Steve Rudzinski directed CarousHELL and CarousHELL 2so I’m giving him a pass on this one, because we all have an Amityville movie in us somewhere and hey, at least he made one that defies the mold. Along with co-writer Bill Murphy, he’s telling the story of Wally Griswold (Rudzinski), the same character he plays in the Meowy the cat series of movies.
Wally has won a trip over the holidays to Amityville and to stay overnight at a Christmas-themed bed and breakfast which is, you guessed it, the former home of the Lutz and DeFeo families. He falls in love with someone else in the house who ends up being a ghost, a fact that he is absolutely clueless about and we have a combination Amityville and Hallmark Christmas romantic comedy all at the same time.
Ben Dietels from Neon Brainiacs is in it and it’s only fifty minutes long. These are both quite good reasons to watch this movie. It’s fully aware of how silly it all is without being so in on the joke that it gets lame. It’s also relatively family safe with none of the usual insanity of these movies. I’m just happy that it’s a real movie, that it’s fun and that I got to watch it.
You can watch this on Tubi or order it from the filmmaker.
This December, the Kino Cult linear FAST channel streams deep cuts of cult horror titles as thematically-paired “midnight movie” double features throughout the month all free with ads. They play at midnight EST.
Kino Cult is a free ad-supported streaming destination for genre lovers of horror and cult films, Kino Cult also has hundreds of new and rare theatrically released cult hits, all presented in beautiful high definition. Additionally, Kino Cult offers an ad-free subscription plan for $4.99 per month.
Arrow Player will have the following movies in December:
December 5: Start your holiday early with The Leech, one of the wildest movies I saw this year.
December 9: Fright Christmas has cold weather thrillers like The Deeper You Dig, Kolobos and The Chill Factor. Plus, check out Horror Hospital and Ghost House.
December 16: Go back in time with Paul Joyce’s documentary Out of the Blue and Into the Black, a look at American independent film production post-Easy Rider, which has interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper, Monte Hellman and Roger Corman.
Head over to ARROW to start watching now. Subscriptions are available for $6.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Samsung TVs, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.
Shudder is finishing 2022 in the scariest way possible. Plans start at under $5 a month and you can get the first week free when you visit Shudder.
Click on any of the links to see an in-depth article on the movie.
December 1: The premiere of the Shudder exclusive A Wounded Fawn, plus Night of the Comet and every single A Nightmare On Elm Street movie. You can read about those movies in our multiple-part series: part one, part two and part three.
Robert William Pickton is a Vancouver-born serial killer and former pig farmer who may be the most prolific serial killer in Canadian history. He left a butcher’s apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family’s pig farm and eventually inherited it. He started killing in the early 80s and may have killed as many as 49 women before he was arrested in 2002.
Why did he become a killer? One theory is that he was strangely devoted to his mother Louise despite her loving the pigs more than he and his brother David, sending them to school in clothes that smelled of pig feces. Once their parents died, the brothers stopped worrying about the farm and more about their charity, the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, which really was just a front for raves and parties in a converted slaughterhouse that were filled with Hells Angels and sex workers.
In 1997, he was charged with the attempted murder of Wendy Lynn Eistetter, stabbing her multiple times before she could get the knife off of him. He was eventually cleared of charges. The police started watching him at this point, noticing that some women never came back from the farm. Today, they think that he may have fed their bodies to his pigs or worse ground them up and sold them to the public.
He wasn’t convicted of first-degree murder — I mean, the cops found a gun that had a dildo with a hole in it so he could literally shoot a cock gun and videotape testimony of Robert talking about injecting washer fluid into women — but was convicted for second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole for 25 years. This was the longest possible sentence for second-degree murder under Canadian law at the time he was sentenced. Canadian courts also decided not to charge him for the other murders and stayed his case.
