KAIRO (PULSE) (2001)

Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Relentlessly downbeat Japanese film that can't quite be called a thriller or a shocker, so maybe it's time to begin referencing a new subgenre, one that might be referred to as the "creeper-outer".  Grammatically awkward perhaps, but it does a good job of describing this off-the-wall movie! While functioning as a grim exercise in dreamlike death imagery in the vein of RING and THE GRUDGE, this baffling feature also seems to be a defeatist comment on how the Internet has isolated people beyond restoration and made human communication more difficult and ultimately more useless than ever. A strange pop-up on college students' PCs asks "Would you like to meet a ghost?", but the source of these ominous transmissions isn't a real website but an electrically-opened breach between the worlds of the living and the dead.  Soon the world ends with a whimper as people start dying by the thousands. Some go mad and kill themselves, but most don't so much die as simply cease to exist, fading sadly into lonely shadows and leaving only dark, oily stains on the walls near wherever they last stood. The nominal hero is a guy who doesn't know the first thing about how to use a computer, but the boundless realm of lonely death that's swallowing mankind proves to be inescapable. This is extremely dark and depressing stuff, with no real explanations offered beyond some of the bland doomed characters' philosophizing about what it all means. There is no real ending, but that's a deficiency modern horror viewers are getting used to. KAIRO offers up plenty of skin-crawling moments, as when vague, blurry shadows begin to move, living people slowly dissipate into shadow, and unbearably eerie whispering voices from beyond plead emotionlessly for help.  It's ultimately a minor addition to the growing cycle of Japan's fatalistic horror downers, but I have to admit I never found it trite or predictable. It refuses to make any sense but its moments of terror are as shuddery as anything in your worst nightmares.   An inevitable American remake failed to fully capture the atmosphere of the original but performed well enough at the boxoffice to warrant a hurried sequel.

KILL THEM AND EAT THEM (2003)

Dir: Conall Pendergast

The worst monster masks since the Larry Buchanan atrocities of the mid-'60s are here (complete with plenty of sunlit close-ups so you can't help but notice how bad they are) in an amateurish sci-fi gore romp. The cardboard box-headed creatures are called "skeletoids", and they're unleashed by a duo of mad scientists tinkering with genetics using homeless people for experimental subjects. The bickering docs are headquartered in an abandoned factory, in a poorly-adorned secret lab that looks like the result of someone trying to stage a haunted house attraction in their basement. A room in which victims are imprisoned looks even more like a bad haunted house, thanks to spray-painted squiggles and crude papier-mache' monster faces stuck on the walls. Two bumbling employees of "The Company", a giant corporation that demands satirically exeggerated levels of loyalty and unquestioning obedience, try to sort out the problem but stumble into the bad guys' clutches. The idea of the all-controlling Company treating its workers as brainwashed slaves seems to have been inspired by the 1977 DOCTOR WHO serial The Sun Makers. Another possible influence is Argentina's THE CURIOUS DR. HUMPP, whose oddball plotting is echoed here when a monster is sent out to do his master's grocery shopping and when a handful of mutated stragglers loiter in the mad scientists' front yard. The skeletoids are described as "unstable", which I guess explains why they have greater strength than a human but are still awfully easy to dismember. In one scene, a guy throws a rock the size of a baked potato at one of the creatures, literally knocking one of its hands off. The creatures shamble around, growling loudly, in broad daylight clad in ordinary jackets, wearing canvas sacks on their heads (this of course doesn't disguise their enormous, hairy, two-fingered, clawed hands). At the climax, two characters are turned into brightly colored uber-skeletoids with slightly better monster faces, but the filmmakers still could have found more interesting masks for about 15 bucks at any Walmart Halloween department. Pendergast and his helpers seem to have put a lot of work into this project, and late in the movie it even becomes evident that they had an actual story to tell. A pretty good one, at that. But the terrible acting, ugly lighting, lousy creature designs and aggravating sound quality (some of the dialogue is barely audible but the ambient noise and ill-chosen garage metal tunes on the soundtrack will practically knock you off your couch) will make this a difficult movie for most viewers to endure. The occasional comedy moments are pulled off with more expertise than the allegedly serious stretches. The jokes are mostly funny and are clever enough to be amusing even when delivered by truly bad actors. It's too bad they didn't add a lot more humor and just go for an all-out spoof instead of trying for that difficult horror/comedy balance, a trick which few Hollywood pros can pull off successfully, much less a gang of nonprofessionals with a camcorder and a few bottles of stage blood.

KONG ISLAND (1968)

Dir: Roberto Mauri

Brad Harris is an adventurer who is double-crossed and left to die in the jungle by scheming partner Marc Lawrence, a mercenary who works part time as an evil scientist experimenting on apes.  Brad's quest for revenge eventually leads him not only to Marc's high-tech cave laboratory but to the discovery of a voluptuous jungle girl who was raised by gorillas.  "I'll call you Eve!", says our hero to the full-grown woman as if adopting a new puppy.  Eve has never encountered spoken language before but within minutes she already knows things like how to nod her head the correct way and go "uh-huh" to signal "yes". Remarkable as she is, Eve doesn't have much to do with the plot, which is a series of hard-to-swallow coincidences, blackmailings and betrayals that eventually allow a showdown of sorts between the two determined, macho, former friends.  The mad scientist implants little radio receivers in the skulls of gorillas, just behind their ears.  You get to see several shots of him and his cronies stitching up slits in latex gorilla masks.  The implants allow him to order the gorillas around, using them as robot flunkies, and apparently give them the ability to comprehend English too.  These are among the most laughable gorillas in movie history, resembling large men in coveralls that were sprayed with glue and then rolled around on a barbershop floor.  The lab also contains several women kept in cages, although we're never told what the bad guy had in mind for them. There are several attempts at surprise plot twists but you'll see them all coming if you can stay awake.  When a corrupt rich man slaps his wife around, the sound effects seem to come straight out of a Bruce Lee kung fu epic. The blonde heroine, who of course ends up sailing away with Harris at the finale (although I personally thought the jungle woman was much more attractive), seems perfectly cheerful and carefree only moments after watching her father die.  As far as I could tell, the whole thing took place in Africa, which isn't exactly an "island".  A strange subplot that never goes anywhere is that the villainous doctor periodically suffers from painful headaches.  I kept thinking they were going to tell us he'd installed some kind of transmitting device inside his own head in order to communicate with his hairy servants, or maybe that the process of telepathic communication with the apes was somehow hurting him.  But nothing is ever said about it, so I guess the guy just happened to get a few migraines during the course of the story.  So will you. The unconvincing production is a/k/a KING OF KONG ISLAND and EVE THE WILD WOMAN. 

 LADY IN THE WATER (2006)

Dir: M. Night Shyamalan

LAID TO REST (2009)

Dir: Robert Hall

A scary slasher movie with first-rate gore effects and coffinloads of suspense. A girl with a painful head wound wakes up lying in a coffin. She has no memory of who she is or how she got there. As it happens, she's just one of numerous unlucky victims who got captured by a silent psycho who wears a chrome skull mask, a black uniform and a shoulder-mount video camera to record his victims' agonizing final moments. A farmer with a limp and a chatty computer nerd try to help the dazed girl escape and end up embroiled in a brutal spree of violence. The makers of LAID TO REST have gone the same route John Carpenter took in the creation of the 1978 classic HALLOWEEN in that their masked maniac has no motivation and no complex backstory. He simply slaughters people because he's a sadistic wingnut, with no psychological insight into his behavior offered. That approach usually results in movies with a lazy, incomplete feel, but it works here because things keep moving at a decent pace and because the victims (apart from the female protagonist, anyway) are believable human beings. The confused heroine, however, will be a problem for many viewers. She's noisy, inept and just plain annoying, a problem compounded by the fact that in addition to amnesia she also suffers from aphasia (she can't think of, as she puts it, "the names for stuff"), a condition that makes her seem more like a victim of a stroke than of a head injury. A strange flaw is that the writers seem to have a dim understanding of how 911 calls work. There are at least two instances of telephone communication failing to work the way it does in the real world in order to keep the terrified characters in jeopardy. If you can forgive the uninteresting heroine and the lapses in realism, you'll be repaid with some very intense pursuit scenes and occasional bursts of blood and gore that look entirely convincing and carry real shock value. The murders in this movie are among the bloodiest, most realistic and painful looking to be found in the slasher genre, with flesh and bone sliced and shredded in horrible ways that are all the more effective for their nonchalant, almost clincal presentation. And when the killer finally gets his comeuppance, what happens to him is even more horrible and agonizing than what he puts his victims through. The ending offers a surprise revelation about the identity of the heroine, but it's only a minor twist that doesn't seem especially meaningful and doesn't affect things one way or another. But the nighttime setting is effective, the woman-on-the-run scenario is a welcome change from the usual slasher formula of isolating the characters someplace where they can be simply picked off one by one, and the crazed "Chromeskull" is one heck of a frightening ripper. If you're into slasher movies, this is one you don't want to miss. Richard Lynch has a cameo in a throwaway subplot about a small-town mortician and the computer geek is played by Sean Whalen, who played a similar character on an episode of NOWHERE MAN in 1995 and starred as "Roach" in Wes Craven's THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS back in '91.

