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YellowBrickRoad (2010)
What were they thinking?
I imagine the people who made this saw Blair Witch Project and said, "Yeah, let's make something like that."
So- Some mystery from the past to look into? Check.
A bunch of young idiots get lost in the woods? Check
Ending that does not make a lick of sense? Check.
What BWP effectively did that this movie didn't was actually give you characters you care about. First, they had too many. Second, the movie goes south very quickly when the characters just start killing each other for no good reason other than they were as tired of this movie as the audience.
The movie has some eerie elements, like the vintage music that keeps coming from an unknown source. But frankly, the backstory was more interesting than the story. I'd rather watch a movie about the 1940's people who walked into the woods than these people.
Batman: Caped Crusader (2024)
A mixed bag
Well, watching the opening credites, Bruce Timm, great, he worked on the excelent Batman Animated Series in the 1990's. Then JJ Abrams, the guy who destroyed Star Trek AND Star Wars.
So the good- The animation looks great, the feeling fo Film Noir of the 1940s with no anachronisms like computers and cell phones. (Although it did have the anachronism of racial equality in the 1940's) The stories were engaging, they kept my interest.
The bad. Race and Gender swapping characters. The Penguin is now a (really ugly) woman, Harley Quinn is now Asian and Gay (and has no ties to the Joker, who is mostly absent from this series). Commissioner Gordon and Batgirl are black. Some of the female character design looks like they were drawn by students in an Intersectional Feminism Course.
Okay, I kind of get it, these characters were mostly devised in the 1940's, were diversity wasn't a thing.
This Batman is kind of a jerk. He's actually abusive to poor Alfred (although he lightens up in the last few episodes) The late, great Kevin Conroy played a Batman who was intense, but he had a basic humanity this one lacks. (I blame the writer more than the voice actor).
Other characters are worse than their TAS counterparts. Bullock is outright corrupt, Harvey Dent (before he becomes Two-Face) is morally compromised.
The Acolyte (2024)
I really wanted to like this!
I went into this show with a hopeful attitude. The first few episodes were promising, but the wheels soon fell off the wagon.
The show is set 100 years before the Prequels, where a murder mystery unravels when someone is killing Jedi who were involved in an incident involving a coven of witches. As the mystery plays out (although the audience can figure it out, which is never a good sign in a mystery), the actions of the characters make absolutely no sense.
There were some interesting concepts. Such as, are the Jedi morally questionable when they find force-sensitive kids and recruit them into this Order before they can make decisions. But the Space Witches aren't much better, in that they created these kids to fulfill a role in their religion.
It doesn't help that the main actress who plays twins can't act, and the lead Jedi is using English as a second language.
The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971)
Rosie Greer did it better
This movie has a lot in common with "The Thing with two heads" Starring Ray Milland and Rosie Greer. And while the latter movie had some ham-fisted commentary about race relations in 1970's America, it was far better than this trainwreck.
The cast includes Bruce Dern, Pat Preist and Casey Kasem... not really a-list actors, put people you may have actually heard of. None of them play the monster in question, which might be part of the problem, because the most important character in the movie is played by non-entities.
So Dern plays a sciencist who is attaching heads onto animals for, um, reasons, and decides to attach the head of an escape psychopath onto a mentally challenged giant, because.. um.. SCIENCE!!!
The evil head takes control and proceeds to go around murdering people, as one does, until the movies exciting climax.
We can also talk about the cinematography, where characters are out of frame during key scenes, and the fight choreography looks awful. Then there's the bad day-for-night. I could go on listing this film's flaws, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
Pagan Island (1961)
Side-boob Island
So we have 60 minutes of white women playing Pacific Islanders, all wearing strategically placed leis so that we don't see any nipples (even though one or two managed to slip past!)
Of course, this movie is pure exploitation, and if you go into it with that in mind, you can ignore some of the more problematic elements.
The movie is told in flashback, which takes away a lot of the tension, as you know who is going to live and who is going to die.
