Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Lethargic Returns

LETHARGIC's HORRORFEST PART 3: INVASION OF THE MOVIE SNATCHERS
I'm doing something different for this update. Instead of a lot of shorter reviews, I'm doing just a few long ones, and this time we have a theme.....remakes of classic horror movies.

After this I think I'm done with movies that I'll want to talk about at length so I'm planning on two more updates with a lot of quick reviews and then I should be out of everybody's hair for a while. For a year at least. But you'll miss me, right? Right?

42. It’s Alive (2009) - For some reason this remake reminds me of the recent GI Joe movie. I really enjoy the GI Joe movie and all the bad reviews of it made me laugh because all the complaints were about how stupid it was, how over the top it was, how lame it was, how corny it was, how cartoony it was. Yet it was based on a stupid, over the top, lame, corny cartoon! Personally, I thought it was pretty cool to watch a live action version of the garbage I grew up watching. There were problems and things I would’ve done differently, but at the end of the day they simply made the cartoon into a big budget live action blockbuster and it was just as fun, dumb and funny as the show was.

For some reason people now expect every single movie like this to be Batman-ed, but not everything lends itself to be remade into a dark and serious film. The source material for GI Joe and Batman are two radically different things. Batman is dark and serious, so that’s how the movies should be. GI Joe was a stupid cartoon, so that’s how the movie should be. It's based on a cartoon that was based on a toy and you expect to get The Dark Knight 2.0 out of it? That would never work in a million years. A serious GI Joe would movie would just end up being stupid, at least you know this one is stupid as soon as you sit down to watch it.
Much like GI Joe, the original source for It's Alive wasn't all that good of a movie to begin with. It has an appeal thanks to its quirkiness and camp value but it's not like its some great classic horror film. It's a movie about a killer baby. People watch it to laugh, not to shriek. The original movie is tolerable because it seems to know how stupid it is. It doesn't hide from its ridiculousness, it embraces it. The remake doesn't seem to understand how stupid it is whatsoever. It tries to turn a corny storyline about a killer baby into a realistic, VERY serious, horror movie. They tried to turn It's Alive into the next Dark Knight. You're not scaring anybody with a stupid little killer baby!!!

This is a remake they SHOULD have gone nuts with and made it over the top insane. Have the baby doing such ridiculous things that you couldn't help but laugh at the stupidity. Instead they went deadly serious with it and ended up re-making a cool, one of a kind, high concept movie into a carbon copy of a million other direct to DVD horror flicks that take themselves way too seriously and you forget you watched it 30 minutes after you hit stop. I'd rather stick with the original goofy version and get at least a chuckle out of the thing.

43. Children of the Corn (2009) - I never liked the original Children of the Corn movie. While the main kid and the red head kid were kind of creepy, it was still really dumb. That and the fact that this is supposed to be a more direct telling of King's original story (making it not officially a remake) gave me hope that it would be pretty good. But the fact that this movie premiered on the SyFy channel kinda tipped me off that I’d likely not like this version either. And I didn’t. It was terrible.

The female half of the couple who end up stumbling into this evil little kid town is the most hate-able character in the history of movies. Annoying characters have been a staple of horror movies for a long time so that you look forward to seeing them getting offed in whatever imaginative way they get offed in. This wasn't like that. This woman was so annoying that it went WAAAAAY past not liking the character, it made me HAAAAAAAAATE her and HAAAAAAATE the movie. I didn't care at all about seeing her live or die, I didn't want to see her at all. She was written as the most overbearing, whiney, screaming, nagging.....two words come to mind that I won't use here....that I've ever seen. Sure, the couple is supposed to be having marital problems and fighting and all but....AHHHHHHH...I HAAAAAATED HER!!! Every time her mouth opened it was like ice picks shoved into my ears. And that's just the character as written. The actress was just as bad. Terrible overacting and nothing but screaming every single word as if being the most hated person in any movie ever was her true goal. Everything else in this movie could've been absolutely perfect and I'd still hate it because of this woman.

Luckily for her, nothing else really worked either. David Anders was his usual solid self as the husband but the part was terrible and gave him nothing to work with. He was simply the stupid character who had to do all the wrong things to make sure they ended up stuck in a town full of murderous children who worship corn. The kids were also terrible. Some of the kids in the first movie did a great job and were freaky little brats. These new kids felt like all the kids who weren't good enough to act in cereal commercials. Terrible little actors.

Of course, even if all those things worked, Children of the Corn would still suck because it's still Children of the Corn and Children of the Corn sucks. It's not even a good story on the page so why would it make a good movie? Stephen King himself helped write the script for this one because he didn't like the first movie. You know why the first movie wasn't any good? Because the story isn't worth making into a movie!! First of all, the original story is only 27 pages long. There is absolutely nothing to it. If you've never done any screen writing or reading about screen writing here's a fun fact.....one page equals roughly one minute of screen time. So a 90 minute movie should be around 90 pages long. So how would one turn a 27 page story into a 90 minute movie? Lots and lots and lots of padding which mainly involve scenes of people running through corn fields.

And besides that....even if Children of the Corn was a 30 minute short it would STILL suck because it is the most farfetched story line ever. Kids kill every adult in an entire town and nobody notices it? For YEARS??? And why do they do this? For the corn??? KIDS HATE VEGETABLES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

44. HALLOWEEN (2007) - I have never been a fan of Rob Zombie. Not of him, his music or his movies. His horror themed image felt like nothing but a cheap gimmick he came up with to market himself. I loved his first movie, House of 1000 Corpses, for the first hour or so but felt the last act ruined the entire thing. I hated his next movie, The Devil's Rejects, for the first hour or so and then really liked the end. Overall his movies felt a lot like his music. Fake and desperate. I don't believe he really loves horror the way he claims. I believe he sees the horror fan base that is willing to drive 50 miles to a horror convention for the privilege of paying an extra from Dawn of the Dead 40 bucks for an autograph to be a cash cow that is begging to be milked. I freely admit that I could be very wrong about the guy but that's just the feeling I get. I’ve given him plenty of chances to change my mind and he hasn’t.

When the remake of Halloween was announced I rolled my eyes right along with everybody else. Why do we need a new Halloween? When Rob Zombie was announced as the director my interest raised a little bit. Even though I'm not a big fan and didn't think his first movies worked, the guy HAS shown that he's not looking to just make a generic studio picture. His first two movies were crazy, violent and weird. There was no way a Rob Zombie Halloween would end up being yet another cookie cutter remake like all the other cookie cutter remakes Hollywood has puked up the past few years. This would at least be something worth seeing even if it was a colossal failure. As the pictures and trailers started coming out I started getting really into it. It looked pretty cool but I still assumed it would be bad. When I finally saw it I went in with my "hope for the best, prepare for the worst" mentality but discovered I didn't need it. This movie was better than my wildest hopes and dreams. It blew me away how much I loved it. Rob Zombie had created his masterpiece. It seemed that doing a remake in a set world with set rules gave him the structure needed to contain and focus the insanity that had always sent his own original movies careening off the rails. The problem is…… I didn't watch the final version of the movie most people watched.

An early cut of the movie, known as the work print edition, leaked online around the same time the movie hit theaters. THIS is the version I watched. When the reviews of the “real” movie started hitting the intrawebz I couldn't believe it. Most people HATED this movie. It made absolutely no sense to me how people could hate this movie that I loved so much. How different could the two cuts really be after all? I started reading what the differences were and it started to make sense. I got the DVD when it came out but I was too afraid to watch it until now. 2…years…later. Now that I've seen what the final product is like I completely understand and agree with the criticism, but it also frustrates me to no end that such a cool movie was absolutely slaughtered by a meddling studio.

