ONE MILLION B.C. (1940)

Dirs: Hal Roach, Hal Roach Jr.

 ONE MISSED CALL (2008)

Dir: Eric Vallette

Another American remake of a Japanese movie, only this time they remade one that was derivative to begin with.  If the RING, PULSE and GRUDGE movies had never been made, the people behind this project would have been left with a blank screen for 95 minutes.  It closely copies the structure of both RING and PULSE, adding nothing new beyond the fact that the haunted communications media device this time around is the cell phone as opposed to RING's videotapes or PULSE's computers.  The usual blandly attractive college kids are dying mysteriously after getting spooky cell phone calls from dead acquaintances, but you won't care much because none of them have any more personality than the teens in the worst of the old FRIDAY THE 13TH and HALLOWEEN sequels.  The other J-horror tales mentioned above offered audiences a little something to think about by making a try for some kind of internal logic to their supernatural premises, but any attempt to sort out the events in ONE MISSED CALL will ultimately fail because the plot just doesn't hold up to scrutiny, a fatal flaw in a film built as a gradually unfolding mystery and packed with what appear to be legitimate clues to the diabolical chain of events.  It's all impeccably shot and lighted and well-made enough most of the way through that you might get the impression an actual story is being told, but in the end nothing is explained adequately and there's no point in trying to figure it out because the plot is full of holes the size of Bronson Cavern.  I still don't know why the length of time between getting the otherworldly call and the victim's forecasted demise was different in each case, nor why no one ever got the idea to simply not listen to the calls from beyond. (I'm not saying that would have saved them, but it would have made the situation a little more plausible if they had at least thought of that option.)   There also doesn't seem to be any logic behind the choice of victims.  They were all people whose numbers were stored on somebody's cell phone but beyond that there's no reason why each specific person is singled out for death.  Since this came along post-RING, the antagonist is another creepy little dead girl with a white face who murders people just because she's bad.  The home she used to live in was adorned with scary looking zombie-faced figurines, another strange detail that would have benefitted from an explanation.  The clues, such as they are, lead to a movie-style, burnt-out abandoned hospital that is easily broken into and still has working electricity.  The finale, which involves a good ghost sucking a bad ghost into a cell phone while unexplained black dirt flies through the air and makes a mess of those present, doesn't make sense on any level and will only leave you wondering if you somehow blacked out and missed a half hour of the movie at some point.  The core idea is that all the victims are cell phone users, and it's hard to completely dislike any movie that includes so many scenes of people throwing their cell phones down and stomping them to bits, then kicking the bits down sewer grates or tearing them apart and throwing them into fish tanks.  In a ridiculous scene, a pet cat is killed even though I never saw the cat answer any cell phone call or play back any message that consisted of ominous spooky meowing.  As far as I could tell, the cat didn't even own a cell phone, but it dies anyway in one of the movie's desperate attempts to be scary.  Most of the shocks consist of shadowy figures swooshing into camera range accompanied by a loud HRROOOMPH! on the soundtrack.  Some of the discordant, warped music is effective but this kind of scare tactic was getting very old by 2008.  You also get to see some CGI-enhanced images of people with smeared, distorted ghoul faces (they don't provide a real clue to the mystery) and some ill-advised ghost's-POV shots in which you can see Pepe LePew-style stink lines emanating from each new victim shortly before his or her death.  Some of the murders are committed physically by the ghost, but others are accidents in the FINAL DESTINATION vein.  And if the killer ghost is a child, then whose big masculine looking hand was that reaching out of the water in the opening scene?  It's a shame the director and crew spent so much money and went to so much trouble to stage certain scenes and to work in a few relatively chilling moments, when they were starting out with this little in the way of a plot and with next to nothing in mind in terms of characterization.  It looks great but this story has all been told before, far more coherently and effectively.   

