The Dead Don't Die - a Jim Jarmusch zombiemovie with an all star cast: Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Selena Gomez, Danny Glover, Rosie Perez, Tom Waits and more. Story is simple: town gets to deal with zombie plague. What makes this movie stand out a bit more are two things: the dry humour of Jarmusch, occasionally having the characters step out of their role and just play the actors they are: "I know this isn't gonna end well, Jim gave me the script". The other is the ending which is kind of absurd and throws you off a bit, not so typical for a zombiemovie. It's also a tad longer than most, around 100 minutes but it's easy to keep watching. I had fun watching this, it's above average in my opinion and certainly beats the dozens of cgi ridden infected shizzle films I have seen over the years. Recommended!

Perkins' 14 - in a sleepy town a police officer is working hard, trying to cope with the fact his son got abducted ten years ago. Having flashbacks all the time, he suddenly has a hunch that the guy they are holding in a cell at his station might be the guy who took his son. He pays a visit to the house of the man, where he finds a creepy basement filled with cages. The cages are empty however, and there is blood on the floor... driving back he finds out the town is in chaos: murdering creatures run around. The police officer is a trained professional, but nothing could have prepared him for what he is about to encounter. After Dark film with a nice plot, I liked it. At first I was a bit confused but soon enough you know what you are dealing with. Acting is OK and effects are good. I loved the fact that there are some subplots which give some depth to the characters and also the ending was pretty cool. Recommended.

Horror High - never saw this before, even though I had seen Return to Horror High (with George Clooney in one of his first feature film roles). That being 13 years ago already, I didn't have any memories of it. This one was also made 14 years before Return to... so it raises the question how connected the two films actually are. The storyline of this one is simple and straightforward: Vernon, a biology nerd, has beef with several people in his school. The janitor, the English teacher and of course the jocks. When he is forced to drink some of the stuff he was experimenting with on his guinea pig, he turns into a serial killer, just like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which they were reading in  English class. Now everyone who picked on Vernon has to look over his or her shoulder, because he might be coming! Some nice kills, effects are OK. Acting is sometimes a bit overdone, this isn't really a movie that will stick (like Return to... won't), but it was nice to see "the original".

Empire of the Nightwalker - aka The Caretaker. In Australia people are getting a strange sickness. They can't stand daylight any longer and have several other symptoms which give away vampirism immediately to the somewhat experienced horrorfan. When a man hires a doctor to take care of his mother who also fell victim to the disease, it turns out this doctor is a vampire himself. By coincidence the man gets company from a man and a young couple. Soon an angry mob appears at the door of the house demanding they get to kill the vampire. While the vampires don't tolerate other vampires in their territory and also don't want to be staked by angry mobs, and the people want to stay alive, they forge an alliance in which they help each other against their enemies. In the meantime the disease of the vampirism doesn't stop spreading... Quite an original take on vampires, I enjoyed it, SOme stuff was a tad boring at times but overall this was quite entertaining. Recommended, especially if you like vampires.

Video Violence - bought this one in a doublepack with part 2 as well, so I'll review that one later. Pretty low budget but it doesn't really show in production values apart from the image being a bit desaturated. Story is about a couple from New York moving into a small town, the guy is running the local videostore and his wife is in public service. When someone returns a tape and the assistant wants to watch it, the guy declines at first, but after a while they are watching it anyway: what they see is someone being murdered in a gruesome way. The guy can't get this out of his head and things get worse when an unknown person drops more of these videotapes on his desk after his assistant disappeared. His wife is trying to help him in his own private investigation, as the local police don't believe him and even seem to actively construct him in his efforts. It goes all into a climax when a customer is being abducted right in front of the videostore and the couple goes in hot pursuit... Acting is OK for the most part, just some castmembers are overdoing it a little. Gore is pretty good and one line in the film really struck me, when a woman replied "We are just ahead of our time", because movies like Saw and the other torture porn weren't invented yet when this came out. Some insght into the future there! Recommended.

The Night Watchmen - a youngster who used to be in a band but wanted something else, becomes a night watchman. He is introduced to the job by a bunch of veterans, but while they are discussing the importance of donuts and the peculiar traits of the boss, something strange happens: they see two guys with a coffin on the security cameras. They go to the scene and find two delivery guys who are in a hurry, they got the address wrong but now need to go because otherwise they will be late for a shop which is about to close. The watchmen agree that the coffin can stay overnight, but they shouldn't have done that: during the night all hell breaks loose... I had fun, this is one horrorcomedy which had both funny jokes and gory kills. It wasn't really very scary of course but with the plethora of really bad horrorcomedies in which the film doesn't succeed in either of the two genres, this was a relief. It's not too long either so it's easy to squeeze in on a movienight with friends.

