aka Demon With the Silver Sickle
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Un-subbed and of rapidly deteriorating visual quality, this movie is still more fun than a barrel full of dead monkeys. An evil witch raises hell in the village neighboring the cave she calls home. She zombifies some folks, possesses others and even bites the penis off of one unfortunate horny husband. A poor woman gets a stick in the eye and is then tossed off a hill for reasons unknown to me, maggots get eaten, a beefy man becomes the witch’s evil lover, a couple warriors show up to help (one of them has a fart-centric fighting technique), there’s a pocong, a man who transforms into a rapist bat (but he’s also a rapist in human form so good for him), a magical skull on a stick, a lot of floating, an elderly fighter with a giant and dangerous tongue, flying coffins, people riding flying coffins and then a goofy-eyed zombie shows up. It makes no damn sense and is as wild as it is stupid... which is fine by me. It runs a bit too long but the insane climax makes up for any dragging.
aka Cries in the Night/Screams in the Night/The Diabolical Dr. Satan/The Demon Doctor
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Jesús Franco has been haunting the catacombs of my mind for a long time. The man directed over 200 films in almost every genre. I am most familiar with his output in horror (shocker). Surreal, exploitative, insane and boring are all words that can describe his work. Sometimes, all words could be used to describe just one film of his. Franco treads familiar waters with The Awful Dr. Orlof, yet he does so in a way that it becomes something not often associated with Franco's work: classic. If one wishes to explore the deep ocean that is Franco's filmography, I would recommend you come to this film a little later down the line. It may falsely convey the notion of Franco as a master. I enjoy the majority of his films, I love a few and I avoid a good amount. His early output is stronger than what came later and The Awful Dr. Orlof remains one of my favorites (I still believe Miss Muerte is his greatest film). If he had carried on in this fashion he may have gone down as one of the most essential horror directors of all time, instead he hits more on infamous and carries a deserved cult icon status. I'd rather have him as the latter anyways. The film opens with a drunken woman stumbling and singing in the middle of the street. She makes it home and continues to sing as she shuffles around her room like me at my nephew’s birthday party. Unlike that classic time I was being awesome, she meets her end upon opening her closet, when Morpho emerges and strangles her. Morpho is a towering, caped and deformed gentleman who carries off the recently perished woman into the night. The tapping of a stick by some unseen person leads the blind beast in the proper direction. Our poor blitzed babe is not the first woman to disappear. A newly engaged inspector is on the case and is, sadly, getting nowhere. He is not privy to the same information as us; we soon learn that Dr. Orlof is the mystery man in control of Morpho. His night out with a beautiful lounge singer concludes with murder and more Morpho. Orlof is using the skin of his victims in an attempt to cure his daughter's fire-born disfigurement. I'm not sure how he is going about it. They don't explicitly show his treatments like they did in Eyes Without a Face (which is the definite inspiration for Franco's film), but it's not working. He decides he must use a living host in order for his treatment to be a success. As Orlof does his weird surgery thang, we spend some more time with the inspector. He's following clues and trying to piece together why his witnesses seem to be seeing two different murderers. With a helpful push from his fiancée (who just so happens to be the spitting image of Orlof's daughter) the inspector comes to the realization of the tag team murder scheme afoot. This still seems to get him nowhere. His fiancée, being the awesome woman she is, decides to go undercover to flush Dr. Orlof out. This all leads to a whole lotta death and a whole lotta Morpho. If you failed to notice, I fucking love Morpho. Ricardo Valle makes for an imposing "monster". His makeup is goofy as hell but he still manages to give me the chills after all these years. This is helped in a major way by Franco's atmospheric direction. In contrast to his later catalogue, The Awful Dr. Orlof shows an assured hand all the way through. You'd get moments of this in his later films but it was rarely frequent and it became noticeable Franco was getting bored with the humdrum expectations of the era. The familiar Franco aspects are also present but not yet prevalent. Breasts are fondled, jazz erupts, lounge/club numbers (although not as intrusive as they would become) appear and Howard Vernon is his usual wonderful self. Not as psychopathic as some of his other films, Orlof maintains its status as genuinely accomplished cinema. Find it and enjoy it but do not judge the man's work by it.
