DAY 8. EQUAL SLICE: One where women get top billing.
Antebellum is a movie that would have been much better if I’d never seen the trailer and if the big reveal didn’t happen until much later in the movie. As it stands, it’s still interesting, but it would have really knocked me out if I had no idea what I was in store for. So that’s why I’m giving you the opportunity to look away now, because you deserve to see this with no expectations.
Eden (Janelle Monáe) is a slave who has tried to escape before and bears the brand of her owner, Him (Eric Lange). When another girl named Julia (Kiersey Clemons) hangs herself — killing both herself and her unborn child — after the treatment she endures and Eden is again assaulted by Him, she falls asleep.
Seriously, spoilers.
Eden is really Veronica Henley, a sociologist promoting her new book along with her friends — it’s nice to see Gabourey Sidibe in this — when she’s targeted by Elizabeth (Jena Malone) and her husband Jasper (Jack Hutton), drugged and taken to the plantation, which exists underknown to the rest of the modern world.
Now that she is part of the past — or at least a re-enactment of it — Eden/Veronica must escape or die.
Writers, directors and producers Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz have mostly worked in shorts before this, but the film has some moment of real slow motion beauty that was filmed using the actual lenses from Gone with the Wind.
Basically, consider this a woke The Village, except that movie had the sense to wait until — again — the close before the twist. That said, I wasn’t bored by this, but the times we meet Veronica, she seems much less likeble than Eden.
Regardless, any time that women of color can be the lead in any movie — much less a horror film — is a reason to celebrate. Check it out for yourself — it’s yet another movie where a woman done wrong sets a house on fire and walks awat in slow motion — and let me know what you think.
B. J. McDonnell took over as the director of the Victor Crowley saga this time around, pitting him against Marybeth Dunston one more time in the swamps of Honey Island Swamp. After a shotgun blast to the face, a chainsaw sawing him in half and another shotgun to the brainstem, it seems like Crowley is finished. But hey — we wouldn’t have a movie if he didn’t get back up.
Marybeth is now Sheriff Fowler’s (Zach Galligan) main suspect in the case of the thirty bodies found in the swamp, but his ex-wife Amanda Fowler (Caroline Williams!) knows the truth: Crowly continually repeats the night of his death and anyone that gets in his way is just blood and guts in his way.
After figuring out that Marybeth isn’t part of the murders, she is released to try and stop the killer one more time, along with a SWAT unit that features Tyler Hawes (Derek Mears, who played Jason in the Friday the 13th remake, meaning that this movie has Jason versus Jason*) and the one armed Dougherty (Rileah Vanderbilt, who was the person that Crowley’s face was molded onto and also played the young version of him in the first two movies).
Oh yeah — Sid Haig shows up too!
If this had been the close to the series, it would have been perfect. However, Victor Crowley is next and that’s pretty good, too! I fell in love with these films, watching the fourth one first when Joe Bob showed it and I’m so happy that I went back and watched them all.
*Hodder was also in other movies with other Jasons. In Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, he appeared with Ken Kirzinger. John Carl Buechler was also in the first two Hatchet movies.
The third National Lampoon movie* to reach theaters — it was filmed after National Lampoon Goes To The Movies — this was written by John Hughes, who was pretty unhappy with the final product. He’d tell the Chicago Tribune, “They didn’t even want me around, and I was shocked when I saw the movie”. My screenplay had been completely butchered, and my name will nevertheless be on the credits forever.” That said, I think no one but me remembers this movie and Hughes ended up doing just fine.
The film failed at the box office and the Lampoon name would end up being hit and miss, with films like National Lampoon’s Animal House and National Lampoon’s Vacation being all time comedy classics and others like National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1, National Lampoon’s Barely Legal and National Lampoon Presents Surf Party (amongst many, many others) became a series of dwindling returns, much like the magazine would be after most of its talent left.
If you’re hoping for the wit of the infamous National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook Parody, know that P.J. O’Rourke and Doug Kenney had nothing to do with this film. No, instead this is the tenth reunion of the class of Lizzie Borden High School and they’re being haunted by Walter Baylor, a student who had a prank played on him, ala Terror Train and Slaughter High.