So a man washes up on an island with only women on it, who are going to sacrifice one of their number to the Sea God. Of course, that's the one our "Hero" falls in love with. After he saves the Island Girls from another tribe of natives (played by black men who are all gunned down, because it's 1961!) He is accepted by the tribe.
He eventually comes up with a plan to beat the sacrifice! Will it work? Well, no, because they already spoiled it in the beginning!
Backcountry (2014)
I was cheering for the bear!
Oh, I have no idea why people liked this movie. It's pacing was slow, the characters were unlikeable.
So this couple goes out to the woods, where the man plans to pop the question out in nature. Instead, they get lost and are stalked by a bear. The man is a supposed experienced camper, but makes a bunch of mistakes, like not taking a map, not taking his phone, you know, very basic stuff good campers know to do.
So we get to watch their relationship call apart, then patch itself up, and then the bear attacks. You don't actually SEE The bear until the third act of the movie. (Imagine if Jaws did this!) and the first two thirds are squabbling.
Also, the sound wasn't very good and I struggled to hear what they were saying.
Morbius (2022)
I really wanted to like this
Ah, the sad state of Sony's Spiderverse. Spiderman went back to the Disney MCU, so they just have the ancillary characters like Morbius, Venom, and Madam Web that only the hard core Comic Nerds know or care about.
So you have Jared Leto, who apparently annoyed his crew by acting like he had a disability between takes Leto's performance was dull and boring, almost like he downed a bottle of Nyquil before each take.
Contrasting that is Matt Smith, bring the same kind of manic energy that he brought to Doctor Who. Frankly, the only watchable parts of the movie involve Smith.
So spoilers, Leto and Smith suffer from a crippling blood disease, with Morbius being the brilliant scientist and Milo being the investor in his whacky cure that involves vampire bats. Keep in mind, these people live in the Marvel Universe, so everyone should see why this is a terrible idea.
So of course, they both gain super powers, but must drink blood to keep them.
The real problem is that the FX look awful and are over the top, while the actors deadpan their performances (except Smith).
Communion (1976)
Catholic Neighborhood drama
Set in a Pre-Vatican 2 Catholic neighborhood, a little girl is suspected of murdering her little sister during her first communion. The girl is really pretty creepy, so of course, you fall for all the false flags they set for you implicating her.
Then they kind of forget about her halfway through, and focus on the drama in the Catholic neighborhood with the divorcee who has an unhealthy relationship with the priest, the creepy gay-coded landlord, and the rather nasty aunt.
None of the characters are likeable. The pacing is pretty much like a TV movie, with some gaps in the movie where the commercials probably would have went. Also in here is Brook Sheilds in a child role.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
Better than the first one
I liked this one better than I liked the first part, even though it took more departures from the book. It definitely dragged in places, especially the scenes in the desert. (Although almost all interpretations do, maybe it's just the psychological effect of a desert.)
So, where they really depart from previous versions is main characters have serious doubt about what they are doing. While this is hinted at in the book, it is much more overt here. (It isn't until the second Book that Paul really starts to realize what a mess he's made of things.)
The Character of Chani is a departure. While she is totally devoted to Paul in the book, here she's the one screaming that this is wrong (even though they are aiming for the same goal.)
The character of Feyd Ruatha was really good as a villian, for anyone still traumatized by the image of Sting in metal speedos in the 84 version, this is so much better. He's a psychopath and it's obvious.
The battle scene at the end is quite impressive, but utlimately forgettable. But this is the curse of modern movies, I guess.
Worth a watch? If you've already seen part one and liked the books, definitely.
La nuit a dévoré le monde (2018)
I was cheering for the Zombies
So we have another Zombie movie, because clearly we haven't made nearly enough of those. Except these are French Zombies.
A jerk goes to his ex-girlfriends house to get some tapes and makes a scene in front of all her other guests. While he sleeps it off in the other room, the Zombie Apocolypse breaks out overnight and everyone in the world except him is turned into a Zombie.