Cold Skin - a man is being dropped on a near desolate island, his job is to observe the weather for one year. He gets to live in a wooden house and the only other building on the island is a lighthouse, which is heavily barricaded. Inside the lighthouse a strange man, Gruner, lives. He claims the island as his own and is very weary of people. In the first night, the new weather observer is under attack by a mass of weird creatures and in trying to hold them off, he burns down his house. Without a place to live and with nowhere to go he turns to Gruner, who lets him in. There, the weather guy finds out Gruner not only has a strange attitude towards people, but also towards the creatures, who keep attacking every night. "If you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss will start to stare back at you", is a quote which appears after the opening credits and it very much fits this film. The development of the characters is interesting, the creatures are scary but not just that, the images of the island are beautiful and the atmosphere reminded me of horrors like El Orfanato and The Devil's Backbone (films which in every other aspect are very different from this one, mind you) so I wasn't amazed to see that the writers were Spanish. I enjoyed this one, recommended, maybe even highly.

Bunni - a short low budget slasher which will either annoy or entertain you, depending on the way you go in. My advice: don't take it seriously and just watch for some nice chicks (the girl in the bee outfit has some great hooters and the killer herself is not bad either) and some gory kills. Acting is really really bad on some parts (looking at you, Ashley) and mediocre on others. Continuity is a real challenge: one of the characters is piss drunk but moments later he is clear headed as ever. Also,

Spoiler:

the killer's assistant gets his tongue bitten off but in the epilogue he is talking normally

The story is simple but not that bad, and as said, there is gore. There is plenty of gore. You have to wait for it, but then a bunch of kills are delivered in a very short time, like the movie barfs up its victims. AFter an hour it seems to be over, but just watch the end credits for a minute or two (or skip ahead) because there is an epilogue, and it lasts another ten minutes. The ending was pretty OK. Bad moviefans will enjoy this for sure.

Evil Everywhere - low budget student horror about a pair of students who fended off something evil in the past. It returns, so it doesn't take long until they are in the middle of it again. This film is a nice try, but it fails in many departments: the cast is almost all from the same age category which makes immersion harder. The image quality is kind of washed out, maybe that was done to resemble "old" film, but it doesn't look good. The story is not very interesting. The kills are simple, the violence is off screen and gore is lacking. Acting is bad, especially by the male actors: that dude with the fingerless black gloves takes the cake, he acts worse than young kids in a school play. The plot twist was meh. Actually the best thing about this film is the DVD cover, which looks kind of cool. I'd avoid watching this, because even at a runtime of just over one hour, this is a waste of time.

Infestation - aka Waves. A movie with a spectacular cover: huge spaceship hovering over earth, sending down a beam which is infesting the world with alien shizzle. Well, the movie is not quite that, unfortunately. The film is about a radioshow on UFOs and other sightings in the sky. Annie, who works for the show, is the person who has to debunk all fake stories, but one day a strange sound is coming from the sky and it's being heard in several places around the world at the same time. At first Annie doesn't believe, but events will make her do so anyway... Acting was meh, and the fact that Annie is only acting for the second time (first feature film) and sporting a pretty heavy accent is not helping things. The sound is actually pretty OKish, but what happens doesn't really make a lot of sense so you have to not only suspend disbelief, but shut down your brain completely, lock it and throw away the key. This is a pretty bad movie, and not a very fun one at that.

Ghost Stories - a film which resembles an anthology a bit, but could easily be seen as a single story, even though there are obviously different chapters. Professor Philip Goodman makes it his life's work to debunk myths about the supernatural, driven by some anger from his youth living with his deeply religious father. One of his idols, another professor who debunked myths, has disappeared for years but when Goodman receives a little note telling him he has to go someplace, it turns out to be from the professor, who now firmly believes in the supernatural. Goodman gets an assignment, which is to prove the other professor wrong in three cases he could not solve. The first one is with a nightwatchman, this story is the creepiest in my opinion as it has to do with ghosts in an abandoned asylum: I actually had goosebumps watching this part. The second case is about a young boy from a dysfunctional family who had a creature haunting him in the forest and the third one is about a very rich man who wanted to have a child but at birth something went horribly wrong... I thoroughly enjoyed this film! Acting is good overall, the atmosphere is asphyxiating at times and the ending is superb! I didn't see it coming, it was a great surprise and left me very, very satisfied. Highly recommended!

That "Ghost Stories" movie sounds interesting. Will check it out, thanks.

I bet you won't be disappinted, let me know what you think!

