Life is cheap and Dr. Tar and his seven nurses have been sellingbodies on the black market, a scam that just might fall apart when he has an affair on one of the nurses with her sister. That girl, Tahwaan, tries to call the cops and gets killed by the doctor and other six caregivers, ending with her on dry ice in a black garbage bag.
All of the women have their own obsessions which Tahwaan uses to kill them, including a scene where a purse gets sewn to someone’s neck. Dr. Tar was totally into this scheme to kill off his staff and it turns out that — are you ready for this spoiler? — the dead girl was once a boy and she had a sex change to marry the doctor and is reborn into our world out of her sister’s ladyparts, then asks Tar to marry her.
Yeah, Thai horror does not care at all if you’re offended.
Anyways, this looks way better than the budget would suggest and it has some interesting kills. I mean, like I said above, a full-grown woman gets born again out of her sister’s privates and if you think that’s boring, I mean, I don’t know how to entertain you.
11. GOLDEN OLDIES: Post-war/50’s movies, from the schlock to the awes.
Robert Breer, who created this, said “In all my work I tried to amaze myself with something, and the only way you can amaze yourself is to create a situation in which an accident can happen.” His father, Carl, was an automotive engineer who designed the Chrysler Airflow and also created a 3-D camera that he used to take photos on vacations. Breer went to Stanford, hoping to follow his father as an engineer, when he discovered Mondrian and became an artist. Moving to Paris in 1949 and staying for a decade, he returned to America to work within pop art and teach film at Cooper Union.
Eyewash is a combination of geometric shapes and photography, all hand colored by the artist. It moves way faster than you can imagine, seeing as this came sixy years ago, and is over before you know it. It’s a study in movement and color that you may want to watch more than once. I know that I did.
As long as we have movies we will have summer camps filled with boned-up counselors who make the most critical of mistakes: fucking in the woods. It happened in the first movie back in 2016 and it assuredly happens here. Let me tell you, if this came out in the 80s, high schoolers would have been losing their minds. I mean, this movie has wall to wall nudity and then decides to throw blood all over said indecency. Who will think of the children?
Fuck the children.
Pine Hill Camp is nearly open. Gil and Nurse Vanessa are the grown up, while Will, Mason, Tasha and Mason are the counselors who are already exhibiting the sort of behavior that gets you killed at camp before the kids even show up.
That’s when Jane (Brittany Blanton), the final girl from the original, emerges and starts warning everyone about parasitic alien worms that crawl into your orifices are out there and ready to destroy young lovers.
Director Shawn Burkett, who made the first movie and co-wrote this with Cheyenne Gordon, also must really love Inseminoid and you know, that’s reason enough to stick with this one. Actually, there are plenty of reasons because this is dumb without being dumb, which is a hard line to tightrope walk but this movie sure does it.
Directed by Brandon Slagle (Crossbreed), based on James Cullen Bressack’s story and adapted by Robert Thompson, Forst stars Vernon Wells as Grant and Devanny Pinn as Abbey, a father and daughter who have not seen one another for years. She wants him to be part of her life as well as the part of the life of the child she is pregnant with. They go fishing and on the way, the car slides off the road, stranding them on the side of a dangerous mountain during a storm.
Grant tries to go for help while Abbey is trapped inside the car, covered in blood and near death thanks to injuries and freezing weather blasting through the smashed windows. As she struggles through madness, she’ll do anything to stay alive. Seriously, I looked down for a moment at the end and I was absolutely shocked by this movie. How often does that happen?
Oh yeah — that wolf on the cover totally shows up too. But man, what happens in the third act? You’re either going to be so astounded you’ll pull up closer or quit this movie in disgust. There’s nothing in-between. Trust me.
Frost is available on digital and blu ray from Cleopatra Records. There’s also a soundtrack featuring Rick Wakeman (Yes), Geoff Downes (Yes/Asia) and Terry Reid.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally was on the site on October 23, 2021. It’s on the site again because now you can find it on your choice of digital and cable platforms, including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, iNDemand and DISH, beginning October 11 from Red Water Entertainment.
