Machine Girl

Machine Girl is a strange beast. I mean… it’s a Japanese exploitation revenge flick, so the movie is automatically in the “fuckin’ crazy” category. I’m not even sure if it really qualifies as a horror film at all, but the over-the-top blood and gore really help move it into that category.



The premise of the film is insane. School girl Ami is left to take care of her younger brother Yu after their parents’ suicide after false murder allegations. Unfortunately Yu and his best friend Takeshi are bullied to death by the son of a Yakuza/ninja criminal and his friends. Ami takes the law into her own hands and tries to avenge her brother’s death with disastrous results. She’s found by Takeshi’s grieving parents minus one arm. Takeshi’s mother, however, blames Ami for Takeshi’s death, but that is all settled via an intense arm wrestling match. The next thing you know Takeshi’s father has fixed up a badass machine gun arm (and chainsaw arm for the Evil Dead fans) to facilitate her revenge. Ami and Takeshi’s mother then bring the battle to the Yakuza family in a spectacularly bloody finale with super-commando grieving parents, a flying guillotine, and a drill bra (I shit you not).



Any attempt to actually critique this film is pretty much useless. The film is way over-the-top and purposefully campy. Director Noboru Iguchi delivers on the promised buckets of blood and gore in a humorous way (this is played for laughs though I’m guessing most “regular” audiences would by a bit horrified by its excessiveness). I found myself laughing quite a bit at the crazy gore moments. As for the acting, Iguchi mostly hired Japanese porn stars for the film. It works. They are so excited to be in the film that they put their all into it.



Machine Girl was pretty fuckin’ rad. It had laughs, action, and tons of gore. I see Machine Girl becoming a cult cinema legend. If you’re looking to kick back and drink a few beers while watching a movie, Machine Girl won’t disappoint. I mean really… who could hate a Japanese school girl slaughtering criminals with her machine gun arm?

the Strangers

My family moved around a lot when I was a child. We lived in secluded homes in the middle of the woods several times in my youth. Believe me when I tell you that being alone at night in the middle of nowhere can be creepy as all hell. Every little sound carries a nervous fright with it. It puts you on constantly on edge. Now imagine that three psychos in masks are toying with you throughout the night, and you have the Strangers.



Kristen McKay and James Hoyt are returning to the Hoyt family summer home after a late night wedding party. The situation is tense, for Kristen has just turned down James’s marriage proposal. As James and Kristen talk about their situation, a knock on the door startles them. A young girl obscured by darkness asks for a person that doesn’t live in the house. She’s turned away, but she keeps returning. She’s not the only one. James and Kristen are terrorized as the night goes on with all of their escape options taken away by the strangers. How will it end? You’ll have to watch the film to find out.

The Strangers is one of those films that’s going to divide audiences. It’s going to upset those without the patience to see the story subtly build. Outright gore-hounds will also be disappointed as the film moves at a slower pace (although it never becomes boring). Writer/director Bryan Bertino slowly builds up tension throughout the movie making an altogether subtle horror film. These killers are not going for the outright kill. They’re toying with their victims. They relish the fear and panic they have caused. James and Kristen are not your usual horror movie victims either. They don’t fall into the usual horror movie clichés. Sure… some of their decisions aren’t the brightest ones, but the mistakes are made out of panic and not stupidity.



The Strangers definitely has a lot going for it. Bertino does a fine job on his directing debut. The film isn’t going to dazzle anyone with its inventiveness, but it’s a solid directorial work. Bertino does a great job on the screenplay though. He effectively builds realistic characters with James and Kristen. By showing us their heartbroken situation early in the film, the characters have our sympathies. This works to draw the audience in when the terror sets in. He also does right in not giving us all the facts. We are never told the motive of the strangers (nor are we told the reason Kristen has turned down the marriage proposal even though it’s clear that she loves James). Hell… we never even see their faces. I think this all works for the better as a random act of violence with no reason is more terrifying. Fear is about the unknown. It loses its power when it is explained (something that the Halloween remake should have learned). The Strangers has one major problem in my eyes though. The audience is never in doubt of the final outcome of the situation for James and Kristen. In fact the film starts with the two young boys discovering the aftermath of the strangers’ night of fun. That doesn’t change the fact that I was engrossed in how everything occurred though.

All in all though, I would definitely recommend the Strangers to those that don’t have a problem with a film that takes its time to deliver its scares. If you are down with a film that delivers horror with suspense instead of cheap scares and gore, then this is the film for you.

