Horror Movie Review: Scourge (2008)

Overall: D

Acting: C

Writing: D

Story: D

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Jonas Quastel

Starring:

Russell Ferrier

Robyn Ledoux

Nic Rhind

Particular trigger warnings: nothing I can really remember

Passes the Bechdel test: also not that I remember

            This whole thing has a “the worst of Syfy original movie” all over it. But maybe I just have a difficult time taking “Ultimate Evil” seriously when it expresses itself in belches and farts. Also, this is a bit more of a synopsis than a summary, because you should not feel at all compelled to watch this movie, so I feel no guilt in telling you exactly why it sucks.

            So basically the plot is that an ancient evil called “The Scourge” was locked up by priests a long time ago in the foundation of a church. In a fire, said evil is released, and possesses a fireman. We get some gross-out scenes as the young fireman suddenly begins eating everything he can – sticks of butter, cartons of expired milk, mayonnaise, etc. He goes to shower, starts belching and gurgling, and acting somewhat zombie-ish.

            Meanwhile, our main character Jesse (Robyn Ledoux) runs into our other main character Scott (Nic Rhind.) Apparently, the two were friends at once point, but Scott got in trouble with the law and with Jesse’s uncle, the sheriff. He was in prison for a while, but has since gotten out, and he was of course never a bad guy, but had simply taken the fall for someone else, now just wants to move on, etc. Jesse is a bit interested in him, but Scott already has a girlfriend.

            Later, the zombie-ish belching firefighter shows up at Scott’s hockey game and causes some chaos. He ends up wandering into the locker room, where Scott’s girlfriend joins him. Naturally she’s been cheating on Scott with the fireman, and is planning on a quicky in the locker room. (At her boyfriend’s hockey game… obviously.) So the fireman kneels down, and belches up a badly CGI’d evil squid bug thing that invades her bellybutton and possesses her. She goes through the same zombie-changes as the fireman, but presumably because she’s a hot chick there’s less eating and belching.

            She winds up going to a club and passing on the evil infection thing to a new guy in the bathroom. Scott has followed her, and he confronts her just in time to watch her spontaneously hemorrhage and die. Scott is assumed to have killed her, and since the fireman’s body turned up at his hockey match, the sheriff is after him.

            Blah blah, they figure out how to kill it, though I’m not sure why they need to do what they do (it involves electricity and alcohol.) Meanwhile the evil keeps getting passed from person to person, before it eventually gets passed to an obese photographer guy. Jesse sets out to seduce him and bring him back to a motel room where she and Scott can try to get the evil out of him. They attempt this, and it jumps to Scott. And because he’s the hero, he’s immediately aware of this, and rather than making him do unsexy things like belch and ravenously eat, he just tries to kill Jesse.

            A secret order priest type shows up at the end to conquer the evil and save Scott and Jesse, and the obese photographer is taken to the hospital. The priest man explains that they’ve gotten rid of most of the Scourge, but he’s always hunting down any remaining ones.

            Then insert one of those stupid “the end… or is it?” endings, letting us know that the horror isn’t really over!

            What a stupid movie. The acting is average, and is probably what can be complained about least. And don’t get me wrong, because the acting isn’t good. It’s just not as bad as everything else. The story itself isn’t unforgiveably awful, the idea of an ancient evil parasite jumping host to host, but it’s hard to find a way it could be more poorly executed. The most obvious thing wrong is the belching, farting, zombie-hosts. It’s just stupid. It’s consistently stupid. And if this were supposed to be a horror-comedy or a parody of some kind, it’d still be stupid, but understandable. But no, it’s played straight. And it’s clear that the writers realize that it’s stupid, as the hot girl that gets possessed and the hero both are spared the gross/stupid bits of the possession. The effects look awful – it’s bad CGI, and when it’s bad, it’s bad. And a maybe petty complaint when there’s already so much wrong – but the bellybutton is not an orifice! It doesn’t stretch to accommodate something entering the body through it and then return to normal immediately! It’s just… stupid.

            There’s really no serious gore in their violence, minus the girl bleeding out in once scene and the pretty non-explicit electrocuting of the guy in an attempt to draw out the Scourge. There’s only moderate sexuality when a girl showers and the fact that the parasite being passed from mouth to belly button usually is accomplished by implying oral sex is going to happen. It gets an R rating mostly due to language, meaning the younger pre-teen male audience that would probably appreciate the bodily humor couldn’t actually see it. It seems like it would have been better cut to PG or PG-13 and left to cable television and late night timeslots on SyFy, because it certainly didn’t deserve a DVD release.

Horror Movie Review: Forget Me Not (2009)

Overall: C

Acting: C

Writing: C-

Story: C+

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Tyler Oliver

Starring:

Carly Schroeder

Cody Linley

Micha Alberti

Brie Gabrielle

Jillian Murray

Zachary Abel

Sean Wing

Chloe Bridges

Brittany Renee Finamore

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes

Particular triggers: nothing I can really think of

In this review, the summary and my reactions and opinions are all lumped together. So spoilers abound through it all.

Forget Me Not jumps right in, showing us our cast of 20-and-30-somethings playing unlikable teens doing unlikable things. This movie suffers incredibly from the problem of having too many characters introduced that are more or less physically and characteristically indistinguishable from each other. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took me almost to the halfway mark to even learn all of their names.

So we have Sandy (Carly Schroeder) the class president, who is dating supposedly bad-boy Jake (Micha Alberti), though he’s never shown to do anything more “bad” than the rest of them. There’s Sandy’s brother Eli (Cody Linley), the valedictorian who just wants to be a pirate. There’s Jake’s sister Lex (Jillian Murray) the supposedly bad-girl who is dating TJ (Sean Wing). There’s Chad (Zachary Abel) who is stringing along two women, cheating on both because he is our Even More Unlikable Douche character. The two women he’s screwing are Layla (Chloe Bridges) and Hannah (Brie Gabrielle). For additional drama, Eli also has a thing for Hannah. And our whole group has just graduated high school, and are planning on going on a vacation together.

The strain on my suspension of disbelief starts in right away. A) None of these people look even remotely like recent high school graduates. That’s not uncommon in horror, or even film in general, but this is pretty egregious. B) None of these people act like high schoolers either, and not just because of the truly endless alcohol, weed, and sex they seem to have available. C) I know this is nit-picky, but how many people do you know that have had the identical large friend group since they were young kids? For that matter, how many friend groups have not one, but two sets of siblings that have the exact same social circle? And how many people do you know that maintain childhood friendships, and then only manage to date within that same circle? One or two of these issues could be pretty easily ignored, but there was just nothing about this batch of people that made me believe they were their characters, or that those characters could be real people.

