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Reasons Never To Own A Camera In Japan

I've once again been shirking my duties on movies I should be into because <sigh> I just don't wanna. I need to review Hunger Games but the premise of a dystopian (fancy word for fake world that is scary or something we don't want - hmm, maybe not so fake after all) society that requires sections of its, uh, citizens to give up certain young ones by taking a name from a fishbowl (Really?) and having them fight to the death is horrid - not. Uh yeah folks, the US has done it for years - it's called the draft and we've lost as many as 175 MILLION people in wars because of it since 1900. Drawing a couple of names from a bowl sounds pretty damn tame.

But I digress as usual. I decided to make a sort of Japanese movies collage but after the first two found a really dumb pattern - for all the pictures you always see in the cliche' viewings of a Japanese touring group, they can't take pictures for sh--- uh, for nothing. At least not without invoking a grudge, a curse, or just something damned unpleasant.

Sex and/or violence is 'pink'? Hmm...

The first couple of movies are from something called the 'pink genre' and actually didn't have cameras in them - not the ghost taking kind anyway. I had to look that genre up - never heard of it before. Quoting wiki, it 'is a broad cinematic term used to categorize a wide variety of Japanese films with adult content. This encompasses everything from dramas to action thrillers and exploitation films, and softcore pornographic features. The so-called pink movie is part of an ongoing (and evolving) cycle of films rather than a specific genre.'

In other words, 'pink' movies are from Japan. Like The Slit Mouthed Woman (2005) - not to be confused with later and better (read more horror, less clothes being ripped off) movies like A Slit Mouthed Woman and Carved. They are all based on a Japanese urban legend (oh, they've got TONS of those) that scared people so much in the late '70s they even had escorts for kids to walk to school. The female ghost was supposedly defaced by a jealous lover by being slit from ear to ear. When she walks alone and comes upon someone, she asks if she's pretty and removes her facial mask. If they say no, it's death by scissors. If they say yes, you live but your face is also carved like a turkey. One is supposed to be ambivalent to save oneself from either fate. Uh, how? Never mind. 

But this movie only uses her as a device to, uh, break up couples while they, uh, yeah. Why did I bother? One I thought it was the movie about the stupid ghost (That would be either A Slit Mouthed Woman or Carved) and two the soundtrack had me in such a fit of giggles through the 70 minute movie... I don't know what you find sexy (Don't tell me, okay?), but the sounds of slurping soup and lunchmeat hitting the counter is not my idea of great sound effects... just as well. There's really no plot and no reason to watch this.


Kuronezumi aka Black Rat (2010) Japan 

This is also a pink movie by the wiki standards. This is about pure revenge, which means that yet another Japanese schoolgirl (they're usually girls) committed suicide 'cause people are bullies around the world and teenage suicide doesn't skip any continent. It's one of the reasons I wear my WEIRDO MOSHER FREAK armband with pride - it helps one of the many foundations that are cropping up in response to bullying and suicide of teens around the world. This particular band is in remembrance of a teen who was actually killed just for what she looked like...

A real person, a real victim of bullying...

The story is paper thin but a group of eight students are looking to do something for a festival. One, Asuka, proposes they do the dance of the seven rats. Sorry, that's the story. She even fashions rat masks but they ridicule her to the point of suicide. One day they all receive a text from Asuka telling them to be at the school on a certain night. Would you go? I say since they showed up, their deaths are pretty much on their heads if they're that stupid. 'Nuff said.

And that brings us to cameras. More to the point, photos. The Japanese have this weird thing about photos. We mess one up and a shadow, light streak or shadowy... thing appears, we shrug, adjust our settings and try again. Not them. They have a massive tizzy - it's a ghost photo! Umm, what? Okay, that's not really fair - if one looks (thank you Google) you'll find a whole slew of ghost photos from just about everywhere, including the States. But American movies? Well, I found The Shutter, but it was made by the same producer who made The Grudge and The Ring. Yup.

Again, just an example. Is it a log, a well-placed cloth or... ?

Basically all these movies have the same theme - you can't understand a damn thing and the pictures are not scary. They usually are from different causes, the usual causes for Japanese culture - grudges, curses, revenge and fear of offending ancestors. And badly dubbed. One movie was so bad I giggled through the thing because not only was the movie description completely wrong, the dialogue was so bad there was really no telling exactly what was happening. My favorite lines? "Don't pack too many stuffs. We move to a narrow place. So we can't have many stuffs."

