Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil

[noiseredux]

it is ABSOLUTELY the best Scream since the original. And I LOVED the whole 'remake' thing.

[Ack]

Of course I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. And now I'm carrying over from my pre-gaming thread.



17. Larva

Before I begin, please understand that this was a made-for-TV movie. Sometimes those are gems, like Killdozer. Other times they can be laughably bad, like Gargoyles. Unfortunately, Larva sits somewhere in the middle, well within the realm of almost completely forgettable.

In Larva, a new vet to the poorly named Host, Missouri, discovers a new strain of parasite that grows and evolves rapidly until it's a weird bat-looking thing made of bad CGI. But the townsfolk don't want to hear it; they're almost all slaves to the big meat corporation in town that has been giving out free experimental feed...which in turn has caused the parasites to evolve. And since the parasites evolved, they're now in the meat, so anyone who eats meat is infected. Luckily, the vet is a vegetarian. Unfortunately, just about nobody else is. This means we get to see a bad CGI, low violence equivalent of a chest burster popping out. Which is actually pretty surprising, because the filmmakers had no issue with blood. You'll see a fair bit of blood in this movie.

One thing this movie does that I appreciate is killing kids; look, let's face it, it's both a ballsy move and a low blow to parents to show kids getting attacked. As someone who isn't a parent, I'm all for it. Hell yeah, uber larva, eat that kid right in front of his mom! This happens, and I love it. There is also a Jurassic Park moment of a guy trying to escape town only to find one of the parasites sitting in his car. He doesn't make it.

With all of these crazy antics going on, the vet, a farmer, a lawyer, and the town sheriff decide to lure the parasites into the sewer and then blow it up. You get a lot of great shots of terrible CGI combined with explosion footage. And then comes the weird part: of the four people in the sewer, you never see the farmer or sheriff again. Hell, they aren't even mentioned. I don't know if they survive or not. Also, the lawyer gets hospitalized, but the vet who has just been in the same sewer explosion? Totally fine. Also, the lawyer is a meat eater, so the film ends zooming in on her stomach, implying that she might still be a host. Nice.

Look, it's absurdly low budget, the acting isn't great, and most of its 90 minutes won't stick with you. There are some great moments, but they are fleeting. There are better things to watch, but there are worse things too.




18. Body Melt

Oh, oh man. You know when you find a movie so bizarre, so grotesque, that you just have to talk about it? Body Melt is that thing. It's an Australian body horror splatter film from the early 1990s, and it reflects that in every possible way: the soundtrack is early '90s dance beats, there are overly muscular guys and a lot of leftover neon from the '80s, and the teenagers are now wearing their sweaters around their wastes over shorts. Plus, you get '90s 3D effects on the computer. And that's not even going into the straight up what-the-fuck nature of what you end up seeing.

Body Melt is about a neighborhood where a health company built on a toxic waste dumping site is testing its new type of vitamins. The problem is, the vitamins are unstable, and they have...side effects. That's putting it nicely. People end up getting killed in the nastiest of ways, from killer placenta to exploding penises, tentacles coming out of open wounds, faces tearing open, vomit, snot...if you can name a bodily fluid, it's gonna be involved, and it's gonna be weird. The film has a portmanteau kind of feel, taking the time to focus on each of the neighborhood residents and how they almost all die in some gruesome and horrible way.

Did you ever see Dead Alive? Bad Taste? Death Warmed Over? Then you have an idea of what Aussie/Kiwi Splatter is like, and with Body Melt, the emphasis is definitely on the splatter. People melt, explode, smash their faces, rip apart, or in one strange tale get murdered by incestuous rural deformed folk living out in the boonies of Australia, because I guess someone decided this movie needed more Deliverance? All of this while the soundtrack is pumping and literally screaming "Body Melt!"

If you haven't figured it out yet, I love this movie. I love how over-the-top, how ridiculous, and how disgusting it is. It's like watching Street Trash but without the homelessness, necrophilia, and guilt. It screams to be watched. It needs to be watched.

Here, have a NSFW trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuWL3YbEXAg

Pre-Gaming
1. Deep Star Six
2. Harbinger Down
3. Island Claws
4. Rabid
5. Attack of the Killer Donuts
6. Demon Wind
7. The Flying Serpent
8. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings
9. Galaxy of Terror
10. The Dead Pit
11. It Follows
12. Don't Breathe
13. The Alien Factor
14. Howling III: The Marsupials
15. Mutant
16. Final Exam

October
17. Larva
18. Body Melt

[noiseredux]

@Ack: That sounds awesome.

@Michi: How come no sub-title for this month's thread? Are you reflecting on how horror movies have a tendency to reboot now?

[PartridgeSenpai]

Sat down and FINALLY watched the first movie/season of Casltevania on Netflix (it's a movie divided into 4 parts. You can cut out the credits between and you'd never know it'd been cut up. It's a freaking movie XP). Just as fun as I'd heard it was! Definitely excited for the second film (unless this will really be a season? ).

