Samurai Cop - hahaha, I really laughed my ass off with this one! This is such a bad 80s actionflick, that if you can sith thorugh this one with dry eyes, you must be a robot. The story is very simple: a Japanese clan, Katana, is dealing drugs in LA and the police employs two guys and their team (in fact 4 people) to stop them. The main character is Joe, a guy who is called Samurai, but it is totally unclear why. It is said that he can speak Japanese but he never does so in the film, and he also "learned samurai" from the masterws in Japan. Yet when he fights, it is very much western style: it looks more like a good fistfight than any oriental fighting art. Joe btw is a very much tanned (he must have spent hours on sunbeds) guy with long hair which looks a bit like woman's hair (style). When he has his swimsuit scene, you can also see his overdone muscles. Acting is not something for this guy, though, as you can see by the fact that he only acted in two movies, and one of them is this one. During the first chase, he repreats everything he says: "Shoot! Shoot him!" and "Go! "Go!" as if his partner doesn't have a clue of what to do in a car chase while being a cop himself. Of course almost all bad guys go down with one shot and Joe and his friends can take several. The helicopter pilot (who gets the ambiguos assignment of going in to see how the drugdeal is done but keep out of sight at the same time ) is a very horny colleague and she wants to hump everyone in the police corps, it seems. In the Katana gang we see Robert Z'Dar playing a Japanese character, and although he is as Japanese as the Joe character, at least he seems to know something about Japan. In the car chases, sometimes the images are sped up to simulate the cars' speed but it looks ridiculous, while in the firefights you can clearly see the fireworks and the little bloodbags at work. Sometikmes a guy gets shot and he forgets to squeeze, so you only get to see the blood in the second shot. Other guys squeeze in time. There is also a magical TV in one of the firefights, as it remains without a scratch although a glass bottle in front of it is shot to pieces (weird ricochet that was). Then it gets shot anyway, then again, then in the next shot there is only one hole again. There are cars exploding on impact with some rocks, and when the burning driver gets out, the car seems to be fine again. In ojne handfight, Joe and his Japanese opponent start the fight in a agrden with a lot of trees and cactuses. Next shot they are in some sort of a field with hardly any bushes. So they first teleported or something I also loved the fact that when Joe was preparing for a handfight, or a swordfight, and he and his opponent were doing these oriental gestures like you know from kung fu films, then his partner came, drew his gun and shot the guy. Wow, I wrote a lot. And it's maybe half of the dumb stuff you can see in this film, so if you are a bad moviefan, waste no time and go see this film! It is a must see!

Raiders of the Damned - this was also bad, but by far not as entertaining. This was more boring and stupid. The storyline is a bit vague, but there is a large underground building in which Richard Grieco is a scientist with a fake mouse for a pet. A team of scientists, flying around in a helicopter to measure the effects of a certain medicine (or poison, it wasn't really so clear) they were pouring on a large zombie population gets lost because their helicopter gets shot down by the zombies (they use bow and arrow and some medieval siege device - of course you can shoot down a helicopter with that). The zombies, some look like the known zombies from most other zombiefilms and some look like dressed up skeletons, like in the Blind Dead series, have a leader who wants to get out of their walled up territory. Now that they have captured the science team, maybe they can make a deal. The Grieco character in the meantime forms a team of elite soldiers to get the scientists out. This team wears some sort of sunglasses with green lights on them, which is very nice for their enemies, so they can see them coming in the dark They also have large weapons who give cgi flashes when firing. What happens next is all very boring and not recommendable. There is something with a device that can make walls melt and go away and there is also some sort of a subplot with the female scientist who should be the bride of the zombieleader but I wasn't really paying attention anymore as it was so uninteresting. Skip this one, you can better watch Samurai Cop twice than this one after Samurai Cop.

Oh, and we passed the 2000 posts limit in this thread

Blood Shot - a terrorist sheik (played by Brad Dourif) is planning a nuclear attack on LA. A secret CIA branch is employing the last vampire on earth, and he is sent out to stop them. He'll form an unlikely alliance with the cop who has been hunting him for years while nobody believed him, and this has cost him his marriage and his job. More a comedy than a horror, this was quite an enjoyable watch, although it isn't the best horrorcomedy I have seen. It isn't scary at any moment and some of the jokes are bit stupid, but there are also jokes which are very much politically incorrect. Effects are OK and acting too, the vampire is the best, imo. Nice little film, nothing spectacular, but OK.

