If that sounds like the set up for producer Roger Corman’s Lords Of The Deep to you, then you are not only correct, but also have my sympathies for apparently having been subjected to that waterlogged abomination.

But Roger is all about second chances! Because a second chance costs half as much as an all new first chance! Thus, this not very intriguing or original premise is also the jumping off point for another of his company’s movies, Unknown Origin.

There’s only so many great ideas floating around, so it’s understandable that every so often you’re going to have recycle a story here or there. This is especially true in one of our most cherished genres, the “underwater version of Alien” genre.

Movies like Deepstar Six, Leviathan, and Endless Descent are favorites because not only do you get plenty of gory deaths from icky creatures, but also because it all takes place right here on planet Earth! This ups the suspense because it’s a lot easier to believe that terribly deformed bloodthirsty creatures are rampaging around a super secret advanced lab that’s been constructed at the deepest part of the ocean for some usually vague mining reason than it is to buy that it’s all happening on a spaceship!

A spaceship? That’s science fiction! Undersea labs are basically submarines that are parked! That’s science fact!

In keeping with the movie’s theory that we can’t continue to plunder our nation’s non-renewable resources, Corman leads by example by re-positioning some of his favorite footage from Lords Of The Deep into Unknown Origin! Pretty much all the exterior shots of the undersea lab as well as the scenes of the lab’s subs moving here and there were first seen in Lords Of The Deep.

There’s also probably some footage from other Corman movies inserted as well. There is at least a shot of an explosion in a shaft that was also seen in Star Hunter and The Terror Within.

None of that is particularly shocking or off-putting since we’ve seen that sort of thing done before in movies like Ultra Warrior. Despite Unknown Origin not having the sheer quantity of re-used scenes as a movie like Ultra Warrior, Corman still turns it up a notch and does something I’ve never seen before in a movie – he uses the same opening text that describes the plight of earth in 2020 as he did in Lords Of The Deep!

I urge you though to ride it out because Corman takes everything that was wrong about Lords Of The Deep (everything) and changes it! I was going to say that he fixed it, but replacing a surly Bradford Dillman as the lab commander with a surly Alex Hyde-White was not exactly an upgrade.

To Alex’s credit, he does spend most of the movie threatening his crew and pulling a gun on them while forcing them to suffocate to prove they aren’t possessed by an alien parasite. Besides, it wasn’t like he didn’t take his suffocation first. It’s called leading by example.

The story of Unknown Origin is just the sort of story we were wishing for while enduring Lords Of The Deep. Gone are the pansy aliens who want to tell us how to save our planet and spend all their brain power communicating with a perpetually stupefied looking Priscilla Barnes. In their place are nasty little lizard-rat-like parasites that crawl into your mouth and slap pinkish tentacles all around your head! And the only to way to destroy them? Burning!

You know what that means! Time to hit the mining supply depot and load up on the flame throwers!

The stuntmen who specialize in burn scenes get a nice workout in this movie as there are at least three guys who get burned alive! That was a smart choice for this movie because in these undersea movies you aren’t able to blow up cars and watching models of subs and labs explode doesn’t give you the same kind of rush. Guys engulfed by flames and writing around on the floor though? Always appreciated!

The parasites are brought over accidentally when the crew investigates a distress call from an underwater Russian mining facility. The Russians uncovered the aliens while digging under the sea and once the parasites were on the loose, everyone went crazy and killed each other.

Despite not knowing the cause of death, the dead bodies are brought aboard for examination as is a survivor. Naturally, he’s infected and the corpses are harboring parasite eggs.

It’s true that the super powers the parasites exhibit are never fully explained. Like how they can avoid almost all detection despite being a big lizardy thing that’s moving around inside a body. And yes, they somehow can possess a person, commanding them to do whatever nefarious bidding they can think of. And really, isn’t it obvious that they’d also have a dose of that super strength all parasitic reptiles are renowned for?

But who really cares about some monster’s dubious résumé so long as there’s 75 minutes of shooting, burning, accusations, and a lab with a self destruct sequence! It even has an android in it along with a shady doctor who has his own agenda!

Unknown Origin is what Lords Of the Deep should have been, which admittedly wasn’t a hell of a lot, but still, I’ll gladly trade slimy parasites with unexplained powers for preachy manta rays too stupid to communicate with anyone other than one of the gals from Three’s Company!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

When you’ve got the Beastmaster prowling around a deep space research station, you can bet one of two things is going on: either he’s on the hunt for the most deadliest alien in the universe ever accidentally created by a couple of guys with an incubator or he’s on the make!

Thankfully for us fans of scenes of people running through hallways, anxiously watching computer monitors, and trying to avoid clunky moving space monsters, the sexy stuff is strictly the stuff of dreams in this one!

Marc Singer (Savate) is the Beastmaster of course, but in this movie he’s going by one of his less flaymobant and loin-cloth impaired identies, Captain Steve Krieger. Beastmaster is in charge of a spaceship that has a total of one other crew member, Tinpan.

