Three students strive to be initiated into a sorority on Halloween night. However, they soon realize that they must fight for their lives from ghosts that have invaded and the housemother that has embarked upon a killing spree.
Oh man — with a synopsis like that, is it any wonder that I picked this movie to watch first on the new Mill Creek Entertainment box set Houses of Hell?
Also known as Paranormal Iniiation, this movie originally played on the Syfy channel October 13, 2012. Morgan Fairchild stars as Miss Margot, the housemother who has decided to kill all of the sorority sisters to create her own ghostly family.
Director Darin Scott also was behind Tales from the Hood 2 and the amazingly titled Megachurch Murder. It was written by Anthony C. Ferrante, who would go on to direct all of the Sharknado movies.
While this never gets to the levels of slasher or paranormal mayhem that you want, you have to realize that it’s a made for cable 2000’s horror movie. Temper your expectations, shut your brain off and have some fun.
This is one of four movies on Mill Creek Entertainment’s Houses of Hell set. It’s an affordable way to get some scares that you may not have seen otherwise. Plus, you get a free code to save these movies digitally on Mill Creek’s MovieSPREE! site. For more information, check out their site.
These two sentences laid down the Christmas movie challenge from R. D Francis. I don’t want to take the Lord’s name in vain on the day of His birth, but I came really close.
A holiday movie. With Hasselhoff.
Pure cruelty.
Originally airing on the Lifetime Channel on November 10, 2012, this movie follows the holiday misadventures of the Fletcher family. Perfume executive Maya (Caroline Rhea, TV’s original Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and her husband Jack somehow get put into the Christmas stress of having family and clients over for the big day. Luckily they hire Owen (Hasselhoff), a planner who specializes in Christmas parties.
If you’ve watched one of these holiday movies — dude, I’ve watched way more than a few — you know that Owen has a sad secret and that’s he’s going to fix everything for this family.
Director John Bradshaw pretty much specializes in holiday movies now, while writers Brian Sawyer and Gregg Rossen have similar IMDB credits.
If you can look at the poster for this film and not want to slice your wrists with a sharpened candy cane, then you might just make it through the challenge. I, as well, double dog dare you. I must say — it has the worst green screen effects I’ve seen probably ever. Becca walked in, and as she always does, yelled “WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?” This time it wasn’t a naked Italian girl being strangled by Ivan Rassimov, but instead, a horrifying sleigh ride.
What if Chris Mitchum played Santa? Yes, Chris Mitchum from Aftershock, The Day That Time Ended, Faceless, Bigfootand Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tusk. I see you starting to get a bit weirded out, but let’s press on.
So who do we get for Mrs. Claus? Well, Cynthia Rothrock, of course. Yes, the hard fighting star of China O’Brien, Honor and Glory, Rage and Honor and plenty more straight to video karate epics.
Honestly, what the fuck am I about to watch?
Let’s go one better. This movie was made in the exact same house as A Talking Cat!?!
They may have also shared the same budget, which was probably catering. Which was probably Jack in the Box.
Yeah, Mary Crawford may be the name in the credits, but this Santa movie is all the work of David DeCoteau. It feels the most porn holiday film I’ve ever seen without actual penetration. I mean, that wouldn’t do for this, a movie that’s trying to be kid friendly and feels holiday destroying.
And is that Gary Daniels I spy? Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star? In a Christmas movie? Wait! Martial artist Daniel Bernhardt, who was Alex Cardo in the second and third Bloodsport films? Surely we’re going to see fisticuffs and people go mano y mano, right?
Nope. They’re going to play croquet.
This is a Christmas movie not set at Christmas, replete with public domain holiday songs and Lucas-like wipes that use Google Images clip art. It’s as if it were edited in iMovie — I know it surely isn’t, it couldn’t be — but almost as if a family made this movie and sent it my way to drive me insane before the holidays and seasonal depression have their way with me in a threeway so rough that it had to be shot by Max Hardcore.
