PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Return Of The Living Dead 3 1993

The Return Of The Living Dead 3 is the second sequel in the series and it came out in 1993. I know I saw it back in the VHS days but it's not listed on My Watched Movies List. John Penny wrote the script and Brian Yuzna is the director.

Kent McCord is a military guy and J Trevor Edmond is his son. Trevor and his girlfriend Melinda Clarke sneak into dad's secret military base to see what they can see. Dad's reanimating dead bodies with a toxic gas. They put exo-skeleton's on the zombies to be able to control them. Of course, zombies being what they are, there's a break out and the chomping starts.

Kent gets sent to another base but Trevor doesn't want to go and give up Melinda. He rides off on his motorcycle with Melinda but there's an accident and she's killed. What to do? Certainly the best thing to do would be to take her to dad's reanimated corpse program. Yep, she's a zombie before you know it. The pair have some adventures and Julie learns to control the brain eating by stabbing herself with bits of glass and metal. It's a sad romance that ends in fire.

I enjoyed it this time around and wold watch the film over again. I've got the last two films to watch and will get to those now.

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First up, the 1999 short film Cool Air. It's based on the Lovecraft story of the same name. Bryan Moore is the director and he stars as Randolph Carter. Carter moves into a room in a boarding house only to have some ammonia tainted water dripping through the ceiling. It comes from the border in the room above whom the land lady says is a doctor. Randolph meets him when he has a light heart attack. Doctor Muñoz helps Randolph out and fills the writer in on his condition. He needs cold to survive. Of course the chiller dies one day and though the doc has had this problem for twenty years he's unprepared to deal with the breakdown. He sends Randolph out for ice and an electrician. Failure brings Randolph and the electrician back too late, they find Muñoz turned into a puddle of gel and bones lying on the floor. It was a well enough made bit of film making. The actors were good to poor, the doc was OK, Bryan not quite that good, and the left over cast members skewing to the poor with bouts of over acting. I listen to the long dialog speeches of the doctor and eventually my mind wanders off in some personal reverie. I wouldn't need to see it again. The Night Gallery version was better.

Black Panther is last year's Marvel Films hit. I wasn't that keen on it and after watching it I might want to see it again but probably won't bother. It was big, noisy and flashy but it was so long I failed to get to the end without my mind wandering off. I wasn't the only one complaining, there was a lot of conversation going on. It's long and in need of paring down. 

Demons: 4 Movie Midnight Marathon Pack

I got this for $3.95 plus shipping from Hamilton Books. It seems to have disappeared off their shelves since this copy arrived here. It's got 4 movies with a Demon theme all crammed on one disc. That's where the real demons are. Watching streaming and screwing up DVDs for the rest of us. Mind you, these movies aren't the ones that need to be on their own disc. It would be a waste and much more costly per movie. These 4 are about a buck each and that's pushing their worth. You never know what you're going to get with a multi movie pack.

Devil 2010 The movie has a story by M Night Shyamalon, the screen play is by Brian Nelson, John Erick Dowdle is the director. John Erick's precious movie was the 2008 Quarantine, I didn't care that much for that, Devil is a better film. Some people get trapped in an elevator the same day that a guy jumps through the window of a tall office block. People work to get the 5 people out of the elevator but pretty soon some weird shit starts to happen. One of the men is murdered in the dark while the lights flick on and off at random. One of the security guards is sure that the Devil is behind this but his boss thinks he's just really religious. The cops show up and the Detective in charge doesn't know what to make of it all. The obvious, someone in the elevator is a killer, and as they find out more about the people on board it looks like they all have some past indiscretions. Another lady is killed and things get worse and worse. The movie is only 80 minutes so they don't waste much time, all the details and backstory are presented while the movie trots along. It's well made, nicely shot and the script is good. I'd watch it again. I gave it a 6 on the IMDb, it scores more 7s but I'm not sure it's there. Still, worth seeing for the horror fan. The rest are not quite as good as the first movie.

Long Time Dead 2002 Marcus Adams is the director and he worked on the story with two other people and the screenplay was written by 4 people. That's probably why it's not so good. It's about some rather unlikable 20 something's who use a home made Ouija board to call up a djinn. Sucks to be them. They get picked off one by one. It's pretty much what you've seen before. I'm probably not going to bother watching it again. There's just nothing special about it.

House Of Voices 2004 AKA Saint Ange That's the name of the orphanage that a young woman named Anna goes to work at in 1958. It's in the French Alps but you hardly see anything of the outside once the bus drops her off. The place is being shut down and there's just one teen girl left in care and the administrator in charge left. Anna hears the voices and footsteps of young children but there's no one there. She finds out some stuff and the place kills her. It's not that interesting getting to the end and I speed up the last half.

