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13 days of sov, 80s & 90s, Everything October, Reviews, Video Store Memories

CANNIBAL CAMPOUT – 13 Days of Shot on Video! (#9)

September 10, 2015 Doc 3 Comments

With 13 Days of Shot On Video I’ll be reviewing a new shot-on-video horror film every weekday for the last two weeks of October. You can view all entries HERE.

For the uninitiated, shot-on-video (or “SOV”) horror films were a genre of movies that made their debut during the VCR boom of the early- and mid-80s. VCRs had been readily available since the mid-70s but didn’t really take off until home rentals (via mom & pop video stores) became popular in the early 80s. Around the same time, camcorders had become available to the public. Fledgling, optimistic directors who aspired to make names for themselves seized this opportunity to make their own products and get their videos on the shelves of local and national video stores. Through pure chance and desperation on the part of these emergent video shops (who at the time, had little rentals to offer), these home movie maestros were somehow able to get their analog features on the rack right alongside big Hollywood productions. It was an amazing and exciting time for cinema and home video. Continue reading CANNIBAL CAMPOUT – 13 Days of Shot on Video! (#9) →

13 days of sov, 80s & 90s, Everything October, Reviews

BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL – 13 Days of Shot on Video! (#11)

September 8, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

With 13 Days of Shot On Video I’ll be reviewing a new shot-on-video horror film every weekday for the last two weeks of October. You can view all entries HERE.

In terms of sheer unintentional lunacy, Black Devil Doll From Hell may be the most batshit crazy movie I’ve ever seen. To call Black Devil Doll from Hell “a doozy” — a movie wherein a woman buys a possessed doll from a thrift shop and is then repeatedly raped by said doll for pretty much the entire remaining runtime — feels like the understatement to end all understatements. We the viewer really truly don’t know what we’re in for, even if we think we do. Black Devil Doll from Hell is audacious, bizarre, borderline pornographic, and the director is clearly insane. But dammit, it has heart! A real earnest sincerity that a lot of films are lacking. I mean, how else can you explain why director Chester Novell Turner decided to make this strange and unclassifiable movie? He obviously had a vision he truly believed in, and you can’t help but admire that.

Even by SOV (shot-on-video) standards, Black Devil Doll from Hell is one of the lower-tiered releases. Abrupt cuts, continuity jumps, and audio issues abound. But again, Turner saw the production through to the end — ponying up $8000 of his own money to complete it — and that takes dolls. I mean balls! Balls. It takes balls. Not dolls.

The movie opens with a painfully long credit sequence: we get your standard white type on navy background, set to some weird proto rap-rock tune whose lyrics do us the service of laying out the entire plotline (kind of like a James Bond film from Hell.) For almost seven minutes the repetitive song drones on, though to be fair it does include some killer guitar solos. Mind you, most films don’t even have opening credits anymore, and the ones that do are usually set to some sort of kinetic motion or action, so the length of the opening is particularly noticeable.

And speaking of music: the music throughout the rest of the film (composed by Turner, naturally) takes on two different vibes. There are these upbeat instrumentals that sound like they came from a Wesley Willis demo tape; oddly cheerful and wonderfully out of place in such a horrifying movie. And then there is this high-pitched stabbing synth sound that almost has a John Carpenter feel to it, but it’s so loud and shrill that it oftentimes overpowers the dialogue. Needless to say, if musical variety is your thing, Black Devil Doll from Hell has you covered.

So, as the movie plods along, we find out the lead (bravely played by Shirley L. Jones) is a church-going good girl who frowns upon promiscuous behavior and shuns men who only show interest in her for her body. However, she makes the regrettable mistake of buying a possessed (and extremely horny) doll from a thrift store and then showering in front of it. She plops it down on the toilet, says “these are the only eyes that’ll see me naked before I’m married”, and then gets in the shower. It’s like the puritanical version of saying, “I’ll be right back” in a horror movie. Anyway, while she’s in the shower, she starts fantasizing about having sex with the doll. And this pattern continues for the next couple scenes: she showers, she fantasizes about dummy sex. It’s surprisingly pretty graphic, too: the camcorder-look and homemade vibe make it feel even sleazier and realistic.