 LAST DAYS OF PLANET EARTH, THE (1974)

Dir: Toshio Masuda

Toho Studios (home of Godzilla) made this entry in the then-popular disaster movie genre. It was banned in its native Japan and is probably the most disturbing movie ever to come from the company.  It comes off as a little preachy at times but there's no denying the upsetting effect of seeing so many horrible catastrophes befall the world all at once. Desperate, pedantic scientist Dr. Nishiyama vainly tries to convince the world's politcal and industrial leaders of his conviction that a prediction by 16th-century prophet Nostradamus, stating that the world will end in July of 1999, is indeed going to be proven right if the world doesn't change its present course of polluting and overpopulating. Pollution in all its many forms takes its toll, and early signs that the end is near include millions of dead fish washing up onto Japanese shores while asphyxiated birds fall from the sky.  As the ozone layer is depleted, more horrors occur in rapid succession.  Babies are born with horrible deformities,  and plants either shrivel up and die or else grow to bizarrely huge proportions.  The poisoned atmosphere produces slugs the size of chihuahuas, bats the size of eagles and foot-long bloodsucking leeches. The world food supply dwindles, so enraged crowds go on "rice riots", raiding food storehouses.  Young people are affetced much like in the British film THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE, turning to wild parties, wanton behavior and eventually some spectacular mass suicides. An unforgettable scene shows teens sailing out into the now-toxic sea, dressed up in white face paint and bright colored wigs and robes to drown themselves in style.  Motorcycle gangs drive off cliffs en masse (this sequence goes on a bit too long and isn't as poignant as it ought to be due to the fact that most of the bikes seem to vanish on the way down and the kids don't seem to be falling from a great enough height to kill themselves anyway).   Some people are burned alive, and others develop weird radiation scars and go violently mad.  The most out-of-place element of it all is probably the references to the precognitive powers of Nostradamus, which adds a note of fantasy to the otherwise science-fictional scenarios. After pounding the viewer over the head with so many tragedies and horrors both natural and unnatural, the strangest special effect comes near the end.  The collected poisonous chemicals man has released into the air suddenly cause the sky to turn into a giant mirror, reflecting devastated skylines up above like an upside-down body of water. The fight over food and other resources leads to global nuclear war. In the horrifying finale, we get a look at the next generation of "mankind": deformed, bestial mutants who look like simian versions of Jason Voorhees. Needless to say, this is pretty strong meat coming from a studio normally noted for its giant monster brawls.  The English language narration is bombastic and repetitive, and it's kind of amusing seeing the book of Nostradamus (who was French) re-created in a Japanese film as a tome that opens from the right-hand side, but LAST DAYS is affecting, harrowing material in spite of its flaws. Much of the disaster footage is from TIDAL WAVE and THE LAST WAR.  The movie is a/k/a CATASTROPHE 1999 and PROPHECIES OF NOSTRADAMUS: CATASTROPHE 1999.  The hard-to-find original Japanese print runs anout 20 minutes longer and is reportedly a little less episodic and rushed than U.S. prints.

 LAST HORROR MOVIE, THE (2005)

Dir: Julian Richards

Even if you are sick to death of serial killer movies, you need to check this one out.  An extremely clever meditation on the voyeuristic nature of horror viewing and audiences' perverse demand for nasty shocks, this follows an insightful, quite likeable murderer over the course of over a dozen random killings using a brilliant gimmick that gives it the "it's all really happening and you are there" format of THE LAST BROADCAST or THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.  The movie constantly confounds expectations by setting up characters who appear to be obvious victims and then switching gears... but only in some instances. So, things never become predictable or boring.  Every time the violence threatens to get so horrible that many viewers would stop watching, the filmmakers know just when to cut away and move on rather than rubbing the audience's face in the brutality too much. There aren't buckets of gore but the murders are all the more frightening for their casualness and relative restraint.  The questions raised by the killer are interesting and legitimate, the murders brutal and shocking in their sheer pointlessness, and the whole film is probably the best movie about a serial killer since the original SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.  Unlike typical ripper fare that is satisfied to simply present a guy going around sticking sharp objects into bloodied-up teenage bimbos, this actually offers you something to think about.  Highly recommended.

 

 LAST HOUSE ON HELL STREET (2002)

Dirs: Robin Garrels, John Specht

Mercilessly slow semi-professional production that makes its short running time play out like weeks. 12 of its 70 minutes consist of insufferably long opening and closing credits that show the same few names over and over again, each left onscreen longer than was necessary.  As for what comes in between, it's another horror project that aims for the flickering, fluttering, grainy look popularized by SE7EN and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.  Endless stretches are devoted to shots of branches, trees, a broken pocket watch, and bleak outdoor scenery. As if this footage wasn't tedious enough (and it is), you get to see most of it again and again, sometimes in negative. Most of the soundtrack is a stream of electronic humming, whooshing, bleeping and gurgling accompained by the sound of people shouting played backwards. What passes for a story has a woman who gave birth to a (never-seen) deformed baby gruesomely chopped to pieces by her deranged religious fanatic husband in their house in the woods. Some time later, a young couple about to be married stops at the house. The guy freaks out and starts tormenting his fiancee' with assorted tools and other sharp objects. All this is related by the negative image ghost of the original victim, who seems to be telling us what's happening because parts of the sound and dialogue track were either lost or unusable.  If this had been cut down to about 8 or 10 minutes, it might have been a disturbing little vignette. But at over an hour it's just a cure for insomnia. After THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET and this movie, we should all probably play it safe and avoid the last house at the end of any street. 

 

 

 LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960)

Dir: Roger Corman

 LEFT IN DARKNESS (2005)

Dir: Steven R. Monroe

 LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, THE (1974)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker

 LIGHTHOUSE (2000)

Dir: Simon Hunter

A dark, scarier-than-average slasher film with excellent cinematography and good acting to set it apart from the average ripper gypper.  Leo Rook is a mad killer in the Michael Myers mold. He doesn't wear a mask but he's silent and violent and chops everyone he meets to pieces. When the ship that's transporting Rook and a cargo of other convicts to a high-security prison runs aground during a thick fog, the madman escapes in a lifeboat to stalk and murder the stranded prisoners and crew in and around a dark, isolated old lighthouse. The characters are by-the-numbers stereotypes, including the drunken old captain, the handsome young convict who Didn't Really Do It, the frightened black guy, and the beautiful young woman with a troubled past who is now the resident expert on serial killers. The killer is kept at a distance from the viewer and is an effectively scary psycho. The main problem with the film is the trapped characters' repeated demonstrations of extreme stupidity as they foolishly isolate themselves from the group even when they know there's a diabolical mad killer waiting to bump them all off. It's frustrating watching a group that includes hardened criminals and trained prison guards who never think of the "safety in numbers" concept. Every time something needs to be done in order to make any attempt at escaping, contacting help or capturing the killer, it is taken for granted that somebody will have to go sneaking off into the darkness by himself to carry it out. This short-sightedness and general lack of clear thought on the part of the cast makes it awfully convenient for Leo to decapitate them one by one with his handy axe and machete. I still don't know how the grouchy character named MacNeil managed to get himself separated from the others. Still, even with this glaring flaw in its logic, LIGHTHOUSE is often very suspenseful and the stalking sequences are as good as any in the slasher genre. The killer collects the severed heads of his victims, but when he kills the black guy he decides to settle for simply stabbing him rather than decapitating him. I guess he only collects Caucasian noggins. The briefly-shown gore effects are excellent and a mood of non-stop tension is created by careful, stylish photography of the shadowy, cramped lighthouse interior and the stormy windblown darkness of the surrounding rocky shores.  If you're prepared to overlook some dumb behavior on the part of the characters, this comes highly recommended to slasher film fans.  It was made in the UK and was released on video in America in 2001 as DEAD OF NIGHT.  

LIVING CORPSE, THE (1967)

Dir: Khwaja Sarfraz 

Here's an obscure version of DRACULA you may have missed.  Made in Pakistan ( a country that's not exactly known for its rich and diverse cinematic heritage), it was considered a lost film for many years before someone unearthed a print and secured a release onto DVD.  Its horrific and sexual content seem endearingly innocuous and extremely mild by today's standards, but in 1967 this was considered so "strong" that it became the first Pakistani film to receive an "X" rating!  It's basically a copy of Hammer's 1958 hit HORROR OF DRACULA but with a few peculiar alterations presumably made to make it work better for Pakistani audiences. Instead of being a strictly supernatural creature, the vampire (called Dr. Tubani, even though Bram Stoker's name appears in the credits) is a well-meaning scientist who becomes a bloodsucker after drinking an experimental potion intended to grant him immortality. No explanation is given for why his chemically-induced vampirism causes him to don a black cape, sleep in a coffin and adopt other mannerisms familiar from traditional Gothic vampire stories. The nightgowned, sexually alluring women who interrupt the film every so often to do erotic dances all look about 40 pounds heavier than they would in an American version of the story, perhaps because in that part of the world a little extra weight signifies good health linked to an upbringing in a successful or "good" family. The actor playing the vampire seems to be taking Christopher Lee as his inspiration, although in a modern interview he states that he hadn't seen any previous Dracula films when he took this assignment. (Do you believe him?)  When Lee opened his eyes as wide as he could and bared his fangs, he looked truly frightening, like an enraged animal, but when this guy does the same thing he tends to look a little goofy, almost like he's spoofing Lee's persona.  Some of the camerwork is fairly impressive when you consider the time and place in which the film was produced, but much of it looks just as flat and stagey as the latter half of the 1931 Universal version. The music score is a bizarre mix, throwing in all sorts of odd bits and pieces including outtakes from HORROR OF DRACULA and even the Mexican La Cucaracha!  This isn't likely to be anyone's idea of a great horror movie, but it's fascinating in its own way and deserves to be seen by students of the Count's long and strange cinema history.   Originally called ZINDA LAASH. 