Mia (Nora Merivoo) and Kevin (Harri Merivoo) — yes, the children of the director Rasmus Merivoo, but they do quite well — are staying with Grandma (Mari Lili) at her home in the country as their parents attend a retreat. Stuck without access to the web, the kids are entertained by their grandmother’s story of the kratt, a demonic creature that will do anything asked. And hey, if they find the instructions and decide to make their own, nothing will go wrong, right?
Rasmus Merivoo, the director and writer, said that “Kratt is a bloody story with no bad characters. A comedy that encourages you to worry less. A lesson on fear and what happens if you listen to it. A film for grownups and kids. A film not for the
faint-hearted, but part of a full-fledged life for the brave.”
Yep, pretty much.
I haven’t seen many — if any — films from Estonia, but hey this is pretty wild.
So what is a kratt? A part of Estonian folklore, the kratt is a creature made from hay or old household implements and then given life by giving three drops of blood to the devil. The flying demon must constantly be kept working, stealing and doing or it will turn on its master. The only way to stop a kratt is to give it an impossible task which will frustrate it to the point that it will burn itself up.
There are moments of sheer whimsy and fun here, as well as some moments that may not translate to American audiences all that well, but who cares? Don’t we watch foreign films to delight in the alien, the different and the strange?
Visual Vengeance has just unleashed a double feature of director Jonathan Mumm’s shot on video movies Blood of the Chupacabras and Revenge of the Chupacabras. I was so excited to sit down with Jonathan and learn how these movies came to be.
B&S About Movies: What has it been like re-releasing your movies with Visual Vengeance?
Jonathan Mumm:It’s really, really nice. They’ve been available streaming but to have them come out with the poster art and all these extras and commentary tracks is very, very cool. It’s like a low budget horror movie version of a Criterion Collection release
B&S: How did you get into directing from acting?
Jonathan: I started in broadcasting but always wanted to be an actor. My uncle, Claude Akins was a successful actor and he let me stay with him and his family when I went to Hollywood. I got small parts in big things and big parts in small things and for awhile made my living as a voice-over artist. I thought my big break had come when Brookside Winery hired me to do a series of radio commercials for them. They had never advertised before and told me if sales went up, they would hire me full-time to be their spokesperson. Well, that kind of a regular job is the Holy Grail for commercial voice-over actors. So, the production company that made the spots and I kept watch on how the company’s sales were going. They went up 14% and we started celebrating, ready for the call that would tell us when our day job was going to start. That call never came. Instead, one day I’m driving home listening to the radio and here’s an ad for Brookside Winery voiced by none other than Vincent Price! I guess they figured if sales would go up with a nobody, they’d really go up with a movie star somebody! I went back to broadcasting.
I did keep my hand in Hollywood, though, taking those reporter parts you often see in movies and TV shows when crews would shoot on location in Sacramento where I worked as a reporter for a TV station.
And then one day I read an article on this Puerto Rican-Mexican-South American myth about a creature that supposedly killed goats, sucking their blood. It was called the Chupacabras which, in Spanish, literally means “sucker of goats” (hence the “s” at the end).
B&S: And that moment inspired these movies?
Jonathan: It was an editorial taken from the New York Times and it was about this creature — at this point no one in the United States had really heard of it — and I thought that if somebody made a movie about it, they could be the first to showcase a brand new monster. So why couldn’t that be me?
I wrote a script and John Alexander Jimenez, one of the guys I worked with, had a 16-millimeter camera and he came on as our DP. We shot a couple of scenes that we used to find investors. We knew once people saw these scenes and recognized the potential, they would just throw money at us. Of course, that didn’t happen.
Nobody seemed interested in dipping into their bank accounts. I did think it was a good sign when one of the investors asked for a copy of the script, but then he said, “I want to give it to my son because he really likes these movies.” (laughs)
We put the film cans on a shelf for a year because I didn’t have the money to finish it on my own. And then Mike Strange, one of the engineers at the TV station where I worked, came up to me and asked, “Are you ever going to finish your movie?”