A lot of remakes these days aren't called remakes. The studio likes to throw around the word "re-imagined" because they know the word "remake" makes a lot of people sick. The term is usually non-sense but in this case it is absolutely deserved. This IS a re-imagining of Halloween. Zombie didn't just try to make an improved version of the original, he made his own version. He took the basic concepts out of the Carpenter universe and put them in the Zombie universe and made something entirely new out of something old. The work print version of this movie SHOULD have been held up as a shining example of how horror remakes should be done, right alongside Cronenberg's The Fly and Carpenter's The Thing. Instead, the vast majority of people out there didn't get to see it. The work print version is a very detailed, character driven, emotional roller coaster that really changes the entire way you perceive Michael Myers. The final version tried to do the same but only did so in very broad strokes. All the fine details that made the story make sense have been cut. Why does Myers like to wear masks? You understand in the early, but just barely in the final cut. Why does Myers stop talking? Fully explained in the early cut, not explained at ALL in the final cut. When Myers is still a boy we see him kill a nurse. Why? Theatrical version cuts the entire motivation for him doing that out of the movie. Pretty much all the characters in the movie become nothing but caricatures. All their motivations have been left on the cutting room floor, all the small moments which really told us who they are and what they're feeling...gone. Sure, there is a moment in the final version where Loomis screams that he failed Michael at the top of his lungs, but it's just words. In the early version we truly see that Loomis loves Michael and not being able to save him from becoming this monster has ruined his life.

The biggest difference between the original Halloween, the work print version of Zombie's Halloween and the final version of Zombie's Halloween is Michael Myers himself. In the original movie he's really not a person or a character. Much like the characters say, he's the boogeyman. Even in the credits he is not called Michael Myers, he is called The Shape. He's not a person, he's not even an animal, he's just walking death, killing everything in its path. You don't care about him as a person in any way. You don't think about his motivations or wonder why he's doing what he's doing, you just go for the ride.

Rob Zombie did something with his movie that I never thought possible. He made Michael Myers a person. We watch him grow from a boy to a man. We see him as a sweet kid who loves his mom and wants nothing more than to just be with her, yet we also see the darkness growing inside him. We see the conflict going on between his human side and his evil side and we watch as all the people trying to help just end up doing more harm than good. So when he finally puts that mask on and invades Haddonfield it's completely different from the original. You're still scared for the people he's after, but you're also sad that he's been pushed this far. You're sad that the darkness has now almost completely taken him over.

He also has motivation in this version. In the original, he had none. He was just a shark looking for his next meal. Remember, in the original, there was NOTHING about Michael and Laurie being brother and sister, all that stuff was added in later. Originally she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the new version we see from the very start that she is his entire motivation and his intention is NOT to kill her. He is going after her because she's his last connection to humanity, he wants her to save him and love him. When he finally captures her he makes no effort to harm her, he puts down his knife, gets down on his knees and hands her a picture of him holding her as a baby. He's not trying to scare or harm her, he just wants her to know who he is but his mind isn’t right so he knows no other way of doing it. When Laurie can't understand him and just stabs him and tries to escape it's a sad moment. Instead of thinking run, run, run you're think no, don't run, stop, he's trying to tell you something dummy!!! When Loomis shows up and starts begging Michael to stop, pleading with him to surrender so he won't have to shoot him…it's a sad moment. In the original movie Loomis running in and shooting Myers is the big YAY hero moment, here it's just another sad moment because you don't want to see Myers shot and you don't want to see Loomis be the one to do it. But in the released version, almost all of that is lost. We don't have the same connection to Michael so when he starts killing people it just becomes a new version of Carpenter's Halloween. It’s no longer a re-imagining, it's now just another remake.

And when the killing starts, it really starts. Yet another difference between the work print and the released version. The body count is very, very low in the work print and some of the kills that do happen occur off screen. The released version has nearly 10 extra kills in the movie including the off screen deaths now pushed front and center because anybody watching this movie would never be able to go 10 minutes without seeing some blood, right?? And that's where you can obviously see the studio meddling that killed this movie. “Hahrump hahrump, we can't have a Halloween movie were Michael Myers doesn't kill a whole bunch of people! Hahrump hahrump!”

In the early cut, Myers generally only killed people he had to or people who really deserved it. That's something else that keeps the viewer from seeing him as a real villain, he's not killing people left and right for no reason. The best example is his escape from the asylum. In the early cut an annoying orderly, who has been bullying Myers for a while, take a catatonic patient into Myers cell to let his friend rape her. Myers tries to ignore it and mind his own business but once they start messing with him, he goes off, he kills both guys and uses their keys to escape. This scene showed us that Myers wasn't really interested in killing or escaping or anything, he had to be provoked before doing anything, and it was two guys who got what they had coming to them. In the theatrical version 4 guards are transferring Myers to a new prison in the middle of the night. Myers uses his super human powers to break the chains holding him and slaughters all four for no explained reason and no real motivation. He then kills pretty much everybody else working in the place. That is something Carpenter's Myers would've done, not Zombie's. This being the first thing the adult Myers does completely alters the entire way you see the character for the rest of the movie. He's now back to just being The Shape again, rendering all the set up we've been through up until now rather pointless.

The other major place you can see the studio being a problem is the ending. The early cut had a great ending that worked completely thanks to everything that came before it. It wasn't the standard “is he dead or not” cliffhanger ending from a slasher movie. It wasn't the cliché ending where you think the killer is dead and then he pops back up and grabs somebody's leg. It was an emotional impact based more on the drama of the movie than the horror. But the studio wouldn't let that stick, they had to change it so there could be a sequel. Zombie said all along that he didn't want to do a sequel and his original ending showed that. There was no question at all that this story was over. There could never be a sequel to it. But the studios love nothing more than to suck every last dime out of a horror franchise so the ending just HAD to be changed. Pretty much the entire last 15 minutes were changed to just another typical slasher movie killer chasing a girl scene. No more drama, no more emotion, just standard, hack, generic, tired clichés.

Ok, I'm TRYING to end this, I promise. I could literally talk about this all day long. I totally and completely love the work print version of this movie. It works on multiple levels. I totally and completely hate what was released into theaters and what was released on DVD. There's never been a movie that is a more glaring example of what's wrong with the studio system than this one. A great movie was destroyed because by focus groups, test screenings and meddling executives who care nothing about creativity. I gained a LOT of respect for Zombie as a filmmaker when I watched his original version, but the version he actually released took it all back. I wish he would've fought harder for his vision like he seemed to do with House of 1000 Corpses. I wish he would've pushed to have this version released as his director's cut. The director's cut they put out does have a couple of these scenes put back in, but not nearly enough, it's simply a longer version of the theatrical release while the work print is a radically different movie. The fact that he then went back and a made sequel after saying he wouldn't just made all my original thoughts about him come back. At least now I believe the man is capable of making a great movie. I just hope that next time he's willing to fight for his vision and not let the suit and ties ruin it again.

45. Prom Night (2008) - Ya know, I pay a LOT of attention to this stuff and even I didn't know that a remake of Prom Night existed until now. I wish I still didn't know. This movie is a prime example of why there is so much bad connotation behind the word remake. There is just no reason why anybody should remake Prom Night. Prom Night is one of the classics of the 80s slasher craze but it's not iconic. You can justify making a new Jason, Freddy, Leatherface or Michael Myers movie because those are horror icons. They will all four be around for the rest of time in some way, shape or form. Somebody want to name the killer from Prom Night? Anyone? Helloooo?

The major problem is that they really didn't bother to remake the movie at all besides the fact that the movie takes place during a prom. The entire story is completely different and none of the characters are the same. It's nothing but a generic, cookie cutter, paint by numbers script that would be bad for a direct to DVD movie. There's nothing to it. It's as bland and generic as anything. The original Prom Night was well made, fairly original and had Jamie Lee Curtis as she was right in the middle of her scream queen reign. This movie has nothing to like and nothing interesting. Bland actors, bland writing and bland directing. It's like eating a rice cake. You chew it and all you can taste is air. The title Prom Night being on the box for this movie is like if somebody wrote "Cheeseburgers" on the box of rice cakes. Call it whatever you want but when you open the box there's nothing of value inside.

