Two women go to the woods, meet some free spirits, and hang out with them for a while. Some bad guys come around asking for some gold coins the hippies found. One bad guy gets shot, and the other (after roughing up a hermit) gets hugged to death by a bigfoot, who, throughout the movie, had been finding beautiful, usually half-naked women, and putting them in his cave. How did he keep them from escaping? By stuffing a tumbleweed in the entrance! He's a quick one.

• One of the hippie women dreams that she has a gunfight with one of the visiting girls. They are of course, wearing only boots, gunbelts, and hats.
• The two girls drink from wine glasses as big as their head!
• Somebody got a "continuity" credit. Way to go, buddy.
• In the end, the hermit hangs out with bigfoot. Maybe they'll room together in Bigfoot's swingin' cave.

Well, there's this big greasy barbarian called Sangral. He leads his people to a valley (along the way, the narrator says they buried old people and young children...were they dead!?), where they beat up some bad guys who were bothering the inhabitants (right after the fight, he tells the victims "We come in peace.") The village gets toasted, Sangral's woman get's toasted, and Sangral gets sort of toasted. An Asian guy named Tuan and Sangral's replacement woman join him in his quest for revenge and resurrection of woman number one.

• A bunch of monkey-men speak in growly Italian run backward.
• Every bladed death was accompanied by the same slurpy sound effect.
• The courageous trio gets "swept away" by a 1-foot deep stream.
• The main bad guy and Sangral duel while holding a rope in their mouths.
• Sangral is lead to a weapon that is described thusly: "with this weapon you will be invincible, its powers are infinite, like the stars in the sky." Wanna know what it is? It's A LUDICROUSLY MASSIVE MULTI-ARROW CROSSBOW. Wanna know what he does with it? Uses it all of two times, and after the first, tosses it! The second time, he kills "Ronny, goddess of fire and death."
• Heh..."Lettuce Entertain You"...ug...cough.
• Here's a sound-clip...Sangral says something heroic (37k).

Well, I really wasn't expecting much from this movie. By the end, my head was spinning from all the plot twists. Basic plot: girl and friend go to visit girl's parents, who live out in the wilderness. Her father is a horror-fx guy (that looks kind of like an obese Sean Connery), and mom's just mom. A bunch of "punkers" break in during the night, and kill pretty much everybody. What they didn't count on was the horribly disfigured and incredibly strong guy the family had in a hidden room. He gets out and whacks all the punkers, except two, which he almost gets to, before he's gunned down by a posse member that thought he was the killer (well, he was, but not of the nice people). With no witnesses, the remaining two punkers blame it all on the ugly guy, and get away with it, until (plot twist!) the plastic surgeon uncle kidnaps them, tells them he was the father of the ugly guy, rips off his makeup+mask (made by his fx brother, and a bang-up job it is!) to reveal that he too is horribly disfigured, and proceeds to make unflattering alterations to their faces.

Major points:

• The punkers were INCREDIBLY overacted. WAAYYY over the top. Especially the leader. He worked so hard at being crazy/angry/rebellious, that it was almost painful to watch. Also, one of them was played by an actor* that was also in Return to Frogtown. This man has a bloody huge jaw. It wouldn't surprise me if some people duck when he turns his head. It's scary.
• I was practically drowning in the "who's REALLY the monster" message. It was slathered on pretty thick.

  * Jason at Unknown Productions let me know that his name is Robert Z'Dar (Tango and Cash, Maniac Cop). Robert stars in an Unknown Productsions film, "Decay".

This movie is one of the best "rampaging monster" movies I've seen. While mining for copper in Lapland, "fossil bones" (it was bloody meat...last time I checked, fossils were stone) were found wrapped around the drill bit. A tail is dug up (why this is all they got, I don't know). After it accidentally thaws, the scientists find that it's alive and growing what's missing...basically, the whole body (?!?). Anyway, the creature gets loose, and trashes Denmark as the military annoys it. Finally, it's brought down with a big tranqulizer.

