1/2
It ain’t false advertising! A 52 minute supplemental feature for a movie that doesn’t fucking exist. It’s all raw footage and it mostly sucks. At least they seem to be having fun. Some wonderful hair atrocities are committed as well. The film opens with two idiots goofing around in what looks like an attic. They fuck around with a turntable and cause some minimal destruction with a hammer. There’s also a fake commercial and rubber boobs. We then jump to a mini movie about the dangers of ouija board usage called Not A Lot of Vegetable. More idiots goof around with the spirit board and one of them gets possessed and goes on a murder spree. This segment is followed by outtakes from this segment which are hard to distinguish from the final product. There’s some nonsensical alien/zombie thing that happens and then a mullet’d moron turns green and kills people. The “cast” can’t keep a straight face and almost everything is indecipherable. The film abruptly ends as the teens goof around with skateboards. It’s a rare SOV feature and I can understand why. This belongs in the trash heap.
aka Under the Doctor’s Spell
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Handsome Lon Chaney JR (the man looks good with a mustache) plays neurologist Dr. Mark Steele and he’s got himself a little bit of a problem. The last few days of the good doctor’s memory have been lost, which may be troubling but it’s downright problematic thanks to his cheating wife being brutally murdered in that time span. Mr. Steele is well-aware of the former Mrs. Steele’s infidelity and that he may be her killer. In order to get to the bottom of things, he has his sexy nurse hypnotize him into recovering those lost days. Chaney delivers narration in a harsh whisper as to catch us up to how unhappy he is (among whatever the hell else he’s thinking) before the murder goes down, so we’re right with him in not being able to label him as innocent. Of course, it’s an Inner Sanctum flick, so I’m guessing the fix is in and some conniving mixed with gaslighting has Chaney as suspect Numero Uno. A couple detectives come for Mark at his office and his nurse Stella advises him to say they were together all weekend. He takes a look at the body and can’t even recognize his wife’s face due to the amnesia which followed the blunt force trauma to the noggin and a witness description points the finger at Dr. Steele. The lead inspector likes him for the crime and when a button he finds on the scene is discovered to be missing from his suit… well, Mark is beginning to agree with the suspicions of guilt. Architect Robert Duval (not the actor, that’s the character name) is brought in for the murder but he insists he is innocent and asks for help from the man he was cuckolding. Steele agrees to help him prove his innocence. What a guy! The head inspector still thinks the husband is guilty of the crime. Duval is eventually sentenced to death and Steele’s guilt gets worse… dude is close to losing his poor mind. Finally, he has his nurse put him under and his claims of not having anything to do with the murder is dismissed by the inspector and the doctor even questions if his own recollections are actually factual. He does his own detective work when he’s not courting his nurse/secretary/book-keeper which isn’t great for Duval as his clock runs out. J. Carrol Nash steals every scene he’s in as the suspicious inspector and the whole thing holds the viewers interest with an intriguing mystery, a nice touch of creativity and a solid cast. This is a fun one.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Following the disappearance of his wife, a video archivist buries himself in his work and stumbles across some disturbing footage of a masked weirdo doing something that resembles performance art in a serial killer’s fever dream version of Hell. He becomes fascinated by the titular occurrence of video piracy and tracks down another instance of the weirdness but the tape is missing. When asking about it, he discovers is was seized by the FCC and when his professional contacts turn up nothing but red tape, he goes to some shadier corners. More disturbing footage is exposed and there’s an underground legend surrounding it called the SAL-E SPARKS incident. The mystery hacker was never caught and the level of intrigue is just too much for our hero to let it go. He finds out that each intrusion date disturbingly coincides with the vanishing of a young woman and the so-called unverified third incursion just so happens to land on the date his wife seemingly evaporated from this realm. James manages to decipher some hidden messages in the footage and his mind starts slipping as he falls down a rabbit hole. He loses his job thanks to his obsession but he also gains an ally on whatever message boards he’s haunting who points him in the direction of the missing women theory. The more threads he pulls, the worse things get because that’s just the way things go. It’s a hell of a journey that doesn’t always manage to keep things interesting but works more than it doesn’t. The infamous I Feel Fantastic video from those early YouTube days serves as the building block (and also the Max Headroom signal hijacking) for a mildly disturbing time which unfortunately doesn’t exactly land its ending.
