⭐️⭐️⭐️
Following the death of his mother, recovering alcoholic Sean Martin returns home to put the woman to rest. Judging by how he spits on her corpse when left alone with the body, he had a contentious relationship with the recently departed. This is further proven when he purchases webcams to place inside the coffin to make sure the woman is, indeed, dead. He throws the salesman off when he demands the cameras run for twelve months instead of the standard four because who would want to watch a loved one decay. Money talks and he gets the salesman to set it up for a year. Sean’s mental stability is crumbling as he begins seeing some of his mom’s elderly friends hanging about and his buddy may have his best interests in mind but Sean is resistant to any kind of meaningful relationship. The past physical and mental torture he underwent at the hands of his mom and her creepy friends goes a long way to explaining why he’s built up his defensive walls and also why his underlying nightmare pertaining to the concrete evidence of his mother’s passing is slipping into obsession. The uncomfortable situation gets downright creepy when it appears there may be something supernatural at play or Sean may just be going off the deep end. He has nightmares that come off as art school short films and then creepy shit amplifies. Darren McAree delivers as the troubled man who has earned his coldness which is good because he’s center stage throughout and it would be damn-near unwatchable if he didn’t make this rightfully unlikable man at least sympathetic. It’s an eerie concept on a limited budget that works thanks to a strong lead and an intriguing foundation for a macabre situation which is just as likely to be mental illness as it is the unknown. Unfortunately it falls apart a bit as Sean plays stage drunk (which is never convincing), melodramatics take away from the atmosphere, it runs just a bit too long to maintain its trajectory and gets lost up its own ass. Still, a strong first half helps and it doesn’t offend with how it closes things out.
⭐️⭐️
Back in 1969, guru Timothy Bach (Ratt’s own Stephan Pearcy) holds a hypnotic hold over his hippie disciples at the Northern California commune they call home. Peace and love takes a turn when something snaps in Bach and he systematically slaughters a handful of his followers. Opening text tells us most of this and then grainy footage stretches on through the credits as Bach watches over a bunch of hippies that definitely look like aughties Californians playing hippies and doing stereotypical hippie nonsense. So, nudity and drugs. Some thirty years later, a group of “teenagers” head out to the area for a “camping extravaganza” well aware of the twisted history the place carries. Two spoiled idiots, their doofus girlfriends and odd-woman out new girl all roughing it in the woods with no tech allowed. New girl Dee Dee mentions she was adopted during some character-building on the way to the woods and my warning bells begin to sound. There’s hiking, goofin’ around, doobie passin’ and general horniness as the group search out the site of the massacre and get on each other’s nerves. A forest ranger ogles one of the girls who goes searching for fire wood and warns them to be safe. We get a brief retelling of the slaughter over a campfire (bad acid seems to have been the cause and Timothy Bach was never caught) and then the “youth” wax poetic about the hippie mentality. Night one passes slowly with a lot of blue balls and talking. Stock-bro Vesper gets up to take a morning leak and gets a rock to the back of his noggin. His girlfriend worries and her friend Gretchen sends her boyfriend out to find their missing member. It takes no time to discover his corpse but it’s set up to look like he fell and hit his head. Ranger Rodgers agrees with the accidental death assessment by teenage football star Lance. Rodgers goes off for help and takes Vesper’s body with him. Rodgers soon joins Vesper in the afterlife. With no help coming it becomes a lot easier for whoever it is creeping around the woods to take out the dinks. The inevitable is revealed, the message is hammered home with all the subtly of repeated kicks to the dick and the climax takes up way too much time. If you know me, you know this era of low-energy horror is my wheelhouse thanks to grabbing whatever straight-to-DVD nonsense made its way to the video store shelf. So no matter how lame it may be, it’s fortunately right in my comfort zone. The story comes off like a repurposed porno script by some burnt out former hippie missing the sixties who really wanted to make a slasher flick but was too lazy to write his own. There’s a bunch of set up for sex in the woods that never happens and the slasher shenanigans are nothing special but there’s a certain charm to it that maybe me and a dozen other idiots can get behind.