The sad thing is that people still fall for this garbage. Hollywood can make one awful movie after another, throw a classic horror title on the poster, and rubes will line up outside the theater to watch it. This movie was so cheaply made that it made a profit on its first weekend in theaters. I hope everybody who paid money to see this feels real good about themselves. Thanks for encouraging them to make more crap like this.

46. The Last House on the Left (1972) and
47. The Last House on the Left (2009) - The original Last House on the Left is one of my favorite movies of all time. If you had asked me a year or so ago to name a movie that could NEVER be remade I would say, without a doubt, Last House on the Left. The things that make the original effective just can't be re-done in today's PG-13 world, but I still held out hope that the remake would at least be a good movie in its own way and since I try to give everything a chance I had to give it a shot. I decided to watch both versions back to back since it had been a couple of years since I last watched the original. This might not seem fair to the remake but it doesn't really matter, nothing I could've done would make me like this remake and I have a few reasons to explain why I detest it. But in case you've never seen either version let me give a quick synopsis for you. Two girls go out for a night on the town but instead end up being kidnapped by a group of psychos. The gang unmercifully torture and kill the girls and then suffer one of the worst coincidences a gang of psycho killers could ever be faced with, they end up spending the night with the parents of one of the girls. The parents figure out what they've done and then go all Charles Bronson on the group. Now to why I hate it…

A) In the original movie the two victims were likable, normal girls. They made some mistakes that led to their situation but it wasn't like victims in normal horror movies who are complete idiots to the point that you don't care if they die or not. These girls made mistakes but it was the kind of believable mistakes a real person could make. Watching these girls get caught by these maniacs isn't all that much different than seeing security cam footage of a real life maniac taking somebody. Having the girls not be stupid and more realistic lent more realism to the situation and made you feel bad for what the girls would end up going though. The girls are written completely different in the remake. Gone is the realistic depiction of two normal girls and in its place is the usual modern horror movie non-sense. One girl is the typical weed obsessed slut. The other is a stuck up spoiled brat. Both are so annoying that 15 minutes into the movie I couldn't wait to see them bite it.

B) The original movie didn't have 1/10th of the gore that the remake has. The original kept it as realistic as possible. There were no heads exploding in microwaves or anything like that. Much of the torture was more mental than physical. One of the most horrific scenes in the original is when the bad guys force one of the girls to pee in her pants. There's no blood, no guts, it's just a wet stain on a pair of blue jeans but it is just a horrible moment because you're watching something that can really happen. It's simple, it’s about very mean people doing very mean things, it's not about the over the top violence. The remake is nothing BUT over the top violence. Even the difference in the rape scene was a bit staggering. In the original it was very short and the camera focused on their faces. That gave the scene soooo much more of an emotional impact. It wasn't about what was physically happening, it was about the mental aspect, it was about seeing somebody's spirit be broken. That scene in the remake is totally different. It's all about the act and making it as violent and "sexy" as possible. The faces aren't as important as showing the bare butts or the panties getting torn off. It's yet another example of why horror directors don't get it. Movies today can do amazing things with special effects and gore and violence that make even the people of thickest skin go ewwwww. But they will never scare anybody the way movies like Last House or Texas Chainsaw Massacre did because people back then knew the way to get a scare was to hit you emotionally and mentally, not physically.

C) The original has one scene that I've always said is one of my favorite scenes in movie history. The scene is very depressing and awful so I know it's weird to like something like that so much, but it just brings out so much sadness every single time I see it that I just HAVE to consider it a great scene. The scene takes places just after the rape scene. The girl simply gets up and walks into a lake. She gets to about chest deep then just stops and stands there until the head bad guy shoots her. Nobody says anything during any of it, nobody forces her to go down there, she just gets up and goes down there voluntarily and forces him to shoot her. It is one of the most heartbreaking moments in any movie ever because you're watching a girl give up. She no longer has the will to try to escape. She no longer has any interest in going back to her life. There's no chance of going back to who she used to be, everything she's been through has completely broken her and she just wants it to end as quickly as possible. While none of the members of the group say anything afterwards, the actors play it beautifully. You can look at their faces and tell that even these despicable monsters are shocked, they realize that what they've done to these girls has changed something inside them and that there's no going back to who they were before. Whether it be tears running down my face or goose bumps going up my arm, this scene does something to me every single time I see it. I was truly hoping and praying that the new movie wouldn't ruin this moment. The entire climax of the movie really depends on it. You NEED to be in a place where you complete despise these creeps for what they've done. You NEED to hate them completely so when the parents do what they do to them, you are behind them 100% and it seems just. Did they ruin it? Of course they did!! In this version of the movie they made the girl a competitive swimmer. So when she walks out into the water the reasoning is completely different. She's going out there to swim away and escape. The scene has been changed from an amazing emotional impact to just another horror movie cliché where the 90 pound teenage girl defeats evil yet again.

D) And that should REALLY tell you why I don't think this movie lives up to the original. The girl escapes. She doesn't die. Spoiler alert. The entire climax of the movie is rendered meaningless. The girl has been shot, raped and badly injured, but she still somehow makes it home to her parents. Of course, by now the parents have already unknowingly allowed the group of villains to stay in their guest house. The movie tried really, really hard to explain why these people couldn't get their daughter to the hospital but it just wasn't believable at all. I understand how the parents would WANT to kill the people who did this. I really do. I fully support vigilantism. Somebody kills your daughter, you have my full blessing to do what you need to do. That is what I SHOULD have loved about this movie. If the daughter had died and the parents spent half of the movie getting their revenge, it would likely be a movie I'd really enjoy. Instead I couldn't help but think about how stupid it was. A parent may really want to get revenge, but they wouldn't give up on getting their daughter help to do it.

This movie should've been about watching these parents do everything they could to get their daughter to the hospital, instead they spend all night needlessly killing people. It made no sense. In the original it made perfect sense. The parents lost everything when their daughter died. Their reason to live was snuffed out. They had nothing left to lose. When they get their revenge, it just felt so much more logical to believe they'd do what they do. Also, the original movie wasn't about the parents killing the bad guys. It wasn't about their revenge. It was about the girls and what happens to them. The parent's revenge was like an afterthought. The remake put the entire focus of the movie on the parent's revenge killings. In the original that part is maybe 20 minutes long. In the remake it's over half the movie. The fact that they made that part so much MORE important to this version, yet gave it so much LESS motivation was idiotic.

E) The last thing that irritated me about this remake is that it didn't need to be this way. The original Last House on the Left was a remake itself. It was a remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring from 1960. Does anybody sit around and complain about it being a stupid remake? No. Why? Well, because most haven’t seen The Virgin Spring, but also because they didn't just take The Virgin Spring and try to redo the exact same story and make it better. Instead they took the plot and turned it into something fresh and new. This remake just takes the original Last House and makes a bad copy. Like they put the original movie through a Xerox machine but the ink was low so it came out kind of weird looking. They could've done what I Am Legend did. They didn't sell it as a remake of Omega Man or Last Man on Earth. They just used the same source material to make a whole new movie. Had they simply made a new, original movie that was "inspired" by Last House on the Left, or instead did a more direct remake of The Virgin Spring, they could have avoided all these comparisons. Instead they tried to fix something that wasn't broke and failed miserably at it. This remake was truly unnecessary.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Part II of Horrorfest

Once again we bring you a full review by guest writer Lethargic. We thank him again.