Eventually the doll actually comes to life, knocks her out and ties her up, and then, y’know, rapes her repeatedly — all the while insulting her, exhaling some mysterious smoke, and shouting “bitch!” more than Freddy Krueger could ever dream of. And yet the most insane part of it all is that she’s supposedly deriving pleasure from the whole thing. It’d be offensive if it weren’t so goddamn insane. Ratcheting up the insanity: the doll was modeled after Rick James. No, I’m not joking.

So now that she’s experienced, y’know, puppet penetration, she seeks out the real thing. But she finds that her human suitors don’t quite live up to her plastic partner. No one can please her quite the same way the Black Devil Doll from Hell does. So she pleads with the doll to do the horizontal mambo with her one more time, only this time the doll has apparently had enough of Jones, and gives her what I can only describe as a “deadly orgasm” — at least, that’s what it looks like.

Soon enough, the doll makes his way back to the thrift store and is purchased by yet another innocent, unsuspecting young woman. And so the cycle begins again. And just like that, the barely-70 minute runtime is up and it feels like you’ve been watching this thing for 3 hours.

As I said earlier, Black Devil Doll from Hell is pretty bad even by ’80s SOV standards. Not the worst I’ve seen, but pretty close. Of course, I mean all of this in terms of its technical achievements. When it comes to originality and the always appreciated “what the hell did I just watch?” sensation, Black Devil Doll from Hell knocks it out of the park. It’s vile, and strange, and moralistic, and misogynistic — but you’ll also be laughing while shaking your head in shock.

Turner may only have two films to his name — Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984) and the equally-treasured horror-anthology Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987) — but he’s still lauded among the tapeheads and celluloid collectors, like some VHS version of Dalton Trumbo or Herk Harvey. Watch if you absolutely must (and you must, naturally) but have a bar of soap ready to wash the dirt off afterwards.

13 days of sov, 80s & 90s, Everything October, Reviews, Video Store Memories

WOODCHIPPER MASSACRE – 13 Days of Shot on Video! (#7)

September 3, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

With 13 Days of Shot On Video I’ll be reviewing a new shot-on-video horror film every weekday for the last two weeks of October. You can view all entries HERE.

Woodchipper Massacre, along with Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, should be included in the annals of horror history grouped under the heading, “Great Titles for a Horror Movie”. Sure, to call the events that take place in the movie a “woodchipper massacre” might be a bit of a stretch — but what a title! You can’t beat it.

Woodchipper Massacre is directed by and stars Jon McBride, a name which even first time shot-on-video consumers should immediately recognize; McBride was instrumental during the late-’80s and mid-’90s shot-on-video wave. (In fact, I already reviewed one of his movies for 13 Days of S.O.V.!) It also stars Tom Casiello — the redhead, bemulleted, brace-face with glasses — who would go on to win several Emmys writing for soap operas as an adult.

The movie sees a trio of youngsters (McBride, Casiello, and Denice Edeal) left alone for the weekend when their father goes out of town on a business trip. For whatever reason, the dad decides these kids need adult supervision (despite the fact that Jon McBride is clearly in his late-20s), so their Aunt Tess comes to watch them while he leaves on business. It’s clear from the get-go that Aunt Tess comes from an old-fashioned, more regimented upbringing — one she intends to enforce on the indifferent kids.

Later on in the movie, Aunt Tess’s son, Kim, shows up to the house, fresh from prison and in search of some money. The group, feeling threatened and unsure of when the dad will return, decide to put the woodchipper in the front yard to good use.