Ink - saw this one coming along and read (very) good reviews about it, so I gave it a go. I must say, it was worth it. I had never heard of the director, Jamin Winans (he had only made one feature film before, all other stuff were shorts) and the cast was filled with names I didn't know either. This doesn't happen to me often, since I have seen quite some films, but it proved to be irrelevant: this film is great! It is quite unconventional, it shows several parallel universes and it has a very nice plot outcome which I hadn't seen coming. The story is about a little girl going in a coma and now two factions in the dreamworld are fighting for her spirit: the Storytellers and the Incubi. A weird creature called Ink wants to be an Incubus and therefore he takes her to them, but in the meantime the Storytellers try to prevent that and they fight the Incubi. These fighting scenes are filmed like the ones in The Matrix, and they happen while nobody can see them, because they are only happening in the dreamworld. This is edited into the film in a very natural way, and it looks great. The parallel universes and the storyline made me think of Spanish fantasyhorror, like Pan's Labyrinth. Actually this is a modern fairytale, where visually everything is great and acting is also great (John and the little girl are even superb). The only little drawback about this film is that at the beginning, you don’t know what it’s gonna be like, the storyline is a bit messy at that point (my guess is that there was much more, but it had to be edited out), but if you stick with it, then you will get your reward in the end, although a little less tearjerking in the end would have been nice. Still, it’s a great apotheosis. I like that this director also wrote the music, as I think that’s always a plus (one of the reasons why I like Carpenter so much). This film is not really a particular genre: it isn’t horror, it isn’t scifi, but one thing is certain, it is very entertaining. Highly recommended.

Detention of the Dead – everywhere I saw that this was The Breakfast Club with zombies. Well, that quite fits this film, yes. It’s about the usual mix of American teens (nerd, Goth girl, jocks, cheerleader, stoner) and while they are detention, a zombie outbreak occurs. Of course not all of them make it back alive, and of course there are some life lessons tob e learned along the way. Sometimes it was a bit cheesy, but they also did some funny stuff with this cliche. The gore was OK although it could have been more and there were some nice, although sometimes a bit unsubtle, references to other zombiefilms. Nice passtime, but nothing really special.

Kiss of the Damned - vampirefilm with a lot of beatiful people and hot, steamy sex. The plot is quite simple: two sisters, one good and one bad, both want to live in the same mansion at the same time. The good sister has just started a relationship with a scriptwriter who turned vampire to be with his new love forever. Now the bad sister starts making trouble: she eats people almost everyday while the rest of the vampires have agreed on just eating animals or synthetic blood, in order to not be discovered and hunted. This all isn't anything new, and the somewhat interesting fact that the scriptwriter was human at first, is not elaborated in the plot in any way, while I could think of several clashes between him and his former colleagues, family, friends, etc. Missed opportunity imo. The sisters speak Frenglish, which is cute at times, but it doesn't add anything to the story at all. The vampires are portrayed as uberclassy and polite people again (like in so many other films), the bad sister being the only exception. In the end there is a little plot twist, but nothing much. Not overly bad, this film, but it was far from being original although it tried.

The Last Exorcism Part II - this sequel has a fail title, but this film isn't a fail itself. The story starts a little later after part one has ended. Nell tries to start over after she has been found in someone's house. She is taken in in some sort of an institute where a few girsl live who all have had their own problems with their lives. The guy who runs this institute tries to convince Nell that the demon Abalam isn't real in teh first place, so she has nothing to fear. Everything goes well, Nell makes friends and gets a job as a cleaner lady in a hotel. There she meets Chris and falls in love, but in the meantime she has had visions and other (audio)visual clues about Abalam being very real. The message of the people trying to save Nell is "When he succeeds in seducing you, it will be the end of the world". Now she becomes uncertain, because everything can be the demon in disguise. This part is the best in the film, and fortuantely, it is the longest. After a short start and introduction, we get to see this story in which you have to distrust literally everyone, because Abalam can take up any shape or form. This part also has the scariest moments, like when Nell hears her name through the radio, or the telephone scene. Not 100% original maybe, but well executed. The ending is a bit of am letdsown, though. After

Spoiler:

the Order of the Right Hand is introduced and tries to save Nell

it's going downhill and the ending is very much meh, for the most part because it is so predictable. Good thing that these final scenes don't last very long. So, nice sequel, the middple part I recommend wholeheartedly, but the endung makes it a bit less enjoyable to watch this film.

Battle of the Damned - some sort of a sequel to Robotropolis, although both films can be easily watched without knowledge of the other. In SE Asia, infection has spread and now everyone has turned into zombies, although they aren't technically zombies (a science guy in the film will explain that to you, twice). A rich guy wants his daughter back so he hires Dolph Lundgren (still going strong at age 55) to go and search for her in the SE Asian city where the infection has spread. Eventually he finds a group of survivors, and the girl is among them. Of course Dolph has to fight lots and lots of zombies, and when the heat rises really high, they get help from a group of robots who start massacring the zombies in even greater numbers than Dolph already did. Now he has to return the daughter to her father before the city gets firebombed, or he will fail his mission and die. It's funny how a large pile of cliches can still be enjoyable when only one new thing is added, in this case the robots. The rest of the film is very much cliche and the only fun facts were to see Dolph in action again and to meet the (for me ) new actress Melanie Zanetti. Brainless entertainment for late at night only.