Gary (Daniels) is a workaholic married to another workaholic named Sadie, who is stranger still played by another world class asskicker, five-time would kickboxing champion Kathy Long. I mean, she’s known as The Punisher and the Queen of Mean. She played Fros-T in the aforementioned Rage and Honor. And why is she and her husband and their kids getting in a van and driving through some magical fog on their way to discover Santa’s Summer House?
Then there’s a caterer named Constance — what is it with DeCoteau and catering characters!?! — who bullies an orphan named Molly into giving up being a photographer.
Somehow, Robert Mitchum, the man who made The Night of the Hunter, one of my all-time favorite films, gave birth to the man who would play Santa here. Santa, who sits in a hot tub and just drops hints about what he does and none of the martial artists can pick up the sledgehammer obviou clues because they’re all too busy playing a game of croquet that may still be going on now, nearly eight years after this movie supposedly stopped filming.
As for Santa, all he wants to do is chill. He has like a month he works a year and it’s so much effort that he spends eleven months watching TV and just schvitzing in the hot tub. Chill, out Santa. Run, run Rudolph. And hey — for all the cookies Mrs. Claus cooks, she seems to be keeping in pretty decent shape. Must be all the times she kicks dudes in the head.
Every holiday season, I discover one movie that makes me at once fall in love and desperately hate the holiday. This year, Santa’s Summer House is that movie. Watch it at your own peril, because trust me, this one will fucking own you.
DeCoteau also directed Christmas Spirit and The Great Halloween Puppy Adventure, two more holiday films. If you don’t think I’m going to hunt those down right now, you may have never been to our site before. I mean, Eric Roberts and a Halloween puppy? Come on. I’m not made of stone.
True story #1: I once had the wild idea of writing a Dukes of Hazzard script where Japanese businessmen try to buy out Hazzard County from Boss Hogg, who of course gets swindled himself. Ninjas would get invovled — of course — and Cynthia Rothrock would play a new Duke cousin who was in the army and had learned how to fight overseas. Obviously, I went to art school. Anyways, imagine my surprise when Ms. Rothrock showed up in 1997’s The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! The moral: Sometimes, the universe listens to you.
True story #2: Cynthia used to be married to her kung fu instructor Ernest Rothrock. The guy owns schools all over Pittsburgh, including one I drive past every single day. When I was a kid, I dreamed that Cynthia was really at these schools and would teach me the ass kicking powers I needed to decimate the bullies who made my life hell. The moral: Instead of dreaming, I turned to Satan and got my revenge Trick or Treat style. Thanks, Sammi Curr!
You can watch this — with help from Rifftrax — on Tubi. It’s also on Amazon Prime without any such assistance.
For all the trash talking I do on modern horror, I tend to enjoy the films of Scott Derrickson. From The Exorcism of Emily Rose to Dr. Strange and Deliver Us From Evil, his films have come from a unique place and have had surprises packed within them. The two Sinister films — he only co-wrote the sequel — are darker and stranger than mainstream 2000’s horror films have any right to be.
Ellison Oswalt (named for Harlan Ellison and Patton Oswalt; played by Ethan Hawke) writes true crime and to get the material he needs for his next book, he’s moved his family into the home where a family was lynched in their own backyard. He hopes that by living there, he’ll discover the fate of the one family member who survived.
Inside the house, there’s a box that contains a Super 8 projector and several home movies. They’re actually snuff films of various families being wiped out as an unseen cameraman records the death, always concentrating on a mysterious symbol. These movies are the true heart of this film, shot on real Super 8 and appearing to come from another universe thanks to stark lighting and ambient music from black metal bands Ulver and Aghast, as well as Boards of Canada.
In fact, the creature behind all of this throat slashing, drowning and burning is named Bughuul, a strange masked demon that also looks like he walked out of Helvete. He’s a Babylonian demon that coerces children to kill their families and then give their souls to him.
Ethan Hawke had never seen the films prior to filming the movie, so all of his reactions are 100% genuine.
Thanks to the Sheriff (Fred Thompson) and Deputy So & So (James Ransome, who would return for the second movie), Ellison soon learns that these ritualistic murders have been going on since at least the 1960’s.
