These reviews are amazing. You guys are killing it.Ack wrote:
21. Killer Workout, AKA Aerobicide
This movie has more cheese than a deep dish pizza.
People are getting killed in a gym by a murderer armed with a large safety pin. Det. Lt. Morgan, a tough mullet cop with a bad attitude, is on the case. But so is muscle-hunk Chuck Dawson, a new employee at Rhonda's Fitness. And meanwhile, beautiful women and muscular men keep ending up dead. Also, the sexual harassment and machismo is real!
I feel like this movie is an excuse for people to watch aerobics videos without the stress of knowing you're actually watching an aerobics video. Throughout the film, you just go back to footage of models exercising. The outfits only change once too, so you know all of this was from like two classes at most. Meanwhile, B-grade '80s pop songs that are totally about sex but unable to say so play in the background. And then we go back to the killings, which are...dumb.
You know what's not dumb? Ted Prior, the actor playing Chuck Dawson, looks and moves like he could kick someone's ass. There's a fight scene about 2/3 of the way through the movie where he gets his ass kicked but still smacks a dude with the wrong end of a rake. It's surprisingly well choreographed. Good fight scenes deserve better movies, folks.
So...yeah. Hot folks get killed in dumb ways. The cops are completely inept. Everyone is in spandex and leg warmers. Mullets abound. I don't-
AEROBICS BREAK!
-get who thought this was a good idea. And yet, it's hilariously awful. This is the kind of movie you watch in a crowd, because it's so dumb, it needs to be experienced with friends. I mean it.
Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
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prfsnl_gmr
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Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
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noiseredux
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Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
Killer Workout is so good.
I'd also recommend Death Spa.
I'd also recommend Death Spa.
Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
It sounds like Death Spa made more sense...and that's saying something.
Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9
22. Slime City
That name is a misnomer; there is no city. There are gallons of slime though. Woo, another splatter film!
Alex gets a new apartment and whines about his girlfriend wanting to maintain her virginity. Then he meets the apartment's residents: two old women, a weird hippy poet, and a sultry goth lady. The poet feeds him green goop, and the goth lady lays him. From there, Alex discovers that he must murder people or else he'll slowly start to melt and that the building was once owned by a Satanic cult which has old cult members possess new tenants through murder rituals and melting. Melt or murder, but murder and become possessed. It's not much of a choice, and eventually Alex starts getting a taste for it.
This movie switches between icky and dumb. I say icky and not gross, because the melting effects involve a lot of yellow liquid and Alex looking really sticky. Once he starts fully mutating into the Incredible Melting Man, his personality changes him into the cult leader Zachary. He also gets a stomach mouth like out of John Carpenter's The Thing. But by the end of it, he gets disemboweled and dismembered, and you know what comes out? Omelets and sausages. I'm not kidding. This guy has an entire freaking breakfast bar for an intestinal track. It didn't gross me out, it just made me hungry for Waffle House. And thus, I realized that I, too, am in a Satanic cult.
While I've been critical here of the effects, I will praise something. In one scene, Alex/Zachary is decapitated and his head is stabbed. His brain then busts out of his skull and crawls across the floor. I didn't know it until now, but this is something I needed more of in my life. All this, and Slime City did it nearly 15 years before The Crawling Brain. Suck it, world.
As for the rest of the cast, they vary, often depending on how much screen time they get. Usually the more time, the worse they are. Alex's girlfriend does ok as the innocent virgin, but his douchy best friend? Well, I wasn't upset to see his fate. There is also an '80s cop, but he is both incompetent AND lacking a mullet. I knew he would never crack this case. And then there are the residents of the apartment, which are either underdeveloped, weird, or trying too hard to appear arousing. Seriously, goth neighbor lady would have been more subtle if she'd been humping the doorframe.
How do I rank this? Well, it's like a weaker version of Street Trash. It's less gross, less offensive, and less poorly written in that this movie actually has a proper act structure, but it looks like it was filmed with the same camera used for The Toolbox Murders...only Slime City came out a decade later, so camera quality should have improved, it just didn't. That's what happens when you put all your budget in crawling brains and sausages, folks.