Too many stuffs? Then leave those stupid cameras behind, you'll just screw up the photos and make more movies with them anyway.

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TWO REMAKES OF GREAT MOVIES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ILLEGAL



Psycho (1998) / Footloose (2011)

I think I've mentioned more than once about the 'list' Hollywood has of remakes it plans to churn out within the next couple of years. They've come up with quite a few more, but I'm just hoping that means that some will drop from the original list.

I decided to swallow the acid rising in my throat and try a couple of Hollywood's 'reboots' (that's apparently the new word for 'we don't have an original idea in our head and we don't have to so there'), one from a while back, one a little more recent.


Psycho (1998): Why didn't I want to see the new Psycho? Why do you think there hasn't been 'rebooted' sequels? One, it's a major insult to Alfred Hitchcock (and Robert Bloch), let's face it. The number two reason? Vince Vaughn. I have a list of actors that I will see a film for no matter how terrible it looks. The opposite goes for Mr. Vaughn. I just can't stand him. He's a smirk and a bit talent, and that's it. And that's how he played Norman/Mrs. Bates. I wanted to knock the smirk right off his stupid face. 

Anne Heche was all right I guess as Miss 'Stabbed In Shower', except for all the slashing he did, did you notice there was NO BLOOD either on the knife, flying around the shower, or any defensive wounds on the character's arms as she went down? No? Guess it was just me. If they were going for the sterile Hitchockian death of the first Psycho, they should have left it in black and white 'cause this was just pitiful. Which pretty much describes this entire sucky movie.


Footloose (2011): Geez Louise doesn't anybody have any more ideas - they've got to screw with ones from when I was young(er)? For you young whippersnappers that are too young for the original, all they've done is taken the soundtrack from the first movie, screwed up the few songs they did use, add a bunch of other ones I never wanted to hear in the first place (Black And Yellow by Wiz Khalifa? Really?), update the dancing a bit, and cast Dennis Quaid as yet another sourpuss so he can practice those frown lines that are getting deeper and deeper on his face (Crack a smile kid, okay?). 

It follows the same basic story which was silly in the 1980's (probably because it's 'loosely based on events taking place in Elmore City, OK') and even sillier now. Biggest WTH moment: In the original, Ren races big tractors with the local baddie and wins. In this version, the baddie gets into a big tractor, drives it ABOUT 100 FEET before stopping in front of painted up school buses, which he and Ren then race. WHAAA? Sigh. I KNEW it was going to be stupid but I watched it anyway. My bad.

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GOOD SCHLOCKY HORROR



The Stuff (1985)

This ridiculous (but entertaining) movie kind of reminded me of Food Of The Gods. You've got the mysterious goo bubbling up from the earth, people stupid enough to stuff it in their mouths, people greedy enough to market it without making sure it's safe, and people stupid enough to eat it without wondering what's really in it. Sounds logical to me. It also attracted some big names, like Paul Sorvino, Patrick O'Neal, Danny Aiello, Garrett Morris and Michael Moriarty, among others. For such a laughable film, that's a pretty hefty cast.

And laughable is the name of the game for this movie. We've got a marshmallow like 'stuff' leaking from the ground which tastes wonderful (duh, it's MARSHMALLOW) but has no calories (How do they know?) and the more you eat, the more you crave. FDA? They don't know what that is, apparently. Soon after an old duffer finds this stuff, corporations take over and soon 'The Stuff' as it is so imaginatively called is shipped all over, sold in quart containers like ice cream and fills all the homes of idiots. A problem - it's so popular, no one wants any other sweets and we just can't have that, right?

So a former FBI agent who's now an industrial saboteur (Michael Moriarty) is hired by those companies to bring down 'The Stuff' any way he can. Apparently neither they nor he eats it. Among those who want him to succeed is 'Chocolate Chip Charlie' (Garrett Morris).


Meanwhile in one of those typical families that never listens to their kids, a young boy comes down to get something to eat. Opening the fridge, he catches 'The Stuff' as it crawls around the refrigerator. His father not only doesn't believe him but punishes him for getting up in the middle of the night. Oh, THAT kind of family. Ick.

So there are those who don't eat this stuff but the rest eat it like it's going out of style. Since it has no calories but is filling people are losing weight and feeling great - unless 'the stuff' decides to leaves their bodies and so after ripping their jaws open (hard for marshmallow to be that brutal) it gorps out of them and crawls off.