LETHARGIC's HORRORFEST PART II


18. The Pit (1981) - This was one of my favorites as a kid. It was one of those movies that seemed to be on constantly in the early days of cable and was one of the 5 movies available to rent in the early days of VHS. I watched it a lot. While other kids my age were obsessed with E.T., I was obsessed with The Pit. It took FOREVER to finally get this movie out on DVD so I could see it again and the wait was worth it. This is one of the few times where a movie actually held up. It's about a weird, perverted 12 year old boy who is constantly picked on by other kids, miss-understood by adults and ostracized by his community. The kid has all kinds of problems including the fact that his mother "washes him too much" and his only friend is an evil talking teddy bear named Teddy. Eventually he finds a pit in the woods where creatures called Trollalogs live. He decides to take care of the creatures and discovers that all they eat is meat. He starts stealing money to buy meat so he can feed them but the money runs out so he has to find a new source of meat. Per Teddy's advice, he decides to kill two birds with one stone and starts tricking the bullies and people who have wronged him into the pit to feed the Trollalogs. One of my favorite scenes in movie history is when this kid pushes an old lady in a wheel chair into this friggin pit. Wow, does that make me laugh. The thing that's great about this movie is that there is not a second of normalcy in it. It is just weird, creepy and odd from start to finish. You could make a thousand movies about a kid throwing people into pit and 999 of them would stink. You could never recapture whatever it is that makes this one work. It's not a well made movie but it has a vibe and an atmosphere that just makes you feel dirty. You feel like you have to brush your teeth after watching it. I loved every second. And it's not because I completely identify with the main character!!! Not fully at least.

19. Cleavagefield (2009) - I've tried to stick with Jim Wynorski for a long time now but I'm finally tired of hoping for the best with this guy. This is just another in his long line of awful T & A parody flicks that fail to entertain either as a movie OR a skin flick. Wynorski started his career in the 80s with a string of awesome horror movies (Chopping Mall, Not of this Earth, Sorority House Massacre 2) and other B-movie classics (Big Bad Mama 2, Deathstalker 2, Return of Swamp Thing). In the 90's he continued to bounce from low budget horror (976-Evil 2) to low budget kids movies (Munchie) to low budget action (Hard Bounty) to low budget sci-fi (Dinosaur Island) to low budget erotic thrillers (Body Chemistry 3). He became the king of the direct to video market. Things started taking a turn for the worse in 2000 when he made a Blair Witch parody called The Bare Wench. The movie wound up being quite successful and its sequel even more so. While he had now delved into complete and total gratuitous T and A nudity, these movies were also entertaining. As far as I know, this was the first time somebody was making these Skinemax type movies that were actually worth watching even without the nudity. For a while Wynorski continued with his normal career while also cranking out a few more Bare Wench sequels that kept getting more and more unwatchable. The problem is, as they became more and more unwatchable, they made more and more money. Far out doing his serious work. So he apparently decided to sell his soul and has all but abandoned his efforts to make watchable movies and now makes almost NOTHING but soft core pornography parodies such as The Breastford Wives, The Da Vinci Coed and Busty Cops. And he's constantly tricking me. I see a title like Cleavagefield and I think wow, that's a funny concept, maybe this one will recapture the magic of Bare Wench. Then I just end up sitting here fast forwarding through a bunch of awful lesbian scenes to watch the 5 minutes of movie he bothered to make. He no longer parodies the movies, he now only parodies the title. He's sunk so low at this point that he can't even get hot girls in his movies anymore. It's nothing but a bunch of ugly naked girls running from some horrible CG monster that makes SyFy's original movies level of FX look like Transformers. Even Wynorski himself seems to be embarrassed. He has used no less than 16 fake names to direct these pieces of garbage. There's no telling how many more he's made that nobody knows is him. So if you ever see a movie directed by J. Andrews, Jay Andrews, H.R. Blueberry, Harold Blueberry, Bob E. Brown, Daniel Fast, David Gibbs, Heny Henri, Noble Henri, Nobel Henry, Noble Henry, J.R. Mandish, Tom Popatopolous, Arch Stanton, Jamie Wagner or Thaddeus Wickwire.....it's really Jim Wynorski and I urge you to change the channel.

20. Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas (2009) - There has been three movies based on the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas and his partner Ottis Toole. The most famous is Henry. The best is Confessions of a Serial Killer. The absolute worst is Drifter. Confessions attempted to tell the true story as faithfully as they could. They made no effort to sex up the story and make the killers seem cool. They were scumbags in real life and they were scum bags in the movie. Drifter went the other way. This truly horrible script seemed to be written by somebody who read half of Lucas and Toole's Wiki page, watched Natural Born Killers a dozen times, leafed through a how to write a screenplay book and went to town. This movie featured some of the worst dialogue I've ever heard in a movie and the production value was barely above a high school play. Wanna check out a visual representation of how horrible this movie is? Look at the casting choices:

Here is a picture of the real Henry (on the right) and Ottis (on the left): http://tinyurl.com/henryottis
The idiot who made this movie decided this guy should play Henry: http://tinyurl.com/nothenry
And this guy should play Ottis: http://tinyurl.com/notottis
Are you kidding me?

21. Visiting Hours (1982) - This is a pretty good thriller about a female TV personality who begins a campaign against spousal abuse. Unfortunately for her, there's a woman hating psycho on the loose, played by Dude Who Does the Splinter Cell Guy's Voice, who thinks beating your wife is A-OK. So he breaks into her house and kicks the crap out of her in protest. Then once she's in the hospital he decides to go there and menace her a little longer. This guy is less a villain and more a big fat jerk. It's good but it would've been a LOT better if somebody did some editing. It's an hour and 45 minutes long. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin could've made a movie with the same plot in less than 20 minutes and it'd be way funnier.

22. The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976) - A really awesome 70s horror flick from the people who made The Legend of Boggy Creek. This one is based on the true life case of The Phantom Killer who killed 5 people in Texarkana in 1946. (Fun fact: I will NEVER go to Texarkana.) The killer wears a sack with eye holes cut into it kinda like Jason did in Friday part 2. It goes a long way to proving that you could use a computer to make the freakiest nightmare of a creature possible, but it will never be anywhere near as scary as a redneck with a sack on his head.

23. The Pumpkin Karver (2006) - It was late when I saw this on the guide. I thought the listing said it starred Amy Acker. I thought the title sounded like a pretty bad movie, but Acker is a good enough actress that I wouldn't think she'd be in that crappy of a movie. My hopes were dashed as 2-3 minutes into the movie I realized I had miss-read the listing. The movie did not star the good actress Amy Acker. It starred the former soap opera has been turned former WWE Diva has been turned over the hill scream queen has been....Amy Weber. This movie was utter tripe. I thought the dialogue in Drifter was bad?? Pumpkin Karver makes Drifter look like Glengarry Glen Ross. I don't even believe there WAS a script, it seemed like the whole movie was improvised. The plot was stupid, the characters were stupid, everything was stupid. And TWO people wrote this?? I could see one person writing something this dumb, but two?? There comes a time when you have to look at your buddy and go dude....this really sucks.

24. Skinwalkers (2006) - When FX guru Stan Winston died it was a huge loss to the horror and genre film world. This was one of the last movies he worked on and was apparently pretty important to him as he loved werewolves. After watching this I no longer miss him.

25. Claws (1982) - Claws is the type of movie that makes me want to hunt down everybody who made it and give them a Joker style beating with a crow bar. The film is sold as a horror film, but it's really not. It's about a young boy, and his dog, being left alone to take care of a farm while his parents go to the big city. While they're away a monster shows up and starts terrorizing the boy and killing the farm animals. It turns out the monster isn't a monster, it's just a lynx. Here's the first problem, the movie takes place in South Africa. You ain't going to find no stinking lynx in South Africa. They're in North America, Europe and Asia. The movie is slow and boring but there's something charming and likable about it. It's just a c nice boy and his dog movie. Very reminiscent of the live action boy vs wild movies that used to come on The Wonderful World of Disney. It's in the final act that this movie sent my blood pressure through the roof. I'm one of those people that really doesn't like watching animals get killed. Even if it's faked, I don't like it. It doesn't anger me or anything but as somebody who has had more pets in his life than friends, it's not something I enjoy. Watching animals die for REAL? That's what makes me reach for my crow bar. I started getting a bad feeling about this movie as it went on. When the boy would discover farm animals that had been killed by the lynx, it looked a tad bit too realistic. I started realizing that this movie was not filmed in the U.S. and was probably NOT going to have a "no animals were harmed" tag at the end. The last 15 minutes is all about this kid and his dog hunting down this lynx and boy was I gearing up. I knew for sure he'd end up shooting the lynx on camera and I'd be livid. But they threw a curve at me and killed the dog. For real. Not only that but they forced the lynx and the dog to fight, basically turning the film into a Michael Vick home movie. The lynx tears the dog to bits and we get to see it limp away a bloody mess. The lynx is bloodied too but nothing like the dog. The boy ends up killing the lynx off screen so I guess maybe it was allowed to survive. The ending of the movie sees the boy walking back home to his waiting parents, carrying the actual.....dead......dog. He tells his dad about the lynx and he asks did you get it, son? He says I got it, Pa! And the whole movie climaxes with a that's my boy! Sarcastic happy music starts playing as the parents run to the boy and hug him while he still holds the dead dog and its limp head rolls around in between the hugs. It's played off as the most triumphant happy ending to any movie ever. Even if the dog was just movie dead, Old Yeller dead, Where the Red Fern Grows dead, the ending should not be played off THIS happy. Knowing that the dog they just spent an hour and half getting the audience to love is ACTUALLY dead? Uggh. Did the director really think this movie that only 10 people have seen was worth that? I give this movie -235 skulls!!!!!!!! BOOOOOOO!

