Fifteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #11 George Romero Presents: Deadtime Stories Vol. 2

 WHY DO I INSIST ON DOING THIS TO MYSELF?  Because I am a sucker for anthologies.  I was looking for The ABCs of Death but that was too long for a weeknight, so I ended up with this.  Aside from the charming little George Romero snippets before and after each story, this flick should be a hard pass.  I watched it for you because apparently I like to suffer.

First story: "The Gorge" - Three friends go caving in the wintertime.  There's a cave in and one of them gets badly injured, although none are unscathed.  No one knows where they are but a rescue finally shows up after about a month, when someone finally noticed their car parked at the trail head.  By then, the two survivors had eaten the third guy.  And things don't actually look up after the rescue.  The sound levels are bad [throughout all three stories, actually] and the music is jarring.  The acting is bad.  The chick's hair looks awfully clean after being trapped in a cave for a month.  This is slow and dumb but at least it's really GROSS.

Second story: "On Sabbath Hill" - A married college professor is having an affair with one of his students.  He gets her pregnant and is a dick about it, so she offs herself in his classroom in front of everybody.  Then she haunts him.  The acting is bad, the whole thing seems very amateurish.  This is slow until the "birth" scene, which is gross (but not as gross as story #1).

Third story: "Dust" - A security guard at a high security research lab has a wife dying from cancer.  The lab is testing "Mars dust" and is finding that it may have curative properties.  The guard steals some and doses his wife; for about twelve hours she is 100% cured and also a bit of a s3x maniac.  So he steals the rest of it, killing the research scientist in the process - and lol knocking his eyeball out in the process.  Of course, no one knows, or could even guess, about the side effects of consuming "Mars dust."  The high security lab is TOTALLY filmed in a high school chemistry lab.  And this is the best story of the three, which really isn't saying much.

Fifteenth Annual FMSScarelicious October Movie Series: #6 Creepshow III (2007)

 I will literally never learn.  I love horror anthologies and yet they are so rarely much good.  I know this, and I should have known better than to watch Creepshow III.  And yet.  For clarity's sake, this is "horror-comedy" but it's not that funny and other than some light gore, isn't that horror-y either.  It does work really hard to connect all the stories, so points for that, I guess. COMPLETE SPOILERS AHEAD so you don't actually have to watch this yourself.

"Alice" is the first, very short installment.  Alice is a dissatisfied and mean teen who hates her suburban neighborhood.  When her police detective (this will be important later) dad gets a new universal remote, Alice somehow keeps getting transported to alt-realities and when she does manage to get back to her own, she is horribly mutated.  A neighbor, Professor Dayton (this will be important later), is the culprit, inventing the device.  Alice finally turns into a white rabbit (literary allusion!) and the professor scoops her up and takes her home.

In "The Radio," security guard Jerry, who lives on a super-sketchy block in an apartment building occupied by a lot of hookers, buys a radio from a homeless dude.  He starts hearing voices on the radio - more specifically, one voice - who tells him how to rob the pimp, kill people who get in his way, and escape with the money.  The police detective investigating the recent murders is Alice's police detective dad.

"Call Girl" is about one of the hookers in Jerry's building, Rachel, who is also very stabby with her customers.  Like, serial-killery.  She gets called out to the suburbs, just down the street from Alice's house and the professor's house, and flirts with a couple of doofuses who ogle her.  When she goes in the house, she doesn't notice that the guy she's there for has already killed the actual family who lives there.  When she kills him, it doesn't take because he's some kind of toothy monster.  It doesn't make a lot of sense.  She doesn't survive the encounter.

In "The Professor's Wife," the two doofuses who ogled Rachel have been invited to Prof. Dayton's house.  They think he's going to show them the invention he's been working on for so many years but he really just wants them to meet his bride-to-be.  They think she's the invention - a robot - and try to dismantle her.  This vignette is probably the closest to "funny" that we get.

The last chapter, "Haunted Dog," is about this asshole doctor doing community service.  He ends up accidentally killing a homeless guy, who chokes on the hot dog the doc gave him, and the guy's ghost follows him.  The doc spends a lot of time at a party peopled by toothy-monster guy from "Call Girl" but that just seems super-random.  Anyway, the doc ends up getting scared to death because this movie is SO DUMB.

Fifteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #5 Maximum Overdrive (1986)

 I didn't go watch the first Prom Night, nor did I watch Vampire Circus and I really wish I had done either of those because what I did watch was Maximum Overdrive.  I've actually been interested in watching this for some time because it's based on a Stephen King short story, "Trucks," which is pretty good.  What I didn't know about Maximum Overdrive is that King adapted the screenplan and directed the movie himself.  What I also didn't know is how much it sucks.  King has apparently "disowned" the movie (however one does that) and has referred to it as "the moron movie" - and after the experience he vowed to never direct again.

The story is that after a weird comet passes by Earth, all the machines go rogue.  This is actually kind of fun: drawbridges go up by themselves; electric knives attack cooks, soda machines fire soda cans at little leaguers, ATMs flash curse words on their screens, lawnmowers - well, you can imagine.  And all the trucks - semis, dumptrucks, steamrollers - are particularly vicious ... but for some reason, passenger cars seem to be unaffected, which seems to be a plot hole.  A bunch of people end up trapped at a truck stop where Emilio Estevez is a short order cook.  There's surviving that needs to be done; they have to pump more gas for the trucks when ordered to do so (via Morse code); some of them manage to escape.  Spoiler.  

The acting is terrible.  The dialogue is terrible.  There's no tension or sense of momentum to the story although it's maybe kind of menacing when the focus is on the machines.  I really expected better from Emilio Estevez, as this flick came out after The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire.  Seriously, the best part of MO is the music, which is all AC/DC, Stephen King's favorite band.  Do yourself a favor and find something else to watch.

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 In the Tall Grass

 Another day, another crappy Stephen King adaptation.

I read the source story recently, a joint effort by Stephen King and son Joe Hill, found in a short story collection, Full Throttle, by Hill.  It was a solid story: unsettling, gross, easily imagined in one's mind's eye.  And that's the problem, I think, with so many SK adaptions.  He (and also JH) writes so vividly and so matter-of-factly that it is easy to picture what's going on, to "see" it clearly, even if it involves vampires or sewer clowns or giant rats or malevolent fields of grass.  Here, it just seems silly, like a lethal game of Marco Polo in a hayfield.

The story is this: pregnant Becky and her big brother Cal are heading across the country so Becky can give her baby up for adoption to a California couple.  Somewhere in the heartland (Kansas, I think), they stop so she can throw up (morning sickness).  They hear voices calling for help from inside a vast field of tall (like six-plus feet high) grass, a little boy and then, later, the boy's mom.  The siblings go into the field to try to help but it become clear very quickly that once in the tall grass, you will never get out.  They become separated and time and space become wonky, moving them around, keeping them apart, keeping them from getting back to the road.

In the story, they meet the kid, Tobin, and the kid's dad, Ross, who has become crazy because of [movie reasons].  The mom/wife is dead and Tobin and Ross are starving and dehydrated.  It doesn't really end well for anyone.  In the movie, a whole new character is added - Travis, the kid who knocked Becky up.  He has come to Kansas looking for the siblings because they've been gone for two months, having never reached California, but somehow, with the wonky time, gets to the field first and is the one who lures Tobin and his family in ... it's confusing.  I get that they needed to bulk up the story to get to movie length but, sigh.  It just didn't work for me.  Plus there are people with grass for heads and root people buried beneath the field.

If you read online articles, you can find the ending "explained" - feel free to do so.  The movie ending is certainly less bleak than the story.  I wasn't impressed, although Patrick Wilson (slumming here) does his best to chew the scenery as crazed father/grass-acolyte Ross.

Seriously though - where are all the good horror movies at?

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #7 R.L. Stine's Zombie Town

Full confession: I've never read any R.L. Stine.  I understand that he writes very popular scary/scary-adjacent books for kids/tweens, though, so when the A.V. Club put this Zombie Town on its list of Hulu Halloween movies to watch, I thought, "Sure, that sounds good."  Reader, it was not good.

In Carverville, a small town named after its most famous resident, a schlock horror director who put forth dozens of zombie movies, said director (played by Dan Ackroyd) is releasing his first zombie flick in 30 years.  Everyone in town is super-excited about it, except Mike, who doesn't like horror movies and has a crush on his best friend Amy.  When Carver drops off the movie, Mike calls Amy to give her a private showing (not a euphemism) and they unwittingly unleash the curse inside the movie, turning everyone in town into zombies.  Except for them and Carver because [movie reasons].  Mike and Amy have to survive the zombies and break the curse.

