BLOODY FREAKING HELL... ANOTHER MONTH IS ALMOST GONE AND I HAVEN'T DONE MUCH IN THE WAY OF HORROR MOVIES - GOTTA PICK ONE REALLY QUICK SO I'LL PICK.... HMMM.... SOMETHING EASY BUT GOOD.... NOPE, THERE AIN'T ONE. I'LL HAVE TO DO AWFUL AND EXCRUCIATINGLY LONG INSTEAD....

V/H/S Viral (2014)

This was to be the turd... I'm sorry, I mean the THIRD of a series of anthologies that were also kind of experiments in alternate horror. You had a wraparound story that kind of hinted that watching these V/H/S tapes in a certain order might do something to you - whether they're pushing for paranormal or not, it was sort of interesting. Not great, but interesting.

So you know what happens next - you get a history lesson! That's right, Miss Murder continues to fill space by telling you Generation Z babies (Hmm, what are they gonna call the next generation?) a little old-time history. We had video cameras before you were born you know. They may have weighed a ton, and the size of one of Jigsaw's traps, but we had 'em. AND most of 'em took full size V/H/S tapes. If they didn't, they usually had adapters so you could transfer your videos onto 'em.

But, like everything else, people wanted things to be as huge as possible, then changed their minds and started to make things as small as possible - which is why you can find lots of people squinting to watch movies on their smartphones. I couldn't believe when a young girl said she didn't understand the movie Inception - that she watched on her phone. I told her it was probably because she couldn't SEE it.

Okay, now the movie. You had parts one and two. Then you have the turd. And this time I'm not correcting myself. I kept having to look at the wiki and the movie description because I was sure this was some kind of spin off 'cause they totally took the idea of mind warping through the supernatural events on the tapes and... well... they killed it. 

For 81 minutes you just sit and watch and shake your head (not too hard - you can get brain damage from that). This movie was vapid, vacuous, vile, vague, vacillating, valueless, vexatious, vulgar, vexing, violent, There's probably more 'V' words I could use, but I don't wanna. But there's one 'V' missing in this movie: V/H/S. 

Smile for daddy...

How do you make a V/H/S movie without a tape in sight? And what kind of crap cameras (and tons of smart phones - don't forget them) have white noise, breaks in the picture, blurring - all those things that we, the previous generation were so used to with our precious technology?

Vicious Circles: The wraparound is absurd and doesn't have a point - its a freaking ice cream truck (cue the annoying bling bling music) leading a police chase around in circles. Along the way it just runs over or drags until they drop whomever it happens to run into. Oh and somehow it gets the girlfriend of the main idiot with a camera, trying to get full video footage of the whole thing for his five seconds of fame (along with dozens running around with their smart phones). The stories flicker in and out with no introduction but the main irritation is the blinking, messy footage. C'mon people, it's 2015 - you know, the digital age? There's no reason to have so much horrible footage that only serves to irritate and give you a headache. Speaking of which:

Dante The Great: The only halfway interesting story also has been done to death (pun intended) in better movies and better ways. A white trash loser living in a trailer park... okay let's stop right there, shall we?

People, I hate to break this to you but the American home (especially the ones you see in movies) are financially available to less and less of the population. The latest stats I could find about Americans who live in trailer parks were wildly different depending on what news source you looked at or what year. I saw percentages and one even claimed that nearly 20 million people in the US live in a manufactured home of some type.

I have lived in apartments, trailers and houses. Currently I live in a single wide trailer in a pretty nice "trailer park" right across the street from a grade school. You'd think that would irritate an old lady like me <stops to sip her Chamomile tea>, but I actually enjoy listening to them play and since we're just about straight across from the playground, my cats have something else to watch when the birds aren't around to tease them.

I am not white trash. I live with my husband in affordable housing (which, since the landlord thinks he can raise the rent every year will soon end) in a nice looking, very small town.

Now, the story. It was presented as a sort of a Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery (Geez I miss Invader Zim!) program, summing up how Dante got started, how he somehow got hold of a cloak that once belonged to Houdini, and became super famous and super rich... until the most recent of his many assistants came forward to tell the police what happened to those other assistants and Dante was arrested and promptly disappeared. 

He grabbed the assistant from the police station and after a brief tussle, she overcame him and the cloak ate him. You heard me. The assistant burned the cloak but of course it was not that dumb and came back and ate the assistant. And that was the end.

