DAY 9. OG NETWORK: See something made after 2010 with no visible cell phones. No texting while watching this one!

Ah man, remember those great old days when the FBI was convinced Juggalos were a gang — which was no fun for them — and we weren’t worried about people standing back and standing by?

Look, if you don’t know the Insane Clown Posse, well…hmm. Where to begin?

Originally known as JJ Boyz and Inner City Posse, the group that would someday become known as ICP introduced supernatural lyrics to create what some call horrorcore. Their albums have all been concept in nature, telling the story of the Dark Carnival, a limbo beyond our reality where lives are judged. The Joker’s Cards that emerge are the albums of the band, designed to change the evil ways of the band’s listeners. Beyond just being a band, they’re a licensing juggernaut, even creating their own wrestling promotion and an annual event called the Gathering of the Juggalos.

So why not movies?

Here’s the thing — for a movie made by a rap group that dresses as evil clowns, I was totally expecting this movie to be horrible. And the truth is, I laughed out loud several times and was kind of awed home much it took from classic cartoons. Sure, it’s filthy as it gets, but there are moments of literal sidesplitting silliness.

Sheriff Sugar Wolf (ICP member Shaggy 2 Dope) has returned to Mudbug, the town of his birth, to find it in the grip of Big Baby Chips (ICP member Violent J) and his gang, which includes Raw Stank and Dusty Poot, who are played by Jamie Madrox and Monoxide of the band Twiztid. These evildoers have already killed Wolf’s father (Ron Jeremy) and brothers. Now, they sent assassins after our hero.

Then, amazingly, the movie takes a page out of Django, with Wolf’s hand being damaged — trust me, Franco Nero never had a gigantic cartoony hole in his hand that he looks through — and must learn all over again how to fight.

This film has plenty of actual actors in it, like Jason Mewes, Brigitte Nielsen, Jimmie Walker and Tom Sizemore, along with pro wrestlers liek Jimmy Hart, 2 Tuff Tony and Scott Hall.

Most of the characters in this film are the ancestors of the characters in Big Money Hustlas, another ICP film. They have said that at some point, a third movie — this time science fiction — would be made called Big Money Thru$ta$. I mean, one of the killers in this movie has laser beams for eyes.

I kind of love the idea that this movie is a spaghetti western that just so happens to have two characters that wear clown paint, which no one ever mentions throughout the entire film, along with plenty of moments of sheer anachronism.

This movie goes best with Faygo. Pour it directly over your head.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

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.

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.

You can watch this on YouTube.

DAY 6. POLL PLOT: One that involves elections and/or voting.* Government not required.

While the election is something I try to avoid every single morning, I do have to say that The Election is a movie that continually makes me happy. Sure, it’s a big dumb Hollywood comedy, but it’s filled with just enough abject stupidity to make me laugh. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

Cam Brady (Will Ferrell) is a five-time North Carolina Congressman, running unopposed when he leaves an explicit message for one of his supporters on her family’s answering machine, throwing his candidacy into question. Soon, he has an opponent — Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), who is the tourism director for the town of Hammond. Marty isn’t really made for the political machine, but thanks to the nefarious Motch Brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow) and their ruthless campaign expert Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott), soon the race is on.

Cam is a mess, either drunk driving or punching babies while Marty is a hapless fool. At heart, they’re both good men who have been pulled through the political machine, forced to become things that they don’t want to be.

Jay Roach went from films like Austin Powers to this and finally Bombshell, which takes the humor of this and adds it to a true — well, mostly — story. The script, taken from a story by Adam McKay and written by Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell, is on the right side of clever versus stupid, which is continually the finest of barriers.

A native of North Carolina, Galifianakis’ uncle Nick had been a State Representative, yet lost the 1972 Senate election to Jesse Helms. Much of this comedy comes from truth, which is always the right place.

I also find it fascinating that Dan Aykroyd’s career has taken him from playing Louis Winthorpe III to now basically being one of the Duke brothers.