Whisper 2007 Kidnappers abduct a young boy and he kills them. Ha ha. The kid is creepy and most of the criminals are stupid and need killing. There's a bit of a good story bit near the end but it's still about average.

Animal Apocalypse - 4 Movie Set

For some reason Amazon lists this under the title of When Animals Attack. How am I supposed to find it under that title? Google, of course. It's another multi movie set that I got for under 3 bucks. I wanted the first movie in the set and it was worth paying the 3 bucks for that. Turns out that it's a better than average collection, especially since it's from Mill Creek.

Bats: Human Harvest is a 2007 made for TV monster movie. The monsters are hungry bats who can bite a man's arm off as the glide by. I can only assume that humans taste yummy, the bats seem to relish chowing down. It's a sequel to Bats and while it's not quite as good as that it's still a nice average getting eaten' in the woods movie. The woods are supposed to be in Afghanistan but it's really around Sofia Bulgaria that the movie is filmed. It's a good average movie, I enjoyed it well enough, I'd watch it again but who knows if that will ever happen.

Fatal Contact: Bird Flu In America is a 2006 medical thriller about a pandemic. I didn't care much for it, the monster is too real. It was made for TV. I wouldn't want to watch it again.

Kaw is a 2007 movie about ravens killing people. Good for them. People are dicks. It's got Steven McHattie as an old coot and Rod Taylor is the medical examiner. Sean Patrick Flanery is the Sheriff and it's his last day, he's moving to the city for a new job. There's plenty of people being killed by ravens and some ravens get blasted. There's a descent script and a good cast. Even the CGI ravens looks respectable. I liked it and would watch it again.

Nightwing is a 1979 killer bat movie that was directed by Arthur Hiller. This time the bats are attacking at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. The plot mixes vampire bats with oil hungry business men. The close up puppet bats were designed by Carlo Rimbaldi, the guy who created the phone home guy, and they look kind of grotesque in a nice way. Large shots with many bats are animated by hand and they often look to flat to seem real. Most of the script is fair and the actors OK. I enjoyed it for the most part, it's not more than average, and even though I have a copy I doubt that I'll ever get back to it.

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Blood Harvest is a 1987 film by low-budget Wisconsin director William Rebane. I've seen other of his films but not on Blu-Ray. Not surprisingly, the better video format doesn't help his film out much, it's still a fair bit below average. Especially in the script department, and that's with 2 people, Chris Vaalar and William Arthur, writing the story, and two people, Ben Benson and Emil Joseph, writing the screenplay. Rebane does his own camera work under the Ito moniker and he's more competent there. Pedestrian but competent.

The only actors in the cast I had heard of before were Tiny Tim and Peter Krause. The only thing I remember seeing Peter in was Six Feet Under. I looked at his IMDb listings and I'd also seen him in The Lost Room back in 2006. He's from the area, raised in Roseville, and 1987 was the year he graduated college. According to the Wikipedia it's Peter's first feature film role and Tiny's first starring role. Bill saw him at a 1985 beer carnival and thought he'd be just right for this film.

Blood Harvest is the first film where Rebane switched to more adult content. Previously his films were more PG or G rated. This has some good amount of nudity, mostly from the main lead Itonia Salchek, and some gore scenes. Itonia plays a college student returning home to her small Wisconsin farm town during a time when the farmer's were losing their farms to the bank. Being low-intellect havin' Wisconsinites they've taken to harassing the bank manager and people of authority. She returns to find her parents missing, the house vandalized and someone lurking about in the bushes. The sheriff is no help. There's the usual sort of running about and yelling you'd expect in a slasher film. There's nothing much good to say, a little nudity and some gore don't make a movie. There's the ungodly pall of the script hanging over everyone's head. It's not a film I'm going to need to add to my stack of rewatchables. That's OK, it's getting to be such a large stack already.

Loch Ness Terror is a giant monster TV movie that aired on the SyFy Channel January 5 2008. It's written by director Paul Ziller and Jason Bourque. In the opening scene we see some men attacked by a plesiosaur at Loch Ness. The only survivor is a young boy, his dad was eaten. Now years later the boy is all grown up an he's come to Lake Superior chasing Nessie. The locals don't believe him until people start disappearing and the monster leaves chunks of lunch lying around. The monster has some babies and they prove to be easily killable. Mom, on the other had has to be blown up with explosive magnetite. The script doesn't have the dialog issues like our previous movie but it makes up for that with technical doltery. It does have a lot of monster action and running around. The CGI is low rez TV quality. It gets the job done but never gets stellar. There are dozens of this sort of monster movie on the IMDb, this is no better or worse than many of them.