The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh - this looked like a ghostmovie to me, as the description said something about a guy Leon inheriting the house of his dead mom and upon arrival feeling that the forces which drove her to suicide, are still around. Well, those forces aren't really ghosts. What they are you have to see for yourself and that's not a huge task because this film only runs for 80 minutes and it is quite atmospheric. It is pretty low budget I guess, because there is only one location and actually only one actor, too. But the director knows how to make something enjoyable with the means he has: the house makes noises, the guy has some telephone conversations, and there is the voice over from his mom. Especially this voice over is important in setting the tone for this film. Without this atmosphere the film would have been empty and boring. This being the first full length film of Rodrigo Gudiño, some credits are due, but to become a real good director I hope he gets more budget and more stuff happening in his next film.

Flying Monkeys - dumb monsterflick. A monkey, together with several other endangered species, is smuggled from Asia to the US to be sold illegally in a pet store. A guy who is a failure at being a father, buys the monkey for his daughter Joan, not knowing that this monkey is in fact a Xigo. So at night, the monkey transforms into a large Gargoyle-like creature, made from terribly bad cgi, and flies out to kill some food. In Asia, two warriors who are stuck in the 13th century, are hunting the Xigos, and it's from them that we learn that 1) the Xigo duplicates when getting shot by regular riflefire, and 2) they can only be killed by their weapons, because they had their weapons blessed in the 13th century (or something). OK, so that's really ridiculous, even for a dumb monsterflick. On top of that almost all the cast can't act for sh*t, they do their dialogues like they are reading them out loud. I was searching for exceptions on this rule, and actually only Jackie Tuttle did a good job on that (and she looks nice, too), but then again, her part wasn't very big. Only other small plus is Electra Avellan, because she is cute, but of course she can't act either. Only if you're in for some brainless entertainment.

The Knife of Ice – aka Il coltello di ghiaccio. Lenzi giallo which isn’t really a giallo, although there are certainly some aspects of this film which match the description. There is a serial killer, it’s kind of mysterious who it is, the main character is possibly the next victim, her friends and relatives are investigating, etc. The plot twist at the end was not really far fetched: my second guess of the killer was right. And for a giallo, the atmosphere was lacking, and the music was not so good. All kills are off screen and there is no nudity, which would have added to it being a giallo more, but still, I can see why this is considered to be one anyway. The storyline is about Martha, a traumatised woman and therefore she doesn’t speak. She lives with her uncle now, and when her cousin Jenny is murdered soon after having arrived at their house, it seems like a maniac is on the loose. With the story developing, it turns out it isn’t so simple. Certainly not a very good film, actually Lenzi only made one good giallo (Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso) and compared to that one, Knife of Ice is very bleak and a bit boring even. So I can only recommend this to Italo fans, as there are enough things for them to enjoy, but if you’re new to Eurotrash or giallo, pick another film to start with.

Endgame – aka Bronx lotta finale. Joe D’Amato made this post nuclear scifi flick which resembles Running Man at first and then Mad Max after. Ron Shannon is a champion of the televised show “Endgame”, in which people are either hunters or prey. The winner can become very rich, and Shannon has already won over 20 times. Now he has to fight three hunters, who are also very experienced, but in this fight something out of the ordinary happens: Shannon meets Lilith, a telepathic woman who helps him in the fight and now wants his help in return. She is a mutant and the mutant people have been persecuted since the war. Now she wants Shannon to liberate her people and rise in a revolt. There is so much wrong in this film it is too much to write. I’ll give a few examples, though: there is an Asian character called Ninja, whose body is supposedly a deadly weapon, yet we see him shoot automatic weapons almost all the time; in fighting scenes, there are always large groups attacking, yet when we see a bad guy going down, he is the only one in the shot everytime (easier for the take with the stunt double); a mutant kid has telekinetic powers, but the rock he “lifts” is clearly hanging from a thread, etc. etc. I had a lot of fun watching this, because I love this kind of bad stuff. Unfortunately my rip had an encoding error after 66 minutes, my mediaplayer choked on it and after the error, the sound was oos by 6 secs. So if you want to watch this, steer clear of the German/English dual audio DVDrip, as it is flawed. Recommended for bad moviefans, however, because this film is a must see for them.

The Brides of Dracula – 60s vampirefilm by Hammer. It has Peter Cushing as Van Helsing (again) but no Lee this time. This is the greatest drawback of this film, as David Peel is by far not as good a Dracula as Lee is. The story is somewhat original, but to be honest I wasn’t really interested. Yes, this film is beautifully shot, yes the acting was good and atmosphere was OK. Maybe it’s just me and have I seen too many Hammer (vampire) horrors, but the formula has been wearing out on me a little, I guess. This film is about a girl stranding on a trip to her new job, and ending up in a castle where a baroness lives who keeps her son prisoner. When the girl finds out why he is a prisoner, it is already too late. Fortunately, Dr Van Helsing is nearby and he can help to battle the threat which is on the loose now. Cushing is the greatest in this film, and Marie Devereux the best looking. If you like classic horrors, or Hammer, you can safely go for this one.

