Reviews

I cannot believe how people have raved on and on about this gorefest. It's not bad but it's also no masterpiece.

I realize that it's best to check your sense of reality at the door with a horror film, but the idea that six surface-dwellers in a pitch-black, unfamiliar environment can take out more than a dozen feral creatures whose senses (presumably) are attuned to living in their home cave is insulting. I also liked the ending myself (my girlfriend says it's "lame") because Sarah finally hallucinates and clearly isn't ever leaving the cave. It's left sort of open-ended.

Just about everything in this movie is a rip-off of Predator and the Blair Witch Project. Moreover, the other devices this movie uses are used so often that they have become cliché. For example, the first five minutes of the movie is a flashback of a sudden and tragic death (then fast forwards to a year later). Deja Vu? That's because it's used in nearly EVERY A- rate horror film made in the past ten years.

I was disappointed by this movie. They made the creatures such a big part of the movie that they failed to be frightening by the end. In fact, the lead characters are so darned annoying in the cabin party scene that I found myself actually rooting for the creatures. The Sarah versus Juno subplot (also contrived) got in the way.

This movie is somewhat different from all of the other Leprechaun films in that it isn't bursting at the seams with its own cartoonishness. It satirizes, but in a much more indirect way. They even slap on a little bs historical introduction to the beginning to make this seem more reputable (but is it really?). The characters here are portrayed with a depth you don't see in the other lep films as they tackle some serious issues.

That said, this movie still isn't as good as the first lep in the hood film a) because there is no Ice-T, and b) it lacks the first one's originality. There is a lot of humor, however, particularly with the melodramatic psychic, Esmeralda. Just as soon as you start to think of this as a serious(ly intentioned) horror film, there's a goofy scene where she has a magical fireball duel with the leprechaun. Rory's new girlfriend is hilarious also, and you don't mind seeing her new gold tooth get ripped out.

In true leprechaun style, you see many of the secondary characters (and even a couple of major ones) suffer gruesome deaths. I'm still not sure what the point of making these movies is at this point (there have been six, spread out over more than ten years now) but I personally hope that they continue to be made. One thing I really like is how there's so little continuity between them, as though each new producer just wants his shot at redeeming this series and adds a new twist to the story. In 3, he's a lawn jockey with an allergic reaction to a magical necklace, in 4, he just travels through space, with no attempts at explanation. They need a new locale though, they smoked up their hood thing. Maybe the leprechaun should go to Cancun.

Dawn of the Dead is usually hailed as the finest of the Zombie films, and for solid reasons - the acting is decent, the premise is good, and there is a genuine creepy feel that gives you chills. People usually hold it as a classic social commentary on consumer culture, but I don't really buy into this explanation so much as it being just a horror film that happens to take place in a shopping mall.

Given when this movie was made and what was likely a relatively modest budget, the film comes off as artistically sound. There are some cheese-fest gore scenes (blood is BRIGHT red) but they still pale in comparison to what you see in a lot of these other types of movies. At first, I hated the music and figured they bought out some local kids' crappy garage band out of cheapness. I realized later that since their sound is like that of muzak, it adds to the ambiance of the movie. The best part is surely the camera work with its scenes of zombies doing mundane things in a shopping mall like walking on an ice rink or riding on an escalator. Rather than reveling in their undead-ness and showing their nasty fangs, this film looks at their humanity more. I like best the few scenes where the living and the undead make extended eye contact because the emotion comes out more when the zombies appear harmless (example: francine staring down a ball player zombie behind a glass door).

This film picks up, following Night of the Living Dead, with the collapse of human society and the emergence of small groups of random survivors. One such group is composed of two lovebird news reporters (Stephen and Francine) and two police-types (Peter and Roger). They flee in the weather helicopter and discover an abandoned mall. The remainder of the movie deals with their subjugation of the zombies within the mall and their struggles to survive there as the world around them steadily devolves. On par with most other zombie movies, we learn about the outside world only through discrete blips on the radio or TV screen. Eventually, all media goes blank and the world is evidently run by greasy motorcycle pirates. A group of said pirates attacks the survivors at the mall, thus setting off this long film's climax with Stephen's death (Roger had already got the heave-ho when he was bitten by a zombie and eventually "turned").