Mikey - a boy named Mikey is adopted by a family, but he doesn't feel the love he wants, or actually, demands. So he kills his sister, and then his parents. The police are in the dark about who the killer might be and Mikey gets transferred to a new home. All seems well, but his teacher, a friend of Mikey's new mom, is not too sure about him. When Mikey develops a crush on his neighbour's daughter (a girl in her late teens, so way out of his league age wise), he does everything to get her, including, you guessed it: murder. Not really a horror but still having the thrilling moments a horror has, this film struggles a bit with the main character: a young kid like Mikey should be scary and he isn't really, which is caused by his somewhat acking acting performance. Not surprisingly, because this is a 1992 film and kid actors in this kind of movies aren't top of the notch usually. Still, he delivers in the fact that he finds very creative ways to end people's lives. I enjoyed the teacher (played by Ashley Laurence, of Hellraiser fame) the best, not only because of her looks but because her character is the most interesting, being in between fires being a friend of the mother and teacher to the son. I enjoyed this one, if you like kid-killers you will have a blast.

Escape From Earth - aka Future Justice. The title my DVD has (Escape From Earth) is wrong: in the film the characters are actually moving *towards* earth, not escaping from it. Story is about a terrorist being defrosted from a cryogenic state in order to be transported to earth, where he'll be executed. Closing in on earth, the crew of the prison shuttle discovers there are no lights on earth and no signals being sent. When they land, they arrive on a nuclear wartorn planet. In search of food, they find a bunch of scientists who have been experimenting on the sick among the survivors, and a gang of ragtag gangsters finds them. Now the movie becomes a mix of Mad Max, Assault on Precinct 13 and The Terror (the alien film). Acting is pretty bad, especially by one of the female scientists who has to think a little bit too much about her lines during her rage and also the terrorist who has to work hard not to burst into laughter in several serious scenes. Effects are cgi so they look pretty fake, but the goo was nice. It's a rather short film so you'll live, and if you are a bad moviefan you will even like it.

Doll Factory - the cover looks like a Full Moon film and the fact it has evil dolls which are resurrected by some teens who are trying to conjure some ghosts by chanting a spell from an old book has Charles Band written all over it, but he is not involved. At least not according to the DVD sleeve, but at least he must have been an inspiration. Atmosphere is just like his doll/monster movies, the dolls themselves are a bit more boring: they look more alike and their movements are kind of limited. If you look a tad closely, you can see the threads as they are not just dolls but puppets. Effects are great! Real physical gore and goo, the dismemberment of some characters is rather gruesome, nice! Story is simple and straightforward, some of the girls look nice and as said: bucketloads of gore. Great fun! Recommended.

My Pure Joy - strange film, in thatit is pretty long and varies between long and rather boring scenes in which you see a bunch of teenagers chat with each other, and some very violent and gruesome scenes in which you see a masked killer torture and kill people. The film starts with such a scene so you get thrown right into it, but after that I found it hard to keep my eyes open because the chat scene lasted for over half an hour before something else happened: a party where one of the guys gets into an argument (and almost into a fight) over a girl. Since you already saw the first violent scene you know that the guy who started the argument will end up dead, but the way it's done is again rather gruesome. The ending has one other violent scene and a little twist which is not very surprising but still nicely done. Although it was rather long, I had enough fun watching this. My advice to the director would be to cut heavily in the chat scenes next film, they serve a purpose, but it could have been done in 20% of the time. Acting was bad in some regards (the mother in the first scene) but rather good in other parts (the main character stands out - he really makes the mental illness believable). If you like slashers / torture porn then this might be for you.

Sharknado 5: global swarming - lights out, brains off, movie on. If you have seen any Sharknado film you will know what to expect and this one is just more of the same. With an artefact gathered from Stonehenge a person can summon a Sharknado, and this artefact travels around the world, as do the Sharknados. Again Ian Ziering and Tara Reid are gonna save the world, Reid doing that by being some sheborg (I have either forgotten the part where she became one or missed it, as I don't think I have seen part 4) who can fly and do all sorts of weird stuff. Bad jokes all around and if you like leather clad girls then this is for you: plenty of foxy ladies dressed in leather pants strolling around, not necessarily adding anything to the plot. If you are having any expectations from a movie then go find a different film, if not, enjoy this nonsense.

Uncle Peckerhead - a punkrockband called "Duh" is going on its first tour but fate seems to be against them: they might not get the closing gig and their van gets stolen right in front of their eyes. The two girls and the guy in the band now have to find a solution and by chance they run into a guy who lives in his van: Peckerhead. He offers to drive them on the tour, and it's an offer that seems too good to be true so they take it and give their first show in front of a bunch of people. After the show they get only three dollars revenue from the promoter and that's too little to buy gas and/ or food, so the tour seems to be stopping in its tracks. But then the lead singer finds Peckerhead covered in blood and the promoter is dead. She is in total shock at first but when Peckerhead shows them the money they actually earned and they have a good talk with him to not do that again, they continue the tour. Of course you can guess that Peckerhead simply can't withstand his nocturnal habit...I had fun, the film had to get going a bit but after that first kill it's actually a pretty nice ride. It helps if you like (punk)rock but it's not necessary. Acting is OK and the gore is great and there is lots of it. So if you like your horrors to be gory then this is a sure bet.