After leaving the projector on one night leads to all of the missing children entering his house and Bughuul physically attacking him, Ellison decides to leave the house behind. He connects with occult expert Professor Jonas (Vincent D’Onofrio), who tells him that the image of the demon is how it can possess children and enter our world.
The real insight is that every murdered family had previously lived in the house where the last murder took place, and each new murder occurred shortly after the family moved from the crime scene into their new residence. By moving, Ellison has doomed his family, as the projector and the films appear in his new house.
Now, the missing children appear along with each murder on film, as Ellison’s daughter Ashley methodically murders each of her family members with an axe before the demon lifts her into his arms and disappears, leaving behind a new film labeled “House Painting ’12” so that the cycle of death can continue all over again.
This is but one film franchise where Ethan Hawke was killed in the first installment and I ended up liking the next movie much better. The other would be, of course, The Purge.
This movie is based on the French graphic novel Du Plomb Dans La Tete, which was written by Matz and illustrated by Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper artist Colin Wilson. Directed by Walter Hill, it was Stallone’s worst performing movie in 32 years. I avoided this movie for some time, but I ended up enjoying it.
New Orleans is the home to hitman Jimmy Bobo (Stallone), who brings his partner Louis Blanchard to kill a corrupt cop named Hank Greely (Holt McCallany, Mindhunter). For some reason, Jimmy leaves the prostitute in the room alive.
Not much later, Blanchard is killed by Keegan (Jason Momoa), a rival hitman. That’s when Detective Taylor Kwon (Han from The Fast and the Furious) comes to town looking for the killer of his partner. It turns out that there’s a conspiracy between Robert Nkomo Morel (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Killer Croc from Suicide Squad) and his lawyer Marcus Baptiste (Christian Slater) and a bunch of crooked cops.
Bobo and Kwon end up having to work together, and much like Tango & Cash, Stallone’s partner falls for a member of the family, this time Bono’s tattooist daughter Lisa.
I love Walter Hill’s films like Streets of Fire and The Warriors. This is not even in the same orbit as those films, but it’s not as bad as its been made out to be. There’s plenty of gunplay and mayhem, but if you’re going to go with a Stallone gunplay movie, I’d advise Cobra.
I’m fascinated by spaghetti westerns. How can Italian directors, many of whom never set foot on American soil, reinvent an entirely foreign genre, that of the Western? How can they take the basics of the John Wayne-style cowboy film and transform it into a world with no morality?
All Italian Westerns owe a debt to the films of Sergio Leone. A Fistful of Dollars liberally borrows — steals — from Akita Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Its hero doesn’t fight the two gangs in the film one on one in honor bound High Noon-style duels. Instead, Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name uses treachery and deceit to defeat both gangs, which depend on their terrorism of the populace to keep their position. Leone would move past simply remaking other films toward creating his own movies that were ripe for being ripped off.
After Leone, arguably the best Italian Westerns came from Sergio Corbucci. The same director who’d go on to direct Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedies like Super Fuzz was really known for some of the most brutal and violent films in the world, which is saying something, as the Italians do love their blood and gore.
His main hero Django, who first appeared in 1966’s Django. The character’s name is a joke based on the guitarist Django Reinhardt’s ability to play guitar despite not being able to use two of his fingers. In the film, the villains destroy Django’s hands before he rises up to take them all out. According to Ruggero Deodato, the assistant director of the film, Corbucci also borrowed the idea of a protagonist who dragged a coffin filled with gold and weapons behind him from a comic book that he had read.
There would be over thirty sequels to this film, many of which were completely unofficial and many of whom have nothing to do with Django at all, including One Damned Day at Dawn…Django Meets Sartana! Nero would only reprise the role once in 1987’s Django Strikes Again, the only official sequel, which was produced with Corbucci’s involvement.
Throughout the films of Quentin Tarantino, the shadow of Sergio Corbucci looms. In his very first movie, Reservoir Dogs, the scene where Mr. Blonde slices the ear of Nash the cop is completely indebted to Hugo performing the same gory attack to Brother Johnathan. At the end of Kill Bill, Tarantino had a Rest In Peace notice for those actors and directors he saw as his most important influences: Charles Bronson, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Leone, Cheng Cheh, Lo Lieh, Lee Van Cleef, Willian Witney and, of course, Corbucci.