So our group is hanging out and they decide to go to the local graveyard to play a game they played there as kids. It’s a “ghost in the graveyard” game like hide and seek, where the “ghost” has to find the other players and turns them into ghosts until only one person is left “alive.” As they get ready to play, a mysterious girl shows up and asks if she can play too. This is Angela (Brittany Renee Finamore.) At the end of the game, she jumps off a cliff (who builds a graveyard next to a cliff? Erosion is a real thing, people), claiming that soon Sandy will remember her. The police can’t find a body when they investigate.

As the friend group goes about their business the following day, Sandy remembers her childhood friend Angela, the girl who taught her the ghost in the graveyard game. Then people start getting offed… and Sandy suddenly realizes that she’s the only one who remembers the people who’ve been killed. The others don’t have any memory of them at all. And reality seems to be changing around them, as if they didn’t ever exist. (For instance someone’s tattoo of a now-dead character’s name disappears, their plans to go to the beach have changed to plans to go to the mountains, etc.)

In some ways I liked this. It sort of subverts the usual plotline, where everyone realizes that their group is being killed off, and is aware that they’re in danger, but then acts stupidly anyway. At least this time, they don’t even realize that their friends are missing. If you cared about the characters, it could even be psychologically hard-hitting to realize that they won’t even remember their significant others or siblings. Honestly, I like this as a plot line, and think it could have been really well utilized in a more suspenseful movie, but unfortunately it seemed to be somewhat wasted in this film.

The plot goes on, more of them are offed, everyone assumes Sandy is crazy, blah blah. Sandy tries to find out what Angela has to do with the murders, while no one will help her. The resolution isn’t really surprising… the motivations are pretty standard for this kind of “pick a group off one by one” deal, though that’s usually a slasher trope, and this doesn’t really feel like a slasher. I suppose you could argue that it is one, but without an actual physical slasher-who-does-the-slashing.

I had so many problems with the believability of this movie that I feel kind of bad even giving it a C. In terms of tech it’s okay – the sound and cinematography are nothing special, but they’re fine. The effects are laughable. I DID literally laugh at the ghosts several times. A mix of bad Halloween costume masks and bad CGI. But ugh… the unbelievable characters. Not that badly acted, all things considered, just horribly miscast and poorly written. The plot isn’t outstandingly original, but I mentioned that I liked this take on it, at least to some extent. Sadly, it’s the characters themselves really ruin it for me. One saving grace may be turning it around and viewing the villain as the protagonist, which could reframe the story in an interesting way. I didn’t really want to watch the film again with this in mind just to find out, though. Despite my issues, I did find the movie to be very watchable, and I enjoyed it at times. It just has too many glaring flaws for me to consider it “good.”

Horror Movie Quick Review: The Rite (2011)

Overall: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Mikael Håfström

Starring:

Anthony Hopkins

Colin O’Donoghue

I liked this one pretty well, but at the same time it didn’t feel like it did anything new.

The basic plot is that Michael (Colin O’Donoghue) begins training in seminary. Having a crisis of faith, he goes to Italy as a last attempt to renew his belief in God, and begins studying with Father Lucas Trevant (Anthony Hopkins), supposedly an exorcist. Michael doesn’t believe that demonic possession is real, and he still questions his faith. But then Father Trevant is possessed, and Michael is forced to take on the role of exorcist.

It’s a movie that is pretty good at what it does, and is well acted. But it also feels like it followed the recipe for making a movie about demonic possession and exorcism to the letter. There’s the main character having a moral crisis over his beliefs and whether or not he really has a vocation, there’s the demon that causes the possessed person to speak in tongues and talk about how the main character’s dead family is rotting/burning in hell, the demon is exorcised, and the main character finds his faith. Hooray!

If you like that type of movie, this one will probably not disappoint you. But if you’re looking for something new and different, this doesn’t really deliver.

Horror Movie Review: Seconds Apart (2011)

Overall: B+

Acting: A-

Writing: C

Story: B

Technical aspects: B

Effects: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Antonio Negret

Starring:

Edmund Entin

Gary Entin

Orlando Jones

Samantha Droke

Particular trigger warnings: coerced suicide, self-harm

Passes the Bechdel test: I don’t believe so

            Seconds Apart is about a pair of identical twins, Jonah (Edmund Entin) and Seth (Gary Entin), who have a psychic connection with each other that allows them to control people’s minds. The brothers, to put it lightly, do not use this power for good. When they were children they killed their babysitter; as teens, they’re doing a “project” where they force people to kill others or themselves, so the brothers can film them as they die. The people they control rarely seem to have any sense that they’re being controlled, and rarely fight the illusions… instead they seem to believe what they are doing is entirely normal. This “project” is apparently an attempt by Jonah and Seth to experience some emotion that they believe they are incapable of feeling. Their sadistic project is somewhat at odds with what appears to be an idyllic home life in a beautiful house with almost Stepford-esque parents.

            Investigating the deaths at the twins’ school is Detective Lampkin (Orlando Jones), a man haunted by memories of the death of his wife in a house fire. The twins frequently prey on these memories, trying to torment the detective.

            Meanwhile, a new girl named Eve (Samantha Droke) transfers to the school, and befriends Jonah. This begins to drive a wedge between the brothers, as Jonah becomes more interested in her, and wishes to drop the “project” with Seth.

I don’t want to spoil the pseudo-“twist” to the ending; it’s not the most shocking out there, and doesn’t change a lot about the plot itself, but I enjoyed it and what it showed about the characters.

            I really enjoyed this movie, though there are some really valid criticisms. One is that it’s a bit disjointed. That was distracting for my boyfriend when we watched it, though I didn’t notice it much at the time. But just trying to summarize it above, I’m reminded of it when I realize how much I didn’t mention.

I’m not sure how the detective jumps so easily to suspecting the twins. He gets some anecdotal evidence from other students, and they play some conceited mindgames with him, but it still seems like a pretty big jump for him to make.

 Some of the “tension” was obviously manufactured, for example with their murder of their babysitter being hinted at several times throughout the film as if it should be a shock when it’s revealed… but because they’ve already been shown killing people, that’s the obvious conclusion, devoid of any real suspense or surprise.

There’s a lot made of the “it” that the brothers hope to feel, but it’s left somewhat to interpretation what “it” is. (Uh… unless I missed it somehow?) It could be fear, as that’s what they believe they should experience at witnessing death, but if they want to feel fear, I’m unsure why they don’t do anything to put themselves in danger. I don’t want to immediately blame poor writing for that – it could be a deliberate choice to leave it to audience interpretation. But honestly, it mostly just leaves me confused more than thoughtful.