DAY 5. GOING POSTAL: Something involving the postal service or shipping or getting a delivery. #savetheups

Isn’t it amazing that we have to fight to keep our postal service going? Honestly, every day that I wake up in 2020, indignity after indignity piles up until I can’t believe I’m not watching a horrible movie.

Clever segway into…

Speaking of horrible movies, Uwe Boll’s movies make back about 1% of their budget yet he keeps making them. I have no idea who their audience is. During this movie, I started to think that this is what John Waters’ films would have been like if he’d paid attention in school and never did drugs.

According to the director, the German fan club for the video game Postal contacted him, inspiring him to get in touch with Running with Scissors, the company who made the game. Boll started with the second game as his basis for this, but then decided to make the whole movie about his war with his critics — he regularly boxes them to prove that he’s tougher than them, which does not prove he’s a better director, but in the world of Boll I guess that’s a moral victory — and to show how the victims of terrorism are not heroes, but victims. This stance needs a storyteller that understands nuance, not someone who starts his film with terrorists abandoning their hijacking only for the passengers to accidentally send the plane into the World Trade Center.  This act alone guaranteed that this movie would play on barely any screens.

How soon is too soon? Pretty much any time, really.

You know how I say that people are often wasted in movies? This movie makes me judge the career choices and whether I even enjoyed any of these actors in the first place, retroactively cancelling nearly everything they’ve ever been in like some backwards in time career nuke.

I mean, I understand that Larry Thomas is only doing conventions — well, was — as the Soup Nazi, but does that make him a good Bin Laden? Did they have a photo of J.K. Simmons having sex with a farm animal to get him into this for under a minute? How did Dave Foley end up here? I mean, I often celebrate actors who went to Italy to make films when their star dimmed, but can a celestial body really grow this dark?

If you ever wanted John Cassavetes to come back from the dead to shake the shit out of someone, make it this time and make it Seymour Cassel, who really should know better. Everyone in this should. I should.

Verne Troyer gets assaulted by 1,000 monkeys to start the end of the world. That’s the TV Guide capsule review of this fecund ball of junk.

As for the challenge today, there’s not really any postal references here, other than the hero being called the Postal Dude, in some attempt to make this similar to the video game.

There are no peaks without valleys. Luckily, I have a new valley to place against all other films, a new absolute zero, a new bottom of the barrel several barrels below the previous barrel that I had once scraped.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I told you to. It’s beyond dreck, the kind of film that I would wipe my ass upon if I could find a physical copy of it. And I’m 1000% ready to do a barbed wire taipei glass death match with Boll if he wants it.

DAY 4. HUNKERED DOWN: One with recluses, shut-ins or people locked inside their homes.

Based on the script for Alone by Matt Naylor, who co-adapted his script with Cho and will see his version of the film release later this month, this movie finds a live streamer named Oh Joon-woo facing the kind of battles that he’d only had online as zombies take over most of South Korea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBwpVq4eE9I

After learning that his family has been killed, the loneliness and pointlessness of life alone gets to him and he attempts to kill himself. He’s once stayed inside, away from the rest of humanity and now, he may very well be the last person left alive.

That’s when a laser pointer flashes and he realizes that there’s somebody else left. Kim Yoo-bin has used traps and an axe to stay alive, using her wits when all Oh Joon-woo has done is hide.

If you’ve read Max Brooks’ World War Z, the story “Kondo Tatsumi,” about a Japanese gamer in a similar situation, may strike you as being very much like this story.

The end of the film really recalled Shaun of the Dead, which is not a bad thing.  In a world where every zombie story has seemingly been told, this tale of a young man staying locked within his apartment — afraid to come outside as a plague ravages everyone else — is alarmingly all too real.

DAY 3. STOCKED UP: When you’re in it for the long haul, you’re gonna need supplies. Watch something with a supply run in it.

