Time...Too Much Time to Kill

Many of you who read this rag (and even those who don't) know about Lucio Fulci and some of his works.  Movies such as The Beyond ("Stop using logic, it's a B-movie"), City of the Living Dead, and Zombie are all considered essential viewing.  However, like many directors, time wasn't very kind to him (Demonia, anyone?).  The biggest piece of evidence that supports this: House of Clocks.  Originally a television movie, it was actually never aired due to excessive (in quality) violence and somehow ended up on DVD.

The basic story of the movie: three people break into a house with the intent of robbing it.  Along the way, they shoot the occupants and soon after, things get complicated, as the house is full of clocks that mysteriously turn back time, which naturally causes problems for the trio.  The movie itself is one long, boring stretch that does very little to relieve that boredom.  As for violence, there isn't a whole heck of a lot, with the maid getting poked to death (don't ask) and the standard gunshots.  Truthfully, this movie was difficult to get through, and if you can get through the movie, you deserve a pat on the back.

The Annual "Summer Can Piss Off" Spiel

Since this coming week the temperatures in the Midwest are going to be in the upper 90's with a heat index of 105 (maybe higher), I can't put off writing a "Summer Sucks" piece any longer.  Sure, I had opportunities before I left for New Mexico last month and when I came back a week later.  However, today is the breaking point for this rant.

As many of you know, I am a Winter person, so any excuse to break out long sleeves I have, I will take.  Is there any redeeming qualities to Summer besides the fact that really good looking women wear less?  Well, if I was writing this in New Mexico, I would say that Summer is brutal, but with some incredibly cool mornings. Such is not the case in Kansas City, though, and that is why I would like to punch the sun in the face.  It might as well be Death Valley the way it is going here.

Playing With Your Devices

Scuffling on what movie to watch last night, I tried to get through Mother of Tears.  That lasted all of maybe half an hour before I switched to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Sure, I can write about the latter, since I have seen that many times.  However, everyone knows that movie, so I wouldn't be adding anything really meaningful to the mix.  So, to fill up some space on this blog, here is a movie that I have seen (or at least know enough about to make something up) that few people know.  From the same movie distributor that brought you Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead and Zombie Doom comes a movie that is actually quite dumb: Screaming Dead.

When I say dumb, I mean a piss poor excuse to get hot half naked women into a horror movie, which is exactly what Screaming Dead does.  In fact, it becomes obvious from the opening scene, as a nearly naked woman is seen trying to hold onto a bar that should it slip, the object above her would come crashing down on her.  The movie stars Misty Mundae, and the movie features women and various torture devices.  Unfortuantely, there is only one woman who actually gets naked (from the waist up, from what the camera can show), and the devices are horribly constructed.  The plot is quite nonexistent, and the ending is extremely nonsensical.

So, what the hell was I doing watching this movie?  Well, somehow, it ended up at a Blockbuster Video store, and since I have in fact, seen a couple of movies starring Mundae (hint: if you're looking for a Misty Mundae film, Shock-O-Rama Cinema would be a good place to start), so I figure what's the harm.  Well, I was wrong on that account.

Running With the Idiots

Finally, after about six and a half years of having a DVD case that was chewed up by a friend's dog handed to me, I got around to trying to watch the movie that was encased within the mangled cover. And as you can probably imagine, it was an exercise in trying to get through Shatter Dead, emphasis on the word "trying."

The plot, with the source coming from the ever reliable Wikipedia:

Shatter Dead is a zombie film set in an unknown area following a woman named Susan's (Stark Raven) attempt to return to the apartment of her boyfriend (Daniel 'Smalls' Johnson) in the midst of the return of the dead to a semblance of life. On her way, she is harassed by a preacher (Robert Wells) and a dead woman named Mary (Flora Fauna) intent on convincing her that being undead is preferable to life.

The director of this debacle is one Scooter McCrae, and this film looks like it was definitely made on a $500 budget, as the camera used was likely one that a vacationer would use in capturing something for home movies and the makeup and blood effects look even worse. Acting is almost nonexistent, which is best (or worst) displayed by some guy that calls himself The Preacher Man. If I wanted someone to convert me to their way of thinking, I would not want to call on this guy, as he is the least convincing preacher ever. On paper, the storyline is excellent, but one has to execute such a story, and that is where McCrae falls woefully short. Not helping matters is a scene where a couple of fruitcakes start shooting up the house where Susan is holed up in, with one of them saying as he kicks in the door, and I quote, "Prepare to be physically challenged!" Since when did Double Dare become associated with a zombie movie, anyway? The violence is wonderful and there is some full frontal, so parents should hide the children when watching this film. However, that is not enough to make Shatter Dead anything more than a curiosity watch.

Lost My Mind

Yesterday was to have been a toss up between Shadow: Dead Riot and Shatter Dead. However, I got sidetracked and never got to either one. Of course, it's easy to be distracted this time of year, with the NHL and NBA playoffs going on, that I haven't even warmed up to the MLB season that's going on now. So, today is a trip back through the mental vaults and a movie that I was deeply disappointed with after it was over. It's worse than Andrew Alberts taking a dumb penalty that kills my beloved Canucks' chances of winning a game and maybe as bad as the Sharks choking in the playoffs (again). Yes, the movie in question is Unhinged.