So the movie consists of a lot of sneaking around, bad special effects as the marshmallow-like Stuff creeps around and rips people apart (heads pop kind of like footballs - apparently no bone or guts in this movie).

The movie is silly, dated, goopy and full of convenient plot devices. In other words, a pretty decent 80's horror flick.

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ALMOST DECENT ENGLISH CREATURE FEATURE




Storage 24 (2012) UK

This movie had two things I usually don't like - one it's an English horror film and two it's a creature feature. I liked Alien and I think I liked Predator (meh) but I'm not much for the creepy crawly type of movie. But this one was surprisingly good. Not great, but decent.

It had problems, most with pacing (most English films are really uneven) and a soap opera-y feel with the people and their relationship problems. It also had the cliche' kind of people - one starts out as a real ass and turns into a hero, one is a great guy who turns into a quivering coward. That's not that original, people.

We start with a military plane falling from the sky in the middle of London. Looking outside of a storage rental business, one sees a car crushed by one of the plane's engines, plus a strange looking transport crate that's broken open. I had problems with that, I'll tell you why in a bit.

The electric grid starts going up and down and the storage building goes into a kind of lockdown, trapping workers and customers inside. And something else. Something - not human. We are to assume that it was the cause of the plane crash, plus what burst out of the crate. Now the crate was kind of small - it looked like it could transport a large dog or something. 

But when the creature makes its appearance after killing a couple of people offscreen (all we see is their mangled bodies afterward), it's got to be almost seven feet tall and BIG. How the hell did it fit in that crate? Unless it wasn't a transport crate and I got it all wrong. I wouldn't be surprised.

Besides the employees of the business we have two women and one man, one of the woman an ex-girlfriend down there to pack up and get her stuff. Showing up to add to the group is the ex-boyfriend with his best friend to confront her. Like I said, leaning toward the soap opera style.

But they start getting picked off one by one as movies go - monsters don't murder in groups, just individuals, right? It's revealed early that the ex-boyfriend's best friend is now his ex's boyfriend (sheesh) so there's that conflict as well. But they must work together to get out of the building alive.

The monster isn't that original - I mentioned Predator, that's kind of what this creature looked like, at least the head did. It can rip through metal like paper and shreds apart everything it grabs. It's not scared of anything - except one of those horrid yapping wind up dogs, ya know the ones that bark and then take a few steps? It HATED that. Hmm, it had taste after all I guess.

The gore was decent in most places - they had a half-man that not only was alive but managed to grab one of the survivors... uh, no. I applaud the effort at trying to make us jump, but he'd been there a while and being alive, much less able to grab with a firm grip onto someone is not going to happen. Sorry.

So as the story goes into the usual run run run hide hide hide crawl crawl crawl oops one more dead kind of pattern, the new boyfriend at first abandons his now ex-best friend, telling the others that he's dead. Well, no, he just ran off without him to save his own skin, the guy turns up still alive. And they make that a really, REALLY dumb pattern to smack you in the face with 'See? See? This new guy is an ass!' Like we couldn't have figured that out. He's out to save himself, screw the people he's with. He next abandons his own new girlfriend, giving the rest the same 'She's dead.' when she actually was hiding. And he even manages to abandon the three left alive by blocking a door and not letting them into the relatively safe room. What a dork. But also very predictable.

This movie drags on like this - with little bursts of activity in between long periods of hiding, bickering, dying. The only amusing part was that little stinking yappy dog - they find some BIG fireworks rockets, tape it to that little creep and send it out in the hallway with the big Predator-like thing. It can only stand there looking at it, still creeped out by it until the rockets shoot that stupid thing straight into the creature and all the fireworks explode. Somehow this disables the creature enough for the last two survivors to get out - the original boy and girl who had just broken up. Now they're all they have left. She offers him a ride home which he accepts until a huge shadow passes over him. He looks up in horror.

We then get a view over the roof of the building - London is a goner. A whole fleet of alien ships is busy blowing the hell out of everything, presumably with lots of those critters in each one. And that's where it ends.

Not near as good as Alien or original like Predator. Not near as irritating as Cloverfield. Overall a meh creature movie with duh people. They should have had more creature and less soap opera.

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BEAUTIFUL, SAD, TWISTED AND BRUTAL






The Tall Man (2012) Canada/France

This is one heartbreaker of a movie that I really think you should see. I'll outline the plot but I don't want to give away too much so for just a bit I'd like to talk about movies set in Washington State that are usually filmed in Canada.