P.S. I thought the Strangers kicked ass.

the Tripper

I believe that the Tripper may actually be the first combination of the Cheech and Chong formula with the slasher genre. It’s kind of odd, but it works. It mixes and matches its separate elements pretty well. Pot-smoking hippies and a Ronald Reagan-obsessed killer! Drug comedy, political commentary, and spurting blood! I’m not sure why nobody thought of this first. I’m especially astonished that this film was co-written and directed by David Arquette. David-fucking-Arquette. Apparently he’s not the fuckwit I imagined him to be.



The film starts out forty years in the past with young Gus watching Ronald Reagan on the television as his father tends to his dying mother. A problem arises at his father’s logging worksite, and Gus accompanies his father there. Apparently a bunch of hippies are protesting the cutting of the trees. This is unfortunately keeping Gus’s father from working and providing his mother with the medical care she needs. Things go terribly wrong when one of the hippies strikes Gus’s father with a rock. Then Gus strikes the offending hippie with something too.



In the present day, Frank Baker (Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman) is holding a Woodstock-like festival in those very same woods. Samantha (Jaime King), her boyfriend Ivan (Lukas Haas), and friends Joey (Jason Mewes), Jack (Steven Heath), Jade (Paz de la Huerta), and Linda (Marsha Thomason) are all attending. Samantha is trying to steer clear of drugs due to a bad experience with her violent ex-boyfriend Jimmy (Balthazar Getty), but the others are continually toasted and tripping (go figure… Jason Mewes playing a druggie!). Unfortunately, a killer dressed as Ronald Reagan is bringing a little right-wing action to the festival… one axe swing at a time. It’s up to Sheriff Buzz Hall (the incredibly awesome Tom Jane) to keep those damned hippies safe.

The Tripper is a great debut for co-writer/director/producer David Arquette. The script is pretty tight. It delivers on all the right things that a horror comedy should. It’s funny as all hell, and the horror moments are well done. Surprisingly Arquette does a great job bringing life to the script. Apparently, he hasn’t been wasting his time on set during his film years. He’s picked up quite a bit of knowledge from all the directors he’s worked with. The acting is by-far the best thing about the film though. The hippies are all funny despite their one dimensional roles. They know they are there to deliver the laughs and be killed, and they have fun with it. Paul Reubens is a blast as the incredibly profane concert promoter. There’s a moment in the film when he hides in a Port-A-Potty to avoid the killer. It’s gross, but the character is such a dick that you can’t help but love the scene. Tom Jane is the real scene-stealer here though. It’s the first time I have seen Jane outright chew the scenery, and it’s awesome. Tom Jane has seriously become one of my favorite actors over the last several years, and this only increases my respect for the man. As for the killer… I would love to see this turn into a franchise because I was totally cheering on the murderous Reagan. You seriously haven’t lived until you’ve seen Ronnie start slaughtering a field full of hippies. I only have a few problems with the film. The hippies characters fall into the genre-trap of just being there to be victims. Unfortunately we spend too much of the movie with them despite their one dimensional personalities. There just wasn’t enough of the Gipper for me. Secondly the film was a little too comedic for me. There are no really serious moments of horror at all in the film, as they are all played for laughs. All that is really nit-picking really. I loved the movie just for the simple fact that hippies are slaughtered. I swear I have such hippie hate. And really… who better to kill the hippies than Ronnie Reagan? Brilliant.

April Fool's Day

Holidays. I love them in a twisted way. I don’t actually enjoy the holidays themselves (unless we’re talking about Halloween), but I love the horror movies made about them. Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, Friday the Thirteenth, Silent Night Deadly Night, Black Christmas, and New Year’s Evil all fill me with holiday cheer. April Fool’s Day is probably the one that makes the most of its holiday though.

Muffy St. John has invited her friends to her family’s island home for a weekend getaway on April Fool’s Day. Her friends are your usual 80’s slasher film victims. They’re in for a weekend full of alcohol, drugs, sex, kickball, and April Fool’s gags. Unfortunately their pranks start off with the accidental maiming of a ferryman on their way to the island.

Geez… that guy can’t take a joke.

After a night of fun (that accidental destruction of a guy’s face doesn’t bring these kids down), the group realizes that one of their friends is missing. What follows are the best jokes of the weekend. April Fool’s Day proves once and for all that murder is the most awesome prank of all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen for the ol’ decapitation gag. I don’t even need to mention my unfortunate experience with the ol’ castration prank. Oh… the shenanigans!