• When the main general-type guy takes a tour of Denmark, it turns into a travel video for a while. Just generic shots of places in Denmark, without the characters.
• The main scientist has two hot-to-trot daughters...after many references to how man-hungry they are, when some do appear, the girls glom onto them like barnacles on a whale.
• The maintenance guy sticks his hand in an aquarium full of electric eels...jerry lewis-ish antics ensue.
• During most of Reptilicus' rampaging, his head lolled drunkenly, and he barfed slime uncontrollably. It was hard not to imagine that he was just bumbling around, trying not to step on anything. (or barbecue cow heads...?)
• "You'll have to fire point-blank at very close range." What a line.
• Reptilicus has a snakey body with feet, but no legs. They're just kind of stuck on there. It was funny seeing him stomp on a jeep.

Quick Description: 70-some minutes of a Japanese guy's screaming, freaked out transformation into a bio-mechanical freak.

A Little Longer Description (I could be wrong about 25% of this): Ok...I am about to describe the plot to Tetsuo: Ironman. This will be an incredible feat. Here goes: there is a guy called Tetsuo. he cuts open his leg, and jams a metal bolt into it. He freaks out and gets hit by a car. The occupants take him to a woods and dump him, and have sex. Later, the male driver starts to develop metal parts, while his flesh rots away. This is being caused by Tetsuo, apparently getting revenge. The "Victim," as I'll call him, has an unfortunate accident involving his lady friend and a new metal appendage...she ends up dead. Tetsuo and the Victim fight, and become merged. Tetsuo says, "Let's go turn the whole world into metal!" and the Victim says "Sounds like fun." End of movie. (in the interests of brevity, I've cut out a lot). Now...I cannot BEGIN to relate how weird and artsy this movie was. It was a real challenge to understand what was going on, sometimes even what you were looking at. But that's what made it fun...trying to guess what the heck the film makers were trying to say.

First of all, this is a short that was on the Tetsuo: Ironman tape, so it might be kind of hard to find. Well, there's this kid named Jack. He's a great drummer, in Industrial Waste Land (it's what the setting looks like). He goes to audition for a band. There's already a drummer, but he sucks. Jack shows him up, and he doesn' like it. Jack runs into him when he's having car trouble, and he: 1. Slams Jack's head with the car hood, 2. Kicks him, 3. Hooks up jumper cables to his ears and fries him up good. He's a grudge-holder, you see. The other band members rescue Jack, and try to fix him by zapping him some more...as they turn up the juice, they laugh when he drums really fast. Well, Jack goes into the wasteland, recuperates, and returns to the band's hangout. He fights with the jerky drummer, and ends up killing him by winging a cymbal at him, which decapitates him. Then a dog (which gets WAY too friendly with a band member) tries to eat the head. Check out Jack drumming!!! He rules! ds-jackjamming.mov (190k).

This was outstanding in a few ways. First, I have NEVER seen so much recycled footage. There was a moderate amount during the normal running of the film, but then they started what I thought was a little highlight thing. Nope. It was practically the whole movie, reduced to clips. Second was the terrible theme song. There was a line (repeated MANY times) that went "Hollywood bows to the blood of new blood". Then there was the Really Stupid Part. The surviving male told the surviving female to crack up a skull to "make weapons to defend themselves with." The knives had disappeared, which made this a little more believable, until I noticed THE POINTY, DANGEROUS FIRE POKERS SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO HER!!!!

A really stupid one...it featured Dirk Benedict ("Face" on "The A-Team") as an occult specialist. The plot isn't worth remembering, but the one thing that is most memorable is that the demon, which looked like one of the less silly Power Ranger monsters, NEVER, EVER, was filmed in the same shot with another actor, even though he talked directly to them, and they apparently saw him! Oh, and there was some mud-wrestling.

Um...plot...somehow a woman (I think she was a scientist of some sort) on a safari gets hooked up with a tribe of Homo Habili, the "missing link." A bad man on the safari shot the only female, so she...replaces the slain member. She hangs around them, gains their confidence, learns their ways, and finally becomes accepted (and impregnated!) by the tribe. Sometime during the movie, there was a funky hip music break that just floored us. It can floor you too! Here's the .MP3 apelady.mp3 (1.4 MB).