Also, if your neighbors ever give you green pudding and absinthe for a welcoming meal, just move out immediately; it isn't worth the hassle.
Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
Oh man, I feel like I've got to see Slime City at some point; I'm a bit embarrassed that I've never seen a Greg Lamberson movie at all before. Despite the fact that I lived around Buffalo, where he's from and we were both regulars on the same horror forum years ago... (Slime City probably won't be my first Lamberson movie, but with a title like that, I feel it has to stay on my list!)
I actually had time to watch a movie after my Friday-night DDR session, so I watched TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!
This movie has a great title and... that's about it. The only other Herschel Gordon Lewis film I've seen is Blood Feast, which similarly didn't do it for me. But I recognize HGL's contribution to the genre; not only did he pioneer the splatter flick, Two Thousand Maniacs is the earliest (I know of) hixploitation horror film, in which a town of Southerners torture and kill Northerners out of a sense of revenge for the Civil War. The story's dumb and even with a twist at the end, it feels pretty bleh. I'm sure the gore was super-shocking in the mid-1960s, but it's pretty tame by today's standards.
I get why this movie used to be a big deal, but honestly, I found it hopelessly dull.
I actually had time to watch a movie after my Friday-night DDR session, so I watched TWO THOUSAND MANIACS!
This movie has a great title and... that's about it. The only other Herschel Gordon Lewis film I've seen is Blood Feast, which similarly didn't do it for me. But I recognize HGL's contribution to the genre; not only did he pioneer the splatter flick, Two Thousand Maniacs is the earliest (I know of) hixploitation horror film, in which a town of Southerners torture and kill Northerners out of a sense of revenge for the Civil War. The story's dumb and even with a twist at the end, it feels pretty bleh. I'm sure the gore was super-shocking in the mid-1960s, but it's pretty tame by today's standards.
I get why this movie used to be a big deal, but honestly, I found it hopelessly dull.
Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
Blood Freak
Motorcycle riding Herschel helps a stranded motorist, Angel, on the road. She takes him to her place, only to find her sister, Anne, having some kind of drug party in the living room with all her ‘friends.’ Angel and Anne are clearly rivals and opposites in every way. Angel is the conservative bible thumper and Anne is the horney, high temptress. Herschel initially turns down Anne’s offer of drugs and booty, but eventually temptation becomes too strong and he gives in, becoming hooked on the drugs in the process.
On top of all this, Herschel is offered a job at Angel and Anne’s family turkey farm that’s run by their father. Some of the workers there are doing experiments on the birds and want Herschel to help them out. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, it would seem.
I’m not entirely sure in what genre one would categorize Blood Freak. It starts off like a pro-Christian propaganda film, before it mutates into a monster movie and then the whole thing is smothered in an overly heavy anti-drug blanket. But it likes to jump back and forth a lot, so the whole thing is very confusing. As is the clumsy framing device of the narrator, who himself looks to be perpetually confused, constantly looking down to read his own lines off a script and appearing as though he himself is just coming down from a serious high and hasn’t yet figured out that he is not, in fact, Hugh Hefner.
Your director, ladies and gentlemen.
Shit, lost my spot...
The story is intermittently interrupted by this rambling narrator, who talks about changes and asks questions like “What is a catalyst?”, keeps bringing up the “Fantastic order of things” and mentions words like ‘decent’ and ‘good.’ I don’t know what he’s going on about, but it sure as hell can’t be related to this movie.
Then there’s our lead, Herschel, a big, strapping young man who looks like a steroid obsessed version of Elvis and is played by Steve Hawkes (a point the film really insists you notice by mentioning it twice). Herschel is clearly running from something, but takes time out of his busy fleeing spree to help a girl on the side of the road and take up random jobs at her dad’s turkey farm. All the while getting high and boinking her sister. For a guy who’s hiding from something, Herschel is a busy man.
