Week Three - October Horror Movie Challenge

Day 15 - PUPPET MASTER II: HIS UNHOLY CREATIONS (1991). Oh Day 15, how I hardly remember you. Puppet Master II, what a shit show. Or maybe it's all the booze talking. In recent months, I've been revisiting some of these Full Moon Productions I loved so much in early nineties and realizing I was a very different person in the early nineties. (But I still dress relatively the same - boots, leggings, plaids.) There's an Egyptian brain serum and some side love plot involving reincarnation of a lost love (isn't there always?) but not enough here to keep me awake for very long.



Day 16 - HISSS (2010) directed by Jennifer Lynch. Think Bollywood without the singing and dancing crossed with what? A snake goddess hellbent on revenge towards a wealthy old white dude with brain cancer that stole her snake lover while they were doing sex so she would pursue him and offer him an immortality stone in exchange for her lover. Yep. That's what this is crossed with. And it might sound like a good time (the snake goddess in human form is impossibly hot, as well) it's pretty craptacular. Cheap, cheap, cheap, but there are some good gore gags and the snake transformations are actually pretty nice. Not what you would expect from David Lynch's offspring, given her other work, but whatever.



Day 17 - John Carpenter's THE THING (1982). Duh.



Day 18 - THANKSKILLING (2009). Recommended to me by my bar partner, who inexplicably smells EVERYTHING and has a serious fascination with boobs. (He drew a crude set on my birthday card last year.) This god-awful, but self-aware, horror movie making at its best (worst?) makes Troma look like they have a high class sense of humor. If you ever wanted to hear a turkey hand puppet say 'nice tits, bitch' then look no further. Misogynistic, poorly acted, over-the-top on purpose, and offensive as the day, this one clocks in at just 66 minutes, which seriously feels like an eternity, but not in a bad way. How many Jon Benet Ramsey jokes can you take in an hour? Watch this and find out.



Day 19 - CARNY (2009). Starring Lou Diamond Phillips as a small town sheriff with an escaped cryptozoological beast on his hands. Maybe or may not be the Jersey devil, because it escaped from a truck at a carnival with Jersey plates. Nice try, crappy script. Sideshow stuff is cool, but I do find it hard to believe such an outfit would hit upon small, religious town Reliant aka Bumfuck Nowhere, USA. All characters are either assholes or you don't care about them, so when they become monster food, you continue with your game of Angry Birds and try to give even less of a shit.



Day 20 - THE BLACK CAT (1934). Bela Lugosi birthday = Bela Lugosi movie. Horror stalwarts Karloff and Lugosi out evil each other over the affections of a young newlywed. Awesome set design, awesome performances, some very Caligari-like imagery, a cat, and a Karloff flaying. Good, good, good stuff.



Day 21- GUTTERBALLS (2008). I wish I could tell you how much I loved this because the MANIAC inspired cover makes me giddy with glee, but it was Friday night, I worked until 3 a.m. and had to be up at 9 a.m. so I probably watched all of ten minutes. I awoke to the DVD menu starting over and no recollection of what had just transpired. It still counts, because this is my blog. I still have the DVD, so a repeat watching will take place.

There's the third week. Started slacking there towards the end, what with two late night bar shifts and the anticipation of birthday celebrations (read: drunkenness) getting in the way. But I'm still in. Don't tag me out yet.

October Horror Movie Challenge - Second Week!

Day 8 - 976-EVIL II (1992) and directed by Jim Wynorski. Not nearly as good as the first one, because I used to be totally obsessed with that, due in part because I remember those hotline numbers you could call and my friend down the street in the seventh grade got in trouble with her mom because she was calling Freddy Krueger and Bobby Brown for like 19.99 a minute and it was a huge deal and I was instructed never to call those numbers EVER or else I would dealt with accordingly. So of course the fact that there was a HORROR movie about these sorts of things is going to go down as some awesome shit to a thirteen year old me. I had seen this one before, so I put it on, had a few glasses of red wine, and promptly passed out. I remember some such shit about astral projection and the complete and utter absence of Robert Englund and Stephen Geoffreys and that is about all. I still have the Vestron Video copy so I can revisit whenevs.





Day 9 - JAWS OF SATAN (1981). Lots of fun to be had here with snakes, Christian overtones, witchcraft, wayward priests, demonic possession, overt sexual symbolism, strong female leads, the first cinematic appearance of a ten-year old Christina Applegate, and a constantly-eating mortician. (I swear one of these days I'm going to compile a list of all the filmic morticians that are always fucking eating on camera.) This wasn't great, but it was pretty good. Me likey.





Day 10 - I BURY THE LIVING (1958). There's a new cemetery director and he thinks he can cause people who buy plots to die by some sort of push pin on a map voodoo shit and this plays out over the course of many, many minutes. I was on the phone for most of this, discussing some work drama, so Sam caught more of it than I did. I found it to be lackluster at best.



Day 11 - THE GIRL SLAVES OF MORGANA LE FEY (1971) - sexy sexploitation romp featuring a vampiric beauty intent on acquiring souls of other lovely ladies to continue her immortality, her dwarf assistant, and some all out Jean Rollin-style imagery from Italian director Bruno Gattilion. Good times, here, perverts, good times. Sexy ladies tied up in dungeons, a dwarf scheming to get in their pants all the while, and some other ethereal/exploitative stuff. I dug it.



Day 12 - SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975) directed by the venerable Jack Hill. I remember this being a ROLLING THUNDER (Quentin Tarantino's early nineties distribution company) release, so when Sam had just started this on Wednesday night as I rolled home from work, I was down to watch, as I hadn't seen it when it had its revival on VHS almost twenty years ago. Good stuff here - girls, guns, and gang warfare - all with ridiculous fucking accents and plenty of knifings. Wish I hadn't waited so long, but I'm glad I did because I don't think I would have enjoyed it two decades ago.



Day 13 - CHAWZ (2009). Korean wild boar invading the human sphere movie. The title is no accident, but there is nothing that can really redeem this, especially the attempts at black humor. Boring. I feel asleep. But you already know how I work late and drink lots, but this is this week's crap-fest. Total.



Day 14 - THE APE (1940). I showed up for the Karloff, stuck around for the lab-or-atories and circus stuff, and got drunk on the fact that Karloff had to don a fucking ape skin and kill people for their spinal fluid to find a cure for polio. I chose this one in part for its brevity (62 minutes and I'm tired, especially after a Friday night bar shift), but was mostly entertained.

There you go, pervs. Just a regular ol'week. Boris and girl gangs and sideshows and horror chat lines and dwarves and killer boars and Christian snakes and all sorts of other good stuff. You're welcome.