Reviews

Set in a Pre-Vatican 2 Catholic neighborhood, a little girl is suspected of murdering her little sister during her first communion. The girl is really pretty creepy, so of course, you fall for all the false flags they set for you implicating her.

Then they kind of forget about her halfway through, and focus on the drama in the Catholic neighborhood with the divorcee who has an unhealthy relationship with the priest, the creepy gay-coded landlord, and the rather nasty aunt.

None of the characters are likeable. The pacing is pretty much like a TV movie, with some gaps in the movie where the commercials probably would have went. Also in here is Brook Sheilds in a child role.

I liked this one better than I liked the first part, even though it took more departures from the book. It definitely dragged in places, especially the scenes in the desert. (Although almost all interpretations do, maybe it's just the psychological effect of a desert.)

So, where they really depart from previous versions is main characters have serious doubt about what they are doing. While this is hinted at in the book, it is much more overt here. (It isn't until the second Book that Paul really starts to realize what a mess he's made of things.)

The Character of Chani is a departure. While she is totally devoted to Paul in the book, here she's the one screaming that this is wrong (even though they are aiming for the same goal.)

The character of Feyd Ruatha was really good as a villian, for anyone still traumatized by the image of Sting in metal speedos in the 84 version, this is so much better. He's a psychopath and it's obvious.

The battle scene at the end is quite impressive, but utlimately forgettable. But this is the curse of modern movies, I guess.

Worth a watch? If you've already seen part one and liked the books, definitely.

So we have another Zombie movie, because clearly we haven't made nearly enough of those. Except these are French Zombies.

A jerk goes to his ex-girlfriends house to get some tapes and makes a scene in front of all her other guests. While he sleeps it off in the other room, the Zombie Apocolypse breaks out overnight and everyone in the world except him is turned into a Zombie.

He somehow secures the rest of the apartment building, except for a Zombie family he traps in an apartment and another Zombie he traps in an elevator. These are by the way, the dumbest zombies I have seen in this genre. Proper Romero Zombies would have eaten this fool in the first 20 minutes.

Most of his actions seem to involve engaging in rather pointless activity. For some reason, the power and gas are still running in this apocolypse, so he's not sitting in the dark.

The movie is supposed to imply that he is slowly going mad. Like a lot of Zombie movies, the number of Zombies outside is often plot dependent. Need the character to feel trapped? Have a whole hoard. Need him to try to rescue a cat, just have a few.

So this is an adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau, so loose that they had to change the names of the characters. So your typical, not violating someone else's copyright mad scientist is trying to advance evolution through surgery. Unlike the other versions, the doctor only can afford one abomination of nature instead of dozens.

Also doesn't have a love story with a panther girl shoe-horned in. Instead, it has an affair with the mad scientist's unhappy wife.

Where the movie really falls down is the monster, as they hid it until the last possible minute, and it just doesn't look that impressive. Unlike the classic 1933 version or the off the rails 1996 version (Which is so bad it's good), the scientist is just boring.

The 1980s were the Silver Age of horror, with some of the greatest icons emerging. They also did a lot of atmospheric films like this one.

A small town sheriff is puzzled by a series of mysterious murders, and begins to suspect the local mortician, played by Grandpa Joe.

As he begins to unravel the mystery, he realizes that everyone in the town is a zombie, resurrected through voodoo and mortuary wax.

A solid cast, including James Farentino, Eddie Jack Albertson, Melody Anderson, and blink you might miss it, Robert Englund in a pre-Freddy role.

The ending is a bit predictable, event though they try to play it as a twist, you can see it coming a mile away.

The plot is that an eccentric billionaire loses a billion dollars to three competitors, due to a court case handled badly by his law firm. His response is to turn his lawyer into a racist doll, which he has already done to the judge and prosecutor in the case.

But that's not all, he keeps a girl band locked in a cage, whom he shocks into performing musical numbers for, um, reasons. His butler wears clown makeup and his head is shrunken. It's like they took all the weird ideas that weren't good enough to get into Band's other films and just dumped them here.

The dolls are soon dispatched to start killing his enemies. Not sure how this is supposed to get him money back for him OR why these dolls, who I assume miss their human existence, are doing his bidding.