Ok. We see the box. It lists some of the 100+ skits, each of which sound hilarious (Truck Wrestling, Does this Aggravate You, Horny Truck, How to Kick Yourself, etc.). We put it in. It starts. The film quality is terrible. We soon realize that it's just...like...um...your uncle Ted, the one that thinks he's funny, got a camera back in the 60's, and recorded himself doing...funny stuff. Some of it actually is. Some. Like one in every 30. The rest are just pitiful. One memorable one was Perverted Cameraman, in which we are treated with the sight of a zebra wang. The guy's name is Len Cella, and I'm guessing he's just a fascinating fellow. What was really tragic about this movie was that the names of the skits were almost always more funny than what he did.

In this original tale (which, by the way, had NO gate to Hell), some young, frisky, very 80's kids are at a cabin for a weekend, and are telling scary stories. One of them tells a story about a motor cycle gang called "The Strangers." This was a really big gang...they had four guys and three bikes. They rode into a town, kidnapped a local beauty, drove to the nearby ghost-town attraction, and rammed her through a brick wall with a motorcycle (but not before her hatchet-throwing dad tried to stop them). So, she's dead for a while, until one of Mr. Hatchet's employees finds a mysterious blue crystal, that brings a really pitiful bat back to life. He brings it back to Mr. Hatchet, who tries it on his goldfish, which mutates and blows up, and then on a turtle, which he taunts. It bites him, but good. I guess turtle bites don't heal very well, because he had to wear metal bands on the wound to hold it together. Anyway, he brings his daughter back to life, and turns the town into a bunch of zombies, all of whom must kill "strangers" (witty!). The daughter isn't very cooperative...she just wants to seduce them. Other interesting parts were:

• The leading male actor seemed to have been inspired by the "Cousin Larry" character from Perfect Strangers...
• This was someone's idea of a person experiencing intense pleasure...it made me twitch.
• The Crypt-keeper's cousin?
• Horrifying 80's makeup...

I wasn't expecting this to be really great, but the effects were actually impressive, and there was plenty to riff on. The royal family of Eh-dan (Eden?) is slaughtered by the evil king Cromwell, with the help of Xusia (the former-pornstar-turned-kidshow-host??), a really ugly sorcerer (in one of the coolest scenes in the whole movie, Cromwell revived him from his slumber in a casket full of blood). When Xusia used his powers, his fingertips glowed like E.T.'s. Anyway, the hero (Talon) is a child at the time, escapes, grows up, and kills the bad king. Blah blah blah. Ok... the cool stuff...

• Talon gets crucified! And swordfights after yanking the nails out of the wood!
• Really Cool Tri-Bladed Sword of Destruction and Power! I thought it looked kind of useless until he started shooting the extra two blades at people...
• Rats that bark! I was dumbfounded.
• The actor that played Frank on Murphy Brown was a rough-and-tumble guy...sheez.
• The heroine knees every villain that comes on to her.
• The good king's son comes into the castle, mortally wounded. As the king cradles his son, he yells to his guards to "Bring a leech!"

HehheHAAAARRRHARR!!! Bram Stoker wrote himself into a story in which he is kidnapped by "The Sisterhood," a gorgeous bunch of man-hating women", who spend their days killing evil, opressive males, watching their sisters dance, and offing a few of their trained rats in amusing ways (this one by guillotine!). Anyway, one of the Sisters falls for him, spares him death by rats (which, by the way is INCREDIBLY quick... these rats are amazing... they clean bodies down to the bone in minutes). The leader of the Sisterhood decides that the group needs a PR man (Bram's a writer, you know...), so Bram gets to hang with the Sisters and write about the stuff they do (for some reason, he wants to escape...this seems a little weird). After a while, it's decided that Bram should become an official member of the Sisterhood. This involves an initiation ceremony in which Bram has to drink some Sister blood, and hack off a guy's head with a monster axe. Somewhere near the end, there's a visit to a torture chamber, in which there's a guy in an iron maiden that I immediately named "Mr. I'm-Not-Happy." I have no idea if Bram Stoker actually wrote this anything remotely resembling this movie. Oh well.

