JACK-O

  

Fun Fact: Jack-O is one of the worst horror movies and best first ladies of all time. I am, of course, more inclined to write about the horror movie than the first lady, because I have seen the horror movie three times under various levels of intoxication. (And I have seen the first lady zero times under zero levels of intoxication. Man, this blog is getting weird.)

  

Anyway, Jack-O is an ultra-low-budget Pumpkinhead story from the early 90s. (There are no pill-box hats in sight.) I was planning to write up a blog post about this movie after I watched it last year, but I honestly could not think of anything clever or interesting to say about it, so I just let the memories fade into the back of my pumpkin head.

  

Today, when I was cleaning out my computer and looking at all my random saved photos (Hello, Eartha Kitt from Ernest Scared Stupid!), I came across the above picture. Now I honestly could not remember if this was a screen cap from Jack-O or an episode of Goosebumps. I believe it is actually from Goosebumps. But the fact that there was ever any doubt really says a lot about Jack-O. And basically, what it says is please do not watch Jack-O.

TITANIC II

STATS

Titanic II

2010

Directed by: Shane Van Dyke

Written by: Shane Van Dyke
Starring: Shane Van Dyke (notice a pattern?)

WHA’ HAPPENED?

It’s the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic’s fateful voyage, and some genius decided to give it another go. Some people are afraid it’s going to sink. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it does not.

Okay. Yes it does. It sinks real good.

…And they officially blew their budget.

Unlike the legitimate Titanic movie, this one doesn’t focus on a large cast of characters. Instead, the only characters we get to know are the ship’s one competent doctor and the boat’s owner. We also follow the rescue efforts of the girl’s father, who plays a Coast Guard captain/iceberg expert. (Uh oh.) It’s this guy:

You build ONE army of murderous rats and then

you’re stuck in straight-to-DVD sh!t like this. Life isn’t fair.

This film greatly improves on the 1997 film, because now, instead of an iceberg, we have an iceberg, a tsunami, and a MEGA-tsunami. You gotta love this film.

Quick, everybody. Lean slightly to the left. It’s a mega-tsunami.

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Asylum Films has perfected the art of the “mockbuster,” releasing such exploitative classics as Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers: Fall of Man, and The Terminators.

They even improved on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by releasing a Sherlock Holmes that replaces Jude Law with dinosaurs and a giant squid.

This made my eyeballs hurt.

WHAT YOU SAY?

“An ice-glacier collapsed off the coast of Greenland.”

“The lifeboats are death traps!”

“Not again!”

“Looks like history’s repeated itself!”

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

None. Our lead actor Shane Van Dyke (who pulled an Orson Welles and wrote/directed this masterpiece) makes sure that the camera lingers on him lovingly, especially when he has his arms draped around the ladies… or when he’s slow-motion surfing.

Whose idea was it to start Titanic 2 with five minutes

of slow-motion surfing? Oh yeah, probably Shane Van Dyke.

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Thousands of people drown off-screen. One guy suffocates from smoke. And the lead character’s best friend gets crushed by the world’s worst emergency exit.

This happened to her to. Via a cabinet. She was pretty killable.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

I absolutely love the group shots. Notice the crowd of dozens who gather to watch Titanic 2 disappear into the horizon.

By some fluke of physics, most of these people are shown on the ship in later scenes.

Try to play Spot the Extra as this movie continues. One lady in particular is like Jason Voorhees: she’s everywhere at all times.

Watch her. Watch her good.

Speaking of extras, I swear I saw Debbie Gibson in the background of most of the group scenes.

Seriously, right? That's gotte be her.

Most of the film involves our two main characters trying to reach the ill-defined safety tanks at the bottom of the ship. This section of the movie seems more like Poseidon Adventure than Titanic (without the stars or awesomeness, of course).

Oh crap. The happy face is going to reach them in T minus 15 seconds.

Our hero (notice how I never learned her name) gets surprisingly good cell phone reception in an elevator… on a boat… in the middle of the ocean… a hundred feet below the surface.

OK. IS IT GAY?

This film is an interesting disaster, mostly because it shows how one man (writer/director/actor/caterer Shane Van Dyke) builds a whole movie around himself. It’s a huge ego project, all the way down to the movie’s climax, in which our main characters gather around his lifeless body and try to bring him back. He spends so much time on himself, that we have no idea how many innocent people died because of him. (Remember, his character built the boat.) In fact, at one point he looks out at the horizon and another character asks him, “Admiring your masterpiece?” That moment almost seemed like a comment on his own hubris.