Tinpan is a robot who is a guy in a grey jumpsuit with a robot head. We also know he is a robot because of all the mechanical noises dubbed in whenever he moves. And also because he walks like he has a stick up his butt.

I don’t care how advanced a civilzation is, no matter if a robot can think for itself, feel emotions, or play poker, he’s always going to walk like he has a stick up his butt. It’s just one of those universal laws of robotics. Besides, I’m sure that Beastmaster is just glad to not have to put with those stinky ferrets anymore.

Beastmaster and Tinpan (which sounds like an old vaudeville act your grandfather would wax nostalgic about) respond to a distress call from a research station, but not before some interstellar warfare!

It’s a mark of how much credit this movie gives its audience that nothing is ever explained about why Beastmaster and Tinpan find themselves in a dogfight with three other spaceships. So many of these really short, Alien homages take lots of valuable time to describe all sorts of backstory with empires, rebels, haunted spaceships and mining companies.

Once Beastmaster and Tinpan manage to fight off the enemy ships and damage their own ship enough that they have to hang around fighting aliens at this lab, we finally get some information on just what it was that set off the chest-bursting, parasitic monsters this time.

There’s this virus going around that we need to find a cure for and as everyone with either a second grade science education or a fertile imagination knows, to fight a really nasty virus, you need to create an even nastier virus! And that’s just what they did!

And then it hatched and turned in a frigging monster that looked sort of like Alien and Pumpkinhead! My history may be a little rusty, but I seem to recall that that’s how Jonas Salk cured polio.

With the creature on the loose, it’s up to Beastmaster to pursue it while it’s up to the rest of the crew to get slaughtered! To be fair, Beastmaster is usually nearby when someone is getting sucked down airshafts, ripped in half or having their head ripped clean off their body, but he had a tendancy to roll out of the way with a lot more acumen than these egghead scientists.

I’d like to tell you that it was because of all his training in the Space Marines or because he grew up on some rough and tumble frontier planet, but that sounds an awful like backstory, doesn’t it? All I know about Beastmaster is that Tinpan is his best friend and that his spaceship is home. And really, is there anything you need to know about a man other than that?

Beastmaster has very little dialogue and does most of his talking with his laser blaster and glazed over squint which he uses to convey both steely-eyed determination as well as disgust whenever the monster does something icky or when he has to shoot a critically injured crew member.

With his feathered hair, khakis and red safari shirt, Beastmaster doesn’t seem to be appearing in a futuristic shocker so much as heading off to a neighborhood barbecue.

Make no mistake though, these clothes utilize some pretty advanced technology. When he was outside hunting the alien and fell off the side of a mountain, it tore up he was white jumpsuit and busted his leg pretty good, but in the next scene back inside the station, his was back in his regular clothes and styling like before! And his leg was as good as new, too!

Dead Space is mainly a series of scenes where Beastmaster chases the monster and where people were getting chased by the monster. I will admit to being confused by both the humans’ and the monster’s actions during all this. Sometimes, the people would close off all the vents and trap the monster there. Except for when the monster was running around loose.

Then the monster would break out of the station and leave, but Beastmaster would follow. Then the monster would come back. Then everyone would announce that the monster was in the control room. And then be shocked when they go to the control room and find, surprise! The monster!

By the time a scientist nonsensically announced that they could use his blood which was infected by the first virus to combat the monster (who was really the second virus created to destroy the first virus) you can understand just why in the world Beastmaster has a sauna on his spaceship that he relaxes in.

All in all, I think the director and writer did what I expected them to do with this one. (Did I mention that the director also made Star Quest II and that the writer wrote Future Kick?)

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In one corner, you have the dark arts and all their reality-bending power to possess people, kill them, and general ability to string together unconnected scenes of bad special effects mayhem. In the other corner is David “the Hoff” Hasselhoff, lifeguard and talking-car pal.

If you think I’m about to reveal who wins out in this review, forget it! I will tell you though that in true Italian horror movie fashion, a Sesame Street brand tape recorder turns out to be more powerful than both of them combined!

Witchery also supplements the usual Italian hijinks and the Hoff with a cast that could have only appeared in an Italian movie starring the Hoff!

There’s a sweaty and pregnant Linda Blair, the Hoff’s one-time wife Catherine Hickland who also played Virgin in Robowar, but who is now playing a nympho architect, and Leslie Cumming who plays a virgin and whose only other credit was in another Italian trash epic, Zombie 5: Killing Birds!

Like all great ideas, the movie’s story is pretty simple: Eight idiots get themselves stranded at an abandoned island hotel that’s haunted by an old hag witch. In the hands of someone who didn’t direct Contamination .7 this could have been your standard stalk and slash affair where people are picked off one by one in the various deserted rooms of the hotel. To be fair, technically, that is what happens, but director Fabrizio Laurenti does it all with a certain zest for the offbeat.

For most of the movie the Hoff looks to be most upset by his repeatedly rebuffed attempts to lay his virgin friend. For her part the virgin owns every single scene she is in because of utter lack of command of the English language.