⭐️1/2
You give a man a fish and he’ll eat that fish and need another one in like a day or two. Teach a man to fish and he’ll be good to go and can eat whenever he wants or at least when the fishies are biting. Give a mad scientist a ship and he’ll use that ship to perform experiments on criminals involving their bad brains and turning them into upstanding citizens. Dr. Stander is the dedicated lunatic getting his experiment on and the criminals he has aboard are a little fed up with it. Fortunately, they talk right by an open vent which allows the doctor to hear everything. Mutiny avoided. It would seem the man of science had set everything up as a cruise so he could work in privacy at sea. I guess that’s something that would work. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been on a cruise, especially in the 1930s. There’s other shit going on involving a poison ring and the pissed off woman running it. She blames her cute secretary Joan for turning over some information to the police and then lies about her being a co-conspirator which gets Stander interested in experimenting on her. Her lieutenant boyfriend Bob (also the doctor’s nephew) is not ready to allow that, so he hides her in his quarters. It’s a good call. Sander’s first subject dies after the procedure, the second one grows homicidally worse and breaks free. Stander thinks maybe experimenting on someone who’s not a criminal is the way to go, which would not prove his hypothesis at all but who am I to judge? So, now Bob is a lunatic and the whole cruise is going straight to hell. What a clunker. This boring drag is not helped by some ten minutes being cut and making a few things feel like they fell in from some other movie. Irving Pichel is solid as the heavy, playing his mad scientist as more misguided than insane while the ship full of scumbags mope around and plot. I fell asleep twice watching it and I wasn’t all that tired.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The legend of an abused spirit named Hikiko is a point of fascination for a quartet of schoolgirls. But when bodies start popping up, the girls suspect the most obsessive member of their gang, Kaoru, may be harboring some homicidal tendencies. A nearby river serves as the dumping ground for the skinned limbs of children (Hikiko has a habit of dragging her victims around until they’re nothing but unidentifiable meat) and Kaoru’s friends abandon her to the bullying of other girls. Kaoru’s life is a living hell as her social and home life are pretty much shit, but she remains steadfast in her belief the urban legend is the one responsible for everything. The awful bullying and physical abuse by former friends, fellow students and her awful father only works to unleash more awfulness as Kaoru becomes the very legend she was chasing. An accidental near murder on a public staircase leads to just enough brain damage to put Kaoru over the edge and some self-mutilation puts her right up there in horrific legend status. Cheap violence and beautiful women grace the screen as we sit back and watch this revenge/tragedy play out. No great shakes but fine for what it is.
⭐️1/2
A quartet of the most dreaded of earth-born parasites, the social media “celebrity”, gather together to play an online séance game called Metaxu. Teams of dopes are gathering and these teams are tasked with live-streaming two séances over two nights at the most haunted and terrifying place they can find. The winners will be decided by which team has the most followers when the challenge comes to an end. The winner will also get their useless hands on more than a million bucks and, of course, the fame that comes with “winning” Metaxu. So, that’s why these four dinks are shacking up at an infamous abandoned hotel with a bad history. The interior is atmospherically decrepit and that’s good for anyone watching. They arrive and look through the dump and come across some hippy woman who puts them up, talks about drugs and warns them that the place is “booked through eternity” and a séance may attract the attention of “him”. One of the women, Kat, has a dead sister who supposedly died in a horrible accident at a frat party but Kat thinks something fishy is up with that story. They’re almost immediately put into contact with strange events and spirits. Eventually, after an incredibly lame-ass round of Metaxu where they conjure a ghost who warns them they’re in danger, they unleash something awful… no, it’s not Eric Roberts… I mean, it is Eric Roberts but he’s playing a demon… it’s not just Eric Roberts… although, he is part of it. Poor Eric Roberts. Money and fame calms their fears and they pay for it because that’s just how it has to be. The dead sister lets Kat know she was murdered, drama proves to be a weak point for the actors, the white social media guy proves to be a real asshole (shocker), digital blood splatter fits the quality, a twist doesn’t really work, comedy doesn’t work either but I did enjoy the climax… mostly for the wrong reasons. I like the hippie woman too. She’s my kind of caretaker. There’s some stuff to enjoy that I don’t think is in any way the filmmakers intended but there’s a whole bunch wrong too… also ain’t any way these folks have more than a dozen followers combined. Poor Eric Roberts.
aka Demons 3/Black Zombies
⭐️⭐️1/2
Surprisingly boring Italian horror flick is one of Umberto Lenzi’s weaker fright films. Not to say it is a complete waste of time but the fumbling of a decent idea makes it a bit harder to forgive. Three college students in Brazil run into trouble when one among them witnesses and records a voodoo ceremony onto cassette tape. Along with receiving a strange necklace from the high priest, the young man (Joe Balogh) is supernaturally influenced to raise the bodies of six dead slaves. The zombies then go about claiming the lives of six white people because that’s the curse and they pretty much have it coming. The costume designs for the living corpses are shockingly strong and they rank among some of my favorite revenants, there is some wonderfully awful acting and bits of nasty violence but the whole thing goes through more than one stretch of butt-numbing tedium. An ok film that should have been a hell of a lot better.
