aka The Forest 2/Don’t Go in the Woods… Alone!
⭐️⭐️
Four friends ignore the warning of the film’s title and get their camping on. While partaking in the boredom a day in the woods entails, someone is thinning out the populated forest of annoying idiots. Local law responds to some missing people alerts and do the absolute least they can to investigate. A title song (which, unfortunately, does not get much play) and a very husky sheriff scores some points for this ambling slasher flick but the parade of expendable meat just leads to boredom that a splatter film this early into the boom doesn’t really earn. Even if it’s attempting to come off as a black comedy, it’s all just kind of agitating instead. Well, at least Utah is pretty and the violence is the right kind of corny. The killer looks like someone the clan from The Hills Have Eyes rejected but he does manage to wipe out a whole bunch of morons, so take that ya desert freaks! Our hero accidentally murders a hiker and apologizes profusely, the mountain-man maniac lives in a real crap-shack, some of the murders are shockingly nasty and nearly every damn character really needs to shut the fuck up. A little oddness, that very large sheriff, a whole lotta fake blood and the title track (even though it’s not much of one) save it from a spot in horror oblivion but only just. The less said about the score that sounds like the unholy union of a Moog synthesizer and a busted washing machine the better.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Pedro Fernández is back as Julio along with his majestic head of power hair! A closed movie studio is the scene of a little girl’s Halloween birthday party. Said girl has a familiar looking doll and you just know the supernatural shit is about to hit the fan. Throw in the greatest musical performance in horror history (Go home Blood Tracks! Eat shit Rocktober Blood! Suck ass Terror on Tour!) when Tatiana takes the stage and sings about boys, you have yourselves a superior sequel and all around wonderful slice of bizarro horror from South of the Border. Tatiana invites our hero Julio to the party her movie producer father is throwing for her little sister. Julio, being both star and love struck gladly accepts. His good fortune quickly turns sour when he notices Tatiana jump in a car with her sister, who is holding the doll that gave him so much trouble a few years back. Immediately after failing to warn his potential girlfriend about the dangerous passenger in her backseat, a disheveled man causes a ruckus in Julio’s store and warns him the doll is looking for him. This man proceeds to stumble out into the street and get hit by a car. As Julio holds him in his arms, the man advises him to read The Book of Grieving Souls, gives him a charm made of sand dollars and passes away. Julio conveniently finds said tome at his local library… lucky break. The Halloween birthday bash is underway and papa’s special effects master has some PG-rated hijinks planned for everyone in attendance. Julio arrives during Tatiana’s stellar performance of the endlessly catchy Chicos, Chicos and falls more in love (don’t blame him there). The giant Halloween display/cake is brought out, little sis cuts herself and as Julio takes Tatiana to the side to ask after the creepy doll, something sinister starts creepin’ around. The doll hides in the cake display, eats a toy witch and transforms into some sort of goblin. Alright… I’ll allow it. The SFX guy gets murdered when he goes to check out the cake and panic sets in when his mutilated corpse is discovered. With the party cleared out, the family heads home and Julio sticks around to banish the evil presence. Another issue arises when the little girl wakes her big sister up to let her know in all the panic, she left a very important gift (7 expensive silver coins left to her by her dead mother) her father trusted her with at the studio. Not wanting to let pops down, she asks her sister to take her back there to grab them. The girls sneak out while papa naps, grab the coins and come across Julio who warns them that they’re in danger. Little sis wanders off and gets snatched up by the little lizard-tailed booger and dragged into another dimension. Now it’s up to Julio to destroy the monster by dawn and save the little girl from an eternity in wherever the hell she’s been whisked away to. Tatiana gets transformed into a cake topper, Pedro Fernández ponytails his mullet and dons a duster, fireballs get lobbed, strings are barely concealed, a phone throws up, papa throws on some denim and grabs some guns, and the world’s worst security guard lets a lot slide until finally getting off his ass and almost immediately getting murdered. The father looks like a Mexican Cameron Mitchell, Julio’s ponytail looks like it should be eating out of your dumpster and the monster looks like Anjelica Huston’s true form in The Witches if she got left out in the sun too long and thrown up on. A real winner.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