26. The Mist (2007) - I kept putting off watching this due to the poor word of mouth. I don't know why I listen to people. People are always wrong. I thought this was very cool. A Stephen King story about a group of people trapped in a grocery store by a bunch of wacky monsters. But it's King so it's not REALLY about the monsters. It's about how people react to the monsters and how in the end it's always us that end up being the real monsters. The good news is that the hero in this one isn't an alcoholic writer. But he IS a painter who just so happens to paint Stephen King book covers.

27. The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976) - I got roped into watching this by my friend.....boy.....I don't know. I just don't know. Sometimes you just gotta stop being friends with people.

28. Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) - Awful acting. Awful writing. Awful sets. Awful special effects. Awful movie title. Awful stock footage. This could be the greatest movie I've ever seen. I'd like to make a trailer for it. SEE! The Mega Shark eat an airplane right out of the sky! SEE! The Mega Shark eat a battleship! SEE! The Mega Shark eat a destroyer! SEE! The Mega Shark eat The Golden Gate bridge! SEE! The Giant Octopus do absolutely nothing because animating those tentacles cost WAY too much money!

29. The Sound of Horror (1964) - The sound of horror is the click the play button made when I pushed it.

30. Dark Knight of the Scarecrow (1981) - This made for TV classic is about a nutty small town mail man who has an insanely over the top hatred for retarded people. Like Dwight Yoakam in Sling Blade but without all the laughs. He gets a group of friends together to hunt down a local retarded man and finds him trying to hide by dressing up like a scarecrow. They shoot him a whole bunch of times and this, of course, leads to the ghost of a retarded scarecrow coming back to haunt these guys. This movie is 100 times better than that made it sound. It also really made me miss TV movies. What happened to the TV movies of the week? There are a bunch of classic horror movies that people don't even realize as this point that they were made for TV. Many of them were better than theatrical movies. Then there were all the "ripped from the headlines" movies of the week. You kids really missed out on that one. It used to be that every single time some scandalous story popped up you could set your watch and warrant that there would be a very awful, but very watchable, TV movie of the week about the story within the month. If this was 1987 we'd have seen at least 5 David Letterman movies this weekend.

31. The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow (2009) - One fun aspect that has been creeping into Horrorfest is how one year I will watch a mediocre, big budget, theatrically released movie and then the following Horrorfest I get to watch its mediocre, low budget, straight to DVD cash grab sequel. Like most D2D sequels The Messengers 2 seems to have almost nothing in common with the original besides both movies taking place on a farm. I figured this was another example of a studio taking a horror script they had laying around, changing a few lines in it and calling it a sequel even though it's not. Plus it's actually a prequel, yet the first movie explained the back story and that story is different than this. After doing some research it turns out that the script for Messengers 2: The Scarecrow was originally a movie simply called The Scarecrow and it was actually supposed to be the FIRST movie. The studio brought in somebody to do some touch up work on The Scarecrow script, instead the new writer turned in a radically different script called The Messengers. Instead of going wait, this isn't the same movie, the studio just made it anyway. So Messengers 2 is actually the first movie in the series even though it's Part 2, while also being a prequel to a movie that it has no real connection to in anyway. Ahhhh, the magic of Hollywood. Fun Fact: The movie stars Norman Reedus. He was one of the front runners to play the Joker in The Dark Knight before Ledger got it. 2 years later Heather Ledger wins an Oscar and is fixing to star in a Terry Gilliam movie even though he's dead and Norman Reedus stars in The Messengers 2.

32. Contamination .7 (1990) - Here's another movie with a convoluted past. The movie itself is about a small town being attacked by evil tree roots. No, you read that right. Toxic waste from a nearby plant caused the tree roots to start killing people. No, you read that right too. The sad thing is that this movie had a lot going for it. It really felt like it should be good......but the acting was HORRIBLE. That totally killed the movie. This movie with a good cast could be pretty decent but with the cast it is has.....yuck. Plus it looked like it was made in the late 70s. To look it up and find out it was made in 1990 was a shocker. The big mess though is with the title. It turns out Contamination .7 is the least known title this movie has used. It was originally released in the U.S. as The Crawlers. Then it was released in the U.K. as Creepers. In 1993 it was released in the U.S. again under the name Troll 3. Obviously, it has nothing to do with Troll. Troll was about an evil troll, not evil tree roots. It had nothing to do with Troll 2 either because Troll 2 was originally a movie called Goblins. It was a movie about goblins, not trolls, and was not actually a sequel to Troll either. The saddest part is that there was already a fake Troll 3 release in 1991. That one was a cheap Italian swords and sorcery flick called Ator IV: Quest for the Mighty Sword. That movie DID have a troll in it, but it wasn't the Troll troll. That didn't stop them from changing its name to Troll 3: The Sword of Power though. So when Contamination .7 was changed to be a Troll sequel that had nothing to do with Troll it should have been called Troll 4. The main problem here is that Troll stunk and didn't deserve a sequel anyway.

33. Monster Hunter (1982) - Well, might as well keep the trend going.... This movie's original Italian title was Rosso Sangue. Translation: Red Blood. It has been released in the U.S. under the titles Absurd, Horrible and Monster Hunter. Ironically enough this movie IS absurd and horrible. It was also released in Germany as Ausgeburt der Holle which even the internet can't seem to translate. In French Canada it was released as Psychose Infernale which seems to be Hellish Psychosis. In Spain it was released as Terror Sin Limite or Terror Without Limit. Now, we get to the really fun stuff. It was also released in Germany as Anthropophagous 2 even though it has nothing to do with Anthropophagous 1. It was also released as The Grim Reaper 2. No relation. Then the best of them it all, it was released as Zombie 6: Monster Hunter. The Zombie series has been famous for sequels that aren't actually sequels. With Monster Hunter coming out in 1982, and Zombie's already convoluted sequel history, this means that Zombie 6 came out only 3 years after the first Zombie movie, 6 years BEFORE Zombie 5 and 6 years before Zombie 4. Yeah, you read that right, part 5 was before part 4.

34. Slaughter (2008) - Slaughter is everything that's right about the low budget horror genre. Usually movies of this ilk just grab a few friends who can't act, write a script filled with horror clichés and try to cover up their complete lack of talent and money with buckets and buckets of red kayo syrup. But every once in a while one goes the other way. They ditch the gore and let storytelling and interesting characters be the star of their movie. That's what Slaughter does. A smart, well written script with twists and turns that aren't seen from a mile away performed by actual actors instead of buddies. It's not perfect by any means. The first half is slow moving and does nothing but scream cliché, cliché, cliché but by time the movie ended I was blown away and it was far away from being just another cliché filled horror flick.