Pig Killer has Jake Busey as Willy and Lew Temple as his brother David. We meet Willy as he unwinds at a bar, then picks up an Asian hooker (Bai Ling!?!), kills her and then has sex with her. The film does not pull a single punch, including showing male members but not in any way that anyone normal could be turned on by. While he’s doing this evil deed, he imagines his mother (Ginger Lynn Allen) berating him.
Seriously, if the title and that intro and the above paragraph didn’t stop you, turn back and run.
Two cops, Oppal (Michael Paré) and Scneer (Robert Rhine) are on the trail of this serial killer but can’t connect the dots. While they’re searching, Willy is planning a big party and also killing women left and right, ending up on a colision course with Wendy (Kate Patel), a runaway who has already overdosed, barely survived and left her family for the streets.
Busey is really great in this, creating a character that is in no way sympathetic but is riveting to watch. However, this movie in no way flinches from the violence of this story, whether that means feeding bodies to Willy’s prize pig Balthazar or injecting a victim in the eye with cleaning fluid while assaulting her from behind in a scene that had to make Fulci try to sit up straight in his grave and say, “Wow. Really?”
I haven’t had to take a shower after watching a movie in some time, so this is some kind of feat. Instead of the true crime films that we can just walk away from and not consider the horrors that have been committed, this shoves your face in the mud and blood and pus and starts stomping on it.
This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.
In the mood for a highly visual, mind-twisting horror film that is short on dialogue and leaves viewers plenty on which to mull over? Then look no further than writer/director Steffen Geypen’s Belgian shocker logger.
Based on Jean de la Fontaine’s 1668 fable “Death and the Logger,” Geypen’s film opens with a logger (Pieter Piron) stumbling across a mutilated body in the forest, which makes him catatonic on the spot. A forester (Jurgen Delnaet) and doctor (Maya Sannen) investigate, a jogger (Mil Sinaeve) crosses their path, and Death (Mona Lahousse) comes calling.
Geypen shows the unfolding events from different perspectives, some of them free of or short on dialogue, leaving viewers to chew on the surreal occurrences and piece together what’s happening. The visuals range from gorgeous to graphic and unsettling — the latter includes some extreme close-ups of bloodletting — all captured marvelously by cinematographer Jens Vanysacker.
Aficionados of strange cinema — including those with a fondness for the work of David Lynch, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, and the like — and other adventurous viewers will find plenty to be keen on here. logger is a dark fable that unsettles and mystifies, and it is bound to stick with viewers long after it finishes.
This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.
Tokusatsu Kigeki Ooki Yuuzou: Jinsei saidai no kessen presents a strange situation rooted in the real world yet taken into the cinematic place of the kaiju: a monster is using the COVID-19 pandemic to take over Tokyo while only one man, the recently downsized Yuzo Ooki can save the world. Yet first he has to figure out his new office, filled with a furry dog person, a garbage thief, a gambling salaryman, a man who would rather be a fitness instructor than work in an office and a horrible boss. And oh yeah, his girlfriend has just dumped him.
The real joy of this movie is that the actual monster — and the alien drama that brings it here — are less important to the story than Yuzo overcoming the human drama that we all have to face, such as making new friends, reinventing your life after failing at a job and keeping one’s happiness even when it seems impossible. Dressing up like Bruce Lee? Well, that can help.
This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.
The world lost someone who truly loved film this week. Albert Pyun started his career getting to work in Japanese film thanks to actor Toshiro Mifune and worked on a TV series with him, which allowed him to study with Akira Kurosawa’s Director of Photography Takao Saito. After working in advertising, Pyun made it to Los Angeles where he started to direct films. Sure, he made direct to video and genre films, but even when his movies were made on the absolute cheap, there was a genius to each of them.
I’ll be going deeper into his films in the future but until then, here are a few of the many Albert Pyun movies on Tubi:
A post-apocalyptic JCVD movie where every character is named for a guitar, made on the abandoned sets of the never-made sequel to Masters of the Universe. Another day at the office for Pyun.
