MonsterHunter

I’ll confess that I was a bit skeptical when I began watching The Birds. I was thinking to myself, “this is a two hour movie about a woman being pecked by some whacko birds. How interesting can that be? Sounds like a bunch of bird doody to me!” And as is usually the case, I was right! The Birds is all about the world turning to bird doody as Alfred Hitchcock unleashes a very effective apocalyptic vision of nature rebelling against man! And by nature, I mean some stinky birds. Read More »

I think I must have missed the wedding. You know, the one where Dario Argento (Suspiria) got married to the steadicam. I think John Carpenter gave the bride away. When you watch Argento’s take on The Phantom of the Opera (not to be confused with the regular version of the film he did about 11 years later), you’re alternately impressed with the sweeping shots of the opera house and nauseated by the floating views he uses to follow some of the action. Read More »

I originally figured that since “tenebre” sounded a little like “tentacle” that maybe this movie was going to be about a giant squid. Then I discovered that it was an Italian flick so I figured that some giant squid was on the loose in Rome eating fashion models. It ended up though being a fairly straight forward slasher flick where the murders were all related to a book that Anthony Franciosa’s character Peter Neal had written, called Tenebre. Read More »

After watching this movie I came to a couple of conclusions. The first is that despite this being directed by their idol, Lucio Fulci, the gorehounds will be somewhat disappointed with it. The second thing I figured out is that in spite of Fulci’s reputation, anyone that enjoys a good, unsettling thriller will come away feeling very satisfied with what they’ve seen. The last and by far the most important thing I learned was that the title refers to a retarded girl’s Donald Duck doll. Read More »

Do not be fooled by the bold visuals and the spectacular murder set pieces that Dario Argento uses in this, the first of a trilogy of films which also includes Inferno and Mother Of Tears. When you look past the style he dresses this one up in, it all still boils down to a coven of super powerful witches defeated by a wispy American ballet student who’s in something like her second week at the ballet academy where this all takes place. Read More »

Dario Argento’s tale of something or other is the middle film in a loose trilogy including Suspiria and Mother Of Tears. Inferno has been described by some as being one of Dario’s least accessible films. That of course is code for “incoherent.” Read More »

If Don’t Torture A Duckling is for people that want Lucio Fulci before he went and got himself married to the special effects department (best man? Eye gouge! Maid of honor? Maggot storm! Flower girl? Pig guts!), then Deep Red is for Dario Argento fans that found his films to be either impenetrable trash like Inferno or nonsensically complicated murder mysteries like Tenebre or Opera. Read More »

In Dario Argento’s first film, Tony Musante plays Sam, an American writer who is in Rome trying to find inspiration for a new work. Apparently all the inspiration he was able to muster up was a work-for-hire project about birds. He turns in that project and is getting ready to leave the country, when, wouldn’t you know it, he happens to be aimlessly walking the nighttime streets of Rome and sees an attempted murder going on! Read More »

The Deep is a movie long on scenes of Nick Nolte and Robert Shaw vacuuming up the ocean floor in search of Spanish treasure and short on anything resembling excitement. The movie has also been “credited” with starting the wet T-shirt craze with scenes of Jacqueline Bisset diving around in a clingy top (what? You thought it was because of the scenes where Robert Shaw was diving around in a clingy top?), but once she gets relegated to bored girlfriend status and just hangs out on the boat while Nick and Robert battle Lou Gossett and a big eel, the movie loses whatever momentum it had. Read More »

This movie teaches us the hard way that the only thing worse than a film ending with a big cello concerto is a film that drones on with lots of talk ten minutes after the big cello concerto. Watching Paul Henreid sitting there with a big violin between his legs while he makes all these “either I’m a musical genius or I’m in need of some serious fiber” faces while he plays some obnoxious dirge that composer/rival Claude Raines dreamed up in between bouts of surly self-pity at having lost the affections of Bette Davis, made me realize why you don’t see a lot of love triangle movies involving classical musicians these days. Read More »