The film certainly has a great cast. I’m always pleased to see Gerrit Graham (Phantom of Paradise,TerrorVision) on my screen. Plus, there’s Michael Lerner (Barton Fink), Misty Rowe (Hee-Haw, SST Death Flight), Blackie Dammett (the father of Anthony Kiedis, who is awesome in Nine Deaths of the Ninja), Miriam Flynn (Cousin Catherine from the Vacation movies), Stephen Furst (Flounder from Animal House), Mews Small (who was in the original Broadway production of Grease) and Anne Ramsey (Mama Fratelli from The Goonies).
It also has an on-screen performance by Chuck Berry performing a medley of his songs (“It Wasn’t Me”, “My Dingaling”, and “Festival”) and a theme song by Gary U.S. Bonds.
In a world of slasher silliness — I’m looking at you, Wacko, Pandemonium, Student Bodies and Saturday the 14th — this one isn’t all that good. It does, however, posit something that no other slasher in my memory really has done before. It redeems its killer.
In the very same year of this film’s release, director Michael Miller would make another strange slasher hybrid, Silent Rage, which features Chuck Norris against an unstoppable killer. MIller would use most of the crew from this movie and Stephen Furst for that one, too.
*I’m not counting TV movie Disco Beaver from Outer Space in the list of National Lampoon films.
The best part of a slasher is that if it works, you get more than one. 2010’s Hatchet II starts exactly where the first ended, placing Marybeth Dunston (now played by Danielle Harris) into the grip of Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder). There’s even a scene that ties in this movie to another Adam Green film Frozen, which film geeks — hello, everyone reading this — will enjoy.
Sadly, this was to be the first unrated horror movie to be released in theaters since 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, but pressure from the MPAA took it out of AMC Theaters before most fans got the chance to see it.
Marybeth learns that from Rev. Zombie (Tony Todd) that her father was one of the boys whose prank started the sequence of events that took Victor Crowley physically from this world, leaving behind his unstoppable ghost. Along with her uncle (Tom Holland, the director of Fright Night) and a team of hunters — all being offered $500 to get back Rev. Zombie’s boat and $5,000 for the head of Crowley — she ventures back into Honey Island Swamp one more time. But all, as they say, is not as it seems.
With references to Jason and Leslie Vernon, as well as numerous and incredibly inventive kills — the last one is incredible — this is pretty much a slasher lover’s dream film. Where movies like Scream use the genre as a joke and springboard for their own retread of the form, this is a tribute worth watching.
How much does Adam Green like slashers? He was in a band called Haddonfield. And he’s made four movies in the Hatchet series, as well as writing the Tommy Jarvis tapes in Friday the 13th: The Game.
Hatchet straddles the line between tribute to the past, humor and being a slasher that can stand on its own quite well. I was pleased to discover how much I loved every single one of these movies.
Victor Crowley was born when his father Thomas (both roles are played by slasher killer elite Kane Hodder) has a child with the nurse of his terminally ill wife, who curses the child. Born deformed in a difficult birth that claims the life of his mother, Thomas has raised the child as best he can when a prank causes a house fire and an accidental hatchet to the face kills the boy, who must now roam the New Orleans swamps as a ghost forever searching for his father and ready to kill anyone in his way.
Woe be to anyone who takes a tourist boat ride through the swamps on a night that Victor is out roaming, which is the perfect set-up for this type of film. I mean, how much more do you want to know?
Crowley is opposed by Marybeth Dunston (Tamara Feldman for the first film, to be followed by Danielle Harris in the others), who blames Crowley for the deaths of her father and brother.
The other thing this movie gets right is having Tony Todd in the cast. He elevates everything he’s ever been in and is a standout here as Rev. Zombie, who has been sued too many times to lead tours. He’ll become more essential in the second film. Actually, if you watch the first three movies together, they tell one big story, kind of like Halloween and Halloween 2. Robert Englund shows up as well, making this the second movie that Hodder, Todd and Englund all appear in (the other is The Wishmaster).
This is a spin-off five-minute film from Nicholas Michael Jacobs’ Tales from Six Feet Under, just like the last film he sent us, Genevieve. Actually, it feels exactly the same as that movie without all that much difference. This is all about “David Burr’s last few minutes of life as Genevieve punishes him for breaking into her home.”
The truth is, this movie is five minutes long, with two minutes and twenty seconds of that time being the credits. I’m all for reusing footage, but this just feels like a throwaway when Jacobs does seem to have talent.
