Tar 2020 Written by Timothy Nuttall and Aaron Wolf, directed by Aaron Wolf.
It's another movie based on a monster from the dirt, jazzed up by putting the monster in the La Brea Tar Pits. Nothing too original here. Nice to see Timothy Bottoms and Graham Greene but that's about it. Watched on Amazon Prime, not going to need to see this one again.
Needful Things 1993 Based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, screenplay by WD Richter, directed by Fraser C Heston.
Ed Harris is the sheriff of Castle Rock, Bonnie Bedelia is his girlfriend, Max Von Sydow is a demon. Max has opened an antique shop in Castle Rock. He's got great stuff and the price is cheap, in cash. It's the favors Max wants, those have a great cost. It's why I don't go to antique shops.
I hadn't seen it before, I bought the DVD some time back but it's just been sitting in a box waiting to get watched for a good long while. I'm endeavoring to clean out that box and get those DVDs put in their final resting place other boxes.
I liked the characters and the script was fairly decent. I thought it poked along at the beginning, I'm not always a fan of the melodrama that fills in between the interesting bits before the real action starts. Once Max gets to manipulating the locals things get more interesting, more often. Nice production values, I watch so many low budget films, it's a welcome change to see some money on the screen.
I was glad I picked up the DVD, I enjoyed it more than many SK adaptations. It certainly has a better sense of humor than a lot of the films made from his books. Books that I haven't ever read. I liked it enough to think I might actually try to get back to it some time in the future. Typically, I seem to have liked it more than the critics did when it came out. Oh, well, nothing new there.
Tomorrow I'm going to watch the extended TV version of the film, then I probably don't need to see it for a while. That's good, that box of DVDs aren't going to watch themselves. They have no hands, how could they work the DVD player. The TV version is just over 3 hours long. You can watch the original in the title link above and the long version here.
Psycho Goreman 2020 Written and directed by Steven Kostanski. It's a Canadian film and Steve is part of the Astron-6 Production Company. His previous films include Manborg, Father's Day, The Void and Leprechaun Returns. This isn't an Astron-6 release, it's on the RLJE Films label. They produce a lot of genre TV and film. You can stream PG on Shudder and it just come out on Blu-ray.
That girl in the picture, that's Mimi, she's a real fuckin' asshole. The kid to the left is her brother Luke, she mistreats him something fierce. Mimi mistreats most everyone, she's loud and selfish, she wants her own way and no one can tell her what to do. After a deadly game of Crazy Ball, Luke has to dig his own grave in the back yard. Luke strikes a coffin like box that's got a glowing red jewel on it. Mimi gloms onto that. They get scared when purple light pours out of the coffin.They fill in the hole just in time to go to bed.
The next day the dirt is out of the hole and soon after we meet the Arch-duke of Nightmares. He's been sealed in the coffin for a long time, placed there by The Templars, the powerful alien beings that defeated him and stopped his galaxy destroying rampage. Mimi doesn't care about his backstory but the flashbacks to his past were quite entertaining. Mimi renames him Psycho Goreman, or PG for short, after it turns out that the glowing jewel gives her complete control over him. Now starts the Arch-duke's nightmare. She bosses him about and he threatens her with a slow torturous death. Mimi soon has PG out on the town and some of the locals aren't always fairing too well after their encounter with an alien.
More crazy things happen and there are plenty of laughs. There's a fair bit of gore and the make up effects are mostly pretty good. The film looks great considering it had a budget of $1,500,000 Canadian dollars. Money well spent. I sure plan to watch it over again.
The 9th Guest 1934 It started as a 1930 mystery novel called The Invisible Host by Bruce Manning and Gwen Bristow, Owen Davis adapted that into a play called The Ninth Guest in 1930, Garnett Weston adapted that lot for the film and Roy William Neill directed.
Eight people get invited to a party in a big fancy penthouse apartment. Most of them know each other and they aren't the best of pals. At first they think that one of them invited the lot but soon a mysterious voice comes over the PA system. They're all the voice's enemies, soon they're going to die. There's no way out, the doors are locked and electrified.
