Dead and dreaming

Let's face it, this blog is dead. My patience for writing proper reviews has kinda gone and died, I just haven't estimated a time of death. So, here goes (if there actually is someone reading this):

Time of death: 2015/07/06, 19.18. We had a decent run.

I do still write at least a couple of sentences on every movie I watch over at Letterboxed so if you have an account please follow me there. 271 so far this year. http://letterboxd.com/tentaclatron/

Motivational growth (2013)

Social recluse Ian has been sitting in his apartment for quite a long time, watching it (and himself) slowly decay. Finally he decides to end his life and mixes chlorine gas in his bathtub but as he tries to cover the vent he slips and falls unconscious on the floor. When he wakes up there is a large patch of talking fungi with Jeffrey Combs voice telling him that it has great plans for him. Listen to The Mold. And the great 8-bit score.

I had no idea what I was getting into here but who the hell can resist a movie about a talking mold with the voice of Jeffrey Combs? I sure as hell can't. And fortunately the whole enterprise is a winner. More like a filmed stage play the movie is set inside Ian's apartment the whole time with the actor frequently talking straight to the audience, describing his predicament and sharing his quite pessimistic views on the world with us. At one he has a long monologue while taking a huge dump (the only worthwhile act of the entire day) and ends it with him pointing into the toilet saying "This is was life is all about. Life is shit". Then The Mold appears and Ian cleans up the place, starts to wash and cuts his beard and sets his eyes upon the cute girl next door. The Mold helps as long as Ian follows The Molds instructions. And soon things start to get weirder. And funnier.

Motivational growth is a hilarious piece of dark comedy, a lot of thanks to the two main cast members, Adrian DiGiovanni and Jeffrey Combs who both do great jobs. The Mold itself is a great character, brought to life by excellent puppetry and Combs performance, always talking about itself in third person. Some of the minor cast aren't as good but never to the point of taking you out of the movie and that is about the only negative thing I have to say about this movie. Sure, it might not be for everyone but if you feel that a messy, slightly disgusting dark comedy about a manipulative patch of talking fungi sounds interesting then you need to check this out.

Dead mans letters aka Pisma myortvogo cheloveka(1986)

Hashtag: Bleak as fuck.

I was born in 1973 and grew up during the last days of the cold war. I clearly remember a piece on the Swedish news very early 80s when the reporter told the viewers: The chance of Sweden being attacked by a foreign power is more probable than ever. Imagine what this does to the mind of a maybe 10-11 year old boy, especially after having read Raymond Briggs When the wind blows. This makes the movies about this particular end of the world hit a bit harder than any other catastrophes and I'm certain I'm not alone. I wonder what this movie would have done to my mind if I had watched it in 1986?

Sepiatoned post nuclear holocaust anyone? I've seen quite a few and while this movie never reaches the despair of movies like Threads it is quite possibly the most harrowing portrayal of life in the ruins that I have seen to date. In Dead man's letters there is still somewhat of a society left, huddling in the drenched ruins but everyone has given up. The remnants of a government is still there but they are preparing to go deep inside their big bunker to sit this one out, most likely just to die in the darkness. Our protagonist is writing letters to his dead son, probably the only one that still has some hope for humanity but everyone thinks he has gone insane. Meanwhile the goverment is leaving behind a group of orphaned, mute children that they have no use for in their self-imposed exile and rhe old man finds it upon himself to care for them, knowing that there will come nothing good to them. Uplifting stuff indeed.

Not a movie that will put you in a good mood but a worthy watch. The cinematography and the sets is totally perfect in the way they portray this dying world and the useless life everyone is living. I wouldn't mind this on a nice bluray. And I know I will feel like shit.

Return from death: Frankenstein 2000 aka Frankenstein 2000 - Ritorno dalla morte (1991)

A young woman working in a video store (Cinzia Monreale of The Beyond) is attacked by a group of young thugs but is saved by her handyman (Donal O'Brien of Zombie Holocaust among others). They return later to finish their job and manages to put her in a coma. The handyman is set up for the crime since one of the young men is the son of the towns wealthiest man and murdered in his cell. Little do they know that the woman has psychic powers and raises O'Brien from the dead for some bloody revenge. Yes, it's Patrick Italian style.