Stefano has taken a job finishing a fresco (which is apparently different than a Fresca, a refreshingly different soft drink) at a church on an isolated island somewhere in Italy. I had high hopes for this film by Pupi Avati when Stefano got off the boat and set foot onto the island. There was a sultry broad making eyes at him and a midget greeted him on shore. This midget, Solmi, was the mayor of the island and some of you are probably bursting a few blood vessels trying to place him. He also appeared as Mr. Big in the hit movie Zeder, another film by Pupi Avati! How could you possibly forget that! Read More »

Death Smiled At Murder is an understated and uninteresting Italian horror film that unfortunately brought to mind comparisons to the similarly understated and uninteresting Italian horror film, The House With The Windows That Laughed. That film by Pupi Avati had this slow, pastoral quality to it with its lush countryside scenery and slack pacing. Death Smiled At Murder also has the benefit of some nice scenery and a fancy score that seeks to add some class to a movie that can’t help but betray its roots as an exploitation-revenge-from-beyond-the-grave drama. Since this was a Joe D’Amato movie after all, these low key scenes of characters having parties and going on hunting trips and taking bubble baths were punctuated by jarring shots of poorly realized gore straight out of Lucio Fulci movie. Read More »

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stopped on the street by total strangers and told “Deadly Outbreak is just Die Hard in a chemical plant.” I suppose they’re just trying to be cute or hip or one of the popular kids or whatever, but I’ve never been one to maintain a polite silence in social situations (and I have the lack of friends to prove it) so I always fire back with both barrels. “Die Hard is just Deadly Outbreak in a skyscraper,” I respond and then bring it all home by adding, “but without Jeff Speakman!” Then I go all Kenpo over their ass just like Jeff would do! Read More »

If you’ve ever sat through Son of Godzilla or Godzilla: Final Wars and wished that all the Godzilla garbage was excised so that the focus could be on Kamacuras, The Deadly Mantis is a dream come true! Kamacuras was of course the giant flying praying mantis that made cameo appearances in both of those Godzilla outings. Though not on screen for long, much like when Kumonga the giant spider puts in an appearance (usually via stock footage), you feel a kinship with these Joe Sixpack monsters. They ain’t too fancy looking or got any cool powers and they usually are just content to mind their own business until one of the big name monsters causes them problems. These are the monsters of the proletariat! Read More »

Six people are on a camping trip on a deserted island (except for the chainsaw wielding maniac, his equally psycho wife and their retarded son, and three or four condom salesmen). The three guys are named Professor (he carries around a video camera), Soldier (he carries around a big knife), and Ken (all Asian movies are required to feature a character with some form of the name Ken - usually Kenny). The three girls are named Linda (Professor’s girlfriend), BeBe (Soldier’s girlfriend) and Winnie (Ken’s girlfriend). Now that you know the main characters, we can set about killing them off. But first Soldier takes everyone’s cell phones and hides them for some murky and ultimately stupid reason, thus assuring the killer free reign until the boat home arrives in the morning. Read More »

This movie manages to do in twenty minutes what most zombie movies do in about ninety. Whether you consider that a good thing or not depends on what you think about all those full-length zombie movies we’ve been exposed to in the last thirty years. I have often complained that some of these zombie films seemed to go on for way too long (see Dawn Of The Dead and Hell Of The Living Dead for example) so you might think that this twenty minute short film would be perfect for the genre. Read More »

As is usually the case in $18,000 movies, the behind-the-scenes shenanigans are infinitely more interesting than the half-finished product someone barfed up on screen. The liner notes by film historian Tom Weaver for The Astounding She-Monster recount a few amusing anecdotes that surrounded this movie’s production. Probably the best among them is the story of how they got villain Keene Duncan to double as a bear by wearing a bear skin suit for a fight scene, only to have him almost suffocate because he was smoking a cigarette inside the suit while they were filming. Read More »

Presumably the French high-priced call girl Mystère is supposed to be a super sexy broad what with her heavily made up face and flawless features. Why else is everyone prepared to pay her something along the lines of $1000 to sleep with her? Personally, I found her just a bit on the nasty side of super skeevy since she turned three freaking tricks in a single night! Later on when she’s trying to escape a would-be killer, I was just thankful that she could still walk, let alone scurrying around her roof in an effort to fend him off! Read More »