He somehow secures the rest of the apartment building, except for a Zombie family he traps in an apartment and another Zombie he traps in an elevator. These are by the way, the dumbest zombies I have seen in this genre. Proper Romero Zombies would have eaten this fool in the first 20 minutes.
Most of his actions seem to involve engaging in rather pointless activity. For some reason, the power and gas are still running in this apocolypse, so he's not sitting in the dark.
The movie is supposed to imply that he is slowly going mad. Like a lot of Zombie movies, the number of Zombies outside is often plot dependent. Need the character to feel trapped? Have a whole hoard. Need him to try to rescue a cat, just have a few.
Terror Is a Man (1959)
Loose adapation of HG Wells... very loose.
So this is an adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau, so loose that they had to change the names of the characters. So your typical, not violating someone else's copyright mad scientist is trying to advance evolution through surgery. Unlike the other versions, the doctor only can afford one abomination of nature instead of dozens.
Also doesn't have a love story with a panther girl shoe-horned in. Instead, it has an affair with the mad scientist's unhappy wife.
Where the movie really falls down is the monster, as they hid it until the last possible minute, and it just doesn't look that impressive. Unlike the classic 1933 version or the off the rails 1996 version (Which is so bad it's good), the scientist is just boring.
Dead & Buried (1981)
Fun 80s Horror
The 1980s were the Silver Age of horror, with some of the greatest icons emerging. They also did a lot of atmospheric films like this one.
A small town sheriff is puzzled by a series of mysterious murders, and begins to suspect the local mortician, played by Grandpa Joe.
As he begins to unravel the mystery, he realizes that everyone in the town is a zombie, resurrected through voodoo and mortuary wax.
A solid cast, including James Farentino, Eddie Jack Albertson, Melody Anderson, and blink you might miss it, Robert Englund in a pre-Freddy role.
The ending is a bit predictable, event though they try to play it as a twist, you can see it coming a mile away.
Blood Dolls (1999)
Hey, what do we do with these Puppet Master Rejects?
The plot is that an eccentric billionaire loses a billion dollars to three competitors, due to a court case handled badly by his law firm. His response is to turn his lawyer into a racist doll, which he has already done to the judge and prosecutor in the case.
But that's not all, he keeps a girl band locked in a cage, whom he shocks into performing musical numbers for, um, reasons. His butler wears clown makeup and his head is shrunken. It's like they took all the weird ideas that weren't good enough to get into Band's other films and just dumped them here.
The dolls are soon dispatched to start killing his enemies. Not sure how this is supposed to get him money back for him OR why these dolls, who I assume miss their human existence, are doing his bidding.
This movie has little point and is just weird, and not in a fun way.
Trophy Heads (2014)
Utter Garbage
So the plot line is that an obsessed movie fan kidnaps a series of 1980s "Scream Queens", and the proceeds to film himself killing them before doing bad taxidermy on their heads.
The sad lives of the former scream queens can't be any worse than their actual sad life that ANY of them thought this was a good idea. None of them have looks that have held up from their heydey.
It's not only torture porn, it's BAD torture porn. I just can't see who this film is made for. It demeans the Scream Queen actresses. It makes the fans look bad. None of the characters are likeable. Who are we supposed to be cheering for here?
Hard Pass... I wish I had.
Birth/Rebirth (2023)
Two hours of my life I can't get back
This movie was.. pointless.
The plot is that a coroner is engaging in some mad science and steals the body of a preschooler who died of meningitis. The mother of the child happens to be a nurse at the same hospital after the coroner resurrects the child, and creepy shenanigans abound.
The method involves taking amniotic fluids from pregnant women who meet a certain tissue type. And we watch the two characters get involved in a creepy symbiotic relationship to keep this child alive.
It's slow, tedious, and kind of creepy, and not worth watching. It doesn't help that neither of the leads are very good actresses, or the subject is a dead kid.
Hard Pass.