Unfortunately this is not some lost classic of the Italian gore movie era even though I kinda wanted it to be. Frankenstein 2000 is strangely paced, has a script full of idiotic dialogue and probably the worst dubbing job ever (and I do not say this lightly, I have seen quite a few). Every third sentence spoken has strange pauses in the middle as if the voice artist was new at this job and desperately tried to fill in the dialogue. It's hard to say if the actors are doing the job because of this but at least the leads acquit themselves well. It also takes about an hour for the mayhem to start which will tax the patience of some not equally used to this type of movie.

But since this is a Joe D'Amato movie it still looks good, he always was a professional when it came to the cinematography and the direction. When things finally get going and Donal O'Brien is raised from the dead and walks around with a giant scar on his forehead we get a couple of cheap but nice gore scenes and Mr O'Brien is quite a nice hulking figure of death. For nostalgics like me this is good fun. The German dvd I bought is more than decent and the best three euro I ever spent.

Crawl or die (2014)

An interesting story (A team of soldiers escorting the last fertile woman off world but end up trapped in a strange underground complex where the tunnels become increasingly smaller and tighter while being hunted by an alien lifeform killing them one by one) slightly brought down by a minimal budget. Actually, minimal would be the overstatement of the year. Some of the sets are unbelievably cheap, you can hear it being made of wood as they touch it. And let's discuss the alien creature. Seen Alien? Oklahama Ward has. And added spider legs. Gigers estate could sue (and win).

But it still works, it really does. I love Alien ripoffs and Crawl or die is far from the worst I've seen. The creature might be "inspired" but Ward took the creepiest bits out of Alien and used them well here, the glimpses of the creature crawling through the tunnels right behind the soldiers are quite effective. After reading some comments on Imdb about how the producer gave him a bit of money for cgi but realizing that it would look awful makes me happy that he chose to do it this way. And frankly, it looks more like the creature from the lovely Forbidden world that also was straight out Alien, which also was a quite clear ripoff. Ripoffs rule and I use that word in a positive meaning.

So, maybe mainly for Alien ripoff addicts and claustrophobics. Like me. It's an accomplished movie and there is a lot of tension, especially towards the end when the creature is so close that it almost can touch our leading lady. Let's hope Ward gets a budget next time, either remaking this with better production values or a sequel that makes him realize his visions a bit stronger.

[REC]4 (2014)

I'm a huge fan of the [REC] saga, particulary the first two. The first one is just a great horrormovie and the first sequel is among one of the rare few - the sequels who are as good as the original movie. Heck, I even love the reason behind all of this that is revealed towards the end of [REC]2, something that I know a lot of people don't. Part three was a fun watch too, although the dark and nasty tone of the first two was sorely missed. It felt more like an 80:s horrormovie.

So now it's finally here, the movie we have been waiting for. The final part in the saga and I will admit to being a bit peeved when I learned that the whole thing was set on a boat. No major apocalypse in the streets here, something I was hoping for. But the trailer looked good so I kept an open mind.

And I am happy to say that [REC]4 is a solid piece in the series. The movie begins with a couple of policemen entering the building where the first two movies were taking place to place explosives and find Angela Vidal, the heroine of the first movie still alive. Flash forward an unknown amount of time and we are on a boat with a security lockdown. Angela and the two policemen are in quarantine, a lab has been set up and people are working on something, possibly a cure. We learn that (slight spoiler for part 2) Angela is not carrying the virus like everyone, including the audience, thinks. The people doing all the testing have a testsubject locked up and soon someone let's it out. Mayhem ensues. Terrific mayhem ensues.

I have a couple of issues with the movie. First, there is an awful lot of shakycam which can be quite disorienting in some of the attackscenes when everything is shot in closeups. I saw the movie at a cinema and suspect that it might look better on a tv, time will tell.