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First up the 2009 dead guy comes to life film The Revenant. I'd seen it before, enjoyed it but hadn't picked up a DVD. I recently saw the Blu-ray cheap enough and ordered one. It's written and directed by Kerry Prior. He directed a movie called Roadkill back in 1996 and he's got a couple of others in the works. He's got more Special Effects credits than writing or directing credits. He's the visual effects supervisor on this movie and he's done effects work on Bubba Ho-Tep, Phantasm IV: Oblivion, Phantasm III: Lord Of The Dead, Phantasm II, The Blob (1988), The Abyss and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

A soldier is killed in Iraq and climbs out of his grave the day he's buried. David Anders plays the soldier Bart, he heads for his friend Joey's place where he finds out how dead he is. It's Joey that finds out Bart's a revenant, he can only be killed by cutting off his head. Bart saves a store keeper from a robber. They get some free stuff from the grateful store owner and rob the robber. They take up the lives of vigilantes and foil some more robberies. Joey gets shot up and Bart turns him into a revenant. Things go downhill for the guys as the rest of the movie plays out.

I got several laughs out of the movie and the effects are good. I do think it could have been a bit shorter. It's 117 minutes and the first third moves along slower. Still, I liked it enough to pick up a copy and I can watch it again.

Embodiment Of Evil is our second film and I wouldn't want to watch it again. It's from 2008 and it's the third of the Coffin Joe trilogy. I'd seen the first, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul and thought it was crap, I can't see any indication I saw the sequel, This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse, on My Watched Movie List but I can't think it's any better. This new movie seems like a remake of the second movie. Coffin Joe gets out of jail and starts killing and torturing again. Not very fun to watch much of the time. Add that to story driven by a creepy dick and it sucks to me. I won't need to pick up this trilogy. Others seem to like it more than me. You can find out yourself, if you watch it. 

Skinwalkers 2006

Skinwalkers is a 2006 werewolf movie that was about average. I took a chance on it because James Roday was one of the three writers. You might remember him from Psych. The other two writers were James DeMonaco and Todd Harthan. James D created the Purge series which I haven't seen. I'm not sure I want to. He also wrote the 2005 remake of Assault On Precinct 13. Todd was a producer on Psych and he wrote a dozen episodes. James Isaac is the director, he directed three other movies and an episode of Joe Bob's Drive-In Theater. I've only seen Jason X. His first movie was in 1989 and his last was in 2008. He died in 2012 at age 51.

In Skinwalkers there's a disagreement between two packs of werewolves. A 12 year old boy is in the middle of their disagreement. The good guys want to end the werewolf curse and return to human. The bad guys want to remain werewolves and embrace their feral nature. They like killing humans and dressing up like bikers. Werewolves don't turn until their 13th birthday in this universe. The kid doesn't know what's going to happen to him. It's prophesied that the kid could end the curse and return the werewolves to normal. The bad guys don't want to see that so they come hunting for the kid. There's plenty of running and chasing, fighting and shooting, and pretty much everyone dies. There's nothing new, it was watchable but only mildly entertaining. It gets a 4.6 on the IMDb and I gave it a generous 5. I picked it up for a couple of bucks and I might watch it again someday. Most likely it will just take up space.

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The Oblong Box is our first movie. It a 1969 horror film with Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. It's an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. It's the first time the Price and Lee were in a movie together, though they only appear together near the end of the movie. It's written by Lawrence Huntington and directed by Gordon Hessler. Lawrence died just into the start of production. Michael Reeves was supposed to be the director but he was replaced by Hessler and died a couple of months after production stopped. Hessler and incoming writer Christopher Wicking reworked the script to add the Imperial exploitation of Africa theme, it's pro-black stance got the film banned in Texas.

Vincent lives in a big manor house, he keeps his brother chained in a room. The brother had been damaged by voodoo in Africa for something we don't know about right away. The brother wants out of his chains and he hires a man to get a pill from a voodoo practitioner. The pill will simulate death. The idea being he'll be dug up and released after the burial. Things don't go as planned.

Christopher Lee is a doctor who's got a guy stealing bodies for him. It's a crime punishable by death in this version of 1865 England. The Wikipedia says that by then the practice was rare and the punishment of death isn't true either. You could go to prison for grave robbing but not get executed. The famous Burke and Hare crimes happened in 1827-1828 but they were murderers on top of being grave robbers. Back in the movie a series of mishaps puts the brother's coffin in Christopher's hands. When he releases the man, the brother starts his plan of vengeance and other random killing. It's not a very good plan, the brother has been driven insane by his problems, and things go south, many die.