Humphrey Bogart plays recently returned war vet Rip Murdock. He’s searching for the truth behind the death of Johnny, his best friend from the service. Rip knows that Johnny was a damn good paratrooper and he deserves his Congressional Medal of Honor, even if it has to be awarded posthumously. That’s not so much to ask for a guy who gave everything he had to kick the Ratzis in their Teutonic nads, is it? Read More »

When British novelist John Wyndham wasn’t busy crafting stories about killer plants taking over the world (The Day Of The Triffids), he was busy crafting stories about killer brats taking over the world. Village of the Damned is the movie version of his novel The Midwich Cuckoos and an interesting premise is let down by an abrupt and unsatisfying ending. Read More »

This pretty effective and gory horror film combines two different things that most of us always suspected of not exactly being on the up and up: small towns and funeral parlors. While there have been a number of movies that showed us living in a small town was the same as moving into a haunted house (Village Of The Damned ) and some films that dealt with the fact that most funeral parlors are really operated by guys doing unspeakable things with dead folks (see the Phantasm series),Dead And Buried takes that logical next step and poses the question that is really almost embarrassingly obvious: What if there was this small town where the guy in charge of the funeral home starting mixing his business with a little voodoo? Read More »

This Roger Corman end of the world shocker (trust me when I tell you that there were some shocking moments in this one) was incredibly, filmed in nine days. I say that that was incredible because while watching it, I was thinking that they should have been able to do it in about a third of the time. Read More »

If you’ve ever read the real estate section of your local paper, you’ve seen the ads: Great starter home! 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, attached garage, coven of zombie witches, excellent schools, $229,000. Built on the scene of a horrific witch burning centuries ago, this history-infused charmer has been retrofitted with central air and is wired for cable. Though thoroughly modern in its amenities, the gateway to hell located on the second floor still functions! Perfect for families with small children who are not too attached to old-world notions of souls! Read More »

We’ve all seen movies where the killer is someone close to the heroine that she never suspected. We’re also familiar with the red herrings thrown out to implicate the innocent. And the little kickers at the end of these horror movies that show the villain’s heinous activities aren’t over despite all evidence to the contrary? Well, we’d be shocked if there wasn’t a shock ending! But Night Killer is going to use all these tired and horribly ineffective conventions as just the jumping off point! How do we know that? Because there is a moment in the movie where a woman says, “my grandma, what a big schlong you have!” Read More »

Sometimes I lay awake at night on my stained mattress and ponder what the future holds for planet Earth. What wonders will we see come to pass? Flying cars? Cures for all diseases? An end to hunger and other cruddy stuff? But then the morning arrives along with cruel reality! And I hit my research library of Roger Corman sci-fi movies! And the terrible future that awaits us becomes clear! The year is 2020! Man has gone and pooped all over the planet! There is only one hope left! An evil corporation named Martel will use an underwater lab to save all of us! By harassing some aliens that have taken up residence nearby! Read More »

Here’s what I’m going to recommend to sensitive British chap Bill, the star of this BBC miniseries: a little less time giving me lectures about how we shouldn’t have a bunch of satellites in space protecting our national security and a whole lot more killer plant fighting. It isn’t bad enough that Bill is unable to contain his socialist/commie views to himself for the full two and a half hours of things, but once he decides to unload on us, he just pulls it straight out of his bum! Where else would his theory that everyone on Earth had been blinded not by killer meteors in league with killer plants (the most common sense explanation) but by some weapon up in space equipped with blinding radiation that went haywire and fried everyone’s optic nerve? Did your teachers ever tell you about the smell test? Basically, it posits that if the answer you came up with smells like it came from inside Bill’s left wing bum, then it probably did! Read More »

You know, for being chunks of rock whizzing through the air, filmmakers sure do give meteors a lot of credit when it comes to contributing to the end of civilization as we know it. I can recall films where meteors (or comets) have been blamed for such various debacles as making the dead walk the earth, turning people into dust, causing all electrical devices to rebel against their human masters (especially that semi with the Green Goblin on the front), and causing plants to run around eating people. This non-exhaustive tally does not include the movies where meteors do more routine damage like causing tidal waves and blocking out the sun with the debris they kicked up on deep impact causing Armageddon to ensue. Read More »