April Fool’s Day is a pretty fun 80’s slasher. It’s a little weak on the gore, but it makes up for it with the suspense and comedy. The cast is strong all the way around with Deborah Foreman (yummy Valley Girl) and Thomas F. Wilson (aka Biff Tannen) being the standouts. Director Fred Walton deftly handles the amusing script and balances the horror and the comedy pretty damned well. The infamous ending probably racks up as one of my few complaints, but I also consider it to be a fitting end the film. April Fool’s Day is good stuff.

NOTE: DO NOT WATCH THE INCREDIBLY HORRIBLE REMAKE STARRING SCOUT TAYLOR-COMPTON (AKA QUEEN OF THE SHITTY HORROR REMAKES)!

NOTE: I'M VERY BUMMED AT THE LACK OF AN ARBOR DAY FILM.

Lord of Illusions

It seems I’m a little behind on my horror reviews this week. My negative review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pretty much drained me for this week. The show should go on though.



Lord of Illusions is a hard film for me to review. It’s one of those films that I love even though I know in my heart that it’s a cinematic failure. That’s often the case with the film translations of Clive Barker work. Barker himself directed this (as he did with Hellraiser and Nightbreed), and it’s full of great ideas that are pretty poorly implemented.

I have to admit that I’ve always loved when films have tried to mix the hard-boiled detective pulp genre with horror. It’s not as if there are tons of examples of this combination around (the entirely awesome Cast A Deadly Spell and the entirely shitty Rough Magic are the only ones that really spring to mind), so I tend to latch onto the few I know. Harry D’Amour (Scott Bakula) is a down on his luck detective always in search of the next job. Unfortunately Harry also has a predilection of somehow getting involved with the darker aspects of the world and the occult. Harry agrees to take a routine job in Los Angeles as a sort of vacation from his troubles in the Big Apple. His stay in LA is anything but routine. He quickly gets drawn into a deadly case involving the famous illusionist (ala David Copperfield and David Blaine) Philip Swann (the always awesome Kevin J. O’Connor) and his wife Dorothea (the always smokin’ hot Famke Janssen). It seems that Swann was once the protégé of the evil sorcerer Nix. For some reason, Swann and some friends didn’t really agree with Nix and his cult when they decided it was time to “murder the world,” so they killed Nix, bound him in some magical face-clamp, and buried him out in the desert. Now Nix is coming back, and Swann’s friends are dying left and right. What do you do when a really pissed off dead sorcerer comes back to finish his interrupted plans to destroy the world… apparently you hire the guy from Quantum Leap to save you.

The movie has a great atmosphere and some creepy visuals to boot. Barker has always excelled at bringing a darker tone to horror than most other writers. He tends to create a strange sexual sadomasochistic tone to most of his work that’s outright creepy. Lord of Illusions is no different. Nix’s main henchman, Butterfield, is a pretty perverse character that somehow reminds me of a demented, evil version of the fat interior decorator from Beetlejuice. On the down side, Barker has never been a very accomplished director. The pacing is all wrong, and the material isn’t always handled correctly. It seems that Barker went at this story half-assed and didn’t deliver the full goods amid worries about how commercial the film should be. I also have to say that while I generally like Scott Bakula… he just doesn’t fit the tone of the story. He’s more suited to lighter drama and comedy. It doesn’t help that D’Amour is the lead character, yet he’s also the least fleshed out. Anyways, this was fun for what it is. It’s disappointing that the premise isn’t fully explored, but on the whole it’s a somewhat likeable film. It’s definitely a hard film for me to look objectively at, so this is a pretty shitty review.

Xtro

I had a line I wanted to use about this film before I even saw it. “This movie was Xtro crappy!” Fortunately, it wasn’t. Xtro was actually pretty damned entertaining despite the fact that it was a total mindfuck. It’s so damned surreal that I pretty much kept my “WTF” face on perpetually. I thought my head was going to have a Scanners moment.

Sam Phillips (a very good Phillip Sayer who looks like Hugh Jackman and sounds like Clive Owen) is a loving and devoted husband and father. That is… until he gets abducted by aliens in front of his son Tony. His wife Rachel (Bernice Stegers aka the female Oliver Reed) moves on with another man, but Tony has trouble letting go of his dad. Everyone tries to tell him that his father ran out on him and his mother, and no one will believe him when he tells them what really happens.