And what luck! The scientists at the turkey farm ask if he’ll help them with some of their experiments, which has something to do with...okay, actually I’m not really sure, but all he has to do is eat a whole turkey and I don’t know any drifter who would pass up the chance to eat a whole fowl for lunch. Plus, they’re also going to pay him in money and drugs. So *chaching* *chaching* all around, I guess.
Mmmmm, mystery turkey meat. Yum.
Of course, something goes afowl (heh heh), causing poor Herschel to have a seizure. One of the scientist panics and dumps his body in the woods, you know, as your mad scientists are wont to do. And to make matters worse, when he finally wakes up, somebody has tapped an ugly-ass mask to his head.
Holy shit! It’s a real-life Jive Turkey! I didn’t think they were real!
Yes. This movie is about Herschel growing a giant, grouteque turkey head. And he’s still addicted to drugs. Except, as everybody knows, turkeys are also notorious blood drinkers, so now Turkerschel isn’t only addicted to drugs, but he’s also addicted to the blood of drug addicts and goes on a stuffing-infused killing spree.
But don’t expect to see him actually eat any blood, cause that would mess up their nice paper mache head.
So, yes. Weird, I think, is the nicest way to describe Blood Freak. It’s not at all scary. I mean, it’s hard to be scared when Turkerschel is walking menacingly up to you and all you hear is *gobble gobble* noises. It just doesn’t work, no matter how many times the movie tries it.
No, the only really scary thing about this movie is the production values. You already know you’re in for a ride when the opening title sequence is just one long car drive. And then they get to the drug house and the real horror begins. Not because of anything to do with the drugs like the movie wants you to think, but because that’s when the actors all start speaking. Lines are stilted and often only delivered with a modicum of competence, and the dialogue is so banal and ridiculous that I have a hard time believing an adult wrote it.
Clearly nobody working on this was a professional. The cameraman seems to think that focusing on a subject is an optional job requirement, microphones are either picking up way to much or nothing at all and don’t expect to be able to tell what’s going on in the dark, because hoping for that is a lost cause. Hell, thanks to the script, hoping to be able to tell what’s going on in the light of day is oftentimes hard enough.
That all may sound harsh, but these amateurish assholes decapitated a live turkey, filmed it and made us watch, so screw them.
I won’t subject you to that. Instead I’ll leave you with this image, which suggests that four people killed and ate Turkerschel. That’s much less
disturbing.
So Blood Freak is a bit of a mess. I can’t tell if it’s a horror movie with a blatant pro-Christian/anit-drug message or a pro-Christian/anti-drug film with a horror angle. It feels to plodding and preachy to be a horror film, but at the same time too exploitative to really fall in the religious category. And the anti-drug message is so garbled that watching this film might actually encourage people to get high, because I can think of no other reason that anyone would be able to get through this movie. In the end, a lot of it is so incomprehensible it probably doesn’t matter. Thanks to the lighting you can’t see a lot of what’s going on anyway, and what you can see isn’t anything to write home about. The acting is horrible, the sound is terrible and every time you think the movie might be getting to a point, in comes the narrator expounding the dangers of drug addiction, all while chain smoking his way through lines he can’t even remember and looking and sounding just about as sincere as the peeling wood paneling behind him. I’m pretty sure the entire plot of Reefer Madness made more sense than this guy.
With all that against it, Blood Freak is really hard to recommend. I guess if you absolutely must watch an exploitative, pro-religion, anti-drug, poorly lit monster movie than you might find this of interest. Sure, some of you might get some enjoyment out of watching Turkerschel awkwardly gobble around and kill people, but for the most part many of you aren’t going to find this appealing. I’m sure everyone working on it had good intentions, but unfortunately everything about the film just falls completely flat.
Blood Freak is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
Motorcycle riding Herschel helps a stranded motorist, Angel, on the road. She takes him to her place, only to find her sister, Anne, having some kind of drug party in the living room with all her ‘friends.’ Angel and Anne are clearly rivals and opposites in every way. Angel is the conservative bible thumper and Anne is the horney, high temptress. Herschel initially turns down Anne’s offer of drugs and booty, but eventually temptation becomes too strong and he gives in, becoming hooked on the drugs in the process.