When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will *yawn*. Huh? What? Oh, yeah, I’m awake. Just sort of dozed off for a minute. You know, deep down I never really believed the various explanations that the Man gave out for these periodic attacks of undead terror cells. You’ve got your Trioxin barrels that keep getting lost and busted open. Or there’s always some comet or meteor or other vague outer space situation that might have caused Joe Zombie to start fussin’ and fightin’. Then you’ve got your virus that some goofball scientist created and inadvertently let loose when he was too busy playing with his Bunsen burner. But I think that Day of the Dead 2: Contigium really hits the nail on the head in the realism department when they have the end of the world hinge on a guy in an ugly shirt clutching a green Thermos. I mean, has any good ever come out of dudes who don’t know how to dress themselves wandering around with a Thermos? Read More »

As expected, Day Of The Dead (2008 edition - now with CGI!) is horrible, but in its defense, it never really gets as horrible as you assumed it would when you busted into the gun store, stocked up on Uzis, ammo, and machetes and hit the streets of small town America to hack your way through a batch of zombies accidentally unleashed by our clumsy government again. Sure, there were plenty of reasons to hate this movie (Mena Suvari as a tough as nails soldier? I had to look in the mirror to make sure some zombie virus hadn’t attacked my freaking brain when I heard that one!), but whenever my hatred would edge into murderous loathing territory, Nick Cannon would go and do something like kick a severed zombie head like a soccer ball while dispensing some potty mouthed bit of dialogue! Goooooal! Read More »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Four people including two white guys, a black guy, and a chick fly around in a helicopter after the living dead have run roughshod over our planet. These four people are holed up inside a rather large structure where they not only have to do battle against zombies with a sweet tooth for arms, legs and pig guts, but also against their fellow humans, thus provoking that often-asked and perpetually not-so-subtle question: Who are the real monsters? Read More »

At the risk of having one of the wee folk put the come hither on me and replace my step kids with changelings, I’m going to go ahead and declare that Darby O’Gill And The Little People was nothing so much as a lot of potato-breathed blarney that even an Irishman full of cheap stout could not have enjoyed. The concept seemed sure fire enough: James Bond vs. a bunch of leprechauns, but the execution left me in such a deep snooze that not even a wailing banshee informing me of my impending demise could rouse me to so much as hit the rewind button once James Bond, his new gal pal, and her drunken toad of a father were singing in a desperate effort to coax the closing credits onscreen and finally drive a stake through this thing’s heart or however it is you kill these little goobers. Read More »

This is a movie most famous for the make-up call the Oscar voters made for Bette Davis after they gave her the shaft the year before in the Best Actress race for her performance in Of Human Bondage (she wasn’t even nominated). I perused the archives in an effort to determine who, if anyone was hosed by Bette’s ill-gotten gains. I only recognized two of the actresses that were also nominated, one of them being Katharine Hepburn, who ended up with plenty of her own statues and the other was Miriam Hopkins. I suppressed a giggle in thinking that she might have been cheated out of the Oscar by Bette since her career would be headed down hill in short order and she would be forced to be Bette’s co-star in 1939’s The Old Maid. I wonder if she hated Bette back in 1935 yet or if she didn’t catch on until years later that it was Miss Davis that scuttled her shot at immortality. Read More »

It’s Satan vs. the Mullet! In outer space! With not much at stake! And one of the more bogus mysteries of all time solved! I’ll be the first to admit though that despite that really great set up, the movie failed to deliver on its obvious promise. The movie’s script was the root of its problems since I didn’t understand anything that was happening. Twin brothers apparently wrote it and they must have been using that twin ESP all twins have so that it made sense to them, but not to us non-twins that weren’t plugged into their secret language. Read More »

Typically uninteresting alien invasion story mixed with an evil government agency’s hidden agenda that’s saved by a healthy dose of Scalia! Professional macho man Jack Scalia plays a guy haunted by his past! But not just any guy! As we’re told by a dude checking out his credentials, Scalia was special forces in Vietnam, winning the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and even the frigging CMH! That’s Congressional Medal of Honor to you liberal pansies who hid in Canada when your country needed you most! Read More »