Perhaps because of this, the film doesn’t bother to develop any of the other characters. There is no romance, no drama, no real emotions at all except for a father/daughter relationship that doesn’t go anywhere. Perhaps worst of all, Titanic 2 isn’t even that campy.  I have no reason to recommend this to a gay audience. It’s a Tara Reid.

I DISMEMBER MAMA

Welcome to VHS Tuesday, where I dig up one of my old, awful horror videos and share its delightfully stupid packaging. When horror videos first started flooding the market, the marketing geniuses really went to town thinking up the best taglines and the most hilariously literal summaries. Today we have I Dismember Mama, an awful, awful video nasty that I never want to see again. But its packaging: pure genius.
   

This is the cover. Look! It’s Roy Scheider playing a washed-up magician.

   

   
Note the tagline: May she rest… in pieces. Damn. Gets me every time.
     
And the summary:
        

POOR ALBERT IS JUST CRAZY ABOUT WOMEN.

     

Albert (Zooey Hall) is a mentally disturbed young man incarcerated in a rest home run by Dr. Burton (Frank Whiteman).

    
A nurse’s reprimand (Elaine Partnow) causes him to lock her in his room, strip off her clothes and attempt to murder her. Then an attendant (James Tartan) is brutally murdered and Albert escapes. And so starts a killing spree more brutal than any ever seen in the annals of filmmaking. First his mothers servant goes, then a call girl in a series of chilling murders culminating in a terrifying Hitchcockian climax that will leave you breathless time and time again!
      

Not only do we know exactly who dies (and in what order!) but we also know that this is the most brutal, Hitchcockian story ever put to film. God bless whatever minimum wage copy-writer wrote this description. You almost make me want to see this movie again. Almost.

VALENTINE

Valentine's Day just happened, and you know what that means, ladies and gentlemen. I'm still in a Reese's-induced sugar coma. It also means that I get the chance to talk about one of my least favorite guilty pleasures, the Denise-Richards-getting-harpooned-to-death slashfest Valentine.

Now, full disclosure: I have a soft spot in my heart for this movie, and there are two reasons why: First, it is the only Katherine Heigl movie that I can bother sitting through all the way (besides Bride of Chucky or Wish upon a Star). I enjoy the fact that she gets murdered at the very beginning. Such is my hatred for Katherine Heigl.

And secondly, it was a date movie for me. One of my first. I was in junior high; I was really nervous. It didn’t go well. But… I look back on that memory fondly. And ironically.

Aside from that, Valentine doesn’t have a lot to recommend. It came at the tail end of the late-90s slasher resurgence, and it comes across as stale and perfunctory. The final revelation is really dumb. And the acting (except for dead-eyed superbitch Denise Richards) is subpar. It’s not campy enough to be enjoyable, nor legit enough to be watchable. It’s just sort of there, limping along through wildly implausible death scenes at multi-media art installations and dimly lit mansions. Even David Boreanaz is weirdly charisma-free (and I don’t mean Carpenter).

But considering all that, I still would recommend it. It’s like a time capsule. It’s a quaint little window into the horror trends at the turn of the millennium. It’s basically the perfect distillation of everything that was wrong with horror movies at that time. The bad plotting, the hyper-verbal yet completely unnatural dialog, the long scenes of exposition, the dozens of unnecessary red herrings. Watch this and you’ll remember what it was like in the late-90s, early-2000s. For some people, that’s reason enough to sit through this dreck.

If you don’t, this lady will cut you.

The Visit

 

Wait. This is a "Nigerian romantic comedy thriller." First of all, I don't know what that means. Secondly, this can't be the right film.

      

That's more like it.

STATS:

The Visit
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan (Yay!)
Written by M. Night Shyamalan (Sigh.)

WHA’ HAPPENED?

Two precocious kids spend a week with their estranged grandparents. They'd never met the old couple before, which makes things particularly unnerving when the grandparents start acting very strangely. There's poop and vomit involved, as well as the tensest game of Yahtzee ever committed to film. I did not make any of that up.

WHAT YOU SAY?

I'm not going to include any quotes here, because I think the dialogue was a little overwritten. But the young boy does rap a lot. Freestyle. It's cute.

Oh, wait. I'll include one quote: "YAHTZEE!"

Seriously. You gotta see this movie. 