Now, Woodchipper Massacre is a hard to categorize film. It’s nowhere near what I would consider a “horror” film. And while there is a lot of humor, most of it falls flat or sometimes goes completely unnoticed because of how low-budget the presentation is; I found myself thinking many times, “Was what I just saw supposed to be intentionally funny, or was that just bad acting and poor production?” The one thing I can assert is that it definitely gave off a sitcom-style vibe: the kids left alone for the weekend, the single father, the older brother, the annoying aunt, her creepy son who pops up in the third act. They even have sitcom-style credits at the end, which just further solidified my feelings about it. I’d go as far as to say Woodchipper Massacre has invented its own genre: Sitcore. (Bleh, forget it. I’m not tryin’ to coin that.)

While I’m sure there’s no definite correlation, Woodchipper Massacre seems like it inspired a few films (or at least, a few film scenes) that came after it: Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Fargo, and The Mangler — all share plot points very reminiscent of what goes on in Woodchipper Massacre.

My complaints about the movie are typical of any shot-on-video horror flick I’ve seen: mainly shoddy writing combined with terrible, terrible acting. Everyone in the movie is basically just yelling their dialogue, rushing through their lines. Cousin Kim looks like some deranged combination of Gene Wilder and Jeff Daniels’ character ‘Harry’ from Dumb and Dumber. He’s so incredibly over-the-top, it makes me wonder: surely he had to know, right? Wasn’t he ever compelled to scale it back just a notch? And Aunt Tess — who looks like she could be their great grandmother (dear lord, that awful wig) — speaks mostly in antiquated aphorisms, idioms and proverbs. Half of them sound made up. “Sleep is good for the soul”, she says at one point. Who has ever said that? No one, because it’s not a phrase.

Cousin Kim, bastard child of Gene Wilder and Harry Dunne.

However, Woodchipper Massacre does have one strong suit: incredible, incredible music! I mean, really, truly. The opening theme recalls influences from Harold Faltermeyer’s Fletch score. From there, the soundtrack bounces between weird video game sounding music to toe-tapping new wave style instrumentals. The closing credits sound like an Oingo Boingo demo — it’s amazing. All of it is surprisingly listenable.

Before I wrap this up, I wanted to point out two things:

On multiple occasions we see the day and time onscreen. This is never relevant or vital to the plot in any way. Superfluous, amateur inclusion …or hilarious, multi-layered in-joke? You be the judge.

The movie opens with a fake statistic crawl, ala The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is the third shot-on-video movie I’ve reviewed (Cannibal Campout and Redneck Zombies being the other two) that has referenced TCM. Just surprising that even amid the glut of ’80s slashers, these no-budget home movie auteurs were paying respects to the original no-budget exploitation classic.

If’n you ain’t seen Woodchipper Massacre, I suggest it for the music alone. But I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of the hammy acting, too. Just don’t expect any gore: the movie may have a brutal title, but much like its equally-brutally-titled inspiration, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — it’s fairly bloodless.

00 - Current, Reviews

“Turbo Kid” (2015) REVIEW

August 29, 2015 Doc 4 Comments

I’m just gonna say it: I didn’t love Turbo Kid.

I know I risk the wrath of many with that bold proclamation, but what can I do? I liked it. It was fine. Some of it was really fun. But overall I was left with a very indifferent, blasé feeling. It’s a feeling I’ve experienced with many of these ‘modern homages’, but more on that later.

For those unaware, Turbo Kid is based on a fan-made 5 minute short that was submitted to be included in the original ABC’s of Death anthology, entitled T is for Turbo. It didn’t end up winning the coveted position (that went to the equally awesome claymation T is for Toilet), but its online presence did garner enough buzz for the makers of Turbo to consider perhaps adapted it into a full length feature.

Enter Jason Eisener, director of Hobo with a Shotgun. Eisener was himself in a similar situation in 2007: he entered a short 2 minute trailer into Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse trailer competition. The trailer won the competition, became a huge hit on Youtube, and eventually Eisener was given $3M to flesh out a full length idea. The resultant film (also titled Hobo with a Shotgun), was a brilliant homage to late-70s and mid-80s exploitation sleaze. And when I say homage, I mean it in the purest sense: the film felt like it was from that era; it didn’t just blatantly lift imagery and ideas from those movies and repurpose them.