Shriek of the Mutilated (1974)
Ugh, boring film with a dumb twist ending
So a college professor takes a bunch of his students up into the woods to look for a "yeti" (even though Yetis are from Asia, so he would be looking for a sasquatch). Except that the Yeti is really just a guy in a suit and they are all part of a crazy cannibal cult that has to scare a woman to death in order to eat her.
Of course, the problem was the Yeti Costume was so fake-looking that absolutely no one would have been fooled by it. The supposed hero of the film, one of the students whose girlfriend ends up on the menu, is perfectly fine using the bodies of his friends as bait for the yeti.
The thing becomes even more absurd with the "Twist" ending, where a bunch of bad racial stereotypes show up to engage in the feast. The whole movie was uncomfortable to watch.
Condemned to Live (1935)
Poverty Row Cash In
Before there was The Asylum and the Mockbuster, there was Poverty Row and their quick imitation movies. Cashing in on the popularity of Universal's Dracula, this movie is about a man whose parents were hiding out in a cave in Africa from some angry natives (that hasn't aged well), and a vampire bat bites the woman. (Clearly, the writers didn't know vampire bats are from South America, not Africa.
Flash forward to the present day, and the baby has grown up to be a respected professor who tells the dumb peasants of this town how to live their lives. But by night, he creeps out and drinks blood. He's tragic because he doesn't know he's doing this. Put in there a love triangle with a girl who wants to marry him for status and not really love and a hunchback who covers up evidence of the murder, and you still have... a pretty dull melodrama from the days when movies were more like stage plays than movies.
Worth a watch? I guess if you are into film history.
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)
The little movie that could
After watching so many big-budget bombs that insult your intelligence, it's nice to watch an atmospheric, well-acted, scary movie made on a shoestring budget. .
The movie centers around John Wayne Cleaver, a young man who has all the markers to be a future serial killer, much to the concern of his family, who run the local funeral parlor. Not coincidently, there is a series of murders in the town, being perpetrated by an elderly man who is, in fact, some kind of creature that needs to exchange its own body parts for those of its victims.
Christopher Lloyd (the only 'name" actor in the film) of "Back to the Future" fame plays the elderly monster, in quite a departure from his usual over-the-top comedic characters. Instead, he plays the creature with a combination of depth, sympathy, and menace as he matches his wits with the protagonist. The movie is an eerie game of cat and mouse.
And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the effective use of location in this film The setting is a town in Minnesota, where you see the sense of decline in the factory towns of the US Midwest. The town itself is a character in this film, with its background characters, decaying buildings, and terrible weather, and it shows.
Definitely worth a watch.
Chi o suu bara (1974)
Toho's second attempt to rip off Hammer
And this one was better than the last one I reviewed, "Lake of Dracula". The story here is that a school teacher takes up a new position at a girl's school in Japan, where apparently the staff can prey on the students. (I'm hoping this is a college!)
The creepy headmaster is keeping his dead wife in the basement, as the students are slowly being picked off.
This one is more Hammer like in that there are ample amounts of blood and breasts, and these vampires are almost scary. But it still falls down on the lack of engaging protagonists. Seriously, no one should be able to win a fistfight with a vampire except a werewolf or a Frankenstein.
The two vampires being symbiotically linked also seems to be a major design flaw. There's also a really creepy part of being able to cut off your victims face and wear it.
So is this fun to watch? Meh, kind of.
Noroi no yakata: Chi o suu me (1971)
Toho Imitates Hammer (badly)
This movie is Toho (best known for their Kaiju movies) doing a horror movie in the vein (pun intended) of the Hammer Dracula films. Except this movie lacks anyone with the talent levels of Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing. It also lacks the blood and breasts that often graced Hammer efforts.
So what does it have? Basically, a lot of dream sequences, with the least effective vampire ever, as the main girl avoids being an unwilling blood donor a dozen times.
The movie is very slow until the last 15 minutes, when there is the confrontation with the vampire and his female acolyte, who is the main girl's sister.
The most absurd part is when the doctor rants at the vampire with "rational" explanations for the last hour of encountering supernatural stuff.