35. From Within (2008) - Just like Slaughter, through much of the first half of this movie I was thinking I was going to hate it but then by the end I really liked it. It has a VERY Japanese horror vibe to it and a very Japanese horror plot about a curse that forces people to kill themselves. But then it also has a plot about a tween girl falling in love with the emo bad boy tween member of a family of witches. If Twilight had sex with The Grudge, From Within would be their unwanted baby. The movie featured Rumer Willis and she confuses me. Is she attractive? I can't tell. Sometimes at the right angle I think well, I wouldn't kick her out of bed. But then other times I see her and she looks like one those Easter Island heads.

36. The Broken (2008) - Another movie that feels like a Japanese horror movie but isn't. Seriously, it's not bad enough that we've been besieged by Japanese horror movies and remakes of Japanese horror movies for the past few years? Now we gotta start making our own Japanese horror movies? This one is about a mirror breaking and cursing some family in way that I couldn't even be bothered to try to understand. Both this movie and From Within had terrible sound mixing. I know, weird complaint, but the dialogue was so hard to hear I had to turn subtitles on for both of them. Broken was so bad that I didn't know the main character was British until 40 minutes into the movie.

37. Trick r Treat (2009) - From the creators of X-men 2 and Superman Returns comes.....this. This one had a lot of hype behind it, but impressive names in front of and behind the camera doesn't always make a good movie. This is an anthology movie so it tells 4 different stories. It started off nice, seemed to be going for a nice old school Creepshow vibe, but as every second passed I found myself becoming more and more disconnected from it. Instead of just telling one story after another, they tried to interweave all the stories together. This lead to making it feel like nothing but a bunch of random scenes strung together. Since the stories were all pretty generic it felt like they just grabbed 4 random episodes of Night Gallery and mixed em all up. Nothing was given enough time to gel. I didn't care about the characters and I didn't care about the stories because every time I starting getting into something the movie switched to something else. That's not to say that there weren't some cool moments but they were few and far between.

38. Dying Breed (2008) - Australia is usually good for at least one good horror movie a year, but not this year apparently. Ya know all those dozens of movies about people going camping in West Virginia and getting stalked by a family of inbred cannibals? Pretend West Virginia is Tasmania and that's this movie. The reason these people went to Tasmania was to try to find a living Tasmanian Tiger which went extinct in 1936. Today this thing is like bigfoot over there. A bunch of weirdos claim it still lives but nobody ever really sees one. The movie itself tells us that people have been trying to find one of these things for years and years and years and years. Millions of dollars have been wasted trying to find one of these creatures and nothing has been found. Yet the 4 goobers in this movie go out there for one day, set up camp and find a Tasmanian Tiger on the very first night as it just comes walking up to their camp site and looks around. Really? It was that easy? It's really bad when the inbred family of cannibals is the most realistic thing in your movie.

39. Rogue (2007) - This evil crocodile movie has quite a bit of tension and suspense in a few scenes but it's ultimately pretty forgettable.

40. Laid to Rest (2009) - One of the worst movies ever made. The only thing that remotely works is the gore and special effects so it was no surprise to find out that this dreck was directed by a makeup artist. The writing is pitiful. I know it's cliché that horror movie characters have to do dumb things to keep the movie going but this took it to a whole new level. There's not a single character in this movie that displays any hint of intelligence. They all do the exact opposite of what any person in the world would do in this situation. The main girl in the movie even TALKS stupid. She calls nothing by its proper name. Here is a sample of crap she actually said in the movie: "I woke up in a dead box at the place where the dead people live. Then the shiny face man tried to make me dead so I grabbed a tire stick." Translation: "I woke up in a casket at the cemetery. Some guy in a mask tried to kill me so I grabbed a tire iron." It IS a laugh riot though! Funny from start to finish. The weird thing is that this movie had lots of name actors in small roles. I have no understanding of how they got these people to do this movie. Mind boggling. The most shocking was Lena Headey. I wondered if she just sat on the set of this horrible movie thinking to herself...."I was in 300.....now I'm in this."

On the IMDB message board for Laid to Rest, they are compiling a "Top 100 things I learned from Laid to Rest" list. Here are a few of my favorites...

When a camera displays "Low Battery", and then shuts down, you act like "what the hell?" and start shaking and hitting it to get it to start.
Sharp knives can slice through skulls like they're butter but you have to put some effort into slicing open a neck.
You just woke up in a coffin, watched a man get killed and don't know who the hell you are? Don't worry! Nice shoes will make you feel better!
If you are the producer and star of the movie, make sure your Missing poster lists you with a completely unrealistic weight (110 lbs, yeah right).
when escaping a killer, hide in the freezer!
Apparently, people only keep 1/8th of a tank of gas for times like these.
Who needs to call the police when you can just send them an email?

41. Danika (2006) - Marisa Tomei stars as a woman going insane with hallucinations. If this movie did not let me look at Marisa Tomei for 80 minutes this is the review I WOULD have written:


And that's all for part two.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Discussion Returns

As promised last week, the discussion questions are returning.

This week is a simple one, but should be fun to hear the responses.


What is the WORST movie you've paid money to see in a theater?


Friday, October 2, 2009

Introducing Lethargic's Horrorfest 2009

My apologies for the severe lack of attention to this site. Full time work has really been getting in the way. There is good news though. While I will not only try to put more discussions up to my once a week expectation, we have a guest providing some reviews in honor of October and Halloween. Now, we must admit, neither Brandon nor Jeremy are big horror movie fans. This however should solve all your desires for horror film reviews. So no further introduction. This is a big chunk of review from Lethargic and we thank him.




Lethargic's Horrorfest 2009 Part One

What is Horrorfest? I've been a fan of horror movies since I was a sweet young boy. Halloween was like Christmas. I'd wake up early and watch the all day long horror movie marathons. But then it got to a point where I wondered how many times can I sit here and watch the exact same movies every year? So I started making my own Halloween day marathons. Then it became an all weekend thing, then an all week thing. A few years ago I decided I was going to have a full on HorrorFEST. Watch as many horror movies as possible in the month of October. That started in 2002 and I got 51 movies watched. In the following years it continued to grow. It became more like September to November. 2005 lasted all the way until December and I watched 200 movies. That was the year I said, OK, let's not go that crazy again. Since then my goal has been to get around 100 watched every year and not let it drag on until the following year.

When I first started Horrorfest all I did was keep a list of what I watched. Then I started rating every movie one a scale of one to five. A couple of years ago I started writing down my thoughts on what I watched. I've posted this stuff in a few places over the years but this year I was thinking about not writing it up or maybe just doing it on my Facebook page. But then Brandon Felder made the mistake of announcing this site on his Twitter and I was like ooooooh! Nashville Predators blogger + Nashville Predators blogger reader = the best Horrorfest of all time! So thanks to my BFFs here at Beyond the Big Screen, you readers get to be shocked and amazed at the terrible movies I will be watching over the next month or so. And away we go....

1. Zombie Nightmare (1986) - Pretty much your typical bad 80's horror movie except this one features the amazingly goofy Jon Mikl Thor. I'm going to pause here while you do a Google image search for Jon Mikl Thor.........ok. Back? Soooo, that weirdo you just saw plays the world's most metal softball player. On the way home from the grocery store he gets hit by car driven by generic 80s villain #356. The slight tap of this car should never have even hurt a sexy beast like Jon Mikl Thor. But it apparently killed him dead because his friends didn't even think about taking him to the hospital. Why would they go to a doctor when they have a voodoo priestess in town, right? She resurrects Jon Mikl Thor....well.....sort of. I guess Thor's asking price was too high and they could only get him for a couple of days because Thor does NOT play the zombie version of the character. That honor goes to Pee Wee Piemonte who just so happens to look NOTHING like Jon Mikl Thor. Who did they think they were fooling? Jon Mikl Thor has long flowing blonde locks, wears a loin cloth and carries the magic hammer of Odin. He's VERY recognizable. You can't put a dude with short black hair who does NOT carry the magic hammer of Odin into the movie and expect us to think it's the same guy.