On top of all this, Herschel is offered a job at Angel and Anne’s family turkey farm that’s run by their father. Some of the workers there are doing experiments on the birds and want Herschel to help them out. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot, it would seem.
I’m not entirely sure in what genre one would categorize Blood Freak. It starts off like a pro-Christian propaganda film, before it mutates into a monster movie and then the whole thing is smothered in an overly heavy anti-drug blanket. But it likes to jump back and forth a lot, so the whole thing is very confusing. As is the clumsy framing device of the narrator, who himself looks to be perpetually confused, constantly looking down to read his own lines off a script and appearing as though he himself is just coming down from a serious high and hasn’t yet figured out that he is not, in fact, Hugh Hefner.
Your director, ladies and gentlemen.
Shit, lost my spot...
The story is intermittently interrupted by this rambling narrator, who talks about changes and asks questions like “What is a catalyst?”, keeps bringing up the “Fantastic order of things” and mentions words like ‘decent’ and ‘good.’ I don’t know what he’s going on about, but it sure as hell can’t be related to this movie.
Then there’s our lead, Herschel, a big, strapping young man who looks like a steroid obsessed version of Elvis and is played by Steve Hawkes (a point the film really insists you notice by mentioning it twice). Herschel is clearly running from something, but takes time out of his busy fleeing spree to help a girl on the side of the road and take up random jobs at her dad’s turkey farm. All the while getting high and boinking her sister. For a guy who’s hiding from something, Herschel is a busy man.
And what luck! The scientists at the turkey farm ask if he’ll help them with some of their experiments, which has something to do with...okay, actually I’m not really sure, but all he has to do is eat a whole turkey and I don’t know any drifter who would pass up the chance to eat a whole fowl for lunch. Plus, they’re also going to pay him in money and drugs. So *chaching* *chaching* all around, I guess.
Mmmmm, mystery turkey meat. Yum.
Of course, something goes afowl (heh heh), causing poor Herschel to have a seizure. One of the scientist panics and dumps his body in the woods, you know, as your mad scientists are wont to do. And to make matters worse, when he finally wakes up, somebody has tapped an ugly-ass mask to his head.
Holy shit! It’s a real-life Jive Turkey! I didn’t think they were real!
Yes. This movie is about Herschel growing a giant, grouteque turkey head. And he’s still addicted to drugs. Except, as everybody knows, turkeys are also notorious blood drinkers, so now Turkerschel isn’t only addicted to drugs, but he’s also addicted to the blood of drug addicts and goes on a stuffing-infused killing spree.
But don’t expect to see him actually eat any blood, cause that would mess up their nice paper mache head.
So, yes. Weird, I think, is the nicest way to describe Blood Freak. It’s not at all scary. I mean, it’s hard to be scared when Turkerschel is walking menacingly up to you and all you hear is *gobble gobble* noises. It just doesn’t work, no matter how many times the movie tries it.
No, the only really scary thing about this movie is the production values. You already know you’re in for a ride when the opening title sequence is just one long car drive. And then they get to the drug house and the real horror begins. Not because of anything to do with the drugs like the movie wants you to think, but because that’s when the actors all start speaking. Lines are stilted and often only delivered with a modicum of competence, and the dialogue is so banal and ridiculous that I have a hard time believing an adult wrote it.
Clearly nobody working on this was a professional. The cameraman seems to think that focusing on a subject is an optional job requirement, microphones are either picking up way to much or nothing at all and don’t expect to be able to tell what’s going on in the dark, because hoping for that is a lost cause. Hell, thanks to the script, hoping to be able to tell what’s going on in the light of day is oftentimes hard enough.
That all may sound harsh, but these amateurish assholes decapitated a live turkey, filmed it and made us watch, so screw them.
I won’t subject you to that. Instead I’ll leave you with this image, which suggests that four people killed and ate Turkerschel. That’s much less
disturbing.