I wish. This sucker is 81 minutes long and only 10 of them were slightly interesting (the Dante story), the rest, a freaking bore. After all, if this wasn't a true continuation of the storyline that they were developing in the first two, what's the point? At the beginning people start going insane from what they see on their phones anyway, so why continue and what... never mind. Okay, here's the short and curly summary of the rest.

Parallel Monsters: A man creates a portal, revealing a universe that exactly like his own. And in that world is his twin. They decide to switch for 15 interminable minutes. Surprise, the parallel universe is full of demons and people die. Aaaaand that's about it for that one. Oh, I did have a good laugh at what these demons had for, uh, private parts. It was kind of a psycho's wet dream combined with some H.P. Lovecraft knockoff effects. But for here I'll only show the woman, sorry.

Bonestorm: Just what everyone wants to see - skateboarders. And worse, they're wearing cameras on their helmets - but they're pointing at their faces. Why exactly? So we can NOT see what they are doing, just hear what they're pretending to be doing? Being young and stupid they agree to go to Tijuana to skate in a dry concrete ditch. Aaaaaand the ditch has monsters (oh I'm sorry, zombies) because something's got to kill these kids. But alas, two of the kids live and we stay bored and it has nothing to do with the movie.

In the wraparound, people are chasing the van like crazy, so crazy that one idiot gets caught in the back bumper somehow and get dragged along, first losing his shoes, and then his feet. That was almost, ALMOST worth watching.

In another segment that isn't even titled, we see a group having a barbeque until one of the guys goes nuts and for no reason whatsoever. He stabs this guy's dog in the head with a fork (there's a saying - we don't care who dies as long as the dog's okay) and the dog's owner goes crazy and wipes out the whole family with forks, knives, anything he can find. Oh, don't worry about the dog. He simply sits there, waiting until his part is done so he can go home, eat his treats, and tear up his SAG card.

At the blessed end the van stops and the guy with the camera whose girlfriend had been abducted is forced to upload all we've just seen so the whole city can suffer through their smartphones. Ummm, they already going insane through their smartphones. That was kind of the point - but since this ends the movie I'm not going to complain at all. And I'm so glad I own a dumbphone.

                      

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM PART TWO





Drive-In Horrorshow (2009)

Anthology movies used to be made in order to showcase short stories, usually having a 'wraparound' story to tie them all together. Now it seems that they're just used to show garbage that wouldn't be tolerated in a full movie. That was VHS, a movie I reviewed 5/16/13. To which apparently, or so I read, they're planning a sequel. Guess there were a few more snippets of garbage to put together.



This particular grouping of horror is the campy type, as seen in the past in such shows as Tales From The Crypt, or even Elvira's Movie Macabre. The world has fallen in an apocalypse and everything is pretty much gone. Except for one drive-in theater. Which is lucky, considering there isn't hardly any of those left to begin with. The proprietor, one of the undead, together with his equally undead helpers show very short stories - their only paying customers a couple of shrouded skeletons who sit in the parking lot on chairs (and constantly complain). And here we go:

The Pig: Your typical boy meets girl at frat party, boy slips rape drug in girl's drink, girl gets raped, girl gets revenge. In this case she glues the boy into the bathtub (the 'glue' looked like, pardon the picture, vomit with lots of corn in it) in order to drown him. The rest of the story is her screeching at him, him pleading with her, him losing some skin as he attempts to loosen his feet to unstop the drain and/or stop the water and the main question that has to be answered really fast: Will he get loose or slowly drown?

The Closet: One of those obvious family situation where one sibling is clearly the favorite, the other abused and ignored. He finds a monster in his closet (very minimal effects here - it is very very low budget after all). The monster convinces him that, one by one, if he feeds the monster his family members he will be sooo happy. And he does. Until he is alone, happy and king of the castle. But then the 'castle' bills come. He realizes too late the obvious - those horrible people payed his way and enabled him to have the things he cherishes in the first place. Well - it's off to the closet. Duh.

Fall Apart: This is about a doctor who cares for all his patients, poor or rich, makes house calls, and does all he can to help the community. Hey this is fantasy horror fiction, remember? Anyway - after visiting a sick farmer with strange skin sores, he starts feeling ill - he loses a fingernail just from bumping it against the sink. Receiving an urgent call from his sick patient he goes to their house only to find it completely empty - and he's being watched by someone in suits. 