I told him I wanted to but didn’t have the money. Well, he had just bought one of the early digital video cameras, a Canon XL 1. He said, “I’ll loan you the camera to finish shooting your movie on one condition. When you’re done, you teach me how to use it!”
I said, “Sure. We can do that!” And suddenly the movie was back on.
B&S: So the whole inspiration came from articles you read on the Chupacabras.
Jonathan: Yeah, it really was that! Once I had read this editorial, I looked up everything I could about the Chupacabras and threw it all into the script. Some viewers didn’t like the fact that I tied it up with earlier sightings of a creature called the Mocha Vampire, but actually that’s part of the legend in Puerto Rico. So is the Mago, the white witch.
I’ve always been into low budget, schlocky horror movies since I was a kid. I didn’t want to make a modern day gory horror film. I wanted to make a throwback to the old Roger Corman drive-in movies I got a kick out of back in the 60s.
B&S: That’s the Corman influence I thought I saw. It’s just as much about the town as it is about the monster!
Jonathan: There’s that sequence in there where they go down the river and they’re in that old World War Two vehicle, the amphibious duck. Well, the reason that that’s even in there is because the fellow who owned it, Mike Mattos, had a military vehicle and tank collection he would loan out to Hollywood. His vehicles were in the Robert Mitchum TV miniseries War and Remembrance and the movie The Second Civil War. He told me he had a friend who had a yacht we could use for our scene. So we show up. No friend. No yacht. And he says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got something.”
And here comes this amphibious duck. (laughs)
B&S: The second movie feels more like a traditional monster movie.
Jonathan: That’s due in large part to the way our distributor advertised the first movie. One of the actors in the movie — Kevin Hale, who has gone on to become quite a successful movie editor these days in Hollywood — kept checking their web site for signs the movie was coming out. He called me and said, “Well, there’s a Chupacabras movie on the website but it doesn’t look like our movie. It doesn’t even have the same title.”
It was our movie! The cover of the DVD had this horrible-looking, hideous creature, you know? And they’re giving you the impression that you’re about to see a really gory movie. Ours was tongue in cheek, this was out for blood!
I do think a lot of people were disappointed that the movie they watched did not quite match the advertising.
Now I admit, if we had seen their drawing before we made the movie, I think we would have made the monster look more like that! Still, it was in keeping with our Roger Corman approach. I mean, how many eyes do you think his The Beast with a Million Eyes really had? Now reaction online may have been vicious, but interestingly all the print reviewers seemed to get a kick out of it including Fangoria Magazine, The Sacramento Bee, Mick Martin’s DVD and Movie Guide and even a punk newspaper called The New York Waste.
In the midst of all the bad internet attention though, I realized other low budget independent movie makers might find themselves in the same boat, so I wrote an article called On Getting a Bad Review that was published by Indy Slate Magazine. And a few months later one of the actors in the film, Mark Halverson, asked me, “Do you think the distributor would be interested in a sequel?”
Almost to spite all the naysayers I wrote to the distributor and asked if they’d be interested in part two? Well, boy, I’ll tell you what, they must have made some money off our movie because I got an answer right away. They even sent a letter of intent.
For the second film, we actually had a production schedule. We actually had a production budget. We actually held auditions for the roles. It’s still super, super low budget and done really fast, but our computer effects guy, Rob Neep, went to town on the monster which this time looks like the monster on the cover of the first movie. We also used better, more sophisticated equipment and 16×9 framing.
B&S: You answered your critics.
Jonathan: The monster appears a lot in the second one because of people complaining how little it appeared in the first movie. I wasn’t sure how effective the monster was in the first movie so I limited its appearance.