This is a PG-13 rating so the zombies don't eat brains or flesh: they suck out your soul so none of them are technically dead.  The two leads, Mike and Amy, have no chemistry.  The acting is excruciating.  The dialogue is awkward at best.  The zombies are boring.  The best parts are (1) a couple of really good pop songs and (2) the fake trailers for Carver's 1970s zombie movies - I wish I'd gotten to see those instead.

An article on Decider said SKIP IT and I should have.

Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series: #1 Cell

 Welcome to the Fourteenth Annual FMS Scarilicious October Movie Series, wherein I attempt to justify this little blog's existence - once so full of television recaps and movie and book reviews.  It's still alive, or at least undead.  It seems apt, therefore, to do horror movies.

We kick things off with Cell, the Stephen King adaptation that reunites Room 1408 stars John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson.  I've read the novel and while it certainly isn't SK's best, it's far better than this sad excuse for a movie.  The premise is SPOILER a signal goes out over the world's cellphones which turns people into "phone-crazies" a/k/a "phoners" - pretty much just psychic rage murder zombies who kill every other person they see.  A group of survivors, who survived because they don't have phones and escaped the signal, band together and make their way north out of Boston, looking for safety.  Along the way they meet up with other survivors and immolate some sleeper phoner groups, but the phoners, being psychically connected, exact retribution.

There are a lot of changes from the book, no doubt in large part due to budgetary constraints.  Instead of starting out in easily-recognizable/expensive downtown Boston, the movie opens in a generic airport terminal.  In the book, the hero Clay (Cusack in the movie), doesn't own a cellphone and lives in Maine, where his ex-wife and young son live; in the movie, Clay has a cellphone - which he tries to use - but the battery is dead and he has a Boston apartment.  Tom (SLJ), whom Clay meets out on the street in the book, is a T-driver in the movie and they make their escape via generic subway tunnels, not over the Tobin Bridge.  In the book, the heroes walk at night when the phoners are sleeping; in the movie, they walk during the day with no real trouble from the phoners.  Towards the end, once they get to Maine, they travel in a school bus in the book; in the movie, for some reason they are in an ice cream truck (which enraged me as it is much less defensible than a school bus).

Also: Stacey Keach is completely miscast as the headmaster of the boarding school they hole up in for a bit and the "Boston" accents are predictably shitty.  Verdict: Cell is a terrible movie and borderline incoherent.  John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are, if you will pardon the pun, totally phoning it in on this one.

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #16 Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

 Repo! The Genetic Opera has been on my list for a while and now, finally and emphatically, I can cross it off that list and never watch it again.  R!TGO is Type 2 fun for sure: I very much disliked it while I was watching it (also fell asleep for one scene but couldn't be bothered to go back for it) but now, after sleeping on it, I'm feeling much charitably inclined.

Since, as I said above, I fell asleep for a while - one would have hoped that a post-apocalyptic goth horror rock opera would have held my attention - I'm not super clear on the plot.  At some point in the future, the world experienced an epidemic of organ failures; one company, Geneco, began financing organ transplants and implemented fashion surgery and if you couldn't make your payments, your organs would get ripped out of your sad little body by Repo-men.  Our heroine is little Shilo (Alexa Vega), sick with a blood disease and kept cloistered at home by her doctor dad Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head, emoting for all he's worth).  The villain is the head of Geneco, played by Paul Sorvino; one of his awful children is played by Paris Hilton (who apparently won a Razzie for her role).  Also popping up is the amazing actual opera singer Sarah Brightman, who is Shilo's godmother and current indentured spokesperson for Geneco.  There's secrets and conflicts and quite a lot of blood.

R!TGO is what the goth/theater kids would have put together with a little (very little funding).  The sets are all flimsy and look like they've come right off a community theater stage (no offense to community theater, some of which can be quite good).  The "songs" are arrhythmic and not the slightest bit catchy: because this is an "opera" instead of a "musical," there are no spoken lines - everything is sung and so the "songs" are just sung dialogue, hardly the basis for a Top 40 hit.  It is definitely bloody and violent, with stacks of corpses, faces falling off and being pinned back on, disembowellings and guts flying everywhere.  Anthony Stewart Head and Sarah Brightman are powerhouses and the best parts of the whole thing.  And now I've depleted all the [nice] things I have to say about that. 

Thirteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #2 Resident Evil: Retribution

 Oh my hell.  Will someone please tell me to never bother watching another Resident Evil movie again?  I've seen two for this movie series so far - Extinction (2007) and now Retribution (2012) - and I know I've seen the first one (2004).  But there's also Apocalypse (2004), Afterlife (2010) and The Final Chapter (2016) and it's really important that I don't watch them.  I do like Mila Jovovich and she is by far the best part of these ridiculous movies but it's just so dumb.

Basically - and yes, I know that this series is based on a horror video game and I know that the series has grossed $1,200,000,000 - but Retribution is a plot-free video game where the "characters" move from scene to scene, shooting things and trying to move to the next level.  The "story" is that Alice has been stripped of her previous super-powers and captured by the Umbrella Corporation, held in HQ where they develop bio weapons and run self-contained simulations in places like "Moscow" and "New York" and, for some reason "Suburbia."  A team goes in to rescue Alice; she ends up rescuing them right back, in addition to a little "girl" who is a clone/fodder for the bio weapon simulations.

Some old friends pop back (Oded Fehr and Michelle Rodriguez) and some old enemies too, I guess.  The zombies are pretty good - fast and vicious and prone to ripping throats out, but not even enough to make this a "horror" movie - but there's just so much shooting (SO MUCH) and bad CGI.  It's distracting and just all so dumb.

OH AND IT'S IN 3D, DEAR GOD

Watchlist, late spring edition

 Since the end of March (that's really not that long and I haven't accomplished all that much, tbh):

• Russian Doll S2 - Not as mind-blowing as the first season, which was so unexpected and original, but still vastly superior to most of what's out there.  Adore Natasha Lyonne.

• Moon Knight - Liked it, wanted to love it but didn't.  Kind of dark and gloomy.  Oscar Isaac's English accent was distracting and I wanted much more of Layla, Egyptian Superhero.

• Eternals - Meh.  Felt like a missed opportunity.  Cast too big to get to know, CGI distracting.

• Happy Endings - Finished it.  Seems like it went out with a whimper, rather than a bang.

• Sweet Tooth - Really quite liked this one, having gone into it with no expectations or knowledge of the source material.  Hope it gets a second season because the ending just seemed abrupt.

Currently: almost done with The Mandalorian and am into S3 of Sex Education.  Looking forward very much to S3 of Umbrella Academy (I just rewatched S2 in anticipation) and She Hulk, Attorney at Law.

Watchlist, spring edition

 And this is what I've done since December 5, 2021:

• Finished S1 of Wheel of Time.  I think it finished stronger than it started - I actually wanted more when I wrapped up the last episode - but I very much take issue with what they're doing with Mat Cauthon's character.  I've been sporadically rereading the book series (midway through Book Four) and Mat is not evil and not a coward.  He's a charming troublemaker, and a reluctant hero, who does the right thing in spite of himself, with a big part to play.  This is not what the series is doing and I'm not happy about it.  I'll be waiting for S2 to see if they course-correct.
• I stalled out on Cowboy Bebop and am halfway through S6 of The Expanse.  I am just not interested in the Philip storyline and it's taking up too much time away from the core characters so I am having difficulty rallying to the finish.
• I watched Hellbound and while I very much enjoyed it while I was watching it, I can barely remember it now.  Pretty gnarly violence (CGI blood and burning).
• If you're a fan of stop-motion animation (I am), The House is fun.  Three tangentially connected stories, the first is very creepy and the next two are more charming and clever than eerie.  
• Loved Only Murders in the Building (Hulu).  Selena Gomez holds her own against legends Steve Martin and Martin Short.  Mr. Mouse actually wants to watch it so I'll watch it again with him.
• Got through WandaVision and Loki; started but fizzled out on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.  WandaVision was fantastic and heart-breaking - kudos to Elizabeth Olsen.  I enjoyed Loki too but wanted much much more time with all the multiverse Lokis.  AlligatorLoki!
• Speaking of watching things with Mr. Mouse: we powered through all eleven (?) seasons of the live action Trailer Park Boys.  The first half of the series is very, very funny (being from Maine, we could recognize a lot of the Nova Scotia stereotypes and tropes); the last few seasons were a little too shouty but we needed to complete it.  Will not be continuing with the movie or the animated series.
• We also completed Money Heist.  The first heist was terrific.  The second heist had diminishing returns but we were vested in the characters at that point.
• I don't know where I stand on The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.  I adore Kristen Bell and I liked the show ... but the tone was odd, swinging from tongue-in-cheek to playing it straight.  I would have been happy if it was all satire (I mean, the title alone) but also it was an actual thriller.  Just pick a side.
• I did a rewatch of the original 2001 Wet Hot American Summer movie (last day of camp) and also the revival series for the first day of camp.  Absolutely brilliant, so fun to see how young that massive cast was for the movie, before they all got famous.  Paul Rudd.
• Is It Cake?  Yes, I binged it.  Doesn't hold a candle to the Great British Baking Show/Bake-Off but isn't really trying to.  It is a silly, silly show and yet I got sucked in because all the contestants were supportive of each other and the host seemed to be enjoying himself and them.