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The undead cop is back (Robert Z’Dar, lookin’ pretty decayed) and he makes short work of the two officers who handled him the first time around (Campbell and Landon back briefly to get themselves murdered). After he gets that unfortunate business out of the way, Cordell ends up in the company of local serial killer Turkell (an impressively bearded Leo Rossi in a role originally planned for Joe Spinell which is a god damn tragedy… nothing against Mr. Rossi), who has been spending his time picking off strippers. Detective Sean McKinney (Robert Davi, great to see him playing a protagonist) and police psychologist Susan Riley (Claudia Christian… where my Babylon 5 fans at?!) begin looking into things when they realize the unbelievable has become reality. Turkell gets kinda needy (he comes off alot like a dangerous Charlie Kelly and it’s pretty damn funny) while Cordell lands on getting revenge on the prisoners who took his life in the prison shower. The always welcome Michael Lerner is the scuzzy commissioner breathing down the necks of our heroes who doesn’t want to hear that the “Manic Cop” is back in action, Charles Napier hosts a crime show and the coolest dude around Clarence Williams III shows up as a prisoner along with Shelly Desai and Danny fuckin Trejo. Lustig and Cohen reunite for a surprisingly solid sequel that doesn’t really take an easy path and prefers to stir up the waters instead of treading easy. Davi and Christian have a nice chemistry that keeps us rooting for our protagonists which helps because even though the story may hold interest, it never really comes off as all that necessary
aka The Sandman/A Demon in the House
⭐️⭐️1/2
Voodoo tomfoolery allows executed serial killer “The Sandman” to have his soul migrate into a body made of sand. Seems reasonable. In order to sever his ties with his former life and gain the absolute power he desires, he has three nights to murder the sole survivor of the last family massacre he performed seventeen years earlier. Griffin has grown from a dinky child afraid of the dark to a dinky twenty-something who looks like he never leaves the coffeehouse and shops exclusively through a Sears catalogue. He’s a freelance writer rocking a backwards brimmed beret (yeah, he’s that kind of guy and he’s played by Bug from Uncle Buck) and goatee combo. Griffin’s friends and acquaintances get marked for death because of who they know. This brings Detective Rolands (Ken fuckin Foree who is severely underutilized) into the picture. With the dead folks showing up with sand in their eyes, Griffin believes the executed criminal ain’t as dead as he should be. He and the detective that saved the day back when he was a kid (William Lucking) start digging into things as the killer with the soothing voice gets on with getting sand in everyone’s unmentionable areas. Griffin becomes a prime suspect because it’s never good pointing the finger at a dead man made of sand, especially when the retired detective who has bothered to listen to you is unceremoniously murdered. Era-appropriate special effects bring the sandy menace to life when he’s not a prosthetic-enhanced wiener who kinda resembles a less wooden Morty from The Fear. This dragged out supernatural slasher is unquestionably lame and a bit too tame for its own good but if you like your horror on the daft side you should get some joy from it. I mean, the villain makes dad jokes and can be stopped by water and sunlight but he does have a sinister Voodoo priest working along with him. There’s a whole subplot with some gang leader that pops in every so often to work as a mcguffin and it just adds more unnecessary minutes to the runtime.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Two missing teens bring a naive private investigator (Heather Menzies) and her local alcoholic guide (Bradford Dillman) to a seemingly abandoned military facility hidden away in the gorgeous mountainside. We know already that the horny couple jumped in the pool located on site and got themselves devoured by something in the water but our likable idiot heroes have no idea, so they go and drain the pool to see if anything’s decaying at the bottom. The sole occupant of the test site, Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy rocking a mustache), flips his lid and reveals the pool was home to some genetically altered piranha Uncle Sam was planning to unleash on the Vietnamese. Now, these super-ferocious fish are in the river and this river leads directly to a summer camp (watched over by an excellent Paul Bartel) where the guide’s daughter is attending and the Lost River Lake Resort (run by the even more excellent Dick Miller). Oops! Our heroes attempt to warn the resort owner and camp director about the oncoming razor-toothed nightmare and the military arrives under the deceitful eye of her majesty Barbara Steele as the lead scientist of the shady experiments. When the army proves more concerned with covering their asses than protecting the populace and the duo don’t want to go along with their “everything is fine” message, they get themselves imprisoned at the makeshift military camp. They escape with some boob-flashing distraction antics and try to save as many lives as they can but a bunch of folks are gonna get gobbled no matter. Joe Dante’s playful Jaws homage/ripoff (done so well that supposedly Spielberg convinced Universal to drop their lawsuit) is a delight for any fan of the drive-in flicks that has so many folks looking fondly on the decade. Mixing animal-attack horrors and genuine comedy to perfection and aided by a strong cast of familiar faces taking everything with the proper level of seriousness but not raising their noses too high. Pacing suffers under repetition and the problem with being Jaws-like is the unavoidable comparisons to Jaws which is never good because it’s fuckin’ Jaws. Still, it’s got enough of its own thing going on and some fine small roles for reliable players. Keenan Wynn gets his feet eaten in a memorable gore gag, Bradford Dillman looks like a Hamish Linklater prototype and Roger Corman gets a gem in his long-running catalogue of film productions.