Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
Oh, the casting for Ravenous was insanely great. That's just a very potent combination of actors.
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
Michi wrote: ↑Wed Oct 15, 2025 6:04 pm@Ack, I've got Down on my list already, as I watched the original a couple years ago, it was okay. I didn't know it was done by the same director. Does it still have the unnecessary subplot about the elevator guy's marriage falling apart because his wife's friend told her he was having an affair? Cause of all the things to alter, that would have been my first choice.
No, they removed that. In this one, the main guy's girlfriend has already left him for some other guy, so he instead ends up hooking up with the journalist, while the only other elevator guy we really spend time with has a pregnant wife and barely even looks at other women.
15. The Bay
I don't remember who it was who originally watched this on here. I think it was Prfsnl a few years back. Either way, their review at the time got my attention, so when I discovered I had access, I opted to put it on the list for this year. I'm so glad I did! This turned into another fantastic found footage film, and in the last two days I have convinced two other people to watch it who also got a kick out of it.
The premise is that this is all footage leaked from government websites several years after the fact and put together by a young journalist who saw the events firsthand on one of her first ever days on the job. The small town of Claridge, Maryland, is celebrating the Fourth of July deep on the Chesapeake Bay. What the townsfolk don't know is that their desalination plant, excessive steroids in their local chicken plant's feed, and global warming have all combined to turn the common sea lice into a hyper aggressive, roided out killing machines that get inside the body and then eat their way out.
The film starts slowly, but eventually you get people covered in rashes and vomiting up blood. It's gross, but it's one or two, slowly ramping up to fill up the town's small emergency room. And once that's crowded...well, once the screaming starts, the town is pretty much dead. Truth be told, in a movie full of chilling moments, the video of the newscaster trying to do her final broadcast but stopping for the distant screams is one of the most effective sequences I've seen in any found footage film. It's brilliant. And its heartbreaking and disturbing. It's one of the best things I've seen all month.
16. One Cut of the Dead
Here we go, a Japanese zombie film that is actually a comedy about making a zombie movie, but with the film starting with a 37-minute single-take that is the "finished" zombie movie. The director is insane, the makeup artist is a psycho, the zombies are ridiculous, and the eventual climax is a big wrap around to the beginning, with some weird beats going on throughout...and then the rest of the actual movie is a narrative about how the single take show gets made. So it's less a true zombie film and more a heartwarming comedy about making a zombie film.
And yes, it is heartwarming. This is an extremely well done independent film with a lot of understanding as well as a lot of love for filmmaking. It shows some of the ridiculous difficulties (particularly with problematic actors) while also highlighting what is moviemaking at its most genuine, fun, DIY core. The producers demand unrealistic changes, the crew is stressed beyond belief, the director is having to step into a role while also making sure everything comes together, and he's doing it all as everything falls apart, and nobody back at the studio even realizes anything has gone wrong.
As for whether it's a horror movie, well...the 37-minute take is a zombie film, so technically yes, even though the rest of the film is a comedy. The single take zombie film is also incredibly impressive. Apparently it took them six tries to pull off, and during the final credits, they show some of the tricks they did to pull off certain sequences, like when the actual cameraman got a quick break to rest his arms and drink water. It's a brilliant sequence in a delightful film.
17. Alligator II: The Mutation
This poster has nothing to do with this movie, outside of there being an alligator in it. I love it.
Somewhere in what is claimed to be a small town but is most definitely a suburban city center in what was supposed to probably be Florida but is definitely California, a slimy chemical plant owner is moving into the real estate business by buying off or forcing out the local Latino population around a lake. But the chemicals he's been dumping into the sewer system have also created a giant mutant alligator full of pure adrenaline and the urge to kill! Now a local tough guy detective has to team up with a rookie cop and a gator hunting master from the Bayou to take it down before it eats the whole town...or at least anyone who goes near the lake. I'm not really sure.
What I am sure of is that the plot is ridiculous and really only serves to give me sequences of stuntmen getting mauled and spitting out fake blood in a giant animatronic mouth as well as explosions, preferably with fake gator pieces flying through the air. Also, they have no idea how big this gator actually is, because sometimes it's obviously footage of a normal gator, and sometimes it's the size of a Winnebago. What size will it be in this next shot? No way to tell! But come on, let's not let things like "facts" get in the way of a good time. The military would be more than happy to just hand beat cops a couple of rocket launchers to kill a giant gator in the sewers.