Calling the hospital he finds that not only are his patients not at the hospital - they never sent an ambulance like the wife had told him. As he continues to lose things like the skin off his hands, his teeth, etc. the men in suits show up and tell him (in a synthesized sounding voice) they mean him no harm. Duh. The men who are immune have some weird 'thing' on their temple - sorry but it really didn't look like anything to me and it's never explained. Then we get lots of camera shots of needles sticking into the gore of his body. And we get a question with no answer: Is this disease man-made? Will it get out? Do we care?

The Meat Man: A horrible serial killer is on the loose. Targeting healthy individuals, the killer is known as 'The Meat Man' because prime pieces of human 'meat' is missing off the bodies - making people wonder if the killer is also a cannibal. Two small boys coming home from school are as scared as anyone else of this specter and, being imaginative, speculate as to who could do such a thing. 

Then one remembers the time they were playing with the stand alone freezer in the basement (?!?) and they got into trouble with their father because 'it is not a toy'. Could he be the monster everybody's looking for? Being boys they come up with different scenarios by which their father just might be him, after all, he loves good steak and always wants the 'best cut', he travels for his job constantly, etc. 

By then the father comes home and the boys, unable to help themselves, ask him about it. He laughs and assures them that just because someone loves meat, and the best meat they can get, doesn't make them a monster. They laugh and go upstairs. Once gone the father, face grim, goes to the bottom of the freezer which has a hidden hatch and opens it to reveal...

The Watcher: This is your typical two couples spend time in the woods and are pursued by a crazed killer. In this case, the killer happens also to be a cannibal. Best line: "You ape-faced monkey!" Uh, no. But that's the equivalent of their combined intelligence and also their chance of surviving this story.


And our host thanks us and hopes to see us again. Not if I see him first.

https://www.facebook.com/dumbandboringmovies

WHOOPS - REALITY IS STILL BROKEN






V/H/S (2012)

Ah, the old horror anthology genre. A dying genre for sure - usually you find it most often in movies from other countries. We had a good run from about the 50's to the 80's but it's becoming rarer. This movie works, sort of, simply because there's not much time spent on any one theme so the obvious flaws and dumb stuff passes quickly. And, guaranteed, you will get confused. And maybe sickened. Lots of blood. Lots of gore. A zombie or two. And for a 'real' look the picture is often interrupted or is fuzzy - got a headache from that. Note: After watching this movie again while I was in a better mood, and having now seen V/H/S 2, I gave this one a better go on 6/8/14...

The 'wraparound' story is that amateur makers of 'shock' videos (mostly pulling down women's tops, paint gun tagging, etc.) want to make some big money (apparently someone with less taste than they have is buying them and putting them on the web). They are directed to break into a certain house to retrieve a 'rare' VHS tape although the exact nature of the tape really isn't made clear. 

What IS clear is when they break in, they discover the owner, quite dead, in his easy chair in front of rows of TVs hooked to VCRs. And hundreds of tapes. Which one is the right one? Some go elsewhere to look, furthering the main story while one stays and checks out the tapes already in the VCRs. But the house is not as empty as they think, the dude in the chair may not be as dead as they want, and the V/H/S tapes... well, they keep their cameras rolling (it's called Tape 56 in the credits):


Amateur Night: Your basic American story. Boys go out to party. Boys pick up girls. Boys take girls back to motel room. One of the girls is a demon (first look at her in the club told me that) and proceeds to eat her way through the group - except for one. When he tries to escape we see him lifted by something unseen into the sky, large bat-like wings briefly seen...

Meanwhile, needing to only find one tape (they were told they'd know when they saw it), a couple of the guys search the basement - when one swears he sees a guy running around naked down there. Does he or are they all just getting very paranoid?


Second Honeymoon: A couple on a trip. Nothing out of the ordinary, except she won't sleep with him. First night in a motel a strange woman knocks on the door asking for a ride. They shut the door and go to sleep in separate beds. Their camcorder is shown to be used by someone in their room, taping them both sleeping and... other things. The last thing the thief does (and of course it's the strange woman) is steal a knife... the next night she kills the husband with the knife, then as he dies, passionately makes out with her lover (the wife) as they leave the motel...

