Ouija Blood Ritual (2020) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Three likable filmmakers produce a web series debunking internet urban legends and spooky rituals. They find some Internet video involving a group of drunk kids attempting to summon some Slenderman-adjacent boogeyman called The Closet Man. They decide it would make for some good social media and creep it up by using a walk-in freezer at an abandoned insane asylum as their summoning closet. Since the opening notice tells us the Tacoma police provided the footage we know it unfortunately worked. Your standard found footage hijinks are livened up by an imposing creeper, some interesting folklore and some well-choreographed scares.

Intensive Care (1991) (Netherlands)

⭐️⭐️

A grouchy surgeon (the grouchiest of gentlemen, George Kennedy) storms out of a surgery when his colleague dares to question his mistake. He stabs his patient a couple times before telling his colleague to do it himself. He then learns that his medical research grant has gone through but the board is denying it because they are concerned about the doctor’s morals. He replays this argument with the head of the board as he drives off and conveniently explains his brain transplant for coma patients studies through inner monologue before getting into a nasty car accident. Seven years pass and the now hideously disfigured Dr. Bruckner is still in a coma at the very hospital he caused so many problems at. Orderlies place clown masks on the coma ward and talk shit about Bruckner who wakes up and is pretty pissed, breaking the neck of a poor nurse just doing her rounds. The vastly unlikable Peter (one of those awful orderlies) heads home to act like a complete shit to his parents and have a boring New Year’s Eve. His father notices that his driver’s seat headrest has been cut by something very sharp, Peter denies doing it and the stalking POV points in the direction of the doctor following the young dope home. Old ugly mug begins murdering folks in the well-off neighborhood. The incredibly cute girl next door Amy (Nada van Nie) is the focus of Peter’s smug affection and he’s happy to see (spy) that she and her boyfriend are having a rough patch. He attempts to seduce her with his saxophone when he invites himself over. As most Dutch youngsters are known to do, they play music together along with her little brother. The sax, bass and piano trio perform some elevator music and the pouting boyfriend heads back to the family home where his parents were just slaughtered. He eats some chicken and then heads back to Amy’s to catch her smooching with Peter for reasons I can’t fathom… he’s honestly the fuckin’ worst and I have a bad feeling they’re setting up his ass to be the hero. Fortunately, Peter gets sliced up by the killer who is hiding in his closet, regrettably the deadly doctor gets distracted by a news report on himself and Peter manages to survive. Fuck. I ask for one fucking thing. Amy throws on a comfy sweater and attempts to survive into the new year. A lazy slasher plot is given life by a parade of characters with a true dearth of intelligence and a seriously slumming George Kennedy barely shows up to a laughable degree. It’s almost impressive just how unlikable the hero is but that washes out because in the end that only means we have to spend so much time with him as he scumbags his way through the movie, sucking all of the charm and good graces out of any screen time he abuses. Wretched pacing also has this bad boy feeling longer than it runs. At least Amy is cute, some of the splatter is graphic, the brain-damaged psycho surgeon is pretty goofy looking and the fireworks-heavy demise of the villain is suitably stupid. Seriously, fuck you Peter. I wish you were dead.

Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Shirley L. Jones (our hero from Black Devil Doll) reads from a book to her dead son Bobby… we know he’s a ghost because of the floating cup and mom’s loving chatter. He also whispers sweet nothings as a breeze blows in mommy’s face. Bobby provides the titular book for his mother to read to him. The first story involves a large poor family sitting around the dinner table in a cramped room, chatting away until father rings a bell and everyone shuts the fuck up. The family is eight-strong but the table is set with only four bologna sandwiches. Instead of splitting what they can, the group races to grab the sandwiches when papa rings the bell again. Suddenly, the date July 16 pops up the screen. The dinner situation happens again and the stinkiest-lookin’ of the family grabs a gun and takes out some family members. This is greeted with lethargy as now there’s enough food for all. A cameo from a plastic Kool-Aid pitcher that my family had growing up is the standout. July 17, the stinky man growls while papa prays and then we’re shown text about the deaths or current living situation of the family members. Wow. What a yarn! Bobby seems to have enjoyed it, if his nonsensical whispers are any indication. The next story is about two brothers. One of them dies and the other breaks into the funeral home after hours to steal the body. The living brother drinks champagne out of a mug that’s fashioned to look like a breast… it’s his favorite glass. With tit glass in hand, Fred pisses and moans at the corpse of his brother about how shitty he was while he was alive. He even admits he had planned on poisoning him before he up and had a heart attack days before he could commence with his poisoning. Now, he plans on not letting his sibling rest in peace so he paints him and dresses him like a clown for his basement burial… sure, it may sound like a dumb idea but it seems to make Fred happy. He laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs while he goes about digging a hole in his basement. Welp, the clownified corpse wakes up, sporting an indecipherable distorted voice that sounds a lot like an RFK jr robot and a goal to take out his living brother. A basement showdown ends in pitchfork violence. Shirley L. Jones lets her ghost child know she needs to change her glasses because they’re giving her a headache but before she can start up another story, her boyfriend arrives. She warns Bobby to be quiet so Daryl doesn’t get upset. Well, Daryl gets upset anyways when he finds the book his lady was reading from. He’s had enough and starts beating her but she fights back and the scuffle travels from the carpeted living room to the kitchen where Daryl gets stabbed and takes forever to fucking die. Bobby even gets bored and leaves for the comfort of a bedroom. The police arrive and mom sits on the toilet while she daydreams about playing with her son while he was still walking this earth before cutting her own throat. The police probably shouldn’t have let her go to the bathroom but they are dressed like uncles at a Sunday barbecue so maybe their heads just weren’t in it. The ghosts of mom and son reunite and all is well. We’re promised Tales from the Quadead Zone will return and, sadly, I am still waiting. The dream of sanity floats just outside the viewers grasp as Chicago’s very own Chester N Turner follows up the lunatic Black Devil Doll from Hell with an anthology populating the same camcorder gutter. An opening title track sung by the offspring of a banshee and a cat in heat along with the lost soul of Buster Poindexter if he had taken a throat punch from Brian Cage rambles over hand drawn illustrations of horror. This grips us by the collar and drags us through the looking glass into the dimension of backyard opus Turner calls home. It may look like Chicago’s forgotten areas but it’s not, it’s a dreamscape where other dreams go to get treated for schizophrenia. Boring, fascinating, an abyss of imagination and zero-budget sincerity… it’s all of these things and I wouldn’t change it for all the world. Lovingly dedicated to Chester N Turner Sr, I know he was proud.

The Doll Fucking Movie (2017) (Poland)

NO STARS FOR YOU! 

Some Polish wanker spends his days doing horrible things to dolls and corpses when he’s not jerking off to those Best Gore mixtapes that your standard depressed edgelord consumes. There’s no audio, just the hypnotic hum of tape static and that little voice in your head constantly asking what you’ve done with your life to be sitting here and watching this bullshit. At least there’s some truth in advertising. Unless you’re really into watching a sad Polish weirdo lick his own man-milk and shove a crucifix up his butthole, I don’t see how you’ll get anything out of these forty minutes that feel like fourteen hours. This isn’t entertainment. This isn’t art. This isn’t transgressive cinema. This is nothing but a hack mistaking deviancy for a message or a perverted con man who just made some curious folks watch him masturbate into a doll’s head and piss on a Bible… oh fuck, that son of a bitch!

The Cyclops (1957) (USA)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Bruce Barton’s plane crashes in a remote area of Mexico and he goes missing. His fiancée Susan mounts an expedition a few years later (no, she’s not lazy and unconcerned, it just took her a bit to get shit together) to find her vanished husband-to-be. The area where the plane went down is supposed to be rich in uranium, so she’s able to get her search partially funded by wealthy Martin Melville (fuckin’ Lon Chaney JR). Along with a disgraced pilot and a bacteriologist/friend, the four set out to the area and, of course, an emergency landing is necessary. The place is radioactive as all hell and this has had a dangerous effect on local creatures and the disfigured missing man. They’re all big as fuck and not at all happy about the tiny folks trespassing in their territory. Melville is prone to panic and causes a bunch of problems as he freaks out and puts everyone in danger. He’s a lot like me in that aspect, except he has money so people have to continue to put up with him. Monstrous howls let the group know they’re in dangerous territory and Susan refuses to believe her beloved is gone for good. When the colossal animals show up, safety is called into question but Susan insists on continuing the search. They finally find the ugly-ass beau and he too is giant. Half his face melted so now he’s rocking one eye and a mixture of radiation poisoning and brain damage has made him one temperamental man-mountain. Susan is in denial that the monster is her missing Bruce but she’ll need to accept the awfulness if she and her group want to leave the Mexican valley alive. Mr. BIG, Bert I. Gordon, does what he does best and throws giant monsters at unfortunate humans. No stop motion to be seen, just some corny back projection has me right at home and loving every minute. Also wonderful to watch Chaney cutting loose and losing his cool as things spiral out of control. Just a fun time.