Oh — you know in the first movie when the monster bites the landlord? That was a head that we’d had made to decide if we liked the way a rubber monster suit might look. Our make up artist, Mike Arbios, said he could make the suit for the amazingly low price of $800 which didn’t seem all that amazingly low to me. So I said, “Go ahead and make the head first.” It looked great. But it didn’t have room for someone to put their head in it, it just had a small hole at the bottom of the neck. He said, “Oh, it’s not the real head, it’s just a mock up.” Well, I paid $75 for it. When you make a movie for as low a budget as this one, you can’t afford to pay $75 for a mock up. We used it like a puppet for that scene!
Our main set in the second movie was the Preston Castle which as the Preston School of Industry was the first boys’ reformatory in California. It was built in 1890 and in use up to the 60s. There were a lot of famous wards of the state that went to the Preston School of Industry including country singer Merle Haggard and actor Rory Calhoun. After it closed down, it was pretty much abandoned. In later years, a non-profit group, the Preston Castle Foundation bought it and has been working for years to refurbish it. But back when we shot there, it was still a condemned building. The first day we were delayed getting there to check it out and didn’t arrive until after sunset. The electricity wasn’t on and I’m walking through this creepy place with a flashlight when a bat comes flying right at me.
When we came out to shoot, we fixed up the rooms with furniture we bought at thrift stores and even wallpapered some of the walls. It looked good, but no going upstairs. Watch out for huge holes in the floors of upstairs rooms! We call it the Hagerthy Psychiatric Institution in the movie which is kind of an inside joke. It’s named after an old Hollywood pal of mine, Mike Hagerthy. We did an episode of the Movin’ On TV showtogether and plays at the Glendale Center Theatre.
I think Blood of the Chupacabras was the first movie ever shot at the Preston Castle, but it’s been in at least a few low budget movies since and even some TV shows like Ghost Adventures.
B&S: Any plans to return for more stories of the chupacabras?
Jonathan: I don’t know. I’ve dabbled around with an idea for a third. It would be much different than the first two. But I ask myself, you know, since those are the only two movies I ever directed do I really want my legacy to be that all I ever did were Chupacabras movies?
By the way, if you’d like to see more of the crazy things that happened behind the scenes, check out the extras on the Blu Ray and visit my website: shootingchupacabras.com
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site on December 23, 2021. It’s back because Ronin Flix has released it on blu ray. You can get it now from MVD.
Shot as Panga by director Sean Barton (who only directed this one movie, but has edited many more) on location in South Africa in 1989, this film was added to the Curse series of films. None of these movies are connected and you know, that’s kind of how we like it. You can call it Witchcraft, Blood Sacrifice or Curse III: Panga, if you’d like.
Geoff Armstrong (Andre Jacobs) and his wife Elizabeth (Jenilee Harrison, Cindy Snow from Three’s Company and Jamie Ewing Barnes on Dallas) are running a large sugar plantation in East Africa. Things go wrong when the sacrifice of a goat by the locals get interrupted and a witch doctor calls a demon from the sea that kills everyone in the Armstrong family except Elizabeth.
Elizabeth gets help from Dr. Pearson (Christopher Lee) and to break the curse she must lure the witch doctor into the sugar cane fields and set him on fire. Seems like a good plan, I guess.
The fish man is designed by The Fly special FX artist Chris Walas, so this has that going for it. It’s not really all that exciting, nor is at as devoted to being entertaining weirdness like the first two films in the Curse non-series.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I love this movie so much that it’s been on the site at least three times. Well, thanks to Blue Underground, it’s four thanks to their new blu ray re-release. Beyond the best that this movie has ever looked — and will probably ever look, until they figure out how to beam it directly into your skull — you get an entire disc full of extras, such as new audio commentary by Troy Howarth, author of Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films, deleted scenes, trailers and extras like:
Meet the Boyles – Interviews with Stars Catriona MacColl and Paolo Malco
Children of the Night – Interviews with Stars Giovanni Frezza and Silvia Collatina
Tales of Laura Gittleson – Interview with Star Dagmar Lassander
My Time With Terror – Interview with Star Carlo De Mejo
A Haunted House Story – Interviews with Co-Writers Dardano Sacchetti and Elisa Briganti
To Build a Better Death Trap – Interviews with Cinematographer Sergio Salvati, Special Make-Up Effects Artist Maurizio Trani, Special Effects Artist Gino De Rossi, and Actor Giovanni De Nava
House Quake – Interview with Co-Writer Giorgio Mariuzzo
Catriona MacColl Q&A
Calling Dr. Freudstein – Interview with Stephen Thrower, Author of Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci
There are also trailers, a TV spot, posters and image galleries.