The second issue I have with the movie is a minor but sad one. And now there will be major SPOILERS of [REC]2 and [REC]4. It turns out that the cause of it all is a parasite, a large slimy thing that wants to find the perfect host. This is incredibly sad to me because I loved the reveal in part two when it turns out that the whole thing is a disease that might have been (accidentally? Haven't seen part two since it was released) created by the Catholic church. There are no demons in part 4, something that i truly missed. Sure, the concept of a satanic parasite is quite fun but the notion of a satanic virus is supremely cool. This was a letdown for me but it didn't stop me from enjoying the movie. A lot. This just struck me hours after watching it and it's what makes me a little sad. I wanted more demons. END OF SPOILERS

And the bottom line is that [REC]4 is a great horrorflick. It's tense from the start, building up to an awesome explosion of violence and mayhem and never let's you down as it frantically runs along to a great climax. It does tend to focus more on jumpscares than trying to freak you out in the darkness but there is a sequence towards the end that involves infected monkeys that is a nailbiter. And I am happy to say (this must be the first time for me) that this isn't the gorefest I was expecting from the trailer. Sure, there is gore, but the movie is more brutally violent than messily gory which works great.

It might not have been what I expected and hoped for but it's a great finale to the saga.

Maniac nurses (1990)

Seriously, I have no idea how to properly rate Maniac nurses. No clue, it's just so mindbogglingly bisarre and strange that just explaining the plot taxes my brain too much. But here goes.

A number of nurses hang around in an old hospital in their sexy underwear, lying about like footage from a lingerie commercial. While not fondling each other they kidnap young women and torture them or just go about blowing the heads of men. Or each other. The leader of the motley crew, Ilsa, has a young daughter that she either wants to make love to or already has a sexual relationship with (it really isn't made clear). The daughter, Sabrina, is a sociopath that reads violent comicbooks and just kills people randomly. While all this is going on there is a somewhat pretentious narration explaining why everyone is a sexual pervert and from time to time some text pops up on the screen scoring everything, dealing out points to all the maniac nurses.

If this had been a porno with all the porno edited out it would explain why this is so baffingly incompetent but it doesn't seem like it is. I guess the director just wanted to make a violent movie with naked women and made it up as he went along. There is some sort of perverted satisfaction in watching this but I can't really decide if I was actually entertained by it. The dubbing is awful, the ladies cannot act whatsoever and nothing makes any good damn sense!

And the best thing about it? I bought it from the director himself while at Weekend of horrors 2014 in Oberhausen. I am a proud owner of a personally signed dvd. I just wished that I had seen the movie before I left Germany, I have a lot of questions for him now.

Just a big WTF. And I would probably watch it again with beer and friends.

Aux yeux des vivants aka Among the living (2014)

Why are Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo so obsessed with violence that truly hurts? Sick fucking bastards. This time they're telling a story about three young kids on the start of summer vacation that see a strange man carry a bound woman into an abandoned movieset in the woods. They follow and discover a quite dysfunctional family living in the ruins. Mayhem and death ensues.

Among the living might not go all the way Inside style (there is far less onscreen gore here and actually a couple of surprisingly gorefree deaths that made me wonder if I was watching a censored version) but there is some pretty harrowing brutal violence going on here as the movie progresses. The only flaw of the story is that it never really manages to blend the Stand by me-ish part of the care-free youths roaming the outskirts of their hometown with the more straightforwards horror bits. Both parts are fine enough with good child actors and a number of creepy bits but as the movie is only 85 minutes long including end titles we never really get to go deep enough into them as we really need and want to. The main villain is quite creepy and the death he dishes out is at times nicely harrowing but it isn't enough. A good flick for sure but nowhere near the insanity of Inside or Livid. It makes you wonder if the movie was cut down for pacing, it sure feels like that.

I do love the sight of a very pregnant Beatrice Dalle brandishing a large kitchen knife in the beginning of the movie, brought a nice grin to my face.

Sucker Punch (2011)

This is a cautionary tale.