Philip “Hawk” Hawkins (Ryan Barton-Grimley, who wrote, produced and directed) was kicked out of the army for killing someone who he thought was a vampire and has been thrown out of his parents’ house, too. He’s working as a security guard in Santa Muerta, California — which would probably be great if it wasn’t for all the gd vampires — when some actual vamps show up. Only one person believes him, his vegetarian pacifist friend Revson “Rev” McCabe (Ari Schneider). Can these two save the world? Well, maybe not. But they might be able to save their neighborhood.
Will Hawk get the love of Theo (Jana Savage)? Will Rev escape unharmed? Will their mysterious eyepatched mentor teach them the ways of vampire butt kickery? How does that goth band fit in? Will mummies show up?
I absolutely loved this quick — 84 minutes! — blast of 80’s infused horror comedy, which moves at a lighting pace and makes you fall for all of its characters. I could foresee several films within this world and hope that this is exactly what the filmmakers intend! Hell, this could be a video game, a comic, action figures, a marital aid line…
This may also win the award for the most volume of blood I’ve seen in a movie in 2020. Or at least the funniest use of way too much blood. Ah, what am I saying? Too much is never enough.
Hawk and Rev: Vampire Slayers was the midnight movie on the opening and closing nights of the Dances with Film Festival and will soon be available on demand from October Coast. You can learn more on the official site and offical Facebook page.
DAY 7. THEY’RE OUT TO GET YOU: One with heavy paranoid (real or imagined).
I was going to do A Scanner Darkly for the Scarecrow Challenge today, but somehow, someway I found a movie that might be even more off the wall insane than a Phillip K. Dick adaption. Just imagine that.
This only came out in the UK and Spain, as far as I know, and went straight to video in the U.S. Somehow, in a world where it seems like every mom and pop horror movie section rental has been pulled off the shelf and transformed into a 4K clean print with a million extras and a collectible slip cover, this one somehow escaped.
We begin with Rip Torn — yes, the Oscar and Emmy-nominated actor from The Larry Sanders Show and, of course, Freddy Got Fingered — screaming in Egyptian at a bug at the top of his lungs before transforming from a Nazi scientist who has somehow escaped war crimes before becoming the Egyptian god Khepera, the scarab-faced representation of the rising or morning sun. Sure, he represents creation and the renewal of life. But isn’t Lucifer also the light bringer?
Meanwhile, in a completely different movie, Murphy (Robert Gintry, The Exterminator) is getting decimated in a bar before he walks into an ambassador’s house and easily cucking him. Then he gets arrested.
Then, in the third movie of one movie, we watch a politican fencing with his graddaughter before one of his servants places a scarab on him and he ends up killing himself.
As if this barrage of stories doesn’t make you disoriented, we get back to Murphy, who watches another politican kill himself with a gun after anotehr scarab gets put on him and then a nun named Elena (Cristina S. Pascual, who played a night club singer hiding out with gay nuns in Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits the very same year) runs away before revealing that she is the daughter of the Nazi scientist/Egyptian god.
Also, she has psychic powers.
This movie has it all. By all, I mean that it has two movies in one.
The first is all about Rip Torn dressed like a bird/bug human god who has long rituals of women dancing near-nude when he isn’t making love to women who transform into cows, at which point he spits milk into their faces. He also transforms outfits throughout the film, becoming the scuzzy direct to VHS version of Serpentor by the end of the proceedings.
The other movie is about Ginty strolling around, getting wasted, having sex with the wrong women and then using an axe to battle hooded bad guys.
At some point, the two movies come together and all them witches paint Rip Torn’s daughter’s bosom with weird squiggly black lines and make her up like Ming’s concubine took care of Dale Arden.
The tagline for this movie was “Evil, plotted by a mad sorcerer… bizarre beyond imagination.”
They’re more than half right.
This was written by Robert and Steve-Charles Jaffe (who also were behind Motel Hell; Robert also wrote Nightflyers and Demon Seed), with Steven-Charles directing*. Ned Miller and Jim Block, who were behind the Ashutosh Gowariker in America vehicle West Is West, were also on hand to presumably say things like, “Guys. Guys. Guys! This movie makes no sense.” Thank Khepera the brothers Jaffe had the good sense to tell them to shut the fuck up.
