aka Night of the Beast
⭐️⭐️
Movie producer, Lukas Armond, is funding a low-budget horror flick and personally auditioning lovely young starlets. Now before you can say “Holy Harvey Weinstein, Batman!” Lukas’ intentions are far less troubling than old horny Harvey’s nauseating history. Ya see, Lukas is worshipping Lucifer and he needs the sexy young ladies as sacrificial meat to the monster he has caged up in his dime-store dungeon. There’s a handsome (by 90’s porno standards) detective looking into the missing girls and a horror-loving chesty blonde is next up on the chopping block thanks to her audition. Lukas’ son Jason is kind of a fuck up and he and his buddy are having a blast bringing girls to their doom. One such girl is the daughter of a police officer and the seeds are sown for the evil cult’s destruction. There’s also two kids snooping around and figuring that whatever is going on in Lukas’ studio is no good. Girls are forced to dress in lingerie and caged up awaiting “dinner with the child.” The detective gets closer to the truth and would have probably saved a few lives if he wasn’t busy sticking his dick in everyone. Features a constantly gyrating brunette in a revealing outfit, thongs, tan lines, silly skull masks, a mowhawked punk named Mad-Dog and softcore pornography production values. There’s a few things to keep your interest but there’s also a whole lot of plodding around, waiting for something exciting to happen. Still, there’s cheap shenanigans, bewbs, butts and some blood.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Leaning too far into insanity can be a crutch for a lot of movies. It can still make for good cinema but sometimes a balance is completely necessary to connect a viewer’s feet with solid ground. The idea of malevolent hair is a ridiculous concept but the fact that it's grounded by a completely believable drama makes for a far more satisfying experience. So come for the homicidal hair but stay for the touching story of a little girl learning to trust and her new parental figure trying to navigate the responsibilities that come with being an adult. Customs agents open up a smelly container and find it packed with hair. They're informed that it's all going to be used for the popular hair extensions flooding the market. The shaved corpse, on the other hand, is not supposed to be in there. The body is brought to the morgue and discovered to be filled with hair. This would be disgusting all by itself but there's also an employee who has a bit of a hair fetish and he falls hard for the cadaver. Taking it home, he's ecstatic to find the thing just keeps growing hair. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Yuko (Kill Bill's Chiaki Kuriyama) wants nothing else but to be a hair stylist. She's working at a popular salon but is mostly doing cleanup and making sure the stylists are happy. She's enthusiastic about where her life is at but she has a problem. Her half-sister Kiyomi is a deliciously awful human being. She leaves her daughter at Yuko's small apartment she shares with a bubbly dancer so she can go party with her sleazy boyfriend. Yuko doesn't want to take care of a kid but is too kindhearted to throw the child out. When she finds that her niece is covered in bruises she stands up to her sis. Kiyomi doesn't like that but seeing the chance to party more, she fucks off and let's Yuko watch the child... at least for a little bit. Mami has a hard time trusting her new guardian thanks to the years of abuse and is in constant fear of being hit. So times are not easy. Meanwhile, two detectives are running around trying to figure out where the corpse from the shipping yard has gone but their plate is about to get fuller when the morgue worker starts selling the hair he's been cutting from the corpse he brought home. Ya see, that corpse used to be a young woman who some organ traders got their hands on and the horrific final hours of her life have somehow been imprinted on the hair still being rapidly produced by her body. The extensions, when worn, offer flashes of the torture and have the pesky habit of turning the wearer homicidal in some cases but in most cases it just flat out kills the poor person. Yeah. Things are fucked. Creepy morgue guy takes notice of Mami and her aunt Yuko. He then brings more hair extensions to the salon where Yuko works... and then the shit hits the fan. Nasty deaths pile up and hair shoots out of cuts and eyeballs and even slashes people to death. Eventually Yuko realizes that all the onslaught is being done by the lethal hair but the realization comes a little too late... she has just given Mami a haircut to boost her self esteem and she used a fatal extension. The insane premise gets plenty of traction thanks to a cast willing to role with it. Yuko and Mami exist purely in the real world and it helps level out the loony shenanigans of Ren Ohsugi's hilarious hair obsessed deviant. Unfortunately the detectives are a bit undeveloped but they're not really hanging around enough to make it a huge problem. The central focus is Yuko and Mami's relationship and it's dealt with expertly. Surprisingly heartwarming in a film that involves people throwing up pounds of hair. There's some shaky cgi but, again, everything else is firing on all cylinders and it really doesn't distract that much.
