Gory Flick – Page 29 – Missile Test

October Horrorshow: Basket Case

Basket Case movie poster This is one of the more bizarre movies I’ve ever seen. From writer/director Frank Henenlotter, Basket Case is an ultra low budget black comedy horror flick about a young man and his brother. By all accounts, Duane Bradley is a normal person. Raised in upstate New York, he’s on his first trip to the big city. He’s naïve — green as all hell, in fact — but he has his charms, and it’s easy to tell that the city can’t come close to extinguishing all his innocence.

Duane finds himself a room in a seedy hotel near Times Square (Basket Case was released in 1982, a whole universe away from today’s Times Square). He carries all his worldly possessions on his person. A big wad of cash, a backpack full of clothes, and a wicker basket in which he carries his brother. Wait...what?

I’m not going to pretend it’s any surprise what’s in the basket. It could have been anything, but it’s pretty clear early on this is a creature feature, so of course there’s a monster in the basket. It’s revealed that the monster is Duane’s onetime conjoined twin, forcibly removed by a gaggle of less than ethical doctors when Duane and his brother were just boys. Left for dead, the twin, named Belial, reunites with Duane, and after the two grow into adulthood, they set in motion a plan to take revenge on the doctors who wronged them. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Basket Case”

October Horrorshow: Zombi 2

I could not imagine there being an October Horrorshow without a zombie flick. REC got close, but that and other recent movies are from the new wave of zombie fare — i.e., the bad guys aren’t zombies, they’re infected by some nefarious viral agent. But Halloween just couldn’t be Halloween without a horde of the classic lumbering undead making an appearance on my screen. Enter director Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, the 1979 Italian sequel/non-sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Zombi 2″

October Horrorshow: Piranha 3D

It’s October, when calm nights are suddenly pierced by screams, unseen malevolent presences terrorize entire families, crazed masked murderers stalk virginal teenagers, and Missile Test celebrates all that is evil in the world with the October Horrorshow, a month’s worth of horror film reviews. A good horror film? We’ll watch it. A bad horror film? Bring it on. An absolutely putrid pile of dog shit that had no business being produced at all? Yep, we’ll delve into those, too. Because the only thing that matters during the October Horrorshow is that there’s blood. And today’s selection has plenty of that, and not much else worth watching. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Piranha 3D”

October Horrorshow: From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money

Listen closely at night and you should be able to hear the sound of the flapping of leathery wings. It’s October, when vampires in Chiroptera guise search for blood. And why not? October is the month of Halloween, and Missile Test is celebrating by reviewing horror films all month. It doesn’t matter if a film is good, bad, or so awful it would be better if all copies were burnt. If there’s blood, it gets a fair hearing. Today’s movie is a real dog born from a recent classic. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money”

October Horrorshow: [•REC]

October is upon us. Aliens are invading, wolfmen howl at the moon, vampires avoid mirrors, and the walls are bleeding. It’s the month of Halloween, which means it’s time for the October Horrorshow, a whole month of horror film reviews on Missile Test. The good, the bad, and the putrid will all be represented in these pages. It doesn’t matter, as long as there’s blood. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: [•REC]”

October Horrorshow: From Dusk Till Dawn, or, a Tale of Two Movies

October has come again. It being the month of Halloween, we at Missile Test choose to celebrate by watching and reviewing horror films. Ah, blood. There just can’t be enough in October. Today’s selection has plenty of it, even though it’s mostly green. But what the hell, it’s all in fun.

Quentin Tarantino was riding high after the success of Pulp Fiction, a film that had a strong case for winning Best Picture at the Oscars the year it came out. Was it Tarantino’s youth which kept his opus from taking home the top prize? Who knows? Some of the competition were no slouches in their own right, but none broke any new ground, nor did they spawn a whole genre of imitations that crop up in cinema to this day (just like Alien and all its clones). And the winner that year, Forrest Gump, felt like little more than the Baby Boomers trying to justify their actions in retrospect by infusing their youths with blandness and innocence, when naiveté (with a sharp edge, at least) would have been a more apt description. This trivializes the profound role they played in turning public opinion against the war in Vietnam, but their role was not nearly as important as that played by the news media who brought home the images of war to the American public. The youth had always been suspicious, and were never onboard with the war policy from the beginning, but every other demographic in America couldn’t have given two shits if we had been winning the war instead of losing it. Anyway, I honestly can’t tell if that film was an apology to their parents or an apology to the directionless void of malaise left behind by their sudden thrust into real adulthood that was then passed on to their slacker Gen X children. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: From Dusk Till Dawn, or, a Tale of Two Movies”