At various times she sounds drunk, sleepy, like she has marbles in her mouth, is on a obscene cocktail of prescription drugs, like she’s saying each word for the very first time in her entire life, and as if she’s mentally retarded. That she insists on referring to the Hoff by his unconvincing movie name “Gary” only adds to the audience’s delight.

The Hoff really comes alive in the second part of the film when he abandons his efforts to bust cherry and gets on with busting witches. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice for the greater good and no one knows this more than the Hoff!

The Hoff is doing everything he can to push back the forces of darkness. He’s dodging flying furniture and falling shutters, he’s getting caught in sliding doors, he’s using a flare gun AND a camera flash bulb to attract rescuers. He’s even tying off a guy’s gushing arm with a necktie tourniquet!

It’s during this scene where the Hoff pulls out all his thespian chops. While trying to help this guy out, he notices his jugular vein is pulsating and the Hoff makes a face like the dude just crapped his pants.

Both the Hoff and us knew what was coming next and just like clockwork the guy’s vein bursts open spewing a geyser of red fluid right in the Hoff’s face! Can imagine how glad the Hoff was when he found out Baywatch was going to be a regular TV series the next year?

But the valiant efforts of the Hoff, the virgin, and the sweaty, pregnant Linda Blair would be wasted if Laurenti couldn’t come through in the horror department. You needn’t worry. Remember, this is the guy who had us watching folks get their eyes poked out by tree roots in Contamination .7!

There’s a good healthy catalog of heinousness in this film to keep pace with his all-star cast. You’ve got a mouth sewn shut, a person or two gets burned alive, there’s a nice crucifixion, a fetus gets gnawed on, an impaling on a swordfish, some voodoo, people going out windows, stabbings, an old fashioned possession and even a ghost rape for good measure. You also not only get Linda Blair in a hilarious fright wig, but as a bonus, you get a stunt Linda Blair in an even funnier wig during a particularly physical scene!

This movie doesn’t even let up with the last frame of film! There’s the classic shock ending you’ve seen in 500 other movies, but once again it’s Laurenti’s execution that leaves you in convulsions of laughter. The combination of the way the final line is delivered with the freeze frame of the character’s brain damaged expression is frankly worth twice the price the DVD cost.

Let me put it this way: Francois Trauffaut’s The 400 Blows was the very best use of the ending freeze frame. Until the release of Witchery!

Please do yourself a favor and buy this movie. It is an essential in every collection. And you’ll feel extra awesome knowing that the Hoff is getting a royalty check of like three cents because of your excellent taste.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The one thing we were hoping to see in a movie called Werewolf Woman, a woman werewolf, was really nowhere to be found except in short glimpses that were just flashbacks and/or delusions.

Normally, a woman obsessed with her demented delusion that she is a murderous werewolf with sexual hangups wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but since Daniella is a survivor of a brutal rape when she was thirteen years old and expresses her repressed desires by peeping her sister and her sister’s husband during one of their conjugal visits to her villa, a short stay at the mental hospital is probably in the offing. Well, that and because she lured the husband (Fabian) out into the woods, forced herself on him, bit and clawed him, and heaved him over a cliff to his death.

Now safely ensconced at the local hospital for the frequently deluded and always denuded, Daniella doesn’t respond to treatment very well. She has episodes where she needs to be strapped down and shouts things like “whore” over and over at the top of her lungs at her sister who is still mourning Fabian’s untimely demise (conveniently blamed on the guard dogs at the villa).

She also has episodes where she hides a pair of scissors under herself just in case the resident nympho sneaks into her room, unties her and needs a good stabbing.

Daniella makes her escape from the asylum in a scene that was unintentionally funny where she hides in a doctor’s car and then smashes the driver’s head against the steering wheel repeatedly causing the horn to honk again and again.

Once the car crashes, Daniella begins roaming around the countryside and the movie becomes a series of scenes where she has encounters with people that are so tainted by their wanton ways, they need to punished by a werewolf woman.

Of course the werewolf woman is merely suggested in Daniella’s actions. She sweats, screams, and growls, but otherwise remains human at all times.

By this time, I had written this movie off as a dull slurry of sex killings with supernatural overtones, but that was before Di Silvestro reached way, way down into his bag of tricks and pulled out… the stuntman!

Forget all the mumbo jumbo about lycanthropy and the reincarnation hooey. Where this film really earns its quirky claim to fame is Daniella’s love affair with a stuntman and their stay at the old west town movie set that Stuntguy is working on.

When Stuntguy picks up Daniella and reveals himself to be not only a stuntman but also sensitive and respectful of the dames, I was only tittering to myself a little. The smart ass in me was thinking, “what are they going to do on dates? Fall off really tall buildings? Break chairs over one another? Pull their punches during domestic squabbles?” The next thing I know, Daniella is shooting at him while he’s high atop a bell tower and he immediately executes a big stunt fall! Much laughing and hugging on the big air mattress follows.