Grave Encounters 2 - a guy called Alex is doing movie reviews on Youtube has just slated Grave Encounters, and complains to his friends at a Halloween party that horror is so dead. Bad cgi, no storyline, only going for cheap shocks, well, you know the drill, they are the usual complaints (you can find them with a certain regularity in my reviews as well ). He decides to make his own horrormovie, a good one, in the tradition of Carpenter and Craven. While doing this, he is getting messages by a guy named Death Awaits and they are about the hospital where Grave Encounters was filmed. His interest rises, and he decides to visit the building with a crew, to make a documentary on the filming of Grave Encounters, as he, after a visit to the ditributor of Grave Encounters, is convinced that that film was real. Of course, this building is not emtpy at all, and he and his crew are in for something terrible. I actually enjoyed this one, and being a seuqel, it is always hard to please the people who saw your first film. The whole intro, with Alex first wanting to make a horror, than turning his interest to the hospital mayb be long, but it was quite interesting and original, too. The second part wasn't so original anymore, as we had seen that stuff already in part one. Some BS

Spoiler:

with parallel dimensions and portals

is added to spice things up. The ending however, was original again, and also pretty harsh. Recommended.

The Colony - in the future, climate change has reversed, and now everything is covered in snow and ice (except for certain setpieces - which is a bit sloppy of the crew). Some people have survived underground in colonies, where they breed plants so they can grow them when the temperature will rise again. In this colony riules are strict: when you get sick, you get quarantined, then you get tested and if you didn't get better, you have to either take a bullet, or take a lomng walk in the snow. Mason (Bill Paxton) is a hardliner howerver, and he simply wants to execute every sick person to save food for the healthy. This doesn't sit well with Sam (Kevin Zegers), the young hero of the story and Briggs (Laurence Fishburne), the leader of the colony. When another colony sends out a stress signal, Briggs and Sam go see what has happened there together with one more guy. They find out that the other colony

Spoiler:

has been overrun by some sort of zombielike vampirecreatures. They reminded me of 30 Days of Night, Prowl and Screamers: the Hunting. On the way back to their own colony, Briggs dies

From this moment, the film gets worse and worse. While the hero isn't a very strong person to begin with, he can't stand up to Mason, and the ensuing fight is gonna be predictable, you'd say.

Spoiler:

This fight can't really take place however, as the masses of creatures attack the colony. Surprise, surprise, they are beaten - most appalling is the endfhigt where Sam wins in a one on one with the creature's leader

So while the story in itself was not so bad and the first part had some nice possibilities, but in the second part the film collapsed entirely. Not so good.

Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio – Italo ghostfilm from the early 70s. A group of people, all from different backgrounds, get stranded in a mansion because of floodings in the surrounding area. The guy living in the mansion is a bit of a weirdo and doesn’t want the mto stay over, but one of the stranded people is a police inspector and he insists, so they can all stay. The former inhabitant of the mansion was a woman named Sheila Marlow, and when the host has told the travelers about her, one of the travelers suggests holding a seance to summon her spirit. After the seance, people get possessed and murder others and then themselves. The survivors try to find out how this is possible, while also trying to stay alive themselves. Some of the kills are pretty violent, but it never gets very gory and there is no real explanation as to how the plot evolves, no twist or whatsoever. Atmopshere is great, though. An uneasy feeling of danger present in the house is all over the movie, the several failed escape attempts add to the claustrophobia. The drawbacks here are the outside shots of the mansion, as those are clearly from a miniature house, kind of breaking the immersion. Nice and a bit strange film. For Italo fans only, I guess.

Women in Fury – aka Femmine in Fuga. This Brazilian WIP flick has everything you expect from a WIP flick: girl goes into prison for something she didn’t do, gets sexually assaulted by both fellow inmates and the matron, gets punished by the warden and in the meantime there are a gazillion fights among the prisoners, and a doctor who used to work in the prison but got fired because he actually cared about the welfare of the women is working on her release. This all works up to an outbreak and the following pursuit and the endfight are really over the top. A good amount of nudity and violence make this a great representative of the subgenre. The dub is a bit weird at times, because for example a huge negro inmate has a highpitched voice like Michael Jackson, but overall, this was a nice and sleazy watch, recommended for the exploitation fans,

Up from the Depths – shameless Jaws rip-off. On a Hawaiian island, a huge fish is eating people. It’s not a shark (feeble attempt at trying tob e original, I guess), but it kills a lot and therefore threatens the economy on the island, which depends on tourism a lot. In a subplot, there is a group of guys on the island trying to scam people by insinuating they can find lost treasures on the bottom of the sea, while putting some beads and coins in the sand themselves to make sure their clients reallt hink they can find a treasure. Then they sell them boats and equipment and the lot. After a while, the very bad overacting owner of a hotel launches a prize hunt for the fish, in order to attract clients as well as save his income. This hunt ends in a way you wouldn’t think of, really:

Spoiler:

the boat with the scam duo on it, uses one of their friend’s bodies as bait. This friend just died in a fight with the fish, and now they drag it after their boat to lure the fish. They put in explosives, so when the fish finally bites it, it explodes. You don’t get to see the dead fish, but everyone cheers for the guys in the boat in a very unbelievable way – I mean, they are cheering on sides of the island from where they can’t possibly have seen the action going on