October Horrorshow: The Human Centipede

The Human Centipede The air is finally crisp here in the big city. The last gasp of humidity fled with the coming of Autumn, and in its place came the sounds of screams carried on the wind. For it’s October, when movie screens and television sets across the country run red with blood. It’s the month of Halloween, and to celebrate, it’s time once again for the October Horrorshow — time to dedicate Missile Test to watching and reviewing horror films. And we start out with a real winner.

I watched this entire movie. I could not regret that decision more. I was hoping for something — any unexpected or tragic event to occur while the film was running that would enable me to look away. Car accident outside. House fire. Power outage. Meteorite impact. Terrorist attack. Stroke. Aneurysm. Anything at all. Because I just could not turn away from this sick, sick movie. And that is my fault. My fault alone.

Written and directed by Tom Six, The Human Centipede is the story of a surgeon with a dream. Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, in a hell of a performance) is obsessed with an idea he first tried out on his beloved Rottweilers. Using his unmatched surgical skill, Heiter dreams of creating a single creature by attaching multiple people mouth to anus, creating the human centipede of the title. It’s as disgusting as it sounds. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: The Human Centipede”

October Horrorshow: Halloween II

Halloween has finally arrived. Across the country the ghouls and goblins are out in force, and scary movies are lighting up the airwaves. We’ve been celebrating here at Missile Test for the entire month of October with the second October Horrorshow, when the site is devoted to watching and reviewing horror films. There’s been no rhyme or reason to it other than one common denominator: blood. Good films, bad films, entire franchises viewed out of order...so what? It doesn’t matter. It’s all in fun, as long as there’s death and gore involved. To close out this year’s October Horrorshow, we present a review of Halloween II, the sequel to John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece from 1978. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Halloween II”

October Horrorshow: Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead The October Horrorshow rolls on here at Missile Test, when we devote the entire month of October to watching and reviewing horror films. The good, the bad, and the putrid all have a viewing. With this review we wrap up the run of zombie films made by George A. Romero. Sure, we’ve been reviewing them out of order, but it doesn’t really matter.

Diary of the Dead, from 2007, is Romero’s followup to Land of the Dead. For whatever reason, Romero regressed when it came to his budget with this film. Land of the Dead wasn’t exactly a blockbuster production, but it did recoup its $15 million budget three times over, yet Diary of the Dead was made with the paltry amount of $2 million. A cut in resources like this isn’t normally made by choice, but Romero did decide to make this an experimental film of sorts, so maybe it was on purpose.

Anyway, Diary of the Dead takes place on the eve of the zombie outbreak that began during Romero’s first zombie flick, Night of the Living Dead. With each of his Dead films, Romero has played fast and loose with the real world timeline when it comes to the zombie apocalypse, which is why the outbreak in his films occurs in the 1960s, ’70s, and 2000s. In that way, his story of the outbreak is timeless. Despite the intervening years between releases, all films take place within the same continuity. That’s only a flaw if one lets it be so. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Diary of the Dead”

October Horrorshow: Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead movie poster The zombie hordes have once again invaded the October Horrorshow here on Missile Test. After a short interlude that featured an amorphous blob, a ghostly pedophile, and a village full of children with psychic abilities, we return to the realm of the undead with George A. Romero’s second sequel to his groundbreaking film Night of the Living Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead.

In this film, the survivors of the zombie apocalypse portrayed in the first two Romero films have been whittled down to a small handful of government scientists and soldiers living in an underground laboratory. Their remaining purposes in life have been reduced to scavenging the surface for supplies, searching in vain for other survivors, and researching the zombie condition, in an attempt to find a cure. The new order of things is open to interpretation among the group, as only the scientists have any interest in continuing the experiments. Their juvenile military protectors don’t seem to find any useful purpose in the scientists’ work, and increasingly assert their control over their egghead compatriots with threats and intimidations. Romero establishes the hostile attitudes these two groups hold for each other early on, and the viewer can be assured that this conflict can be even more dangerous than that presented by the undead. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Day of the Dead”