 

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Okay. We all know that found footage horror films are well past their sell-by date. After the first Paranormal Activity came out, people went crazy. After the last Paranormal Activity came out, people went... nowhere. At least not to the theaters, anyway. The bloom is off the rose, is what I'm saying.

But leave it to good ol' M. Night to shake things up a bit. After a long and embarrassing dry spell, he's figured out how to breathe new life into this dying subgenre. In this film, the main girl is an aspiring filmmaker who has clear emotional reasons to continue making her movie, which only heightens the weirdness when her footage starts revealing the creepy side of her family.

BLOOD AND GUTS:

The violence doesn't erupt until the very end, and the worst of it is only shown in quick flashes. Instead, this movie gets its chills from showing a seemingly normal elderly couple doing increasing weird and dangerous stuff. Also, there's a lot of poop involved. That's pretty gross.

PLOT HOLES AND CRAZINESS:

M. Night's best decision when writing this movie is to go against his tendency to attach a twist ending to everything he does. Instead, he reveals the true nature of the situation at the end of Act II, which makes the whole movie seem less cheap than, say, The Village. It also allows him to really go ape shit during the third act. 

Seven eights of this film is good.

  

OK. IS IT GAY?

Nope. There is absolutely nothing queer about it. On a scale of 1 to Freddy's Revenge, this movie's a 1. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go see it. You absolutely should. I mean...

"YAHTZEE!!!!!!!!"

Top 5 Christmas Scrooges

Late December. The days get shorter, the nights get colder, and people start knocking on your door so they can sing at you. 'Tis the season for drinking eggnog, wearing ugly sweaters, and watching people be horribly, disgustingly mean to each other. We all deserve a little coal in our stockings every once in a while, but some people take the naughty list to a whole new level. This week, we're counting down the top five movie Scrooges, those heartless holiday-haters who make life miserable for everyone else, and then never learn their lesson!

Number five: Mrs. Deagle, Gremlins
Any elderly woman who threatens to murder a cute, little puppy dog is bound to get some holiday comeuppance. And that's exactly what happens to Mrs. Deagle, when the titular monsters sneak into her house and rewire her electric chair into a death trap. Will anyone mourn her passing, though? Not likely. Mrs. Deagle is a prime example of a movie Scrooge.

She shuts down local businesses, cuts in line, throws buckets of cold water onto Christmas carolers, kicks innocent families out on the street, and threatens to kill that aforementioned dog with household appliances. The only time she ever shows kindness is when she's talking to her dozen-or-so cats. Perhaps it's best that she died before seeing her beloved felines turn into Gremlin food.

Number four: Uncle Frank, Home Alone
Every family has an Uncle Frank, the relative that always shows up for family gatherings, eats the food, and says cranky and inappropriate things to virtually everyone else. Sure, he doesn't do anything evil, but he's just not pleasant. And because the movie is from young Kevin McCallister's perspective, everything is amplified.

Still, any non-family member would recognize Frank as the Scrooge of the family. He refuses to pay for the pizza, he blatantly ignores his wife, and he calls Kevin a little jerk. Plus, in a rare deleted scene, he even pulls down Kevin's pants as some sort of prank. "Look what you did, you little jerk" indeed.

Number three: The Mouse Queen, The Nutcracker Prince
The only thing worse that an ugly old mouse is an ugly old mouse with the voice of Phyllis Diller who can curse you with ugliness if she ever bites your big toe. Not surprisingly, this character and the ugly-toe curse were not part of Tchaikovsky ballet, but were added to the animated movie version.

The Mouse King might be the main villain, but his angry old mother was the true Scrooge of the story, busting out weirdly specific curses and crawling through delicious-looking food like she was auditioning for Ratatouille. She was the one who turned some innocent boy into a nutcracker, all because... Well, her motivations don't quite make sense. And isn't that the Scroogiest thing of all?

Number two: The Penguin, Batman Returns
Superhero movies aren't typically Christmas-y. The flashing lights and tinsel tend to distract from the action scenes and the tight tights. Leave it to Tim Burton, then, to make the darkest, creepiest, most Christmas-y superhero movie of the 90s.

It's late December in Gotham City, and guess who's not feeling the holiday warmth: That's right. The deformed circus freak living in the sewers under the city. And can you blame him? It isn't his fault that his parents abandoned him into the sewers because he had six total fingers and the face of Danny DeVito. It is his fault, however, that he kidnaps half of the city's children and unleashes a troupe of evil circus performers on the street. That might be a little much. By the time he starts shooting his own minions with umbrella guns, it's pretty clear: The Penguin is a grade-A Scrooge.