So Blood Freak is a bit of a mess. I can’t tell if it’s a horror movie with a blatant pro-Christian/anit-drug message or a pro-Christian/anti-drug film with a horror angle. It feels to plodding and preachy to be a horror film, but at the same time too exploitative to really fall in the religious category. And the anti-drug message is so garbled that watching this film might actually encourage people to get high, because I can think of no other reason that anyone would be able to get through this movie. In the end, a lot of it is so incomprehensible it probably doesn’t matter. Thanks to the lighting you can’t see a lot of what’s going on anyway, and what you can see isn’t anything to write home about. The acting is horrible, the sound is terrible and every time you think the movie might be getting to a point, in comes the narrator expounding the dangers of drug addiction, all while chain smoking his way through lines he can’t even remember and looking and sounding just about as sincere as the peeling wood paneling behind him. I’m pretty sure the entire plot of Reefer Madness made more sense than this guy.
With all that against it, Blood Freak is really hard to recommend. I guess if you absolutely must watch an exploitative, pro-religion, anti-drug, poorly lit monster movie than you might find this of interest. Sure, some of you might get some enjoyment out of watching Turkerschel awkwardly gobble around and kill people, but for the most part many of you aren’t going to find this appealing. I’m sure everyone working on it had good intentions, but unfortunately everything about the film just falls completely flat.
Blood Freak is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
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prfsnl_gmr
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Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
Do it, Michi, you and Ack are killing it with these reviews. You really should collect all of them for a book or dedicated site. They are just too good to be read only by us here in the Racketboy forums. (The same goes for REPO’s posts, but that’s another story.)
.....
Last night, my wife and I order in some Chinese food, and watched Dog Soldiers (2002). It is the first feature film directed by Neil Marshall, director of The Descent, which is great; so, we had somewhat high hopes for it. At the same time, I found the Blu-Ray disc at Dollar Tree; so, we also had some concerns about its quality. It met all of our expectations. Dog Soldiers is, basically, a b-movie about commandos fighting werewolves, and it is as fun and stupid as its premise. It is, overall, well-acted, and Sean Pertwee (the Third Doctor’s son!) steals all of his scenes. For a well-trained fighting force, however, these commandos make some pretty horrendous decisions. (“Should we board up the windows? Nah!!!”) The dialogue, pacing, and plot all leave something to be desired, and the film’s rock-bottom budget doesn’t help it. (Also, the Blu-Ray looks terrible. It came with a DVD, which seems pretty pointless since, on both formats, the movie looks like it was recorded on a VCR.) We still had a good time with it, though, and it was the perfect film to accompany inexpensive take out on a Friday night.
prfsnl_gmr’s Petrifying September Pre-Game of Putresence
prfsnl_gmr’s Horrifyingly Haunted October Horror House
.....
Last night, my wife and I order in some Chinese food, and watched Dog Soldiers (2002). It is the first feature film directed by Neil Marshall, director of The Descent, which is great; so, we had somewhat high hopes for it. At the same time, I found the Blu-Ray disc at Dollar Tree; so, we also had some concerns about its quality. It met all of our expectations. Dog Soldiers is, basically, a b-movie about commandos fighting werewolves, and it is as fun and stupid as its premise. It is, overall, well-acted, and Sean Pertwee (the Third Doctor’s son!) steals all of his scenes. For a well-trained fighting force, however, these commandos make some pretty horrendous decisions. (“Should we board up the windows? Nah!!!”) The dialogue, pacing, and plot all leave something to be desired, and the film’s rock-bottom budget doesn’t help it. (Also, the Blu-Ray looks terrible. It came with a DVD, which seems pretty pointless since, on both formats, the movie looks like it was recorded on a VCR.) We still had a good time with it, though, and it was the perfect film to accompany inexpensive take out on a Friday night.
prfsnl_gmr’s Petrifying September Pre-Game of Putresence
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noiseredux
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Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
Today I watched a film which Ack watched/wrote about in the pre-gaming thread: It Follows
Anytime a modern horror film gets a lot of mainstream attention and critical acclaim, I'm always a bit wary. Sometimes the praise is justified (eg Hereditary) and sometimes it's grossly exaggerated (eg A Quiet Place). Thankfully, It Follows is absolutely the former! This movie was really excellent and I can't believe I dragged my feet on it for as long as I did (I blame the internet talking about an "STDemon" making it sound kind of dumber than it is).