aka Scream Bloody Murder
⭐️⭐️1/2
A killer in a hockey mask does away with some old-looking young folks as they open up a long-closed camp. No. It’s not that movie. It’s one of my favorite bad slasher flicks to hit the straight-to-video shelves in the early-aughts boom period. Psychopathic killer, Trevor Moorehouse, is a bit of a local legend, so it’s no surprise when the bland idiots start coming to messy ends. Counselor Jason (ahem) is the first to go missing and the usual post-Scream meta-shenanigans lazily play out. Half-assed violence and a script that may have less effort put into it than a porno from the same time period add to the stank of failure. Non-running chainsaw attacks, a creepy old coot with a warning, transference, the buttliest of butt-music, and the acting prowess of a 2nd-grade performance of Les Mis bring it all together in a beautiful bit of garbage cinema. I recommend booze and like-minded idiots.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Hilarious vampire flick finds a small office infested with bloodsuckers when the new sales manager takes over. Not only is timid Evan passed over for the job, the man who takes his spot is an old enemy from school. Of course, he’s also a vampire. Evan has to team up with slacker best buddy, an incredibly efficient security guard and the head of HR who just broke up with him. Vampires explode, jokes land and an excellent cast shows the fuck up. Pedro Pascal is great as the head vampire and Joey Kern steals every scene he’s in as the Evan’s pretty much worthless buddy.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mike Flanagan’s debut full-length horror feature is a triumph of low-budget cinema. Two sisters begin to suspect that a creepy tunnel in their neighborhood may be harboring a horrifying secret which may have to do with the disappearance of the eldest sister’s husband seven years earlier. Fully utilizing its small and talented cast, Absentia works as a wonderful character study about family and grief. But when it wants to terrify, it shows you just how far you can push the limits of your budget with a masterful manipulation of sound and visual design. It slowly turns up the unease until it becomes near unbearable. Flanagan has gone on to show just how amazing of a filmmaker he is with a string of great horror, including the game-changing The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A promising (and awkward) young FBI agent (with a preternatural gift) is given an unsolved and confounding case involving an elusive serial killer who has struck ten families over thirty years. “Half-psychic” Agent Lee Harker uncovers troubling information pointing to the occult and, more disturbingly, a personal connection to the killer who calls himself “Longlegs”. Apparently the monster has the ability to make the father’s brutally slaughter their own families and then take their own lives. The only reason they have been able to connect anything to the killer, is because he leaves a note behind at the scene. Cage taps into the manic energy of his younger self to disappear into the disturbing role of the titular lunatic and Maika Monroe plays things subdued as our hero. Alicia Witt is there as Harker’s mother and that’s always a good thing. Osgood Perkins has one hell of a reputation in this house with his wonderful The Blackcoat’s Daughter and deeply under-appreciated I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (and let’s not forget he was David in Legally Blonde) so I’m happy as hell that he’s unleashed another solid bit of genre unease. Foreboding, intriguing, darkly comedic and gradually weirder and weirder, it’s a solid bit of spooky strangeness that eventually spirals out into the inevitable hellish ouroboros that’s been scratching at the back of your brain since the start of things.
aka The Beasts’ Carnival/Cannibal Killers
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Bruno Rivera (Paul fuckin’ Naschy) is a famed mercenary in the employ of the Yakuza… not to mention in a relationship with the sister of the idealistic crime boss running the show. He double crosses the dangerous gang and flees into a mountainous region of Spain where they made their score with a cache of stolen diamonds. The brokenhearted woman and her angry brother vow to track him down and soon the criminals are hunting for the back-stabbing bastard. Said bastard, is given refuge in the home of a local doctor, his two daughters and their African housekeeper after sustaining multiple injuries but managing to take out a good amount of the folks out for his blood… including the big boss himself. The family nurse Bruno back to health and put him up in their vast estate. Bruno thinks there’s something strange going on in the house and it may have something to do with the doctor’s dead wife but it could be that Bruno’s mental state is more fragile than he thinks. The growing number of corpses and a peeping eyeball that usually shows up right before loss of life aren’t exactly a good reason to remain calm. Of course, this family has their reasons for helping out the stranger and Bruno may end up wishing the spurned Yakuza woman got her hands on him instead. Naschy, closing in on his fifties here, still carries his swagger even if it’s a bit of a stretch to see all these beautiful women lose their fucking minds over his machismo. Guess that’s the benefit of making your own fuckin’ movies. A Japanese/Spanish coproduction comes off a little awkward with its erotic corruption, crime drama foundation and minor dives into supernatural/horrific waters fitting like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of various origins. A man gets eaten by pigs in a standout scene that looks fake as fuck but is still intense, a few nightmare sequences play out, there’s a costume party out of nowhere that features Naschy dressed as Napoleon and Naschy probably plays one of his most convincing bastards. Issues arise with pacing and obnoxious comedy but it has a mean-spirited edge that works pretty well for the morally corrosive vibe it’s going for. Killer main track.