aka The Mutant Kid
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Danny lives in the woods with his grandpappy, away from the world and living off the earth. Thanks to his mom being contaminated with radiation courtesy of her job at the nuclear plant, Danny has some powers not usually found in bland young dudes. These powers include slurping down live fish (bones and all), starting fires with his hands and glowing in the dark (allegedly). “Superpowers” aside, Danny’s mutated mother is wandering the woods and judging by the danger-induced cross-eyed fits Danny has, she may be psychically connected to her spawn. He discovers some buried drums of nuclear waste at a construction site (the old research facility) and passes out after the birthmark on his neck begins to bulge. His grandpa wakes him up and also discovers his dead daughter’s locket in one of the drums. That locket points towards the shady folks at the nuclear facility knowing a lot more than they let on when it came to the dead mother. There’s also a group of camping “teens” and agents from the nuclear plant looking to tie up loose ends concerning Danny’s dead mama in the woods. This means there is plentiful soon-to-be corpses of the innocent and not-so innocent variety. A mutant varmint bites one of the campers when he’s trying to make sweet, sweet forest love to his lady. The goons kill grandpa right in front of Danny who flees into the woods “His mother must have been a billy goat!” and right into the campers who decide to help him. The girls are almost immediately kidnapped. The kidnappers are almost immediately slaughtered. The girls almost immediately get back to their boyfriends. Well, that was mostly pointless. The bitten guy is obviously in trouble but his friends don’t seem to thinks it’s all that big of a deal. Danny decides vengeance is the only way to go and then meets back up with the scared campers who are just kinda sticking around. The bitten guy loses it and begins to mutate. About halfway through, the movie feels like it reaches its natural conclusion and then jumps ahead ten years to New York. Danny suffers from nightmares he doesn’t want to talk to his girlfriend about. There’s a whole lot of trauma there and he’s terrified of the future he will be providing for he and his gal. Danny starts showing physical mutation and in those woods from a decade earlier some hunters try to store beer in a sealed drum of nuclear waste and unleash evil. Danny has a psychic link with this evil, so he knows that a problem has arisen and this time it ain’t his mama. Aerobics, construction, death and heroics are all gonna play their part. With a script in tow that may have been pieced together by a dozen monkeys given a writing prompt, this flick feels like a mess but that ain’t a bad thing. The stupidity is born from a heart located in the right B-movie location and some cheap but fun special effects make it a hell of a lot easier to overlook any scripting issues. It comes off like a comicbook movie based off of something from a universe that is slightly dumber than ours and I’m shockingly fine with that.
⭐️⭐️
Trojan Tunnels INC (run by a slimy Henry Fonda) has pissed off a big-ass octopus thanks to using illegal frequencies underwater during whatever shady shit they’re working on in the area of a small California beach community. Fonda’s number-one-in-command is to blame for the fuck ups and now he’s trying to cover his ass. John Huston is an elderly journalist who smells a scoop, Shelley Winters is his alcoholic sister, Claude Akins is the salty town sheriff and Bo Hopkins is some expert at something who trains killer whales and takes things personally when the giant octopus eats his wife. There’s also a yacht race that gets a shit-ton of focus. Shelley Winters seems to be hellbent on wearing the most ridiculous outfit she can find and the cheap-o octopus attacks are admittedly charming but boy is it fucking boring. The boat race attack scene is hilariously awful from almost every perspective of filmmaking and pushes the film into my “give it a watch but only if it’s free” territory.