So it only makes sense that Eisener is a producer (plus a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo) of Turbo Kid. In a way, Tubro Kid feels like a spiritual successor to Hobo. Like, Hobo with a Shotgun 2099, or Teenager with a Powerglove.

But there are problems with Turbo Kid, problems Hobo didn’t suffer from. And these problems are what most of these modern homages are suffering from.

First: a consideration has to be made. Can we turn a 5 minute idea into a 90 minute movie? Better yet, do we need to? The original short is incredible. I know when I saw it, and then heard they were making a full length movie, I was giddy. Imagine the awesomeness of that 5 minutes, only 90 minutes worth. How cool would that be! But that’s not how it works; rarely does it work like that. (Hobo was pretty much a fluke, an anomaly. It shouldn’t have worked.) You can’t have an hour and a half of go!go!go! Full length films have character arcs to develop, peaks and valleys. And sometimes what works in a short format won’t work any other way. This is the exact reason Kung Fury worked so well for me. They debuted a 2 minute trailer, raised some money, and released a 30 minute short film. It’s packed to the brim with insanity. It says all it needs to say, doesn’t drag its feet, and leaves before it becomes tiresome.

Then there’s the ‘star power’ aspect. Eisener was lucky with Hobo: he had Rutger F-in’ Hauer as his lead. We’re talkin’ the most revered badass dude from iconic 80s cinema (Blade Runner, The Hitcher, and sure what the hell, Blind Fury.) I would watch Rutger Hauer read his email for 2 minutes or 2 hours. Turbo Kid is lucky to have genre legend Michael Ironside as its villain, but he’s not the star. And while the two young leads are just fine, I’m not compelled the way I would be if I were watching some titanic 80s character actor lead the movie.

Next: making a movie inspired by bad cinema doesn’t give you a pass to make a bad film. I get that you’re taking straight-to-video trash, taking the best parts of it, and Frankensteining it into a new movie. But that doesn’t mean anything if the end product is just as shoulder-shrugging as its source material. The z-grade action movies of the 80s were desperate beasts. Your homage should elevate the source material. If they couldn’t do it right the first time around, here’s your chance.

And lastly: misappropriating pop culture. Look, I’m over it. No one should look at a hilariously ironic button or t-shirt and think “this same concept would work as a 90 minute movie!” This is why the Internet exists. Because we can ingest it in small doses, move on to something else for a palate cleanse, and then come back if we want more. Incremental bursts of nostalgia, 30-second clicks to remind us of the past. The endless sea of blogs with 500 word blurbs on childhood memories get the job done. I don’t want to sit down to watch a movie and just have it be 90 minutes of “hey, look, we remember the 80s and 90s, too!” The Nintendo mania, the Power Glove idolization, the View-Master, the dayglow clothing, the comic book obsession. It’s taking the place of the actual story. It’s fashion over function. Look, I get it. I have an Ecto-Cooler scented candle sitting on my living room table right now. But I don’t sit there and worship it. I light the sumbitch every now and then, make the apartment smell like a tangerine, and then blow it out.

Maybe I’m just put off because I don’t know who Turbo Kid is meant for. It’s a movie where 30-year-old actors play 14-year-old kids who dress in thrift store chic and obsess over outdated technology in a modern wasteland. Maybe it makes me feel icky because it hits a little too close to home. Look, watch Turbo Kid. But also watch the low-budget — but original — movies that inspired it, like BMX Bandits, Motorama, and Dead-End Drive In. It’s only fair.

Eisener’s tribute to underground bygone cinema was the first. And slowly but surely, other imitators began trickling in. And while it’s not a full blown flood at this point, I’d say our shoes are still ruined.