The introduction of Eve as the plot device to force the brothers apart is a bit cliché as well… the “woman causes divide between two close male friends/family members” isn’t exactly an original trope, and she didn’t have much characterization outside of that.

But the movie was very well-acted, including the rather surprising choice of Orlando Jones as the detective, and the chemistry between the brothers in particular was wonderful. The “twist” at the end is pretty creepy and well handled, in my opinion. I liked that the individual characters (with the unfortunate exception of Eve) were all quite complex – Detective Lampkin’s personal traumas didn’t feel too overstated, and gave him enough dimension to be interesting, and the twins’ relationship with each other vs. their relationships with the rest of the world contrast really well.

The world of the movie itself felt quite surreal, somehow removed from the real world. It felt fantasy-ish, something like the stylized settings in Willard or even in Edward Scissorhands, possibly because of the Victorian semi-Gothic aesthetics of the film. I enjoyed that, though it might not be to everyone’s liking.

There is less “horror” to the film in some ways. There are some scares in terms of the murders, but much of the horror comes from knowing what the brothers are capable of, not necessarily just what’s happening on screen. There’s a lot more focus on the drama between the characters and suspense. Again, I enjoyed that, but that may be disappointing if you aren’t expecting interpersonal drama and twisted psychology. Objectively this probably wouldn’t get a B+, but that’s what I give it for my personal enjoyment.

Horror Movie Review: Hyenas (2011)

Overall: C-

Acting: C

Writing: D

Story: C-

Technical aspects: C

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Eric Weston

Starring:

Costas Mandylor

Meshach Taylor

Joshua Alba

Christina Murphy

Derrick Kosinski

Andrew James Allen

Christa Campbell

Particular trigger warnings: Mexican racial slurs

Passes the Bechdel test? Yes, but barely.

If you are hoping for a horror film that brings mostly unintentional comedy, this could be the choice for you. Because this was bad, but mostly silly-bad, with much of the camp probably deliberate.

Hyenas has several plot threads going, none of them especially compelling. First we have the story of Gannon (Costas Mandylor), a man whose wife and infant child were killed by a breed of “were-hyenas” brought to North America by slave traders. He’s initially unbelieving when it comes to the existence of these werehyenas, but a man named “Crazy Briggs” (Meshach Taylor), a hunter of these creatures, convinces him. Crazy Briggs takes Gannon on as something of an apprentice hunter.

Then suddenly that part of the movie just kind of… ends for a while, and we’re taken to an apparent gang war in the local small town between the obnoxious white kids and the Hispanic kids. Bobby (Derrick Kosinski) leads the white kids against Marco (Joshua Alba), the leader of the Hispanic kids. Complicating things, Bobby is hazing/recruiting Jasper (Andrew James Allen), whose older sister Gina (Christina Murphy) is dating Marco. Drama!

Meanwhile, it’s revealed that the leader of the matriarchal hyena clan is dying, and so the disparate packs are meeting in the mines outside the town to pick a new leader. Wilda (Christa Campbell) seems poised to take over.

Back with Gannon, they rescue a girl from some of the hyenas, leading to an incredibly contrived plot twist that I doubt anyone was fooled by if they were paying any attention.

Eventually the plots converge somewhat by coincidence, as Gannon and Crazy Briggs head to the caves to kill Wilda and the rest, while Bobby and Marco go there to fight out their issues, and Gina follows them in order to stop them.

[Spoilers] There’s a silly action-y ending, that again I doubt will come as much of a surprise to anyone: Bobby and Marco are suddenly friends, most of the good guys escape (minus a dramatic self-sacrifice,) and most of the bad guys get blown up. [End spoilers.]

This movie is just so damn silly. It’s often entertainingly so, but much of the badness also comes just from sloppy writing and inconsistencies. I joked that when it cut to a scene about the white kids/Mexican kids’ rivalry that they’d never be referred to again and that they would have nothing to do with the rest of the film… and I wasn’t really that far off. Most of the movie seems to be about the struggle Gina has with her brother being drafted into the white kids’ gang, and yet that’s ultimately inconsequential to the rest of the film and the hyena plot. It causes some additional tension between Bobby and Marco, but it was established that they hated each other whether Jasper and Gina were in the picture or not. Eventually, despite taking up a whole lot of screen time in the first half, Jasper’s character is pretty much dropped from the movie and has nothing to do with the resolution. I kept expecting the douchey white kid gang to have something to do with the hyenas, but there was no connection between the pack and either gang; the storylines only cross by coincidence when the characters wind up in the same place, rendering the “dramatic” gang plotline absolutely unnecessary.

There are a lot of times where it seems like there were a few scenes missing or something, where there are unexplained character changes or passages of time. For instance, it seems that Gannon and Crazy Briggs are the only two people to know about the were-hyenas, but then at one point Gannon is getting a report from another hunter that was never mentioned or introduced. At another point there’s a brief bit of narration by Briggs that tells us how he started training Gannon (rather than showing us any of said training) but it’s unclear how much time has passed. We later find out that it was three years since Gannon’s family was killed, but nothing in the narration made it clear that we’d skipped so far ahead until he mentions it. Toward the very end, [spoilers,] Bobby and Marco are ready to kill each other, and yet thirty seconds later they decide they’re BFFs. Granted they were faced with a cave full of werehyenas, but it goes beyond temporary truce and into the unrealistic “now we’ve overcome our differences!” resolution. [End spoilers.]

The effects are laughable mixes of bad costuming and bad CG hyenas. The “transformations” prompted snorts and giggles. Of course, your experience may be helped or hindered by the fact that Wilda has to take off her clothes every time she’s going to transform (a trait not apparently shared by any of the not-as-hot-as-Christa Campbell-werehyenas.) The nudity is still relatively lacking (nipple-less boobs!) but hey, it’s there should that be a draw for you. (Though would people find her as hot if she, like real female hyenas, had basically a pseudo penis? Just wondering. Maybe she does; we don’t see it.)