No, this is not a good movie. It's a bizarre movie though, and I often found myself wondering at the wisecracks if this was meant to be a horror comedy and just nobody remembered to tell the director. Because there are a lot of jokes. The film is just plain silly. But Kane Hodder shows up in flannel to then become gator bait, so is it all bad? Not at all! It's just also not good.
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
Even though I bought it ages on on GOG during its early access era, back when its full release was faced with uncertainty, I bought World of Horror for Switch today. Beat the first run I played of the Switch port while watching something on my tablet.
"Can we have "Gremlins"?"
"We have "Gremlins" at home!"
"Gremlins" at home...
Though it IS worth noting that both Duane Whitaker (aka one of the racist cops from "Tales from the Hood" and Maynard from "Pulp Fiction") and Daran Norris (aka Stan's dad on "American Dad" and the voice of Cosmo, Jorgen von Strangle and Mr. Turner on "Fairy Oddparents", the latter he played in the live-action made-for-TV movies) are in this drek.
"Can we have "Gremlins"?"
"We have "Gremlins" at home!"
"Gremlins" at home...
Though it IS worth noting that both Duane Whitaker (aka one of the racist cops from "Tales from the Hood" and Maynard from "Pulp Fiction") and Daran Norris (aka Stan's dad on "American Dad" and the voice of Cosmo, Jorgen von Strangle and Mr. Turner on "Fairy Oddparents", the latter he played in the live-action made-for-TV movies) are in this drek.
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
No, they removed that. In this one, the main guy's girlfriend has already left him for some other guy, so he instead ends up hooking up with the journalist, while the only other elevator guy we really spend time with has a pregnant wife and barely even looks at other women.
Oh, thank goodness. Because I've been considering watching it since I'd already seen the first one, but I hesitated because I reallydidn't want to sit through that ridiculous story-line again.
Also, I agree that The Bay is great, and that the Alligator movies are silly fun. And if you like the Alligator films, may I suggest the Killer Crocodile movies. Now THOSE films are ridiculous.
Anyway... More films! And now that we're getting closer to the end of the month, the watching intensifies!
Sssssss
A college student named David is honored when noted local herpetologist Dr. Stoner offers to let him be his lab assistant regarding his study of various species of venomous snakes. But Stoner is not a well man. He loves snakes so much that he things they shall eventually inherit the Earth. So under the guise of giving David regular doses of antivenom, Stoner starts injecting him with a chemical cocktail of his own making, one that's meant to turn poor, unsuspecting David into a snake.
Okay, I can't lie, the only reason I watched this is because I watched Curse of the Puppet Master a few years ago, and I read back then that the script for that film was supposedly based heavily on this one and I wanted to see how much of that was true. Turns out the answer is: Very. Some things were altered, of course. But it's actually surprisingly close to, I'd say, an 80% beat-for-beat retread. Wild.
Anyway, overall the film is a rather cheesy and very low-budget mad scientist/monster movie. The acting is okay, but the plot is pretty slow and sparse, only dropping kernels of relevant info and filling the rest with snake footage until it gets much closer to the end. Well, that and David is kind of an idiot when it comes to believing whatever he's told regarding the shots he's being given. One would think that someone who was planning on working with snakes would have looked up or asked about some of this stuff beforehand, but I guess not. But like I said, David doesn't seem quite that bright. Really, the most interesting thing about the movie is that they used live, honest-to-god snakes throughout the film (except for that one scene where the actor went to grab a King Cobra. That was clearly a puppet). Today I know that they'd replace a lot of that with CGI, so it was interesting to see such a variety of living, breathing, slithery reptiles crawling around the set. Though I am mad that they clearly killed some of them too. That's just bad form. But I guess that's the 70s for you.....the bastards.
Altered
Three rednecks manage to catch some sort of angry, dangerous creature out in the woods. They take the creature back to their friend Wyatt's home where they strap it down in the workshop and desperately keep its face covered. As the movie progresses we learn what the creature is and the 4 men's connection to it.
With the risk of spoiling the movie, this here is a monster movie disguised as an alien movie. Or, is it an alien movie disguised as a monster movie? Either way, aliens are involved and as it turns out they're nasty little buggers with a very vindictive streak who like to put creepy tracking devices into people and then do things like slice open their bellies and slowly pull out their intestines to torture them, just because they can. And the effects are decent too, so the creatures and the gooey bits look pretty good. The issue lies in the plot, where we're never told why these four men, who were apparently abducted a good decade ago, are suddenly being targeted again after so long. We do know that they're obsessed and a little afraid of Wyatt because he was resistant to almost all of their experiments. But if that's true, then again one wonders why they took so long to come back and potentially do anything about it. Overall, interesting and different take on an alien abduction story, but has a few holes in it.