Jack Scalia co-stars with his gigantic hair as the bad ass submarine designer who dives down a billion miles into the ocean to blast some respect into mutant sea monsters that have gone and wrecked his sub! And don’t lie to me and say you didn’t just rip a fricking hole in the crotch of your wet suit when you read that! Incredibly, like some sort of unbelievable deep sea anomaly that can only exist because of the extreme conditions down there, Endless Descent goes out and just blows away the lofty expectations you have for a film featuring Scalia vs. mutants! Read More »

From the four corners of the world, eight cyborgs leave their current civilian lives, putting their dreams of being a race car driver, ballerina, and bull fighter (what?) on hold so that they might help one of their own and also to save Earth! Once they join forces, the greatest super team of all team is back in action! Yes true believer, your suspicions are well-founded! The dream is alive and well! Finally after twenty-five years, the Galaxy Legion has reunited to combat evil, to cast light upon the dark, and to find out how 006’s career as a matador is working out! Read More »

I realize that most of you are expecting to read something marginally amusing about how rotten this movie is. You want to hear me run the Muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, down for his penchant for staring dumbly about, like a little girl lost in a department store and about to wet her pants. You desire the expected cheap shot about how V.D. croaks out his meager lines like he’s had half his tongue removed while the remaining half is swelled up. Read More »

Truly, the Fly has his final and most horrifying revenge on us in this, the final film in the original trilogy. Just like the other star of the previous two films, the Fly joins Vincent Price on vacation and actually sits the whole movie out! I try not to expect too much out of some of these movies, but is it really out of line to expect that in a film entitled The Curse Of The Fly, that the Fly be running around groping ingenues and choking lab assistants? Aren’t we owed scenes of some actor valiantly struggling not to tip over due to the top heavy nature of the giant fly-head mask he has to wear? At the very least, we should get some flashbacks that show the Fly in his prime, complete with that honey-combed point of view shot they used whenever they wanted to show us what the Fly was seeing. But you know what we get? A glossy 8×10! Read More »

Robert Siodmak, who warmed up his film noir chops with Phantom Lady hits his stride in this crime melodrama starring Burt Lancaster, Yvonne DeCarlo, and Dan Duryea. Burt plays a regular guy whose heart still belongs to his ex-wife Anna. Burt’s character, Steve, is a square-jawed type who doesn’t really appreciate anyone telling him what to do and doesn’t appreciate the fact that tight, white, tank top undershirts are supposed be worn underneath something. Read More »

This is the third and final movie in the Creature series of films that populated the mid 1950s. This one came out in 1956, Revenge Of The Creature came out in 1955, and Creature From The Black Lagoon came out in 1954, so you can see that Universal didn’t exactly let the ideas for sequels gestate any longer than it took to get the rubber Gill Man suit back from the dry cleaners. Read More »

One year after his first butt kicking, the Creature returned to the big screen in 1955 in Universal’s first sequel to Creature From The Black Lagoon. The Creature tries hard in this one, but he’s given such weak material to work with that even he can’t save this lackluster effort. Read More »

In the late 1950s, one name was synonymous with mountains and monsters and that name was Forrest Tucker. Tucker, who would later cement his legendary status by starring in the legendary television show, F-Troop, appeared in The Abominable Snowman in 1957 where he got chomped by psychic Yetis over in the Himalayas. Only a mere one year later, he would strap on his hiking boots for another go round when he almost got chomped by giant one-eyed psychic aliens in The Crawling Eye. Read More »

The Cyber-Tracker (or “CyberTracker” depending on the movie) franchise is brought to an explosive conclusion in this sequel which is positively cybertastic! Three long years after the events in the first CyberTracker film, Eric, Connie, and Jared return to do battle once again with evil cyborgs who are charged with enforcing the law, but have this disconcerting habit of being used to kill innocent people and assassinate politicians. The stakes are even higher though this time around because the Cyber-Trackers come in all sorts of awesome flavors! Read More »