This movie feels like it was written by a hormonally imbalanced 13 year old teenager who has overdosed on video games, which paints a not so pretty picture about the mindset of Zack Snyder especially since the whole fucking movie revolves around watching Emily Browning dress up like a thirteen year old schoolgirl. Everything is set to (mostly) awful popmusic that very rarely fit the tone of the movie other than the million scenes where the girls are walking in slow motion towards the camera, an overused theme if there ever was one that could have bordered on parody if I didn't know that the whole thing is totally moronically serious. It all boils down to the viewer enduring waves upon waves of Snyders patently retarded fight scenes where every punch ends in slomo and when the story is as bad as this you wonder what the hell is wrong with his brain.

At least it's better than Watchmen. The only reason I'm giving it one and a half star is that I kinda like the first two sequences, the samurais and steam zombies. And the fact that it flopped. But the rest is just a big bloated turd.

Psycho pike (1992)

Psycho pike! Psychooo pike!

I hate fish. Sure, sharks are cool and majestic creatures and there are quite a few deep sea creatures that I enjoy scaring myself with by looking at pictures of them on the internet. But most of them are just smelly creatures that really don't deserve to live. Then there are the Pikes. Pikes are vile and disgusting creatures, massmurderers of our lakes. You will never see a Discovery special teaching you that they should be revered, I can assure you that. I've always wanted to see a killer pike movie and thought that I never would get the chance but to my amazement there had been one out there for twenty-two years! Ok, it doesn't seem like it got an official release but still! Twenty-two years! There was a large hole in soul until today! I finally feel complete!

The movie? Not particulary good. Low budget semi-serious stuff about pollution causing a pike to grow huge and some people that want to hide it. Two couples out on a fishing trip. You know. The usual schtick. Poor acting and very little actual pike. The final attack is awesome though and the pike itself is rubbergoodness beyond awesome. The movie not so much. It's obvious that they went for quirky (and who can blame them?) and some of it works. Sorta. I did have a nice time watching it but mostly for the novelty of it.

Soon back from the dead

If anyone cares the reason there has been no activity at all here is the fact that I have been home taking care of my daughter for the last two months. Swedens paid paternity leave. Or whatever it is called. Having a baby means very little movies, especially after they start walking.

So, soon. Soon.

Star crystal (1986)

Star Crystal really wants to be Alien but ends up like the slow little cousin that maybe stayed under water for an extended period of time and suffered brain damage because of oxygen depravation. It plays out its cards straight, an expedition on Mars discovers a strange egglike object in the ground and brings it onboard their spaceship. On route they are all killed and their craft taken to a spacestation that has some sort of meltdown and explodes, leaving only five survivors on the very same ship. Soon enough they start to die one by one, killed by a tentacled creature that somehow has control over the ship.

Sounds good, eh? Not really. I could go on and on about the low budget inhibiting the scifi elements of the story, the very strange design of the spacecraft where every room is connected by small tunnels and the piss poor acting but I will leave you with one thing. The ending. There will be SPOILERS now but frankly, read on. It will spare you 90 minutes that you will never get back. You see, while killing the crew one by one and sucking their bodies dry of all fluids the alien creature accesses the ships computer to learn about humanity and ends up reading the bible. Then everyone becomes friends, the alien apologizes and everyone departs as friends. There is even a scene towards the end where we are supposed to feel sorry for the creature as it is left behind. Yes. I'm not making this up. End of SPOILERS.

So, what we have here is a cheap Alien ripoff with one of the most preposterous endings of all time. At least it is weird enough to be one of those "Ok, did you hear about the one where..." movies.

And I love that poster which has nothing to do with the movie, it feels more like it was ripped off from Lifeforce. Those were the days when the poster really meant something.

Dead Shadows (2012)

Dead shadows has frankly one of the coolest stories that I have ever seen. When a comet comes close to earth people start to mutate into strange tentacled beings. Think Lovecraft and The Thing, a match made in heaven alright. The makeup sfx are frankly awesome, lots of melting people and other fun stuff. The CGI is uneven but works well and there are a couple of nice scenes of mass destruction. Unfortunately, that is about the only thing that is good about the movie.

