviously.  It's a sad day when the song you put in your movie goes on to be better known than your movie...  But it's also quite common.

So now I switched to Kraftwerk.  We Are The Robots.  Are you, Kraftwerk?  Ah, simplicity.  Getting back to Shriek, I guess that's why I'm here.  Shriek of the Mutilated.  So what if the yeti just caps a dude?  Bangs him into a rock, tosses him off a cliff?  Since he's not mutilated, does he get to shriek?  Common sense would say yes, the title of the movie might say no though.  It's a question that must, must be answered.  Did I mention that the villain in this is a yeti?  It's a yeti.  Also apparently known as just "Mutilated" and "Scream of the Snowbeast"

I guess my crisis of faith isn't really an issue.  I think I am now determined to just approach movies with a more open mind.  Like this movie.  I found myself entertained in an odd way while watching this.  This movie is just so over the top in virtually every way.  First of all it has completely unconnected scenes in it.  Scenes that aren't related to anything.  In the beginning for example, some guy slits a woman's throat, but she survives long enough to electrocute him while he's in the bath.  Completely unnecessary, unrelated scene. Also, the post-production of this added a few dubbed lines that are completely fake.

The editing is one of those jobs as well where you could honestly have filmed the scenes years apart, in another country.  You never see where anything is in relation to anything else.  It's like you see a woman, cut to a bloody body (with completely different lighting and everything) then cut back to her reacting as if she just saw said body.  Another thing is that this movie has some truly odd characters.  First there's the "Indian" guy Laughing Crow who is supposedly insane, there's Dr. Prell, who leads an expedition every seven years (?) apparently, to find the yeti.  I really don't know what to tell ya.

So basically Prell takes some students out to find the yeti.  The students get killed.  Then randomly in one scene some average sized white thing appears out of nowhere and runs up to some dude and kills him.  First of all, a yeti running is just hardly imaginable.  We imagine the abominable snowman, we always picture him big and lumbering.  Although, size is usually not excluding speed so in a way it almost makes sense that he should be fast.  He has to catch other animals to survive, if he exists, remember that.  But he's also quite small, kinda just looks like a big dog or something.

"Good boy!  Doggie go walkies?"

At this point yeti's had been mentioned, sure.  We were kind of expecting to see one, yes.  But the way the yeti first appears, that sequence - it's done in such a way where we are not sure what that white thing was, and what we just saw at all.  The scene comes completely out of nowhere and it's not led up to, and it's extremely anti-climactic.  As I saw it my initial reaction was "there's no way that was the yeti just now because that scene was so stupid".

But the movie, somehow, wasn't all that bad.  Incoherent at times, sure!  Cheaply made, thrown together, with no real actors - why, of course!  Directed by a director who made a rated-X film called "Snuff" about snuff films, as well as had a history in porn?  Double YES!  One of my favorite things ever is to put the movie's volume on mute and play music in the background while I watch it.  For this movie I'd recommend Kraftwerk Computerwelt.  The dialogue doesn't fucking matter anyways.  

For being slightly weird, very grade Z, yet approachable.  For being a good movie to put on if you're tired or if you're in a wacky mood.  For being a movie about a yeti, for all of these I guess it can have 2.5 stars.

Update

I had what I will call a crisis of faith the other day.  It was Sunday and I was watching something, and I realized that now I see everything through this filter of Grindhouse Review.  I don't just watch movies anymore.  I was watching and I was judging the pacing, I was remembering weird little scenes, I was formulating the review in my head.

Why do we think our opinion matters so much?  In the end do we really think that it matters, it's relevant to the movie what we think of it?  Be it bad or good, does the perception of a film matter?  Let's look at a movie like The Matrix.  The Matrix was a movie that most people saw and most people saw as innovative.  What does it matter what I personally thought of it?  The internet is about self indulgence.  Anywhere, at any time, you can read people explaining a thought, and you can decide whether or not you agree or you disagree.  Sometimes you can't find a specific thing, but that is only going to diminish as the internet goes to more obscure corners of the globe, people have more and more opinions, and time goes on.