If you’re a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, you may recognize most of the mythology about the hyenas as being very similar to what was mentioned in the episode “The Pack” from the first season, where Xander and some other kids were possessed by hyena spirits. And honestly, I think I’d rather watch that episode a few more times than this movie. Still, the film is entertaining and campy and easy to laugh at.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Shadow Puppets (2007)

Overall: C-

IMDB

Directed by:

Michael Winnick

Starring:

James Marsters

Tony Todd

Marc Winnick

Jolene Blalock

Shadow Puppets is the story of eight seemingly random people who wake up in an abandoned asylum, none of them with any memory of how they got there. As they meet up with each other, they begin to search for a way out. But there’s some kind of sentient shadow monster lurking, which is hunting them and picking them off. They find a machine apparently used in experiments on erasing memories, and they rightly figure that since the machine was used eight times, it must have been used on them. [Reasonably minor spoilers] But when they find a ninth stranger in a coma, they realize that one of them has not had their memories erased, and that person must be the one behind everything. And so the traitor in the group is discovered and begins trying to kill everyone. [End spoilers]

This movie suffered the most from having way too many characters introduced in way too short a period of time. And because they don’t learn their names until halfway or more through the film, I was just giving them insulting nicknames the entire film, because otherwise I had no way to tell who was who.

The story starts off somewhat intriguing, with the strangers in the asylum, wondering what their pasts hold and why the building seems abandoned… but as soon as the (poorly animated) Shadow shows up, it just gets somewhat… silly. Its presence is never really explained (or rather, the explanation makes no sense.) If the pseudo-monster had been removed in favor of focusing just on the idea of the science experiment on their memories, it would have been an improvement. And anyway, most of the characters get little individual screentime outside of our mains, so when they’re killed and in danger it didn’t resonate any with me.

There are also several small but silly inconsistencies (things as simple as the characters constantly complaining that they’re freezing, but never wrapping themselves in the sheets they all have from the beds they awoke in.)

The movie was okay, but it started far better than it finished, and had more than a few moments that were unintentionally funny out of sheer ridiculousness.

Horror Movie Review: The Tenement (2003)

Overall: D

Acting: D

Writing: D-

Story: D+

Technical aspects: D+

Effects: D

IMDB

Directed by:

Glen Baisley

Starring:

Joe Lauria

Michael Gingold

C. J. DiMarsico

John Studol

Mike Lane
Ed Shelinsky

Danielle Russo

Particular trigger warnings: sexual assault, animal cruelty, prostitution, hard drug use

Passes the Bechdel test? I don’t think so

I basically give a synopsis below, because it’s hard to pick apart otherwise. Beware of spoilers all the way through.

The Tenement is a series of four loosely related stories about different occupants of the same tenement house.

The movie starts with a man named Ethan (Pete Barker) speaking to the owner of the building (Jude Pucillo.) Ethan says that he used to live there forty years ago, and he wants to know if the new owner has seen the building do anything strange to the people living there. Ethan begins to reminisce about the time he lived there.

We suddenly cut to a scene of a girl being kidnapped and crucified as part of a cultic ritual, but we soon find out that this is just a crappy movie within our crappy movie, as this is part of Ethan’s memory. It’s 1980 and Ethan (Joe Lauria) lives in his apartment with his bedridden mother (Doreen Valdati) and spends his time either at work or at home watching horror films by director Winston Korman (Michael Gingold), whom he idolizes. Well, Korman is in town casting for a new film, and Ethan is paid to deliver black roses to him. He gets mistaken for a prospective actor, but when he can’t act and freezes up, Korman laughs at him and mocks him until he runs away. Ethan goes home, kills his cat, and then leaves his overbearing mother. He dresses all in black, and goes to Korman’s house. Korman is outside, doing all he possibly can to prove even further that he is a caricature of a douchebag and we Should Not Like Him. After an awkward chase scene, Ethan kills Korman with a shovel, dropping a black rose on the body, becoming the “black rose killer.”

            The second story happens in 1990, and focuses on a young mute girl (mute apparently due to something traumatic in her past, though this isn’t expanded on) named Sarah Weston (C.J. DiMarsico). She spends her time waltzing alone to music from her radio. A neighbor named Henry Wallace (John Studol) keeps watching her, prompting her parents to take her away on a vacation for a while. They leave her alone for a while, and Wallace breaks in and sexually assaults her. She fights back, but he keeps overpowering her. In the midst of the rape, he suddenly blacks out and appears to be hallucinating and recalling trauma from his own childhood. He wakes back up in the living room, with Sarah gone. He finds her in the bedroom, and approaches her, but she turns up her radio, he starts screaming and holding his head, and then he disappears. Later on, with the Weston family back at home, Sarah is seen dancing in her room, but the shadows and mirror show that she’s dancing with some sort of creature.

            The third story jumps forward nine years to 1999, and is about Jimmy (Mike Lane), who has begun attending a therapy group to help him deal with his relatively unspecified issues. He appears to mostly just be a shut-in. On his way home, he’s attacked by a wild animal (and by wild animal, I mean a husky that just kind of happily trotted behind him for about three seconds.) He’s bitten on the arm, and he slowly starts becoming convinced that he’s turning into a werewolf. He thinks the symptoms are obvious, though no one else sees the transformation. He kills his friendly neighbor who apparently had a thing for him, he kills a male prostitute, and then he kills a female dancer in a strip club. Here he’s apprehended, and sentenced to life in a mental hospital. But then he’s attacked by some apparently “real” werewolves, who want to kill him for bringing too much attention to them.

            The fourth story happens in 2000 and is about another serial killer (Ed Shelinsky) living in the tenement, who pretends to be a taxi driver to pick up women and then torture and murder them. We see him capture and kill a prostitute, and then go out “hunting” again. This time he picks up a girl (who I can’t remember being named, but I believe is being played by Danielle Russo.) She has him take her out to the place where Winston Korman, the horror director from before, used to film his movies. She has to give him directions, but she says she’ll just go in for a second to get money for the cab fare. When the taxi killer follows her in and attacks her, she says she “likes it rough” and attacks him back, saying it was obvious he wasn’t a real taxi driver because he didn’t know the place she wanted him to take her, and the two fight some more. Apparently they realize that they’re soul mates or something, and the two make out. Then we see that they’ve joined forces and are killing people together. Aww.

            The movie closes with the elderly Ethan and the owner discussing that they have seen the house do strange things to people. Ethan lays a black rose on a nearby bench. The owner (who by this point I was calling “goth Fabio”) confronts Simon (Chris Alo) the local pimp and drug dealer, telling him to stop hanging around and selling all he sells in front of the building. Simon pretty much blows him off before hallucinating madly about drug use and overdosing and what the fuck ever, while the owner stands nearby, leering at him, obviously the cause. The end.