Escape Room & Escape Room: Tournament of Champions
I'm lumping these two together, since they essentially have the same plot.
A group of six people are brought together, in the first voluntarily and in the second involuntarily, to solve a series of elaborate escape room puzzles. Only this isn't your standard escape room. These rooms are operated by Minos, a shady organization run by mysterious wealthy individuals that brings people together and forces them to compete in these rooms for their own selfish amusement, where the stakes are literally life and death. Except the contestants don't know that until they're already trapped in the room.
These films are basically Saw, just way less bloody. Only the people in charge could actually be considered much worse. In Saw Jigsaw is demented, but generally does give a person a chance to live. Here it's made pretty clear by the first film that they intend for everyone to die, whether they successfully complete the rooms are not.
Speaking of the rooms, I'd talk about the acting, which is fine, but that's not really the point of these movies. The point of the films is the elaborate set pieces and how the characters go about solving the rooms. And to be fair, the set pieces are pretty fascinating. But you can also tell that a lot of it involves CGI, so they're not as interesting as they could be. And while overall the movies are meant to be silly, stupid fun, I do find it annoying how all powerful Minos is depicted as, since a lot of what they supposedly do simply isn't feasible, even if they're flush with that much dough. But like I said, these films are meant to be fun little distractions, so it's just best to sit back and enjoy and not think to hard about them.
Current movie count: 20
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
Last weekend we watched Bring Her Back, which was my partner's pick, and it was a pretty tense ride. The movie is about two step-siblings who find their father dead in their house, with the younger sibling, being sight impaired. They're then placed in a foster home and that's where things start to go downhill. There was one scene that was a bit much for me, but overall this was a memorable ride. Just curious, has anyone else watched this yet? I don't recall seeing it mentioned earlier in the thread, but I might've missed it.
Starting off this weekend we went for Alligator. Someone on here had watched it and mentioned it previously and it caught my attention. Oversized alligator on the loose in Chicago! Glad we watched this one, as I thought it was a well done B movie. The movie had a quirky cast of characters, some gore, and some funny lines throughout. We enjoyed the fact that it didn't take itself too seriously, but at the same time the movie and the effects were pretty well done for the time.
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
^ I watched Bring her back a few weeks ago. I thought it was ok. more psychological thriller than horror to me. The kid chewing on some stuff is the only things that really "horrored me" lol. good acting though. I thought Weapons was better. Both kind of the same type of horror movie.
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
Is Weapons the one with the old lady who looks like a genderbent version of Assistant Principal Bone from Doug? I haven't seen it yet.
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
I kinda like how we've got a small, inadvertent reptile thing going. That's great.
Here are a few more to add to my ever growing list...
Evil Laugh <------ Link to more detailed thoughts
A group of doctors go to help their friend clean up his new house. But the friend is nowhere to be found. Oh well. They came to clean so that's what they'll do. But then they slowly start to disappear too. Because as it turns out, the house they're cleaning up is the scene where a very unhappy young man went a little mad and killed a bunch of kids several years ago. Course, it would have been nice for their friend to tell them that BEFORE they got to the house and started to get slaughtered....
Before you ask, yes, the killer does have an "evil laugh." But at some point I think the filmmakers mistook 'evil' for 'cartoon villain', so it's only ever ridiculously amusing, never intimidating. Should have really called it "Stupid Laugh", but anyway.... The movie is your typical low-budget slasher, one that's pretty predictable as long as you're paying attention to what people are saying. Most of the characters are annoying and/or dumb, most of the kills aren't that great, and the epilogue is really, really, eye-rollingly dumb. But I still kind of liked this movie, mostly because there was a lot of very amusing weirdness going on throughout the whole film and it's actually very well shot. So at least one person on staff went to film school and knew what they were doing. It's also not meant to be taken very seriously and one of the characters is a self-aware horror fan. Silly, but fun slasher.
The Guardian
A couple leaves their children in the care of a well-liked nanny to go to an event. Realizing they've forgotten something, they return only to find that the nanny has absconded with their infant daughter. Meanwhile the mysterious nanny sacrifices the infant at the base of a very creepy looking tree.