Had a movienight with friends because I bought a large box full of crap movies so I needed some mental support to watch them.

Return To Splatter Farm - an imdb reviewer wrote: look at the DVD cover, then you will have seen the best this movie has to offer. The plot is about a woman who inherits a farm and with some friends she decides to pay it a visit. Of course there has been a number of murders in said farm 30 years ago, and the killer never got caught. In the opening scene we already saw a couple getting slaughtered so it's clear what you are in for. Acting is wooden, the characters seem to be made out of cardboard. We noticed there is a girl who is not really a looker, but she acts like she is the hottie on the set so we suspected the real hottie to have quit and this was the replacement. The kills are mostly done off screen or with very cheap effects. The Polonia brothers, who edit and direct partially, make a cameo in a flashback, leaving their mark on this wasted piece of celluloid. The ending left us baffled, as it comes really sudden and it feels like the film is unfinished. So yes, I concur with the imdb reviewer: check out the cover because it looks really cool, and it is indeed the best thing the film has to offer. For bad moviefans only.

Big Bad Bugs - in a cave which is supposed to be in Afghanistan but actually is just outside of LA, a team has some extreme readings and decide to start digging but then they get massacred by a giant cgi scorpion. The military HQ wants to send in a rescue party and they recruit an ex-military because he is specialised in wormholes, which is what the army suspects the first team had found. Of course this specialist doesn't want to get back into action at first, and when he does he gets put into a team together with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, who is a very loudmouthed marine (which is rather funny: he doesn't want a fire to be lit but he screams and shouts all the time, giving away their position almost as much as a fire would). Arriving at the cave they encounter a large cgi spider, when they kill it they enrage it's mother which is a tad larger even. With some exaggerated heroism the marine kills the spider, which of course screams in a high pitched voice. From the carcass the specialist digs up a crystal and they find more of those later. In the final scene these crystals get used to create yet another oversized animal and the endbossfight is hilariously bad, we were laughing out loud for minutes. Really bad film, crappy cgi, overacting, dumb mistakes. For bad moviefans only.

The Divine Enforcer - aka The Deadly Avenger. A priest is fighting bad guys not only with prayer but also with violence. Like the German tagline says: in his left hand the Bible, in his right hand the weapon. His weapons are some glittery pistol and ninja blades with crucifixes on them. The main culprit is a killer who sucks the blood out of his victims by using needles: his nickname is therefore "the vampire of LA". The priest encounters several people in his confession booth who are in for a "special treatment" and he takes care of them afterwards. The vampire killer is elusive though, until the priest meets a girl (she is supposed to be a girl still in school, but she is obvioulsy 5-10 years too old for her part) who has visions about the near future. The killer also enters the confession booth but the priest can't capture him right away, so a game of cat and mouse ensues. This film is a bad movie classic. It's from 1991, so it breathes late 80s, both in hairdressing (the woman tending to the priests) and in music (the inevitable synthesizer music). The most famous names have less important roles: Jan-Michael Vincent, Robert Z'dar and Jim Brown all appear only for minutes. The fights are fun to watch as they are so exaggerated and the movie is very suitable for some MST3K-like comments. So again, bad moviefans will enjoy this one.

Dreaming Purple Neon - the storylines of a druglord who gets duped, a couple who broke up recently, a dentist helping a young patient and a satanist performing a ritual to summon a demonic queen all come together in this hallucinogenic film. The drugs and the demons are intertwined in a weird way where the drugs induce the demons but the possessed also produce the drug. This film was very gory, with lots of goo and blood: intestines ripped out, eyeballs gouged out, people brutally tortured and murdered in order to get the demon out. Against this backdrop the other storylines lose essence very quickly and wveryone us fighting for their lives and trying to get out before they are being possessed. This was the best film of the evening, but that certainly had to do with the comparison material, as this film also had a good dose of overacting. Still good fun though, especially because of the copious amounts of gore.

Bliss - an artist has a creative blockage and can't finish the painting she was working on. Her agent drops her and everything seems to be falling apart. When going out she ends up using a new kind of drug and she meets some people who are really deep into partying. What follows is a very long registration of a trip and after a short intermezzo about her painting we are back in the party dungeons where all of a sudden people start dying. More trippery ensues and the artist slowly but steadily finds out what has happened to her and who her partyfriends really are. Short film and then the majority is taken up by the trippy partyscenes so that leaves very little time for some horror. So indeed, the scenes with gory deaths are pretty short and the whole horror thing is cramped into a pretty short final part of the film. I thought it was too short and the introduction towards it was too long. The main character spouting curses and F-words is also getting old really fast. You won't miss a lot if you skip this.