Pyun’s first film — and his highest box office as well — has Richard Lynch, Richard Moll, Lee Horsely, Simon MacCorkingdale and a triple-bladed sword. It’s even better than it sounds.
Pyun once said, “”I have really no interest in cyborgs. And I’ve never really had any interest in post-apocalyptic stories or settings. It just seemed that those situations presented a way for me to make movies with very little money, and to explore ideas that I really wanted to explore…”
It’s like Full Moon wanted a Tron of their own and didn’t think Disney would sue. Well, they did. The movie is still pretty fun and has a wild cast and an early story by David Goyer.
Tim Thomerson is so awesome that he got two different Full Moon characters: Jack Deth and Brick Bardo, who is also known as Dollman. Pyun was so good at comic book-style movies that eventually, he’d get to make one of his own: Captain America.
The Vicious Lips are trying to become the biggest rock band in the galaxy. Made up of Bree Synn (Gina Calabrese, The Dungeonmaster), Wynzi Krodo (Linda Kerridge, Marilyn from Fade to Black!) and Mandaa UUeu (Shayne Farris, who was also in Down Twisted with Kerridge), they’ve just lost their lead singer Ace to, well, death and need to get to a gig across the universe. It’s not perfect but it has a great idea behind it.
An absolute mess that was saved by Pyun, who made this movie with zero budget and somehow turned out something. I’m not saying that it’s good, but it is something. I wonder how Pyun got Emo Philips to even be in this.
I love this movie. It’s so odd because the town where it takes place is perfect and yet has more fog than any place in California other than the Sunset Strip. It’s my favorite movie Pyun did and more people need to see it.
This description should tell you why you need to see this: “In a future Earth where robots rule, a bad robot whose hard drive was destroyed tries to stop a droid civil war in order to find a stash of weapons.” Also: Rutger Hauer and Shannon Whirry are in it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I was reading through old holiday movie posts, trying to get myself in the spirit of the season, and some of them made me laugh. I decided to pick out my favorite holiday movies — some new, some old — and in the spirit of giving, share them all with you. This originally appeared on December 25, 2019 but has some new material and editing.
Much like The Wizard of Oz, The Magic Christmas Tree thinks that reality is in black and white while dreams are in color. Both films have a witch. Both movies have wishes. But only one of them had a budget. And only one of them is a classic beloved by families for generations.
Sorry Richard C. Parish. Your one-and-done directorial effort isn’t getting a 4K re-release this year. Or any year, really.
In the black and white real world, three boys are walking home from school on Halloween. One of them, Mark, helps a witch get her cat Lucifer out of a tree. The moment someone told me I had to climb a tree to save a demonic cat, I would honestly be out of there, but Mark instead falls out of the tree and gets knocked out.
When he wakes up, the witch gives him a magic ring, as well as some magic seeds that need planted. On Thanksgiving, while everyone else is sleeping off the turkey, Mark is combining the wishbone of a turkey with the magic seeds and the magic words and the magic ring to grow the magic Christmas tree. His turtle Ichabod just watches in terror as Mark engages in a rite of eroto-comatose lucidity.
This tree that grows is unkillable, even when Mark’s dad cuts the grass in the middle of November. I guess we should assume that they live in California. Also — Mark’s dad is played by the director and his dialogue appears to appear as if by magic. In fact, this entire film appears dubbed even when it isn’t.
While Ichabod the turtle eats the grass, dad has a wacky grass-cutting session that ends up with the mower in flames and him acting drunk. The way he talks to his wife, you can only assume how he really treats her. This film cuts deeply into the dark underbelly of post-war America. The dream is dead. The power mower is in flames. The Christmas tree is alive.
That’s right. On Christmas Eve, the Magic Tree comes to life and can talk. It grants Mark three wishes. The Magic Christmas Tree also speaks with all the snark and pomp of Charles Nelson Reilly. Seriously, it’s as if the tree has seen it all and is bored with this charade. He’s merely indulging Mark.