About a year later, Phil and Kate have just had their first child and are looking for a new nanny. They hire Camilla, who seems patient, kind, polite, soft-spoken, and has the best references. They think they've hired the modern version of Marry Poppins. But they quickly find out that their new nanny has nefarious plans for their young son.
Honestly, I was digging this one right up until they got to the ending. Because though there were a lot of supernatural elements, it felt very much like a psychological horror, with Camilla slowly doing small things to cause concern before Phil finally gets suspicious and...well, not 'jumps' into action, but finally gets around to making a couple of phone calls. (On a side note, why to to the trouble of asking for references if you're not going to bother checking them until weeks later?) Not that you don't always know that Camilla is the bad guy, since somewhere towards the beginning she lures a trio of would-be rapists/muggers to the tree and we get to watch it kick their asses. That's fun. But then towards the end the parents get a serious case of what I call "The Stupid", which pops up a lot in horror movies. For example, here's a pop quiz: If your kid gets so sick they have to be put into an incubator, and the crazy woman you fired shows up and tries to steal him do you-
A) Call for help from a Doctor/Nurse
B) Call for Security
C) Try to call the Police
D) Grab your child and run down the hallway asking for no assistance whatsoever, and flee the hospital in a mad panic without telling anyone what happened
If you got to D and thought 'WTF, why the hell would you do that?' then congratulations, you're smarter than the parents in this film. And of course after that it only gets worse, because they can't get into their house because the druid lady (or is she a witch? the movie isn't really clear on that point) has filled it with wolves. Except a minute or so later Kate manages to get in and grab some Jeep keys (what as wrong with the car they just had?) so she can escape and the house is sans wolf. Meanwhile Phil is running to a neighbor's house or something, right? Haha. Of course not. He blindly runs into the woods with his child, letting Camilla hover after him menacingly and herding him towards the tree. And then instead of letting the tree just kill the two of them, Camilla lands, and I guess she couldn't hear that huge-ass Jeep crashing through the forest and she just lets it run her ass over. And that's not even the film's climax! That's the pre-climax climax. The actual climax involves Phil, the evil tree, a chainsaw and enough blood to fill a full-sized pool. Just wild.
The Forest
Sarah's twin sister Jess has gone missing in a notorious forest in Japan known for many of it's visitors committing suicide. But Sarah is convinced that Jess isn't suicidal, and is still alive and well, merely lost somewhere out in the woods. So she travels to Japan and procures a guide who is willing to take her into the forest to look for her wayward twin.
Another one I liked for the most part, as it's very moody and focuses on the psychological angle of the supposedly haunted forest. Especially since Sarah, portrayed as the more stable of the two, goes deeper into the forest and we realize that there's actually a lot of trauma there lurking just beneath her 'put together' facade. It's a little too jump scary for my personal taste, but there are still a couple rather effective horror moments in here. And I rather liked the ending, though it was tragically bittersweet and not what I was expecting. Because Sarah does manage to help her sister, just not in the way she planned.
Movie total for the month so far: 23
Here are a few more to add to my ever growing list...
Evil Laugh <------ Link to more detailed thoughts
A group of doctors go to help their friend clean up his new house. But the friend is nowhere to be found. Oh well. They came to clean so that's what they'll do. But then they slowly start to disappear too. Because as it turns out, the house they're cleaning up is the scene where a very unhappy young man went a little mad and killed a bunch of kids several years ago. Course, it would have been nice for their friend to tell them that BEFORE they got to the house and started to get slaughtered....
Before you ask, yes, the killer does have an "evil laugh." But at some point I think the filmmakers mistook 'evil' for 'cartoon villain', so it's only ever ridiculously amusing, never intimidating. Should have really called it "Stupid Laugh", but anyway.... The movie is your typical low-budget slasher, one that's pretty predictable as long as you're paying attention to what people are saying. Most of the characters are annoying and/or dumb, most of the kills aren't that great, and the epilogue is really, really, eye-rollingly dumb. But I still kind of liked this movie, mostly because there was a lot of very amusing weirdness going on throughout the whole film and it's actually very well shot. So at least one person on staff went to film school and knew what they were doing. It's also not meant to be taken very seriously and one of the characters is a self-aware horror fan. Silly, but fun slasher.
The Guardian
A couple leaves their children in the care of a well-liked nanny to go to an event. Realizing they've forgotten something, they return only to find that the nanny has absconded with their infant daughter. Meanwhile the mysterious nanny sacrifices the infant at the base of a very creepy looking tree.