Di Silvestro then goes into “love montage” overdrive and actually has scenes of them frolicking on the beach in the sunset interspersed with scenes of him diving through saloon windows! Some may question why there was never anyone else ever on this movie set and what happened to the movie that Stuntguy was shooting, but those are obviously people who have never been in love!

But what about Daniella’s werewolf woman gimmick? Was all it took to cure it the love of a rugged and pretty cut stuntman? Had he vanquished all the ghosts of the past with his high morals and even higher falls?

Before we get a chance to answer all those questions, Daniella gets gang raped! If that seems sudden, that’s an example of Di Silvestro’s pacing and narrative work for you. Three guys we’ve never seen before show up without any explanation (I guess they just check abandoned movie sets for women to assault) and brutalize Daniella while Stuntguy is out buying a new case of breakaway liquor bottles. All of this sends Daniella back over the edge and Rino switches to Death Wish-style revenge antics for the remainder of the movie.

This was a dull journey into the one dimensional world of Daniella, who remained, as she was from the very beginning of the movie, a pale cipher capable of little beyond moving from catatonia to animalistic rage.

Nothing is explained as to why she received no help from the time of her rape at age 13 to the present or why she was allowed to fixate on this idiotic (and likewise unexplained) bit of family folklore.

Cloaking it all in this faux modern psychology did nothing beyond making things seem even hokier than they otherwise would have been. And stopping the movie dead in its tracks for several minutes about two-thirds of the way through so that Daniella’s doctor could recap in excruciating detail everything that we had just seen to the investigator while playing a game of pool was about as ill-advised as picking up a growling hitchhiking chick with froth drying at the corner of her lips.

Still, I would willingly trade lots of boring scenes, an uniteresting main character, and a decided lack of the titular monster for a peek inside the high risk love life of a stuntman any time!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Sally hears a news report recounting the misadventures of the Great Mexican Food Truck Bandit and immediately jumps to the conclusion that her irradiated and 60 foot tall brother is responsible.

Major Baird isn’t convinced though. After all, he says, the U.S. Army hit that big bastard with a couple of bazooka blasts knocking him off the top of the Hoover Dam where he fell to certain death hundreds of feet below. You could almost hear Major Baird saying, “weren’t you paying attention to the end of The Amazing Colossal Man? Gawd!”

I think we all know how it is when the little ladies get some crazy idea in their pretty little skulls. I was not the least bit surprised then when I found all of us down in Mexico examining the scene of the crime.

The discovery of one footprint made by a 60 foot man leads to a great example of international cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement. I am of course referring to Operation Enduring Bread where we load up a food truck with drugged bread and drive it around until one carb-craving giant snatches it up and dumps all 3 trillion loaves in his gigantic piehole.

You know, once I got a look at this giant and how he behaved, I kind of thought that instead of harassing the military and traipsing done to Mexico in search of her brother, Sally should have busting her rump to make sure no one knew she was related to this guy.

Has there ever been a more pathetic movie monster in the history of the silver screen? This guy’s face is half-rotted off, he only growls and squawks, wears Depends and is clearly retarded.

Sure, I shuddered when I saw him, but not out of fear. I mean this guy was too fricking dumb to die after being shot up and dumped 700 feet off the Hoover Dam. This rampaging monster that we’re supposed to fear is hiding in Mexico stealing loaves of bread. He doesn’t need to be captured and controlled, he needs to be on food stamps!

Once he’s drugged and captured, the movie begins to mirror its characters in that it doesn’t know what to with the giant. For awhile he’s housed in an airport hanger where they try to test his brain to see if he’s permanently retarded or just temporarily retarded.

Naturally, even a monster who’s a mental midget still retains that primitive “escape and terrorize local community” instinct and the giant skulks around Griffith Park in Los Angeles for a little while.

Eventually the giant demonstrates the most brains of anyone involved when he figures out there’s no real point to this 69 minute movie, grabs some power lines and commits suicide.

But does this mean that the movie is a bad movie? Well sure it does! Do you have the brains of a retarded colossal man?

The real question though is whether you should watch it. My answer to that is what’s 69 minutes out of your entire life? You spend more time than that in a week picking your nose at work and examining it!

First of all, the Colossal Man has been upgraded for this movie. For now he has become…the Colossal Beast! And we all know that a Colossal Beast is much more awesome than a mere Colossal Man.

But even if you loved the Colossal Man, you get your due, too! That means I’m talking about flashbacks! Usually we bemoan these cheap ways of providing backstory, filling up time, and making us pay to see the same trash twice, but in this case the flashbacks take the very best of the first movie and put it in this movie. And it turns out to be the very best of this movie, too!

Did you know that Operation Enduring Bread wasn’t the first time they tried to drug the Colossal Beast? Back when he was only a Colossal Man, they tried the same thing, but with a giant syringe!

They actually get it done, stabbing Colossal Man in the foot or ankle. Colossal Man then does what anyone one of us would if we were a giant whose brain was damaged in a plutonium bomb explosion – he picks up the syringe and spears a guy with it! Have you ever seen anything like that in a movie before? (Except for when you saw it in The Amazing Colossal Man of course.)

