Had friends over for bad movienight:

Dark Universe - aka God of Thunder. Cheaply made Thor rip-off, in which Thor needs to stop Loki from unleashing all hell on earth. His cgi legions have murdered thousands of other cgi figurines, the green screen smiles at you in several scenes. Acting is really bad, the Thor character reads his lines in slomo and the Freya character screams 80% of the time. The sfx are extremely low budget and resemble the 90s scifi films. The plot resembles that of a low budget computergame which I wouldn't want to play. Some nice continuity goofs (watch the windows of cars get slammed through and then being unharmed in the next shot). Crappy film, so bad it's good fans can have a good time but there are "better" ones out there.

Vampire Shadows - aka Shira: the vampire samurai. An ex-pornstar turns kung fu in a vampiretheme. There are several groups of vampires, some sporting latex outfits a la The Matrix and others having annoying members saying the same sentences over and over again (like "Belie that") meant as a comical note. They fight because the latx group wants to dominate the world by creating a new race of daywalking vampires and the other group wants to stop them. The fighting starts soon and ends near the closing shots of the film: they keep doing it in different settings. The Japanese settings are conveniently filmed in Japanese Gardens, which was a nice touch. Some of the ctas actually know how to handle their fighting skills, others are only filmed in close up or from really far away so you don't notice it's not them (or that's the intention - it failed with us). The front cover is an Underworld rip-off, this was probably made when Underworld started to become popular. The fighting seems to be endless to a point where it even gets boring, but the outfits and the nonsensical story might pull you through. Only for bad movie fans.

Mystics in Bali - really weird film about an American girl (played by a German tourist) on Bali who takes lessons in magic from a local witch. The monster you get to see is a giant tongue coming from a bush, drawing pictures on the inside of her thigh, as a "mark". After she graduates she can suck blood from victims using her head which flies around without body (although with lungs, intestines and other organs). This is so weird that there is something ridiculous going on every other minute. The dub is horrible, the rest of the film is typically Indonesian horror crap from the 80s. The sfx are like children's drawings on the screen and made us laugh all the way through. If you want a bad movie to watch with your friends, then this is a perfect example! Highly recommended for bad moviefans!

Specimen - as a kid, Mike finds out he can cause fires. In one of these fires his mum dies so he gets to live with foster parents. Grown up, Mike wants ro find out more about his mum, because she was some sort of a mystery to him. He returns to his old hometown but his fire abilities are acting up and he gets in trouble. Moreover, an alien who resembles the Terminator a little bit too much to be coincidental, is hunting him down, leaving a trail of violence wherever he goes. Cheap scifi from the 90s where again the sfx take the cake, acting is so so at best. Nice passtime but again, there are "better" bad movies out there.

Plague - this 1979 Canadian movie suggests that it's about a viral outbreak which is life threatening on a global scale: on the cover it says something about that and it shows a screaming skull. Instead, this is a pretty slow movie where you see scientists in a lab, several shots through a microscope where you get to see small organisms crawling alongside each other and from time to time someone grabs his stomach, collapses and dies. There is some subplot about the main scientist sending his wife and kid to London for safety which doesn't work out like expected and there is a subplot about patient zero trying to escape from the hospital where she is being quarantined. Lots of people speaking on the telephone and lots of imagery where you see cars drive, [planes fly, etc. Sokme violent scenes where people are trying to get out of the quarantined city and they start a firefight with the military. Overall I thought this was rather boring and didn't really fulfill its promises. I'd skip it if there were options.

Abrakadabra - my second Onetti brothers film (first one was Francesca), this one is about a magician who gets to deal with death on stage. His father died decades ago while performing a magic trick, and now he is confronted with these new deaths. It seems like they are pointing to him, and he is of course hellbent on finding out who is behind all these murders. Atmosphere is nice in this short film, the trick which surprised me so much in Francesca is less impressive this time, not only because it wasn't new to me anymore but also because it was less meaningful in this film. Acting is good and overall I liked it but the mystery was a bit less appealing in this one, it felt a bit like you didn't really care who killed all these people. Crafty murders, though. Recommended if you are into Italo films.