It was fairly good, not great. It gets a 6.1 on the IMDb and that's about where I peg it. When you get to the core of the story, it's just rich people acting like dicks. They get some punishment, yay. There's a nice new Blu-ray out but you can still find the old Midnight Movies DVD with a second Vincent Price film, Scream And Scream Again. I got one for 12 bucks shipped to me by Amazon. I had seen SASA but didn't have a copy.

Blade Of The Immortal was our second film. It's a 2017 Japanese movie that's based on a Manga. It's directed by Takashi Miike and Tetsuya Oishi wrote the screenplay. It's a revenge story that's been punched in the face by the movie's 140 minute running time. It's got a strong start but about 80 minutes in I'm not with the movie much anymore and there's an hour to go. Sometimes the fights go on so long, I'm zoning out. I wouldn't need a copy now that I've seen it.

Fright Night 2: New Blood 2013

Fright Night 2: New Blood is a 2013 horror film that's less a sequel and more of a remake of the 2011 Fright Night and the 1995 Fright Night. They all share a bit of a similar plot. Dumb ass kid up against a powerful vampire. It's a fantasy, the kid wins. This one is written by Matt Venne and directed by Eduardo Rodriguez.

Ed, Charley and Amy are students on a student exchange trip to Romania. Amy was Charlie's girlfriend, she broke it off because she thinks Charley was cheating on her. Charley's heartbroken and Ed is a dick. Charley sees a woman in a window across the street from his hotel. She in underwear kissing another woman in underwear. Then there's blood dripping down her back.

Turns out that the woman in her underwear is the Professor giving lectures on Romanian culture to the exchange students. Charley sees her with a female student later and in the AM the girl is missing. That evening Charley sees her drive off with a big student sized bundle. Charley gets too close to the vampire lady and things get dicey for him and Amy. Poor Ed couldn't be more fucked if he was wearing a red shirt on the away party on Star Trek.

There's some nice scenes of Romania and there's plenty of running about and yelling, some biting, some stunts and some dumb ass students. They aren't so smart, mixing it up with a vampire, and only through sheer luck do some survive. I thought it was OK but I liked the local scenery. As a horror movie it's barely average. It scores a 4.3 on the IMDb which I think is from the lack of anything new going on. They did change Dracula to a woman but who cares. I still like the original film the best of the three. At least there were ladies in their underwear.

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Up first the 1979 Gold Of The Amazon Women with Bo Svenson and Anita Ekberg. The IMDb says it was a TV movie and explains why there isn't any nudity. It would have helped, the movie was hard pressed to keep us interested with it's poor story and silly plot.The screenplay was written by Stanley Ralph Ross, under the name of Sue Donem, and directed by Mark L Lester.

Bo, and some guy he likes to pick on, go into the Amazon jungle to find the Seven Cities of Gold. They got a map from a guy who was killed with arrows in the streets of New York. Donald Pleasence is after the gold and he's ruthless but incompetant. He's got a few of the Amazon women who broke off from the tribe headed by Anita Ekberg. Bo and his buddy get befriended by the locals and one of them goes with them as a sort of expendable guide. He gets killed by a snake a bit after they depart.

Eventually Bo and Anita team up and beat down Donald and his rebel Amazons. Rather than gun that shit down they pack him off to jail. Just another of the unsatisfying elements in the script. It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination but it's a good one for complaining about. You can find out how much you like it by watching it on YouTube. There's a link above.

Our second feature is Slumber Party Massacre 2, it came out in 1987 and while there is some nudity, there's so many other annoying bits that I can't give it much of a score on the IMDb. It's written and directed by Deborah Brock. Roger Corman is the producer.

Crystal Bernard, remember her from Wings, is part of an all girl rock band that's very Bangles like, but not so good at the playing and singing. They decide to take a trip to a friend's condo to lay about in bikini's and drink with some boys. Sadly, a monster rocker from Crystal's Id comes calling and kills nearly everyone.

I found the characters a bit annoying, especially that one guy, but it did have a sort of interesting villain with his drilling guitar. Some parts of the script are poor, some parts are slightly better. The gals band kind of sucks, surely not something I would want to hear, even when I listen to all sorts of music.I wasn't impressed with the music in the movie generally.

I wouldn't recommend it much, it's more for when you've run out of good horror movies. You can see the movie on YouTube and find out if you like it. I thought I might have seen the first movie but my Watched Movie List says no. There's a third one that I haven't seen either.