As the shocked thief takes the tape out we clearly see that the dead man is no longer in the chair...

Eye like this one...

Tuesday The 17th: The four-teenagers-going-to-the-woods-oh-please-let-them-die-fast-please-please-please scenario. But of course there has to be some perversion in this or it wouldn't make it... weird. In this little drama, their new friend Wendy has led them into this forest for live bait to catch the... thing that slaughtered her REAL friends and left her alive the year before. Nice. I like this girl. But despite her bait and her booby traps, the... thing that is and isn't real traps her, rips her open, and crawls inside, and we see her in a sort of St. Vitus dance...

The guys come up from the basement - their friends are gone. One stays to look for the tape while the other goes to look for them. The "dead" man is back in his chair...


The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Younger: Emily is video chatting with her doctor boyfriend. She's freaked about a bump on her arm - they keep happening - and she swears her apartment is haunted. Her boyfriend tries to talk sense into her but fails and she goes on a ghost hunt... and finds them. They knock her out. 

Her boyfriend, who's supposed to be on a trip is actually next door. He runs over and while she's unconscious (ignoring the psycho looking children who knocked her out) removes a fetus from her. He asks how many more times this will be done, as Emily is losing it without knowing why - he apparently has been the go-between for her and whatever aliens they're trying to push for a long time. But not to worry, he has others for 'breeders' if Emily fails...

Back in the living room, now it's completely empty of anything dead or alive or??? The remaining thief finds the video camera they've been running this whole time and uses it as light as he tries to find someone, anyone... Careful what you wish for. He finds the headless corpse - and the head - of one of his 'friends', the "dead" man standing there watching him. He runs, falls down the stairs and the "dead" man kills him. We next see the empty living room, and the last tape starts:

?????

10/31/98: On Halloween four guys way too old for this kind of thing get lost on the way to a party. The house they think is the right one (although there are no cars and no people - they're not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed) is big but spooky and something's happening upstairs - they've walked right into an exorcism of some type. When the boys join in the chanting, all hell breaks loose - literally. I'm sorry about that - I really, really hate it when people use 'literally' like that but it's late and I'm tired so... the four men think the best thing to do is get the girl and get the puck out of there so they do...

Only to realize that the girl is... not normal. She disappears out of the car only to reappear on the road ahead of them. They then realize (because they're just not that smart) that they're on railroad tracks and yep, here comes the train...

The credits treat you to more of the doomed idiots (Tape 56) that figured they'd be the next Punk'd as they destroy stuff, steal stuff, assault women, and just make you glad in general that they are now dead...

THREE SLICES OF BOREDOM WITH A SPLASH OF BLOOD ON THE SIDE





Three Slices Of Life aka Slices Of Life (2010)

Not aware that this was yet another anthology of short stories (a big duh on my part since it SAYS three slices, at least on some of the posters) I was curious about the premise of a girl who can't remember her life yet there's a sketchbook full of stuff and she wonders if she really wants to remember anything after all. The poster of a girl soaked with blood also, I must admit, got me interested. This independent film took four years to make. That must be because Anthony G Sumner probably only had the weekends to work on it. Just kidding. Barely. And this movie is a little interesting. Again, barely.

Our wraparound story is simple: A girl named Mira wakes on the lawn of a seedy motel. She apparently works and lives there. She has no idea, however, of what has happened to her or really much else. However she takes her place in the motel office, with whispers of 'wake up' and 'remember' being constant in her ears. Among the things on the ground beside her is a nasty looking book (I mean the look, not the content) which definitely looks as if the writer took liberties and tried to copy the look of the Necronomicon. She looks at the book - on the front it says Work Life and she opens it up...

Work Life: A clerk at a computer firm wants to be liked. By anyone. He completes an online computer programming course and figures that he should be promoted and work upstairs with the others instead of in the basement by himself where he spends most of his life. Covering for another employee's shift he tries an online 'chat' service, but every woman simply laughs in his face and cuts the connection. 

Meanwhile upstairs in the real world, employees step on each other trying to advance, mainly by coming up with ideas the boss will like. One has what he thinks is the perfect product. It is nanoadvertising - by clicking on the site, the customer will be induced to like the product, and MUST buy it. The boss rejects it, seeing only lawsuits by people being electrocuted by their computers.