Dracula - the Argento version. Argento, one of my all time favourite directors, has become an old man. His last film Giallo was painful to watch. Now this Dracula of his was not as painful, but he is not back on track, that's for sure. With his film, Argento wanted to stick closer to the Nosferatu films from the 20s and 30s, and steer clear of the more spectacular Dracula films made later. His cast has some Argento regulars, like Thomas Kretschmann and his daughter, Asia. Unfortunately, they don't have the chemistry like they had in the Stendhal Syndrome, they both fall quite flat in this film. Kretschmann especially totally lacks any form of charisma, which is quite important to have as a character like Dracula. This Dracula is not scary at all, maybe a bit pitiful, but while he should be both to be interesting, he is only the latter and therefore quite boring. Sadly that can be said about the entire movie: it is quite boring, not in the least because this story has been done to death, an Argento doesn't bring it in a revolutinary new way. What is revolutionary in his films, is the use of cgi, and very bad at that too. I read somewhere that he did this on purpose, well, if he did, his purpose must have been to chase away his last stubborn fans who still believe he can make a good film. It was awful. Some effets were evn laughable, and while I usually enjoy that a lot in other films, I wouldn't have expected it in an Argento film. The good stuff is in the nudity, it had an old-fashioned Italo feel over it, and the camerawork is sometimes pretty cool. Some parts of the musical score are also quite OK, but overall it isn't enough for this film. Argento better starts working on a good slasher or gioallo, or think about retirement, so we can remember him for the good films he made instead of sinking ever deeper into the swamp of B-movies.

2019: After the fall of New York - Sergio Martino directed this B-scifi from 1983. In this film, World War III saw the Americas fight vs the rest of the world and the rest of the world (a union between Europe, Asia and Africa, whose members are called Euraks) has won. New York lies in ruins, but in these ruins somewhere is the last remaining fertile woman. All other women are sterile, and therefore the last human which has been born was 15 years ago. Parsifal, a guy being first abdicted, then employed by the New Federation (some sort of a resistance group) gets the mission to find the woman in Manhattan and then bring her to the Fed's secret base. The Euraks will of course try to prevent this from happening. I thought it was pretty weird that a European director would portray his fellow Europeans as bad guys in a movie, but the story itself was quite OK for the genre. It has a lot of simliarities with Escape from New York and Parsifal even looks a bit like Snake Plissken. There are many different types of characters, like rateaters, dwarfs, ape-people, etc. The effects are laughable, it's funny to see a car chase where the Euraks try to stop the car by lowering a barricade and when the car drives through it, you see it wiggle all over the place There are other typical B-film things in this, too, like the guy shooting enemies and everytime before he shoots, he screams "Bastards!", LOL. Although this is not a good film, it wasn't as bad as Endgame which I saw recently. So when you like this type of movie and want to choose, this is the less bad one, but still a great watch for bad moviefans.

Witchboard - Brandon and Jim are two old friends who are having a feud over Linda, now Jim's girlfriend and Brandon's ex. On a party, Brandon brings his ouija board and has a session with it, together with Linda. Jim thinks it is all bullocks, even when Brandon does make contact with David, the spirit of a boy who died when he was 10 years old. Jim and randon get into a fight and Brandon leaves in anger and forgets his board. When Linda uses the board next day, alone, she doesn't know what forces she is unleashing upon herself and her surroundings. Soon people start dying, can the evil spirit be stopped in time? Nice 80s horrorfilm, with good performances by actors I thought I knew by their faces, but apparently I didn't when looking up what they performed in during their careers (nothing I have ever seen). Good music, nice atmosphere, sometimes it even gets a bit scary (especally in the parts where you don't really know what's gonna happen next). Usually these films with ouija boards get silly very soon, or stay uninteresting from the beginning, but not this one. The ending was a bit meh, but overall this film was very enjoyable. Recommnended.

Morte sospetta di una minorenne – I expected a giallo, but I got a poliziotteschi. Claudio Cassinelli is a guy who investigates a crime cartel which deals in drugs and in young girls for prostitution. He gets help for this from a small time crook who used to steal stuff from off his motorbike. He sets up a deal for a young girl, and via this girl he digs deeper into the cartel. It turns out tob e way bigger than he thought. Cassinelli plays great, but because I got this in an ogm file, it played stutteringly, and the sound was oos for the entire duration of the film. This cost me a lot of viewing pleasure. And because I actually expected a giallo, I had trouble enjoying this film. I also thought that Sergio Martino would be capable of giving me a certain kind of atmosphere which was lacking in this film. It certainly wasn’t another Mrs Wardh or Your Vice. Music was OK and the hitman was cool, but the “funny” scenes inbetween (like the one with the guy on the monobike falling over) made me cringe with annoyance a little. The ending was also quite sudden. I guess I’ll rewatch the early 70s films of Martino and forget his later efforts in total.