Never has that influence been deeper than in this film, an indirect remake and remix of the Spaghetti Western, now back in American hands.
In 2007, Tarantino said that he wanted to create a movie that dealt with America’s sinful past, but not in a message movie. Instead, he wanted to make “genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.” He went on to explain that after starting to write a book about Corbucci, he was intrigued by how his films offered an evil and horrible version of America.
There are also allusions to the films Mandingo and the snow scenes of Corbucci’s The Great Silence. Even the title itself alludes to the American title of another Corbucci film, Hercules Unchained.
The movie begins in Texas in the middle of the 1800s. Ace and Dicky Speck (James Remar and James Russo) are driving black slaves on foot toward an unknown destination. One of them is Django (Jamie Foxx), who has been separated from his wife Broomhilda von Shaft (Kerry Washington), a house slave raised to speak German and English.
Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist/bounty hunter, soon arrives and offers to buy Django to gain his knowledge over three men he has a warrant to bring in dead or alive. Ace tries to shoot him, but Schultz easily kills him and shoots Dicky’s horse, leaving him trapped and at the mercy of his now freed slaves.
Schultz isn’t another slaver. Instead, he offers Django a chance to be a free man and teaches him the career of being a bounty hunter. He’s a natural — he’s able to pull off incredibly complicated shots with all manner of weapons. As they track the Brittle brothers, they make their way to the plantation of Spencer “Big Daddy” Bennett (Don Johnson). While the two men talk, Django finds two of the brothers — Big John and Lil Raj — whipped a slave. As he remembers them doing the same to him, he flies into a rage and murders the two men. The third brother runs but is easily stopped by Schultz.
Later that night, Bennett and the local Klan raid the campsite of our heroes, but a combination of poorly made hoods, explosives and skill allow Django and Schultz to escape. Afterward, Schultz relates the German tale of Siegfried and his epic rescue of Broomhilda. Realizing that he has at last met a real hero, Schultz feels honor-bound to help Django reunite with his wife.
Some months later, Django and Schultz travel to Mississippi and the Candyland plantation, whose owner Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) now keeps Django’s wife. Schultz and Django meet Calvin at a gentleman’s club where he stages Mandingo fights and attempts to buy one of his fighters, which is all a ruse so that they may purchase Broomhilda.
Over dinner, Schultz offers to buy her as his escort. This makes Calvin’s loyal house slave Stephen (Samuel Jackson) suspicious, so the villain changes the deal so that they don’t get the fighter, but only the woman. He thinks he’s won, when truly our heroes have exactly what they’ve come for. However, he can’t stop lording over Schultz and continually demands that they shake hands. A shootout ensues, with Schultz killing Calvin, Calvin’s bodyguard Butch (also James Remar) killing Schultz and Django killing, well, everybody.
However, our hero can’t stop everybody and is captured, with Stephen forcing his surrender by threatening Broomhilda. Django is nearly castrated by Billy Crash before being sold to the Australian-owned LeQuint Dickey Mining Company, who will soon work him to death.
Django soon turns the tables on the mining company’s escorts, played by Tarantino, Michael Parks and John Jaratt (Mick Taylor from the Wolf Creek films). He returns to claim Broomhilda’s freedom papers from Schultz’s corpse, kills every single one of Calvin’s slave trackers (Zoe Bell, Michael Bowen, Robert Carradine, Jake Garber, Ted Neeley, James Parks and Tom Savini play the trackers at various points in the film) and then enters Calvin’s mansion, where he murders everyone else as they return from the funeral. He saves Stephen for last, shooting him in the kneecaps so that he can’t escape the house exploding as our hero rides into the sunset with his wife, or as happens in The Ring of the Nibelung, they renounce the world of the gods and together, they hail light-bringing love and laughing death.
Spike Lee said he would not see the film, saying, “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It was a Holocaust. My ancestors are slaves stolen from Africa. I will honor them.”
Samuel Jackson again defended Tarantino, replying to Vogue Male that “Django Unchained was a harder and more detailed exploration of what the slavery experience was than 12 Years a Slave, but director Steve McQueen is an artist and since he’s respected for making supposedly art films, it’s held in higher esteem than Django, because that was basically a blaxploitation movie.”