Just think, what if you loved The Matrix but hated the scene where Neo follows the white rabbit in the beginning (the white rabbit being the tattoo the girl had).  I bet you that you can find people talking about that very scene online right now.  Or a week, month, year ago.  People discussing it, it's relevance, it's meaning.  It's odd that now you can find virtually anything you want online, and everyone can post and have their opinions and can express themselves.  You can go onto a board and agree with other people who think the white rabbit scene was dumb.

But what does it, in grand scale, mean to view a film this way?  To view it from the eye of the critic, or the cult writer, or the opinionated?  Before you could have an opinion, but no one knew it or cared about it.  Now you can fly your opinion in everyone's face and people can comment on it, ignore it, believe it or not.  I just think it's another way of prioritizing ourselves, telling ourselves we matter, our own uninformed and ridiculous opinion matters.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel really conflicted about continuing this blog.  I feel like I see movies in a quicker-to-judge, more negative way.  I just see them so I can bitch about them later.  And furthermore, I think anyone who undergoes what I've been doing, but that doesn't find their opinion swayed in the same way I did, is merely lying to themselves or isn't introspective enough to realize what's happened.

I think it's a bad thing I haven't seen movies the same way.  I used to approach them with a more open mind.  A submission.  I would go in expecting it to be low and be surprised when it was good, rather than going in expecting it to be bad and then bitching when I proved myself right.

But I also don't want to lose a thing that I have grown to enjoy and which passes the time: blogging, and watching movies.  So what do I do?

Don't Answer the Phone - 1980

This is another movie where I saw the trailer online and it stuck out.  The trailer played like one of those classic horror one's from the 70's, extremely stylized, it said the name of the movie like 3 times, it had the over the top narration and nudity in the trailer (always a plus).  I was pretty excited for this movie, although didn't want to get my hopes up too high since Savage Weekend ended up being a big disappointment.

This is a ripoff / rethinking of the classic film When a Stranger Calls.  I thought it was interesting as I was watching that this is the first time where I saw a movie, with a plot that revolved around a certain technology (the phones) yet that technology wasn't new.  It's like, the internet and computers were coming out in the 80's and 90's so they made internet / computer movies.  The atom bomb was around in the 50's so they made atom bomb movies.  The phone....had been around since the early 1900's and yet it didn't get a horror movie until 1979?!  What the hell?  Well, actually, Black Christmas in 1974 had the main villain make phone calls as well, but you'd think it would've been featured before then.

The idea behind this movie is basically, take When a Stranger Calls, and give it a higher body count and more horror in place of the slow build up suspense of Stranger.  Also, fill the movie with rampant nudity.  In the first scene we see creepy dude Kirk Smith in a girls house as she comes home from work.  The phone calls, and it's...not him.  She talks and hangs up, then he kills her by choking her.  This is like the third one of these victims to happen recently, the police tell us, and the third to then be raped and dumped somewhere.  Could it all be one man?  Yes, it could.

Whatever you do....don't answer the phone.  Although, since only like 2 people who are killed in the movie did answer the phone, doesn't really matter if you do or not.  More like Don't Be a Girl.  Don't Be a Girl and Be Around This Guy.  Something like that.  Cause the phone....well, like I said he didn't even call that first girl. We do see him with a phone at one point.  And he calls a radio station.  But all the other victims are just random chicks that he runs into, or happens upon and decides to kill.

The killer, Kirk, is calling into a radio show complaining of headaches.  We understand, eventually, that he might have brain damage that's causing him to erupt into violence, but at first no one knows that it's him calling the station.  We follow police detective McCable as he scrambles to uncover what's going on, he checks in on prostitutes, tries to find missing girls, tries to connect the cases.  Also, there's Sargent Hatcher who is kinda running his own other investigation.  There's also suicidal Lisa, there's like 4 kills in the movie, and a whole lotta nudity.  All these different stories are kept in check though, and don't get confusing.  It does provide a nice pace, which was great.  About 50 minutes of this movie just flew right by while I was watching it.