This movie has little point and is just weird, and not in a fun way.

This movie was.. pointless.

The plot is that a coroner is engaging in some mad science and steals the body of a preschooler who died of meningitis. The mother of the child happens to be a nurse at the same hospital after the coroner resurrects the child, and creepy shenanigans abound.

The method involves taking amniotic fluids from pregnant women who meet a certain tissue type. And we watch the two characters get involved in a creepy symbiotic relationship to keep this child alive.

It's slow, tedious, and kind of creepy, and not worth watching. It doesn't help that neither of the leads are very good actresses, or the subject is a dead kid.

Hard Pass.

So a college professor takes a bunch of his students up into the woods to look for a "yeti" (even though Yetis are from Asia, so he would be looking for a sasquatch). Except that the Yeti is really just a guy in a suit and they are all part of a crazy cannibal cult that has to scare a woman to death in order to eat her.

Of course, the problem was the Yeti Costume was so fake-looking that absolutely no one would have been fooled by it. The supposed hero of the film, one of the students whose girlfriend ends up on the menu, is perfectly fine using the bodies of his friends as bait for the yeti.

The thing becomes even more absurd with the "Twist" ending, where a bunch of bad racial stereotypes show up to engage in the feast. The whole movie was uncomfortable to watch.

Before there was The Asylum and the Mockbuster, there was Poverty Row and their quick imitation movies. Cashing in on the popularity of Universal's Dracula, this movie is about a man whose parents were hiding out in a cave in Africa from some angry natives (that hasn't aged well), and a vampire bat bites the woman. (Clearly, the writers didn't know vampire bats are from South America, not Africa.

Flash forward to the present day, and the baby has grown up to be a respected professor who tells the dumb peasants of this town how to live their lives. But by night, he creeps out and drinks blood. He's tragic because he doesn't know he's doing this. Put in there a love triangle with a girl who wants to marry him for status and not really love and a hunchback who covers up evidence of the murder, and you still have... a pretty dull melodrama from the days when movies were more like stage plays than movies.

Worth a watch? I guess if you are into film history.

And this one was better than the last one I reviewed, "Lake of Dracula". The story here is that a school teacher takes up a new position at a girl's school in Japan, where apparently the staff can prey on the students. (I'm hoping this is a college!)

The creepy headmaster is keeping his dead wife in the basement, as the students are slowly being picked off.

This one is more Hammer like in that there are ample amounts of blood and breasts, and these vampires are almost scary. But it still falls down on the lack of engaging protagonists. Seriously, no one should be able to win a fistfight with a vampire except a werewolf or a Frankenstein.

The two vampires being symbiotically linked also seems to be a major design flaw. There's also a really creepy part of being able to cut off your victims face and wear it.

So is this fun to watch? Meh, kind of.

This movie is Toho (best known for their Kaiju movies) doing a horror movie in the vein (pun intended) of the Hammer Dracula films. Except this movie lacks anyone with the talent levels of Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing. It also lacks the blood and breasts that often graced Hammer efforts.

So what does it have? Basically, a lot of dream sequences, with the least effective vampire ever, as the main girl avoids being an unwilling blood donor a dozen times.

The movie is very slow until the last 15 minutes, when there is the confrontation with the vampire and his female acolyte, who is the main girl's sister.

The most absurd part is when the doctor rants at the vampire with "rational" explanations for the last hour of encountering supernatural stuff.

So in conclusion. Japan shouldn't do gothic horror movies, and Britain shouldn't do giant monster movies. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Gorgo and Konga!)

This movie could have been a lot of fun, except the cast is weak. First, Nicholas Cage as Dracula channelling Bela Lugosi. Maybe it was the accent he was trying to affect, or maybe the appliance he had in his mouth, but it was hard to understand what he was saying half the time.

The other weak link in this movie is Awkwafina. She plays the cop who teams up with Renfield at the same time Dracula teams up with a drug cartel she had been hunting. She's just not a good actress, and it seems that the character was written for someone else.

The actor who plays Renfield is pretty good, but he's let down by his two main supports.

A lot of it seems to satirize group therapy and support groups. Renfield joins a group of people in dysfunctional relationships with narcissists.

