⭐️⭐️⭐️
The under-appreciated Larry Cohen works from a David J. Schow (the man who coined the terms “stalk-and-slash” and “splatterpunk”) script for his serial killer outing in the Masters of Horror series. On a desolate patch of mountain road, a bus breaks down and its passengers make a few dangerous choices. Cautious and tough Stacia (Fairuza fuckin’ Balk) decides to walk the 12 to 14 miles to the nearest hotel, Birdy and Danny decide to hitchhike with a helpful and possibly insane truck driver (Michael fuckin’ Moriarty) and a paranoid wife and her frustrated husband decide it’s safer to stay with the bus driver until help comes. A charming hitchhiker comes across the bus and all the pieces are in place for an unexpected turf war between two serial killers and a handful of strangers who just had some truly terrible luck. Paths are crossed at the tiny motel where Stacia is staying unfortunately sandwiched between a truck driver who is following the trail of bodies and the hitchhiker who needed a place to torture his latest victim. Cohen does what he does best by allowing some interesting and flawed characters to breathe in the hands of some very good character-actors. Schow’s script may be a little scattered and silly but it creates enough space for the antagonists to prosper, unfortunately the protagonist kind of gets the short end of the stick. It’s still a good time. The wonderful Michael Eklund shows up as a rest stop cashier who gets to be the focal point of Moriarty’s acting chops. Lucky.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Matt “Serenity Now!” McCoy plays Preston Rogers, a well-known mountain climber who returns to his home near the cliff where a horrible accident left him a paraplegic and claimed his wife’s life. He begins to suspect there is something large lurking around the surrounding woods. His nurse refuses to believe him and he gets more frantic as whatever big and bad forest-dwelling beast begins picking off a bachelorette party being held at a neighboring cabin. Newly confined to his wheelchair, he attempts to save the lovely ladies (including sexy-as-all-hell Tiffany Shepis who makes her exit far too soon) and refuses to sit by and let them die. The cast (luckily) takes the whole thing seriously and is peppered with genre favorites in small roles (Jeffrey Combs, the aforementioned Shepis, Lance Henriksen, Paul Gleason, Phil Morris and Dee Wallace all collect a paycheck). The sasquatch is practical and a bit goofy looking (but who the hell cares) and there are some bursts of gory goodness. This enjoyable indie horror is a decent enough time waster.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Lucky McKee reunites with the amazing Angela Bettis (if you haven’t seen May, what are you doing?) to get a little icky in this Masters of Horror addition. Our girl Bettis plays an awkward entomologist named Ida who receives an anonymous package from Brazil containing an unclassified insect. It breaks free and ends up biting Ida’s new gorgeous and odd girlfriend Misty (Erin Brown). Misty begins a slow transformation into something horrifying and when Ida receives a letter from her old professor (also, her new lovely lover’s papa) about the strange insect and its methods of reproduction, she begins to catch on to what her current girlfriend is undergoing and a contagion that is at high risk of spreading. The risks of moving a relationship way too fast are magnified into a ridiculous realm of body horror much to the benefit of any viewer who likes things to get a little weird in their horror. McKee’s consistently fresh spin on genre material continues as he utilizes a strong leading lady and a demented twist on a familiar warning. Big bug horror (but not too big), body horror, intolerance and relationship horror combine into a somehow cute, somewhat disturbing and undoubtedly strange combination. It may push into territory that gets a little too quirky but that’s a minor issue when it comes to this series that started out way too bland for my tastes.
⭐️⭐️
A social media giveaway is won by an aspiring vlogger and Angus Mattock happily makes his way to the wilderness retreat he’s been awarded. Documenting his digital detox in the gorgeous wilds has him following directions deep into the middle of nowhere, where a freshly set up mini cabin awaits him. He attempts to make the most of his time cutoff from modern amenities even if it sure as shit ain’t exactly roughing it. He picks up some unsettling sounds on his equipment and then begins hearing them with his own ears as night falls. The sound of screams has him snuffing out all his light sources and hiding in his tiny cabin. A frantic woman appears at the door and claims that something is after her and she needs to be let inside. Angus refuses and even pushes the woman down when she makes a desperate attempt to get in. She then wanders off into the darkness. The next day Angus walks into the woods in an attempt locate the woman he was no help to the night before. His axe gets stolen from him while he’s taking a dump in the woods and he returns to his cabin to find the place ransacked of anything that would help him in the situation he’s ill-prepared for. He decides it’s time to hike on out of the area and get back to regular life… sure, that’s gonna happen. A quick sojourn into a cave proves to be disturbing and he’s back at the cabin as night falls and something out in the perfect dark terrorizes him. The film stumbles on as our hero shares a recent tragedy and attempts to survive and get help however he can. Some nasty foot violence happens, forcing Angus to put a halt to any hiking out and madness comes knocking along with whatever is hanging about out of the viewer’s eye-line. Self discovery at least feels earned but boredom is still boredom and that boredom is even worse than regular boredom when spending all of your time with a mildly wet blanket of a man.