The murderer says someone is going to die every 15 minutes and he's a man of his word. He invites them to outwit death and escape. Some doe. You can find out by watching the film in the link above. I enjoyed it, it's a bit better than average, but it managed to keep my interest and it's short. A lot of people gave it a 7 on the IMDb but I only gave it a 6. Those two rankings are over 55% of the votes. It's got 453 of them, not too bad for an old movie. You can get a DVD for 6 bucks on Amazon. It's from Reel Vault, part of Oldies dot com. They have a lot of odd stuff including a lot of public domain titles.
Critters Attack 2019 Written by Scott Lobdell and directed by Bobby Miller. A reboot of the series with Dee Wallace and some people I hadn't seen before. From reading about the film I see there was a Critters TV series on Shutterfly, I have not seen Critters: A New Binge.
The movie opens with the Critters landing, once on the ground they start munching people. Even the park rangers get chomped. A young gal takes a babysitting job I hope of getting in good with a lady from the college she hopes to attend. She takes the woman's two teen children out to a park, her brother tags along because he likes the daughter. They go to the park where they stumble onto the new critter invasion.
They can't get much help from anyone, so they devise their own defenses. They do learn from the dying cop that the Critters can be killed with high pitched noises. Dee shows up randomly in the movie, eventually she joins up with the kids and they blast the beasties. The movie ends with a hint of more Critters to come.
Nothing overly great about the movie but the series left much to be desired as it plowed on. It's not overly gory and there's a few gags. I gave it a 5 but it was more a 4. I wound up ordering the DVD after I watched the first four title but it sat for ages. Finally getting it off the unwatched movie shelf.
Coherence 2013 Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit.
A group of old friends get together at a house the night a comet is due to pass over. It's all personal chatter and backstory until the weird stuff starts happening. The lights going out seemed normal to seeing yourself in the street. They figure out that the comet has created a rift between parallel universes. They discuss the other selves, whom they're really bothered by. One guy is much more disturbed than the others, to the point of violence, he really wants to kill them before they come for him. Some of the rest of the group turns violent as they try to deal with all that's going on.
It was a lot better than some of these small budget films with people talking and talking while little happens. It was shot in 5 days with $50,000. Even with that tight a budget, there's a bit of physical action, some fairly good actors, and a decent script. Nicholas Brendon and Elizabeth Gracen were the only ones in the cast that I knew. I'd think it's leaning more to being a horror movie than an SF film but that's OK, I'm running out of unseen SF films to see in general, I can't afford to be picky. I don't think I'd need to see it again.
These three films are all from Amazon Prime. It's the only way to keep up with the slightly newer SF films. I've near enough stopped buying DVDs, I have my favorite titles already and often I don't want to take a chance on something I don't know about. I'm not getting out to the used stores to check for cheap discs that I can take a chance on and the postage rates from the UK have gotten too expensive for me.
In Bright Axiom 2019 Director Spencer McCall co-wrote the script with Geordie Aitken, Farouz Gipson and Wylie Herman.
Some artist types think they should start a space for artists to flourish, or some such. People are invited to the mysterious society housed in a weird building. It's more like a cult but the guys behind the group say it's not a cult. It fails quickly, the organizers don't really have any idea what they are doing. The story is told in documentary style. It's not that interesting and not really SF. I wouldn't want to watch it again.
Empire Of The Sharks 2017 Written and directed by Mark Atkins. Produced by The Asylum.
In this Waterworld type film some people in a tiny floating village are up against the warlord John Savage. His minion isn't happy with the tribute from the village and he takes some women as prisoners. The slaves are forced to work powering a machine that takes the salt out of water so they can drink it. Some of the villagers form a plan to rescue the women. They hire some scum who fuck things up for a while but eventually they got eaten by sharks so I laughed.
It's about the usual level of quality of the average film from The Asylum. It's not something I would watch again, not that I should have bothered in the first place, but I was happy to have it on in the background as I sorted stamps.
Evil Takes Root: The Curse Of The Batibat 2020 Director Chris W Freeman co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Mack.