The beautiful Columbia River Gorge

I've lived in the Columbia Gorge most of my life. It is the area of the Northern state line of Oregon and the Southern state line of Washington, separated by the Columbia River. It's absolutely beautiful - but I think I can say with no exaggeration that both Washington and Oregon are two of the most beautiful States in the Country. With Oregon you have everything from beaches to lush forests to miles of orchards to desert places to tall mountains. 

Mount Hood overlooking the orchards of Hood River, Oregon

In Washington you have much the same - except maybe more farming. In fact just this morning I was pleased to see on the Bing app a picture of the Gifford Pinchot Forest in Skamania County, Washington where I lived for over a decade. I can see why they like to set movies there, but movie makers go as cheaply as possible, and that usually means Canada. So what movies and TV shows are set in Washington? Way too many to list but here are a few, usually set in a fictional Washington town:

• Twin Peaks (TV and Film): Filmed mostly in Snoqualmie, Washington.
• Twilight: Actually believe it or not this was primarily shot in Oregon mostly around Portland, although the sequels were shot in many places including Vancouver in British Columbia, Italy, Louisiana, Brazil, and I guess wherever the filmmakers thought that the place had the right "colors". WTH?
• The Tall Man: British Columbia
• Rose Red (TV): Seattle Washington and other Washington State locations.
• An Officer And A Gentleman: Bremerton, Port Townsend and Fort Worden, Washington.
• The Ring: While some of it was filmed in Seattle and Bellingham and other Washington towns, film locations included Oregon, California and Massachusetts. 
• Millenium (TV): Vancouver, British Columbia.

There are tons more, that's just a sample.

Okay now our movie - I'm just going to set it up and let you watch and get your own opinions. My opinion of the whole thing was that at first I thought meh, just another horror movie about a monster who kills kids. This is far, far different from that.

Julia, a widowed nurse, lives in the town of Cold Rock. Cold Rock was a thriving mining town until all mining was shut down - now it's just yet another sad, dying town with dirt poor residents. They have a problem however - their small children keep disappearing, without a trace. Some have come to blame it on The Tall Man, a sort of boogeyman that steals kids at night, taking them to his lair. Since the whole town sits over mining tunnels that reach everywhere (that would be scary to live in a house on) and they go on for miles, searches conducted all over find nothing. And since the place is surrounded by forest, searches are hard and still find no trace of any children, dead or alive.

Julia tries her best to help the residents but they treat her like dirt - after all, she's ONLY a nurse. Her husband was the town's doctor before he died. Besides her son, David, his nanny and an older child named Jenny (Jodelle Ferland who you may remember as Patience Buckner on The Cabin In The Woods), who is mute by choice because of her hard life, she's pretty much alone. Jenny is very talented as an artist, but that will never happen. She lives with her mother and stepfather, the bastard already having had a child with her older sister. She figures the same will happen to her when she's old enough and wishes 'The Tall Man' would take her.

One night Julia hears a loud noise downstairs. She discovers the nanny tied up and sees a dark figure taking off with her son. She gives chase, even jumping onto the truck, breaking in and fighting with the driver until the truck crashes. The dark figure grabs the child and runs away. Julia tries to catch them but she's injured and only makes it a little ways down the road, where the police find her.

And this is where the whole movie changes. Not having a local hospital (Julia is their only source of medical care) the cop takes her to the local diner, filled with people. There she is comforted and asked to tell what happened. But Julia remains silent. She does not tell them her son was kidnapped, or that her nanny is still half bound and bleeding at her house. I thought to myself this isn't right...

And that's all I'm going to say to give you a chance to watch the movie and have your own opinions because this will make you think. What really is right and wrong when it comes to the future of a child? Who is evil and who is good? This movie starts what we feel is the usual way for a horror movie and then twists upon its head, becoming instead a thinker and one way or another you are going to have a strong opinion. I did.

MOVIES THAT GET ONLY A DISHONORABLE MENTION



A Whole Shi--- Uh Boatload Of Bad Movies

I haven't been slacking off, really. I've been watching movies like crazy, and it's been making ME crazy. See, I knew I'd be reviewing bad movies, I just didn't realize how bad movies could be. We're not talking Plan 9 From Outer Space bad, something you can enjoy BECAUSE it's bad. We're talking movies that should at least have been decent, may have had a good actor or two in it, a decent premise maybe, but it was just AWFUL beyond the pale. 

