aka Mad Mutilator/The Axe Monster
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Protecting his “land” with a preternaturally brutal efficiency, a metal-masked lumberjack in a beanie randomly comes across people and slaughters them. A sort of stream of consciousness bloodbath with a minimal connecting thread and thought up by an insanely boring lunatic. The opening murder happens to a little boy who foolishly wanders into the woods after his parents stop the car so that papa can take a piss. Dad gets his head chopped off when he goes looking for his son, his hands groping around the empty space where his head once was. Mom flees after a brief standoff on opposite sides of the car that may last less than ten seconds but still feels like it’s carrying on forever. An eerie shot of her running down a vast road with forest on either side of her is drenched in an almost indecipherable muddy tint. She keeps running. As day and night seem to shift in and out of reality and any semblance of time and place dissipates into a cloud of tropes that are only half realized. Ogroff follows, gives up and then continues his hunt. If you started watching this film on a Monday, at twelve minutes in, it’s somehow Thursday. The woman comes across Ogroff’s shed which looks like a teenager with no money attempted to do his best impression of Leatherface’s place but only had three minutes to prepare. The woman is caught and chained to a post. Her screaming annoys the psychopath so he cuts her tongue off and feeds it to his dog. He then butchers the corpse of her son. Dismembered limbs are strewn about while organ music blares. That’s fifteen minutes akin to infinity all resembling home footage broadcast from a parallel dimension where excitement is taboo and everything is inspired by a bootleg copy of an American horror film. It’s torture. It’s transcendent. It’s exactly what the New French Extremity wishes it could harness but is too far up its own ass to realize. More random people come to an end for being in the wrong place. Cars are destroyed, a chess game is ruined, a chainsaw is turned against its owner, dialogue rarely happens outside of overdubbed screams and grunting, Disney characters cameo and if there’s any message trying to be expressed it’s written in braille at a home for the fingerless blind. Eventually, auteur N. G. Mount attempts to add some depth to the pointlessness but it makes little sense. This involves a homicidal love interest, wonderful budget zombies and a vampire priest. Why? Fuck if I know but Howard Vernon is there. Just take your usual DIY backyard asthenic and throw it in a much larger backyard then add a lethargic but still dangerous motorcycle chase. Somewhere between watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on mute through the haze of an opium fog and a premonition of the insanity taking a very long trek up hill while drying in concrete that was Bernard Launois’ hypnotic Devil’s Story, Ogroff proudly stands masturbating an axe handle coming off like Day of the Reaper suffered brain damage thanks to being beaten by a heavy camera held in the hands of both Polonia brothers. Is it good? God, no. It’s a fucking mess that rambles on and seems haphazardly thrown together by a complete lunatic who really could not care less if his vision of horror would entertain anyone. Is it a completely unforgettable viewing experience.? Yes… somehow for all the wrong and right reasons, it’s awkward finger nails sink deep into your brain and even after you think you have finally shaken it’s lulling chaos, you’ll realize it’s just kind of been hiding and waiting to choke you out again. Innovative genre films have been blessing the filmscape since its inception, this isn’t one, this belongs to another world.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
A fed up train guard is forced to work the red-eye shift after getting off his previous run. The usual shitty commuters worsen his mood after finding out he’s been passed over for a supervisory position by his crappy coworker. The train comes to an abrupt stop in the middle of a rural bit of nowhere after hitting something big. Unfortunately for everyone, that big something is a werewolf and its first victim is the driver. The usual snipping subsides when the idiots realize there’s something incredibly dangerous on the prowl after they try to hoof it to the nearest station. Trapped on the train, with no means of moving, they attempt to survive the night. Some assholes turn out to be pretty decent folks and some are straight-up garbage but they’ll have to work together to not get eaten. There’s a lovely cameo from Sean Pertwee and an injured pensioner slowly succumbing to her werewolf wound. The werewolf is kind of goofy-looking and it gets a little corny but the heroes are pretty damn likable and there’s a healthy amount of splatter, so I didn’t feel like I was wasting my time.
⭐️⭐️1/2
A young couple close on a new home away from the hustle and bustle of city living. Unfortunately for them, this is Florida and unless you’ve set up some time in Disney World, you just can’t escape awful. Ya see, the neighboring property was once the location of a boarding school where a vicious massacre played out. The now crumbling property is still inhabited by the sole survivor of said massacre with the intention of just being left alone. Hugh invites their friends over to check out their new digs (Laurie ain’t all that happy about it because they just moved the fuck in and I feel nothing but sympathy for her because her boyfriend seems like a real fucking tool) and party, their awful/annoying friends decide to explore the creepy ruins next door, destroying a bunch of shit there in the process. One of them even pisses in the corner of the house because it’s Florida and these are the people who inhabit it. This vandalism and disregard of property draws the unwanted attention of the very unstable psychopath haunting the place. The titular lunatic brings some swift and fatal violence to the intruders and the young couple’s plans of a peaceful future crumbles under the realization that nobody may be making it out alive. I dig the Blood Widow’s simple look of unemotional white mask and BDSM leather mommy ensemble… it works for an efficient and emotionally troubled murder machine. The unlikable losers that stand as victims-to-be are a pleasure to watch get slaughtered. These are some truly inconsiderate pieces of cannon fodder and I am more than pleased to bid them good riddance. Seriously, when the hippie chick is the most likable person in your clique, you’ve done something very wrong. Of course, she goes off to investigate the decrepit house on her lonesome during the night and dies first… if you don’t count the pre-credits dude who somehow looks like a child and a forty-year-old man at the same time. Hugh blows at every aspect of being a human and a significant other. God, he needs to die. Cheap splat, some indecipherable night shooting, convenient journaling and some truly deplorable humanity helps this feel like it would have sat comfortably shot on video more than a decade earlier. It’s all very Florida in presentation and attitude and I will fault it for that because fuck Florida but still begrudgingly shrug it off because it’s the same place that gave us William Grefé and I’ll always appreciate that. Thanks, Florida… I guess.