This movie was pretty bad. One of the reviews on the case says that it “certainly shows an affinity for the genre” and we remarked that that seemed like a backhanded compliment. And that really feels like the nicest thing I can say about it, too. It’s clear that the makers really like horror films, and it seems like they probably even really enjoyed making this movie, but I certainly can’t say that it was very good. According to something else I found online, the director, Glen Baisley, was a sexploitation film director in the 60s and 70s, and then filmed porn for a while, before coming back to horror films, and I guess I wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. (And the “Walter Korman” film we get to see a brief snippet of during the first story is a perfect sexploitation/horror, to the point I wonder if it was a clip from something the director did in the past.)

My problems with the movie are varied. The acting was generally really substandard. Some actors were fine, but some side characters delivered their lines so badly it sounded like they were reading them off for the first time, and at other times it was obvious they couldn’t remember their lines correctly.

The stories themselves just weren’t that well-told in my opinion either. The first one, it sounds like all the dialogue between Ethan and his mother was lifted from Willard (which is a much better film.) They refuse to show the mother for a while, and I wondered if it was going for the Psycho-style twist, though apparently that was just a deliberate allusion. It reminded me more of Willard, anyway, down to the tone and pitch of the mother’s voice. Plus there were the weird dangling plot threads like Ethan's hallucination-girlfriend. The fourth story just bored me more than anything else; it was too bloodless to really be shocking the way it seemed to be aiming for, and it just managed to leave no real impression. The second and third had at least glimmers of interest for me. I want to know more about Sarah and the thing she was dancing with. Does she have strange powers? Is she allied to some kind of demon that killed her attacker? Is the creature a personification of the “monster” she killed? And the third story, while (probably deliberately) ridiculously silly, at least has a twist that could be interesting in a better film; the idea that someone who pretends to be some kind of monster is killed by the real thing.

As far as the anthology goes, judging from the title and the prologue/epilogue frame story, we’re apparently supposed to think that the building is somehow compelling people to become violent or is giving them delusions and apparently occasionally psychic powers. But without the occasional exterior shots of the tenement house, there’s nothing that tells me that these people supposedly live in the same building; none of them meet each other, there aren’t any other ties between the characters or stories (aside from Gordon Korman being mentioned in two stories, and Ethan being a character in one story and the frame,) there aren’t any other clues to the setting. There’s also never any reason given for why the building would have this effect on people. It really comes off as just being the most tenuous possible way to connect four ideas that couldn’t quite be films on their own. And despite all the stories being relatively short, averaging in the 20-30 minute range each, the film drags.

The entire time we’re skipping around from the 80s onward never felt convincing to me either – there was never anything that made me believe we’d changed time periods. Hairstyles, clothing, technology, etc. all remained so constant that it was hard to feel that this was somewhere in the past, or that years were passing between the stories. And Ethan, supposedly our “tie” between the past and the present of the building, appears to have aged about fifty years since 1980, so either their math is bad, or the frame story is set in the future.

The effects are nothing great. Fights don’t look at all convincing, with it often being incredibly obvious that there’s no force behind any of the blows. The movie doesn’t overly rely on gore effects and the like, which to me is a point in its favor, since the blood effects they have aren’t that good. Some of the scenes ended up prompting laughter when it wasn’t intentionally funny.

Pretty much everything from the acting to the effects to the scenarios just feel completely unconvincing. And allegedly this is part one of a trilogy… I’m not sure how to justify continuing this through two more films.

Horror Movie Review: Side Sho (2007)

Overall: B-

Acting: C

Writing: C-

Story: C

Technical aspects: B+

Effects: B+

IMDB

Directed by:

Michael D’Anna

Starring:

J.D. Hart

Toni Robider

Dana Poulson

Elizabeth Bailey

Hunter Ballard

J.R. Reynolds           

This movie starts off with a pretty awesome opening credits sequence, using vintage photos and advertisements for actual freakshows and side shows that were popular in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, that was probably my favorite part of the movie.

            The basic plot is that a typical suburban American family (plus a friend) is on vacation, heading home on their roadtrip. The father, John (J.D. Hart), is stopping at old roadside amusement parks and side shows in order to take photographs for a book he’s putting together. At a gas station somewhere in Florida, he finds out about a supposedly abandoned freak show just down the road, so the family takes a slight detour, despite the complaints of the daughter, Christy (Toni Robider), and her friend Steffi (Elizabeth Bailey.)

            Turns out that “Side Sho” is not actually abandoned, and the barker (J.R. Reynolds) offers to give them a tour. The family splits up, the girls and the mother, Gwen (Dana Poulson), going one way, the son, Cory (Hunter Ballard) going around the grounds to take pictures, and the father heading with the barker to the “real” freak show. Turns out that it’s full of twisted things like malformed human fetuses, so John freaks out and intends to get the family out of there. Meanwhile Cory has an after school special “we can all be friends despite our differences” moment with a young boy with a facial deformity.

            The family decides to leave, and they rush out of there, but not before a mysterious someone puts water in their gas tank! So the car conveniently dies in front of a group of creepy cabins, and the man there says that it was an old fishing camp. He’ll let them stay the night, since it’s getting dark. But shock! awe! horror! This used to be a prison camp! And the man letting them stay there is part of an extended family of deformed freaks descended from the prisoners, as are the barker and the woman from the gas station, and they intend to kill the father and the son, while keeping the women as “new breeding stock” since they’re getting so inbred!

            What follows for the last two thirds of the movie is your basic slasher run-and-escape-and-fight-and-die-and-kill-and-run-some-more, until the end when two of our heroes escape, to be picked up by a police officer… but as the scene ends, we see that HE IS ONE OF THE DEFORMED FREAK FAMILY.

            The movie is pretty average, which in some ways is a shame because the tech is great. The cinematography is fantastic, and the sound direction is good as well. Set design and such is also great. Leonard Wolf provides the soundtrack, which has more presence than I’m used to (by which I mean I noticed it pretty constantly, rather than it fading into the background) but it was well done and has some pretty good tracks. It’s actually kind of sad that such good tech went to a film that’s so average in many regards.

            The acting is middle of the road. It’s not unwatchable, but particularly at the beginning, the dialogue is horribly stilted. Very “you have said your line, therefore I will now respond with my line,” not flowing like anything resembling an actual conversation. It sounded almost like sitcom dialogue where they pause for the laugh-track or other audience reaction. This seemed to be less of an issue later in the movie, though probably because it was more running and screaming and less “conversation.” The woman from the gas station they meet at the beginning bothered me the most as far as acting – she looked like a kid doing an impression of a crotchety old woman, scrunching up her face to talk out the side of her mouth (if you ever watched the 90s kid show “The Amanda Show” on Nickelodeon… it looked like Amanda Bynes’ old woman impression)… It was distractingly awkward looking.