The clerk, who everybody calls 'Worm' (ha ha ha... no, that's not clever, sorry) steals the disc and loads it onto his computer. Now EVERY woman on the dating site wants him, and we have a weird scene reminiscent of Videodrome and not in a good way as his computer keyboard and mouse seem to become flesh. Ick. He then decides in order for his co-workers to like him, he must send an email with this 'worm' in it to all his coworkers. The effects are not what he expected. 

After epileptic fits and foaming at the mouth, all the workers in his building have now become zombies. Makeup and effects? Eh, good enough. Four years of production good enough? Not really. But to be fair, it is an independent film and compared to some big money productions it did work well enough. 

After almost being chomped by his now devoted (and undead) coworkers (I've worked in offices like that - I swear with some of these same people) he escapes to his basement where he finds a pretty girl who was a temp upstairs and didn't know how to work her email and so was unaffected. He is overjoyed to have someone while they hear gunshots upstairs - the government didn't waste time on this one, they were there within ten minutes of the outbreak. Wow, it usually takes them ten minutes just to take an emergency call. Sorry, that's mean but true. 

But just as 'Worm' is about to kiss his new girl, a new hole appears in her head. Good splatter though. The hazmat dressed assassins, recognizing somehow that not only is he human but he started the whole mess, take him with them to... wherever zombie masters go. Now 'Worm', who only wanted a friend, will spend the rest of his life alone in isolation as he is studied by faceless workers.

Back at the motel Mira comes to herself as if in a fugue. Her book has changed - it now says Home Life. She opens it up and starts to read...

Home Life: A young, very pregnant woman, enjoys a baby shower with friends when they hear of the recent Amber Alert on the news - young girls in the area have been disappearing for the last four months, the bodies of a couple of them have already been found. This disturbs her but her husband is a police officer working on the case so she tries not to think about it. She hears children's voices outside and looking out the window sees one young girl standing there. 

Now I have to break in this story and say that this, while being the most obvious story with obvious ending had a lot of what-the-hell moments in it, I'll tell you why. The girl who calls herself Ally doesn't want to open her eyes but stands in the yard, even when the woman offers to call her mother. She then morphs into a demon looking horror. The woman gets bad contractions whenever she sees her.

And now, the TV keeps turning itself on, always on the Amber Alert story, and the three dead girls found so far are haunting her, telling her they want her baby. Does that make sense? She didn't do anything, why torture her? I mean this has the most obvious whodunit ending since there's only her and her husband, but why torture her? Anywho, this idiot cop keeps secret keys around his neck. One of the demon children attacks him and takes the keys. 

The woman is led to the shed she is not allowed to go into (D to the U to the H) and the key unlocks both the door and a small trunk inside a van (Did she not KNOW they owned a van?) and discovers the child the TV kept playing the Amber Alert for, still alive. She lets her out and here's hubby trying his best to look menacing but just looking stupid. He says 'I was going to have to wait another month to have my fun but I guess I'll start now.' Uh, what? He wanted a kid to mess it up? Kids have only been disappearing for four months, don't you think he'd be doing this a little longer and farther away from home... ah, never mind.

The little girl Ally who first appeared to her (and causes bad contractions whenever she sees her) comes again with demon face (pretty good, bad for the kid though, hope she didn't get nightmares) and attacks and kills the husband. She then goes to the woman who's water is breaking and says 'Mama I saved us.' Conveniently, the others disappear.

Back at the motel Mira keeps hearing whispering and now believes she sees the people from her stories at the motel. The book has changed again, it now reads Sex Life (Oh brother, here we go)...

Sex Life: This, for you gore fans was full and overflowing. You're gonna get tons of guts, gallons of blood, and apparently most of the film maker's budget on this story which is stupid, simple and silly but boy was it RED. Brother and sister, alone except for their uncle who has been sexually abusing the sister for years, decide to make a run for it when they think they've killed him. They end up in a wooded area where another story has been playing out.

A father is seen locking up his daughter in the basement. He then takes implements to cut a body in the bathtub apart (wait, that's not the good part) and putting the pieces in garbage bags goes off to the woods to bury them. He slips, hits his head and becomes unconscious. The brother and sister find him and being out of money and gas decide to take him to the hospital and stay in his house which is huge and full of everything they could need. 