Number one: Killer Santa, Rare Exports, Santa's Slay, Christmas Evil, and Silent Night, Deadly Night 1 and 2 
It may come as a surprise that there are so many killer Santa movies out there, but if you think about it for a second, it makes perfect sense. Santa sneaks into your house with the sole purpose of rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. Swap the red and white clothes for a blue jumpsuit and you basically have Michael Myers.

In some versions of this story--Rare Exports and Santa's Slay--jolly old Saint Nick is an ancient being with the murderous drive to dispense old world punishment on new world victims. In all the other versions, Santa is really just a crazy person in a suit, dealing with inner demons and past trauma by dressing up and murdering. In most of pop culture, Santa is such a jolly old fellow, that when he snaps and stabs someone with a candy cane, that makes him the biggest Scrooge of all.

So the next time you feel a little cranky this December, try to learn from these cautionary tales. Don't be a Scrooge. Or at the very least, don't threaten someone's puppy dog. You know that's not going to end well.

DEADLY BLESSING

    

STATS:

Deadly Blessing
Directed by Wes Craven
      
WHA’ HAPPENED?
You thought Amish people were bad. (Wait. Did you?) Just wait till you meet the Hittites, these crazy farmers that get caught up in a slow-moving horror mystery involving tractors, snakes, and someone dropping a live tarantula into Sharon Stone's mouth.
     
FAVORITE QUOTE:
A poor manchild has been killed.
     

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

Why did I watch this movie? Well, it was directly by Wes Craven. And I’m a completist. I was sure it couldn’t be worse than My Soul to Take. But the fact that this is mostly known as the movie where Sharon Stone got a live tarantula in her mouth tells me that it wasn’t exactly one of Craven's top tier movies.
          

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

Some PG female nudity. Including a bathtub scene with an overly curious snake. Similar to Nancy’s bathtub scene in the first Nightmare on Elm Street. If Mr. Craven has to rip off other movies, they might as well be his own.
    

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Nothing particularly memorably. Most deaths occur in shadowy barns and whatnot, so there isn’t a lot to see. Apparently, Amish country isn’t very well-lit. Who knew! But that guy from The Hills Have Eyes gets probably the longest death scene. So there’s that.
    

PLOT HOLES AND CRAZINESS:

The reveal of the killer is sudden and kind of dumb, but holy crap does the film have an awesome ending. Think Drag Me to Hell, but completely unearned. Like, if Freddy Krueger showed up at the end of Scream. It makes no damn sense, but it is probably the only thing I will remember about this movie in a month. That and the scene where Sharon Stone gets a tarantula in her mouth. Now that’s the stuff that dreams are made of.
           

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Ernest Borgnine was born to play a crazy Hittite farmer. Forget his Oscar-winning role in Marty. THIS is his legacy. Aside from him, though, everyone else is pretty much sleeping through this film, especially Martha, the main girl, who goes from constipated to dizzy without ever registering terror. All-in-all, a forgetting slog of a film, even for its short run-time, but be sure to stay for that cuckoo-bananas ending. You will not regret it.

AMITYVILLE DOLLHOUSE

     
Amityville Dollhouse
1996
  

Tagline: The biggest name in horror comes home. (What?)

    

Starring Kalabar from Disney’s Halloweentown. That’s about it. And it took me literally the entire movie to figure out where I knew him from.

    

     

WHA’ HAPPENED?

Basically the same nonsense from all the Amityville sequels: supporting characters die but the family is more-or-less safe. Everyone thinks the dad is going crazy. The house blows up at the end.
      
The difference here is that the magic dollhouse of the title is to blame, and it can summon demons, giant rats, and previously dead relatives. Also, the family’s younger son is a creepy little whiner whose only friend is a pet rat. Remember when I said that no one in the core family gets murdered? Well, sometimes that’s not a good thing.
   

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

The mid-90s was a wonderland of random direct-to-video sequels to semi-popular horror films. Some were fun (Leprechaun 2, 3, and 4), some were painful (Children of the Corn 5), and some involved an evil dollhouse that summoned dead people.
    

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

The older son has a shirtless make-out session with his girlfriend. It’s fairly steamy, until the girlfriend basically gets eaten by the fireplace. It’s kind of a mood-killer.
     