Hood Angels - an urban actionflick, you could see it as a modern day blaxploitation but it lacks the charm of the old ones. The story is about a rapstudio where rivalry gets so high people get killed. Three women who are being arrested wrongfully are being recruited by the lawyer of one of the victims to find out what really happened to him. They unravel the intrigues which came from the rivalry in the studio and are about to confront the bad guys when they get caught by those same bad guys: time for a standoff! Bad movie where acting is over the top at best, audio is sometimes inaudible and muffled and the actionscenes are like bad choreography: the martial arts with which the ladies are fighting the bad guys look ridiculous. The title sort of suggests this is a black CHarlie's Angels film but they don't even get close. Watch this only when you want to laugh at a film, because taking this seriously will leave you frustrated for sure. Recommended for bad moviefans.

The Game - a while ago I bought a BluRay box "Weird Wisconsin - the Bill Rebane collection", because I recognised some films on it that I had seen (The Alpha Incident, The Demons of Ludlow) and I noticed the imdb scores of the films in the box were really low, so it would be some nice SBiG fun. Problem was that I could not play the docs as I didn't own a BluRay player back then. But now I do! So I slipped in The Game (1984) as the first BR ever in my own home theatre. Well, if you have seen The Game from 1997 with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, you might get an idea of what this film is about, just with about 10,000 times smaller the budget. Some rich people are willing to pay one million dollars to the last player standing in a game they organise around one of their houses. They scare the players and play tricks on them, which leads them to do stuff they might regret. Acting is really dull, most of the actors are overdoing it a lot. Effects are somewhat OKish, there could have been more gore though. There is quite some skin to be shown and the ending was a bit stupid. Overall this was a bit of a dumb movie but it was a nice bad film experience. Recommended for bad moviefans.

Twister's Revenge - the second Rebane film I watched from the collection. It isn't horror and only a slight bit of scifi in this one, because there is a computer who is running a monstertruck. This computer is called Twister and some numbnuts want to steal it to get rich. So the computer takes revenge, hence the title. The numbnuts are extremely dumb, their IQ must be expressed in negative scores. All they were doing reminded me of slapstick like Laurel and Hardy, and here too is a guy who thinks he is smart but is actually really smb as well. Apart from the dumbos trying to steal the computer and kidnapping the woman who designed/masters it, nothing really happens in this movie and it's therefore rather boring. I'd skip it and save the 90 minutes for some better or "better" movie.

Monsters Dark Continent - apparently this film is a sequel to some other film about monsters roaming the earth and destroying the planet. I haven't seen that one but I didn't feel like that really mattered. This film is a mix between a warmovie and horror/scifi, it's actually a movie like Jarhead but with added gigantic monsters which have squids as heads. The introduction is rather extensive, you get to know the characters of the soldiers who are going on a tour and that is pretty well done, the purpose is clear of course, you have to feel for them when they get hurt or die. Upon being in the Middle East (country isn't specified and the inhabitants are referred to as hadjis or civilians so you don't know whether this is Iraq or some other country, probably so they could just focus on the story without having to worry about making it realistic - it felt a lot like Iraq though, considering the background story) they are being sent on a recovery mission to retrieve a squad which went missing and they get to deal with insurgents and with monsters. It didn't really grab me, it felt rasther generic and a bit like an oddity, as it gave you the feeling of watching a warmovie and then all of a sudden these beasts appeared. Strange. Don't think I'm gonna watch it again. It lasts for almost two hours, so think again if you are about to watch it. If you like what you read above then go for it.