Some back story on this movie, the film was banned in 1983 due to its graphic violence and nudity, and was literally pulled-off shelves nationwide. It was later given a DVD release in 2004. I don't necessarily know about the former, but the latter would probably have been the bigger reason for such a move by Britain. To say that this movie was sorely lacking in the violence department would be an understatement. The plot is rather clichéd, as three women on their way to a jazz festival crash their car in an abandoned area, and I seriously doubt that a stick would cause such a huge wreck. The women find a house and stay with a family there. What they don't know and will find out soon is that the family holds a rather murderous secret.

Aside from the women taking showers and one of the women taking an ax to the stomach and brutalized, there just simply isn't anything really worth seeing in Unhinged. The secret of one of the family members is quite disturbing, which at least, makes the ending worth watching for curiosity purposes. The filming is quite shoddy, as it is rather lo-fi, especially when one of the women meets her demise in bed with an ax to the head, which I might add, looks like someone glued the ax to her head and isn't graphic at all. Talk about false advertising!

Green Stools and Fruitcakes

Some time ago, I posted about the unintentionally worst movie ever in Hell of the Living Dead. Well, that movie still has that title, but not by much. I know you're asking yourself: "What could possibly challenge a Dawn of the Dead ripoff as the worst horror movie ever?" Why, it's Troll 2, of course.

Seemingly everyone I know has at some point or another, known about this movie, so I won't get into major details about the plot. Instead, I will give the short version of what this film is about: no trolls, people eating green crap and turning into either trees or sweating green goo, and a little boy that should have probably been locked up in a mental hospital. Also in this film are quite possibly the stupidest parents in a movie, what could pass off as the first gay orgy caught on film, and the best line delivery ever (see the end of this piece).

Yes, this movie is terrible, and likely the worst movie that everyone knows about, but it's hard to think of this movie without actually laughing at part of this movie. From the awful script writing to the overall horrid concept of "goblins" instead of trolls (cue Cheech going, "Hey, that's false adverstiement.") it would be difficult to hold in a chucke or two. However, it is not advised for anyone to actually sit through this movie without at least getting a break or two to take in the mess that this movie leaves behind.

Hell of the Living Dead

Two years after the release of Dawn of the Dead, which was known in Europe as Zombi, the beginning of what is certainly a spate of imitation zombie movies in that ilk took place. Italian director Bruno Mattei decided to do his version of a zombie movie in the form of Hell of the Living Dead, which itself has had different names, including Night of the Zombies and Virus. By any name, this is quite possibly the unintentionally worst zombie movie of all time.

The movie begins at a power plant in Papua New Guinea where an experiment goes wrong and a mysterious gas is released that turns people into zombies. In the next scene, some eco terrorists threaten to shoot hostages if the experiment is not stopped, only to be shot down by leftover soldiers from the Dawn of the Dead movie. The next scene cuts to a couple with a child and a reporter and cameraman in a deserted camp. The reporter and cameraman head to the lake while the child, who turns into a zombie a few minutes later, eats his father while the mother gets attacked by a zombie while searching for help for the child. The surviving reporter and cameraman meet with the leftover soldiers after encountering their own zombies by the lake. If all of what I just said makes your head spin, just imagine how this all plays out on film. The only other "highlights" of the film are the reporter stripping from the waist up and throwing on paint to fit in with the natives, stock footage from National Geographic being thrown in to make it look like the movie really is in Papua New Guinea, and the repeated idiocy of the soldiers not aiming for the zombies' heads despite the fact that the advice gets repeated throughout the movie. Besides all of the complete idiocy of the characters in the movie, there is the matter of the soundtrack, which is in fact, the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack. Ah, lazy movie making at its finest.

Demonia

While Italian director Lucio Fulci has had some great moments such as Zombi 2 and The Beyond, he had directed his share of horrible movies, as well. In fact, he left one of those movies while it was still in production mode (Zombie 3). His later years were especially unkind, and nowhere was that more evident than in one of his last directorial features in Demonia. I had bought the movie for about three bucks, so I thought of it to be a low risk deal. Boy, what that a mistake, even at three bucks.

The main story of the movie begins with some nuns with a mysterious mark on their forehead getting crucified some time ago. Fast forward to modern times in Toronto, where a teacher and his student are in the middle of a conference with other members of their archaeological team. That group travels to Sicily, where they accidentally release the ghosts of the nuns who were executed years earlier. Now, the ghosts set out on a killing spree, with one person getting killed in the meat freezer while his tongue is spiked to a chopping block while another ends up falling to his death, presumably pushed by one of the ghosts. The entire story line of the movie is one big mess, which often leaves the viewer clueless as to what the hell is going on in the movie. Despite some pretty decent murder scenes, the gore is somewhat hokey and hardly makes up for the total lack of...well, just about everything.