As Ack pointed out in the pregaming thread, the movie is clearly saying something and the "curse" is obviously allegorical, however its exact meaning is purposely obscured, allowing the viewer to get caught up in the film rather than strictly analyzing it as "ah, so the movie is trying to say ____ about sex" and doesn't come across as having a morality message or anything like that. I was completely into the synth soundtrack and it seems like the movie makes a few calculated choices to make the setting more mythical than everyday reality. Parents and authority figures are depicted similarly to the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons: they're there but they don't contribute to the character's lives in any meaningful way. The time-setting is vague: everyone comes across as modern, but the teenager who gives the protagonist the curse has a car that looks to be about 45 years old, all the TVs are old CRTs - one scene even involves two of them stacked on top of each other. This sort of takes the movie out of a specific setting (even though it's explicitly Detroit).
And this movie managed to really draw me in! The sense of dread is palpable and the movie trains the viewer to look at everyone in the background and wonder "are they a normal person, or are they the thing that follows?"
This movie definitely deserves all the praise it's gotten since its release. A modern masterpiece that deserves to be seen by all genre fans.
Anytime a modern horror film gets a lot of mainstream attention and critical acclaim, I'm always a bit wary. Sometimes the praise is justified (eg Hereditary) and sometimes it's grossly exaggerated (eg A Quiet Place). Thankfully, It Follows is absolutely the former! This movie was really excellent and I can't believe I dragged my feet on it for as long as I did (I blame the internet talking about an "STDemon" making it sound kind of dumber than it is).
As Ack pointed out in the pregaming thread, the movie is clearly saying something and the "curse" is obviously allegorical, however its exact meaning is purposely obscured, allowing the viewer to get caught up in the film rather than strictly analyzing it as "ah, so the movie is trying to say ____ about sex" and doesn't come across as having a morality message or anything like that. I was completely into the synth soundtrack and it seems like the movie makes a few calculated choices to make the setting more mythical than everyday reality. Parents and authority figures are depicted similarly to the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons: they're there but they don't contribute to the character's lives in any meaningful way. The time-setting is vague: everyone comes across as modern, but the teenager who gives the protagonist the curse has a car that looks to be about 45 years old, all the TVs are old CRTs - one scene even involves two of them stacked on top of each other. This sort of takes the movie out of a specific setting (even though it's explicitly Detroit).
And this movie managed to really draw me in! The sense of dread is palpable and the movie trains the viewer to look at everyone in the background and wonder "are they a normal person, or are they the thing that follows?"
This movie definitely deserves all the praise it's gotten since its release. A modern masterpiece that deserves to be seen by all genre fans.
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prfsnl_gmr
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Re: Racketyboy Month of Horror 9: The Axis of Sorta Evil
A lot of great directors make their debuts with horror films, and tonight, my wife and I watched Play Misty for Me (1971), Clint Eastwood’s groovy erotic thriller/proto-slasher film. It stars Eastwood as a disc jockey seduced and stalked by an obsessed fan...who does not take rejection well. Jessica Walters plays the fan, and she kills it (literally and figuratively) in every scene. The movie is nonetheless a bit uneven, and the middle is mostly an extended, ridiculous “AM Gold” hippie love scene and concert footage from a jazz festival. (It was 1971...so...you know...drugs.) It starts strong, however, and the ending is chilling. Much more understated than Fatal Attraction, but no less fun or frightening,
prfsnl_gmr’s Petrifying September Pre-Game of Putresence
prfsnl_gmr’s Horrifyingly Haunted October Horror House
prfsnl_gmr’s Petrifying September Pre-Game of Putresence