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A large lunatic in a policeman’s uniform is murdering innocent New Yorkers and causing panic. The higher-ups seem content to coverup the nasty business but seasoned detective Frank McCrae (Hell yeah, it’s Tom Atkins) is investigating and is a thorn in the side of his commissioner (cool as fuck Richard Rountree) and captain (forever badass William Smith) as they are not all that keen on his belief that the killer is or was once an officer of the law. Police officer Jack Forrest (his humble fabulous Bruce Campbell) gets dragged into things when he refuses to give an alibi for his paranoid wife’s murder (he’s having an affair with another cop and he doesn’t want to sully her name) and becomes the chief suspect. It’s all a set up on the part of the actual murderer’s old flame (Sheree fuckin’ North) to allow her former lover to carry on with his nasty business. Said lover (proving this movie just keeps on giving, our hulking monster is Robert Z’Dar) was once a cop who got himself made an example of for his trigger-happy stance and murdered when they put him in Sing Sing, basically signing his death warrant. McCrae believes Jack’s innocent and attempts to fish out the actual killer with the help of the young officer and his vice-cop girlfriend Theresa Mallory (she of impressive hair, Laurene Landon). The strong opening has a woman fleeing from two muggers into the hands of a back-lit cop and getting her neck broken by the supposed beacon of law and order, disgusting even her muggers. It’s the perfect way to show your cards from the start and William Lustig is more than capable of keeping everything interesting. This dream cast adds so damn much to the proceedings that even a weak script couldn’t have sunk it. Luckily, the writing by Larry fuckin’ Cohen is solid and Lustig has an eye for the un-romanticized side of New York as he already showed in the excellently scuzzy Maniac. Dark comedy blends with gritty thrills smoothly and the likable protagonists help through some slight underdevelopment but it’s not much to complain about. Sam Raimi and George “Buck” Flower get cameos and that’s just groovy.
1/2
The Grinch gets caught up in the lapsed copyright oblivion and we get a budget-strained trash-stained Christmas gift in the process. Unfortunately, this gift is coal wrapped in a turd. The titular creature, who looks a lot like the aftermath of a repurposed Bigfoot costume, is stopped by some old author who knows the score and in celebration of his defeat delivers a soliloquy about his dead wife and the demon’s parents. While mumbling to himself we get some backstory about a boy making a pact, dark forces and how we’ll “never know”. Sadly for the injured old man in the tasteful sweater, green Bigfoot returns wielding some candy canes which he uses to bring about eyeball violence and death. One year later a duo of true crime podcasters show up to the site of the old author’s death because the reclusive dead dude left a wake of mystery and whispers of a monster. That’s guaranteed views in the heads of these two dopes. We get more backstory about the monster and the author who was obsessed with the damned thing and then our heroes march off into the woods to do some investigating. They find some seasonal decorations in the woods, lazily strewn about some branches, an ornament filled with blood and a stocking filled with bones. Instead of beating a hasty retreat, they just keep on stumbling around weird shit. The monster watches until jamming a large candy cane through the stomach of one woman and then boiling the face of the other in a tiny cauldron. Later ladies. A family of four arrives in the area looking for an escape from the hustle and bustle and cure for poppa’s writer’s block. They stumble across a small inn and decide it’s a good enough spot to relax. This inn is the dead author’s old home which his daughter has inherited. The husband recognizes the spot but can’t put his finger on just why. Two elderly teens walk through the woods. The horny guy tells the girl the spooky story about the area and the couple are soon attacked by the goofy beast. He ditches her, she gets her throat sliced open and bleeds out for an extended period of time while the dink gets his heart eaten. My ass grows numb and I keep asking myself “Why isn’t Chrissie Wunna here?” The question about Wunna’s absence repeats as more idiots drive through the area and the cheapjack dyed Bigfoot claims more victims I could not give two-shits about. The family pops up between slayings to let you know they’re still around in the dead author’s house until they’ll be needed for the climax. A very boring and very pointless time. The score also blows.