Since this is a Tarantino film, there are plenty of references to movies within and without the universe of his films. Django and his wife are meant to be the great-great-great-grandparents of the character John Shaft. And of course, Franco Nero shows up in a cameo role that made me raise my arms in triumph. When Tarantino first met him, he astonished the actor by knowing all of the dialogue and words to the songs from his films.
There are also appearances by Dukes of Hazzard star Tom Wopat as U.S. Marshall Gill Tatum, Russ and Amber Tamblyn as Son of and Daughter of the Son of a Gunfighter, Bruce Dern, Jonah Hill and Lee Horsely — from The Sword and the Sorcerer — as Sherrif Gus.
Happily, this film isn’t the end of the story. A comic book sequel to the film, Django/Zorro, is supposedly going to be made into a film. Tarantino has also discussed plans to turn the movie into a longer mini-series, as well as a series of novels. One of those planned novels, Django In White Hell, eventually became The Hateful Eight.
Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) recruits the Expendables after their latest mission — to retrieve a Chinese businessman, which is the only appearance of Jet Li in this film — for an easy paycheck. But when one of their own is murdered, the mission goes from simple retrieval to revenge against new bad guy Jean Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme).
The Expendables films are fan service for 80’s action movie lovers. The second installment ups the ante with new cast members and the rare opportunity for Van Damme to play the heavy. He should do it more often — he’s amazing in this role, given to snappy one-liners and pure menace in every scene.
New team member Billy (Liam Hemsworth) tells Barney (Sylvester Stallone) that he wants to retire and live with his girlfriend. That’s before the fateful mission from Mr. Church that brings them up against Van Dame and his army of Sangs.
The coolest part of this film is when the team is saved by Booker (Chuck Norris), who is the same character that Chuck played in Good Guys Wear Black. I kind of love how deep these films go into movies that aren’t usually as loved or as remembered except by a choice few. He’s also referred to as a lone wolf, which is a shoutout to another Norris movie, Lone Wolf McQuade.
Along with new team member Maggie, the Expendables must save five tons of refined plutonium abandoned in a Russian mine before Vilain sells it on the black market, shifting the balance of the world’s power.
Of course, everything works out just fine. That’s what we expect in these kinds of films. Lots of bullets. Lots of knives. Lots of things blowing up real good. And plenty of snappy lines along the way. Hey — how can you beat a movie with a body count of 482?
Sly himself said of the people he recruited this time out, “I like using people that had a moment and then maybe have fallen on some hard times and give them another shot. I like those kinds of guys. Someone did it for me and I like to see if I can do it for them.”
Director Simon West gets how to shoot action. His resume speaks to that fact, with films like Con Air, The General’s Daughter and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. This was the first film that Stallone appeared in that he didn’t direct for over a decade.
If you love Jean-Claude Van Damme, good news. We’ll be featuring his films all next week. Get ready — I think I went a little overboard celebrating the Muscles from Brussels.
Who says giallo had to stop in the 1970’s? Certainly not the makers of this film, who crafted this neon-lit exploration of the genre in 2012. This is the story of an old man obsessed with a serial killer who is also obsessed with him. Each murder, the killer calls him to say that he has killed for him again. Finally, he decides to go into the night and hunt down the murderer.
While this is a crowdfunded short film, it’s long on style and mood. It feels, looks and sounds exactly like a giallo should, with a killer that has a much more elaborate look than the typical black mask and gloves.
As the old man keeps looking for the killer — fulfilling the role of the amateur detective so essential to giallo — he remains one step behind throughout.
There’s also an intriguing commentary of the role of women in giallo as Hester Arden plays every single female role. Are women interchangeable? Or just victims to be moved around and endlessly repeated? I read that Argento wanted all of the women in Tenebre to look the same to give the sense that the same woman was dying over and over. This film accomplishes the same task.
There are no easy answers here, even in the ambiguous ending. I’ve heard that the creators of this film intend to make a full giallo film someday and I look forward to seeing what they do. This is a masterful effort that I’ve watched several times and look forward to coming back and exploring many more.