The purported purpose of this movie is nicely expressed in the pirates themselves - the humans are more horrific than the zombies. They embody the worst in human nature. They're stupid - when they storm the mall, they go straight for the bank and collect dollar bills like that currency matters. They're sadistic and greedy. But though we are supposed to draw a contrast between them and the four main characters whose perspective dominates the movie, we see those four enjoying life shut up in the mall with jewelry and fine dinners as though nothing were happening in the outside world, so they become callous in their own right. After all, it was Stephen who shot at them first because, "it's (the mall) ours." This may be too much thought, but this really is the brainiest movie in a genre known for its corniness. I've always wondered how they have electricity and running water even after weeks and weeks in the mall when ostensibly nobody's left to manage utilities plants. The zombies themselves are pretty silly-looking - "let's just slap some blue paint on their face and tell them to slowly stumble around. It'll look pretty good!" The random assortment of zombies never fails to delight, however (my favorite is the hari krishna zombie).

This is truly among the worst movies ever made. I'm not even sure where to begin.

A guy named Kevin gets a job as a security guard at an abandoned movie studio. There's an older guy there who warns him not to go into a certain area but doesn't say why. Of course, he does go there and releases little hand puppets, I mean creatures, that run amok. Turns out the old guy had locked them in there 30 years ago when they arrived from outer space. They somehow have the ability to grant wishes, but they kill you. After chasing them all around and into "club scum," Kevin and his four loser friends coax them back to the studio and blow them up.

Yeah.

Kevin is a dweeb. His girlfriend Amy is a prude who secretly wishes to be wild. Nick is an ugly airhead who just got out of the army and yearns to prove his manhood by challenging other guys to front yard showdowns with garden tools (wtf?). Daphne...Daphne needs to eat a cheeseburger, first of all, with bacon! She's the slutty big-haired girlfriend of Nick. Kyle is the only one flying solo so he needs to take out his desires on 900 lines.

The "effects" are awful and the bloopers to numerous to list here. The hobgoblins (and this designation is arbitrary) are only two feet tall but manage to attack peoples' upper body when the camera pans up. You can actually see an arm supporting the hobgoblins a couple of times. When grenades go off, they only yield fireballs, no explosions and nothing goes flying through the air from the impact. My favorite is the sounds editing - they dub these sounds at certain points that sound so artificial you can't help but laugh. During the mortal kombat in the front yard, every time the guys hit rakes there's a "boing." Same with the times (oh yes, it happens more than once) in which Nick and Daphne go right in front of their pals into a van to engage in amorous activities - "boing-boing-boing-boing-boing." GAAAHHH This movie is as bad as Troll 2 in many ways but I have to give the edge to Troll 2 because that movie has so many hilarious lines that you can take from it. The plot line there is actually more absurd as well. This movie is not as re-watchable as Troll 2 and whereas you can watch that one sober and still laugh, Hobgoblins is just lame unless you're intoxicated.

Mac and Me is one of those few movies that truly fly below the radar of most peoples' memories. I'm thinking that this is selective memory, because this movie makes such a crappy impression that it's hard to forget.

This movie's first strike is that it's a blatant rip-off of E.T, and they couldn't even wait till the next decade to try and capitalize on it. E.T. at least was a good movie that kids and adults alike could enjoy, if for different reasons. Mac and Me is clearly aimed at kids, but it falls woefully short by virtue of the fact that it's no fun for kids and the aliens are very disturbing in appearance. There are no jokes or scenarios that adults (or kids for that matter) would find funny. As noted by other reviewers, there are numerous product placements made in such an obvious way that it's laughable any ad exec would want to take part. In fact, most people that do remember this film remember most vividly the McDonald's break-dance scene. A pack of perfectly choreographed kids manage to fend off government thugs trying to get "Mac" by busting into an 80's break dance. In McDonalds. What? The most irritating part is the alien family. They live on some moon that US spacecrafts can visit and return to earth from (this is set in the present day of 1988, mind you). They drink a dark liquid (Coke, evidently) out of the ground. Throughout the film, they never show any sign of thought above the level of sea slug, they just mope around looking dumb, drunk, and without genitals. They waddle when they walk. They have some sort of mystical power by which they can resurrect the dead (huh?). Then, at the end of the movie, when you think that surely they go away, NO, they are naturalized as US citizens and given driver's licenses so they can drive a pink Cadillac convertible around. The government thugs have reversed the short-sightedness of their plan to study the aliens, and decide that they will allow space aliens to live among us, so long as they wear clothes from now on. This movie is just so random.