The Bye Bye Man - I was in for a slasher with a serial killer wielding knives or axes, hacking people in half, that sorta stuff. I picked this film, because I thought it would fulfill my wishes, but it didn't. It's not a slasher like that but it is still a good movie which I enjoyed, and if you like slashers you should not skip this one. The killer is a supernatural being, appearing after someone says or thinks its name. It goes into your mind, making you see stuff which isn't there, not see stuff which is there and it also makes you do the most horrible things. The film opens with a scene in 1969 where a guy starts shooting people who know the name "Bye Bye Man" and then it switches to the present (it does so rather suddenly, I missed the mention while watching but could make it out from the appearance of the people on screen). The beginning is rather calm but as soon as the Bye Bye Man enters the lives of the main characters stuff starts to pick up. The whole " you see stuff which isn't there and not see stuff which is ther"can be confusing at times but overall it is pretty easy to follow. Acting is well done, I would have liked an explanation of the name Bye Bye Man though. I didn't really like the ending that much, but it was still OK. Recommended.

Deathstone - actionflick starring Jan-Michael Vincent and R. Lee Ermey, playing (ex-)marines in the Philippines, where a professor has dug up an old tomb, from which a female reporter has taken a pendant she found there. Unknown to her, this pendant contains some magic power to kill, and soon the first victims are being slaughtered. Another marine gets the blame so Ermey and Vincent are rescuing him from the angry Philippine mob. Lots of fighting occurs in this film and the horror part of it is limited to the pendant, which kills only a few times. Of course there is a crooked politician who has shady deals with a corrupt marine officer and a lovestory between the blamed marine and a Filipino girl. The story is simple and you get what you expect with a few bad sfx when the pendant is doing its cursed killing. Some dialogue is inaudible, especially Ermey is sometimes really hard to understand because the mic is too far away from him. Overall I had expected more demonic stuff and less cheap Filipino extras. Not really for horrorfans, bad moviefans might like it though.

Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace - from the makers of Jesus Christ Vampire hunter which I enjoyed, but it was very long ago since I saw it. There are some similarities, like some mock action scenes with fights and accompanying cartoonish sounds, there are some babes (not as hot as in JCVH though) and a strange story. The story is about Harry Knuckles, some kind of vigilante who fights crime. He has to deal with Bigfoot, a Scottish dude and several other bad guys. He has to recover the pearl necklace from the title (which was stolen), which turns out to be an essential part of Bigfoot's functioning. After a gazillion fights he meets up with his brother (played by the same actor), who is his bad counterpart so now he has to fight him too. It's a strange film, and if you have little to no experience with Troma film, you might not appreciate this. It's for bad moviefans only anyway.

Monster A-Gogo - another film from Bill Rebane, this is his first feature length film, although, length: it's just over an hour long. It's black and white and the story is very simple: a space pod returns to earth and the space agencies are out to recover the crew but all they find is a smashed pod and when some of the searching people go missing, things get suspicious. Of course it's some nuclear monster or something roaming around killing the people by incinerating them and finding it is a challenge. Eventually they do of course but it takes its sweet time. Acting and sfx are what you can expect for a no budget film from 1965, if you want to have a laugh at bad scifi flicks pick one from the 50s, they are mostly more enjoyable.

Fairytale - aka The Haunting of Helena. Modern Italian horrorfilm, and I have a soft spot for Italian cinema as you might know by now. The story is nice, it's about a huge project undertaken under Mussolini to drain the swamps close to Rome, eliminate malaria and construct houses for poor people. This project is real, btw, and it serves as the backdrop for this story. Sophia, a recently divorced woman and her daughter Helena are gonna live in one such house, and they find a mysterious cupboard in the basement. They like its looks so they have oit put in Helena's room. Soon, Helena starts to hear sounds coming from it, this starts when she loses her first tooth. Sophia is trying to help, but things don't go better, they become worse. So she starts to investigate the stories surrounding the apartment, with the help of a neighbor and some local archives, she finds out more and more about the horrible truth from the past... I actually liked this one. I read some raving reviews destroying it, but I thought it was nicely done. The plot development is not new, but pretty well executed. Acting is OK to good, although Italians keep having a thing with language: the main actress is British  so she speaks the most often. The others are Italian speaking English with an accent or Italian (with hardcoded subs), some actors are being dubbed. It misses a bit of the atmosphere of the 70s films but it tries to create some, nice effort. Pretty well done, might watch it again.

