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....
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..........
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!
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