00 - Current, Reviews

“Clown” (2014) REVIEW

August 22, 2015 Doc Leave a comment

I don’t find clowns scary and I never have. I never understood people who were afraid of clowns. It always seemed like one of those universal fears — like a fear of the dark — that everyone seemed to share. Fear of the dark, I can understand that. But a fear of clowns? I always thought the fear of clowns was a silly and cliche thing. How is a guy in a rainbow wig and make-up scary? Sure, maybe Wizzo was pretty scary. And John Wayne Gacy. But in general, the idea of clowns never affected me. That being said, if you happen to be one of those people who are afraid of clowns, this movie will probably destroy your life.

Clown (2014) gets down to business pretty quick: it opens on a child’s birthday party; Meg (Laura Allen), mom of the birthday boy, gets a call that the clown she ordered has to cancel last minute. Meanwhile, the dad, Kent (Andy Powers), is a real estate agent who’s onsite cleaning up a house he plans to sell. He calls to let his wife know he’s coming home soon, she mentions the clown canceling, and Kent — playing the role of Superdad — says not to worry, that he’ll handle it. Luckily, he happens to spot an enchanting chest in a mysterious back room which just so happens to contain a bizarre jumpsuit and — believe it or not — a wig and a red nose. He slaps it on, makes it home to wow all the kids at the party, and as the evening comes to a close, falls asleep with the whole get-up still on.

In the morning, he awakes to find that he’s still dressed up and having trouble taking off the wig, nose, and outfit. Late to work (and in taking his kid to school), Kent leaves everything on and runs out the door. Once he drops his son, Jack (Christian Distefano), off at school and makes in to work, he then resumes attempting to remove everything. Unfortunately for Kent, it’s stuck, and it looks like a career change is on the horizon: entertaining at kids’ birthday parties in Hell.

The first few minutes of the film require a lot of suspension of disbelief. The fact that he happens to find this costume right after his wife tells him they’re in need of a clown is almost laughably lucky. Add to that the fact that Kent, for whatever reason, wears the wig and clown nose for the first part of the next day — and doesn’t seem to even be remotely panicked or concerned with his appearance — also demands the watcher to look the other way. But once the ball finally gets rolling, it doesn’t slow down.

I was actually really impressed at how the film handles its pacing. Seeing as the shit hits the fan almost immediately — within the first 20 minutes of the 100 minute film — I was wondering how they were going to maintain the tension for the remainder of the movie, but they manage to pull it off. The film keeps gaining speed, upping the stakes as we watch the desperate and confused Kent transform from a loving father into a murderous, child-eating monster. Did I mention the Clown likes to eat kids? He does.

Also impressive is that this is the big screen debut from writer/director Jon Watts. He also wrote and directed 2015’s Cop Car, which is a complete 180 from Clown, both visually and in subject matter and tone.

To me, the scariest part of Kent as the killer clown isn’t his final transformation (although it is awesome): I think the scariest part is when he’s in transition. Wearing a knit cap, a trenchcoat, and garbage bags duct taped over his feet — while still sporting the white face and red nose — he looks terrifyingly creepy. Add to that the fact that he’s often shot in shadows or under the cover of night makes him far, far scarier than any clown I’ve ever seen.

Clown is one part IT and one part The Fly, and that makes for a killer combination. Whether you find clowns scary or not, you should get a thrill out of this movie. Doc sez: two severed thumbs up!

00 - Current, Reviews

“Nurse” (2014) REVIEW

July 24, 2015 Doc 2 Comments

This week, actress Paz de la Huerta sued the makers of Nurse (a film she starred in) for $55M, claiming it destroyed her career.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: does her name mean “orchard of peace?” Why yes, it does!

For the 7.125 billion of you who don’t know who Paz de la Huerta is, you’re not alone. Neither did I. I mean, I’d seen her name pop up on gossip sites occasionally (I think?) or in magazines; I knew she existed. I have a friend who lives in Texas who would occasionally post on Facebook that he was at ‘Paz de la Huerta International Airport’, which I’d assumed was a joke — and after Googling it, yes, I do believe he was joking, even though the name “Paz de la Huerta” is attached to several buildings in Texas — so ultimately, I’m left even more confused about Ms. de la Huerta than I was before. Maybe I’m just an out-of-touch old fogey. I digress.