Plaisir a trois – it had been a while since I saw a Jess Franco movie. So, it was some kind of a reunion for me Very predictable film, where a voyeuristic couple has set their eyes on a young girl living nearby. When her parents are off for a journey, they invite the young girl over and they have sex with her, and with their mute servant, all together in different combinations. The title says a lot in this case. The storyline is only there to make room for the sexscenes, and after you have seen one, you have seen them all, although there are some fantasies thrown into the mix to spice things up. The ending was quite nice, it had a bit of a crime thing over it. Atmospheric Franco, and not as supersleazy as you migh expect. It still is a typical Franco, though

Zarkorr! The Invader – think of a Godzilla film, put it in the 90s, made by a cast and crew with no money and a lot of enthusiasm and you will get this film. The story is simple: an average guy gets a visit from aliens in the form of a miniature girl who tells him that he is the chosen one to rid the earth of Zarkorr, a superhuge monster which is destroying everything in it’s path. Most of the cast hasn’t acted in more than 5 films in their entire career, and a lot of them have only acted in this one. But it is lowbudget done the way it should be: you can see the cast had fun making this film, and it never takes itself too seriously while not falling into the trap of making dumb jokes about moviemaking itself etc. I had a lot of fun watching this prodcuit made by people who loved what they were doing. Recommended if you like good lowbudget stuff (and with good I don’t mean the film is good, but it has that particular lowbudget charm).

No One Lives – a gang is robbing a house, but it goes terribly wrong and they have to make a run for it. Now the guy who did the f*ck up wants to make it in the clear, and he kidnaps a couple and tortures them in order to get their bankaccount data. However, it turns out that he didn’t kidnap an average joe, and soon the entire gang has to fear fort heir lives. I liked this one, it has a nice story with some twists in it, enough kills and some of them are really cool and certainly enough gore. There were some weird things in the story I didn’t get, like

Spoiler:

why the girls started to fight

and also some obvious stupid things, like

Spoiler:

shooting the gun so often in an unclear situation that it is empty at the moment of the perfect shot

but overall I enjoyed this one. Recommended.

Mimesis – this film starts with two cameos and then it goes from a party where some people are dressed up in weird costumes to two characters waking up in a cemetery, dressed in different clothing than before. Fans know this immediately: this is the set of Night of the Living Dead. Soon a zombie appears and bites the guy, the girl runs off. Then it looks like it is gonna be a one on one copy of NOTLD, and they go pretty far with it, characters and situations all included. Because I thought that was a bit lame, I started to lose interest, but after a while it turns out that it is not a copy after all. Although I had it somewhat seen coming, I was glad that it wasn’t a simple “remake”. Still, it could have been way better, but it is a bit original to say the least.

Halloween - the Rob Zombie remake. This belongs among the better remakes, as it wasn't simply a copy of the original, but it added a lot of stuff too, like the youth of Myers and his first kills. At the same time it is keeping the classics, like the scenes where Myers stands next to a tree watching Laurie, and the iconic music. It was a very interesting film, pretty gory, with several brutal killings and other brutal scenes, like the one in which Myers escapes from the institution. It is somewhat long, I think it could have been done in 100 minutes, but that's not making this film any worse. Very enjoyable for both fans of the original and for people who have never heard of Michael Myers before. Recommended.

Long time no see here Picked up watching horror a few days ago, here are the results so far:

Wiseguys vs Zombies - Troma film in which two guys can act and the rest is shit. The two guys are the wiseguys and they encounter a zombie outbreak of low budget proportions. The story was quite uninteresting, and the fact that the two wiseguys stood out so much among the cast is not a good sign for the quality of this film. I lost interest around halfway in, as this movie is way too long, too: almost two hours of nonsense. The ending came very sudden, like they hadn't really thought it over.

Hide and Creep - fine example of how a low budget film can be cool. People had fun making this film, that was obvious. I had some fun too, especially with some of the funnier moments in the film, like the reading of the results of a poll: "65% of our viewers doesn't want to live next door to a zombie", etc. I enjoyed this little film, it's no Oscar material of course, but especially for it's budget it is quite a nice feat. Recommended.

Meat for Satan's Icebox - this one was the second film in a double feature with Wiseguys vs Zombies and it had the same amount of nonsensical filmmaking over it. It was a little less long, but still way too long and it became incomprehensible towards the end too. Some sadomasochism, some cannibalism, some amateur surgery and all ended up in the film having more than one ending. Or I missed something, and a pretty important character had not died earlier although it very much looked like it. Or she was resurrected while I wasn't looking. Film doesn't really go anywhere.

Salvage - not the best film I know, but a real relief after having seen the two Troma shitbags. In this film everything looked really good compared to those two, and the cast was actually trying to give a performance other than a bit of booo-ing and aaarrggh-ing into the camera. The story is about a sea container washing ashore in the UK, close to some town where a woman lives who has trouble with her daughter whom she hasn't seen a quite a while. When the daughter barges in on her when she is again humping another guy, she runs out in anger, leaving her mother behind with the guy. Moments later, the street is quarantined by SAS and everyone is ordered to stay inside and lock all doors and windows. When a neighbour covered in blood gets shot, things take a nastier turn. Nice little film, I really liked this one. It doesn't have many original things, but I enjoyed the way it was made. It also has a nice running time of 75 minutes. Recommended.