It’s pretty amazing that the most Italian giallo made in years was created by two British guys — director Ryan Haysom and cinematographer Jon Britt — working in Germany.
You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime and learn more at the movie’s official Facebook page.
Sure, this is based on the 1987–91 television series of the same name by Stephen J. Cannell and Patrick Hasburgh, but I was amazed by how much I loved this movie. It takes that concept, goes crazy and pushes every teen movie cliche as far as it can take it.
In 2005, Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) are denied access to their prom, with Schmidt rejected and Jenko’s grades keeping him away. Years later, they meet again at police academy and somehow become best friends and eventually bike patrol partners. Their first arrest, a drug bust, goes bad when Greg forgets the Miranda rights.
The team is reassigned to the Jump Street team, which infiltrates high schools with undercover agents under the command of Captain Dickson (Ice Cube).
There’s a drug at Sagan High School called HFS that has been killing students, so Morton and Greg get new identities and learn that society has changed. Everything that made Greg popular is now frowned upon, so his only friends are the geeks. Morton is now popular and fast friends with Eric (Dave Franco), who is creating the drugs.
Can the guys catch the criminals? Will Morton fall in love with Eric’s girlfriend Molly (Brie Larson)? Will they throw a massive drug fueled party? Of course. But getting there is so much fun, as this is a movie that doesn’t take itself or its subject matter seriously.
There are some great supporting actors here, from Rob Riggle as a gym teacher to Chris Parnell as a drama teacher, Ellie Kemper as a science teacher, Dakota Johnson as a fellow Jump Street team member and Nick Offerman as the Deputy Chief. If you loved the original show, good news. All of the original cast, except Richard Grieco and Dustin Nguyen, appear in cameo roles.
After the events of the last Piranha film, where Lake Victoria was attacked by prehistoric killer fish that were continuing to evolve, the lake has drained and the town itself has been abandoned. But what if there were a new waterpark that could drum up tourism? That’d be cool, right?
At another lake, two farmers (Gary Busey and Clu Gulager!) find a dead cow that’s filled with piranha eggs, which hatch and kill them. Obviously, the piranha are not as eradicated as we’ve been led to believe. Which I guess is good, as otherwise, we wouldn’t have this movie, directed by Feast‘s John Gulager (who is Clu’s son).
That’s when we meet marine biology student Maddy (Danielle Panabaker, Killer Frost from the DCU shows) who is home for the summer and at the waterpark that she co-owns with her stepfather Chet (David Koechner). That’s when she learns that he’s about to re-open the park as Big Wet, complete with strippers and a grand opening featuring David Hasselhoff.
Of course, all oceanic hell is unleashed all over again. Deputy Fallon (Ving Rhames) returns from the last film, missing his legs and being helped by former cameraman and current therapist Andrew Cunningham (Paul Scheer), who is trying to get him back into the water. Luckily, his titanium legs have been outfitted with a shotgun with endless ammo, which will help.
There’s also a scene where a piranha swims into a woman’s nether regions and bites off the member of the man who is attempting to deflower her. Keep in mind that she has had the fish inside her for several hours and that will tell you all you need to know about this film and whether or not you should watch it. There’s also a scene where the decapitated head of a man motorboats the bloody breasts of a woman, so just know what you are getting into.
Christopher Lloyd returns as Carl Goodman, continually explaining how the fish continue to evolve and the connection between the park and the underground river where the piranha make their home. Interestingly enough, the sound of the piranha was not accomplished in this film in the way that Joe Dante did it — recording a dental drill with an underwater mic. Nope. In this film, they’re the sound of a chihuahua barking. Trust me, I have a five pound one of these dogs and it may be the most frightening sound you can be awoken by in the middle of the night.
Guess how they kill the fish? Yep. They blow them up real good. Then one of them learns how to walk and kills a small child, with the film ending with people taking selfies of the dead kid.
If you’re looking for a movie that’ll get you through the afternoon and perhaps make you laugh, I guess this will fit the bill if you’ve already seen all of the other Piranha films.
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