            The story itself is pretty basic slasher fare, without really adding anything new. The effects are pretty good, from the makeup of the freak family to the blood. And while the plot is standard, and you can pretty well guess which characters are going to be offed, the death scenes are pretty creative. I don’t think I’ve ever seen two reptile-related deaths in the same non-reptile-horror film – one person having their face crushed in with a turtle, one getting a terrarium with a poisonous snake smashed on his head. Lots of killing of the innocents, lots of return killings of the villains. But it’s not aided by having the predictable “twist” ending of the escape-but-not-really-because-it-was-a-trap. That just shoved it into eye-rolling territory for me.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Fertile Ground (2010)

Overall: C+

IMDB

Directed by:

Adam Gierasch

Starring:

Gale Harold

Leisha Hailey

Fertile Ground is the story of married couple Nate (Gale Harold) and Emily Weaver (Leisha Hailey). After Emily has a tragic miscarriage, they move to Nate’s ancestral home in the country, presumably in order to move on.

As time goes on, Emily begins to believe the house is haunted, and she finds disturbing materials such as the diary of a former Weaver bride who was eventually murdered by her husband. Human remains are found in their yard, and a local historian tells Emily how many strangely similar deaths have occurred in that house.

 Nate begins to act strangely and threateningly toward her. She realizes that an ancestor of Nate’s murdered his wife there, and that ever since, the people in the house have been essentially possessed by his spirit, accounting for the near identical deaths of so many women at the hands of men in the house.

There was a lot that I enjoyed, particularly the artistic direction. There was some really great use of light and shadow, some beautifully framed shots, etc. The story itself was pretty good, if relatively typical of ghost stories (the “ghosts possessing and reliving significant events/changing the people present” isn’t exactly original… see, duh, The Shining or Amityville Horror and countless others.) I thought it was pretty well acted, and liked the characters well enough. Parts of the story dragged a bit, mostly because it was too predictable to justify the sometimes drawn-out suspense. There were a couple parts I found genuinely creepy, but some parts fell flat. For better or worse, the movie doesn’t contain much gore, which I generally like, since over-reliance on gore has become lazy shorthand for “this is a horror movie!” Few people seemed to like this one, largely because of its slow pace and somewhat predictable story. I do think they’re valid criticisms, but if you can get beyond the pacing, I think it’s still a decent ghost story.

Horror Movie Review: Razor's Ring (2008)

Overall: D-

Acting: D+

Writing: D

Story: D

Technical aspects: D

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Morgan Hampton

Starring:

Wayne Casey

AnnieScott Rogers

Paul Schilens

Lisa Wharton

Nate Duncan

            The basic plot of this one is that an innocent guy named Scott (Wayne Casey) is just out for a jog, when he’s suddenly kidnapped by the couple Razor (Paul Schilens) and Julie (Lisa Wharton.) Their motives for this are never really explained… they’re both wanted by the police, but they’re driving around running over people and animals as a game, and for some reason they grab Scott and take him with.

            They aim to run over a little girl, and Scott attempts to get control of the car, and they end up hitting an old man. The man’s family members attack the three, capturing them and taking them to see “Red.” The three are kept in a shed, where they’re tormented in various ways (Razor has a finger cut off, Julie is forced to stand naked on their dinner table, Scott gets stabbed…) And Red (AnnieScott Rogers,) the apparent matriarch of the group insists that she’ll slowly let each of them go over the next few weeks, so her family will think they’ve been justly taken care of.

            Blah blah, stuff happens, Julie and Razor are supposedly let go, Scott is allowed to come live in the house rather than the shed, and he’s taken to a big party they’re putting on. As he’s eating, he finds Razor’s ring (clever title!) in his food, and he realizes that OMG THEY’VE BEEN EATING PEOPLE. AND HE’S NEXT. Either a Soylent Green or a Troll 2 joke would be appropriate here.

            Spoilers! He escapes, there’s the fakest explosion ever, and he returns to society. But then he realizes that he’s now addicted to eating human flesh! He then buys the land the cannibals were living on, and is apparently planning to eat his girlfriend? Or something. (End spoilers.)

            Anyway, not a good film. The characterization was very inconsistent – Razor and Julie plan to pin the death of the old man on Scott, Scott plans to tell the truth about his non-involvement, so they’re fighting with each other most of the time. But then suddenly they’ll be acting like great friends, trying to work together, or just talking to each other. And what’s ostensibly a couple days later (though we’re told that it’s been weeks, sometimes; there’s no real sense of time passing) Razor and Scott sit talking about how wonderful the food is, and how great things are. (It’s funny because they’re EATING JULIE, GET IT?)

            The acting is pretty poor, though not the worst out there. Some is likely more budget than anything, but in a couple scenes it appears an actor screws up a line and then just has to roll with it. None of the characters strike me as very believable in their roles, though. The one exception is probably AnnieScott Rogers as Red, as she’s pretty entertaining. She falls into the “watch my extreme mood shifts to show I’m evil” acting camp, and could be considered the low-budget Kathy Bates-as-Annie Wilkes, but she’s pretty good as both a violent psychopath and as the kindly grandmother-type.

            The sound direction was all right, but the filming was not. It appears to be done almost exclusively with a handheld camera, sometimes going out of focus, always unsteady, using clumsy zooms to focus on things. Scenes are terribly edited together, in some cases making it painfully clear that the two people or events that are being cut between aren’t happening even remotely near each other.

            The effects are laughable. Most of the gory scenes aren’t shown, probably for the better, because the blood effects are pretty sub-standard. And the explosion at the end… we both literally started laughing at how silly it looked.

            This movie definitely felt like a waste of time. But it gets a D simply because my bar for an F has been set so incredibly low.

(Happy October, everyone!)

Horror Movie Review: 100 Feet (2008)

Overall: B

Acting: B

Writing: B

Story: B

Technical aspects: B

Effects: C

IMDB

Directed by:

Eric Red

Starring:

Famke Janssen

Bobby Cannavale

Ed Westwick

Michael Pare

Particular triggers: domestic violence

Passes the Bechdel test? yes, but barely

            100 Feet is the story of a woman named Marnie Watson (Famke Janssen), who is placed under house arrest after being found guilty of the murder of her husband, Mike (Michael Pare). Mike was abusive, and the murder was in self-defense; Marnie had reported him several times to the police, but as Mike himself was a cop, little was done and the investigations were generally dropped. Complicating things, the cop in charge of Marnie, named Shanks (Bobby Cannavale), was Mike’s partner.