A woman finds a monster in her bedroom and the police find her body in a tree. Before that she had called her ex and the message brings him to her small town only to find her dead. Things turn weirder when the daughter becomes possessed. Turns out mom's company had done some clear cutting and unwittingly unleashed an ancient forest demon. It's come to visit and it's not a happy critter. The monster wasn't too badly portrayed.
The movie is pretty much a standard monster slog to the end. There's plenty of running and yelling in the woods. It's pokey and there's nothing really unique that stands out. There some fair to middling graphics and a passable production. I can't complain much about the acting. Sadly, it's still some below average. I'd give it a 4 before I would give it a 5 on the IMDb, it's current score is a 4.1. I did like the African priest character.
H0us3 2018 Director Manolo Munguia co-wrote the screenplay with Sergio Martinez. It's a Spanish picture, dubbed in English. It's pretty much shot in one room in a big house.
Computers figure heavily in this film, the characters were all computer students in university. Most of them haven't kept in touch much but they've all come to have dinner and stay in a big old house. There's not much going on but them all talking about stuff. One of the more annoying guys tells everyone he's cracked the password on a secret file from the dark web. He's found some code and put it on his phone. Now his phone can see 30 seconds into the future.
Everyone gets all excited wondering about the implications of the software and what it could mean if the government had it. They alter it to see 12 days into the future and find everything was on fire. Everyone freaks out. It takes about 90 minutes to get to that point in this 104 minute movie.
I didn't much care for the ending and the sting before the credits. It's ponderously slow and quite dull at times. I watched it on Amazon Prime and wished they would add variable speed to their player. Anything to get to the end of the movie quicker. I wouldn't need to see either of these again.
The Night Before 2015 Director Jonathan Levine wrote the story that he adapted into a screenplay with Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, and Evan Goldberg. A couple years before TNB Jonathan wrote and directed Warm Bodies. I saw that and liked it well enough. I haven't seen any of the other 5 movies he's directed.
Fifteen years after they started to look for the legendary Christmas Party, the Nutcracker Ball, three friends decide to quit the hunt after this one last try. Lucky for them Joseph Gordon-Levitt works in a hotel and he finds and steals three tickets to the secret event. Seth Rogan and Anthony Mackie are his pals, all three guys have their own issues, all of which are mostly resolved by the end of the movie.
It's kind of funny, not all the gags were to my liking, and kind of like a bunch of movies. It's still a bit better than average and I would watch it again sometime. I believe the DVD came from Dollar Tree. When they used to have DVDs for a buck. Haven't seen that for the last year or so, I rarely ever go there anymore.
Plan 9 2016 Written and directed by John Johnson. John adapted Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space but made it as a modern zombie film. These zombies run fast and bite hard. There's plenty of gore and loose body parts. It's sadly sexed up with some nudity and sex scenes. It's better made than Ed's film, John had more money and a bit more talent. Brian Krause is the big name in the film, at least from the modern day, Wood fans will recognize Conrad Brooks from the original film. He's got a small part, mostly he sits in a chair. It's watchable, though my mind did wander at times, some scenes are not as good as others. On the whole below average, I'm leaning more to a 4 than a 5 on the IMDb. I was kind of wishing that John had made his own story, instead of fiddlin' with Ed's story.
Interestingly the votes on the IMDb look like this.
Uncle Peckerhead 2020 Written and directed by Matthew John Lawrence. It's Matthew's first feature, he had written, produced and directed 5 shorts between 2007 and 2015.
That's David Bluvband as Scott, Chet Siegel as Judy, and Ruth Lolla as Doris, they're DUH, a New Jersey punk band with 22 minutes of their own material. Judy is the main force behind the band, she's peppy and naive, somewhat at odds with her noisy musical choice. Scott plays guitar, he's kind of a goof, Doris is the drummer, she's kind of dour. I didn't care that much for what they played but some of the people in the movie liked it. As the movie opens Judy quits her job, she's lined up 6 gigs around the area with a possible 7th when they return. First barrier to their leaving, their vehicle gets repossessed. The day is saved when they stumble onto this guy.