When I'm taking notes and the next scene is so... stomach turning that I throw my pen in disgust (my cats actually love it when I do that)... well, let's just say I'm down a lot of pens. Cats aren't dogs - you throw something, they get it... and then you never see it again. Shoot.

So here's a list of dishonorable mentions of movies I really REALLY tried to do full reviews on but they were just horrid:

Beneath The Darkness (2012): I had a crush on Dennis Quaid in the 80's and 90's - I really did. I mean could he smile or could he smile? But something's gone dark with Dennis - he's either just not happy anymore or he has gotten into the 'this is the movie for you' trap and now he's stuck playing psychos. Look at Pandorum. Great movie, except Dennis was a psycho. But at least THAT was a decent movie. This... oof. 

They should have called this Trying To See A Damn Thing In The Darkness, 'cause the movie apparently takes place in a town that never sees the sun. Nothing is more frustrating than a dark movie, especially when it's a BAD dark movie. Dennis Quaid plays the owner of a funeral home. Ooooh, that explains it. See, in bad horror movies, certain professions automatically mean you're a psycho. Let's see, there's doctor, mortician, scientist, clown, priest, and of course cop. That's just a sampling but you get the idea.

So why is Dennis mad this time? Sigh. Infidelity. Yup, he's on a tear (and burying people alive) 'cause his wife was having a little too much fun. And teenagers being stupid and never being believed by anyone over 21 find out but have to 'catch' him themselves because, I dunno, they watched too much Buffy The Vampire Slayer or something. And they do. In the dark. Duh.


Silent House (2011): Oh boy, was this transparent as hell. Teenage girl decides to help daddy and his brother fix up a house they used to vacation at waaaay out in the sticks so they can sell it. As soon as she gets there she starts seeing strange things and hearing strange noises. And hmmm... there's some Polaroids she finds that her dad snatches away from her before she can look at them. Uh huh. Call Child Services please 'cause we all already know what happened and why she's freaking at being back at that house. But no, we have to suffer through ANOTHER movie that mostly takes place in the freaking dark, as she slowly realizes that the spectres she thinks are after her and her dad and uncle are shadows of the past and SHE is the one causing the havoc. 

See, in case you don't watch horror movies or you are really thick (and I don't think you are) the Polaroids she had found were of her... seems her daddy and brother used her as... uh... a main source of entertainment when they were out in this house. BIG surprise. Not. Massive duh.

Rites Of Spring (2011): Take all the country setting horror movies you know, add a splash of He Who Walks Behind The Rows and BAM! You've got yourself one horrible horror movie. But at least most of it takes place in the daytime. 'Cause it's Spring you see... no? Well I can't blame you. With a mashing together of a kidnapping plot gone wrong, girls captured, tortured and killed over decades as sacrifices, some kind of undefined monstrosity, and corn fields (Don't these farmers ever grow anything else in horror movies?), you are sucked into a head scratching, yawn inducing movie that has no purpose and no real ending. BIG duh.


Choose (2011): A revenge movie of the DUHest kind. A serial killer goes after seeming random people and makes them choose how they're going to die. Of course these people are only random because in horror movies, police are always stupid. They've been working on this thing for a couple of years. So of course the daughter of a detective gets on line on her computer and pretty much figures it out in five minutes. Okay that's not quite fair, she had help - the killer wants her to know who he is and why he's doing this. The reason? Sigh - another revenge scheme - all the people killed were NOT random, and her detective daddy should be fired on the spot for not knowing that since he was also involved. DUH of the decade.

Movies That Weren't Quite So Bad:

Crooked House (2008) UK Made For TV: One would think this would be incredibly slow and boring considering it is both a TV movie and from the uneven movie-making UK. But I found this surprisingly good (although it is a bit slow). It is the story of a young man living in his flat until one day he finds a very strange doorknocker in his garden. Taking it to the museum, the curator tells him that on the site of his building used to be a mansion with a peculiar man who was said to be into the black arts. He then proceeds to tell him of several stories of families that lived (but not for long) in that mansion. He ends the stories by saying the mansion was torn down and the new building put up because the original owner did not have an heir. The man decides to keep the ugly thing and installs it on his door.

