Tag: Bloody Flick

October Horrorshow: The House by the Cemetery, aka Quella villa accanto al cimitero

Leave it to Lucio Fulci to make a haunted house flick with lots of gore. Whereas countless filmmakers have used spooky ghosts as an unseen menace, to varying effect, Fulci decided to stick with what he knew, and he knew gore. He also knew convoluted storytelling.

From 1981, Fulci directed The House by the Cemetery from a screenplay by Dardano Sacchetti, Giorgio Mariuzzo, and Fulci, himself. The movie follows the Boyle family: college professor Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Malco); his wife, Lucy (Catriona MacColl); and their young son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza). Fair warning to all potential viewers — Bob is a chore. Missile Test has made it clear how we feel about the talents of child actors, but in this instance, Frezza gets a pass. It’s the awful dubbing that does the most to make Bob one of the more annoying movie children one will see. Anyway… Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The House by the Cemetery, aka Quella villa accanto al cimitero”

October Horrorshow: Homicycle

I’m pretty sure Brett Kelly isn’t the best auteur from Ottawa, Ontario, but he’s certainly the most prolific. As of this writing, Kelly has directed thirty-nine features, with a smattering of shorts thrown in for good measure. Alas, this profligacy has not equalled quality, but that’s never been a concern at Shitty Movie Sundays.

Three Kelly-helmed pictures were released in the year 2014. According to IMDb, Homicycle is the best of them, with a 2.7 rating out of 10. Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t even have a rating. Yikes. So, what gives?

Homicycle is bottom feeding filmmaking. It’s the kind of flick that regional filmmakers crank out for a few thousand bucks and hopefully, maybe, find distribution with some garage-based company. In this case, Camp Motion Pictures here in the States. These films won’t make anyone involved rich, but they just might cover the mortgage until the next financial quarter, when it becomes time to make another. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Homicycle”

October Horrorshow: Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, aka The Curse of the Screaming Dead

Just because a movie is objectively bad, does not mean that it is unwatchable. That’s a maxim here at Missile Test, but it cannot be denied that, often, there is correlation between the two. A case in point is Curse of the Cannibal Confederates. It’s an objectively bad film in just about every way, and it’s tough to sit through. By the time this review is over, it will have settled into the leprous nether reaches of the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index, but it does have a few of those sublime moments of true unselfconscious ineptitude that mutants live for.

Curse is one of many films that Troma picked up for release a number of years after it first saw daylight. The film was originally released in 1982 with the title The Curse of the Screaming Dead. After Troma picked it up in 1987 they gave it a new name and did some light editing to the title sequence. This version, a low-quality VHS transfer, is what I saw. But, should one feel the need to see this flick in an HD scan that removes most of the mud and restores the original cut, Vinegar Syndrome released it on Blu-ray in 2023. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Curse of the Cannibal Confederates, aka The Curse of the Screaming Dead”

October Horrorshow: Bottom Feeder

To give one an idea of this film’s shoot, Bottom Feeder, writer/director Randy Daudlin’s parvum opus from 2007, was Tom Sizemore’s first movie after he got out of rehab. As if that weren’t tough enough for an actor who had spent the past decade in supporting roles in top tier movies, Sizemore brought along a TV crew capturing the entire thing for the reality show Shooting Sizemore. An actor who had been flirting with A-list status, in recovery, with the pressures of carrying a movie and a television show at the same time, in a b-movie titled Bottom Feeder? It’s amazing this thing ever made it into the can.

Sizemore plays Vince Stoker, a Vietnam War veteran (Sizemore was born in 1961) who currently works as a maintenance man at a shuttered mental hospital. He leads a small crew, including right hand man Otis (Martin Roach), young dipshit Callum (Joe Dinicol), and his niece, Sam (Amber Cull). Part of their job is to patrol the tunnels under the property that link the buildings, and roust out any teenage partiers or homeless people who have set up camp. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Bottom Feeder”

October Horrorshow: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

In a business that is so laser-focused on exploiting intellectual property, it’s amazing that it took over a decade for a sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to see release. Sure, it’s not unusual for a sequel to take so long to be made, but it is uncommon. This is especially so in horror, where movies can be made for miniscule budgets and, if lucky, see huge returns.