Lots and lots of blood and gore which is so gratuitous it becomes comical in itself.

Again, it's good for one viewing... and that's about it.

This is a remake of "From Beyond", without any of the originality. Crawford Tilenghast (the character from the original HP Lovecraft Story) creates a resonator which allows the dimensions to interconnect, and allowing monsters from that dimension to enter our realm. Oh, and people get horny!

Instead of the clever creature effects from the earlier movie, we have a lot of bad CGI. It's just not as good of a movie as the earlier one. And of course, being a Charles Band movie, we have the obligatory amount of gratuitous nudity.

The movie ends, inexplicably, with a reset button being pushed, everyone who died is alive again, and Herbert West from Reanimator shows up. (Not Jeff Combs, but a look-alike.)

So this movie is about a boxer who teams up with two women to find his missing brother, only to wonder into the eponymous Doctor's lair. Except in this case, the monsters have taken the doctor hostage and are forcing him to try to "cure" them of being monsters.

The makeup effects are good, but it's let down by a weak story and Band's insistence in putting nude scenes into a movie that probably didn't need them. Seriously, Chuck, just direct some porn films, everyone will be happier.

The problem with this movie is that it borrows the concept from the HG Wells classic. But the Wells version didn't turn men into animals, it turned animals into people.

The setting is in the 1940's, but they didn't have the money to do an actual period piece, so you get modern actors imitating bad film noir.

This is Vincent Price doing what he does best, getting macabre revenge on people who have wronged him. The movie starts with Price as an illusion designer who wants to be on the stage, only to be frustrated by his partner invoking his contract. The same partner who stole his wife years before. By the time he gets killed, you are kind of cheering for Price.

Price proceeds to eliminate other cast members, including the aforementioned ex-wife and his professional rival, before a police officer realizes all these people have the same fingerprints. Meanwhile a mystery writer meddles in the case, all bringing it down to a thrilling conclusion in the workshop of the Mad Magician.

Special shout out to Green Acres Eva Gabor as the unfaithful wife.

If this movie was made today, they'd replace the complex characterizations with a lot of CGI Splatter.

I'm not seeing where all the hate is coming from. This movie is exactly what the title promises you. There's a bear and it takes cocaine.

Of course, the true story this was based on was that a bear ate some cocaine dropped by smugglers and died.. which isn't that funny. This bear goes on a rampage, and while it kills a lot of people, most of the kills are kind of amusing.

The bears (there are more than one) are rendered by CGI and they don't look that good, but they aren't horrible. The acting performances, where characters are given story arcs (the mother trying to find her daughter, the park ranger looking for a promotion, the drug dealers trying to recover their stash), are passable. Ray Liotta is the only name person, and he gives the best performance his limited acting ability could provide.

Still, it's a perfectly fun movie if you turn off your brain for a couple of hours.

Someone in Korea looked at all the acclaim Japan was getting with Kaiju properties like Godzilla, Gamera, and Mothra, and decided, "Hey, we can do that!" Only to find out, "no, no, you can't."

So let's talk about the plot. Space aliens drop a monster on Earth that is supposed to eat all the people so they can colonize it. The monster on the ship is the same size as the Aliens, so are they all giant sized, or did the monster somehow grow when he was sent to Earth.

The monster is dropped on South Korea, and our nominal hero is an air force pilot who is due to get married to probably the most clingy bride you've ever seen. Insert your own Bridezilla joke here. Korea is being devastated, but it's interrupting my wedding. The Monster, (who kills surprisingly few people, much less eats any of them.) goes on probably the tamest rampage ever.

Then they introduce the annoying kid character. Who climbs up the monster skin and start hacking out it's ear drums. Small Psychotic Children... my one weakness!!!

The monster, suffice to say, looks awful. Also, no idea why it does what it does. It spends half the movie carrying the bride around, for some reason. Is it supposed to be in Lust like King Kong? Who knows.

The human characters are this movie's weakness. Because suitmation scenes are expensive to film, most Japanese Kaiju movies fill their film with a human story. Except in this movie, all the human characters are annoying and you want the monster to stomp them.

The same year this came out, the Koreans also released "Yongary: Monster from the Deep", but that one was made with Japanese help, and it shows.