Next up: finish The Expanse, plus Archive 81 and Wentworth, Moon Knight and The Mandalorian.  I've also been sucked into Happy Endings, which found a rerun home on Netflix.  That is an underrated sitcom that got better as it went along - laugh out loud funny.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 The Wolf of Snow Hollow

On the plus side: as I was watching, I recognized an overhead canyon road shot - "Is that Little Cottonwood Canyon?" - and a ski lift shot - "Is that Solitude?" - and when I checked, The Wolf of Snow Hollow was indeed filmed on location in Utah, mostly in Kamas.  So that's cool!  On the negative side: almost* everything else.

Let me quote from the Netflix DVD sleeve:

A small town cop, struggling with a failed marriage, a rebellious daughter and a lackluster team of officers, is tasked with solving a series of brutal murders that are occuring on the full moon.  As he's consumed by the hunt for the killer, he struggles to remind himself that there's no such thing as werewolves ...

Boy howdy - struggle is right.  This is a tiny indie film ($2,000,000 budget; $186,026 box office (which certainly wasn't helped by a 2020 release)) but sometimes tiny indie films (The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, etc.) are fantastic so it wasn't the lack of money.  This was Robert Forster's last film and he was actually pretty good; Riki Lindhome was another bright spot.  But writer/director/lead actor Jim Cummings needs (a) acting lessons, (b) directing lessons and (c) screenwriting lessons.  Other than Forster and Lindhome, the acting was terrible.  The editing was awkward and confusing.  The music choices were sometimes so bizarre that I wondered if this was supposed to be a horror comedy; even after watching it and reading several reviews, I still don't know: parts were laughable but it certainly wasn't funny.  This was one of the longest 82ish minutes of my life.

*  I definitely appreciated the practical werewolf effects - I am such a sucker for dudes in wolf suits!  And the poster is really great.

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #10 Candyman 3: Day of the Dead

I watched the first Candyman back in 2014 but I don't think I ever saw II.  I suspect it doesn't matter much.  This third installment is from 1999 and is so bad that I'm only going to transcribe my notes so as not to spend any more time on it.

• And we start right off with a sexy, braless blonde: Donna D'Errico, our heroine - "Caroline"

• TONY TODD.  That is all.

• Donna D'Errico = a terrible actress btw

• Who the fuck takes the subway in Los Angeles?

• The Candyman wants Caroline (his great-great-grandaughter or something) to join?/believe in him so he starts killing off all her friends and framing her for it.  Genius. 

• Was Donna D'Errico on Baywatch? [Checks Wikipedia] YES.  She is 53 now and if you scroll through her Instagram [which I did while I was supposed to be watching the movie], #1 she looks younger now than she did in 1999 and #2 she's had so much work done that she doesn't look like she did then.  She looks amazing but ...

• This movie is trying to say something about white L.A. cops' racism against Hispanics.  But it's just so bad.

• Lol a bunch of pierced L.A. goths capture Caroline - they're worshipping the Candyman - and have tied her up with a ball gag in her mouth.  That's funny.