 LOCALS, THE (2003)

Dir: Greg Page

The notion that a parcel of land, as opposed to a house, a man-made object or a person's family bloodline, can become permanently and irreversibly tainted with supernatural evil as a result of gruesome tragedies that occur there is a recurring theme in horror from New Zealand, where good farmland is precious.  This N.Z. production starts out like just another of the many TEXAS CHAINSAW ripoffs but then gradually develops its scenario into something startlingly original, interesting and spooky. Two college-age buddies, a shy and serious-minded one and a goofy wisecracking one, head into the backwoods on a camping trip hoping to catch up on their friendship and just generally get their heads together. One of the guys is depressed because his girlfriend just dumped him for not liking Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS movies. They have a chance meeting with two cute girls whose clothes and hairstyles appear about 20 years out of date. Far from civilization or familiar surroundings, they witness a murder and suddenly find themselves being pursued by a gang of ignorant backwoods goons armed with rifles and led by the killer. This might sound like the same sort of thing you've seen a thousand times before, but THE LOCALS has a uniquely eerie feel. The story becomes less predictable as it advances into dreamlike confusion over exactly what has happened to whom, and when.  That's not to say that just anything can happen, however. The plot actually sticks to its own logic enough to make sense if you're paying attention. There are some great and odd-looking special effects, excellent acting, appropriately witty dialogue and a simple but very clever storyline that sets the movie apart from all the typically cheap and uninspired crazy-rednecks-chasing-city-folks-in-the-woods movies spawned by the success of TEXAS CHAINSAW.  The killers appear as violent and threatening without ever lapsing into camp parody and the bloody killings here carry more of a sense of tragedy and emotional loss than in most stalker films. And it's nice to see a film of this type that goes beyond simply presenting a series of murders and actually goes to the trouble to tell a real story. The leader of the murderous "locals" is played by the actor who was Professor Challanger on the short-lived ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S THE LOST WORLD TV series. If you like backwoods horror tales, THE LOCALS is one to look for.

 LONG TIME DEAD (2002)

Dir: Marcus Adams

Instantly forgettable British horror that goes through the motions of many low-grade American shockers that came before.  A group of interchangeable (some of them even look and dress alike) college kids go messing about with a ouija board and immediately make accidental contact with an invisible fire demon (oddly referred to as a djinn) who promises to kill every last one of them, seemingly just for a lack of anything better to do.  One kid's father is in the loony bin after unleashing the very same demon in Morocco in 1979, shown in a bland and useless prologue.  This entire subplot turns out to be a bit of a blind alley that adds nothing significant to the film's simple stalk-and-slash structure.  The demon (who leaves burn marks on his victims' throats) never does materialize in the flesh, but that's the least of this sloppily assembled feature's shortcomings.  The acting is perfectly competent and a few of the scenes are moderately suspenseful, but the tired technique of depicting an evil force's point of view by rushing through hallways and down staircases with a steadicam was far too shopworn by 2002 to retain any of the dramatic power it had back when Sam Raimi made it a low-budget horror movie breakthough (and soon-to-be cliche') with the original EVIL DEAD two decades earlier.   At one point, a banishing ritual is performed in an attempt to send the low-budget entity back to the beyond, but this fails to work because some computer-animated fire suddenly shoots up and puts the kibosh on the ceremony.  (No real explanation is given for why the ritual fails.)  Since this is a low-budget horror effort made in 2002, it naturally plays it safe by ending on the standard "the monster is still at large" note, which in this case makes the whole story seem rather pointless.  It took seven writers to come up with this derivative little tale.  Long time wasted. 

 MACABRO (1980)

Dir: Lamberto Bava

Lamberto Bava's first feature as director was this obsessively morbid look at how grief, guilt and loneliness can drive people to insanity.  Son of the legendary Mario Bava, this director's later horror films were generally more conventional action-and-gore shockers, but the remarkable thing about MACABRO is how very polished and professional its direction is for a debut film. The whole movie is put together with a sure hand, deliberate pacing and real confidence. The emphasis is on warped psychology rather than bloody mayhem, but it's an uncommonly sick and shuddery tale.  An unbalanced, cheating housewife in New Orleans rents an upstairs apartment in the home of a blind man, in which to carry on an affair with her lover. The woman's diabolical 12-year-old daughter finds out about her mother's infidelity and comes up with an unspeakably horrible way to punish her.  A double tragedy of operatic proportions results, sending Mom over the edge and earning her a year-long stay in the local Home For The Mentally Interesting.  Fresh from the loony bin, she returns to the same apartment, seemingly to continue her affair.  But her boyfriend was gruesomely killed in the horrific accident that was partly responsible for her breakdown in the first place.  The lonely blind landlord, who is a bit unstable himself after the death of his mother and who has a crush on his attractive tenant, becomes suspicious after he starts hearing what sounds like lovemaking sessions upstairs at night.  No one else can ever be heard entering or leaving the apartment, so who could she be with up there?  Whatever you're thinking at this point, the truth is even more disgusting and perverse.  All in all it's pretty engrossing stuff, with a twist ending that seems out of left field but is a fitting capper for this sick tale in a nightmarish Twilight Zone kind of way.  If you're a 16-year-old video game geek with the attention span of a housefly you may not have the patience to stick with this one, but if you're willing to sit back and be told a creepy and horrible tale of psychotic weirdness, this is well worth watching. A/k/a MACABRE and FROZEN TERROR.

 MACHINED (2006)

Dir: Craig McMahon

A true rarity: a backwoods ripper movie that manages to work in the tradition of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE without ever actually copying it.  MACHINED is sometimes sick and disgusting, but it's supposed to be disgusting and it succeeds quite well at being exactly what it wants to be. Star David C. Hayes creates an unforgettable villain, "Motor Man Dan", a hulking repressed sadist who is both morbidly obese and just plain morbid. The 300-pound-plus psychotic auto mechanic is fascinated with real-life murder stories in the news and collects serial killer memorabilia. When he accidentally runs over a stranded motorist on a nearby back road, causing brain damage which somehow regresses the victim to an infantile state, the deranged Dan sees an opportunity to retool the dying man into an obedient murderer who can commit the gory atrocities Dan's always dreamed of.  As for the hitchhiker's crippling physical injuries, Dan uses his mechanical skills to craft new body parts and braces out of old car parts. The poor guy ends up as a pitiful half-man, half-robot imbecile with squeaking pistons and humming motors grafted to his body and a steel box equipped with a camcorder and video lights fastened to his disfigured head. When stragglers make their way to Dan's out-of-the-way garage and junkyard, the mountainous madman sends his creation out to stab and slash them to death while excitedly watching the action on a TV monitor that gives him a killer's eye view of the attacks. The story recalls the queasy medical sci-fi theme of 1960s Euro-horror such as DR. ORLOFF'S MONSTER, as well as even earlier fare like the numerous mad scientist movies of the '40s that saw innocent people transformed into monsters to do the bidding of a twisted and controlling master.  MACHINED features a scary soundtrack filled with nightmarish scraping metallic sounds and eerie groaning music that enhance the dark, tragic mood. Scenes in which the pathetic, wheezing, metal-encased monster lurks in the shadows of filthy cluttered sets are pretty frightening and the movie frequently puts the viewer in the same unhealthy voyeuristic position of its sick bad guy (definitely a character you'd call the "heavy").   The science fiction elements are of course skimmed over, but this remains an engrossing and impressively scary sickie with fine photography, good effects and a teriffic villain.  

MACHINED REBORN (2009)

Dir: Craig McMahon

Also known as simply REBORN, this shameful sequel is an altogether inadequate and unsatisfying followup to 2006's MACHINED. Tipping the scales all the way from gruesome horror-fantasy into torture-porn, this foul and foolish concoction simply strings together prolonged scenes of hideous mutilations and painful deaths, consistently failing to make any of them realistic. The dumbest married couple in slasher history end up buying the property on which Motor Man Dan operated his combination auto garage and torture chamber in the first film. The earlier murder spree seems to be a matter of public record, and yet the killer's small, cluttered headquarters in the desert is still right there, with him still sequestered inside with his trusty video cameras. (This area must have the laziest police force in all the U.S.) Five minutes of awkward exposition at the beginning gets everything the script has to offer in the way of logical explanations out of the way in a hurry, so that intelligent thought can quickly be dispensed with and chintzy extreme gore can take over. Now deprived of his quasi-robotic killing machine, the mountainous Dan is much more willing to get his pudgy hands dirty this time around, routinely sawing victims' arms and legs off himself, just for kicks. In one of the movie's many credibility-crushers, a man takes a shotgun blast to the face from a distance of about 18 inches and walks away with only some red holes in his cheeks and forehead (his eyes are unaffected). In a ridiculously unlikely turn of events, he decides to painfully weld, screw and bolt car parts found in the madman's lair to his own body in order to transform himself to a gruesome metal-encased half-human fighter, even though his character has no idea that's exactly what happened at this very same place three years before. And that's only one of the absurd coincidences and unlikely character reactions this film asks you to swallow. In a movie as patently phony as this, there's no such thing as human beings bleeding to death or going into shock from extreme pain. People who've been horribly mutilated act tired, as if they've just forced themselves to get out of bed after taking a little too much NyQuil. The mean-spitired nature of the violence in this project would make it difficult to watch if it wasn't all so jaw-droppingly stupid. As presented, it's all just sadistic and bloody without ever offering anything realistic enough to be disturbing, outrageous enough to be funny, or suspenseful enough to be scary. A half-hearted attempt to make it look like there might be an actual plot sees flickering zombie-ghouls (presumably the angry ghosts of Motor Man Dan's previous victims) popping in and out now and again but doing nothing at all. The first movie had a freaky nightmare-like vibe going for it, but this more literal and less stylish rehash is just a quick cash-in.