Anyway, for the most part it's just another dumb 80's horror movie, but it has its share of fun moments. Though my favorite moment wasn't IN the movie. During a scene with a body bag my friend decided to call it a corpse sack. At that moment it was the funniest thing I've ever heard. Now I keep thinking about how I want to start a metal band called Corpse Sack. Also, after you watch most bad 80's horror movies you can go to IMDB and see that these people never made anything else. Not so with Zombie Nightmare. This cast was kind of amazing. It had Tia Carrere who would go on to find fame and fortune in Wayne's World. Frank Dietz who became an animator, his movie Kung Fu Panda was mildly successful. John Fasano went on to write and produce all kinds of stuff. That Pee Wee guy has done stunts in nearly 200 movies and acted in a bunch more. The main villain, Shawn Levy, is now a very successful director including the Night at the Museum movies. Adam West was in it, he went on to become famous for being completely insane. Then, of course, Jon Mikl Thor went on to play in front of literally 10's of people in bars across the world fronting the world famous rock band THOR. So big props to the casting director of this one.

2. Quarantine (2008) - Most horror movies made in the 2000s generally suck because they follow the same formula. The opening 10 minutes are used to set up their villain, killer, monster, etc. Like they'll have a whole group of people get massacred by whatever it is and it makes you go wow, if that happens before the credits even start then this movie must be BANANAS!!!! But then after that opening scene the movie slows down to a crawl as the people making it think that when we buy a ticket to "Crazy Axe Murderer Part 27" we want to spend 80% of the movie watching story, plot and character development. Quarantine does the complete opposite. While watching it, the first ten minutes were awful. Slow, boring, aggravating to the point of almost making me hate Jennifer Carpenter which I didn't think possible. But as the movie progressed it became clear. They did what horror movies SHOULD do. They used the opening act to introduce us to the characters and the plot. OK, here are all the people, decide who you like and don't. Ok, now, we're trapping them all in a building with a mutant super rabies virus that turns people into bloody thirsty killers. Ok, that's everything, GO! And once it goes, it goes. The movie is constantly going uphill. The tension and the scares are constantly getting scarier and...uh...tensionier....
whatever....until the last 10 minutes where the movie does indeed go BANANAS! On a scale of 1-5 skulls I give this one 5 skulls. As far as horror movies of the 2000s, this would most certainly be in my top 10 and maybe top 5 on a good day. Of course this is the remake of the movie Rec which I have not seen yet, so maybe after I see that version I won't like this one anymore. We'll see.

3. Cemetery Man (1994) - When I saw this movie 15 years ago, it was classic. It had horror! It had comedy! It had the greatest female thingies my young eyes had ever seen! 15 years later, some of it has held up, some of it hasn't. The comedy is still there. The female thingies....boy, are they still there. The horror? Not so much. But the good news? The horror is funny. So if you want to laugh, it's a great choice. Want a scare? Not a great choice. Thingies? Best choice ever.

4. Hellgate (1989) - And the winner for worst movie I've watched so far goes to Hellgate. Here's the plot: Hot chick gets killed by a biker gang. She then haunts a road and leads motorists to a Wild West ghost town named Hellgate. Her father, Mayor of Hellgate, has a blue rock which he uses to zap a horrible 80's movie laser at the people his daughter lures in. The blue rock laser zaps the people into zombies who are then trapped in Hellgate for eternity. The end. Think the few seconds it took you to read that plot was awful? Try watching it for 90 minutes.

5. Corn (2004) - Hellgate is no longer the worst movie I've watched. Jena Malone had a pretty good career going for her there for a while. Starting with Donnie Darko she had a string of about 5 or 6 really cool movies. Then for some reason (A dare? A bet? Payment to the mafia?) she decided to make Corn. Probably the worst career decision anybody has made since Mike Tyson got on that plane to Tokyo. I haven't seen her since. She should've checked the cameras out while filming because by the look of this garbage I'm thinking it was shot on some kid's webcam. She should've also looked at the poster for the movie before she signed on. It features a bunch of sheep with red glowing eyes, behind some badly drawn barbed wire and the word CORN in a menacing font with a biohazard symbol in place of the O. At the bottom is the terrible tagline of "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." OOH THIS IS GOING TO BE SCARY!!! The problem with having scary sheep in your movie is that sheep aren't scary. If you do scary sheep as comedy, that can work. (See the movie Bad Sheep for an example.) But this movie is DEADLY serious and more like a melodramatic Lifetime movie than a funny killer sheep movie. The plot revolves around a girl who gets pregnant after an affair with a politician, drops out of college and goes back home to the farm to live with her Pa, there she discovers that the farm's sheep have been eating genetically modified corn that is making them crazy, nobody in town believes her about the sheep so she..........Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

6. Jack-O (1995) - At least that's what the box says. The title screen calls the movie Jacko Lantern. The box also says the killer is named Jack-O. In the movie the killer is named Pumpkin Man. Even the person who designed the DVD packaging couldn't be bothered with sitting through this garbage. Classic 80's B-Movie Queen Linnea Quigley + Classic B-Movie Producer Fred Olen Ray + Poorly designed big plastic pumpkin headed killer = One very, very, very, very bad movie. How this thing managed to get a 2 out of 10 on IMDB is beyond me.

It did have one fun scene though. Dude is sitting on a motorcycle with his girl. She asks for a hit of his cigarette. He gets really mad, tells her to get her own, and then throws his on the ground. That alone was enough to make me like this guy for being such a jerk. But then he lights up another cigarette. Now I LOVE the guy.

7. Highway to Hell (1991) - A Hell Cop kidnaps a girl, forcing her boyfriend to journey to Hell to save her. Sounds awful, right? I expected a typical slasher movie with a Jason Voorhees style killer in a cop uniform, but I was wrong. This is surprisingly watchable. Not a slasher film at all. It's more like your typical fantasy adventure flick where somebody has to make a long journey and face countless obstacles to save somebody or get something and meets up with a group of wacky characters along the way. Like a Wizard of Oz or Lord of the Rings in Hell kind of thing. It's a fun little movie. If I had paid attention to the people who made the movie and starred in it I probably wouldn't have expected a typical slasher movie. A script by the screen writer of LA Confidential performed by a better than expected main cast of Kristy Swanson, Patrick Bergin, Chad Lowe, Richard Farnsworth and CJ Graham (Jason in Friday part 6) is helped along the way by a bunch of fun cameos by the likes of Lita Ford, Ben Stiller, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, and the BRILLIANT choice of Gilbert Gottfried as Hitler.

8. The Tommyknockers (1993) - Another Stephen King story adapted by screen writer Lawrence Cohen (Carrie and IT) proves that lightning does not strike thrice. No blame on Cohen though, he didn't really have as much to work with this time. This was not one of King's best stories. The plot revolves around a buried green glowing UFO that telepathically teaches residents of a small town how to build and fix stuff. Water heater broke? No problem, the UFO teaches you how to fix it and also make it glow green. Need a TV that will kill your cheating husband and also glow green? Got you covered. Having trouble sorting the mail at the post office? Well, handy dandy green UFO can build you a mail sorter....that glows green. Putting on a magic show? Let the green UFO make you a great trick.....and make it glow green. Need a type writer that writes the story for you? This UFO can build it AND make it glow green for one low, low price plus shipping and handling! This stupid UFO is better than the Slop Chop, Awesome Auger, George Forman Grill, ShamWow and Mighty Putty rolled into one. It does everything. And it glows green!!!!!! Even after all that the most unbelievable aspect of the movie is the casting of Traci Lords as a postal worker. Do what now? I've been to the post office, never seen nothing like Traci Lords there. If Traci Lords worked at the post office there would be a constant line around the building of middle aged men buying one stamp each. And of course there's only one member of the town not affected by the green glowing UFO, our hero, the alcoholic writer. Really, Stephen King? AGAIN? ANOTHER alcoholic writer hero? We get it. Everything is about you and you're a big hero. WE GET IT. Quit writing about yourself and write another book about a haunted car or a vampire or a bad doggie. Enough about Stephen King in Stephen King books.