Hm. Shatner, playing veterinarian Rack Hanson, battles mutant tarantulas. Man's encroachment on nature causes some tarantulas to change their behavior and become hive creatures, making mounds and cooperating to bring down bigger food (or something like that). It had some amusing parts... The spider attacks were cool... the cow was my favorite. There was one part when "Rack" and some of his friends were stuck in a spider-surrounded house. It was getting hot, so Rack decided to open up a vent on the ceiling to check things out. Now, they had boarded up pretty much every opening in this house, and he decides to open this one up...??? Anyway, there's some stupid woman standing under the vent when he opens it, and a ton of spiders fall on her face. Ha ha. Also, on the back of the box, there's a still in which a pilot is covered with spiders, one of which he seems to be thrusting into his mouth! I was looking forward to seeing this part, but upon close examination, this frame just wasn't there. (sigh). BTW, I deeply admire actors that are tough enough to let boxload of tarantulas crawl on them.

...stay away. Avoid or become nauseated. This is the first "Negative Cheese" movie. It could have been a good movie. It had a Keanu Reeves-wannabe actor, a really foul-mouthed Uma-Therman-wannabe, a talking dismembered head, etc. HOWEVER...this was an unrated director's cut version. The first stomach-turner was when the two afore-mentioned actors were in a the hotel room bathtub, making whoopie, and the second guy peeked in the door and...um...wrestled with his one-eyed pocket-snake. Then there was a closeup of the results on his hand. It gets worse. He...samples it. Ok. End of that scene. Then there was scene where the three of them are sleeping. "Keanu" and "Uma" are in the bed, while the second guy is in a chair. The second guy gets up, goes to the bed, kneels between them, looks back and forth between them, as if deciding, then removes his pants. At this point, we turned it off. We can only take so much. I officially curse this movie.

Update: I was told that the non-director's cut version doesn't have those rotten scenes, and is actually not too bad. I suppose I'll give it another go, if I run across this version. I'm so brave.

Delicatessen is a really weird post-apocalyptic French artsy film in which an out-of-work clown is nearly eaten by the boarders in a building run by a butcher. Since there's a real shortage of food in this era, the people there have a practice of having the butcher kill a stranger (or one of the boarders, if a suitable stranger isn't available) and fix him up in cute little bags for general consumption. Anyway, the ex-clown is hired as a handyman for the building (working makes him more meaty, and they get some labor out of him before they mow down). He falls in love with the butcher's daughter, they revolt against the "system" and kill the butcher (that's really simplified, but hey). There are lots of interesting characters in this building...the perpetually thwarted suicidal woman, the "moo-makers" (they make the cans that moo when flipped), the Trogs (militant sewer-dwelling guys), the freaky old guy that lives in the basement, the floozy that pays for her food with...ummmm...heheh, etc. This movie is the perfect mix of comedy, creepiness, and pure weirdness.

He's an impudent farm boy, taught by his father to wield deadly sticks! An evil rich guy comes and gives the family a hard time. He beats up the father and rapes the mother. While defending herself, she whips out a knife and GOES BOBBIT on him. He does the Big Owie Dance. Later on, he says he feels like "half a man." He also lives vicariously through his hired samurai, who ravages an island girl. The boy is put on a slave ship, and escapes. He washes up on a beach that sort of reminds me of Hawaii (note the weird green things). He meets a nice island girl and Ben Kenobi's cousin. He trains under Kenobi. He gets a stick that's supposed to be tougher than steel, and he cuts it in half on a rock!? Somewhere during the movie, the island women shake it to distract the evil ship horn-dogs. Also, Dean Stockwell gives a bang-up performance as a sassy Spaniard!

A dorky guy tries out for a band. He sucks. He gets ridiculed. So he makes a pact with Satan to be a "rock and roll star, with all the stuff that goes with it" (read, chicks). So, he gets big hair, permanent eye-liner, and suddenly can jam like nobody's business. So he joins the band, replaces (and later kills) the effeminate lead singer. During one of his performances, he vomits green puke on a female audience member. He meets Tracy Lords (who, by the way, is pretty much the only female that doesn't get naked), and decides he and she should get cozy. He finds out that he has to perform a ritual in which he must, in the presence of Tracy, play the guitar, and baptize her in a liquid consisting of water, her blood, Special Blue Glow-in-the-Dark Voodoo Powder, and an anaconda. One of the best parts was during the end, when he was performing this ritual in an almost deserted amphitheater, another rock group comes in, watches, and thinks he's rehearsing for the opening act. They give a standing ovation when his head blows up.