Revenge in the House of Usher (1983) (Spain/France)

aka Neurosis: the Fall of the House of Usher 

⭐️⭐️1/2

Rambling Franco flick serves as a loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher with some characters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula thrown in and disguised as a sequel to Franco’s classic The Awful Dr. Orlof. Howard Vernon “reprises” his role as the doctor but is now named Eric Usher. The good doctor is going insane and seeing ghosts wandering around his crumbling castle. Even as his mind mirrors the deterioration of his home, he continues attempting to cure his comatose daughter Melissa. He’s doing this by performing blood transfusions from unwilling young women. With the help of his loyal servants, including the deformed Morpho, he’s keeping women prisoner in his dungeon. The bearded Dr. Harker arrives at the castle, after being summoned by his former professor Usher, to find his teacher the worse for wear. He confesses his crimes to the young man (utilizing plenty of footage from The Awful Dr. Orlof) and claims that the spirits of his victims are haunting him. He’s told by the local doctor not to take anything Usher says seriously but Harker still has his suspicions about the good doctor. Dream and reality are given the loosest of ground to stand on and nothing can really be trusted. Vampires, ghosts and the super sexy Lina Romay all wander around lost in this mess of a film but it is a Franco flick so it’s still a better mess than most shit-heaps.

Ballad in Blood (2016) (Italy)

aka The Inferno

1/2

On the (very early) morning after an intense Halloween party that looks like the exact opposite of any party I’d ever want to attend, a buck-naked dude walks into a bathroom to piss. He tells a black cat to go fuck itself and then steps on broken glass. Limping his way over to the room where two folks are having the kind of unconvincing sex people have been having in Euro-horror films for decades, he complains of his current issue and demands someone get him a rag. The man throws up on the woman riding him and the sex expectedly ends. The girl runs off to shower. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen. The trio of (maybe) humans carry on like it’s their first day on Earth but that may have something to do with English being a second language to these folks. I don’t think it changes the fact that they’re all idiots. As the guy pulls the glass out of his foot, he notices a naked corpse on the skylight. Her topless body soon falls through when the glass breaks. Now they’re all wondering just what the fuck happened to this “girl”. Lenka (having successfully showered off her man’s vomit) recognizes her as her friend Elizabeth. Everyone argues and may have brain damage. We jump back in time to piece together the story and find out what the hell just happened… in between the present where the unlikable dinks wander around acting like morons. Drug dealer Duke and his very drunk friend leave Lenka with the corpse to make a drug deal with a gang of roving goths who they rob when their leader claims he needs some leeway on paying. They then walk off and Duke spits some rhymes before hitting the bar run by the very drunk guy’s midget landlord. He demands the rent and the two leave. The most non-threatening gang of goths return, having followed the duo and run off, satisfied with knowing where they live. Lenka is missing but there’s blood on the bedsheets and most of the damage has been cleaned up. They find her smoking dope and listening to music in an “antique bathroom” that’s in the apartment. The overflowing water in the bathtub contains the corpse of her friend. This upsets Duke for no discernible reason and he tries to drown Lenka. The next scene has the dudes goofing around in the bathtub while Lenka blow dries the corpses hair. Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen. Elizabeth was a vlogger, so they begin to go through her footage to get to the bottom of things but it’s a whole lot of dumb fucking hijinks and nudity. There will be more death, racism, sweat, sex on the opposite end of erotic and character actions that make no god damn sense. The reveal is somehow worse and dumber than even I was expecting. Of course there’s still plenty of time left for things to get even more daft. If this film had come out a decade later, I’d swear an AI program was responsible for the script. Instead we have to point the finger at fuckin’ Ruggero Deodato and whatever dinks he was working along with on this inept screenplay. Some unintentional laughs save it from the lowest pit of genre damnation but it is dangling right on the fucking edge.