You can get this Blue Underground release from MVD.
Here’s the first time I wrote about this movie on February 26, 2018.
The House by the Cemetery is one of my favorite films ever. I cannot defend its lack of story, the fact that it’s influences are pinned to its sleeve or that it makes little to no sense. The first time I watched it — at a drive-in marathon that also included Zombi 2 — was an experience that burned the film into my brain.
The beginning will grab you in seconds, as a woman searches for her boyfriend in an abandoned house. She finds him dead, stabbed with scissors. Just then, she’s stabbed in the back of the head and the blade of the knife comes out of her mouth! We see her dragged away as the movie begins.
In one of the eeriest scenes in the film, Bob looks at a photo of the house and notices a young girl moving from room to room. This is the most subtle of all frights, a small moment where reality is not as it should be, and far more potent than even the goriest of grue that Fulci will soon serve up with glee. Only Bob can see this vision, which warns him to stay away.
As his parents get the keys to the house, Bob sees the girl again. Inside the rental office, Mrs. Gittleson (Dagmar Lassander, Hatchet for the Honeymoon) is upset that the couple has the Freudstein keys to Oak Mansion, but she promises to find a babysitter from Bob.
The mansion is a mess. Yet when the babysitter (Ania Pieroni, Inferno) comes, she enters the previously locked and nailed-shut cellar door. Strangeness follows, like a librarian recognizing Norman despite never meeting him, the discovery of a tomb inside the house and a bat attack.
The Boyles demand a new house as Norman goes to the hospital. Mrs. Gittleson comes to tell them that she’s found a new property, but the Freudstein tombstone in the ground holds her while a figure stabs her in the neck. The next morning, Ann the babysitter cleans up the blood and avoids questions.
While the Boyles are at the hospital to treat Norman’s injuries from the bat, Mrs. Gittleson arrives at the house to tell them of a new property. Letting herself in, she stands over the Freudstein tombstone, which cracks apart, pinning her ankle. A figure emerges, stabs her in the neck with a fireplace poker, and drags her into the cellar.
The next morning, Lucy finds Ann cleaning a bloodstain on the kitchen floor while eluding Lucy’s questions about the stain. As they drink their morning coffee, Norman tells Lucy that the house was once home to Dr. Fruedstein, who conducted horrific experiments in the basement. He decides to go to New York City to learn more and on the way, he finds out that Freudstein killed his old friend Peterson’s family.
Ann can’t find Bob, so she goes to the basement where Freudstein slashes her throat and decapitates her. Bob finds her head and screams, but his mother refuses to believe the story. Bob goes back to the cellar but gets locked in. His mother tries to open the door, which can’t be unlocked. Norman returns and they make their way down to see Freudstein’s hands holding Bob. One axe slash later and the hand is cut off as the monster goes away to recover.
Inside the basement, Norman and Lucy find mutilated bodies, surgical equipment and a slab. Turns out that Freudstein is 150 years old and has learned to escape death. He returns and attacks Norman, who returns the favor by stabbing him. The twisted doctor replies by ripping out Norman’s throat. Lucy and Bon try to escape, but Freudstein drags her down to the basement where he rams her head into the floor until she dies.
Finally, the doctor grabs Bob, who is rescued by Mar and her mother, Mary Freudenstein. Mary tells them that it’s time to leave as she leads Mae and Bob down to a world of gloom and ghosts. The film ends with this quote:
House by the Cemetery is a mash-up of Frankenstein, The Amityville Horror and The Shining. And it’s another in the series of classics that Dardano Sacchetti (working with Giorgio Mariuzzo here) wrote for Fulci. If you think it’s nonsensical, imagine how early American audiences felt when the original VHS copies released in the U.S. had several of the reels out of order!