 MAD MAGICIAN, THE (1954)

Director: John Brahm

 MADMAN (1982)

Dir: Joe Giannone

 MAID, THE (2005)

Dir: Kelvin Tong

 MALEVOLENCE (2004)

Dir: Steven Mena

A redundant slasher movie that does at least conjure up a genuine feeling of danger on a few occasions, MALEVOLENCE is reasonably well-made but utterly bereft of originality.  Starting out like a slightly higher-budgeted, better-acted remake of the obscure indy film SINYSTER, this eventually settles down into a generic Mad Killer On The Loose programmer. Your typical gang of inept young crooks botches a typical movie-style bank robbery in which one of the gang is, predictably, wounded. He dies and they bury him out in the middle of nowhere, having apparently seen enough cheap movies to know that's how it's done. The surviving losers have unwisely chosen as their hideout an isolated old farmhouse with an adjacent slaughterhouse. It's too bad they hadn't seen just a few more cheap movies, or else they would have known that abandoned slaughterhouses are always in use by deranged killers who butcher people just for kicks. Of course, they get knifed to death in uninspired attack scenes by some dolt with a pillowcase on his head like Jason in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2.  Playing it safer than the demented SINYSTER did, this one mostly sticks to copying scenes and ideas from HALLOWEEN and other far superior shockers, seemingly without an understanding of what made them work so well the first time. Example: There's one of those shots of a relieved character in the foreground with the supposedly dead maniac sitting up all out-of-focus in the background. But whereas John Carpenter got a real shock out of that in HALLOWEEN, this movie ruins it by including a shot of the killer's hands starting to move first, so we already know he's not dead and it's obvious he's going to sit back up. The problem with MALEVOLENCE isn't in the acting, direction or editing, all of which are above average for a low-budget slasher film, but in the simple-minded script, which lets people behave in ways that are inconsistent with common sense until intelligent viewers will be frustrated by all the illogical moves these characters make. One character goes missing and his crony decides to go drive around dark, unfamiliar roads until he just happens to see the guy. Yeah, that'd work.  And when they first miss the guy, nobody even searches the premises first; they just immediately arrive at the conclusion that he's run off with the loot.  One hostage escapes her duct tape bonds in about 30 seconds, while another poor actress spends nearly the whole film tied up, unable to escape a duct-taping job that looks so haphazard that after a while you start thinking your arthritic grandmother could've wiggled free in less time. The killer's motivation is silly, as we're expected to believe that he became a mad slasher because as a kid he was taught how by an older mad slasher. Really, that's all there is to it. It never occurs to the local police to check out the spooky old slaughterhouse near town, even after a string of mysterious disappearances has plagued the area.  And, meeting all expectations, the movie ends with the groaningly predictable closing shot letting us know He's Still Out There. Z-z-z-z-z-z-z...  

 MAN IN THE ATTIC (1953)

Dir: Hugo Fregonese

This remake of THE LODGER is one of the best Jack The Ripper movies. It's unfortunately light on scares and often seems so relatively genteel that it's more like a costume drama with sordid undertones than an actual horror tale, but it's well worth seeing just for the brilliant performance of a young Jack Palance as The Ripper. Palance was never better than he is here, portraying his "Dr. Slade" character as a soft-spoken, outwardly polite gentleman whose murderous rage and unhealthy sexual obsession can still be sensed boiling underneath his perfectly reasonable surface. Palance is so amazing in this role that it's difficult to imagine any other actor who could have done it better.  With his quiet intensity and odd boxy features, Palance's every facial tick and nervous twitch speaks volumes about the trouble a psychotic killer might have trying to suppress his violent urges and fit in with civilized society. He rents a room in the attic of a respected London couple and meets their pretty niece, an entertainer who's starring in a surprisingly bawdy and sexually suggestive London stage act.  The landlady is Frances Bavier, who would go on to play Aunt Bea on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW.  Many of the characters don't have English accents and some of the ones heard are obviously faked. A bigger problem is that the film stops dead twice for long, unimpressive dance numbers that were by no means worth two several-minute-long interruptions into the Ripper story. Wisely, the script never confirms that Slade was the character's real name and ends with the police unable to locate his body, which ties the story in with historical accuracy much more cleverly than versions that end with him being positively identified and hauled off in either a paddy wagon or a meat wagon. The smart dialogue, shadowy fog-shrouded photography, detailed sets and elaborate wardrobe are all plusses, but it's really Palance's brooding, masterful balance of pathetic vulnerability and unstoppable fury that make MAN IN THE ATTIC a winner in spite of its low scare factor. 

 MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH, THE (1959)

Dir: Terence Fisher

 MAN WITH NINE LIVES, THE (1940)

Dir: Nick Grinde

 MAN WITHOUT A BODY, THE (1957)

Dirs: W. Lee Wilder, Charles Saunders

 MANGLER REBORN ,THE (2005)

Dirs: Matt Cunningham, Erik Gardner

 MAUSOLEUM (1983)

Dir: Michael Dugan

 MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE (1988)

Dir: Robert C. Hughes

 MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

Dirs: Herbert Tevos and Ron Ormond

If you enjoyed BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS, THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER and other inadvertently dreamlike '50s failures, here's another one to add to your must-see list.  Apart from its mind-numbing flamenco guitar score, which keeps the same few notes strumming away through almost the entire production regardless of what's happening onscreen, its most notable feature is its uniquely messed-up story structure.  The whole thing is told in flashback, but there isn't a single character whose flashback it could be.  None of them are present for the entire story, and on at least two occasions the tale seems to be the personal reminiscence of minor characters who are dropped and never seen again.  An offscreen narrator (Ed Wood actor Lyle Talbot) does a terrible job of trying to make the jumble of events seem like a plot.  He pronounces "muerto" as "MOO-air-toe", speaks directly to characters who have nothing to do with the main action, and calls spiders "hexapods" (which means they have six feet) when most junior high school science students know they have eight.  Jackie Coogan, a decade before landing the role for which he would be best remembered (Uncle Fester on the original ADDAMS FAMILY), is mad scientist Dr. Aranya (a phoenetic spelling of the Spanish word for spider), a nut who has a secret lab on top of the Zarpa Mesa in the Mexican desert. With his goatee, thick glasses and calm manner, you'll barely recognize him as dear old Fester. His experiments with spider serum have resulted in a chorus line of voluptuous women who can instantly heal from the severest of injuries (a trait the script wrongly attributes to spiders).  This is pretty impressive work coming from a guy who, like the narrator, doesn't know the difference between insects and arachnids. The shapely spider-gals dance and help out in the lab but they never speak and mostly just stand around with their eyes wide open like some kind of mentally retarded robots.  The main one is shown with six-inch-long poisoned fingernails in the opening but with normal nails thereafter.  A doctor who visits Jackie catches a quick glimpse of a shy spider the size of a Shetland pony peeking from behind a dressing screen in the lab.  The shock of seeing a spider who was evidently up to something unwholesome behind a dressing screen causes the once-brilliant doctor to turn instantly into a slow-talking, smiling idiot who acts kind of like Lenny from OF MICE AND MEN.  Jackie unwisely lets him escape into the desert.  The infantile man eventually uses a gun to hijack a handful of characters in a small plane into taking him back to the mesa of horror, whereupon Jackie (even more unwisely) gives him a quick injection of something that instantaneously cures insanity, allowing him to blow up the place and set the audience free.  The mad doc's master plan is poorly articulated but I think he means to conquer the world with an army of indestructible dancing girls, evil hairy midgets and a few really large spiders.  Guess his instant madness cure just wasn't enough to make him feel important. There are continuity errors galore and unintentional laughs aplenty.  In addition to the genius-turned-imbecile and the mindless spider girls, the other cast members seem to have mental problems too, as none of them ever display any common sense.  All in all it's an amazing viewing experience, and one can only speculate on what the movie might have been like had Coogan used his miraculous idiot-into-genius formula on the filmmakers.  It ends on an ahead-of-its-time "ooooh, scary" note that seems to be trying to set things up for a sequel.   Also released as LOST WOMEN OF ZARPA and LOST WOMEN, and a lost cause under any name.  