They don't know about either the body or the girl but they soon find the girl and let her out. While she cleans up, they see tons of artwork and a family tree showing that the bloodline of Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed leads up to the girl they just released.

Quick history in case you didn't know: Elizabeth Báthory was from Hungary and was the most prolific female serial killer in history - although no one knows the precise count of how many she murdered. She is often referred to as the Blood Countess although some have also called her Countess Dracula. Her main thrill was bathing in the blood of virgins, believing that to be the source of immortality, or eternal youth.

Meanwhile the father has woken in the hospital and beats cleats to make it home to finish what he started.

The daughter has cleaned up and the boy catches a glimpse of her as she puts on a robe. To his delight she doesn't mind a bit, in fact, is quick to take him to bed. Unfortunately, his delight is short-lived as the last descendant of the Blood Countess reveals the 'secret' to her bloodlust (at least according to this movie) - she has some sort of blood lusting worm living in her... uh... you know. We are talking total blood spatter ladies and gentleman... much MUCH more blood than can possibly be in any one person, much less a handful. The boy is reduced to mulch in a very gory manner and the girl laughs and laughs as she revels in the blood and guts.

Her father, of course knowing exactly what she's capable of doing, grabs a gun and shoots her in the forehead. The sister, seeing him come home and expecting the worse of all adult males shows up just after, seeing her pieces of brother smeared all over the bed, all the blood and the shot girl on the floor. 

She of course thinks instantly the worst of the guy and takes a sledgehammer... apparently they weren't satisfied with just smashing the guy's head in - first she has to swing at his face, taking off his nose, most of the skin, muscle... hmm, must have been some razor blades on that hammer. He dies and she buries her face into her brother (ewww) and cries. Then notices something strange.

The girl is dead but she's slowly being dragged towards the wall. Once there she is sat up by... something. That's when we get to see our wiggle worm, the size of a Buick but somehow fitting nicely into this skinny girl. It now finds the only heartbeat in the room (I guess being a Bathory descendant doesn't matter to it anymore) and sloop! Sorry, sloop is a stupid word but it fits here -  sloop! It makes a new home in the sister's... you know. She gets a strange look on her face and the ending is obvious a mile away. Sure enough she shows up at dear ole' uncle's place and, well, you know.

Back at the motel Mira is now convinced the people in her changing book are at the motel and goes to talk to the owner - and discovers a horrifying (and predictable and boring and stupid) revelation: She has been living over and over and over again, writing stories on the skin of the older one as the newer one writes. Long story short (too late) Mira IS the owner of the motel in her newest form, and takes the older woman's skin (which has been already conveniently peeled for her as the woman proudly demonstrates) to write further stories.

Hmm Mr. Sumner, maybe you needed another year.




                           

EASTERN HORROR IS CONFUSING

Epitaph (Gidam) (2007) South Korea

I've always said that Eastern cultures are afraid of different things than Western cultures. Rarely in the East will you find movies on serial killers or slashers or monsters like Freddy Kruger. In the East, they are afraid of angering their ancestors or vengeful ghosts or spirits becoming attached to them like an extra shadow or something. I don't pretend to understand it, but I try to watch a few here and there. With uneven English subtitles and rituals and customs that are unfamiliar, I can only watch when I've got half a brain to concentrate with, because unlike a lot of stupid horror movies you can't just watch with one eye and do something else - it takes full concentration.

This is sort of an anthology in that there are several stories within the main story, but since they are sort of intertwined with characters appearing in more than one story it was really hard to keep it all straight. I don't promise that I really got the complete gist of this, but it was interesting all the same. The photography was gorgeous, the soundtrack was very pleasant and the scenes were set up very well. Now if I spoke Korean I would really have enjoyed the subtleties of this film.