Seriously, this movie makes no sense whatsoever. There aren’t plot holes because there’s not even a plot. And sure, some say there’s too much gore. Yes, I’ve heard these complaints and I say no to all of them! Look, you’re either going to become an evangelist for this film (if you meet me in person, there’s a good chance I’ll have on a t-shirt with this film’s logo, I wear the shirt all the time) and you’ll think it’s the biggest piece of garbage ever made.
You have no idea how happy I am to own the 4K version of Fulci’s classic Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero. Blue Underground has been releasing some astounding versions of Fulci’s masterworks this year, such as Zombie and The New York Ripper. Now, they’re giving the same high quality treatment to Dr. Freudstein and, of course, little Bob.
Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco, Thunder and Catriona MacColl, who is also in Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and The Beyond) have just left New York City behind to live in the country, which Norman will work on the same research that his friend Dr. Peterson was undertaking — you know, before he went nuts and killed his mistress and himself.
Why should Norman tell his family that they’re moving into such a frightening house? He can just scream at his wife and demand that she start taking her pills again when he isn’t exchanging sex eyes with Ann the babysitter (Ania Pieroni, Mater Lachrymarum!).
Hey Blue Underground — I’m the only one asking for it, but where’s the 4K Manhattan Baby?!?
I adore this movie because it’s really all over the place. It’s kind of, sort of The Amityville Horror by way of The Shining while also being a zombie picture and at other times, becoming a slasher. Dr. Freudstein is a mess, falling apart, losing his hand and killing everyone Bob loves for reasons that are left up to you — the viewer — to define.
It also ends up a great quote — “No one will ever know whether the children are monsters or the monsters are children” — that is attributed to Henry James but really came from Fulci. I have no idea how it ties to this movie at all and I’ve watched this film potentially hundreds of times.
I’ll be honest — I first discovered this movie at an all-night drive-in series of zombie films. I wondered why it was part of the show and thought that it surely would suffer compared to the other movies shown that evening. I was completely wrong.
This is the last gasp of shorts from Fantastic Fest.
Night (2021): Ahmed Saleh’s Night is based on the true story of a Palestinian mother and took four years to make, which you will realize is true after seeing how detailed the stop motion animation is. Hiam Abbass is the voice of the mother, Salma Saleh is her daughter and Night is played by Rafia Oraidi.
The idea of this film is that Night has to fool the Mother into sleeping to save her soul as war rages all around. This lives up to its title — it’s very dark in tone — and the music is beyond sumptuous. It’s haunting throughout and tells its story in an incredibly effective way.
I’d love to see a behind the scenes to learn how this was made.
O, Glory! (2022): Directed and written by Joe Williams and Charlie Edwards-Moss, this is the story of a psychiatric doctor and his assistant who have been summoned to an isolated country house to examine Deborah (Emily Stott), whose brother believes is losing her mind.
The three men find themselves in the grip of her psychosis — or is it theirs? — as they try to help her. Shot in rural England and infused with folk horror, this shot on 35mm short is gorgeous, this could — and should — be a full length movie.
Return to Sender (2022): Director and writer Russell Goldman and producer Jamie Lee Curtis were inspired by things ordered from Amazon that didn’t arrive or the wrong thing came instead. Goldman based Julia, the hero of this story, on his family’s history of addiction. She gets no support from customer service as her orders fail and ends up ruining not just her life, but someone else’s as well when she doesn’t get what she wanted.
Allison Tolman plays Julia and she’s great, just falling to pieces as she keeps getting the wrong packages which must be some grand conspiracy against her. This looks incredible and is better than most major movies I’ve seen this year.
Seafoam (2022): Directed, written by and starring Izzy Stevens, Seafoam explores a waking nightmare as Billy keeps seeing the same man (Jae Kim) after visiting her mother in a psychiatric health ward. By the end of the film, this descends into madness.