 MESSENGERS, THE (2007)

Dir: Oxide Pang, Danny Pang Chun

 METAMORPHOSIS (1989)

Dir: "G.L. Eastman" (Luigi Montefiori)

 METAMORPHOSIS: THE ALIEN FACTOR (1990)

Dir: Glenn Takakjian

In a secret lab at the Talos Corporation (which must have been named for either the bronze giant from JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS or the Talosians on STAR TREK), scientists are conducting tests on government-provided tissue and cell samples that may be of extraterrestrial origin.  Results (kept in rabbit cages) include a fanged crustacean with tantacles, a thing that looks like a dog turned inside-out and the best one, a green mutant frog creature with seriously lopsided eyestalks and big teeth. When a geneticist accidentally pokes the frog in one of its misaligned eyes, it bites his hand, causing him to immediately begin a long, painful transformation into a hideous killer monster. Well-meaning scientists try to help but nothing seems to work, and soon the guy has changed into an outrageous pinkish-red slimedog the size of a forklift. The thing has an eyeless, dragon-like head, several long tentacles that end in three-pronged pincer claws coiled up inside various ugly orifices, and the unexplained ability to shoot potatoes full of sharp teeth at people.  The numerous makeup effects are incredibly ambitious and, for the most part, very convincing, sometimes giving Rob Bottin's work in John Carpenter's THE THING (an obvious inspiration) a run for its money in the freaky goo-covered monstrosites department.  We see the guy in several stages of "metamorphosis" and they're all very elaborate and effectively disgusting. The final stage creature doesn't necessarily seem to be a flesh-eater but for some reason it is driven to kill everybody it can get its tentacles on, which leads to plenty of well-done gore effects including mangled faces and hands, realistic severed heads and so forth.  Most of the movie is devoted to its pursuit of the handful of characters trapped inside the building with it, including two boring teenage girls, two boring hitmen hired to clean up the problem, and a few more boring victims and villains.  The film's drawbacks include its roster of completely stereotyped one-dimensional characters, below-average acting on the part of several of the major players, and (of course) a lack of a satisfying ending.  The pseudo-scientific doubletalk during the first half is surprisingly good, making more sense and sounding more logical than in many low-budget monster movies.  (But when they got to the part in which a particle accelerator was used to turn the beast momentarily humanoid again, they lost me.)  The fast-paced, wet and wild shocker was originally planned as a sequel to THE DEADLY SPAWN. It reportedly suffered a terribly troubled production history, taking over three years to complete because of behind-the-scenes financial problems. It's a movie that's rough around the edges but director Takakjian (who went on to work as an art supervisor and animator on a number of TV programs for The History and Discovery Channels) makes the most of  it and delivers an energetic thrill ride that ought to please monster and gore fans everywhere.   Pity nobody could think of a decent, halfway original sounding title for the finished product. The movie has nothing to do with either of the previous films called METAMORPHOSIS nor anything to do with the previous film called THE ALIEN FACTOR.  Its only remaining link to THE DEADLY SPAWN is a visual one, specifically the general look of the red alien creatures with hundreds of crooked little teeth.  Don't expect great characterization, but if you'd like to see an action-packed effects showcase from back in the era when movie monsters were created with actual three-dimensional on-set props, puppets and costumes, as opposed to flat-looking computer-generated cartoonery, this one is hard to beat 

 MINERS' MASSACRE (2005)

Dir: John Carl Beuchler

Herein lies the answer to the age-old question, "Whatever happened to John Buechler?"  John Carl Buechler was one of Hollywood's busiest and best-known purveyors of low-budget special makeup effects for scads of (mostly direct-to-video) monster movies of the 1980s.  His career seemed to culminate when he scored a couple of directing assignments (TROLL; FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 7: THE NEW BLOOD;) , and once he even got to play a monstrous ghost (THE SLEEPING CAR).    Buechler kind of ceased to be a household name among fantasy film fans since then, but here he is again, popping up as director of MINERS MASSACRE, a strong contender for the title of Least-Imaginatively-Titled Movie Of The Decade. Traditional stalk-'n'-slash stuff that's better directed than most, this one simply follows the dots set down by Jason, Michael Myers and other previous movie maniacs. A handful of squabbling young jerks head out West to a legendary gold mine one of them has just inherited.  (Why oh WHY does every low-priced horror production feel a need to include a female character who does nothing but complain the whole time about being dragged off to someplace she clearly chose to come to in the first palce? If you hated the thought of taking a trip and you didn't get along with the other people going, wouldn't you just stay home?)  But I digress... Naturally, the mine is haunted by a zombie miner, known locally as "The 49er" just like in the old SCOOBY-DOO WHERE ARE YOU? episode that seems to have inspired this project.  Whenever anobody tries to take a piece of "his" gold from the mine, he whacks 'em Jason-style...even though I'm not sure what good all that gold does him in hell.  The undead miner is an effective, cool-looking old creep in terms of monster makeup, and the foggy backlighting and other filmic techniques make him seem appropriately scary. Unfortunately, his big old duster coat and rumpled hat make him look exactly like JEEPERS CREEPERS in every shot except his (very few) close-ups, in which he looks just like "Slim", the zombie gunfighter from HOUSE 2 THE SECOND STORY.  This is another case of good lighting, acting, directing and cinematography being largely wasted on a script that offers not a single nugget of originality from beginning to end.   Even the ending-- in which the monster, having clearly been destroyed in the prescribed method, inexplicably jumps back up to deliver an illogical, totally predictable shock just before the closing credit scroll-- is, like a crucial part of the ghoulish miner's attire, old hat.  Won't independent horror writers EVER tire of that ending? Most viewers were already tired of it shortly after the original HALLOWEEN came along and made it mandatory.  Decades ago, Universal proved with Frankenstein and The Mummy, and Hammer later proved with Dracula, that you can always resurrect a good monster for a sequel without having to leave the door so far open at the end of a previous installment. So why not leave audiences with enough closure at the end of a horror movie to let them feel like they've actually been told a story, instead of just a day-in-the-life (or -in-the-afterlife) of some murderous monster?  I doubt that anybody went home from the theater disappointed because Boris Karloff's stitched hand didn't reach out of the rubble of the windmill at the end of FRANKENSTEIN, or because Bela Lugosi didn't pop out of the shadows to bite Edward Van Sloan after getting a stake through the heart in the closing moments of DRACULA, or because Linda Blair didn't jump out at the camera inexplicably re-possessed in the final shot of THE EXORCIST! 

 MONSTER CLUB, THE (1980)

Dir: Roy Ward Baker

 MONSTER MAKER, THE (1944)

Dir: Sam Newfield

 MONSTER MAN (2004)

Dir: Michael Davis

This teen roadkill movie, influenced by such hits as JEEPERS CREEPERS and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, is one of the best of its kind. Whereas most films of this subgenre are content to wallow in pointless sadism wrapped in artsiness or homage, this one actually pays attention to pacing and tells a clever story. An uptight neat-freak kind of guy is driving cross-country to the wedding of an ex-girlfriend. Tagging along to provide ODD COUPLE-style character contrast is a buddy who's a crude, obnoxious, arrogant, insufferable clod that thinks people find him hilarious. Crossing the dangerous rural America always depicted as home to homicidal inbred freaks in this kind of movie, the two run afoul of a large, weird-looking "monster truck"...driven by an actual monster. The acting and character-driven humor are way above average and the characters are uniformly well-drawn and thoroughly believable. All the strange things that happen on this nightmare road trip are actually explained at the climax, which thinks things through so well that several of its twists took me by surprise even though the clues were all in place. Creepy sights, isolated locations and a constant sense of real danger all come together to make this a surprising shocker. There's also some first-rate monster makeup and good gory FX work along the way. There are only two real drawbacks to MONSTER MAN. One is the credibility-straining idea that a huge, noisy, one-of-a-kind vehicle, which leaves tire tracks the size of small cars in the dirt, could continue rolling along killing and mutilating people and nobody would bother to follow it or investigate the crimes. (As in most redneck horror movies, the cops are total morons.)  The other problem here is the nonstop flow of incredibly raunchy dialogue. The people in this script are so appallingly foul-mouthed and grossly vulgar that after a while it gets to be a real chore to keep listening to their ear-punishing trashiness.  I can't imagine how this would be broadcast on TV.  They'd either need to reshoot half the film with less low-minded dialogue or else air it in a timeslot normally reserved for the cheesiest of infomercials. I'm never sure why writers of low-budget movies so often think they have to resort to the foulest low-common-denominator trash talk they can come up with, but it's been a problem with the independent horror genre for ages. The plotline here is extremely clever, but you wonder what was on the mind of the guy writing the screenplay. Are the people he knows in real life as hopelessly crass and crude as this?  I doubt it. People this vulgar in real life would never be friends with anybody with any class or sense of decency. I also doubt anybody would leave an obscenity-free monster movie saying, "Yeah, that movie was OK, but it would have been a lot scarier if all the dialogue had been really filthy..."  It's too bad they took the lowest possible road when it came to dialogue, because MONSTER MAN stands up surprisingly well in virtually every other department. If you can get past the flood of filthy talk, check this one out. It's never dull, the bizarre plot won't insult your intelligence, and the whole film really does deliver the gruesome goods.