David Littleton plays Peckerhead. He's homeless but he has a van. He offers to drive them for gas and a little cash. The band is unprepared, they have no money so they have no other options for transportation, Uncle Peckerhead seems a nice enough guy. When the band gets stiffed by the promoter in their first gig, the band find out what sort of guy Peck is, a murderous, flesh eating demon. He's only affected by his problem at midnight and for only 13 mins. He keeps it under control with a shot of something that puts him to sleep.
Though troubled by their murderous friend they decide to continue the trip with him, Peck did raise some cash. The rest of the trip sees a return of the beast and a bit of regret from the band. They aren't thinkers this lot. Never hook up with a demon or hell beast. Untrustworthy, to say the least. Still, it's funny when it happens to some people.
It's a free movie on Amazon Prime. I thought it was a pretty good horror comedy with a nice mix of gags and gore. The script is good, same for the actors, nice effects and good over all production. I'd be interested in see it again.
Beast Of The Water 2017 Rashaad Santiago is the director, Rick Prince wrote the script with additional dialog from Thomas Horton and Lee Bateman. You'd think with three guys going at it the script would be better. Nope. It's the old evil corporation plot. Easy to fall back on, boring as shit. The story is about an archeologist that's got a lead on a fountain of youth. He's got a lead on the location, and he organizes a trip. His University is cutting funding and it's his last chance to come through with something concrete. Unfortunately we already now that the place is protected by a Native American spirit beast that bites people's heads off, after it rips their arms off. The rep of the corp is a ruthless cold hearted bitch, a smirky blonde type I just hate, sadly she doesn't get chomped. The last scene in the movie makes me think they might have hoped for a sequel, she now knows about the beast, and a killer like that is the cliched wet dream of every evil corporate prick. Cold hearted bitch's man on the ground is a big strong psycho who'll kill anyone he needs to kill to move the mission along, or anyone his boss tells him to kill. The evil corp, and it's evil minions, is one of those plot elements that makes me want to barf. On a good note the beast from the water was a pretty good suit. Big and strong looking, the beast can pull a man's arms off with a simple tug. The big strong psycho enjoys a bit of that action. I didn't think the beast was wrong, that guy was a real prick. He needed to punished for his evil. Good beast! Overall a film that's below average, especially regarding that evil corporation business, but I did like the beast and the makeup effects. Nice message from the Native American spirit guy, he was cool. I wouldn't need to bother with it again. It's was on Amazon Prime where they think the movie was released on 2019. They are so wrong, so often, when listing the dates for films they offer. You'd think they haven't got the Internet in that office. Look it up and get the right dates on there, you lazy fucks.
Tomb Of Torture 1963 Director Antonio Boccaci, credited on the film as Anthony Kristye, wrote the original story, he co-wrote the screenplay with Giorgio Simonelli, who's credited as Johnny Seemonell. The films original title is Metempsyco. It was released in the US by Richard Gordon on a double bill with a German vampire film called Cave Of The Living Dead.
A doctor bring his daughter Anna to a village with a castle. That's her with her father, he used to live in the village 20 years ago. He's brought Anna to the castle to see if it can cure her of the odd dreams she's been having. In them she see's the violent death of Countess Irene. Irene used to live in the castle but disappeared 20 years ago. Anna also has ghostly visions of Irene now that she's in the village.
Irene's sister Countess Elizabeth lives in a house in the village and leaves the castle empty but for a deformed servant. When the movie opens we see the deformed servant kill two local girls down in a secret dungeon. There's a secret door inside the castle and a secret entrance behind a loose brick near the empty moat.
Raman was in love with Elizabeth until he met Irene. After Irene disappeared he left the area for 20 years but has recently returned. He's returned to search for Irene's body but Elizabeth thinks he's only after the supposed hidden treasure. Elizabeth is also seeing the image of Irene.
That's Anna and a reporter who's investigating the death of the two girls. They seem to fall in love between scenes and it's a lucky thing, he's there when things get dangerous.
It's a fairly decent movie, bit of murder, some torture, a mystery, a bit of sex, a ghost, guinea pigs pretending to be rats, it's got the lot. The music is a bit goofy. The script is a bit weak, there are times then it jumps ahead and misses telling us some bit of business that might have made the story clearer. In the end it was entertaining enough to be average and I would still watch it again someday.