Day of the Dead 2: Contagium - very bad film. It doesn't have anything to do with the first Day of the Dead, at all. The introduction is quite cool, you can see some military gunning down infected and uninfected people at a hospital in 1968. After that, we traverse to the present and the present is really, really boring. In a mental hospital we get to see some sort of a soap opera with patients and a good doctor and an evil doctor who sees his patients more as some kind of a project. Wow, never seen such a character roster in a movie before... After some patients find a thermos from 1968, they unleash a virus (halfheartedly explained as being sent from outer space) and everyone gets sick, and then turns into zombies. Cliche after cliche follows, you get bored to the edge of insanity, The End. Skip this.

Bone Sickness - this unknown film (to me, at least) has two parts: a boring one and a great one. In the boring one we get to see Alex who is mortally sick with some weird sickness (guess what kind of sickness), while his wife, who by sheer coincidence has very large breasts, takes care of him. At one point Alex gets so sick he vomits worms, which doesn't make any sort of sense, but is cool to look at, so we forgive the director and scriptwriter for this nonsense. The second part is a gore fest I hadn't witnessed in months, maybe even in years. Wow, buckets and buckets of gore pass by your screen in several not so obvious ways, and it is quite a blast. The story wasn't all that important after all, it was just the prelude to this fantastic bloodbath. I recommend skipping the first 45-50 minutes and just watch the second part.

Necroville - two losers get fired from their jobs in a videostore, so they have to get a new one. They end up at the company called Zom-B-Gone, a zombie extermination bureau. Such a bureau has a lot of work in the town called Necroville, because the town is infested with zombies, vampires and werewolves. While Alex really enjoys their new job, Rick seems to have some trouble adjusting, AND he has to deal with his very demanding girlfriend at home. Soon however, Rick has found his place and they can start sweeping the town, but then a master vampire appears... Pretty funny horror comedy, I had a good time watching this. There were several good jokes in this one, and some were quite clever too. The end fight was hilarious! Although it was a tad long, I never got bored. A bit more cute girls would have topped it off, but it was a fun ride anyway. Recommended.

Treasure Chest of Horrors - low budget anthology. While Necroville succeeded in making me laugh and have a good time, this one was really low budget in all it's aspects. It seems yo have some sort of a cult name to it, and it does have cameos by Shawn Phillips and Lloyd Kaufmann, but didn't scare me nor made me laugh. The humour is of the piss and poop level, with a lot of farting going on. The wraparound story is really, really bad: a guy dressed like a pirate finds a treasure chest on the beach (not that that is a real feat, as the chest simply lays on the sand, not hidden at all) and it contains 4 VHS tapes with on each one a horror story of about 15 minutes long. There is a serial killer story, a very bad vampire story, an emo-zombie story (the title makes it sound funny, but the short film is quite bad) and one about a mannequin doll going on a killing spree. This last one was actually a bit OK, the others were rubbish. Luckily the running time was short.

The Veil - the back cover said 105 minutes, but while watching, I found out they actually meant 150. That was a bit too long for me last night, so I finished watching this one today. It's a British zombiefilm about a few SAS teams being sent into a small town because a virus has been going on a rampage there, turning people into zombies. Now the plague has to be contained and any info about it, too. The movie soon turns into B&W and I don't know what purpose that served (maybe they wanted to make it an ode to NOTLD). The characters were all very hard to understand because they were all wearing gas masks. Because they all wore uniforms too, they were totally unidentifiable as individual characters. This made following some scenes needlessly complicated, especially when the story develops from a fight between humans and zombies to a fight between humans and other humans. Although the story itself is not so bad, I really don't understand why this film had to run for two and a half hours. It could have been done in 90 minutes and it would have made one hell of a zombieflick. Now it was just too drawn out overall, making me lose interest halfway, and if I hadn't split viewing over two days, I might not have finished it at all. I;m glad I did, though, the ending was quite OK. Not a bad film, but way too long.

They Are Watching Us - aka Nos Miran. When a policeman called Juan gets a new and famous case of a missing person, he totally goes for it, as he sees it as a unique opportunity. He speaks with the policeman who used to be on the case but is in a mental hospital now, only saying towards all the time "Nos Miran" ("They Are Watching Us"). Juan is getting more and more convinced that there is a parallel universe where dead people walk around like the living, and they can see us through certain spots. Slowly but steadily he unravels more pieces of the puzzle, and he gets so grabbed by the case that he neglects his family life. When his mother, his wife and his colleagues try to stop him, or at least slow him down, he ignores them based on the assumption that he is almost there to solve the case. When he finally reaches his conclusion, there is only one more thing to do... As Spanish films go, this one also is very atmospheric. It kept me interested throughout, although there are many aspects of the film which I had seen before, like the setting, the role of kids and the supernatural aspect of it all. The music is creepy at times and I got goosebumps at least once. You don't get to see much, there is more suggestion than actual seeing anything, but maybe that's actually better. I could easily get into the story and believe the characters, I liked this one a lot. Not the best Spanish horror I have seen, but still very enjoyable. Recommended.