You know what I’m looking for in a movie? Half-nude dancers in Satanic rituals, screaming at bugs with microphones, Robert Ginty in anything and a movie that despite featuring human sacrifices throughout ends with the kind of music that you’d hear over the end of a failed McLean Stevenson sitcom and not bat at eye.
This is the kind of movie that I drive people nuts talking about. Trust me, you should be glad to be quarantined because if parties were still a thing, I’d sit next to you in a maniacal rage screaming “Ginty and Torn in the same film!”
There aren’t enough stars in every parallel reality to properly rate this batshit paen to…something. I’m just glad these crazy bastards had the gumption to go to Spain and convince people to give them money to make their politcial conspiracy of a scarab Nazi scientist god movie. Their balls are as huge Set’s testicles, which of course are healed at the same time as Horus’ eye after their comsic conflict.
Canada, I love you. Seriously, you have made so many crazy slashers that you’ve won my heart. And just when I think I’ve seen them all, I find this 1987 rarity that features a killer named Frankie who kidnaps women, forces them to dress up like his mother and then stores their used up dead bodies in a closet. But now that he’s found — and lost — Madeline (Melissa Martin, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) thanks to dear old mom, he decides to commit matricide and take off into the night looking for the one that got away.
This ones comes to us from Lloyd Simandi — whose resume is packed with wonderful junk like Empire of Ash films, Chained Heat II, Medieval Fleshpots 2: Hot Wenches and Forbidden Rage: White Slave Secrets — and Michael Mazo, who also directed Empire of Ash III. In case you’re wondering who did Empire of Ash II, the secret is that these guys were so scumtastic that they just released the first film all over again as the second one.
For all the scenes of women soaping up in the shower — seriously, this movie must have employed a 35,000 gallon hot water heater to ensure all those showers remained piping hot — there is also a scene of women going to the male strip club. And everyone chasing the killer. And the killer chasing them back. And, perhaps most amazingly, the killer stabbing a woman and then using the same knife to slice up some pizza.
This is the kind of movie that Twitter kids would today label as problematic and that my wife walks past and shakes her head, wondering why I always end up watching movies where everyone is either stupid, naked or stupid and naked.
I often joke that John Carradine and Donald Pleasence never said no to a movie, but the films they refused were probably asked of Cameron Mitchell, who absolutely, positively would never ever turn down a role. He’s in the movie — released at the absolute peak of VHS rental mania — as the owner of a video store of the beyond, renting out all manner of sleazy films to an increasingly more bizarre cast of characters, including scream queen Michelle Bauer (Reform School Girls, Sorority Babes in the SlimeballBowl-O-Rama, Evil Toons) before she became so well-known.
Much like Terror In the Aisles, Zombiethon and Famous T&A, this is a compilation tape of horror films. But until the high class by comparison Pleasence and Nancy Allen-starring Terror In the Aisles, this is a bottom of the barrel — and that’s where we like it, thank you — scraping collection of clips from the Continental Video catalogue.
As Mitchell holds forth at the Shoppe of Horrors Video Store, one-and-done director Robert A. Worms III throws every film the label has at you. And while many reviewers have mentioned how bad these movies are, guess what? They’re the bread and butter of what we talk about here. And this bread may be soggy, but it tastes delicious.
For many, this was their first exposure to the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, as clips of Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red are in this. Plus, there’s a whole mess of wonderful occult oddities like Enter the Devil(truly the peak or valley, depending on your point of view, for bad taste Satanic shockers), Suicide Cult, To the Devil A Daughter, Ruby and — spectacularly and incredibly grainily — Cathy’s Curse.
Continental Video would also release plenty more great junk in the years to come, such as Witchboard, Thrashin’ (which was the hardest movie to get in the days of Prime Time Video), Eaten Alive!, Daughters of Darkness, Hollywood Vice Squad, Mary Mary Bloody Mary, The Redeemer, Maniac Mansion, El Castillo de los Monstruos, two Fred Olen Ray Sleazemania compilations and the Bubba Smith exercise video Bubba Until It Hurts.
I have a free idea for Vinegar Syndrome or Severin. Remake this and throw in clips of all your new releases. After all, you have fans like me who pretty much buy everything you do. And buy it again. And again.
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