            “100 Feet” refers to the distance that Marnie is allowed to travel – any farther, and the anklet she wears will send a signal to the police, and she’ll be sent back to prison.

            It quickly becomes clear that Mike’s ghost is haunting the house, and he continues to attack her. Unwilling to leave or be sent back to prison, Marnie attempts exorcisms, attempts to force Mike’s spirit out of the house by getting rid of his possessions, etc. but nothing works. Some of the assaults against her are investigated by Shanks, who is beginning to believe that someone else is beating Marnie, and that this other person may be the one actually responsible for killing Mike.

            It’s hard to say much else without being too spoiler-heavy.

I actually really like this movie. I find Marnie’s character interesting and sympathetic, not quite the same as the average female horror movie protagonist. She seems genuinely conflicted, not feeling guilty for killing her husband because of the circumstances, but regretting that it happened. She’s imperfect, but her actions are consistent with her character.

The small cast helps the film feel very self-contained, and emphasizes the feeling of isolation that Marnie experiences in the house.

I enjoy the premise of being literally trapped in a house with something malevolent, and by something more than a broken-down car or a silly dare. (And yes, I remember that Disturbia also used the “house arrest” premise, but I like its use in this movie far more, and that’s about the only way the films are at all comparable.) Also in the category of at least kind of subverting common tropes, while she does refuse to seek outside help, this also makes sense for her character. After her experiences, of course she’s not going to ask Shanks or any other cops for help.

The biggest detractor in my opinion is the ending, which is tied together a little too neatly and rapidly. The ultimate way they get rid of Mike’s ghost works, I suppose, but seems like something that would have occurred to her earlier. The effects are also a bit hit-or-miss. They aren’t the most ridiculous, but a few times the ghost modeling is quite fake looking (when he’s heavily active) and one scene in particular has pretty laughable blood effects.

Occasionally this one runs on Syfy, and I’d certainly recommend the watch if it does come up. It’s also had a DVD release, and it’s one that I enjoyed enough that I’m considering purchasing it.

Horror Movie Quick Review: Case 39 (2009)

Overall: B

IMDB

Directed by:

Christian Alvart

Starring:

Renee Zellweger

Jodelle Ferland

Case 39 is about a social worker named Emily Jenkins (Renee Zellweger) who is beyond overworked, but takes on the case of a girl named Lilith Sullivan (Jodelle Ferland.) There seems to be a severe case of abuse towards the girl, seemingly confirmed when Lilith’s parents try to murder her. The parents are found not guilty by reason of insanity as they claim that Lilith is a demon and they had no choice but to kill her. Emily ends up taking Lilith in until a better foster home can be found, but then as people in Emily’s life begin to die under mysterious circumstances, she realizes that Lilith’s parents may have been right.

I’m a fan of evil child movies, so I liked Case 39. It does a pretty good job of setting Lilith up as the innocent victim (though somewhat unfortunately because of the expectations of it being a horror movie, and especially after reading a summary of it, the audience will still realize that she’s evil, so there’s not much opportunity for surprise.) It’s well-acted (and I really like Jodelle Ferland, as far as child actresses go) and the characters are pretty good as well. Emily’s conflict over proper professional behavior vs. legitimate worry for Lilith is believably handled. In a few ways it felt like the ending and resolution were a little bit rushed, and I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to not realize that Emily is probably going to wind up spending a good chunk of her life in prison after the credits roll. The film isn’t the most groundbreaking or original offering, and it felt to me like there was just something kind of missing, but it’s a well put together film that is largely successful in telling its story.

Horror Movie Reviews: Intermedio (2005)

Overall: F

Acting: D

Writing: F

Story: D

Technical aspects: F

Effects: F

IMDB

Directed by:

Andrew Lauer

Starring:

Edward Furlong

Steve Railsback

Cerina Vincent

Amber Benson

Callard Harris

Paul Cram

Alejandro Samaniego

Dean M. Arevalo

What the ass, man? This sucks.

This was a bad movie. Like… in some ways just bafflingly bad. Also, I give basically an entire synopsis of the film below, so it’s super heavy on spoilers.

            Okay, so we’ve got four main characters. Malik (Edward Furlong) lives out in California with his girlfriend Barbie (Amber Benson). His childhood friend Gen (Cerina Vincent) and her boyfriend Wes (Callard Harris) come by to visit, and Wes has a super-awesome plan for them to meet some Mexican drug dealers, spend all their money on some super-awesome marijuana that’s apparently the best weed in the history of weed, and sell it for a super-awesome profit back in the US. As you do.

            But… the tunnel they have to go through turns out to be the very tunnel that Malik and Gen’s respective fathers disappeared down when the two were kids! But the four decide to go down these tunnels, even though the Mexican drug dealers insist on not going all the way to the halfway point due to the fear of “intermedios.” The intermedios are supposedly ghosts trapped in between the realm of the living and the dead. There’s also some other story that’s tied in somehow about how someone who catches the blood of a dead man before it hits the ground will become immortal or something. It’s a little vague.

            As they go through the tunnels, some weird stuff happens, though it’s pretty disjointed. A guy appears to be following them, knocking out the lights and the like. After the four kids meet up with the drug dealers Jorge (Alejandro Samaniego) and Al (Dean M. Arevalo), whoever is stalking them uses a mysterious amulet apparently filled with blood to summon ghosts to attack them. One kills Al, and the others run away. They get separated, with Wes running around alone and yelling for quite a while. (Giving us the wonderful line “What the ass?”) Barbie gets cut in half while they try to run away, and Jorge’s fingers also get cut off. They all get lost in the tunnels, but end up in a safehouse that’s blockaded from the inside. They keep running into a ghost-like boy named Zee (Paul Cram), who seems mostly to want to help them. Wes semi-sacrifices himself so that Gen and Malik can get away, and they crawl through a tunnel to a room filled with bodies. They end up escaping, and ask for a ride from a local (Steve Railsback). He says he’ll drive them to the nearest town, though the viewer knows that he’s the creepy guy who was summoning ghosts before! He starts going on a rant about how his son died in those tunnels, and how the papers made him out to be a terrible person, but the only ones to blame are the drug dealers and people like Malik, Gen, and their friends. He gives Gen some beer (from a sealed can) and she passes out, he drives nails into Malik’s legs before knocking him out with chloroform. The pair wakes up back in the room with the dead bodies, but they find another tunnel to escape out of. They come up into a bedroom that’s covered in news clippings about the boy, Zee, who was killed presumably because he was a drug runner. They realize that the creepy old guy must be Zee’s father.