Three years later, Sam comes back. Apparently he’s changed a bit during his travels.




He’s still a nice guy, but that doesn’t keep him from killing a Eurotrash stud with permed mullet and his lady friend. Seriously… I’d kill a guy with a Euro-perm mullet too just on principle alone. He also can’t be running around like a terd with legs, so he decides to impregnate a nearby young lady with his penis proboscis. He’s reborn as a full-grown human version of himself in what has to be the freakiest birth scene of all time.







Being such a family man, Sam tries to reconcile with his wife and child. Since Tony knows what really happened, Sam decides to make him part of his new alien family in what could be considered an insanely incestual and pedophilic manner.





This leads to trouble, however, as aliens can pretty much change reality just by thinking about it, and Tony is apparently a young psychopath killing any and everyone that slightly inconveniences him. He does so by creating murderous live versions of his toys. Believe me… my distrust of midgets has been heightened even more by this film.





Anyways… you’ll have to see how it ends yourself. I highly recommend Xtro to B-movie enthusiasts. It’s cheesy, well-acted, and just so fucking absurd. Xtro is the lovechild of Lynch and Cronenberg that you’ve always wanted to see. It’s the strangest family film I’ve seen in some time (I still think Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q still holds the trophy on that one). You won’t be disappointed.

Hatchet

Finally… the family movie we’ve all been waiting for has arrived.



Wait a minute… scratch that.

Most horror buffs have probably heard quite a bit about Hatchet by now. It’s had incredible word-of-mouth amongst horror fans. They’re treating it as if it were the new messiah of horror. I won’t lie. It’s not, but it is good. Unfortunately the fact that it’s pretty damned derivative of the films that influenced it keeps it from the big leagues. Still, Hatchet shows that a great amount of fun can be had with gore, laughs, and the right attitude.

Ben’s (Joel David Moore of Dodgeball and Grandma’s Boy) friends have dragged him to New Orleans and Mardi Gras to help him forget a break-up. Ben’s not having any of that though. He really wants to go on a haunted swamp tour. His best friend Marcus is the only one that sticks with him despite protests over how he will miss out on the beer and the babes,. On the way to the swamp tour, Hatchet introduces its cast of characters. Tour guide Shawn is hilariously inept. Wannabe porn film director Shapiro constantly films the breasts of his two actresses Jenna (a pretentious “serious” actress) and Misty (Buffy and Angel’s hilarious Mercedes McNab as a Paris Hilton-like airhead blonde trying to break into acting). The Permatteo’s are a typical Midwestern tourist couple (Mr. Permatteo is played by Office Space’s Richard Riehle). Last, but not least, is Marybeth the quiet loner who we later find out is on a mission of revenge for the death of her father and brother. Unfortunately, they don’t realize the swamp is off limits because of the murderous Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder playing the billionth deformed, retarded redneck in this type of film). We’re told that he died due to an accidental hatchet strike to the face(happens all the time), but we’re never quite sure what he is... ghost or freakishly tough human. Anyways… the usual (actually… it’s a bit more hardcore than the usual) mayhem follows.

Hatchet knows exactly what it is, and it delivers the goods. There are very liberal amounts of gore, nudity, and laughs in this film. All of the actors turn in great performances for this type of film. They’re consistently funny (this is considered a horror-comedy) and end up bringing more life to the typical slasher stereotypes. Kane Hodder (the man most associated with Jason Voorhees) portrays a new film slasher, and he does a great job here. Apparently the cast was even frightened of him off-camera too. You’ll even see cameos by Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) and Tony Todd (Candyman). Director/writer Adam Green does a great job here as well. His script, despite being pretty damned standard plot-wise, is constantly funny. There are enough issues (you’ve pretty much seen this all before) that will keep this from being a horror great, but the film is still a great watch.

*Strangely, there is a Disney review of this film telling about parents about all the questionable material the film contains, so that they can speak about it with their children.

Deaths: 11
Where to start… cutting, hacking, ripping off with bare hands, head twisting, impalement, death by belt sander, beheadings, and just plain ripping out of guts. The gore is incredibly over-the-top here, and I loved every moment of it.

LOL:
An old redneck that drinks his own piss tries to warn away the characters from the swamp. It has to be seen.



Sadly, we probably won't ever see his "Jump To Conclusions" mat.


It would be wise to avoid the Victor Crowley Dental Clinic.