We start with an older doctor named Jung Nam who's given a photo album from a hospital that's about to be torn down. He realizes it's the album he put together when he was a young doctor at the hospital in 1942, just after Pearl Harbor. I wondered why there were a lot of Japanese in the movie so I had to look it up. During WWII Japan led Korea by colonial rule - exploitation of a weaker country by a stronger country. And here is basically the stories they put together: 

Jung Nam, a student,  becomes obsessed with the corpse of a young woman who was found drowned in the icy river. Then they start the second tale: A young girl called Asako is brought into the hospital after a car crash which claimed the life of her mother. The mother haunts her and scares her to death. See, that's what I don't understand about the Eastern thing. Why would you have to be afraid of your mother? The final tale is the case of a murdered Japanese soldier which is being investigated by doctors In Young and her husband Dong Won. The husband is beginning to suspect his wife of the crime because he notices she has no shadow. Again, didn't understand the significance of that, but did appreciate how they did the special effects, low key but very effective. And this is also why even though I paid strict attention to this movie, I got lost a lot because these three stories kept crossing over each other, certain scenes repeated themselves without explanation and the whole thing was just... yeah.

All I could tell for sure was that in the case of the frozen girl the student is obsessed with her because he keeps having visions of her alive - even a vision of a whole life with her (a very rich and beautiful sequence actually) until he comes to and realizes he's naked with a corpse covered in snails and leaking rancid water. Ick. The punchline, so to speak, is that the mother of the dead girl 'married' her daughter's dead spirit to the live student's body to keep her soul away from the man who caused her death. That's what they said, honest.

The young girl haunted by her mother is the result of her mother marrying a man whom the young girl also fancies (she's about 10 so it's a crush) and she has determined that her new 'dad' should love her like he loves her mother. While driving they argue and in a fit she grabs the steering wheel and causes them to crash, killing all but the girl who doesn't even get a scratch. When the girl comes out of her catatonic state and tells the doctor the whole story, the haunting stops. And so does the girl's heart. Why did she die? Dunno. And the doctor that treated her gets hit by a car right afterward and sees her as he dies. Huh?

The murdered soldier that the doc figured his wife did 'cause she had no shadow? At the beginning they had shown a film of brain surgery being performed on a Japanese General Hirai by both husband and wife. After the surgery when the General woke up he wasn't quite all there and grabbed a scalpel and killed the wife. The husband had been living with her 'memory' for a year. Ah but wait, there's more. We now know why a Japanese person was targeted (revenge) but hey - it wasn't the wife who was killed but the husband. His wife has been living a year as her husband. Confused? Yeah, don't blame you.

But they really tried, and there are spooky moments galore and it was well made so if you want to try to make more sense of it than I did, give it a try - you might like it.



                              

WAKE UP <TAP TAP TAP> WAKE UP!!!





Nightmare Alley (2010)

Way way WAY back when I was a young chick if I ever got to stay up late at night, it was to watch local programming that Portland, Oregon was famous for directing toward the insomniac crowd. We had Portland Wrestling, bad movies, and of course, the wake-up call in case we got drowsy from our locally famous Tom Peterson (he's even got his own Wiki page, look him up) of Tom Peterson's Furniture and Electronics - a businessman who got quite popular by the 80's. He even gave away free Tom Peterson haircuts (a 50's style buzz cut) and Tom Peterson watches with purchases. 

His knocking on your TV set was a regular part of your late night viewing pleasure. It was a cheap but effective ploy. It reminded me of this movie - it would have fit perfectly in the local channel's late night lineup (language removed of course).

This is an anthology of the most horrible, low budget, badly acted and poorly written stories you will ever encounter. The whole cast looks like someone went to a local bar/tattoo parlor and cleaned the place out. And Scarlet Fry - whose name alone is one of the few giggles you'll get here - claims them all. He even hosts his own abortion of horror. 

Well Mr. Fry, you knew this movie was bad so I'll give you credit there. This is not supposed to be overly clever or good. In fact, it is supposed to be AWFUL. But there is a difference Mr. Fry between AWFUL and WORTHLESS. Plan 9 From Outer Space was AWFUL - the most celebrated awful movie there is. Not recognized as actually having some interesting aspects until years after Ed Wood's death, it is now even being remade - not necessarily a good thing, but it is being recognized as something to see. 

You, Mr. Fry, also will not see that happen to your film in your lifetime, and unfortunately not even decades later because this is not AWFUL, it is WORTHLESS. Small giggles and puzzled looks will not get your movie recognized, just thrown in the trash. And claiming it's filmed in Grind-o-scope, like you're hoping it's somehow linked to the great Grindhouse films is criminal.

Speaking of trash: The beginning is two foul mouthed idiots approached by a guy offering a comic book in exchange for a cigarette. After giving it to him, the guy inexplicably stabs one of them, causing the second to abandon his buddy but hold on to the comic and run away... about half a block to lean against a dumpster. 

