aka Cannibal
⭐️⭐️
This VHS box use to scare the hell out of me when I was little and searching through the Horror section at my local video store. It just promised such horrific things, added with that title that is way grosser in context to the whole cannibalism vibe promised. Of course, like most of these low budget late-80s flicks, it was empty threats magnified in the brain of an idiot. So I finally sat down and watched the damn thing (never worked up the courage in those days) thanks to a fellow trash-film-loving (and creating) loon I trade flicks with. A family of backwoods idiots need meat to sell to a local hamburger joint and that is really unfortunate for some high school seniors on their way to a rich prick’s family cabin. Cattle is awfully expensive and requires long term care and investment but if one were to slaughter some city folk who were wandering around where they shouldn’t be… well, that’s all profit right there, Bubba. The six “kids” from L.A. catch a couple of the rednecks’ attention at the shitty burger place by pure coincidence. One of the backwoods brothers wets his pants. So, yeah. Well, the hicks track down the fresh meat and trick them into taking a detour. The biggest and most braindead of the bunch pretends to be injured in the middle of the road, luring the derps out of the car and massacring one of ‘em immediately. He also helps himself to some meat. The rest of the family strike, decapitating the cutest of the bunch, injuring one dude with a pickax and allowing three of them (rich prick included) to escape into the woods. The hunt is on and the chances of survival are pretty damn weak. It has its incompetent charms but every character ranges from forgettable to unbearable and makes for some tough watchin’. The gore is cheap, the talent is absent, the hero looks like someone took Balki from Perfect Strangers out of the oven too early and there’s a couple household chores you should probably get done while it’s polluting your television. I liked the score and there’s enough perfect awfulness to make one viewing survivable. There’s way more pitchfork to the foot than I was expecting and I think this is the most amount of heavy breathing I’ve ever seen on screen in a film that has zero humping in it.
aka Left Behind/Ghosts of Chernobyl
⭐️1/2
American tourists… will they ever learn? An urban explorer discovers a camera during his expedition into the infamous Exclusion Zone in Pripyat. Caught on camera is the final days of an American girl who came to visit her boyfriend along with some buddies. After spending time with these unlikable assholes as they act like dopes, the group take a backroad and get their car stuck on some shitty road. They attempt to find a nearby village in the darkness, bickering and complaining the whole time. They don’t find the village and end up camping in the woods. More complaining and assholish behavior follows and then one of them drowns because he’s an idiot. Soon, they encounter spirits and the cool-lookin’ ghost girl that’s been popping up to provide jump scares (failing but they tried) finally makes her presence known. Old footage reveals the whole Chernobyl disaster was caused by radioactive experimentation on a young girl… well that’s a first. The location is endlessly interesting but no matter how many creepy specters you throw at people, unlikable pricks will never be fun to spend time with.
⭐️1/2
The supposedly haunted “Mad Hatter Mansion” proves to be just that when a psychology professor and four student volunteers spend a weekend in its sinister walls. Years ago some drugged libations led an orgy to an accidental fire which in turn wiped out a swinging masquerade party in the mansion. The owner, a world famous hat maker, was well-known for his debauchery and when he perished with his guests and daughter it supposedly left a supernatural imprint on the place. This bit of folklore has the professor, whose interest lies in the effect of paranormal implications on human behavior, excited to study his students over the weekend. One of those students (Henry, if you must know) seems to have a deeper connection to the place but it may have to do with the mutual loss of a young girl. Past trauma seems to haunt everyone just as much as the resident specters and as the weekend crawls on, the mental wellness of the group deteriorates. There’s some sinister shenanigans afoot and the group of likable youngsters are caught in the midst of something well beyond their understanding. Teeth fall out, nails rip, a raccoon gets skinned, secret passageways get uncovered and the fiery spirits of the dead pop up to cause something lighter than jump scares. It builds upon a foundation of The Haunting and Hell House but wanders off into an overly dramatic area of tedium. The villain is pretty cool looking but similar to the entities of the far superior We Are Still Here, and the characters are way less annoying than usual. Michael Berryman stares on as the mute caretaker and tea is slurped in a sinister fashion. It’s... not great.