What it gets right is a really hard thing: the hours that seem to crawl by as you watch someone you love who is no longer there, telling you things that may not exist, as you keep watching their face for any inkling that they know who you are. And you know where they are now is where you will be someday very soon. This movie hit me a bit too hard.
Sucks to Be the Moon (2022): Creators Tyler March, Eric Paperth and Rob Tanchum have created an animated short in which the moon, tired of being lonely and in the shadow of the sun, decides to escape to meet other planets and falls in which a bad crowd — Pluto — and somehow comes back together to be friends with the Sun, only for both to realize just how important they are — were — to Earth.
This is a movie that has taught me that the universe is basically a club where all the planets hang out.
What have you been up to, Moon? “Hard drugs and crime.”
I’d say this was perfect for kids, but man, in no way should you let your kids watch it.
Tank Fairy (2021): In this short film by Erich Rettstadt, Marian Mesula plays the Tank Fairy, a magical woman who delivers tanks of gas with plenty of sass) to Jojo (Ryan Lin), a young man with a dream and the need for someone exactly like the Tank Fairy in his life.
This movie looks like foreign commercials or a strange TV show from a country you can’t place and you watch it while you eat and watch those wild music videos that some restaurants still play and I say that as a supreme compliment. Shot in Taiwan, it has energy, verve and, yes, sass. Also gas.
This movie feels like it could give someone that needs hope some hope.
Vertical Valor (2022): Directed and written by Alex Kavutskiy, Vertical Valor celebrates the lost heroes of World War 3: the skaters who stayed home and keep working on their ollie while delivering bad news to, well, the same dad over and over and over yet again. Man, I never knew I could have served in this unit, because I could rail grind and get some limited air even as a fat teenager. Perhaps my knowledge of sponsored riders and Misfits lyrics could have been put to service for my country. I could have read old issues of Thrasher to blind vets. Man, while I’m glad that we haven’t had a major world war — I mean, give 2022 time — I do know that I could have been part of the effort.
Zombie Meteor (2022): Co-directors and writers José Luis Farias and Alfonso Fulgencio have taken the boredom I feel about zombies and made them fun again. Mar (Coral Balas) and Petrov (Iván Muelas) are in orbit on a space station when — you guessed it from the title — a meteor filled with zombies adds so much danger to their regular day.
I had no expectations about this. In fact, I thought from the description I’d not enjoy it. I will admit it. I was wrong, this was great and I’ll watch anything these creative forces make. You won me over, even if I’m still sick of zombies.
Keep your mind open and allow the living dead inside, I guess.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This appeared as part of Slasher Month on October 12, 2020. All the Puppet Master movies will be covered this week, so here it is again.
Puppet Master 2 begins in 1990 as André Toulon’s grave is being excavated by Pinhead, who opens up the coffin and pours a vial onto his creator’s skeleton while Blade, Jester, Tunneler and Leach Woman watch. Soon, the skeleton raises his arms and Toulon is back from the dead.
Then, we return back to the hotel where Megan from the last movie has been killed and as a result, Alex is suspected of her death and is in an insane asylum. Nothing about the reanimated dog is mentioned.
Soon, the puppets are trying to steal away parapsychologists Carolyn Bramwell, who Toulon believes is the reincarnation of his dead wife Elsa. There’s also a new puppet named Torch along for the ride. This one also explains why the puppets kill — they need brain tissue to stay alive.
This one ends with Toulon double crossing the puppets in the hope of bringing his wife back from the dead. Like I said before, no one should screw with the puppets, not even the Puppet Master.
Strangely enough, the only reason why Leech Woman was destroyed in this movie was that studio executives at Paramount hated her. Another bit of trivia — look for Mr. Punch from Dolls on Toulon’s shelf.
Puppet Master II is the only movie that David Allen, who created the puppet special effects for the first film, directed. Check out our review of The Dungeonmaster to learn way more than you may want to know about this talented artist with a dark secret.
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