The comic is the 'newest' edition of Nightmare Alley (costing a cold dime) and he opens it... to see himself in the comic with his head chopped off by someone in the dumpster behind him. Then... well I already told you. We then see:

Mr. Fry wearing the costume of... I would guess a ghoul to tell his stories. His mask is so tight, and the soundtrack so awful that all of his dialogue is muffled behind the mask and the lips barely move. If that is part of the inside joke, it's a very small one. And the stories begin with more attention to detail paid to the titles than to the stories themselves (And I'm not bothering with his inane banter in between.):

A Fistful Of Innards: Three outlaws are walking in a desert (horses are too expensive). Sweating in their J Crew clothes, they look up to see a horribly fake meteor crash right in front of them, making almost no noise, no hole and being perfectly cool. To them it looks like gold but they get nauseous. The fattest of the three shoots the other two and tries to pick the damn thing up. The two shot get right back up - they are now zombies. They kill the third guy with the nugget, chew on what's supposed to be his brains then go into town - or rather towards two hastily built wooden shacks. You then 'hear' since seeing would cost money screams, shots, and munching sounds.

Rebellion: Ah yes, a story that's dumb AND racist. A man walks into a Mexican whatzawhozits shop for no apparent reason and picks up a box with a stuffed rat. He takes it to the counter and the Senora with a horrible accent and obviously no Latino or Mexican background whatsoever tells him in first year Spanish then English that's not much better that the rat is Satanic and contains a Pentagram necklace. She doesn't charge him for it, just tells him to get out. First thing he does... ah hell, you already know. The rat is now his 'master' and has him kill for him - until he finds a woman hitchhiker that I guess the rat likes better 'cause he has her kill the guy and take his car. The only thing interesting about this story was the car - a 60's or 70's Ford Galaxy 500, not a great car but this had obviously been restored, and it was funny that they put a blanket in the front seat so the actors wouldn't get it dirty.

Death Chat: After his girl catches him cheating a guy decides to set up a date via the internet. He finds one hot and ready and goes to the house - which is covered in plastic. What is the number one rule about places covered in plastic children? Get out, right? Not in this case. It means that whomever they rented this room from did not want anything getting dirty. Anywho, the guy gets axed by a woman whose mask they must have blown whatever budget they had on, it was decent - for a dime-store Halloween mask. The explanation is a year ago at that house a cheating husband was axed by a woman who then threw acid in her own face so... she's haunting the place? The internet? Uh huh.

Meat: If you're expecting these stories to get better, stop now and watch Twilight or something. A woman is flirting with a massive pig of a guy (his boobs were sooo much bigger than hers) who only wears 'Daisy Dukes' and if that doesn't give you a horrid picture, nothing will. Her husband arrives before she can do anything, so after the fatter guy leaves (her husband being only maybe 10 pounds lighter) she kills her husband and we see her baking. She calls the guy with the Daisy Dukes shorts which apparently is the only piece of clothing he owns and he comes back. She drugs him and, to save money, we get a title card that explains that she 'incompacitated' him (Yes, yes I know it's incapacitated, just let me finish this okay?) and fed him her dead husband's flesh for six weeks before the smell brought the police.

Closet Case: A homophobe is propositioned by a the type of gay guy you see absolutely never, and is enraged and kills him but steals his homo mag and reads it. There, I did it all in one sentence.

The Great Damone: Is another self-absorbed idiot who thinks he's an artist but nothing sells. His wife screams at him, he cuts her throat, uses her blood as paint and sells it for way too much. Wanting more he saws her head off (the saw clearly has air between it and the body) and covers it in clay to sell... which it doesn't. Despondent he commits suicide - his wife laughs and he cries in Hell.

Slash Of The Blade: They make a great deal about a radio announcement of a Jack The Ripper display opening featuring 'authentic' pieces from the 1880's crimes. Then they show people we don't give a rip about (Get it?) being slashed one by one by some idiot in a cape, top hat and bad mask with a kitchen knife. That's it. That's the story.

And Mr. Fry ends it. As you've noticed if you've actually read this far, these stories, if you can call them that, often have no clear beginning, plot or ending. They just... stop. Unfortunately for whoever watches it, they stop 88 minutes too late.