Highlights from a previous movie (including a Las Vegas rampage that is better than the Griffith Park one) which surpass anything in the current movie require the sure (but very cheap) hand of a certain kind of director to carry them off with the success demonstrated in this movie.

Bert I. Gordon has worked with giant spiders (Earth Vs. The Spider), giant grasshoppers (Beginning Of The End) and a colossal man (The Amazing Colossal Man) so he was a natural to direct this feature as well. That, and he probably had all that good footage from the first movie stashed in a paper bag under his bed.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Just when I thought that Fulci had turned senile and was being tricked by his producers who only wanted skin and not that peculiar brand of “art” that Fulci usually brought to the table, the guy rolls off the girl when he hears her kid squawking for her in another room. He goes down to this kid’s room and stabs him with some scissors right in his little kid gut over and over!

Right away, we can see that even though the movie will be undoubtedly quite hideous, it won’t be won’t be completely devoid of its positive aspects. Bratty kid whacked? Ten cool points. Slutty mom taught a lesson? Twenty cool points. Naked guy photographed in shadow so that I don’t have to see his wiener? Priceless!

I think this must have been a dream sequence (surely a dream sequence for any guy who’s ever had his girlfriend’s snot-nosed kid interrupt some good loving with their self-centered mewling) because this little kid was alive the rest of the movie and turned out to be the instrument in the devious plot that killed this guy.

If you’re watching a Fulci movie for its gore then you better load up on the uppers, keep the lights on and make sure you don’t blink because the only gore is a short little autopsy scene where some guy is taking out the innards of the dead rich guy (Giorgio) and gives us a play by play where he talks about stuff like the colon which is kind of scary in its own way.

And when your movie hinges on some dude talking about how he found chunks of glass in some guy’s intestine, you’re simply reminding me why I’ve never watched C.S.I.

Back at the funeral, we’re enjoying a nice mixture of memorial service and flashback. As each grieving relative or mistress approaches the casket, they remember how crappy Giorgio was to them when he was alive.

Everyone that is except his daughter Rosy who was away at college and still loves her father very much and is understandably receptive when she starts hearing her father’s voice telling her that she needs to find out who killed him.

Okay, does anyone see a problem here? This guy was a jerk, his family members are greedy and homely asses, and Rosy is an airheaded moron who listens to the voices of dead people. Tell me again why I care about any of this?

The bulk of the movie is Rosy’s clumsy investigation of her daddy’s death. Rosy accuses the mistress of being the culprit, then her own mother, then figures out that someone had tricked the little boy into grinding up light bulbs and filling the ice cube trays with them and some water. Her father then had some drinks with the tainted ice cubes and this killed him when he failed to recognize that the “crushed up light bulb” taste of his drink wasn’t normal.

Rosy has a confrontation with the rest of her family and tells them that they will have to live with what they’ve done and then she leaves and goes and visits her dad’s grave and laughs heartily about everything, finally leaving the graveyard skipping merrily down the steps to the street below!

The funniest part was that the family killed the guy because they were worried that he would cut them out of his will. It turned out that he already had!

That just goes to show you that the perfect murder isn’t just about coming up with a really far-fetched scheme involving a crazy little boy who likes to grind up light bulbs. Searching through documents for wills and deeds and trusts may not be as glamorous as getting some glass in a guy’s intestines, but just as important!

Stupid beyond words in every respect, you have to think that even Fulci realized how lacking the story was (which he came up with) since he added in a useless dream sequence where Giorgio’s stepson gets attacked by zombies at his crypt. Without question, this one goes down light a light bulb laced lemonade and will leave you with blood in your stool.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Perhaps the additional scenes could have fleshed out a few of the characters who were overshadowed by the movie’s obsession with promoting the producer’s singers. And maybe with the scenes put back in the correct order, Jackie Chan’s seemingly gratuitous cameo, wouldn’t have felt like a cheap publicity stunt designed solely so that his name and face could be shoehorned onto the DVD cover.

But I rather doubt it. I’m going to hazard a wild guess that all any of that would have done was make the movie nineteen minutes worse.

This was one of those movies that started out in fairly mediocre fashion and only got increasingly putrid as it went along. When I was watching the first fight between a vampire hunter (Reeve of the Anti-Vampire Federation) and some vampires, I thought that it was mildly entertaining in a “at least I’m not having to listen to Twins perform one of their signature Cantonese pop songs” kind of way.

Sure, a lot of the fighting was that ugly mix of Matrix-style slow motion and Hong Kong-style wire effects that succeeds more in looking incredibly fake than in anything else, but the important thing was that a lot of stuff was getting busted up. I never realized how much glass there could be in an underground train station until I saw all the really poorly computer generated glass go flying in all directions.

Those of you hoping that this would be the kind of band infomercial for Twins like KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park was for KISS are going to be sorely disappointed. At the very least, a movie such as this should provide the viewer with silly moments designed to get over the band’s characters super powers (and for some reason these movies starring bands always imbue them with powers far beyond those of mortal bands), but Twins doesn’t even do a number for us!