 

 

 

 MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS, THE (1959)

Dir: Irvin Berwick

This is the first monster movie I ever watched as a kid, and I'll always have a soft spot for it even though I realize it isn't exactly GONE WITH THE WIND.  Set in the CA coastal town of Piedras Blancas but mostly filmed in nearby Point Conception because it was thought to be more picturesque, it tells a simple tale of a scaly crab-man on the loose near an old lighthouse. The rude, grouchy old lighthouse keeper discovered years before that a local legend about a sea monster was true. Grief-stricken and lonely after the death of his wife, he's been secretly feeding the thing ever since, leaving scraps of meat in a metal bowl on the rocks by the shore. There's a potentially fascinating story there, about how the old man dealt with his own loneliness by tragically identifying with a monster, which he assumes must also be suffering because of its similarly isolated situation.  Unfortunately, the psychological aspects of the script are minimized in order to allow more time for a dull romance between the lighthouse keeper's voluptuous daughter and a local student of marine biology. When the old man is injured in a fall and can't continue to provide food for the creature, it becomes a lot bolder, skulking around town at night tearing people's heads off!  There are some serious logic problems in the story. The monster's attacks start before the man stops leaving food for it, yet the killings at the beginning of the movie seem to be the first attacks it's perpetrated. So why has it waited until now to come after people? And if it hasn't killed before, why is there a legend about a monster in the first place?  The movie moves along at a brisk pace, making it easy to overlook the deficiencies. The monster is the real reason to watch, and he's a classic. He looks like an uglier cousin of the Black Lagoon Creature, with tiny eyes, huge flared nostrils, and an oversized mouth. The great scaly bodysuit with thick veins and armor-plated flesh was created by Jack Kevan, a talented makeup artist for Universal who created such previous 50s monsters as the Abbott & Costello "Mr. Hyde" and the MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS, before striking out on his own after getting fed up with Universal's makeup department head Bud Westmore getting all the credit for Kevan's design work. The budget must have been a little too small to allow for a complete monster to be made, so this monster has the hands of THE MOLE PEOPLE and the feet of the Metaluna Mutant from THIS ISLAND EARTH!  While the Mutant's pincher-toed feet work nicely with the creature's crustacean appearance, the Mole People hands are a problem. The script tells us that the monster's victims had their heads neatly lopped off as if with huge scissors, but there's no way those big lumpy paws with virtually no thumbs could do that. The monster seems to possess some human intelligence, especially when he takes an interest in a human female after seeing her undress for a nude swim. (True, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON featured a similar situation, but it seems racier here.)  Gore was highly unusual in movies of 1959, but this includes several shots of bloody severed heads, including one with a crab crawling across it much like a famous scene in JAWS. Some moments are genuinely scary, like when the monster comes unexpectedly trundling out in broad daylight in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers, and a creepy scene in which a little boy (played by the director's son) sobs that he just found a local shopkeeper, ending his story with "...and he didn't have any head!"  Shots of the monster's huge claws reaching into frame and its shadow moving along the sides of streetlit buildings at night are memorable too.  But it's too bad they included a scene in which a character throws an oil can at the beast from a distance of what looks like about 20 stories up during a high wind, and scores a direct hit to the monster's noggin without hitting the girl it's carrying off! (This guy could have been an all-time baseball legend with that sense of aim!)  The ending sees the monster fall from the top of the lighthouse but fails to actually confirm his death, as if they were leaving the door open for a sequel. (Sadly, there never was one.)  Despite some problems with the plot and some medicore acting, this is a decently-made monster rampage made with enough style to keep things interesting and to make it a popular item with monster fans.  The monster certainly left a strong childhood impression on me.  He's still one of my favorite rubber suit monsters of all time. If someone offered a life-size full-body figure of THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS, I would re-mortgage my house to get one.  

 MONSTER SQUAD, THE (1987)

Dir: Fred Dekker

A cult classic.  A quartet of monster movie-obsessed kids who gather in their treehouse to talk about monsters (and collect monster paraphernalia) are the only ones who know what to do when the movies' classic monsters-- who, it turns out, are all real after all-- materialize in their hometown.  Led by the aloof, sinister Count Dracula, the monsters need a cursed medallion to open the portal to the beyond and allow evil to rule the world.  To help in his quest, Dracula enlists the aid of a Werewolf, a living Mummy, a Black Lagoon-like Gillman and The Frankenstein Monster.  Can the kids, using Prof. Van Helsing's diary, figure out and perform the necessary ritual in time to save their community from Dracula and his army of evil?  THE MONSTER SQUAD is one of the best family-oriented horrors of the 1980s which followed the success of Steven Spielberg's kid-friendly E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982).  The kids are among the most realistic of fantasy cinema, using just enough harsh language and immaturity to prevent them from ever becoming the nauseatingly cute or tiresomely precocious child stereotypes who so often populate Hollywood product.  These kids are only moderately nerdy and their genuine concern for their homes and families ultimately overcome their naturally short attention spans, mixed interests and worst fears.  The movie works well as a 'Monster Rally' too, with Universal's classic creatures of the '30s and '40s cleverly redesigned to stay true to their cinematic icon status while reflecting the more elaborate makeup effects of the '80s.  Thus, the scary skull-faced Mummy is destroyed by simply unravelling him (a good sight gag revealing that there's nothing beneath the bandages!), and when the Wolfman is blown to bits, his various body parts quickly pull themselves back together because no silver was used.  Tom Noonan's Frankenstein Monster is one of the cinema's best since the days of Karloff, displaying a simple, potentially dangerous but basically innocent mind corrupted by Dracula's evil machinations. The only monster who lacks believability is Duncan Regher's Dracula, who looks like a guy on his way to a Halloween party as Dracula. Regher gives a good performance, projecting an excellent blend of disdainful superiority and smug, overconfident hatefulness, but his white-painted face and cape with the huge red-lined stand-up collar are a bit more than he can overcome.  Also packed into the film's all-too-brief running time are vampire women being destroyed with crossbows, Dracula's impressive bat-monster transformations, and trouble at home for the main kid whose burned-out but well-meaning Dad, about to seperate from his disinterested wife, is a local cop who watches in disbelief as honest-to-goodness vampires and monsters terrorize his neighborhood.  This movie is packed from start to finish with funny ideas, intelligently witty dialogue, cleverly staged action and outstanding makeup and monster effects. Definitely a genre hoghpoint from a decade notably lacking in highpoints, THE MONSTER SQUAD is one to look for.  Not to be confused with the identically-titled, unrelated NBC-TV sitcom of 1976.   

 MONSTER WALKS, THE (1932)

Dir: Frank Strayer

 MOTOR HOME MASSACRE (2005)

Dir: Allen Wilbanks

Poorly wrought slasher effort has another camper full of terrible teen actors getting whacked in the woods by another psycho with a grudge against sexually active twerps.  MOTOR HOME MASSACRE deserves kudos for its attempts to give the victims at least some characterization and for pulling off an impressive number of good jokes.   There are quite a few funny lines and moments in this semi-professional comedy-horror cheapie, but the script as is schizophrenic as its villain and the sense of humor is scant compensation for the crude technique and transparent mystery angle.  The killer turns out to be exactly who you think it is, so there isn't anything the least bit surprising about the script's feeble stab at a multiple-twist surprise ending.  It's a good thing the film has the comedy content going for it, because the murders are badly staged and let down by obvious, phony, backyard style effects composed mainly of spattering red paint blood.  Lots of teens get sliced up with a machete but not one of the kills looks scary, funny or believable.  In one shot the prop machete looks like a piece of gray cardboard.  In one scene a skunk shows up but since it doesn't spray anybody, I'm not sure why it was in there. The worst character is the dorky token "pretty fly for a white guy" stereotype who does such a miserable job of squawking out lines like "Yo shizzle" that he comes off as mentally retarded rather than just a tough-guy wannabe.  And the very end, involving a man standing on a bridge, defies all logic and, worse still, isn't even funny.  To his credit, the director does a decent job of keeping things in a campy (pun intended) vein but this derivative little homemade feature just isn't entertaining enough to deserve your attention.

 MR. HELL (2005)

Dir: Rob McKinnon

Exaggeratedly goofy characters, preposterous situations, absurdist dialogue and strange, sketch comedy-style acting give this low-budget slasher movie a very peculiar, uniquely campy feel.  Nothing that happens in it is remotely believable but I was never sure if director McKinnon was kidding or not.  Harold Eugene Loveless is a buffoonish serial killer posthumously nicknamed "Mr. Hell" by the press because of his initials. He's one of the least scary slashers I've seen yet. While attempting to kill a bratty 10-year-old girl whose father he has just murdered, Mr. Hell is literally dissolved into a puddle of goo by the accidental release of some toxic green slime at the top secret chemical plant in which he works.  Years later, the plant is scheduled to be shut down and some moronic workers (one of whom continues to eat his lunch even after some unidentified toxic glop pours onto it) allow a drainage tank to be emptied, whereupon the slasher is inexplicably reconstituted first as a green slime-man and then (disappointingly) into his old human self, only with a diminished I.Q. and a pasty complexion.  He cuts the eyes out of his victims (well, sometimes, anyway... in several scenes he seems to forget what he's doing) because the devil will give him one extra life for each pair of peepers he scoops out and stores in a glass jar hidden next to the fire extinguisher.  Top-billed Tracy Scoggins, as ridiculous supervillain "Dominique Horney", bursts into the plant with her gang of dimwitted killers on the place's final day of operation to steal a vial of flesh-eating bacteria.  The reborn maniac kills just about everybody, but Tracy's thugs needlessly slaughter a few workers too.  The sets and props look cheap and unfinished (a guard shack is made of plywood painted on only one side) and the general air of jokiness is at serious odds with the gory plot.  An absurdly oversized air duct leads to a tiny room, and the security at this allegedly high-tech installation is almost nil.  The acting in MR. HELL appears at first glance to be just plain bad, but it might be unfair to blame the cast since virtually everybody in the film behaves in such a uniformly unrealistic manner that it's possible the broadly comic overacting was a deliberate choice on the part of the director.  Each and every event in the story is too ridiculous to be taken seriously, including a couple of awkward "tragic love" moments that seem to have been thrown in just to try and vary the comedically angry mood a little bit here and there.  The ending is a real groaner but, there again, somebody might have thought they were doing something funny instead of truly scary.  Whatever they had in mind, it didn't quite work.  MR. HELL is too predicatable and one-note to be a good horror movie satire but it's far too silly to really scare anybody.  