            The old guy comes back and we get a flashback of sorts explaining how he actually murdered Zee. The old guy tries again to kill Malik and Gen, but the previously-silent Zee tells him to stop. Gen grabs the old man’s amulet, which takes away his powers over the ghosts, who then kill him.

            Malik and Gen get out of the tunnels and get a ride. They then get a hotel room, and the two appear to have decided to become romantically involved. The camera pans out their window, where the ghosts of Barbie and Wes are staring at them.

            This movie was just… badly done. The plot isn’t anything special, but could have been an average or above average movie if done correctly. They even have some real actors! But no, it’s presumably poorly directed or something, because the acting is pretty shoddy, and Edward Furlong pretty much just yells all of his lines.

            The story also is just absolutely rife with plot holes. There’s little reason for them all to go down there, particularly since Barbie is on crutches the whole time. (Trivia tells me that this is because Amber Benson actually was injured, so the crutches were written in for the character, but going into a tunnel with someone who can’t walk is still a stupid idea in-film.) Even down to simple stuff like the old guy kidnapping and knocking Gen and Malik out, leaving them in a room, and then coming back later to kill them. Why did he leave them at all?

The ghost effects are always bad, but additionally are inconsistent. Sometimes they’re bad CG blurs, sometimes they appear to be guys in bad skeleton costumes. The other effects such as the blood and gore stuff is also poorly done.

Some stuff strays between plot hole, inconsistency, and plain incompetence. Several scenes have had the film flipped, so text on people’s shirts appears backwards. Some scenes are entirely reused, just with the film flipped, like when they crawl through the tunnels. When Wes is running through the tunnels he alternately is carrying his backpack and not carrying anything, and eventually inexplicably loses his shirt. Zee is alternately called Zeke and Zack and I think something else throughout the movie. It’s shown that his father killed him by strangling him, but we got a “shocking” scene earlier where you could see him from behind and it appeared he’d been shot in the head. When Gen steals the old man’s amulet and he’s shown frantically trying to get it back, he’s STILL WEARING THE DAMN THING. Gen’s tank top starts out at a reasonable length, and gets progressively shorter through the film (presumably whenever they figured people’s attention was waning) until we start to get some gratuitous underboob shots.

This movie pretty much had no saving points. It’s kind of funny in an unintentionally-bad-movie way, but really isn’t worth seeing unless you want it for that reason. (And while I think the actors realized how bad it was, I don’t think it was truly intended to be as awful as it was… I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem quite self-aware enough for that. If I AM wrong, then I still think the film fails to achieve its goal.) Even if you’re watching it for the “hey, this is a bad movie, let’s laugh at it” reason, it’s more obnoxious than entertaining a lot of the time. Though at least we now have knowledge of the phrase “what the ass, man?” which has entered into near-daily use in our household.

Horror Movie Reviews: I Was a Zombie for the FBI (1982)

Overall: C-

Acting: C

Writing: D

Story: C-

Technical aspects: C

Effects: C+

IMDB

Directed by:

Marius Penczner

Starring:

Larry Raspberry

James Raspberry

John Gillick

Laurence Hall

Christina Wellford

Passes the Bechdel test? Not to my recollection.
Specific warnings? None I can recall.

I have only seen the later DVD version, which is apparently not identical to the originally aired 1982 version.

            This movie was entertainingly silly. In some ways it’s probably more of a D film, but gets bumped to a C- just because it means so well and is so self-aware of its silliness. (Though unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well in my memory; Biophage for instance held up well in my mind, where this one I remember the negatives more than the positives.) The film is a parody of 50s B-movies, in the same vein as Lost Skeleton of Cadavera, though it appears to be a lower-budget more independent undertaking.

            The plot is as convoluted as one could hope when it comes to parodying 50s sci-fi and FBI agent type stories. A plane carrying a pair of criminal brothers, Bart Brazzo (John Gillick) and Bert Brazzo (Laurence Hall,) crashes in Pleasantville, and FBI agents Ace Evans (Larry Raspberry) and Rex Armstrong (James Raspberry) are sent on a case to find the brothers.

            But unknown to them, the plane was shot down by aliens! Aliens who have taken the Brazzo brothers hostage in the nearby Health Cola plant. Some time later, the criminal brothers go to a different cola plant, this time for Uni Cola, where they hold the secret cola recipe and an attractive reporter named Penny (Christina Wellford), (who also happens to be Ace Evans’ fiancée) hostage. They demand a ransom of one million dollars, which is provided. Ace and Rex thwart the brothers’ plans, sending them to jail. They rescue Penny, but the cola recipe is lost. Uni Cola is furious about the failure to retrieve their secret recipe, and Ace and Rex are reassigned.

            They are sent back to Pleasantville to investigate the strange zombie-like behavior among the townsfolk. They get a tip that the Health Cola plant is somehow responsible for the zombie behavior, and they figure out that it’s probably connected to the missing Uni Cola recipe as well.

            Showdown ultimately ensues in the Cola plant, where they must rescue the recipe (hidden in Penny’s necklace) and thwart the evil plans of the aliens who intend to control the world through the production of soft drinks. The final battle against a stop-motion monster that would make Harryhausen proud is truly a crowning moment.

            Honestly, I think the fact that this is a played-straight parody of 50s B-movies hides and in some ways excuses a lot of flaws. The acting is somehow both flat and over-the-top, but it fits with the parodies of stock-characters that the actors are portraying. The story itself is ridiculous and convoluted, to an extent that I’m afraid my summary above sounds a bit confused. This could have been intentional, but it could also have just been clumsy. The stylized black and white filming looks nice, so it gets points for that, and I especially loved a few of the shots of the buildings and other settings. And the effects, while apparently “updated” slightly for the DVD release, are delightfully silly. As mentioned, the stop-motion monster at the end is wonderfully ridiculous in a way that I really loved. On the downside, the movie kind of drags. In between some of the more ridiculous or action-heavy parts, the dialogue seems really unneeded, and it starts getting boring to sit through. Also, as most reviews mention, the title is quite misleading. There are zombie-like people, and there is the FBI, but there are no strict zombies, and definitely no zombies in the employ of the FBI.

            Ultimately, I think this may be a love it or hate it type film. If somewhat loving parodies of this nature appeal to you, this one is pretty good. It’s not as over-the-top silly as Lost Skeleton of Cadavera, but has the same deal going to some extent. But if that doesn’t appeal to you, there’s nothing else that will keep you interested.