aka The Big Calamity/Gwan Gung vs Aliens/Kwan Yu Battles with the Aliens
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Two meteorites appear in the night sky, witnessed by an elderly sculptor on his walk home. The next day weird shit starts happening. A heatwave hits Hong Kong along with some hot rain, an earthquake and the brief disappearance of gravity. The sculptor’s son is a “space scientist” and believes some nuclear activity from the sun is to blame but as things continue to get strange (everything moves in reverse from puppies to airplanes) the scientist and his scientist wife discover an alien race has paid a visit to earth. The scientist’s fun-loving sister gets sucked up into the heavens and ends up found passed out on top of a building. She comes to and shares a story about goofy-ass Martians coming to earth to end our development of nuclear energy. Science fails but luckily for the world (well, at least Hong Kong) the elderly sculptor has been devoutly sculpting a stature in honor of an ancient Chinese God-General named Kuan Yu (according to the subtitles) and he has more faith in him then his son’s science when it comes to saving the planet (well, at least Hong Kong). With enough prayer, the giant god-general lends a colossal hand in the battle against the silly laser-club wielding Martian menace. Super low-budget and super fun Taiwanese kaiju flick is exactly the kind of bargain-bin monster shenanigans this idiot loves. The opening is a bit slow-going but the Martian/warrior-god battles are more than worth the wait.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Somewhere on the outskirts of your best friend’s backyard, Nathan Schiff was living his dream. That dream consisted of mustaches and a secret community of lepers taking up residence in the outskirts of Long Island, feeding on human flesh… but we’re not here to judge. We open up with a student enjoying some solitude and getting herself tied up by a lunatic wearing a sack over his head. Her screams are in vain as there ain’t anybody but her and the goggled creep around. Those screams are eternally snuffed out when he does her in with the highly convenient lawnmower he has on hand. He bags up the viscera and heads on out to god knows where. ROLL CREDITS! A cranky detective stares ponderously out over the water, his girlfriend tries to get him to have some fun but he’s far too busy tackling the existential dread his job has imprinted on him. He may have a wonderful mustache but he’s a bit unbearable to be around. Wandering the beach, Detective Cameron, now sporting a less-impressive mustache, stumbles across a mutilated head buried in the sand. Before he can raise the alarm, another more impressively mustachioed man pays him off to keep silent and reburies the head. Mighty mustache drives off and meets up with sack-head and a pube-stached blonde biker who proceed to beat the shit out of him. He’s late for a payoff and after his bribe from earlier, he’s short on what is owed. The bikers threaten to burn the bags of long-pig but luckily for Mr. Mustache he’s got a gun. He gets his human meat and tells the bikers the deal is still on, then off he drives to deliver the garbage bags of flesh to the mutated monster that wanders the wastelands of Southeastern New York that he calls dad. Detective Cameron goes to visit his chief and let him know what he came across on his day at the beach. He’s supposed to be working undercover but, much to the chagrin of his Gene-Shalit-looking boss, he decides to keep digging into the suspicious activities. The detective teams up with his buddy and quits the force to deliver justice the only way he sees fit. On the other side of things, Mr. Mustache is crumbling under the pressure of his unfortunate situation and it looks like papa has become pretty damn powerful and his leper colony of four is dying off due to his selfishness and hunger. In between poorly choreographed scuffles and non-convincing performances we get butcher shop scraps, fake blood, discussions about love with a garbage bag full of lady parts, Budweiser, leprosy displayed with oatmeal and peanut butter and the papier-mâché nightmare that is Mr. Mustache’s father. Daddy speaks like a pompous literature professor doing a Harvey Fierstein impression and every performer looks like someone in the background of a photograph of your parents from before they were married. Sure there’s a bit of a drag but then our mentally-deteriorating lead shouts: “You don’t know what it’s like to be the son of a leper! What is a brain without eyes to see?!” and we forgive the boredom that just proceeded. It’s all wonderfully cheap and comes to a close with a ridiculous revelation and a whole lotta very dangerous chainsaw violence. Just another slice of time-capsule-oddness from the sadly overlooked Schiff.