Thank god they never made a sequel to this (it appears that they wanted to - "We'll be back!") and thank God that this movie will sink to the bowels of society's collective consciousness. What makes this movie so bad is that it almost defies logic that such a bad film of total incoherence would come from a big budget release and a reputable studio.

My brothers rented this after it first came out because they're both serious Zombie movie enthusiasts. After viewing, they were inconsolably disappointed and I thought I had seen one of the three worst movies of all time.

What makes this movie so bad is mainly its lack of plot. I simply could not figure out what the hell was going on at any point of the movie, and I'm still utterly confused about what happens in the final 2/3rds. It begins at some point in the past and two law officers hunting zombies. One of these is zombie legend Tom Savini, whose amazing five minute performance rolled him to the top of the credits list. That's warning sign number one. There's a grand-poobah zombie named Abbott Hayes who is allegedly the undead manifestation of a dead child molester (warning sign number two). Hayes' role is difficult to ascertain because the events and settings in this movie are so random, but he evidently orders other zombies around. Tom Savini dies, but they find a number of local children that the zombies had kidnapped (wtf?).

Fast forward to the present day, and the children have grown up into punk-ass teenagers. They're riding around in a beat-up van (see the child molester connection?) ruminating on the legacy of "AAAABBOTT HAAAAYES" when the king zombie himself strolls in front of their van in broad daylight, having emerged from the woods for no reason. They swerve and go off a cliff and die. Now this scene is probably the funniest of the movie. I swear you don't want to see this part with a full bladder. Abbott Hayes' walk looks like a crazy dance put into slow motion - there's no other way to describe it.

After this, it gets fuzzy but to summarize, I can tell you that the kids come back as ravenous zombies and that the heroine, Laurie, and several other people lock themselves in the town diner, and the zombies attack. The movie ends abruptly without any resolution and no clue as to what's f-ing going on.

This straight-to-video beast represents the type of crap that should have been left in the twentieth century. Yes, it was made in 2001! The acting is bad enough but the sound editing is horrific. Most of the voices seem far away or muffled and you can't follow what tripe they're talking about. As I've already mentioned, there is no plot to speak of. The cast is seriously a bunch of college kids who thought it would be cool to be in a crappy movie and score a case of beer each in the process. The special effects are on par with zombie movies from a quarter-century earlier, with all the squirting red dye and gray paint. It's been my experience that most zombie films are essentially the same in premise - zombies come around for unknown (but perhaps chemical) reasons, society as we know it collapses, and the survivors have existentialist interludes between zombie killings in which they tackle serious questions about God, life, etc. This movie doesn't really have any of that since zombie attacks seem to be a recurring problem in this town, but it yet falls in with many of the other clichés that make zombie films suck. The bad acting, editing, plot, and the sheer hilarity of having to go with the "what if teenagers became zombies" idea because you had a small budget and no new concepts, combine to make this a crap-tastic movie experience.

Rumpelstillskin fails to deliver on the hype you may come to expect if you've seen those clever Leprechaun movies.

This movie in my view actually tries too hard to explain the origin and m.o. of the title creature and thus detracts from its status as a crappy "creature flick." Part of what I find funny in these films is that something hits you completely off-guard and for no apparent reason. Here, all you have to truly wonder about is how Rumpelstiltskin knows how to drive a Harley and then a Semi. The movie begins in late medieval Europe, a scene replete with clichéd, scruffy pitchfork-carrying peasants. The townsfolk chase down the monster and a witch in the crowd manages to trap Rumpy in a statuette before he can eat the baby he stole (evidently the fairy tale's basis is in reality).