The hero guy is running from a band of evil ninjas. They tree him, and then one of them blows a huge stream of puke at his face!! (This isn't a normal ninja ability) The guy falls to the ground, and the close-up on his face shows some kind of potato-salad junk covering it. The ninjas all laugh and run away (apparently this is the coolest way you can off a target). Then the hero's friends ride up, jump off their horses, and run to their fallen bud. They all think he's dead, except for one of them (who must be wise in the ways of the ninja-puke-attack) who hits the potato salad. It cracks open (I guess it dries quick) and the guy comes to. The knowledgeable guy turns to the rest of them and says "That is the mark of a true warrior!" Obviously.

The first gut-buster in the movie is then a hither-to normal priest, when confronted by a pack of advancing zombies in a graveyard, turns into a Van Damme clone! He spin kicks, he punches heads off, he does the stupid little itty-bitty rapid-fire kicks in the face! Then he says I kick *** for the Lord!" The other great scene is the final zombie fight. The hero's mean uncle throws a party in the hero's house, and the zombies that were being kept in the basement get out, and start mowing down on the party people, turning almost everybody into a zombie. The hero, after fighting and running a bit, gets a push-lawnmower, starts it, lifts it up so the blades are in front of him, and runs through the crowd of zombies!! It's the bloodiest cinematic moment I've ever seen! And it's really fake blood, so as not to be too disgusting.

In this post-apocalyptic story, almost all the men are sterile, so virile studs like Rowdy Roddy Piper are wanted by the government to boost population. They want to control this populating though, so the slap a hi-tech chastity belt on him that skwunches his cahoneys if he doesn't do what he's supposed to. I don't need to describe all the amusing things that could happen in this situation...use your imagination. Another interesting part was when the heroine is forced to do a belly-dance for this huge toad-mutant-king. She dances very well, because he starts yelling that she has "Aroused the Seven Snakes" and it cuts to the toad-mutant-king's crotch, where seven tents are being wildly pitched.(yeegh)

R.R. Piper movies are always a hoot. This one's main amusing part is when Piper is trying to get his friend construction worker friend to wear these special glasses that will let him see the aliens living among us. His friend doesn't want to. They fight. Hard. For a reaallly long time. Piper says "Wear the glasses!! (thwak)" Construction worker says "No!! (whap)" This lasts for a long time. It's hilarious. Then there's Piper's line, "I've come here to kick butt and chew bubble-gum. And I'm all out of bubble-gum."

Ok. When we first saw this, we were utterly mystified for the first 3/4 of the movie. There is NO plot. It's just clips from different zombie movies slapped together, with an occasional scene where a zombie goes into a theater. At the end of the movie, there are a bunch of zombies sitting around this oblivious woman. Then she notices. That's the end. Some of the zombies in this movie are SOOO bad. The one's from Zombie Lake are just guys with green-dyed-faces in Nazi outfits. There are some others that look like they just have some mud smeared on their faces. I especially like the Arabian Zombies. It looks like it's in Saudi Arabia, complete with Saudi Arabian freedom fighters machine-gunning the zombies.

This one had a lot going for it. It was dubbed, German, and from the 70's (I think). I can't remember much, except for the this one whiny guy that we all wished would just get chomped on by one of the grannies. It was kind of neat when the grannies and their greedy inheritors are at the dinner table, and the grannies open up a present from their evil daughter. A gas flows out, flowing into the grannies. They begin to mutate and drool slime, But Nobody Notices! It's really funny.

555 was a mistake. It was filmed with a camcorder(!!!) and was genuinely sick. The only thing that was entertaining was the film quality. It was also incredibly boring.

An old security guard is patroling in winter. He sees something like yogurt pumping out of the ground. What does he do? What every normal person would do...he Tastes it! He likes it. He calls his buddy. He tastes it. He suggests that they market it. Yeah. Happens all the time. Well, it's sold as "The Stuff" and everybody eats it. Except a few people, like a little kid that opened the fridge one night to see the Stuff crawling out of its container. Later on we see that the Stuff eats out a person's insides, and fills the empty space with itself. When it wants to attack or something, it gooshes out of the persons mouth (and when it does that, the mouth gets all ripped out and stretched...decent fx here).