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The mysterious disappearance (I guess, if someone disappears it’s going to be mysterious anyways, so maybe calling a disappearance mysterious is overkill) of a twelve year old catches the attention of a journalist. With the local police force unable to come up with any answers, the journalist and his videographer begin doing their own independent research and this is the material they were able to recover. There’s talk of black masses and Satanic worship but a friend on the police force tells them that’s all just gossip and that the missing girl will show up eventually. Not satisfied with the official stance, Marco digs deeper and some strange shit is unearthed. A recovered phone from another student paints to a very disturbing picture of a young girl with some otherworldly powers and the devastating trail of violent death she left in her wake. It goes deeper because of course it does and our two heroes find they may have bitten off way more than they can chew. Presented as a documentary pieced together with material from schoolmates, newscasts, interviews and footage from the two men scrambling around town for some kind of answer. Shaky performances are to be expected in micro-budget films with child actors (even the big productions have issues with kids) so it’s no surprise, that also goes for the digital effects but the work within a limited budget shows that Diego Carli knows exactly how to utilize what he can to craft a surprisingly enthralling suspense flick that hits familiar areas of horror but still manages to be interesting.
⭐️⭐️
Based on a hit game that I have never played. It’s not the game’s fault, it’s been a good amount of time since I’ve picked up a controller to do anything but pause a movie or switch to a different streaming service. Now doing my late night YouTube rabbit holes, I have come across some gameplay videos but I usually only make it about thirty seconds through those until it’s off to a documentary about Amazonian megafauna, so I really have no basis of knowledge for what this movie is all about. This is just a long-winded way of me saying, I’m coming into this like I would any random horror film I stumble upon. Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland from Arrow) is a newly certified mortician at River Fields Mortuary. Her socially awkward boss, Raymond Delver (the always welcome Paul Sparks), knows that there’s some awful shit brooding inside the building with the basement seemingly the main hub of unsavory activity. Usually, Raymond would tackle all nighttime work with Rebecca focusing on the work during the daylight hours but an emergency brings the newbie into a late hours shift and throws her right into a supernatural nightmare scenario. Confused as to why she has been directed to embalm and then cremate her “charge”, the horrific and fresh injuries on the body are also concerning. But a job is a job and especially this freshly into a job, nobody asks too many questions. Even if the same odd itinerary is assigned to every corpse she is dealing with during her unexpected shift. Rebecca has personal problems as well which the evil is going to be able to manipulate with an endgame of making the young woman a proper vessel for possession. There’s rituals to attend to and tasks that go beyond the usual body preparation to keep the sinister shenanigans at bay, but being a novice at battling the forces of darkness is a dangerous game. Raymond is there to shine some light on Rebecca’s current situation and there’s convenient tapes located in the storage basement to assist with the banishment of a demon but it’s gonna be some rough waters. The dead are restless, violence is intensifying and the shadows are growing deeper. Plenty of by-the-number horror beats are hit and I’m guessing that honoring the inspiration for the film leads to some rather clumsy plotting. All I’m saying is needlessly complicated puzzles make more sense in gameplay and don’t translate well to the cinematic universe. I’ve also never successfully banished a demon so what the fuck do I know? The minimal cast is fine and there’s some suitably spooky bits but again, I have no frame of reference to add any disappointment to how things are presented. There’s just an abundance of familiarity especially in those dramatic flashbacks to Rebecca’s trauma and general sense of pointlessness as the film comes to a close. As with most games I have taken the time to play, the aesthetics hit the proper vibe but the story leaves much to be desired.