Evilenko - Malcolm McDowell plays Andrej Evilenko, a serial killer who rapes and eats his victims. The story is based on the real life serial killer Andrej Chikatilo, a guy who confessed 56 murders (in the film there are 55). The 80s Soviet Union made making investigations for detectives harder than usual, because lots of information was never used out of fear that the image of the Soviet Union might be damaged. After Evilenko is fired as a teacher for trying to molest a child, he gets work at the KGB. In this job, he can travel around a lot, widening the area of his murders and making it more difficult for the police to find him. Several times he just escapes capture, mostly by coincidence and luck. Eventually he does get caught. This is not a horrorfilm, as you don't get to see any kills, no gore, no scary stuff. It is more a detective/thriller. Quite interesting though, and totally different from the other film about Chikatilo: Citizen X.

The Island of Dr. Moreau - the 1996 remake with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. The story is OK, I could see this was a classic once. A guy called Douglas has a plane accident over the South pacific and then gets picked up as the only survivor. He is being brought to a secluded island where a doctor (Moreau) is experimenting on genetic manipulation of humans and animals in order to make a perfect new race. Entertaining story, but it wasn't very scary imo (except for the scene where Douglas discovers the situation about the creatures). There are many creatures, but they look a lot like fantasy characters, which was a bit of a turnoff for me. There is some minor gore, but actually the scariest thing in the film is the extremely fat Brando dressed up as some sort of a cult priest. Somehow I had the feeling that this is more a kids' film, at least I was a bit disappointed. Many horror films have done this theme better.

Famine - in a college, a group of students is having a 24 hour famine for a good cause (they raise money by not eating). They haven't had one for five years, because at the last famine something went horribly wrong: a popular teacher got some acid over his face and then the students were quite traumatized, so it took a while before they dared to have another famine. The new teacher Ms Vickers is taking the lead in organizing this famine, but shortly after they have started, students are disappearing and the remaining students eventually find their dead bodies, horribly mutilated. The kills are really gory, which is a big plus, but on the downsiode there are these things:
1) After five years, most of those students would have graduated
2) They would have grown older, at least
3) The make up of the janitor is really childishly done
4)

Spoiler:

the fact that the male teacher who got acid on his face is now a female teacher is just... too much

Some mindless fun, but also a lot of stupidities. It's only 75 minutes, so you can give it a try.

Wasting Away - wow, really cool zombieflick! I saved the best for last, lucky me! Original take on the while zombie thing: some people die and become zombies, but they don't know it. So, for them, everything looks normal, and the uninfected people look like they run all the time and speak with speedy voices. For the uninfected people however, they look like zombies who can only grunt and grawl. The view changes between the two pov's which is quite cool and also has some funny jokes to cut short any attempts to take this film seriously. I had a great time watching this, I laughed often enough and the girls are juicy (in normal pov, that is). Recomnmended, if not highly!

Riding the Bullet - Alan, an art student, is somewhat troubled: he is obsessed with death and he thinks his girlfriend is breaking up with him and he tries to commit suicide on his birthday. Soon after he hears that his mother has had a stroke and he sets out to see her, hitchhiking all the way. Along the way he meets several weird characters, and he ends up in the car of a very special stranger. This Stephen King story is hopefully more scary in it's book form, because this film was quite boring. The flashbacks and the appearances of Alan's conscience (or his other self, or whatever) are quite annoying and distracting. I'd skip this one.

Turistas - several cliches piled up with only minor originality doesn't make a film good and Turistas is a fine example of that. The cliches: a group of students go on a trip to a remote country, they have an accident with their bus and end up in what seems a paradise on earth, but in the meantime everyone in that paradise is out to harm them. The originality: what happens to the tourists actually has some kind of a reason, and a hint of idealism even. I liked the landscape shots: Brazil is a mighty beautiful country. The climax was a bit stupid imo, and the ending was really bad:

Spoiler:

out of eight "gringos", five die, and they are the two Swedes they meet on the beach just before they get abducted, the two Brits they met on the bus, and the friend of the female main character - the most important characters stay alive, namely the brother and sister and the love interest of the brother

Could have been way better, imo.

Priest - a comic based film and you can see that. Future world with humans and vampires pitted against each other, Matrix-like slow motion fights, and a protagonist who has a mission he isn't allowed to conduct but does it anyway. The vampires aren't the creatures you might expect after having seen so many vampire films before. They are some kind of slimy monsters here, nothing human about it. Therefore it is quite weird that at some point there is some kind of a master vampire, the "human vampire". Quite laughable imo considering the vampire-stories throughout the ages, but anyway: this film is quite entertaining. It has an atmosphere which is a bit comparable to the Hellboy films, but less (almost no) joking. It was an OK film, the best I had seen today, but that is mainly because of the other two films not being that good.