Shoot, I didn’t even know that this movie was a plot by Twins management to promote them until after I had finished watching the movie and was doing a little background check on the principals. I mean, I knew the movie was also known as Twins Effect, but I just spent the movie waiting for some twins to show up and eventually just chalked the title up to some dodgy (or optimistic) translation issues.

Those of us who aren’t necessarily Twins fans are probably wondering why we shouldn’t just skip this movie altogether (aside from the fact that it’s a really bad movie). Emperor Entertainment Group was thinking about you, too! In addition to Cantonese superstar singing duo Twins, you can also admire the acting of EEG’s obscure Hong Kong pop idol Edison Chen!

Okay, so EEG put a bunch of their pop stars in a movie featuring vampires, but without any of them singing so much as a theme song. Now, what exactly is this movie about then?

One of the Twins is a realtor who sells a church to Edison and his vampire groupies. For some vaguely explained reason, Edison and company are going to be living in the church, though if you’re a bunch of vampires trying to blend in, I’m not sure why you’d be living in a house of God, but maybe some if it will rub off on them and if they aren’t exactly Strong Christians, they can maybe be Weaker Vampires.

Edison and his crew though aren’t the real bad guys. That role would fall to some Eurotrash bloodsucker who is intent on killing off all the members of the vampire royal family so that he can collect their something or other and use their essence or whatever to open up this ancient book that will give him the power to walk around during the daytime, thus making him master of the world somehow.

Helen (the Twins realtor) is the sister of Reeve, the vampire hunter. Reeve’s partner is killed at the beginning of the movie in the train station and his new partner is Gypsy. Gypsy turns out to the other half of Twins.

Gypsy and Helen don’t hit it off very well at first as they engage in a furious rooftop battle over a discarded stuffed animal. Um, wasn’t there a bunch of vampires running around trying to take over the world with a book of the undead or something? Couldn’t the fight over Teddy Ruxpin have waited?

Helen and Gypsy become close once Helen reveals to Gypsy that she has fallen in love with Edison even though Gypsy’s and Reeve’s job is to hunt down monster scum like Edison. She implores Gypsy to speak to Reeve on her behalf and Gypsy agrees.

I don’t recall that much ever came of this because by this time the Eurotrash guy was after Edison and Reeve ended up fighting Eurotrash instead of Edison. The whole movie is a bit like that. Things start up, go nowhere, and new things start up.

And none made anything approaching any sense at all. Why did we move into a church? Why did Helen and Edison crash a wedding on their first date? What’s the deal with all these vampires running around? Who thought it would make any sense for Helen and Edison to not only run into Jackie Chan at that wedding, but also to run into him at a hospital where he was employed as an EMT?

And to have him help fight off some vampires by stuffing them full of antidepressants and then turn up the music so the vampires would be in a better mood and just dance around instead of trying to kill Helen, Edison, and Jackie? Surely that’s not funny in any culture!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Most of the film is spent waiting for Fulci’s typically nonsensically supernatural explanation for things to kick in, or at the very least for a fog machine to get cranking. Instead, we are left with a fairly conventional serial killer tale, though it still is confusing and poorly executed enough to betray its real origins.

Lester Parson is, as we learn from the get go, a cannibal who likes to watch videos of the women he is eating while he is getting ready for dinner. He also has this mangy cat that he always gives a helping of chopped whore to and he even has a bunch of pigs he keeps somewhere in his house (maybe it’s an adjoining barn – you know how fancy these Italian villas are) that he feeds all the leftovers to.

Lester isn’t just your regular old cannibal though. He actually has a sensible reason for eating rich women. See, he needs their money to fund his love for the horses! Now, I’m not talking about the kind of love for the horses that someone like Hercules might have. I mean this guy likes to play the ponies!

He’s always betting thousands of dollars on these horse races and he’s always losing them. In fact, he’s so pathetic that his own bookie makes fun of him for his lack of talent in prognosticating the winners saying that he didn’t think Lester could win a horse race even if it was fixed. Ouch!

Another cool personality trait that Lester exhibits is that he likes to talk to himself. This may not seem so unusual for someone that has all the earmarks of a guy who’s insane, but he talks to himself via a tape recorder!

He’ll push play on his tape machine, start talking and wait for his own pre-recorded voice to answer him. This clearly is semi-Fulci territory in that it is completely ridiculous, but I’m sure all the people out there who like movies where Brett Halsey is romancing women with hairlips are going to say that he was only imagining his voice on the tape and that it was all in his head, but if so, none of the rest of what we see makes any sense.

Each time Lester does away with some ugly skank, he settles in to watch the news later only to see that some similar murder has been committed, but the killer hasn’t disposed of the body. We’ve watched in graphic detail how Lester gets rid of the bodies, so it can’t be him, can it?

Well of course it can’t be him! It’s literally his shadow! The scene at the end of the movie where he’s whining to his own shadow about how it ruined everything is a fine example of non-existent special effects combined with the insipid plotting you were secretly hoping to see in this one. But then why are we seeing him dispose of the bodies if he isn’t really doing it?

Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way or anything, but I do have to confess to laughing a little bit during this movie. Please don’t take this as some kind of endorsement, because I can’t emphasize enough the generic stupidity and threadbare look displayed throughout this movie, but there I was chuckling at Lester’s plight.

Brett Halsey is pretty much the whole picture here and I’ll give him credit since he seems to be in on the joke throughout things. His best moments aren’t when he’s killing broads or losing a high stakes poker game. They come whenever he’s trying to romance these nasty looking pigs that he hooks up with.

Whenever they aren’t looking at him, he’s cringing at their beards, wincing at their hairlips, and gagging at how close those hairy moles are to his face when he’s being intimate with them. Sure, he’s a cold-blooded maniac, but it all isn’t chainsaws, ovens, and running vagrants over repeatedly with his Mercedes. There’s some hard work involved here as well.

Lester’s laughable attempts to disguise himself are also something to take note of. He watches the news a lot and they keep saying how they’re closing in on the killer (he’s been given the catchy name of “The Maniac” by the press) and they have a description of him, so Lester gets contacts, shaves his beard, gets a new pair of glasses, then dyes his hair this barf-colored blonde and finally is found out by his hairlipped girlfriend who saw the news before he came over and recognized him from the police composite sketch on TV.

Lester and I had pretty much the same reaction when we saw that composite. It looked pretty much nothing like Lester. In fact, it didn’t even look like a human being so much as some facial features haphazardly put together.

A horrible, horrible effort from Fulci, who once upon a time brought a little style to pointless gore and it only solidifies his reputation as “director who made the worst horror movies of the late 1980s.” In movies like this, you can’t even tell that Fulci ever had any talent to begin with, let alone that he actually lost whatever he had. Doesn’t someone from his family care enough about his memory to buy the rights back to these bearded ladies and forever prevent them from being seen in public and held up to ridicule?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Tom’s not too keen on having his studliness put on trial though and the next thing I know, this dumb broad manages to have her ample caboose break through the railing at the top of the lighthouse and is hanging there above the rocky surf with one hand, pleading with Tom to help her. While Tom stands around pondering this situation, Vi falls to her death, but I’m sure he felt bad about it.

The next morning, Tom is scanning the ocean with his binoculars when he sees a body floating. Uh-oh! Looks like that she-ghost promised on the movie poster is already doublecrossing him and is going to be floating up on shore, probably with a big note pinned to her reading “Tom Stewart is hung like a hermit crab!”

Tom realizes all this and dives in and hauls the body to shore only to discover that it was just a bunch of seaweed and that his walnut-sized brain was playing tricks on him!

About this time we meet Sandy. She’s Tom’s fiancées’ eight-year old daughter and is played by the daughter of the director. She’s not as bad as you would expect the daughter of the director to be, but I’m supposed to be seeing some dang she-ghost terrorizing this bum all over Haunted Island!

Most of the movie Sandy just kind of hangs around getting on the increasingly insane Tom’s nerves, but how many of us could really put up with some dumb kid trying to show us some lame magic trick, while we keep hearing our name being called by our dead girlfriend?

Tom sits around his island bungalow trying to practice his piano playing, but stuff keeps happening to interrupt him. Stuff like some record being mysteriously played, even after he’s taken the record off of the record player. I imagine it’s just a coincidence that the record is that kicking new tune called “Tormented” by that break-out artist, Vi!

For no real reason, we’re introduced to the blind real estate agent who doesn’t seem to do anything on the island but bring people flowers. She tells Tom that even though she really doesn’t believe in she-ghosts and stuff like that, she sees a lot of strange things in her business. Then she tells some vaguely supernatural tale about a boy and his dog that turned into ghosts and left seaweed laying around the house and peed on people’s couches or something.

She leaves and Tom gets haunted some more. Tom tries to get Meg to elope so he can get off the island, but she says no, so he says he just might go elope by himself. I know that as you’re reading this, you’re wondering how much more exciting can things get.

How does a boat captain who ferried Vi over to the island (she even managed to mention the name of her secret boyfriend to him) and is owed five bucks by her sound? Tom is new to this whole “covering up suspicious disappearance of mistress” thing, so when the sea captain comes by looking for Vi because she owes him five bucks, Tom grudgingly pays him and thinks that’s that.

Naturally, the sea captain puts together the fact that no one ever saw Vi leave the island and that Tom is getting hitched to some rich gal who isn’t Vi and he realizes that the five bucks he got can be re-negotiated into $5000!

The sea captain gets cool points because he constantly refers to Tom as “Dad” but Tom gets cool points because he takes the sea captain up to the lighthouse and is convinced by the she-ghost to whack him in the head with a lead pipe.

After he leaves with the body, Sandy comes walking down the stairs all sad and stuff. Tom went and murdered a guy and didn’t even tell her! And she thought they were best friends!