As we entered the dumbest and most boring apocalypse ever this year, I discovered that every plan, every zombie escape strategy I had, none of it mattered. Instead, I would sit in my living room and watch moronic leaders fight over whether or not we would wear a mask, people willing to die to eat at TGI Friday’s and actual liberty get booed by people who shouldn’t even be allowed to sit in the stands at a football game.

If George Romero was around, he wouldn’t be surprised, other than the fact that our end is so bloodless, so pointless, so vanilla.

I watched Dawn of the Dead so many times that I could recite it at will in high school. Obviously, my goal was not to get laid. It was to study this movie over and over.

While the rest of the world had to wait until now for the end times, Pittsburgh knew it was real long before, when our church of commerce was taken over in the middle of the night by a bunch of maniacs and filmed evidence would confirm every one of our greatest fears. Like Pogo told us we met the enemy and it was us. It still is.

Where Night of the Living Dead took place inside a cramped farmhouse, Dawn would take place in Monroeville Mall, a place that now has a bust of Romero and a photo of Dario Argento that refers to him as a “castmember.” The humor of this caption makes me overjoyed.

Romero knew one of the mall’s developers, who showed him the secret areas behind the mall, and told the director that people could survive a disaster inside the mall. He now had an idea for the movie, but he couldn’t find anyone in America to help make it. That’s how Dario Argento came in and made his way to Pittsburgh.

Shooting from 11 PM to 7 AM, when the holiday music would come on and couldn’t be stopped, the filmmakers — joined by a creative cast and crew, including special FX maniac Tom Savini*, made a movie that influenced the whole world and every horror film that would follow in its wake.

Where the zombie plague was confined to Evans City before, now the end of the world has expanded and much like how no one can agree on how to fix a simple plague these days, no one can agree on how to properly battle the newly dead getting up and killing those that they once loved.

Stephen “Flyboy” Andrews (David Emge, Hellmaster) and Francine Parker (Gaylen Ross, Creepshow) are planning on stealing the traffic helicopter from the TV station they work at and escaping Philadelphia. They’re joined by SWAT officers Roger DiMarco (Scott Reiniger,  Knightriders) and Peter Washington (Ken Foree, who is in so many horror movies, but let’s go with Death Spa) and land in Monroeville, hiding inside the mall and clearing it of the undead.

All the consumerism is too much. The living dead want to get into the mall, remembering their past lives, which were simply consuming. Now that money doesn’t matter, nothing that was worthwhile in the mall does either. The foursome decides to leave, but Roger has grown too reckless and is bitten. And one night, a gang of motorcyclists break in and allow the zombies to crash through the barricades. Stephen, angry at his loss of home, flips out and kills several bikers before he is bit.

As he turns and follows his former friends into their hiding place, the urge to give up is too much. Originally, Peter would shoot himself and Francine would walk headfirst into the helicopter blades. But in the small window of happiness here, the pregnant heroine lives as the black cop decides to stay alive and save her. We see them fly away to an uncertain future.

While the American version of this film is 127 minutes and features a mix of library music and the Goblin soundtrack, Dario Argento’s Italian cut, known as Zombi, features more of Goblin and cuts out any of the film’s comic book humor, concentrating on providing more action. It would lead to a revolution in Italian horror, of course.

I’ve debated featuring this movie on our site for some time. It means so much to me, but I didn’t know what else I could say about it that hadn’t been said. Yet today, as I sit here and wonder just how bad the world is going to get by the end of this year, I see that the zombie apocalypse that I spent my life preparing for — influenced by this movie — is almost preferable to the Fourth Reich or Civil War that we seem to be heading toward. I can only hope that a few years from now, I’ll read this and laugh at all the hyperbole. Or maybe I’ll be fortifying the Exchange on Miracle Mile, surrounding my wife and myself with guns, DVDs and all the supplies we need to survive. Because after all, when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth.

*Nearly every stunt in this movie was done by Savini and Taso N. Stavrakis, including a dive over a rail that led to the effects master nearly breaking his legs when he missed his mark.