aka Spider Panic! 2012
⭐️⭐️
When my buddy was stationed in the Middle East, the first thing I asked him was how big the camel spiders actually got. He assured me that although they were rather large, they were pretty shy but very fast and all the rumors about them biting a soldiers ass off were just tall tales. Finally able to sleep, I was content that my nightmares of giant alien-looking arachnids would finally be snuffed out. Well, leave it to Roger Corman’s production budget to bring the eight-legged (the movie claims they only have six legs but I think someone screwed up their digital renders, so they just ran with it) horror to America… just on a tight budget. I guess I didn’t need to mention that if I already mentioned Corman. So, American soldiers battle the Taliban in the desert and get a helping hand… uhm, leg… from those giant creepy crawlers. The soldiers have no idea why the ambush suddenly ceased but are thankful to be alive. A local lets them know what was responsible even if Captain Sturges (Brian Krause) doesn’t exactly believe a spider (well, they are actually neither spider or scorpion) could have done this. Sturges takes a bullet to the leg and is getting sent home, he escorts the corpse of his unit’s sole casualty back to the states and you better believe that body has some dangerous passengers coming home with him. During transport in Arizona, a police chase (sheriff C. Thomas Howell is in pursuit of a criminal) leads to a collision which shoots the coffin into the road. The spiders escape and take very little time to raise some hell. Random folks are introduced and soon these random folks meet a janky cgi death. A bevy of unlikable dopes gather together (some actually become pretty likable, some remain pretty rancid and most I couldn’t name if you had a gun to my head) and get eaten while some small town drama and dreams fill out the runtime. Military weapons, various secrets, C. Thomas Howell’s mustache, American know-how and American greed all play into things. There’s also a group of college students holding up in an abandoned house that I completely forgot about. It’s only eighty minutes long and still feels like it could lose thirty of those minutes and be fine. There’s that SyFy channel nostalgia that at least brings me some joy and I love me some C. Thomas Howell but it’s still a very mid-level creature feature that feels like it was processed in a factory with very little heart.
⭐️1/2
A family that seems to hate each other comes to the house of the father’s recently murdered brother to care for his mentally ill niece. Mom is the only one that gives a shit about the suicidal Hana but the distrust of dad and daughter is well-founded because there is definitely something evil in the house and it may have possession of the orphaned girl. No budget nonsense is slightly elevated by some unsavoriness and a good looking cast but there is a whole bunch of nothing going on in its 60-minute runtime. There’s a curse or some shit, a vhs tape, a creepy old neighbor and full frontal bathtub nudity made possible by a suicide attempt. The shitty special effects are about the only thing this has going for it... that and Elizabeth Osbourn as the knife-wielding daughter.
aka The Forest Primeval/The Creeper/Three Blind Mice/Carnivore/Bump in the Night/Horror at Mill Creek
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Some fun-loving park rangers and their ladies go camping in a practically unexplored neck of North American wilderness. They run across a homicidal woodsman (or woodswoman) who lays claim to the area. A couple familiar faces pop up in the cast and the killer is a pretty cool-lookin’ creeper, wonderfully camouflaged to fit in with their environment… so it scores some bonus points in its slasher category. Adding to the fun is the location-shooting in the vast wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, our victims are all believably isolated as things spiral out of control. When the group leader (Mark Metcalf) is discovered dismembered, the group of youngsters realize they’re in some deep shit, 45 miles away from the nearest road out. Immediately blaming their bus-driver/local-creep (a scuzzy Joe Pantoliano) they decide to bring the fight his way. Fortunately they discovered a small cabin and are pretty sure he’s cooped up there. They find the remnants of their buddy in the shit-shack but nothing else, so grabbing a water raft discarded on the property, they head to a nearby river. I believe it was The Burning that taught us to never raft in a slasher flick, something our team of goobers soon discover. Granted there’s less loss of life (probably because their raft wasn’t makeshift) and we don’t have to live with the reality that we just watched Fisher Stevens get his fingers severed… thank God for that. Never thought I’d be happy a movie didn’t cast Fisher Stevens. Anyways, out of the river and back in the woods, night soon falls and one by one the dudes and dames get picked off by the wild lunatic with sharp objects. A serviceable backwoods-slasher hybrid with a capable cast and imposing killer.
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.