 MULBERRY STREET (2006)

Dir: Jim Mickle

Technically complex but nearly plotless, this relentlessly downbeat shocker is one of the saddest horror tales in years.  On what begins as an ordinary summer day, Manhattan residents find themselves terrorized by a strange fast-spreading plague caused by mutant rats.  People who are bitten quickly sicken and transform into what can best be called "wererats".  Victims grow excess facial hair, sharp teeth and nails, and a complete loss of reason and humanity, becoming squealing bloodthirsty hyperactive monsters determined to rip their friends and relatives to pieces.  It might seem like a silly concept at first glance, but director Bickle presents everything in such a down-to-earth, straightforward manner, with the audience gradually realizing the seriousness of the situation along with the trapped characters, that it all works.  The performances are excellent and the affecting cast features a large number of knowable, believably flawed people trying to make the best of a horrible situation.  It's to the film's credit that it sets its action in a drab inner-city neighborhood where the residents are bored, broke, unhappy, and uncomfortable and yet resists the temptation to make any of them the kind of angry foul-mouthed stereoypes common to tenement-set movies.  The characters here have made some questionable life choices and most of them aren't especially heroic, but even the gay and bisexual characters seem like real, basically decent, human beings instead of objects of scorn or ridicule.   There's nobody here whose death you'll be cheering for, which is highly unusual in city-under-seige movies. MULBERRY STREET repeatedly kills off major sympathetic characters in shockingly sudden, unexpected bursts of violence, but since the script invests so much time in giving us insight into these people's dreary lives, there's always a genuine sense of loss that comes with each senseless death.  Some viewers may see it as a one-note killathon but it's really very well planned and constantly shocks and startles by refusing to stage its action and progression along standard Hollywood horror story lines.  The parade of gruesome demises doesn't come off as simple mean-spirited cruelty, but more as an accurate reflection of the unpredictable nature of human existence.  Here as in real life, those we know and love can always be snatched away from us in an instant, no matter how well we know them or how much we love them.  And it's that awful feeling of tragedy that makes MULBERRY STREET so devastating.  Keeping with the theme of total chaos, the movie never offers any explanation whatsoever for the plague.  No scientists, soldiers or experts ever show up to tell us how the contagion began, as the script steadfastly sticks to the point of view of a small number of confused, desperate individuals.  In a lot of horror movies that would indicate lazy writing, but in the case of MULBERRY STREET the lack of any kind of rationalism one might hang onto is the whole point.  The monster attacks copy the flickering, high-speed style of 28 DAYS LATER but the technique works better here, with crazed, infuriated victims of a rabies-like disease, than it does in the many "living dead" movies that had also put it to use by this time.   It seems unlikely that reanimated human corpses would have that much energy, ferocity and coordination, but in this context it seems perfectly fitting and truly frightening, making for one upsettingly vicious fatal attack after another even as the onscreen gore is usually kept at a minimum.  The near-humorless film does offer an occasional flash of sly wit, as when a TV news anchor announces the upcoming Address by The U.S. President, "from Bermuda"!   There are a few events that didn't quite make sense (why is one character led away by government hazmat workers in protective suits at the end while another is shot with some kind of poison dart?), but in spite of minor quibbles along similar lines MULBERRY STREET is a troubling, memorable shocker recommended to those viewers who come prepared for an immensely depressing tale of tragedy and loss.  

MUMMY THEME PARK, THE (2001)

Dir: Al Passeri (Massamiliano Cerchi).

 MUMMY'S SHROUD, THE (1967)

Dir: John Gilling

 MURDER-SET-PIECES (2004)

Dir: Nick Palumbo

If you still haven't gotten enough generic misogynistic serial killer crap, here's some more for you. It's the usual screaming-bimbos-covered-with-blood stuff, only this one is more sadistic than average. A muscular Nazi sympathizer takes glamour photos of sexy women and then rapes, slices up and kills them. Sometimes he screams at them in German. Sometimes he just shoots people. No police investigation is seen. The actor playing the killer photographer is excellent in the role. He always seems like he can barely contain his rage and acts so sullen and creepy that you'd think anybody would be scared of this guy and peg him as a threat. In this low-intellect movie, however, nobody notices how obviously crazy he is except the heroine's foul-mouthed little kid sister, who, according to movie tradition, knows more than everybody else because she's a child. In between the killings, the movie is slow and boring, with endless filler footage of people very slowly walking through the sets and cars driving around Las Vegas at night. At least the photography is good and all the flashing colorful neon signs make for some picturesque backdrops.The obvious and only goal here was to be as offensive as possible, so the women spend a lot of time screaming and crying as they're being sexually assaulted and sliced up with a straight razor. Good-looking girls with zero characterization keep coming along, stripping for the camera, and ending up bound, raped and drenched in Karo syrup blood. Determined to outdo previous sexist slasher efforts like MANIAC and NEW YORK RIPPER, this one includes scenes of little girls of about 9 years of age being graphically stabbed and sliced to ribbons onscreen too. It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to see that. There's no plot and no insight into what could realistically cause murderous urges in a man, and the ending is a frustrating, eye-rolling copout. I guess filmmaker Nick Palumbo is proud of his effort, as he appears on the DVD to presumptously call his film "the most controversial horror movie ever made".  One wonders how he got access to every horror movie controversy in history for accurate comparison. He must not be familiar with SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT, CANNIBAL FEROX, NEKROMANTIK, MANIAC, or even THE EXORCIST, all of which are movies that people have actually heard of.  Just because three film laboratories refused to process this waste of celluloid doesn't make it art, Nick. Offending people is easy. Constructing a story and creating a suspenseful mood requires talent. What's your next project?, a collection of scenes showing infants and puppies and kittens being torn to pieces? If all you want is to be noticed, I'll bet that would do it. (Note to Mr. Palumbo: That last suggestion wasn't a serious one. Please don't take notes here.)  It's sad to see Gunnar Hansen, Tony Todd and Ed Neal all making cameos in this stinker. They must have really needed to pay the rent.

 NEON MANIACS (1986)

Dir: Joseph Mangine

 NIGHT CHILD, THE (1974)

Dir: Massimo Dallamano

 NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY, THE (1999)

Dir: Jeff Burton

"The night divides the day", huh?  How did they ever come up with that clever title? Viewers who saw Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM (1960) may recall a witty scene set at a low-budget movie shoot, in which a director asked his cameraman and sound man, "Can you see it? Can you hear it?" , and then, after getting an affirmative answer to both queries, replied "Fine. Print it."  THE NIGHT DIVIDES THE DAY, an atrocious home movie shot in the woods with a camcorder, fails to meet either of these minor requirements. It's too dark, the action scenes are so hideously set up and crudely shot that you can't tell what's happening, and the sound recording is so poor that it's often impossible to understand what the characters are saying, especially with the rock soundtrack frequently drowning them out.  It's a late-entry FRIDAY THE 13TH throwback with yet another group of smug, neurotic college dillweeds heading off to a camping trip in the woods in spite of the string of horribly photographed murders plaguing the area. Most of the time people walk around in the dark and rattle off pop culture references in mumbled tones, and in fairness it should be noted that the spoken references to David Bowie, The Beatles, The Alan Parsons Project, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Edgar Allan Poe, STAR WARS and even The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy do help to ground these people in the real world much more effectively than the usual generic arguing found in most productions of this low pedigree. Some of their self-important, pseudo-intellectual little exchanges are honestly pretty funny and sound natural enough on those occasions when you can hear them. The acting and the throbbing suspense score aren't the worst you've encountered either. But there's only the bare bones of a story here, so Burton has to go out of his way to kill time with tedious filler, like unnecessary cutaways to some bad actors at a police station and a couple of pretentious segments that are supposed to represent two of the campers' "stories" told around the campfire but which aren't really stories at all, only pointless clusters of footage showing people walking around in generic spooky settings, fancied up with slo-mo, double exposures and other traditional video effects.  These segments go nowhere, mean nothing and are sure to irritate and alienate most viewers. Some of the dialogue is aimed at making you think a supernatural presence may be at work, but the killer turns out to be one of the guys (the one you'd expect), who explains his laughable "motivation" at the end with a cliche' electronically altered echoing voice.  In spite of some appreciated attempts at crafting natural sounding dialogue, this murky and completely pointless home-movie is almost unwatchable.