Bad mistake. Always at the same time toward four in the morning he hears someone using the knocker. Answering the door always shows no one there - but when he turns, the inside of his flat has become the inside of the mansion. He slams the door shut, then opens it - it's his flat again. After a few times of this, with him even exploring the mansion and seeing the original family performing some sort of black arts rite, he takes off the knocker and goes back to the museum - which has been closed for years. In fear he turns to his girlfriend, who he had abandoned because she became pregnant (although he promised to provide for the baby). She's no help of course. 

Going home he throws the knocker in a pond, but that morning he is again woken by the knocker - which has appeared on his door again. Slam - mansion. Slam - flat. Very scared he looks at the door - the knocker is again gone. Again he hears a knock - but this time it's his girlfriend. She's in labor and in a panic he has her sit on the couch while he calls an ambulance. But when he turns around, she's gone.

He rushes again to the museum and breaks in. He finds the picture he was shown by the non-existent curator of the first family that had no heir. This time the picture shows them holding a son and he knows that it was supposed to be his. Rushing back to his flat he can only look in horror as he finds the mansion that was supposed to have been torn down - after all, as the curator said, it would have still been there had there been an heir. Okay, a bit of a ways to go for a punchline, but not half bad.

The Dunwich Horror (1970): This is the original, not the silly remake the Sci Fi channel put out, but both have Dean Stockwell in them. Now I've said before that you can't really encapsulate an H.P. Lovecraft story into a movie very well since it's almost more of a mythology than a story but hey, there's Sandra Dee getting naked (which shocked me, I've never seen her but I remember them singing about her in Grease), Dean getting to feel her up - a lot - and psychedelia galore. Yeah it's still kind of silly -  apparently Dean's character's main power is to widen his eyes every few seconds as sort of a hypnotism technique. Uh huh. Loved the curly hair and porn star mustache though. And it is MUCH better than the remake so if you have a choice, pick this one. It's still not that good, but meh.

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TWO VERY BAD MOVIES EXPLOITING THE DISABLED



House Of Bodies (2013) / The Tenant (2010)

Just what are the odds of finding two (awful) horror movies in a row that feature deaf characters? In one it's a convenient plot device. In the other, it's criminal because not only are they deaf, they're small children. In either case it's an extra slap in the face of the movie goer as they have to sit through these two abominations.

House Of Bodies: This immediately had the kiss of death - 'based on real events'. So you know the movie is total BS. The only 'real' part of this movie is probably the fact that serial killers exist. Yet for some unknown reason, this movie actually had Peter Fonda, Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard in it. How the hell does that happen? This movie was, in a word (but you know I'm going to give you a lot more), ludicrous.

The premise is that a man committed a series of atrocities on young women in his house (YAWN). Now, struggling college students trying to pay for their expenses have rented the house, and turned it into torture-porn-for-profit website. Each girl who rents a room has to perform a very disgusting (and fake) scene of being killed by torture, just like the girls who were actually killed in the house. Oh yeah, that's enlightened thinking.

One girl is a bit shy of taking it all off so some other actor can off her (sorry, I mean kill her). Enter a young man who had Ménière's disease when he was 12, causing him to lose his hearing. When people started making fun of his speech, he stopped talking. Looking for something, uh, that teenage boys like I guess (and apparently having a credit card) he logs onto the site and gets our shy girl, Kelli. She is the usual idiot, saying things like 'What's the matter, you a deaf-mute or something?' Sheesh. He should have come back with 'Hey what are you, a a dumb blonde skank or something?' It would have been only fair. So despite both not being the sharpest tool in the box they strike up a friendship - as close as you can get for one on the internet, for money.

Queen Latifah? She plays some sort of, uh, online counselor? She's supposed to be there if he needs anything - when she's on her shift. Uh, okay. So she's available... part of the time. Groovy. Peter Fonda? He plays the incarcerated serial killer who is being grilled throughout the movie by detectives because, darn it all, here he rots in jail but women are still turning up dead, killed just like he supposedly killed them. How come? Uh, 'cause they have the wrong guy? Pfft, we're not going to get answers that quickly, they have a 78 minute movie to make.

So we get a lot of dumb S&M which, because you're smart too, quickly becomes very real as each girl is picked off by the REAL serial killer - the one that Peter Fonda is in jail for. Because it's his son. Duh. Is there a happy ending? Ya know, I can't exactly remember, it was. Just. That. Bad.