• This is by far the worst of the ten movies I've watched this month 

• I'm sorry but could someone please give this poor girl a bra?

• Such a bad movie BUT I can appreciate that Caroline wore sneakers (and not high heels) throughout - very sensible

Twelfth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #6 We Summon the Darkness

It's 1988.  Heavy metal rock music is, to the Christian moral majority, the work of Satan: satanic panic was real, y'all.  In We Summon the Darkness, across the country, eighteen people have been murdered by satanists, which you can tell from all the candles and pentagrams at the crime scenes.  The authorities can't figure it out but they're sure that heavy metal music is to blame.  Meanwhile, in the heartland, three girls - Alexis, Val and Beverly - are on their way to a heavy metal rock show.  They pick up three dudes in a sketchy van and, after the show, continue the party at Alexis's dad's McMansion.

Here's the twist HERE'S THE SPOILER WHICH I'M NOT SORRY ABOUT BECAUSE I THOUGHT THIS MOVIE SUCKED:

The guys are basically good dudes and it's the girls who are out to kill the guys AND they're not doing it because they're satanists - they're doing it because they're holy rollers who are trying to blame satanists and drive the fearful faithful to Alexis's dad's conservative mega-church.  The murders all across the country have all been committed by her dad's congregation.  (Alexis's dad, by the way, is played by Johnny Knoxville who isn't that good an actor.)  Beverly gets cold feet, however, being a recent recruit who isn't entirely onboard with the church, and ends up trying to help the remaining two boys after Alexis stabs the first one.  Bodies start to pile up - including Alexis's coke-head stepmom who just stopped by to pick up her stash, interrupting the attempted murders; and a sheriff - and at one point, Bev is using an outboard motor as a weapon.

I found this flick deeply unsatisfying.  I usually enjoy it when a horror movie goes off the rails in the final third but this one was just confusing.  It seemed like something got cut that would have clarified Bev's motivation.  Why crank Belinda Carlisle's Heaven and then immediately have the power go out?  That motor would have been waaaaaay too heavy for Bev to be toting around.  Why not take the van keys out of dead Ivan's pocket?  Things totally shifted into WTFdom and my last note reads: "Dear A.V. Club: this movie is stupid." 

Eleventh Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #8 Killer Klowns from Outer Space

I debated L O N G and hard about even including this one in this series.  IT'S SO BAD.  But I took the time and watched the whole thing so now you have to hear about it.  At least a little bit because I can't bring myself to write much more than that.

I mean, what was I expecting?  Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  I knew what I was getting myself in for.  However, in the course of this blog I have watched a lot of movies, many of which were terrible but also many of which I thought were going to be terrible but ended up having their own charms (the recent Critters, for example).  So I was hopeful.

It was badly misplaced, that hope.  KKfOS has very little to redeem itself.  The acting is appalling.  It's late 1980s so while the hair was big, the clothing was mostly sweaters = boring.  The music was bleh.  The dialogue was awful.  There was little to no plot: a spaceship, that looks like a circus tent, lands in Crescent Cove (some small town in the middle of the country) and the aliens, who look like terrifying clowns, start harvesting the local populace, presumably for later consumption.  A local love triangle (girl, new boyfriend and police officer/former boyfriend) battle the aliens. (FYI: that synopsis makes this move sound more interesting than it is.)  I shall quote from my notes: "This is excruciating & I'm falling asleep."

The ONLY good thing about this movie is the klown design and the set design for the interior of the spaceship/funhouse.  But as trippy and rad as that was, it is not nearly enough to make this movie worth watching.

Tenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #6 Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings

For some reason I have a soft spot for the original Lance Henriksen vehicle, Pumpkinhead.  I watched it online, on my desktop computer, in 2008 (twenty years after its release) and I just loved it.  The practical monster effects were terrific, the good guys and bad guys were amazingly not one dimensional.  It was way better than it should have been.

I am sorry to report that the sequel, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, does not meet the standard set by its predecessor.