I just wish Netflix didn't run on 360p on this computer for absolutely NO reason. I cannot get it to run better, and it's the exact same wired connection that my housemate uses for their blu-ray player. Everything runs in perfect HD on that blu-ray player when they use Netflix on it! I'm absolutely stumped XP

[Ack]

19. Voices from Beyond

I am an enormous fan of the bizarre and gory films of Lucio Fulci. To say his work is twisted is to seriously underrate just how strange and avant garde his films could be. They are often incoherent, with a dreamlike haze that quickly turns into nightmares. Unfortunately, 1991's Voices from Beyond was one of the final films Fulci ever worked on, and it suffers from both a lack of funds and a bitterness that became apparent at the roll of the final credits. But it still has touches of the old spark despite the problems he was facing over the use of his name, his diabetes, and his money troubles.

Voices from Beyond starts with the death of rich Giorgio Mainardi, whose house is full of deceit; his father is an invalid whose wife hates everyone and only wants money, his stepbrother is a cruel worm of a man, his wife is sleeping with said stepbrother, his son is actually not his, and he's also having his own affair with a high-value prostitute. He's not a nice man in his own right. But there is one person he cares about: his daughter, Rosie. After Giorgio's death, his spirit entreats Rosie to investigate his death, but she must do it before his body fully decomposes. At night, he haunts the dreams of all those in the house.

Most of this is pretty cut-and-dry. The way the murder was committed is both sick and inventive; glad Fulci got to use his giallo background for some great effect. But where Fulci's work in gore and horror really bears out is in the death of Giorgio, his autopsy, his rotting corpse, and in the nightmares he sends to people. Yep, those nightmares include cheap gore, child murder, and even zombies. It's obvious when you watch these scenes that they're low budget, but they still remind you exactly who was sitting in the director's chair. There is also a fair bit of nudity and sex, lending the film a sense of sleaze that keeps it from feeling entirely generic. Oh, and Fulci had a thing about eyeball gore; he literally cuts up a few in a plate of eggs during one nightmare sequence. Nice.

Unfortunately, when Fulci isn't giving into the faucets of his career that he's known for, the movie just kind of limps on. I was shocked to pause it at one point and discover I was already 3/4 of the way through; I felt like nothing had happened and I had only just gotten started.

Now, I think it's important to consider this is a story of a bad man's ghost who uses someone he deeply cares about to understand just who really cares about him, because the movie ends with a note: "this film is dedicated to my few real friends, in particular to clive barker and claudio carabba" and signed by Fulci. He only directed one other movie that year, Door to Silence, and then died alone in a small apartment in 1996 from diabetes complications. In the last years of his life, he was unhappy, poor, and in bad health. While Fulci was known to be difficult to work with, he also faced considerable trials during his life, such as the death of his wife and then his daughter being paralyzed in the early 1970s. He received little recognition in his home country and was considered a hack by many critics who were meanwhile heaping praise on the likes of Dario Argento. He wasn't even aware he had international fans until attending a Fangoria convention in the United States just two months before he died, where he found people lined up to meet him. Hopefully those fans brought him some small amount of solace.

If you've never experienced Fulci, don't start here. Go back to his work in the 1970s to see what he could do. But if you really want to dig, watch Voices from Beyond and think of the man behind it.

Pre-Gaming
1. Deep Star Six
2. Harbinger Down
3. Island Claws
4. Rabid
5. Attack of the Killer Donuts
6. Demon Wind
7. The Flying Serpent
8. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings
9. Galaxy of Terror
10. The Dead Pit
11. It Follows
12. Don't Breathe
13. The Alien Factor
14. Howling III: The Marsupials
15. Mutant
16. Final Exam

October
17. Larva
18. Body Melt
19. Voices from Beyond

[PartridgeSenpai]

I just wish Netflix didn't run on 360p on this computer for absolutely NO reason. I cannot get it to run better, and it's the exact same wired connection that my housemate uses for their blu-ray player. Everything runs in perfect HD on that blu-ray player when they use Netflix on it! I'm absolutely stumped XP

Maru helped me get it working! Turns out all I needed to use was Firefox instead of Chrome, because Chrome just hate Netflix on my machine apparently XP

[Nemoide]

Tonight I attempted to watch Happiness of the Katakuris. Unfortunately, the DVD I got from the library was scratched and started skipping at the 1h 20m point, becoming unwatchable (even after cleaning the disc, even on my computer). I'll re-request it and get a different copy. It might not be a real horror film, but it gets mentioned enough in horror circles for me to feel like I ought to check it out.

I want to hold off on any real review until I've finished it but in the meantime, I'll just say that I don't understand why Takashi Miike has as strong a following as he does, but the movie is still entertaining enough to make me want to watch the rest of it.

[noiseredux]

I'm not a Miike fan myself. What I have seen of his work really just bothered me.

[Ack]

I'm not a Miike fan myself. What I have seen of his work really just bothered me.

What, did Audition get under your skin?

I'm a fan of Miike's work. Most of it is low budget schlock, but he's both prolific and capable of working in a variety of genres, from children's films to samurai action movies, to gory crime films.

[noiseredux]

Audition and his Master's of Horror episode.