Now, Mark’s a smart kid, so he wishes for an hour of absolute power, which he promptly is corrupted by absolutely. That said, he’s not that smart, because why wish for only an hour? Just wish for absolute power. Don’t put any limits on it, Mark. And don’t talk to trees.
What does Mark do with all that power? He makes flowers appear and disappear. Mark has obviously not gone through puberty, because if I had magic power in 1964, I would use the entire hour with Barbara Steele. Or Mamie Van Doren. Or Bardeau. Ah, you get the picture, even if Mark doesn’t.
Instead, he makes people run all over the place and throw pies in one another’s faces, but the camera is so far away you may wonder exactly what’s happening. It’s all kind of like Benny Hill but terrifying instead of madcap. Firemen get pies in their faces while their antique engines careen out of control. Happy holidays, La Verne, California. Hope you survive the experience.
Yes, the same town where the wedding scene in The Graduate was shot (and Wayne’s World 2) is subject to the Magic Christmas Tree gifting Mark with the power to be a complete jerk.
Mark’s second wish is to have Santa Claus all to himself. He couldn’t think of any other wishes. I mean, you have any power in the world and you can’t think of a wish?
Santa really seems like he’s senile. He also seems like he can’t stand up from the chair he’s stuck in.
This wish causes every other child in the world to grow very sad, so Mark uses his third wish to send Santa back to the children. That’s because he gets sent to a pocket dimension where his selfishness leads him to meet the very personification of Greed. The giant man yells, “You are my little boy!” and offers him a mountain of cake and toys to stay.
Greed is played by Pittsburgh native Robert “Big Buck” Maffei, who uses his 7’1″ frame to his advantage, playing monsters and aliens in a ton of television shows and movies, including a creature (actually a Taurus II anthropoid) in “The Galileo Seven” episode of Star Trek and the giant cyclops on Lost In Space. His last movie appearance was in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams.
Mark gives Santa back to the children. But of course, it was all a dream. A horrible, horrible dream. Maybe Mark learned something. Maybe we all did.
The bastards at Goodtimes released this on VHS in 1992, pairing it with Rene Cardona’s Santa Claus. I can’t imagine a more horrifying double feature ever — the battle of Santa and Patch directed by the man who brought you Night of the Bloody Apes paired with this film that feels like it was shot on one of those Price Is Right Showcase Showdown sets with all of the lights turned out.
You can watch this for free on The Internet Archive and Tubi. I would advise you to avoid it and ensure that your Christmas Day isn’t filled with relentless horror.
Director and writer Steve Balderson has created quite a story here. Aging artist Oliver (Xander Berkeley) wakes up next to his wife Evelyn (Sarah Clarke), ho has died in her sleep, and refuses tot live a life without her. He keeps her body in the bathtub, filled with ice, trying to keep her looking as she did in life. At the same time, her spirit continues speaking with him for just five days before passing to whatever comes after our world. Oh yes — he’s also been given the greatest art commission of his life by his agent Alex (Mink Stole, wow!) and must continue to create art while going through the greatest change of his life.
A film of magical realism that plays with time, sound, light and color to attempt to share an emotion and mental space that is unshareable, Alchemy of the Spirit was a rough watch — I mean this in a good way — as I try to navigate the loss of my father. Life is unlike it ever was and while the common and rote moments of it never stop, the joys of it seem muted somehow, the colors much more simplistic. I hope this can change soon and that I can take these moments of art and use them to grow and change. You’ll always miss someone. But can you honor them by creating in their missing space?
This movie was part of the Another Hole in the Head film festival, which provides a unique vehicle for independent cinema. This year’s festival takes place from December 1st – December 18th, 2022. Screenings and performances will take place at the historic Roxie Cinema, 4 Star Theatre and Stage Werks in San Francisco, CA. It will also take place On Demand on Eventive and live on Zoom for those who can not attend the live screenings. You can learn more about how to attend or watch the festival live on their Eventlive site. You can also keep up with all of my AHITH film watches with this Letterboxd list.
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