We start with a black and white flashback to 1958 where in the tiny town of Ferron Woods, a group of hot-rodding townies beat, stab and hang a disfigured hillbilly boy, Tommy.  Some thirty years later, a group of teenagers - assholes who act out a bit but who aren't really all that bad, just obnoxious - steal a spellbook from the local witchy woman and do the ritual that raises Pumpkinhead II.  This iteration of the demon - smaller than the original and kind of looking like the mutant alien in Joss Whedon's Alien movie - was brought out of Tommy's remains and thus begins rampaging to avenge his death.  SPOILERS FOR A 1994 MOVIE.  The body count is relatively high: PHII gets the six original hot-rodders, now doughy middle-aged men, plus four of the teenagers who raised him, for no good reason I could tell.  The sheriff saves his daughter but the posse takes out ol' PHII (in theory - there are two more direct-to-video sequels after this one).

Look, this one isn't scary.  I'm not sure it was even scary back in 1994.  There is no sense of atmosphere or tension and the characters are wooden.  Even the creature effects are only middling - and I am a huge fan and proponent of practical monster effects.  This is a lightweight and fairly stupid movie, not even trying for camp or any touches of humor.  Except that one character is named "Mayor Bubba."  That's kind of funny.

I have already failed

I've blown my one resolution already: I am not going to get a movie review up here before the end of the month.  Sometimes life gets in the way.  Sometimes you're lazy and just want to turn your brain off to watch a bunch of Supernatural episodes.

I have watched Maniac but I truly have nothing coherent to say.  I just didn't get it.  I tried, I really did.  I like weird, trippy shows (Dirk Gently, Legion, to name a couple recent ones) but I just didn't understand Maniac.  I liked the way it looked, I loved Sally Field and Emma Stone.  I just didn't know WTF was going on more often than not.  I don't even think it really mattered that I fell asleep a couple of times either. 

Mr. Mouse and I, having just blown through all eleven seasons of Cheers [full disclosure: I prefer Rebecca to Diane by a long shot], were searching for something else that we both might like.  Seeing how we've watched all available/streaming The Good Place and Better Call Saul episodes, and Brooklyn 99 is not on Netflix (I can't stomach paying for more streaming services lest I start paying as much as when we had cable), we've started Schitt's Creek.  It's funny.  I find Catherine O'Hara a bit grating here but I really like the younger actors - the David and Stevie relationship, at least so far as we've gotten, which is halfway through S1, is tons of fun.

So that's where we stand.  Now shooting for a new movie review in February.  Wish me luck.

Ninth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #22 Wolfcop

It is because of my abiding love for werewolf movies that we end this year's Scarelicious October Movie series with the truly ridiculous Canadian C-movie: Wolfcop.  It's pretty much all there, right in the title.

Deputy Lou Garou (see what they did there?  "Loup-garou" is French for werewolf) is a hard-drinking waste of space, a poor excuse for a cop in small town Woodhaven.  Not that the bar is set particularly high: the Woodhaven populace seems to consist of thugs, drunks, drug dealers and hunters.  When investigating a disturbance call one night, Lou is knocked unconscious and wakes up back in his own bed with heightened senses, a pentagram carved into his chest and facial hair that sprouts faster than he can shave it.  His initial transformation comes that night and since it happens while he's taking a leak in a bar bathroom, he transforms penis first, which is not anything I ever thought I'd see.  Soon enough he is making the rounds in wolf-guise, stopping liquor store robberies and busting up meth labs.  Lou is a better cop as a werewolf than he ever was as a regular guy.

This movie is not good.  It is pretty much incoherent and stupid; there's some "plot" about a sinister cabal turning people into werewolves and sacrificing them for "reasons," but the only - and I mean ONLY - reason to watch Wolfcop is for the practical effects.  While Wolf-Lou's fully-transformed facial make-up is not great, the transformations are pretty good, especially given the low, low, low, low budget.  The gory fight scenes are good too, with Wolf-Lou pulling off arms, legs and faces.

And there's a hot chick with big boobs having sex with a werewolf in a jail cell.  She lit candles.  It was something.

That's all for this year, folks! Hope you found something here you want to see (not Wolfcop).  We'll do it again in 2019 for the Tenth one!

Ninth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #18 Scream 4

What is there to say about 2011's Scream 4 (or, Scre4m, if you must)?  It's bloodier and not nearly as clever as the very clever first installment, and is truly not at all scary.  There are jump scares here and there but at this point, entirely unoriginal and, to me, a let down from the dream team of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven.  Maybe that's the point: all the characters are all in on the joke, big horror fans themselves who know that horror movie sequels continue with diminishing returns.  But what would have been wonderful would have been if yes, all the characters acknowledged that ... and then this fourth Scream movie turned out to be amazing, to put a lie to it all.