With her outrageous claim fresh in my mind, I was intrigued: I wanted to see if this movie was bad enough to ruin one’s career. Nurse 3D had been sitting in my Netflix Streaming queue for months, but I wasn’t really itchin’ to watch the thing. Alas, I plopped down and turned the sucker on.

The story centers around a nurse (if you couldn’t tell from the title) who develops an infatuation with a female co-worker. The infatuation grows and turns into this weird blackmail/stalker-type deal, and eventually it comes out that this creepy nurse is actually crazy and using a false name. Oh, and she’s been killing men for sport the whole movie.

Now, if that description didn’t make it immediately clear, the movie suffers from something a lot of bad horror films suffer from (especially recentish ones): too much going on. To me, it’s a sign: it shows a director who lacks the confidence to tell a simple, straight-forward story, and so they just throw a bunch of crazy shit at you as if that’s all it takes to make a movie interesting/scary/good. Just pile it up; bog the audience down so by the end of the movie they have no idea what the fudge is going on and leave confused — which is better than them leaving bored.

Nurse 3D starts very promising. We see a provocatively dressed Paz, slinking sexily through a nightclub and we hear her narration. She talks about how she can’t stand men who cheat, and how it’s her job to kill them and wipe that type of scum off the face of the earth. Great start, right? We see a guy notice her; he slips off his wedding ring and puts it in his pocket. He approaches Paz, buys her a drink. She turns him down and walks away. She narrates: “I always give them one last chance”, (meaning “to save their own life.”) The guy stands up and follows her outside. She kills him. Here’s why that works: He approaches her; he seeks her out; she turns him down, but he persists and seals his own fate. Unfortunately, the movie immediately abandons this solid concept and regresses into standard horror movie mush, and she ends up just killing dudes, even the ones she aggressively seduces. No longer do we empathize with her mission. It’d be like if Jason Voorhees went door to door, asking parents to send their teens to his camp.

So with its great promise abandoned, the movie devolves into typical slice and dice, with full frontal female nudity thrown in to keep watchers awake. By the end, Paz is completely batshit insane. The climax — which happens to be the best part — takes place throughout a busy hospital. It’s incredibly over-the-top. Unfortunately, since the previous 95 minutes were already cranked to an 11, the outrageous ending feels more excessive and overblown than anything.

So the final verdict: could this movie ruin someone’s career? Not hardly. Leprechaun didn’t ruin Jennifer Aniston’s. Critters 3 didn’t ruin Leonardo DiCaprio’s. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes didn’t ruin George Clooney’s. And Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation didn’t ruin Matthew McConaughey’s. Paz, this one’s on you, dollface. The weird thing is, her acting is so otherworldly and bizarre that it transcends “bad”. It’s not bad in an amateurish way; it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s cryptic and indecipherable, as if she read her lines from the Voynich Manuscript. And in a strange way, it captures your attention; you are unable to look away. It reminded me of Shelley Duval’s performance in the under-seen and absolutely incredible 3 Women.

One last thing to note: the director thought de la Huerta’s acting was so bad that he actually had another actress dub many of her lines. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. However, a good chunk of Paz’s lines are narration, and the actress they chose to dub her lines sounds nothing like Paz de le Huerta, so there were many times when I thought the other lead female in the movie was doing the narrating. This led me to believe there was going to be some crazy, Fight Club-type twist at the end where this second female lead and Paz would be revealed to actually be the same person. But no, it was just a bad voiceover.

In terms of “what’s the most boring profession we could film in 3D?”, this falls somewhere between Electrician 3D and Carpenter 3D. It’s a totally passable entry in the modern B-movie arena, but in the end it just doesn’t know what it wants to be: slasher, psychological thriller, or soft core Skinemax fare circa 1995. It’s currently on Netflix Streaming; check it out if you dare.