⭐️⭐️
Four years on and Tiara is now a badass Thai boxer. Her, her dead boyfriend’s brother Alan and a group of his friends head out to Phuket for some fun. They hop on a boat and end up back on that damn island. Looks like our goofy-masked killer ain’t as dead as believed and now he’s got himself a cult of followers. There’s way less splat and far more hand to hand combat on display. The island setting is still a nice change of pace and Tiara is way more likable this time out as a butt-kicking badass. The killer (or is it killers?) is on the far side of threatening, even as he slaughters Tiara’s disposable group of idiots.
aka Lost Paradise: Playmates in Hell
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Indonesian slasher. That's all you had to say. Indonesia has been a constant source of joy in my trip down the horror rabbit hole and I was teethed on slasher flicks so I was all in when Waterfall of Pengantin first bleeped on my radar. Luckily it wasn't that hard to track down and here we are. The thing about expectations is that they are rarely met and WoP is nowhere near as wild as I wanted it to be... but that's on me. What we have here is a pretty standard slasher flick but with just enough local flavor to give it an edge on the competition. Don't think of it as an average Friday the 13th, think of it as an excellent I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. The template stands strong. A group of airbrushed idiots head to the wrong location and the psychotic sole inhabitant in a knockoff Slipknot mask begins stalking and slaying the pretty people. The group is headed by a woman named Tiara who has a car accident (completely her fault, btw) in her recent past which has left her with a fear of the dark. Her handsome pile of meat boyfriend is along for the ride and constantly avoiding her insistence on engagement. Also joining in on the fun is Tiara's younger sister (I think, they may just be close friends) and her friends (they're all pretty interchangeable except for one girl who had short hair and took pictures and one horny guy who was a tool). They're heading to The Bride Island to see the legendary Bride Waterfall. Supposedly any wish you make at the waterfall will come true. So there's that. The island also has another legend and it's not a happy one. According to lore, a shaman wanted to take a young girl for his bride but the villagers weren't having it. The shaman, being a complete asshole, kidnapped the young girl and the villagers gave chase. In the tricky act of fleeing and holding someone against their will, the girl went over the waterfall and died. This drove the shaman insane and instead of taking a good long look at his actions and the consequences they bore, he murdered everyone on the island and got half his face burnt off because of it. So on the cheerier side of things there's a magical waterfall and on the other, pants shitting side, there's a story about a deformed lunatic with a broken mind... guess which half actually has some truth to it. The killer's motivation is a bit more interesting than usual. Not only is he collecting blood to consume in an effort towards invulnerability, he also takes a shine to Tiara and decides she'd make for a good bride. He discusses this with the old wise shaman who exists only in his head. He wields a machete and a hook spear with precision and can take a beating. He's also pretty scrawny but that's made up for by his viciousness. There ain't much going on with the characters but that's a pretty standard move when it comes to slasher flicks. They give more backstory to the final girl (obviously) but even she barely registers. So don't go in expecting to fall hard for anyone outside of thinking they're handsome or they have breasts because after they pass on to the next realm of existence you probably won't remember their names. The characters also make some hilariously awful decisions. The usual exploration of abandoned buildings (and even a Dutch cemetery) are expected but what wasn't expected is what happens in the processing room of the old canned fish factory. The walls are splattered with blood and fish guts and there's no telling how long the place has been vacant but when the girls discover it has running water, they sure as shit decide a group shower is the way to go. Obviously an excuse to get some nekkid ladies on the screen is rendered pretty damn pointless thanks to a lack of nudity. So the idiotic action of a fish-rot shower is also treated with a PG innocence. Yeah, it's pretty great. Finally, the thing that the majority of slasher fans (and those constantly complaining idiots who just can't get over the fucking eighties) will be coming for is the violence. It's slight in the flick but still present. There's no constant barrage of mutilation but there are some nice and juicy bits. A spear through the head, a slightly slashed throat and nails through the hands stand out as most memorable, there's also a Friday the 13th Part 3-D style eyeball gag that's brought to life with low quality digital effects. It's a hodgepodge of crapola and I dug it. Throw in the island jungle setting, some great nighttime shots and there's very little you have to add to maximize the atmosphere. The minimal bit of black magic being practiced in the background and the tropical environment at least offer the illusion of freshness. Hell, I liked it a lot more than I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