The Tenant: This was just inexcusable for exploiting four supposedly deaf-mute children that were signing like they were in training to be mimes or something. My apologies if they actually WERE deaf-mute but somehow I really doubt it. The basic premise is that a doctor is running experiments instead of taking care of his mental patients. What a surprise. He wants to be able to 'fix' genetic errors that cause disabilities in the womb. When his wife, pregnant with twins (sigh) insists that he quit immediately or she's gone, he does - but his faithful assistant gets his wife back by injecting the doc's latest attempt into her womb just before she gives birth. Needless to say... life sucks and then you die. She does.

Doc plays with Moe, Larry & Curley

A bus carrying stupid people and the above mentioned children breaks down and it's pouring. Now, instead of staying with the bus, which would keep them out of the rain and be there when someone drives by and can help them, they run through the rain and break into the now-abandoned mental asylum (Why why WHY are there so damn many abandoned asylums? Can't they turn them into libraries, or schools or something?) for shelter that they already had if they had stayed on the damn bus.

Somehow I don't think they want him as a spokesman...

You've got the rest figured out, I'm sure. The baby that got the dose of the doc's experiment is a grotesque monster, living in his own filth in the hospital. The assistant now brings him... I dunno, elephant meat? Little bits of dog meat? Whatever she brings, it's gross which I guess is appropriate. So these idiots roaming the halls get picked off one by one (not the little ones) until a girl is left to find out that hey, she was adopted and the monster is her twin brother. Wow. I. Am. Not. Impressed.

Again the ending is... the ending and you don't have to worry about the movie any more.

A LITTLE BIT INTERESTING, A WHOLE LOT DISGUSTING



A Little Bit Zombie (2012) Canada

I guess the time of the zombie comedy film has been with us a while now, with other film makers desperately trying to make something in the vein of Shaun Of The Dead and failing, miserably. Take Warm Bodies. Please. When I heard it described as 'the Twilight of zombie movies' I knew it was doomed. I know I won't watch it. Who wants to watch what has been described as a goreless romantic movie for the whole family? That's called a Disney movie folks - if you want sunshine and flowers, go there. If you want gore and the dead undead, watch a real zombie movie. 

Just not this one. And WTH is a little bit zombie? Is that like being a little bit pregnant?

It starts off well enough - an outbreak is afoot (with no explanation) and an anonymous team of two are trying to annihilate every last one of them. While cleaning house at a circus (no zombie clowns though, rats) a mosquito happens by and bites one of the zombies. Okay, I know there couldn't be enough blood in a vein or artery, just let me explain the plot, deal? Deal. 

The sickened mosquito flies on until it is squished on the windshield of a hapless man, his uber bitch of a fiancee', his sister and her husband, a guy who thinks movies like American Pie are thoughtful examinations of human behavior. In other words, a bitch, a ditz and a human ape are travelling with him. They are going to a cabin for a vacation before the nuptials much to the constant complaining of the bride-to-be. You want her very VERY dead after about 30 seconds.

They get to the cabin and everything seems fine - until the mosquito comes back to life. Now it's supposed to want brains, right? Uh, not this one. After buzzing around the three obnoxious people it zeroes in on our hero and bites him. He smashes it. It recovers and bites him again. He smashes it. This goes on for a while but finally he manages to crush it beyond zombie recovery.

From there the film totally degrades into 87 minutes of farting, belching and puking schtick. If you like grossout bodily functions, this is the movie for you. Funny how one can watch a zombie get its head blown off without a tick but when someone decides to void their breakfast all over someone else's face.... ick.

Needless to say, this poor boy, a white collar kid named Steve gets worse - and now knowing his condition, his three, uh, friends try to help him. I should say his sister tries to help him while the other two bitch constantly. Animal brains work for a bit and then we get more grossouts - he needs human brains. So they decide to find someone 'no one will miss'. Hey, why don't you just eat the three with you? I wouldn't  miss 'em for a second.

The ending comes finally when the two hunters confront the sort-of zombie. When the gun-happy one insists that Steve is about to meet his end, his head is blown off by Steve's sister. No big loss there. The female part of the duo tells Steve he is a new mutation and needs to be studied - in hopes of finding a cure for the... and then her head is gone. 

The bridezilla, not wanting her plans ruined, even if it means a wedding cake made of human brains, has splatted her brains all over Steve. Which he doesn't mind at all. And the movie ends and I need a Tums really badly.

By the way, the CGI'd effects were terrible. Did they even try?

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