Blood Fest - Dax, a horrorfan, wants to attend Blood Fest, a horrorfestival in town. His father forbids him to go and cuts his wristband in order to prevent him from entering, but he finds a way to get in anyhow, so he and his friends Krill and Sam are gonna enjoy the festival. Soon after the opening of the festival, the gates close and it turns out the festival is meant to be a mass killing ground for the most well known horror icons. Slashers with chainsaws, vampires, zombies, etc. are all out for the kills and it's for real: the audience is actually dying. So Dax, Sam and Krill, together with "topless girl nr 4" Ashley and her boyfriend try to find a way out, abiding by the rules of the genre, like "never split up". Eventually they will find out who is behind all this, and it's quite the shocker. I enjoyed this one, there are plenty of films which use the "laws of the genre" to function as the backbone of their plots, but this take was original anyway. There is lots of gore, people die in the hundreds, so enough fun to be had for the gorehounds. The vampires are pretty, the zombies are acting like you would expect and the ending is also nice, although a bit predictable. Nothing really groundbreaking but a nice popcorn horror to pass some time.

Exam - the DVD cover of this breathes horror, with taglines such as "how far would you go to win the ultimate job?" and "80 minutes, 8 candidates, 1 answer, no question" and "The Usual Suspects meets Saw". Well, it isn't horror. If it's anything, it's a thriller with scifi elements, but I think horrorfans might appreciate this. Four men and four women of various backgrounds are being put into a room, each with a table and a chair, on the table a paper stating "candidate 1", "candidate 2", etc. They get an instruction about what to do and what not to in the next 80 minutes, in order to win the job. After a few minutes, the candidates are starting to figure out what the puzzle is they have to solve, but it's all pretty tame, there will be violence, but only later and also pretty restrained. There is no gore, no torture (so the Saw reference is probably only about solving the puzzle) and no supernatural stuff. There is a role for a mysterious virus though, with which some of the candidates are infected, this is the scifi part. I had fun watching it, but I thought the cover was very misleading. So if you expect horror, like Saw maybe, either adjust your expectations or skip this one, because it won't give you what you expect.

Invasion From Inner Earth - far into the wilderness there's a cabin where six young people are holding up. Four of them just concluded their research and are about to return to civilization when  they hear on the radio about strange things happening around the world: it seems like there is an invasion going on. They discuss what to do but they don't actually do anything. The invasion is the least scary invasion I have ever seen in a movie, because there are no aliens in sight, the spaceships are flying saucers which you can see at a few points in time during the film, but apart from that the presence of the aliens is only made known by coloured smoke, red light, a voice over the radio and electronic music. Very, very dull and unscary. You wonder why the characters think they are gonna die because there is no danger present. Still some of them don't make it, they get "eaten" by the red light. A very uneventful Bill Rebane film, like I have seen some others before. This is one of the worst ones, it's even boring for bad moviefans I guess, apart from the "kill" scenes maybe.

Seasoning House - this movie opens with "Balkans 1996" so you know you are in former Yugoslavia right after the war. A young mute girl, who lost her mother during the war, is being kidnapped with a group of other girls about the same age and they are being enslaved in order to work as prostitutes in a remote building. The girl gets the attention of the big boss, Viktor, and she gets to be a servant instead of a prostitute. She gets around the building through the walls and the airvents, and this way she can observe everything which is going on. She takes matters into her own hands at some point and the result will be bloody. This film feels a bit like a rip-off of A Serbian Film (which I saw back in 2010 - my god time is flying), a movie which was more extreme than this one. There are some similarities, like cruel stuff being done to helpless people and drug abuse, and the surroundings of course. The flashbacks were helpful but the killing spree at the end is a bit weird imo. If you are an avid fan of films with cruelty, then you can give this a chance, otherwise I'd say skip it, as it doesn't bring anything new really.