⭐️⭐️
Spring break in Colorado is even worse than it sounds for a group of friends who get themselves stalked by a masked psycho during a cabin stay in the (not-so) remote Colorado wilderness. Wait. Is that not supposed to be a mask? Holy hell! I think that’s supposed to be an actual grandma. Wow. Anyways, “granny” doesn’t take kindly to the youths hanging around and I can’t say I blame her. They’re about as likable as I was at their age. Lame deaths follow and one girl gets kidnapped by the “elderly” lunatic because she reminds her of her dead daughter. Her “definitely straight” boyfriend comes looking for her and lame action follows. Some trash acting made possible by limited casting choices amongst friends and family, the cringy awkwardness that said friends and family members bring to performances, some trash thrashing from musicians who accepted payment in brewskies, some polite chuckles made possible by inside jokes, dialogue based off of half-forgotten high school conversations and special effects provided by a Spirit Halloween discount rack all combine to bring up hazy memories of SOV garbage that came before… and this one has a murder-granny… so… bonus!
aka Bloody Bill
⭐️
Early outing from schlock studio The Asylum offers up plenty of splat but not much else. A debate team and a criminal (he carjacked ‘em to hunt down his “business” partner) end up in a ghost town populated by zombies under the leadership of a crispy executed confederate raider. Old town curse, a student that is the spitting image of the villain’s sister blah blah blah... You’ve seen it all before and done better. The soundtrack is hilariously awful and really the only memorable thing.
1/2
A new drug turns a bunch of German criminals/idiots into cannibalistic morons and even mutates a small amount of ‘em. That’s about all there is to it. Granted it’s in German without subtitles but seeing the talent in front of the camera, I have my doubts about there being much of anything going on behind the cameras. Speaking of cameras: holy fucking hell, I don’t usually notice camerawork in something with this low of a budget but I swear by the trash film gods the handheld camera was being operated by a chimpanzee with severe ADD and a speed addiction. Guns, cheap wigs, cheaper fright masks, butcher shop splatter, mutilated genitals, viscera banging, and home footage from someone’s vacation and personal life all pad out the runtime. If you’ve ever needed proof that ninety minutes could feel like an eternity, well, look no further.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Archeological students (one of them may be Eminem hiding under a black wig and painted on beard… I have my suspicions) on the prowl for Native American artifacts in the California desert (something the state and the college do not allow) naturally ignore the warnings of a tribal elder and disturb the sacred grounds. Their professor is forced to stick around the university and catalogue artifacts but he seems shady enough to get into illegal activity for the sake of science. Anyways, the digging unleashes a pissed-off spirit who uses deadly force to ensure that the artifacts do not leave the land. Fred Olen Ray unleashes one hell of a rambling supernatural slasher with a killer that can possess the ignorant idiots desecrating the earth but also shows up with a face that resembles a melted rubber mask… knowing Ray, it just may be that. He’s also rocking some tight blue jeans, a fine look for a centuries-dead shirtless spirit warrior. Your standard slasher plot gets a nice injection of off-kilterness thanks to some truly zonked-out performances (and not just the space-case D.J. who seems to have a connection to the paranormal tomfoolery staining the area) from the amateur cast and random-ass boogeyman shenanigans. It’s also memorably brutal (when it finally gets around to it) with its cheap splatter and I will always take that in my 80s bodycount flicks. It makes the error of stacking its kills in the last act which causes some boredom but there’s a few heartwarming attempts at lame spook-show thrills (quick flashes of spooky faces drizzled into the desert wandering) to keep this idiot smiling. I love that lion man and you’ll never change mind. Forrest J Ackerman pops in for brief cameo (naturally, carrying a monster movie book) and all is right in the world.
⭐️1/2
A family outing is caught on deteriorating Super-8, a creepy uncle wanders off with his niece to play but his warning about not telling her mom and dad tells me this is a game nobody should play. Something big slaughters everyone. No. It makes no sense as to who the hell was filming this. The ugly past becomes the ugly present and a group of youthful idiots (they all look like they are running light fevers) are on their way to a secret rave in the middle of the woods. The two Romanian girls met the guys the night before and I guess whatever chemistry one has with humans akin to old, wet garbage was on full display. A long car ride that you can smell from the comfort of your living room stretches out for an opening act that just crawls on and on and on. Unfortunately, night falls, drugs are done and the three Italian dudes turn out to be serial rapists. The two girls they have with them suffer for putting their trust in the wrong guys as they drag them out to some ancient ruins located deep in the dark woods. All of this awfulness awakens a group of long-dead gladiators who begin to slaughter the unlikable Europeans after the girls manage to spill some of their tormentors blood. We cut to scenes involving the unlikable brother of one of the rapists as he jabbers on about violence and sexually tortures the prostitute he has hired. Why? Because everyone and everything is terrible. The undead ghost gladiators or whatever they are take forever to get to work taking out the scumbags (they show no mercy to the women as well) and it’s an ugly trip. I’m all for brutal ends coming to rapists but the wretched nothing sandwich we’re forced to eat to get us to the point we want to be at isn’t recommended. The team behind this were going for an old-school Italian exploitation vibe and they captured the cocaine-fueled ugliness but nothing else. It’s not insane enough to be entertaining like even the scuzziest of Italian releases and it’s so damn bleak that most of the joy we should be experiencing with the supernatural stupidity just vanishes into a void where almost all torture porn ends up. Some gnarly violence is focused on and those despicable rapists do get what’s coming to them at the dusty hands of the wrathful undead (who look like they just made their way from a steampunk convention), so I guess it has that going for it.