For starters, the script is awful. The dialogue is mostly just juvenile and the plot plain bad. The main character goes from introvert recluse with a fear of the dark so strong that he has to medicate himself to a superfighter that can handle two baseball bats at the same time to take down hordes of infected people (and walk in darkness without being afraid). It's like there is a large chunk of plot missing, like an Edge of tomorrow montage where he trained himself over and over again into perfection. And speaking of the fightscenes, the soundeffects are atrocious. Everytime out hero hits someone with his bat it sounds like he is striking a sandbag, like they are using the same soundeffect every time. It sounds cheap, like an 1990 Amiga computergame.

This is a shame since the visual side of Dead shadows is frankly astounding, especially since the budget was fairly low. There is quite a lot of excellent gore and fun tentacled horror so watch the movie for that, not its dumb plot. And it has one of the finest melting faces I have seen in years. And a naked Spiderwoman. Yay for naked Spiderwomen!

Oh! I almost forgot, it has a tentaclerape scene too! If you are into that.

Oltre il guado aka Across the river (2013)

An ethologist is tracking animals in a remote mountain forest and get's trapped in a ruined village when the river he crossed get's too high for him to go back. He continues with his work but starts to find dead animals everywhere, hears strange sounds coming from ruined buildings and one one occasion sees two ghostly girls caught on one of his remote cameras. At first our hero has the safety of his RV to stay sane but when it goes missing he has to spend the nights in the ruined village and that is when the horror really starts to set in.

Across the river is basically the essence of a slowburner, the entire movie revolves around the main character as he roams the village (mostly at night of course) in search for whatever it is he is hearing. To be fair, there isn't really much going on here, the movie takes its sweet time building atmosphere and if you are expecting your average j-horror inspired shocker from seeing the dvdcover you will be sorely disappointed. What the movie delivers on is an excellent location and a protagonist that is quite believable, acting rationally in a very strange situation and that does a lot in keeping it from descending into something that easily could have been just silly. It is mostly a one man show apart from a couple of scenes with an old couple to fill in a bit of backstory and that is what makes the movie work. The sense of loneliness together with an unknown threat lurking in the darkness helps tremendously with the suspense. It's not perfect, however strong the atmosphere may be the movie still moves just a little bit too slow but apart from that I had a decent enough time and the finale is quite creepy.

Maybe not for everyone but an accomplished movie that you might enjoy on a dark night with the lights turned off.

Savaged (2013)

Young deaf-mute girl goes on a roadtrip in the New Mexico desert before she moves in with her boyfriend and ends up being a witness to a group of racist rednecks murdering two native american men. They proceed to rape and torture her before finally deciding to finish her off and burying her alive but her nearly dead body is found by a shaman who performs a ritual that binds her soul to the spirit of a very angry native american warrior. Now she is back from the dead and pretty fucking angry.

Normally I really don't care for rape/revenge movies but decided to give Savaged a spin after reading a couple of positive reviews online and realizing that it had a supernatural element (I am a sucker for any horror based on native american myths and stories). I'm really glad I did. Yes, it starts out pretty nasty with the raping and the torturing but it really isn't dwelled on in any lenghty detail. It's when the girl comes back from the dead when the fun really begins as she goes on a gory rampage, killing the rednecks one by one while slowly turning into a bloody mess.

While some of the special effects aren't very special (in particular a visual effect concerning a toppling car) the rest of the movie is quite good. Amanda Adrienne is not a very imposing figure, very thin and slender, but she comes off really well as a woman possessed by an angry spirit and the makeup of her slowly rotting and damaged body is excellent. The rest of the cast have roles that doesn't require them to do much more than to be as repulsive as possible (the filmmakers work overtime reminding you that these people deserve everything that is done to them - and more) but they are all in on it, making you giggle with joy as they are disposed of with tender love and gore. And gore is what you get here, decapitations and disembowelements galore. The tone of the movie does turn slightly less serious as the vengeance starts going down but I think that's why I enjoyed this movie so much, it isn't as depraved as I expected it to be. Instead of a dark and depraved thriller we get a ghoulishly messy supernatural horror (with a nice and sad little love story included) and we need more of those.