If you’ve been thinking that up until now, the she-ghost hasn’t exactly been pulling out all the stops in terrorizing Tom then you’ve got to see her when she causes Meg’s wedding dress to be ruined because there’s seaweed on it!

Or the big finish, when at the wedding she causes all the flowers to wilt and blows the pages of the Bible the priest was holding to the page about burial instead of weddings! She’s an absolute fiend! (Within her white-trash-level budget of course.)

Director Bert I. Gordon (Empire of the Ants) shoots this in about the most bland way you can imagine, using the same ugly establishing shot of a beach house about ten times during the movie. Sometimes it looks like night, sometimes it looks like sunset and sometimes it looks like it was cloudy, but Gordon was hoping it would pass for night – all in the same scene!

And the effects used to depict the hauntings make you long for William Castle’s tricks, especially when Richard Carlson is forced to hold a mannequin’s head and act scared of it.

For his part, Tom is an unsympathetic moron, and the movie can’t even decide if the she-ghost was just a product of his imagination (everyone saw her handiwork at the wedding, but no one saw anything else she did). If it wasn’t his imagination, then he really wasn’t driven insane by his guilty conscience, which renders the whole concept (at least what I thought was the concept) of the movie void.

Tormented is an apt title for this film, but for all the wrong reasons. It’s an experience about as welcome as wilted flowers, obnoxious wind, and a wad of stinky seaweed at your wedding!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

First of all, there isn’t really any monster in the castle to begin with. Sure, there is some disfigured guy who looks a bit like professional wrestler Mick Foley that runs around conking people on the head with a club.

There’s also some crazy chick that kills some people (at least I think she did – this was another one of those affairs where the lengthy shots of people walking in hallways and down stairs sapped my ability to focus) and it turns out that she either likes to dress up in a suit of armor or she thinks she’s wearing one or some other character is having some kind of delusion.

You can clearly see that this is shaping up to be one of those films that’s mystifying in its reason for existence, since they don’t really attempt much a story and they don’t slather on the monster mayhem either. It’s just people standing around looking vaguely pensive and saying little (which is probably a plus because the voices that are dubbed here do little to dispel the feeling that you’re watching the repackaged lackluster Italian movie this is).

Two women approach the spooky castle just outside of town and one of them convinces the other to go inside. There wasn’t any explanation as to why two grown women would just be walking around and decide to explore a castle in the middle of the day, but they do.

Once inside the castle they look around, get killed and then dumped in a field. They cops find them just as this doctor is bringing his hottie daughter back to town.

The cast involved in the rest of the movie included the doctor and his daughter along with Elizabeth, who was the owner of the castle and chief maniac, a nosy reporter named George, and a guy in a turban named Raman.

Raman doesn’t really seem to actually have any reason to exist other than to mill around whining about how he can’t find the body of his dead wife, Countess Irene, who disappeared in the castle years ago. I think it goes without saying that the newly arrived daughter, whose name is Anna is a dead ringer for the dead Countess.

With two dumb girls having been murdered, Anna decides it would be a good time to take a skinny dip in the local lake, even though it looks really cold and the nosy reporter whose car happens to break down right next to her is wearing a heavy suit coat.

After feigning outrage that her public skinny dipping was discovered, she gets a ride back to town with this chap and in the next scene she’s talking about how she loves him and he’s beating up a cop and her dad and babbling about what a bad deal it was that he had to pimpslap his future father-in-law.

Huh? Did I miss something? Normally, I would credit a series of events like this as being “fast paced”, but somehow this development doesn’t speed the movie up any. In fact, the nosy reporter-turned-fiancee disappears from most of the rest of the movie, only showing up with his new best friend Raman to try and break into the secret torture dungeon in the castle.

This is a laughable effort with him and Raman taking a big log and repeatedly ramming it into the wall, accompanied by a badly dubbed thud. They do this several times, decide it probably won’t work and then go back and do it some more times. I don’t remember how they finally got into the basement, but they did and just in time to save Anna.

Nothing much really goes on during the bulk of this movie. I recall some confrontation with Anna and Elizabeth where Elizabeth scares Anna by telling her that some people are going to kill her.

Elizabeth is hanging out in the castle trying to find some jewels that the dead Countess left behind and she gets the information when she takes Anna captive later. Anna knows because she has this unexplained connection with the Countess that remained unexplained.

Raman and the reporter bust in just as Elizabeth is menacing Anna. The usual last minute antics ensue: A disfigured henchman ends up hanged after he gets tangled up in some chains, Raman discovers the remains of his long missing wife, and some guinea pigs that may be pretending to be rats gnaw away at the rope on a crossbow until it goes off.

Raman, the reporter, and Anna then stand around wondering along with the audience just what it all had meant. I admired this movie for ending at this point, without even bothering to insult my intelligence by trying to explain what we just saw.

This is simply a quite unremarkable all-around loser and even as it failed to answer the question posed onthe DVD case, it raised an even more important one: Don’t we have enough of our own dull horror movies that we shouldn’t need to import and re-dub someone else’s refuse?

© 2011 MonsterHunter