About a year later, Phil and Kate have just had their first child and are looking for a new nanny. They hire Camilla, who seems patient, kind, polite, soft-spoken, and has the best references. They think they've hired the modern version of Marry Poppins. But they quickly find out that their new nanny has nefarious plans for their young son.
Honestly, I was digging this one right up until they got to the ending. Because though there were a lot of supernatural elements, it felt very much like a psychological horror, with Camilla slowly doing small things to cause concern before Phil finally gets suspicious and...well, not 'jumps' into action, but finally gets around to making a couple of phone calls. (On a side note, why to to the trouble of asking for references if you're not going to bother checking them until weeks later?) Not that you don't always know that Camilla is the bad guy, since somewhere towards the beginning she lures a trio of would-be rapists/muggers to the tree and we get to watch it kick their asses. That's fun. But then towards the end the parents get a serious case of what I call "The Stupid", which pops up a lot in horror movies. For example, here's a pop quiz: If your kid gets so sick they have to be put into an incubator, and the crazy woman you fired shows up and tries to steal him do you-
A) Call for help from a Doctor/Nurse
B) Call for Security
C) Try to call the Police
D) Grab your child and run down the hallway asking for no assistance whatsoever, and flee the hospital in a mad panic without telling anyone what happened
If you got to D and thought 'WTF, why the hell would you do that?' then congratulations, you're smarter than the parents in this film. And of course after that it only gets worse, because they can't get into their house because the druid lady (or is she a witch? the movie isn't really clear on that point) has filled it with wolves. Except a minute or so later Kate manages to get in and grab some Jeep keys (what as wrong with the car they just had?) so she can escape and the house is sans wolf. Meanwhile Phil is running to a neighbor's house or something, right? Haha. Of course not. He blindly runs into the woods with his child, letting Camilla hover after him menacingly and herding him towards the tree. And then instead of letting the tree just kill the two of them, Camilla lands, and I guess she couldn't hear that huge-ass Jeep crashing through the forest and she just lets it run her ass over. And that's not even the film's climax! That's the pre-climax climax. The actual climax involves Phil, the evil tree, a chainsaw and enough blood to fill a full-sized pool. Just wild.
The Forest
Sarah's twin sister Jess has gone missing in a notorious forest in Japan known for many of it's visitors committing suicide. But Sarah is convinced that Jess isn't suicidal, and is still alive and well, merely lost somewhere out in the woods. So she travels to Japan and procures a guide who is willing to take her into the forest to look for her wayward twin.
Another one I liked for the most part, as it's very moody and focuses on the psychological angle of the supposedly haunted forest. Especially since Sarah, portrayed as the more stable of the two, goes deeper into the forest and we realize that there's actually a lot of trauma there lurking just beneath her 'put together' facade. It's a little too jump scary for my personal taste, but there are still a couple rather effective horror moments in here. And I rather liked the ending, though it was tragically bittersweet and not what I was expecting. Because Sarah does manage to help her sister, just not in the way she planned.
Movie total for the month so far: 23
Re: Racketboy Month of Horror 16: Weaponization
I used to have The Guardian on VHS but never got around to watching it... until catching bits and pieces on Chiller. I think it was Chiller.
Late '80s/early '90s horror was such a different beast. The colors were more muted and the stories were just so much more mature, as though the period between the death and revival of the teen slasher subgenre killed all interest in R-rated movies for teenagers not yet completely old enough to watch them.
Speaking of retro teen horror, I really need to get back into my Christopher Pike novels. I've been stuck on Fall Into Darkness for ages it seems.
Aside from Christopher Pike, and obviously the Fear Street series from R.L. Stine, can anyone recommend any good retro YA horror? Aside from a handful of the works of Christopher Pike, I've also read The Accident by Diane Hoh.
Late '80s/early '90s horror was such a different beast. The colors were more muted and the stories were just so much more mature, as though the period between the death and revival of the teen slasher subgenre killed all interest in R-rated movies for teenagers not yet completely old enough to watch them.
Speaking of retro teen horror, I really need to get back into my Christopher Pike novels. I've been stuck on Fall Into Darkness for ages it seems.
Aside from Christopher Pike, and obviously the Fear Street series from R.L. Stine, can anyone recommend any good retro YA horror? Aside from a handful of the works of Christopher Pike, I've also read The Accident by Diane Hoh.