In short: Fun and gory horror that was way more fun than I expected. Recommended.

Mr Jones (2013)

A young couple goes to a cabin in the Californian hills to shoot a documentary (never heard that one before). They have some personal issues (of course) but all of that is forgotten when they happen upon a strange cabin filled with grotesque scarecrows and realize that they have stumbled upon the legendary Mr Jones, a Banksy type sculptor who has been an enigma in the art scene for many years, causing nightmares to the people that has his sculptures. But when they start to dig deeper they realize that Mr Jones might just be building the fucked up pieces of art as protection against something, to hold something back...

Mr Jones has an exceptional concept and the sculptures/scarecrows are awesome pieces of art (I wouldn't mind owning one myself, not that my girlfriend would ever let me display one and I understand her). The first fortyfive-ish minutes or so are excellent but it is when we slowly start to be shown why Mr Jones is doing what he does this that things start to fall apart. A bit of SPOILERY talk now: There is some talk about the border between the living world and the dreaming world being a bad place and while the concept is sound enough and quite intriguing, this means that you the audience is subjected to a lot of random dreamlike imagery and while nicely shot (quite a few cool shots of the crows) it is just too random to be more than just interesting. I like it when horror goes into slightly Lovecraftian territory and Mr Jones shows off some fleeting images and odd sounds, I just don't like it as much when it is drenched through a dreamhaze. End of SPOILERS. It just doesn't hold up, a bit more straightforward horror here would have done wonders here. Still, the ending, while pretty ambigious, ties everything up fairly well.

Oh, it's found footage as well (until the final act. Sort of) which will put some people off.

Flawed but interesting and incredibly well designed, Mr Jones is worth your while. It's just that it could have been so much better but the filmmakers wanted something else.

Zombi 3 (1988)

I know I was not the only one to be disappointed by Zombi 3 when I finally managed to aquire a bootleg vhs most likely around 1989-1990. The poster was awesome, we were promised gore and mayhem and expectations were sky high. And we got something very different from what we thought we would get.

The worst thing you could do when watching Zombi 3 for the first time is to compare to what is frankly a masterpiece of Italian horror, Zombi 2. The reason for this is that they are entirely different bodies with no connection whatsoever. Where Zombi 2 is a slow, moody piece of horror with a general feeling of old 50:s and 60:s horror (albeit with a bit more grue), Zombi 3 is a product of it's own era, a fastpaced actionpacked piece of cheese that is so firmly attached to the actionmovies of the 80:s that it is virtually impossible for it to age well. Even when it was released it felt like a parody of itself. I partly blame Fragasso and Mattei for this, just take a look at their output of the time and you'll see a pattern. Fulci can't be excused either, there isn't really anything in Zombi 3 that shows the hand of the same master that gave us such iconic movies as Zombi 2 and The Beyond. I'm guessing that this is partly due to declining health but more importantly that the crew he had weren't his old troopers like Sergio Salvati or Gianetto De Rossi. The quality of his 70:s and early 80:s movies is nowhere to be seen, replaced with a general aura of cheapness.

With all of that negativity out of the way, I won't deny that Zombi 3 is a very entertaining movie. The pace is strong, getting into the zombieaction fairly quickly and it does manage to maintain it until the end. There is enough tacky gore and absurd events to keep you from being bored and it does have a pretty damn good score as well, most likely the best thing about the entire movie.

So whatever you do, don't expect another Zombi 2, think more of Hell of the living dead. For me that isn't that much of a bad thing, as long as you are aware of it.

Död Snö 2 aka Dead snow 2 (2014)

Död snö 2 starts when the original ends, the lead character having sawed his arm off, accidentally killed his girlfriend and fled the scene of the crime with the nazi treasure returned to it original "owners". Unfortunately he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes his car, only to awaken to find himself accused of murder and the nazi commanders arm grafted onto his stump. The zombie nazis are still on the march and now he has to escape the law and find out what their target is before everyone is killed. Well, it turns out that their original target is to kill everyone. Surprise.