Skip to "present day." Now this was confusing because even though this movie is allegedly from 1996 (and that's when I recall seeing it the first time), the celluloid's grainy-ness, actors' clothing, and general feel suggest a filming from at least a few years earlier. A widow with a newborn is dragged by a friend (with a high-pitched whiny voice) to the store of a mystical witch who sells trinkets, including a certain statuette. Said widow releases Rumpy by wishing upon it that her husband were alive to see the baby. He comes back, makes sweet love to her, then changes into the beast he truly is. He thus sets off a chase across the countryside as she tries to hide the baby, eventually enlisting the help of a local TV personality, and they lock Rumpy up again in a pointless and unexciting fashion not worth dwelling on here. They hoist the statuette into the sea in a bid to set up a sequel. Boring summary, isn't it? The movie's much of the same.

This movie is really sort of dry compared to the other creature flicks, and it overall isn't all that funny, which is what I look for in the BAD movies. Rumpy has a few one-liners that are mildly entertaining and the climactic battle is funny in an overacted, over-dramatized sort of way. The monster also walks around in duck walk all the time for some reason, which is sort of funny to watch, as is the actor's grotesque appearance.

There's really not much more to say about it. This one is really only for those hardcore fans of crappy horror flicks. Certainly don't let your kids watch it - this has nothing to do with the harmless character of Grimm brothers fame.

I collect crappy horror films, particularly the "creature flicks" and I have to confess that Troll 2 is my run-away all-time favorite. This movie has absolutely no redeeming qualities, none. Had the acting, story, effects, dialogue, any one of those not been as awful as they are in this film then Troll 2 simply would not be the same. It would have been forgotten long ago and not held as the utter piece of crap that it is.

First, there is absolutely no connect with the first Troll movie. This is probably a good thing since the first movie wasn't even funny in an awful way, just horribly lame. There is not a single troll in Troll 2 anyway, since they're all "goblins." The premise entails a family (Mom, Dad, Joshua, Holly) in some sort of "exchange program" which puts them in a town called Nilbog (get it?). It turns out that the town is really goblins who try to feed humans neon green slop that turns them into part-vegetables. The goblins then eat them. The family is evidently comfortable eating food like corn-on-the-cob with neon green stuff on top and cakes with "eat up" written in green "icing," except for Joshua who suspects trouble by virtue of the fact that the boy is in communion with his dead grandfather, a man who conveniently knows all about the goblins and how to conquer them.

As if this premise weren't enough, the acting is horrible. Holly has a boyfriend who comes along and drags three of his own friends who each suffer a gruesome fate (turned into a tree, drowned in popcorn, etc). These dorks couldn't score with Nilbog girls if they paid them, but since there's a weird homo erotic feel to their interactions, it probably wouldn't come to that. Holly's BAD at delivering her lines - it reminds me of second grade and how we'd read the parts of a play out loud in class. It sounds prepackaged and faked, like reading off a teleprompter. The Mom is equally awful and has really strange bug eyes. You half expect her to turn into a goblin. Apparently "row, row, row your boat" is her favorite song and she makes her family sing it. Joshua looks like he's in constant pain and every whine of his makes you grit your teeth and beg for a chainsaw (Creedence has one!). Although far from being good, the Dad here delivers the best performance, but maybe that's because he reminded me of Craig T. Nelson, who can actually act. As far as costumes, they went crazy with the green dye. It's everywhere. There are only three goblin mask molds that they use on different midget or kid actors so that the goblins look inbred. There's a closeup where we see a goblin's mouth and the fakeness of the mask is revealed. The music is a keyboard synthesizer.

The strangest thing about this movie may be the continual string of non-sequiturs. We see "Nilbog milk" but we never find out why it's there or what it's supposed to do (It presumably doesn't aid in the vegetable-morph process). We never learn about grandpa's powers, why he's unable to stop the family from eating bad food yet is able to hack a goblin with an axe through a mirror later and produce a Molotov cocktail to hurl at the Nilbog preacher. Why turn Arnold into a tree? Who was that girl randomly running through the forest and why doesn't Arnold seem surprised to see goblins? Just who is Creedence and what does her family being "from Stonehenge" have to do with anything? How does "the power of goodness" vanquish the goblins? I have to conclude that there's a satirical undercurrent to this film because it's just that random.

This film is obviously a local product from somewhere in Utah. It changes your perception of that state. According to the cover, this movie is just over an hour and a half but I swear it feels like a three hour movie. I recommend watching Troll 2 if you like funny bad movies, but it's best watched with friends and intoxicating substances. "They're eating her! And then they're going to eat me! Oh my gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawd!"