From 1986, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 sees Tobe Hooper, working again with Cannon and Golan-Globus, return to the well one more time. But, if viewers are expecting a simple retread of the first movie, they are in for a surprise. The original movie has a reputation for gore, and Hooper also viewed the film as black comedy. Well, neither is accurate. There is not a lot of gore in the first movie, and only Hooper seems to have found much humor in it. All that is fixed in the sequel. Hooper went all-in on some sicko campiness, and gave so much free reign to f/x guru Tom Savini that the film was released unrated in the States, and remained unreleased for decades in several large overseas markets. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2″

October Horrorshow: The Kindred

This movie was on the way to being a lost film. Released theatrically in 1987, Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow’s opus, The Kindred, hadn’t seen a home video release since the VHS days. But, Synapse Films dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s, and produced a 4K digital release in 2021. Good for them, because this is a creature feature that deserves to be seen.

Taking elements from monster flicks, cabin in the woods flicks, and mad scientist flicks, The Kindred follows a group of post-grad medicos who are trying to survive attacks from a gooey human/sea creature hybrid at a country house. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Kindred”

October Horrorshow: Dead Mail

Is this a horror movie? Usually, if I ask that question, it means a movie is not a good choice for the October Horrorshow. Just because a movie has horror elements in it, does not make it a horror movie. A case in point, much disputed, is The Silence of the Lambs. I do not think of that as a horror movie. I think of it as a thriller, or a police procedural. Sure, when Hannibal Lecter rips someone’s face off and wears it, that’s horrific. The iconic character Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wears someone’s face, and there’s no doubt that is a horror flick. But the use of horror in Silence is in service to the story, and not the purpose of the story. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Dead Mail”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Phoenix the Warrior, aka She-Wolves of the Wasteland

This movie has to be trash, right? One doesn’t go into a 1980’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi b-movie with a scantily-clad female cast and expect Shakespeare. In the days before the World Wide Web, a movie like this was about one thing and one thing only, and that was gratuitous nudity. It’s true. Movie watchers were shallow enough that for about three decades leading up to the widespread use of the internet, showcasing nudity was a core purpose of thousands upon thousands of substandard movies. Good for them!

Phoenix the Warrior is a little skimpy with the goods, though. Although the look and feel of this movie is lifted from Mad Max, in many ways this has more in common with a women in prison flick. Director and writer Robert Hayes (Dan Rotblatt shares writing credit) even managed to squeeze in a pseudo shower scene, but that’s about it. Hayes did the absolute worst thing he could do as the director of an exploitation flick: he relied on his skill as a filmmaker to see him through. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Phoenix the Warrior, aka She-Wolves of the Wasteland”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Cocaine Wars

There are a lot of plot and characters to keep track of in Cocaine Wars, Héctor Olivera’s magnum opus from 1985, from a screenplay by Steven M. Krauzer. It takes place in the cutthroat world of the drug cartels in an unnamed South American country (filming was done in Argentina). There’s cartel boss Gonzalo Reyes (Federico Luppi). His rival, corrupt General Lujan (Rodolfo Ranni). A crusading politician, Marcelo Villalba (Juan Vitali). An expat American coca farmer, Bailey (Royal Dano). A World War II Nazi fugitive turned cartel wannabe, Klausmann (Ivan Grey). A reporter from the States, Janet Meade (Kathryn Witt). And, tying it all together is drug smuggling treetop flyer Cliff Adams (John ‘Bo Duke’ Schneider), who pisses off just about everyone in the movie at some point. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Cocaine Wars”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Pharaoh’s War, aka Pharaoh’s Expedition, aka Pharaoh’s Campaign, aka Desert Strike, aka Hamlet Pheroun

An action flick starring Mike Tyson?! Sign me up! An action flick featuring Mike Tyson in a small supporting role, but he still kicks a little ass? Sure, I’m game for that, too.

Pharaoh’s War, one of the many loose translations of the film’s Arabic title, Hamlet Pheroun, is a straight Egyptian flick. There’s a good chance that it wasn’t ever meant to be seen in the West, but the inspired casting of Tyson, and strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, most familiar to viewers as one of the actors who portrayed Grogor Clegane in Game of Thrones, opened up new possibilities for sales, so here we are.

Tyson appears early in the movie, as a good guy mercenary leading refugees out of a war torn city in Syria. But, he is intercepted by warlord Frank (Björnsson), who forces all the refugees to become his hostages. That’s an adequate setup for a shitty action flick, but it’s also the last we’ll see of Tyson for a bit. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Pharaoh’s War, aka Pharaoh’s Expedition, aka Pharaoh’s Campaign, aka Desert Strike, aka Hamlet Pheroun”