A dog that can think (but not talk) is given to an old woman. After she has it for a while, she starts getting senile, and begins to lust for her canine. She tells it she used to call her husband's love organ "her little man", and then says to the dog, "Come here, little man." She's in the tub at the time, and she grabs the dog and pulls him in with her. Baxter freaks out, and decides he doesn't like her. So when she's on the stairs, he knocks her down. He's given to a young couple next. He likes to watch them copulate. He's a sick little dog. Anyway, he ends up with a little boy that is fixated on Hitler. The boy trains Baxter to be an attack dog. The boy meets a girl (who he thinks resembles Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend), who has a female dog. Baxter mates with the other dog, while the kids watch (interesting switch!). Baxter is ashamed. He feels that he must prove to the boy he isn't weak, so he attacks him. The boy beats Baxter to death with a stick. Then the boy wonders if the young couple will adopt him. The End. (only the French would make a movie like this...)

An autistic boy (10-11 years old) has no friends except for his attractive baby-sitter. He tries to make friends, but they're all mean to him (the little girl that lives next to him offers a ride on her bike, but it falls apart when he sits on it, and she laughs at him...tsk, tsk). About a mile away from his house is a woods with a deep pit in it. In this pit are Troglydites(sp?). Apparently they survive by eating clumsy forest-dwelling creatures. The boy treats them like pets, and goes and talks to them. One of the stranger parts of this movie is his teddy bear. It seems to be possessed, because it talks to him, and at one point, moves...but this is never explained. Anyway, the boy starts to feed them meat he buys at a butcher shop with money he steals from his baby-sitter. He runs out of money, so he starts feeding people he doesn't like to the beasts. This is where the movie starts getting really amusing. First he steals the neighbor girl's bike, and lures her (for a mile!) to the pit, where he puts it on the far side. She runs down the path, doesn't see the HUGE pit and falls in. The boy is pleased. Then he plays football with the baby-sitter's boyfriend (his competition!). The boy runs to the pit with the ball, then tells Biff to go for a pass...Biff doesn't watch where he's going (surprise!). Then comes the topper...there was an old lady in a wheelchair that was mean to him. He offers to take her for a walk, and she's pleased. So he takes her (a mile long trip, for crying out loud! ) to the pit, and dumps her. Anyway, he runs out of people he doesn't like (he takes his baby-sitter out to the pit, and she accidentally falls in), so he decides to let the Troglydites out...wouldn't want the poor blighters to starve or anything. So they get out, wreak havoc, and finally get driven back into the pit and blasted by hicks with shotguns. I suppose the boy's mother was killed, because he's taken to his grandparent's house. He meets a little girl his age (his cousin or something). They hit it off, she asks if he wants to see something neat, and he says "sure." They head off into the woods to (at this point, Mark Plozay, a friend of mine, made the most amazing call...he predicted that the girl would have her own pit, and that she would push in the boy) her pit, and she pushes him in. End of Movie. Wahoo!

This really cool flick starts out in a Siberian prison camp and ends up in Montreal, Canada. Ilsa is in charge, and she likes to kill people and mate in multiples. This movie is mostly Ilsa and crew getting it on, and people dying in interesting ways. After Stalin dies, and the camp is burned to the ground, Ilsa relocates to Montreal and starts taking over organized crime (in Canada?). A prisoner that escaped her camp happens to come into one of the brothels controlled by Ilsa. She sees him, and decides that she must interrogate him (even though she's not connected to the Russian government anymore)...he's a hockey coach now, by the way. Anyway, the Russian government decides that they cannot lose such a precious citizen, and sends twenty- or-so hitmen to get him back. There's a big showdown, and lots of people die. Ilsa escapes, but breaks her leg out on a frozen lake, and (I assume) freezes to death. Some of the highlights include:

• Prisoner's head smushed with a big hammer
• Tiger savages innocent dummy!
• There seems to be a rule in Russia that you can't take more than one drink out of a glass without throwing the glass on the ground
• Seems there's also a law in Canada that you can't go more than five miles per hour on a snowmobile. It was great when a guy with a gun was brought down by a single Ilsa-grunt on one of these slow-moving machines...he was armed with a spear, which made it really amusing.