So in conclusion. Japan shouldn't do gothic horror movies, and Britain shouldn't do giant monster movies. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Gorgo and Konga!)
Renfield (2023)
Fun movie, they could have used a better cast.
This movie could have been a lot of fun, except the cast is weak. First, Nicholas Cage as Dracula channelling Bela Lugosi. Maybe it was the accent he was trying to affect, or maybe the appliance he had in his mouth, but it was hard to understand what he was saying half the time.
The other weak link in this movie is Awkwafina. She plays the cop who teams up with Renfield at the same time Dracula teams up with a drug cartel she had been hunting. She's just not a good actress, and it seems that the character was written for someone else.
The actor who plays Renfield is pretty good, but he's let down by his two main supports.
A lot of it seems to satirize group therapy and support groups. Renfield joins a group of people in dysfunctional relationships with narcissists.
Lots and lots of blood and gore which is so gratuitous it becomes comical in itself.
Again, it's good for one viewing... and that's about it.
The Resonator: Miskatonic U (2021)
Remaking "From Beyond"
This is a remake of "From Beyond", without any of the originality. Crawford Tilenghast (the character from the original HP Lovecraft Story) creates a resonator which allows the dimensions to interconnect, and allowing monsters from that dimension to enter our realm. Oh, and people get horny!
Instead of the clever creature effects from the earlier movie, we have a lot of bad CGI. It's just not as good of a movie as the earlier one. And of course, being a Charles Band movie, we have the obligatory amount of gratuitous nudity.
The movie ends, inexplicably, with a reset button being pushed, everyone who died is alive again, and Herbert West from Reanimator shows up. (Not Jeff Combs, but a look-alike.)
Dr. Moreau's House of Pain (2004)
Even worse than the Marlon Brando version
So this movie is about a boxer who teams up with two women to find his missing brother, only to wonder into the eponymous Doctor's lair. Except in this case, the monsters have taken the doctor hostage and are forcing him to try to "cure" them of being monsters.
The makeup effects are good, but it's let down by a weak story and Band's insistence in putting nude scenes into a movie that probably didn't need them. Seriously, Chuck, just direct some porn films, everyone will be happier.
The problem with this movie is that it borrows the concept from the HG Wells classic. But the Wells version didn't turn men into animals, it turned animals into people.
The setting is in the 1940's, but they didn't have the money to do an actual period piece, so you get modern actors imitating bad film noir.
The Mad Magician (1954)
Vincent Price at his best
This is Vincent Price doing what he does best, getting macabre revenge on people who have wronged him. The movie starts with Price as an illusion designer who wants to be on the stage, only to be frustrated by his partner invoking his contract. The same partner who stole his wife years before. By the time he gets killed, you are kind of cheering for Price.
Price proceeds to eliminate other cast members, including the aforementioned ex-wife and his professional rival, before a police officer realizes all these people have the same fingerprints. Meanwhile a mystery writer meddles in the case, all bringing it down to a thrilling conclusion in the workshop of the Mad Magician.
Special shout out to Green Acres Eva Gabor as the unfaithful wife.
If this movie was made today, they'd replace the complex characterizations with a lot of CGI Splatter.
Cocaine Bear (2023)
Fun if you don't take it seriously
I'm not seeing where all the hate is coming from. This movie is exactly what the title promises you. There's a bear and it takes cocaine.
Of course, the true story this was based on was that a bear ate some cocaine dropped by smugglers and died.. which isn't that funny. This bear goes on a rampage, and while it kills a lot of people, most of the kills are kind of amusing.
The bears (there are more than one) are rendered by CGI and they don't look that good, but they aren't horrible. The acting performances, where characters are given story arcs (the mother trying to find her daughter, the park ranger looking for a promotion, the drug dealers trying to recover their stash), are passable. Ray Liotta is the only name person, and he gives the best performance his limited acting ability could provide.
Still, it's a perfectly fun movie if you turn off your brain for a couple of hours.