I just imagine the subject of this movie, Jan in a Pan from "The brain that wouldn't die" and Hitler in a Jar from "Madmen from Mandoros" all getting together for a party.

Okay, the plot here is that a scientist develops a way to keep severed heads alive and transplant them onto other bodies. He wants to use this to help his hunchbacked assistant but before he can, and understudy decapitates him and keeps his head alive.

He then proceeds to put Hunchies head on the body of a body of a stripper, and disposes of the stripper's old head and hunchies old body by leaving it on an railroad track.

Well, now not-Hunchie starts hanging around the strip club, attracting the attention of the stripper's old boyfriend/artist. Again, maybe this movie made sense in the original German, but I doubt it.

Well, what to say about this movie that will fill out the requisite 600 characters? You have a millionaire who is a genuinely nasty person, to his trophy wife his employees and his doctor, who finds out that he has a brain tumor.

He meets a mad scientist who has discovered a way to transplant the head of a dead monkey onto a live monkey. Not sure how this helps the rich guy, but he gets the brilliant idea to steal the head of 16th Century fraud ... er Prophet Nostradamus and resurrects it using this method.

He immediately asks old Nosty for stock tips, which fail miserably because Nostradamus was a fraud when he was alive. After he loses his fortune, he goes on a rampage against his wife, her lover and everyone else.

This movie is cheap, dull and disjointed and not worth your time.

There is an axiom that you show your monster sparingly in a horror movie to maximize its effectiveness when revealed. The correlating rule is that when you do reveal the monster it can't look silly. Jaws and Alien got this, which is why they are effective films. Conversely, Schlock Classic "The Giant Claw" didn't, where fairly good performances were undermined by a monster that looked just plain goofy.

So that brings us to this film, about a woman whose fiance inherits a Scottish castle and a horrible family secret. The movie implies that HE might be the monster, but that's just a red herring. The explanation they give at the end, combined with a monster that looks utterly absurd, just leaves you scratching your head.

I more effective monster that met the buildup they might have had a good movie, instead of one you are laughing at the last five minutes.

There's a difference between making a bad movie by accident that turns out to be so bad it's good, and making a bad movie on purpose that is just there.

The makers of this film clearly have a love of the work of Ed Wood, Jr., often considered the "Worst Director of All Time". But while Wood's movies were often bad due to his lack of resources, this movie is intentionally bad by way of imitation, and in the process, loses some of the charm.

The plot is that evil aliens come to Earth with their pet monster, but after being shot down by stock footage, they crash in a small, whiter than white small town, and the monster escapes. The Female alien goes around shooting people with her ray gun that turns them into Spirit Halloween Decorations, while the male learns the lessons of love. This movie is kind of a mashup of "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Teenagers from Space".

And... well, most of the joke just don't land, because it just lacks the sincerity without talent that Wood and directors like him had in producing C-Movies in the 1950's.

The man came with his projects with such sincerity, that you can safely ignore his lack of budget, props, sets, talented actors or the ability to write engaging dialog. He was just a guy who wanted to make movies with his friends.

So the plot is pretty by the numbers. Mad Scientist Bela Lugosi is trying to make a race of atomic supermen in a swamp somewhere in the south. Assisted by mute henchman Tor Johnson, he is subjecting hapless victims to gamma rays and feeding the rejects to his pet giant octopus, which can live in fresh water, for some reason.

The movie concludes with the girl reporter discovering his secret, only to be saved from being experimented on by a reluctant Tor, who subjects Lugosi to the machine, making him an atomic monster.

It's pure 50's schlock, romanticized by the Johnny Depp/Tim Burton film.

So a computer scientist creates a super advanced automated home, and then has a terminal leading to his super-advanced artificial intelligence machines. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, everything, as the super computer goes mad (as they tend to do in movies like this) and decides that it wants to create a living host for itself. The movie's interactions with the female protagonist are really uncomfortable to watch.

The movie is amusing in what it got wrong and right about our computer automated future.

This movie came out the same year as Star Wars, which changed the face of Science Fiction forever. This one is long on dialog and short on action by comparison.

It also ends with a trippy light show, because it was a rule after 2001: A Space Odyssey that every SF Movie had to have a trippy light show.