Freeway - a thriller more than a horror, but it has enough to enjoy for the fans. A serial killer known as the IS5-killer (as he usually preys on women travelling on the Interstate 5 freeway), picks up Vanessa, the daughter of a prostitute and a father who died when she was young. At first he seems to want to help her out, but as he reveals his true intentions, it turns out that Vanessa is one feisty girl who can't be dealt with easily. It was a nice cat and mouse game to watch, it ended pretty quickly though, but then there was a twist. A bit unrealistic if you ask me, but it gave the film a second youth so to speak. Acting is great, both Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon are doing a very good job and the supporting roles are pretty well done too (for example Dan Hedaya as the detective investigating the IS5-killer). I had fun, good film, recommended.

Enemy Territory - an insurance salesman is sent to a client at the end of a workday, but in order for him to earn the commission, he has to get the signature before the day is over. What he doesn't know, is that the building the woman lives in, is being "ruled" by a violent streetgang called "The Vampires", who treat everyone who enters as a threat to their existence, especially if they touch members of the gang, like the insurance man inadvertently did. A mechanic and some other inhabitants of the building are trying to help him escape the wrath of the gang before they get to him. It's gonna be a long night, that's for sure. It's a bit of a mix between action and thriller and it also has some blaxploitation vibes over it. It stars Tony Todd in one of his first movies as the gangleader, and Jan Michael Vincent as the wheelchaired Vietnam vet who is armed to the teeth. A nice passtime if you're in the right mood I guess, I had the idea I was, but this film didn't make a deep impression on me.

Let Her Out -  a woman stabs herself after being raped but the foetus survives and grows up to be Helen, a bike courier. After she gets hit by a car, she is in the hospital for a while and afterwards she is having visions and nightmares. An MRI scan reveals what is said to be a tumor, but it turns out they are the remains of her twin sister who didn't survive the stabbing. This evil twin is slowly but steadily taking over Helen, making her a danger to herself and to her friends. One of them, Molly, is trying her best to save Helen. The cast is pretty small in this one, only five characters actually have a name: most people you see are extras. The story is strange, the whole "disappearing twin" syndrome is very unbelievable to me and even though horror tends to be supernatural and unbelievable, there has to be some sort of base from where you can let the story grow and this base is making no sense at all. Both Alanna LeVierge and Nina Kiri are giving great performances, they carry the film but it's not enough unfortunately, because they have to work with so little. Other things don't help either like the scene in the subway station, where it is all abandoned (ever seen a subway station without a single person in it? I haven't), and there is more. Attempt at body horror, but there are way better ones out there.

Freaky - in Blissfield, a sleepy town somewhere in the US, stories go around about a serial killer, the Blissfield Butcher. Some believe he is real, some believe he isn't, but when four teenagers are brutally slaughtered, the police are hunting for the Butcher. On the location of his last murders he found a strange dagger and while attempting to kill his next victim, a but of a dull schoolgirl called Millie, he swaps bodies with this girl. This leads to a lot of confusion and to some dumb scenes, but Millie's friends are starting to work on a solution for the problem. Will they be able to get their friend back or will they have to deal with the fact she is now a giant serial killer? Usually, the premise of a film sounds nice to me but then I am being let down by the execution (be it script, acting, whatever). This one's different, because the premise sounded stupid to me, but the execution is pretty well done. Don't watch this if you expect a hardocre slasher because even though there are some gory kills, the film is about the bodyswap more than about kills. Acting is very nicely done, although Kathryn Newton had some trouble to be convincing as the bodyswapped serial killer, Vince Vaughn on the other hand does a great job acting like a teen girl. So yeah, the movie is a bit dumb but it's still rayther enjoyable.

Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion: Grudge Song - aka Joshuu sasori: 701-gô urami-bushi.Third film in the Scorpion series, this film has a story around Nami teaming up with Yasuo Kudo, a guy who has a grudge against the same cops as Nami has a grudge against. They decide to make a plan but then Kudo gets caught and the hunt for Nami is open once again. In this film there are more scenes in the prison again so it returns more to part one, which is the film I enjoyed the most. This is the second best film as part two was drifting too far away from the original storyline in my opinion. The whole thing with the cops, the wardens and the death penalty in the second half of the film grabbed my interest the most. Acting and atmosphere are similar to the previous films, so that was in order. Nice series, it is surely something different, both from other Japanese films I have seen and from other WIP films.