aka Zombie/Woodoo Island/Zombie Blood Bath/Voodoo Blood Bath/Invasion of the Zombies/Caribbean Adventure
⭐️⭐️
Walking venereal disease and novelist Tom Harris takes some time away from banging anything with two gams and a vagina to join his agent on an expedition to an island where voodoo is being practiced. The island’s name is Voodoo Island so that’s not just some racist guess on my part. It’s not just a trek about inspiration for his next novel, not at all, it’s mentioned to the likely very itchy Mr. Harris that a hurricane wiped out the island’s fishing fleet a few years back, leaving the female to male ratio at about five to one. The agent thinks the island would serve as a great setting for Tom’s next novel and the excitement of the island’s danger and strangeness is enough to impress the frustrated agent’s eccentric (unbearable) wife. The place is also home to a reclusive scientist who secluded himself from the public eye to work on cancer research and as we all know that’s way easier to do in a private villa surrounded by jungle that may or may not be crawling with the living dead. Yep. It all checks out. Off our ragtag group of “heroes” fly to a vacation spot riddled with dangers known and unknown with only enough fuel to barely make it to their destination. Ooops. The cancer researcher has discovered that by injecting natives with snake venom he can turn them into oatmeal-faced zombies with eyes that seem to be haphazardly painted ping-pong balls. I suppose that’s the next best thing to curing a horrible disease but I’m no scientist. The overseer of the island, Charles Bentley, is using these goofy zombies to his own nefarious ends and forcing the doctor to carry on with his work. Tom will be far too busy to poke the natives thanks to his lecherous eye zeroing in on the doctor’s daughter. He’s already seen what she has to offer thanks to a rescue attempt from a spying zombie with a machete while she was skinny dipping. This did lead to the decapitation of a local fisherman after warning the walking erection of an upcoming sacrifice but I guess you just can’t win ‘em all. Danger looks to be coming for Tom’s love life so he steps up to be a hero and to do this he’ll have to unmask the true evil on the island. There are bits of interest throughout the runtime but a lot of meandering and staleness rob it of being a true garbage classic. The low-jack zombie action is wonderful and I’m always a fan of sixties bikinis but I can’t imagine that this films ‘71 release date offered up much excitement to anyone who took this in when it got attached to the “Great Blood-Horrors Double Feature” with I Drink Your Blood. Hell, I can’t imagine outside of some leering sexiness and a graphic (and hilarious) decapitation that this bad boy would have offered up much excitement if it hadn’t sat on the shelf for six years. It’s a watchable curio but not much else.
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
“Master of horror” William Malone (such universally recognized classics as Feardotcom and the remake of House on Haunted Hill… which I know isn’t all that great by critical standards but I do fucking love) works from a Matt Greenberg (the man who blessed the world with screenplays for both Reign of Fire and Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest and no, there is no sarcasm in that statement) for this Masters of Horror outing. Teenage outcast Tara gets herself abducted by a psychotic couple and because she’s no idiot, ends up locked away in the basement of their isolated estate after figuring out some bullshit is going down when she comes to in a supposedly care facility. Anton and Judith (fuck yes, it’s Lori Petty and the always welcome William Samples) have made a pact with something ancient to bring their drowned son back from the dead. Said pact calls for the sacrifice of twelve virgin teenagers and our girl Tara happens to be the final one. What a horrible way to be needed for the first time. Tara shares the cellar with the couple’s teenage son who is definitely off because black magic is no way to adapt to death, even if it’s not by your own doing. She rescues him from an attempted suicide upon waking up in the basement and assumes he’s another victim of the lunatics. The longer Tara stays in the basement, the more convinced she becomes that there is something supernatural in the works and she really needs to get her ass out of her current situation. Judith is dead-set on bringing her departed boy back but Anton seems to be losing his marbles the deeper they get into the unsavory business of resurrection. Tara and the mute boy she has befriended uncover more and more awfulness as they await the girl’s fate and do what they can to escape. Warnings of a “fair-haired child” etched into the walls point towards the fact they do not want that ticking timer to come to an end. There’s a nice weird edge to everything and this outing from the first season proves to be one of the more pleasant surprises to get produced. It successfully comes off like a Lovecraft outing from his cycle before he went balls deep in the Elder ones and is purposefully melodramatic and harnessing the right level of camp for something this inspired by a late 60’s American International horror flick and reruns of Night Gallery. A charming slice of macabre that I really feel like the Masters of Horror series should have aimed for more than it did. A likable leading lady, a couple of intriguing villains and a weird-ass monster… that’s all I really want.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
John Carpenter enters the Masters of Horror fray and tackles the always interesting idea of lost media. Of course, the lost media in question is a notorious film that was screened once and supposedly drove the audience into a homicidal frenzy. Now an eccentric private film collector, the enigmatic Mr. Bellinger (the enigmatic Udo Kier), hires a bankrupt theater owner with the kind of bendable morals desperation causes (Norman Reedus before he had a real handle on dramatics) to unearth the lost film La Fin Absolue du Monde. After Berlinger shares a horrific souvenir with the young man, Kirby Sweetman begins hunting down what information he can and discovers a history of death for the people behind the movie and a curse that supposedly comes along with the film that may be better left unseen. Bellinger is completely aware of the power the rare cinema holds but he has no qualms about the dangers or the cost of a single viewing. There’s tragedy in Sweetman’s past and the downward journey into Hell he’s traveling on is going to rip those wounds right open as he navigates cryptic critics, snuff filmmakers and the dangerous power of cinema. An incredibly satisfying story helps this bad boy along even if some shaky performances and melodrama produces a few hiccups along the way. So, excellent inspiration, it’s the execution that falters.