Just to clear up something from the get go, no, this movie is not based on the hit pinball game. It’s the other way around. The Creature is the most famous “biped from the deep” and if he didn’t invent the genre, then he certainly defined it. The movie was so popular that it spawned two sequels in short order (1955 and 1956) as well as countless imitators such as The Monster of Piedras Blancas and The Horror of Party Beach. Even decades later in films such as Humanoids From The Deep, you can still the Creature’s influence. Read More »

When you’ve got Hammer laying on the blood, gore and skin around this time, I’m not sure what the point was in making a movie like this. They want to bring the vampire into the modern world to see what would happen if some jaded city dwellers encountered a creature they thought only existed in myth. The only problem is that the movie is so small-scale, none of the potentially interesting culture clashes between the old vampire and the happening young kids and their big scary city happen. Read More »

It’s time for another one of those bargain basement action icon team ups that can occasionally nudge a movie like Cyber Tracker from cyber crapper status all the way up to cyber clunker status! Much like the Jeff Speakman flick Scorpio One which had the Perfect Weapon take on Brent “Huffbo” Huff of Strike Commando 2 fame, Cyber Tracker creams the undiscerning action audience’s jeans with the mouth watering showdown between Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Richard “The Kick Fighter With A Mullet” Norton. If it doesn’t stack up to the fight on the space station between Speakman and Huff where Speakman smacked Huff in the head with a fire extinguisher, that just goes to show that when you have such legends brawling, the edge often comes down the intangibles. Intangibles like space stations and fire extinguishers. Read More »

In space no one can hear you scream “filler episodes!” Volume 2 of the Cosmo Warrior Zero saga features episodes 5-8 of the thirteen episode series and is highlighted by space pirate Captain Harlock’s giant guard cow rampaging through a wild west town. Usually, those sort of bovine antics would be enough to unhesitatingly recommend the title (even if there was never any of the expected giant cow pie scenes that such a creature promised), but while the story even has a midget killing the giant cow with a bazooka, things grind to a halt when they haul out that most tired of cliches whenever someone is hunting someone else that they secretly respect. Read More »

I picked this particular title up out of the steaming heap of anime that generally featured big-eyed ten year old girls in short cheerleader skirts fighting off horny demons with lots of frisky tentacles because I thought it would be cool instead of deviant. Don’t get your hopes up though, this one isn’t deviant either. Whatever possessed me to think that any kind of anime could be cool? Two words: space pirates! Read More »

If you have any education at all, you know that this movie is based on a novel written back in 1845 by Alexandre Dumas. Since this is one of those hundred-plus year old books and is French, it is a classic. This means that you were assigned to read the thing in school, but didn’t, content to rely on the smart kid with atrocious breath to fill you in on the details. I didn’t come into the game with zero knowledge of the subject matter though. As most you know, I spent a good portion of the early 1990s at opening night of every new Van Damme flick. We all recall Van Damme’s Double Impact where he played twins for the first time. It was based on this Corsican situation so I have a pretty good idea about what’s going on here. Read More »

At long last it can be revealed! The startling secret of the Incas’ empire has been hidden from the eyes of the white man for a millennia! Now, thanks to the unceasing efforts of Professor Bradbury and his sidekick, Linda Logan, the entire world will know what has been concealed beneath the volcano deep in Incan country, wherever the hell that is! Is it an untold wealth of fabulous jewels? Tons of shiny, kick ass gold knick knacks? A fountain of youth that gives all who taste from its refreshing pool eternal life? Any of those would be pretty snazzy to be sure! If the secret of the Incas’ empire sucked! Read More »

If your favorite parts of Italian war movies are the scenes of jeeps driving around some ugly foreign country, Days Of Hell will have you creaming in camos! Easily taking home the coveted title “Italian War Movie With Most Jeepage Per Minute,” Days Of Hell helmer Tonino Ricci (Rush, Rage, Raiders Of The Magic Ivory) brings an added depth to all the Jeeping around in the film, by having his crack commando team frequently jumping out of it to shoot native tribesmen and Russians. Additionally, in one Jeep-orgasmic sequence, D Team actually splits up and starts cruising around in two Jeeps! Two Jeeps? Admit it, you just got an M-16-sized chubby! Read More »