BLOOD AND GUTS:

The zombie dad was pretty great, in a Pet Semetary 2 kind of way, and the burn victim girlfriend was effective. (Seriously, do NOT date someone who lives in a haunted house.) But the coolest scene is when the teen son gets an earful of mosquito. It was like that scene in Wrath of Khan, but with a more realistic fake ear. Gloopy goodness.
        

FINAL THOUGHTS:

After watching Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (which is a slightly lamer title than Dollhouse), I’ve decided that this sequel is just as bad, if slightly less inconsequential. As always, there are plenty of dry patches, and the climax is a little rushed (Look! A demon! Okay, let’s leave.) But it’s charming in a bone-headed way, and the scene with the giant rat was adorable.

PIECES

      
No words can describe how awesome and derivative this movie is. Oh wait. Words totally can do that! And here they are:
       

PIECES… It’s exactly what you think it is!

   

The year is 1941! A young boy is assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman, when his mother enters in a rage and tells him to throw the puzzle out. Instead he returns with an ax and hacks his mother to death, tricking the police into believing a maniac had killed her.

   

Forty years later at a Boston college, the terror really begins. A chainsaw-weilding madman is roaming the campus collecting pieces of beautiful co-eds for a ghastly human puzzle he is assembling—and the police haven’t a clue to the crazed killer's identity.

    

CHRISTOPHER GEORGE (MORTUARY) stars in this horrifying adventure into madness, hysteria and bone-chilling brutality.

Truth Or Dare?

   
Happy Tuesday! Here's another awful VHS summary. This comes from the 1986 slasher Truth Or Dare?, one of the most notorious video nasties I have had the pleasure of sitting through. Here is what the video box says:
     

It’s Time To Play TRUTH OR DARE? A Critical Madness

    

(The question mark makes everything seem less scary, somehow.)

   
Meet Mike Strauber. He plays a deadly game. He plays Truth or Dare with everyone…even himself.
    

Truth Or Dare, a child’s game turned into a psychotic, twisted game of self-destruction. This non-stop psycho-thriller packed with action will assault you personally. Mike Strauber, played brilliantly by John Brace, formerly of the Burt Reynolds Playhouse, brings you to the edge of your seat with passionate understanding coupled with unbridled hatred. If anyone ever asks you to play Truth Or Dare… tell them you’ve seen the movie.

CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER

                                               

STATS:

CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER
1974
Written and Directed by Brian Clemens
Starring Horst Janson (seriously)
                   

WHA’ HAPPENED?

A rich family goes around sucking the life out of pretty, young girls in order to stay youthful forever. Our titular captain (What is he the captain of? No idea.) comes to the rescue, defeating these age-sucking jerkwads with his fencing skills, luck with the ladies, and obscure vampire knowledge. (Fun fact: vampires can bring dead toads back to life just by walking by.)
                 

                       

ISN’T THAT SPECIAL?

I’ve always been a Hammer fan, and I knew this entry in their mid-70s output is particularly strange. Not oppressively strange in a kung-fu-vampires kind of way, but strange enough to catch my interest on a lazy Saturday morning.

SHIRTS AND SKINS:

Kronos is shirtless a good 40% of the movie. He has one dimly lit sex scene, and a bunch of innocent bromantic scenes with another male character that turn slightly more homoerotic because hes shirtless. (In one memorable exchange, his buddy touches the captain's torso scar and says that he knows he has guts, because he’s already seen his insides.) The actor playing Kronos isn’t exactly someone to write home about, but hey.
                 

                           

BLOOD AND GUTS:

Mostly slight trickles of mouth blood and glumpy old-age make-up. Hammer has done a lot better in the past.

RANDOM THOUGHTS:

I enjoyed the wonky mythos that this film built around its vampire characters. Specifically, each vampire can only be killed in specific ways. Some have to be staked, some have to be burnt, and some have to get a crucifix to sink into their embarrassingly vulnerable chest. It must suck to be the vampire that dies via garlic pizza.
                    

                           

OK. IS IT GAY?

Yeah. The film builds a strange rhythm where it has a bromance scene with Kronos and the doctor who summoned him (the scar-caressing one), followed very quickly by Kronos making sexy-time with his female companion. Either hes bi, or he needs to sort through some issues fast. That, coupled with a particularly androgynous son-of-a-vampire, makes for some pleasant 70s escapism with a slight queer bent. Fun times all around.