 NIGHT FEEDERS (2006)

Dir: Jet Ellis

It's not exactly intellectual and you can tell there wasn't a STAR WARS level budget to be thrown around, but this backwoods blue-collar monster movie is a pleasant surprise on many levels and shapes up as one of the best of its kind. Four hunters pick a very bad time and place for a weekend camping trip. Little do they know their secluded patch of North Carolina woods is crawling with carnivorous alien humanoids that just crawled out of a crashed meteor. The four-foot tall, green creatures look like classic bulbous-headed UFO aliens but with huge sharp teeth and voracious appetites for human flesh. They hate bright light and only attack when it's dark. Can the bubbas band together and stay alive until morning?  The characters are impressively portrayed as real guys who may not be rocket scientists but do have logic, loyalty and determination on their side. There's a tendency in low-budget horror to depict Southerners as hateful, trigger-happy inbreds who can't tie their own shoelaces or spell their own surnames, so it's refreshing to see a movie of this kind that credits good-ol'-boy types with human intelligence and bravery. Even the forest ranger is only doing his job, checking things out and asking to see hunting licenses instead of indulging in typical cheap movie harrassment stuff.  The best character is big fat Donnie, who keeps wishing his redneck buddies were there.  Donnie is a likable and believable guy, and I fully expected him to be the first to die because (A) he's overweight and (B) he's over 20 years old.  But NIGHT FEEDERS doesn't play it the same old Hollywood way when it comes to characters and their actions, and Donnie gets to do plenty of first-class monster whuppin' and emerges as one of the genre's most unlikely and believably human heroes.  You'll have to be ready to forgive some cheesy computer animation at the beginning when the meteor splashes down,  but the monsters are impressively presented and the gore effects are excellent and plentiful as arms and legs are bitten off, bodies are eviscerated and all sorts of bloody mayhem is seen.  The only really dumb part is when precious daylight is wasted on burying the mangled remains of the victims when the time would've been much better spent trying to reach help.  Other than that, the cast's laid-back style of acting and reactions to their predicament is realistic enough throughout to make NIGHT FEEDERS well worth the price of a rental.  It probably won't win any awards, but it was obviously made with the intention of really scaring and entertaining its audience instead of just going through the same old motions. Yay Donnie! 

 NIGHT OF HORROR (1981)

Dir: Tony Malanowski

 NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR (1985)

Dir: John Carr, Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, Philip Marshak, Gregg Tallas, Tom McGowan

 NIGHTMARE ASYLUM (1992)

Dir: Todd Sheets

A girl (the actress is credited as Lori Hassle) runs through a Halloween haunted house attraction (the "Devil's Dark Side Haunted House") screaming and blubbering for 69 minutes while various people in storebought rubber masks or greasepaint makeup chase her around and shout at her.  I have to admit that Lori does a very impressive job with all that screaming and other hysterical behavior.  She comes across as genuinely scared and confused.  But that's all there is to this wretched home movie shot with a low end camcorder.   The assorted mixed nuts who terrorize Lori imitate the bad guys from the TEXAS CHAINSAW films, sometimes quoting them word for word.   Much of the time the sound quality is so poor that you can't understand what any of them are saying.  Not that it really matters.  Most of it was probably ad-libbed.  Since it was all shot in a real haunted attraction, you get to see some decent masks, body parts, elaborate painted backdrop sets and various homemade horror props that are of mild interest.  But the photography, lighting and camerawork could scarcely be any worse.  And too much footage is wasted on  empty black hallways, fog machines and terribly cheap costumes.  When people get sawed open and disemboweled, the gory aftermaths are represented by piling some hamburger meat on their bare torsos.  I liked some of the high-energy music and there's a nice Dario Argento-inspired scene of a door being unlocked in extreme closeup, but the near-total absence of plot and characterization make this a hard feature to sit still through even at only 69 minutes.  The opening titles include the credit "Edited by The Chopper", which I can certainly believe, but the closing credits say "Edited by Blind Mello Jelly", an apparent reference to an old SANFORD AND SON episode.  The director (and I use the term loosely) also made the ZOMBIE BLOODBATH and ZOMBIE RAMPAGE video movies. 

 NIGHTMARE WEEKEND (1986)

Dir: Henry Sala

The story goes that this cheap U.S.-French shocker was repeatedly rewritten and overhauled by several financial backers with delusions of writing ability.  These included an American, a Frenchman and an Indian who all wrote chunks of it (and even rewrote each other's parts) in their own native languages without having a clear understanding of what their fellow hacks had written in the first place.  The result is an even bigger mess than you'd think.  Christine Rondhasser, who worked on a few other French films, is credited with "continuity", leading one to wonder where she was while the movie was being assembled, since there's almost no continuity in the finished product.  It's so sloppily edited and incoherently scripted that it's difficult to tell what's supposed to be happening at any given time.  The fact that the lighting and acting are awful and the photography amateurish only adds to the tedium.  There's no story structure, making it apparent that the editors went ahead and stuck together what material they had in a feeble attempt to make it resemble a story even though there clearly wasn't enough footage to assemble anything even semi-coherent.  The situation (you can't call it a "plot") has to do with a dimwit college girl who spends a weekend at the mansion of her scientist father.  By an astounding coincidence, several of her bimbo friends from campus have been invited there too, to take part in some kind of ridiculous mind control experiments. Nobody seems to know what anyone else is thinking or doing in this movie, but the scientist has an evil female assistant who plans to sell his preposterous invention to an unspecified criminal.  She's a rude, hateful, horrible person but she's had sex with several of the male cast members, so she's able to get away with murder.  There are too many characters to keep track of and most of them have no semblance of personality, so after a while it gets pretty tough to sort out what's happening to whom and why.  The mind-altering experiment, one of the most improbable in sci-fi history, is supposed to cure patients of paranoia and is run by a cheap looking computer operated by a mechanized hand puppet named George.  George, who has green yarn hair and a green nose, would be rejected from MISTER ROGERS' NEIGHBORHOOD for not being realistic enough.  Apparently he was created by the scientist to be a childhood companion to his whiny, selfish daughter.  He still gives her helpful advice in adulthood, like suggesting that she impress a local doofus (Dale Midkiff, who went on to PET SEMATARY) by putting on a white dress and hitchhiking.  Much time is wasted on footage of disco dancing and girl-watching, but when people arrive at the mansion, the idiotic experiments begin.  The computer is somehow able to transform people's  "personal objects" into little silver balls that fly through the air (mostly offscreen, as this would have required an effect) and land in victims' mouths.  The affected parties then either die from a severe case of exploding face or turn into either passive lobotomized zombies or else deranged killers.  The editing is so terrible and the effects so totally inadequate that the viewer is most often left to guess what's supposed to be taking place.  George the puppet wants to protect the scientist's daughter, which leads to a would-be rapist getting his face melted in a pond.  When the computer is used to play video games, it inexplicably takes control of real cars nearby and causes them to crash into trees.  A nervous maid sees a tarantula in the kitchen and is so startled that she has to immediately lunge for her big cup of scalding hot coffee. One guy fondles a girl's underpants, whereupon they spring up and attack him.  I'd like to be able to report that NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is so bad it's good, but even with all the crazy stuff that happens, it's ultimately too dark and boring to be much fun.  At least it's a bad movie that's bad in a way all its own.  I dare you to sit through the whole thing without using the good old Fast Forward button.  The director has no other official credits but it is said that he'd shot some pornography in Thailand.

 NINE LIVES (2002)

Dir: Andrew Green

 NO SURVIVORS, PLEASE (1963)

Dir: Hans Albin, Peter Berneis

 NUN, THE (2006)

Dir: Luis De La Madrid

In a plot that very closely parallels that of John Irvin's Peter Straub adaptation GHOST STORY (1981), a group of middle-aged women are hunted down and killed by the malignant spirit of a cruel, hateful nun whose accidental death in a bathtub they caused at a Catholic school back in their teen years. The former students die in ways inspired by a series of paintings of the deaths of various patron saints that hang in a school hallway. A teenage girl goes to the now-closed school in Barcelona with a few friends to solve the mystery behind her mother's gruesome death. Top-drawer special effects carry the story along as the ghost, whose body was disposed of in a pond 18 years before, appears in the form of trickling drops and puddles of water that merge to form her scary zombie-faced spirit. The visuals are remarkable in their realism, especially when the ghost-made-of-water splashes right through people. After the Japanese influence of THE RING and DARK WATER made mysterious pools and drips of water an official harbinger of supernatural manifestations, this kind of imagery became common in ghost movies. The imagery here is heavily indebted to those films, but at least they did a first-rate job of making it look real.  In a huge speculative leap, a character deduces that the ghost needs to manifest herself in water since that's where she died, and since weapons and solid objects pass right through her semi-liquid spectral form, he assumes that if they can get her to materialize completely underwater she will be solid enough to be (re-)killed.  No, it doesn't make much sense in the movie either. The characters behave fairly realistically most of the time, with only a couple of instances in which they have to make really poor judgments in order to place themselves in danger.  The film becomes too complicated near the end, as the plot gets sodden with a flood of last-minute revelations, some of which you'll have figured out by the halfway mark and at least one that seems thrown in as an afterthought. THE NUN probably goes on for a bit too long in its climactic battle (more scary parts and less talk would have been welcome), but it's still a better than average ghost movie with a slick professional look, a few good shocks and a fairly tight little story.