aka The Haunting of Rebecca Verlaine
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Olaf Ittenbach is up to his old bloody tricks in this enjoyable and poorly acted dismemberment fest. The brutal slaughter of a peaceful commune (we get to see all the nasty and under-lit murders spliced in with the opening credits) leaves young Rebecca Verlaine the sole survivor. She wakes up from her shock-induced coma two years later with amnesia and is put in the care of her aunt and uncle. Twelve years pass and Rebecca has still not regained any memory of that awful night or her life prior to that. When her father’s ghost begins putting in appearances, her memories slowly return in a fractured state. This leads to her looking into her past which drives her head first into the massacre that claimed her father’s life. Attempting to figure out who she was, she drags along her professor/lover with plans to dig deep into the tragedy that took her memory. She talks to the detective who worked her case and gets a bunch of exposition dropped in her lap. It turns out her father left her everything, so even if the cop didn’t want her to snoop around the commune, he’d have very little say in what she does with her property. She soon learns that the ghosts of those slaughtered that night are still there and they are a malevolent bunch. The spectral occupants have a knack for ripping apart any unfortunate soul who steps into the house and after they make a mess of a few police officers, Rebecca’s dad tells her to figure out who killed them and bring them to the house for some splattery vengeance. Dismembered limbs fly, fists are forced through human flesh, heads explode and blood stains everything in Ittenbach’s refreshingly old school splatter flick. Most of the cast struggles through their lines but James Matthews-Pyecka steals the show with his overacting and delivery that just screams “I AM GUILTY! I AM UP TO NO GOOD!” Lead actress Natacza Boon is so damn skinny she successfully pulls off fragility without putting that much effort in. But who gives a damn about acting in an Olaf Ittenbach film? You’re here for the guts and I am happy to say the man has not lost a step in his icky strut. There’s a shit-ton of carnage on display and all of it is practical. The boring bits are easily enjoyed thanks to the quality of acting and the splatter (although mostly played out in poor lighting) is as impressive as ever. Another fun flick from that German nutjob.
aka Bobby/Toxic Adventure Part 4
⭐️⭐️
Lame low-budget nonsense offers a fun-looking monster but not much else. Armond Davis is a sociopathic millionaire owner of a chemical plant who is slowly poisoning the town around him. Careless dumping of waste has not only lead to contaminated water but also deformities in animals and a newborn baby. Heart issues have him desperate for a donor and he employs a shady doctor and his buff bodyguard to go snatch up an unwilling participant. They find a gym rat named Bobby and get the procedure done. Dumping his body in a nearby lake riddled with toxic waste seems like a good idea at the time but Bobby comes back and he’s looking for his heart. It takes forever for the mutated and drippy Bobby to return so there’s a long stretch where Bobby’s mullet’d and tough fiancée does some investigating of her own after the cops prove to be useless. There’s also an EPA investigation that has Mr Davis scheming to bring to an end. By the time the severely deformed Bobby starts picking off the bad guys, it’s too little too late. There’s some small charm in the dull characters and some quick flashes of splat but the whole thing is just so humdrum.
⭐️⭐️1/2
On the remote island of Saipan, a building developer and her small team meet up with a business broker and his local guide to scout out some prime land for the location of her company’s new resort. Drone footage reveals a mysterious bunker and it’s decided that they need to investigate it for any structural issues it may cause. The discovery of some mummified corpses unsettles but the small group will soon find out there are far worse things waiting in the decrepit WW2 Japanese bunker. A 1670 prologue has a local shaman cutting the face off of a would-be Spanish conquerer and throwing him in a cave. A curse is born and a trap is set which will trickle down for generations. The curse seems to have been unleashed when its sinister influence began working its way into a Japanese soldier stationed in the bunker. A little digging leads to a sort of time looping hell. Now the group of surveyors have to deal with the physical manifestation of their own personal demons as well as the growing madness amongst them. The acting may be hammy, the story may be predictable to all hell but there’s a nice mean streak and some suitably creepy-ass ghouls roaming around the decrepit bunker. The villain looks like a chubby Jon Moxley and I’m all about that. Oh and Lance Henriksen talks on a phone, shows up for a post-credits joke and collects a paycheck.
aka House of Evil/Seven Sisters
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A prank goes incredibly wrong, leaving a cantankerous house mother very dead and the sorority girls renting her house in a tough position. Because they’re mostly idiots, they go forward with a party they were gonna throw unaware that their crime was witnessed by the landlord’s big ol’ secret hidden away in the attic. If you’ve seen any slasher film in the last sixty years, you should know where this is going. It follows the standard stalk and slash thrills of the sub-genre but it has a developed backstory for its killer, likable ladies in distress, some cool slayings, death by cane and an amazing slasher costume to make it one of those prestige slasher flicks that have everyone looking so favorably at the eighties output. With the corpse disappearing and degrading mental disorder in the cards, it opens up the idea that the angry old gal wasn’t as dead as believed but we know better. I love this film, I’ve loved this film since seeing it at the tail-end of an all-night movie marathon held in my basement with a VCR nearing the end of its life and I will love this movie until I collapse in a heap in front of my fridge looking for leftover nachos I probably shouldn’t have eaten anyways.