Scream 4, as the third sequel, is governed by the rules of modern horror remakes - per the meta-commentary of the movie's high school Cinema Club: patterned after the structure of the original but with more extreme kills, plus throwing the rules of the original out the window.  I guess they did that?  SPOILERS Certainly we had a female villain, and excellent Final Girl Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell, returning the role once again).  But it sure felt like more of the same, all over again.  Props to Hayden Panettiere who is pretty funny as horror movie fan Kirby.

Also, this is two horror movies in a row about fame-obsessed teenagers as slashers.  Fear for the future, my friends.

Also?  LOL with Adam Brody up there on the poster: I don't think he even had three lines before getting offed.  Put Neve Campbell up front where she belongs!

Ninth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #16 Devour

In which I am led astray by my Jensen Ackles crush ... I solely picked Devour because he was in it - baby-faced too, at age 27.  I knew it was going to be bad - it had to be bad.  And it was, starting with the terrible music at the opening credits.

Young Jake (JA) is a nice young man/student/computer nerd who has been having waking nightmares for a while.  For his birthday, his friend Conrad signs him up for a secret video game where the game calls you and gives you tasks to do.  (Note: it's really not a video game, despite the EVIL VIDEO GAME!! promos; you sign up online and then get phone calls that mess with your head.  Not actually a video game.)  Conrad and Jake's one-time hook-up Dakota (Dominique Swain) sign up too and before you know it, (1) Conrad has shot two kids in his dorm and then killed himself, and (2) Dakota butchers a professor who won't stop coming on to her and then kills herself.  Jake starts investigating what's going on, hooks up with Shannyn Sossamon, nurse/Tarot afficionado, and soon enough he's tracking down devil-worshippers because WTF is going on with this movie. 

I dozed off for a moment and woke up a little lost but I don't think it matters because all of a sudden it turns out Jake is adopted (did we know this?) and SPOILER not only is he Shannyn Sossamon's character's lover but also her son because she is a demon.  And then Jake gets hauled off to jail for killing everyone.

My notes:  THAT WAS RIDICULOUS AND ALSO TERRIBLE.  I mean, a little gross but not scary and pretty incoherent.  And it's like the writers started doing an evil video game movie, then decided halfway through to switch to demonic possession but didn't bother to go back to fix the first bit.  Not at all recommended.  And WTF is with capitalizing the V in "devour?"  I'm not doing that.

Ninth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series:#14 Tales of Halloween

Another October and I take another stab at a mediocre Halloween horror/comedy anthology series: 2015's Tales of Halloween.  Ten tales, connected by taking place in one town on one Halloween, where the kids starring in one segment show up as background trick-or-treaters in other segments.

The stories are: (1) "Sweet Tooth," a cautionary tale about sharing (or not sharing) your candy; (2) "The Night Billy Raised Hell," where in Billy and the actual Devil paint the town red; (3) "Trick" with murderous children collecting lives instead of candy - and a nice, dark, little twist at the end; (4) "The Weak and the Wicked," pretty weak itself as three bike-riding bullies get their comeuppance; (5) the "Grim Grinning Ghost," which seems to be a first-draft sort of thing; (6) "Ding Dong" has the Wicked Witch wishing for children of her own - very, very weird; (7) "This Means War" is the battle of the Halloween decorations; (8) "Friday the 31st," with a deformed slasher and an alien, which turns into some over-the-top crazy goriness a la Ash vs. the Evil Dead; (9) "The Ransom of Rusty Rex" wherein a kidnapping goes horribly wrong ... for the kidnappers; and (10) "Bad Seed" which is kind of Pumpkinhead, Jr.

The framework samples Adrienne Barbeau from the wonderful classic The Fog.  There's a decent cast, including Greg Grunberg, Clare Kramer, Barry Bostwick, Barbara Crampton, Pollyanna McIntosh, John Landis and Sam Witwer.  And some of the segments aren't terrible.  But I thought it averaged out to a sold meh, so you can take it or leave it, I guess.