The kills in this movie and the acting in some minor roles are not very good, which was annoying.  There is a particular girl who the killer picks up for a photo shoot, he strangles her and she dies in like five seconds.  Then as he backs away from her you can see her obviously breathing still.  The madman himself is actually portrayed decently, he walks a thin line between cool and overacting, and sometimes it definitely is overacting.  But usually he fits the rest of the tone of the movie, he's good enough to be entertaining.  He has a lot of screen time, so they're pretty lucky they got a good actor.

This movie was not that bad!  I'd consider it for a midnight movie, a bad movie night, a slasher marathon, etc.  It felt 70's enough to still have that "funky" feel to it, which is nice too.  In the end, I'm happy to have a middle road 3 star movie pop up again.

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return - 1999

This movie couldn't have been made in any other time than the 90's.  It's got that mix of flash editing, overacting, and "dark coolness" that it tries really hard to achieve.  All it's missing is some Nu Metal on the soundtrack and this thing would date itself faster than a Now That's What I Call Music mix-cd.  It went direct to video because there was a 0% chance it would succeed in any other way.

It does have actors, and apparently some actual work went into this movie, which I can't say is a good thing.  Why does it feel like right now I'm either watching 1 star or like, 4+ star movies?  Where's all the middle range forgettable classics that leave no impression and are just movie movies?  I miss the 3 star rated films.

There are 5 huge paragraphs worth of plot on the Wikipedia page.  Jesus fuck, do NOT read that.  The movie is about the re-animation of Isaac through short actor John Franklin.  Regular teen girl Hannah comes to Gatlin where the movie takes place, her presence awakens Isaac, who was in the first Children of the Corn (don't remember) and he's been in a coma since.  Anywho, he awakens, he's evil, wants to fulfill a prophecy about He Who Walks Behind the Rows (HWWBTR).  Yep, remember him? HWWBTR is talked about in this movie a whole shitload.  I think that exact phrase is said like 179 times.

But this movie was stupid.  Right when Isaac is at his height of evil-ness and resurrects HWWBTR, it turns out HWWBTR has been around a while already, playing innocently as Hannah's love interest Gabriel.  Gabriel then kills Isaac.  Then Gabriel gets killed.  What?  So the whole 6 movies we've been waiting for HWWBTR to show up, then when he does he kills his cohort and promptly dies?  And in the meantime displays virtually no special power besides being able to walk on the wall?

Most of the actors involved in this haven't been in very much, and I looked through most of their IMDb pages only to not be surprised to see most of them haven't had real work in years.  Stacy Keach is in this movie, in a tiny role, and he does nothing of value.  Nancy Allen was also in the movie, and she looked really old which was depressing cause I liked her in the Robobcop movies.

This movie was fluff, forgettable, fast-forward fodder.  I should just invent that as a rating system.  FFFFF:  Fluff, Forgettable, Fast Forward Fodder.  Help me think of more F's.  How about Failure, Fatiguing, Fuck-it (as one word, with the dash?) Eh, I'm over it.  Move on.  So it sucked, what of it?  What are you gonna do about it, bitch all day?  Yeah, actually that is what I'm going to do about it.  I plan on bitching about this movie as long as I fuckin want to.  To all my readers.  Read my stupid review, you.  Read about how I hated this retarded movie.  Read it.

Update 9/17/15:  I'm not promising that I'm going to finish Children of the Corn anymore.  I will ideally see the first and second ones, but I started Children of the Corn 7: Revelation, and just, no.  No.  I also don't have high hopes for the 2009 made-for-tv remake of the original CotC, nor do I particularly want to see the 2011 CotC: Genesis.  I just....I dunno.  No.  Fuck that.