The sequel to Död snö is bigger, gorier and has a much higher budget, giving Wirkola and his fellow filmmakers a chance to fill the screen with hundreds of zombies and a shitload of goofy gore. Unfortunately, and this is a big one, someone decided to include a group of American characters that are amongst the unfunniest I've seen for years. It's like a group of Norwegians sat down and wrote what they thought American nerds were like, without ever having met an American in person and based them on the lamest US comedy shows they had seen. Nothing about them is funny, nothing! That includes the dialogue that to me, a Swede, felt like nothing an American would say. They're even supposed to be nerdy teens that live at home with their parent and are played by 30+ actors. Argh. I could fill pages upon pages with bad things to say about them. Argh.

Fortunately the rest of the movie is quite entertaining with a great Norwegian cast and a lot of tasteless violence where no one is spared, not even babies. A good enough sequel but the fucking Zombie squad does so much damage that it is almost irreparable. And those überlame Star Wars jokes. Those god damn Star Wars jokes. What the hell were they thinking?

Skinless (formerly known as The Ballad of Skinless Pete) (2013)

Dustin Mills latest is a microbudget little nugget of slimy joy, basically The Fly versus The Incredible Melting man. It tells the story of Dr Peter Peele who is trying to find a cure for cancer by using the enzyme from a parasite. As funding falls through he decides to test it on his own inoperable skincancer which at first seems to work very well. But, since this is a horrormovie, all goes straight to the lesser known circle of hell: the circle of blood and slime!

Mills is getting better and better with the art of telling a story for every movie he makes. I've been following his career from the start, ever since Puppet monster massacre (although it wasn't actually the first one I saw, though I did buy it on its release) and you can somehow watch him putting the pieces of his storycrafting together one piece at a time. With Skinless (I did like the The Ballad of Skinless Pete title better but I suppose it's easier to sell it without a title that sounds slightly phallic) he has made an oldfashioned monstermovie his own way, pouring on buckets of slime and blood, sprinkling it with nuggets of nudity and arrived at a nice little movie. Slightly hampered by its miniscule budget, yes, but nowhere near enough to lessen your enjoyment. Brandon Salkil, Mills own Bruce Campbell, does his usual schtick, chewing the scenery with gusto and Erin P Ryan does a good job with her role as his colleague who ends up a victim of his experimentations. More importantly, they hold up well enough to sustain a narrative that is essentially a two person show, something that could have killed this movie outright in the hands of the wrong person(s). The script isn't actually reinventing the wheel but the pace is good and the story is intriguing. Good, slimy fun for the whole family.

So, in short, if you like watching people melt you should get this. You can buy it from here.

Bach Ke Zara (2008)

Ever thought that Evil dead was a fun movie but felt that it would have been better if it was acted out by a group of possibly mildly retarded Indian people (the dialogue is pretty damn preposterous and make the cast sound more than a little intellectually challenged) and had a couple of cheesy song and dance numbers? Well then, here you have Bach Ke Zara, an exact replica of Evil dead, Bollywood style. Made in 2008, this oddity looks like it could have been made in 1988. Scene by scene is replicated, only with far less graphic violence and talent, and tons of music I'm pretty sure was stolen from other movies. If you thought Bruce Cambell was overacting in the original, wait until you see this, the hysterical crying and whining of these Bollywood actors goes to a whole new level of absurd. It is on the other hand slightly more raunchy than I expected a Bollywood movie to be. No nudity or things like that, only a lot of grinding asses and bare flesh. Heck, there is even a little sideboob at one point!

No, this is far from a good movie. On the other hand, there is quite a lot of fun to be had watching how the Bollywood filmmakers steal scene after scene after scene of the original movie. It is entertaining to say the least and it is fricking hilarious to hear someone scream "Shut up, you rascal!" to a possessed person. Just watch the hilarious overacting in this dramatic scene where one of the cast just has chopped up his possessed girlfriend with an axe. Then decide if the rest of the movie is worth it.