9. Catacombs (1988) - Garbage. Just pure garbage.

10. Timber Falls (2007) - This movie could be the ultimate in horror hackery one could ever see. A couple go hiking in the woods (100,000 different horror movies) and get accosted by some rapey rednecks (Deliverance), deal with a crazy old hermit lady (Misery), get chased by a mongoloid maniac (Jason Voorhees) who has a burned face (Freddy Krueger) and likes to kill and torture people with hooks and hammers (Leatherface). Just when they think they're being saved by a local cop, it turns out he’s a crazy killer too! (Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake) And then it turns out that all these people are part of one big murdering family! (Every Chainsaw movie ever and 5,000 other clones) The girl ends up getting the upper hand and chopping off the evil mother's head in the end. (Friday the 13th) Normally I'd complain about this. But this was so over the top I couldn't wait to see what they would steal next. There were certainly more good moments than bad. I guess it was OK in the end and it definitely deserves an award for the most "homages" in horror history.

11. Wilderness (2006) - The description of this said "stranded on a remote island, a group of juvenile delinquents are hunted by a killer." Now, that sounds like something I can get behind. Who doesn't hate juvenile delinquents? And it made it sound a lot like the awesome movie Battle Royale and I expected something like that. I expected something along the lines of a bunch of criminals being banished to a deserted island to get killed or kill each other, something like that. Something that would be like a punishment. What I got was quite different. After one of the juvies kills himself, the rest of his dorm room of misfits are sent to this island as punishment for bullying him into it. But.....it's not really a punishment at all. There's nothing very menacing at ALL about this island they get sent to. It's quite nice. They have a guide to take care of them and tents, sleeping bags, food, all the things you need to have a swell camping trip. I'm really having trouble finding the punishment here. Instead of being caged up in a cell, they get to sleep out in the wild open? Really? To make matters better, they soon reveal that these guys are locked up for murder, armed robbery and rape. Yet, they still get to go camping? But wait....there's more. Due to a scheduling conflict, there is also a group of female juvies on the island at the same time. OH NOES!!!! So now these murdering rapists are not only getting this awesome all expenses paid camping trip on this beautiful deserted island, but they're also getting to hang out with a bunch of hot crazy slutty chicks. Why do I get the sudden urge to be a criminal all of a sudden? Well, sure, a killer shows up and kills everybody but nobody knew that would happen when they handed down the "punishment" of the happy fun time woods filled with hot girls.

12. The 13th Guest (1932) - This is a great atmospheric whodunit thriller. Made around the same time as Dracula, it has a lot of the same feel. Like Dracula, it has no music, so in the quiet scenes all you can hear is that white noise hiss that gives the movie so much more added creepiness than music could ever deliver. But...the thing is...the movie isn't what is important here. I watched this because it was a episode of Vampira's Attic from 1954. Actually, it is THE episode of Vampira's Attic. This was the only episode the station ever recorded and saved. And as I watched it, knowing this was the only one I'd ever see, it was really quite sad. Vampira was the first TV horror host and would later go on to star in the under-rated classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. And this proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that being first is always better than being second. I expected the same old goofy camp that her rip off Elvira made famous, but it wasn't like that at all. Sure, she had goofy jokes and puns, but even a goofy joke and pun can be funny if delivered properly. Kinda like how I could go poke somebody in the eye and it wouldn't be funny at all, but The Three Stooges could do it and it'd be hysterical. Plus, unlike every other modern horror host, she actually looks naturally freaky. She's not selling sex the way Elvira does, Vampira would rather creep you out. And she's just really, really cool. Sitting there in her dark attic, drinking a "vampire cocktail" out of a martini glass in one hand and smoking a cigarette in one hand, talking about the movie and cracking jokes, she....was......awesome. I would normally love this movie, instead I was mad that the movie wasn't getting interrupted enough because I wanted more Vampira. And I can't believe this is the only one. That really stinks. Now I have something else to make me feel completely out of place in the year 2009.

Fun fact on Vampira: She was famous for having an insanely tiny 17 inch waist. 38, 17, 36 were her complete measurements. She kept this tiny waist because the only thing she ever ate was boiled eggs, graham crackers and orange juice.

Another fun fact on Vampira: Her breath smelled terrible.

13. The Girl Next Door (2007) - This movie is the most frustrating movie you could ever see. It's based on a real life story but as much about the real story as Psycho is about Ed Gein. The true story is still regarded as one of the most shocking crimes in American history. In 1965 a 16 year old girl and her sister were sent, by their parents, to live with a woman they knew because they couldn't take care of them at the time. The woman, her two kids and two neighborhood children would end up torturing the 16 year old to death. That story right there is enough to make a pretty terrifying movie. Do you really need to embellish that? Isn't the actual crime bad enough? Apparently not! They turned it up to 11 in this movie to a point where, even though I knew the true story, I still didn't believe it. The 2nd dumbest thing they did was instead of making it her kids and two neighborhood kids....they made it EVERY single kid in the neighborhood. Every kid in the entire neighborhood is just taking part in the torture and rape of a kid their own age. Really? Not a single one of them would say...umm...hey....stop? Nobody would call the police? Nobody would tell their parents? EVERY one is evil? Really? But the #1 dumbest thing and what made this movie version so frustrating is the addition of the next door neighbor kid. He met the girl when she first moves in and become best friends and she becomes his first love. While he doesn't take part in any of the torture, he witnesses almost all of it. He stands by and does nothing. He doesn't try to stop them, doesn't try to get help, doesn't even try to comfort her, he does nothing. It just lead to me screaming at my TV. DO SOMETHING!!!! If they had just told the true story without needlessly embellishing it and without adding in this extra frustrating character, this could've been a very good movie. Instead I hate it more than I've ever hated anything.

14. The Man Without a Body (1957) - This is a classic. This would be in the "so bad it's good" category but I kinda hate that term. I figure if something makes you enjoy watching it, even if it's because it's bad, that makes it a good movie doesn't it? If so....this one is really "good". A man with a brain tumor finds a doctor who is working on transplanting minds. Brain tumor guy would kinda like that option obviously. So he decides he needs to find a good head to get transplanted into. What does he decide on? Nostradamus of course. Just because he's been dead a few hundred years doesn't make it a bad choice of head. So he cuts Nostradamus' head off and they bring it back to life. But uh oh, Nostradamus head is too smart! He tricks the brain tumor guy into losing all this money! Brain tumor gets all mad and tries to kill Nostradamus head but kills one of the doctors instead. The other doctors transplant Nostradamus head onto the dead doctor and then wrap WAY too many bandages around him so he ends up looking like a giant tooth. Giant Nostradamus head tooth then goes crazy trying to kill the brain tumor guy. Wait...........what am I talking about??????????

15. Night of the Blood Beast (1958) - When you get a movie from the 50s made by Roger Corman you know you're in for some crappy fun. When you get a movie from the 50s made by Gene Corman, Roger's less talented brother.....well.....you're know you're mainly just in for some crap.

16. Voices (2007) - Oh, look. It's yet another Japanese horror movie. Yaaaawwn. Here's all I could think about while watching this: If you go by their movies, it must really suck to live in Japan. It used to be cool because you were always a samurai or a ninja. But since the 60s, you either get killed by a giant lizard or killed by a evil ghost. But I liked this one. Probably one of my favorites of the Japanese horror onslaught.

17. Necropolis (1987) - A group of do-gooders in the 1600s bust in on a witch who is minding her own business trying to worship the devil in her own home. She gets all uppity about it and goes YOU CAN'T KILL! I'LL HAVE MY REVENGE!! The scene then fades and cuts, very awkwardly, to 1987 New York where the witch now looks like Siouxsie and the Banshee's number one fan. She now spends her day riding around on her Vespa, trying to find the Devil's ring. When she's not busy with that she spends her time weirdly dancing to awful generic 80's keyboard music and growing breasts. She gets up to 6 of them!! This is the time in Horrorfest when I start wondering why I do this to myself.

I'm tired so that's all for part one. Part two, coming soon!