OTHER SIDE, THE (2006)

Dir: Gregg Bishop

Highly recommended horror-action movie made for only $15,000.   College grad Sam North is killed by an unseen assailant while waiting for a secret rendezvous with his girlfriend.  ER doctors revive his body just as his soul escapes from hell.  Nearby in the morgue, several corpses suddenly spring to life, inhabited by the souls of other fugitives from "the pit" who hope to redeem themselves and finagle their way into heaven by helping the hero find out who killed him and why, and to learn exactly what prevented his missing fiancee from keeping their date.  Sam and his determined companions go on the run, pursued not only by the police but by three ruthless undead killers called "reapers" (a term that is seriously overused in horror fiction from this period), damned souls who are almost impossible to kill since they can hop from one dead body into another.  Our beleaguered hero has to find his missing mate (of whose murder he is now suspected), evade the cops, dodge bullets from the heavily armed reapers and figure out what connection his brother has to the strange events.  THE OTHER SIDE invents its own clever new set of rules for a supernatural tale and then has the courage and intelligence to stick to them, making for a very satisfying story.  The bewildered lead character is quite believable and his newfound cronies stand out as an amusing and always watchable blend of strength, humor and tragedy.  Some of the acting isn't exactly Oscar-worthy, but this movie is still an amazing achievement considering the low budget.  It contains more realistic human emotion and sharper internal logic than most of its big-budget Hollywood contemporaries.  There are funny running jokes about a pit escapee whose sex-obsessed behavior threatens to get in the way of his mission and a reaper whose black hat is seen rolling away every time he gets clobbered.  Even with all the fantasy elements, the script has a pretty good grip on true religious faith and incorporates it into the workings of the plot without coming across as preachy.  The editing, pacing and even the fake blood compares to A-list movies.  One minor flaw is the quick clips of lost souls in the afterlife struggling with what looks like a runaway roll of Saran Wrap.   And I assume it's a joke that the heroine is named Hanna and works at a diner called Montana's.  But with this much slam-bang action and a stable of unusually well thought-out characters spouting witty dialogue, the film never dwells on anything too long and never wears out its welcome.  You eventually get intelligent answers to all the facets of the mystery and, as icing on the cake, the movie even comes with an actual, honest-to-goodness ending, an asset missing from the vast majority of horror films from 2006.  A true rarity: an independently financed horror project that focuses on real storytelling instead of going for easy shocks.  Don't miss it.

 PANIC BEATS (1982)

Dir: Jacinto Molina ("Paul Naschy")

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007)

Dir: Oren Peli

It's surprising that Paramount saw fit to release this hollow home-video timewaster as though it were a real movie. If you're very young, very impressionable, terribly superstitious, or just haven't seen many horror films, you might get a shudder or two out of it. All others will be unlikely to find much entertainment value in this predictable non-story. In the tiresome and over-used BLAIR WITCH PROJECT tradition, it's yet another cheap attempt to generate realism the easy way: by presenting its content as nonprofessional video footage. Agonizingly slow and repetitious, it's about young Katie, a bland nutjob who moves into a house with her co-dependent nutjob boyfriend. Katie has been periodically terrorized since childhood by an invisible demon who presumably remains invisible in order to eliminate the need for makeup, special effects, or production techniques more complex than keeping a spare camcorder battery on hand. The boyfriend, who seems to toggle between skeptic and believer from scene to scene, is determined to capture proof of the evil spirit's existence and thus sets up his trusty camcorder in their bedroom. Cue endless footage of a bed as seen from the corner of a room, occasionally enlivened by such fresh and original spectral phenomena as a door creaking open or an unexplained thumping noise. Although there are a few moments when PARANORMAL ACTIVITY flirts with legitimate storytelling and thereby threatens to finally kick into gear and turn interesting, every clue goes unexplored and goes nowhere. At one point an old photograph is found in a place where it shouldn't be. So what? An online search reveals that a woman in another city suffered the exact same trauma as the heroine some 50 years earlier. So what? A psychic pays a visit and states that his area of expertise is with ghosts, not demons. So what? A sprinkling of talcum powder on the floor is found to contain mysterious foorprints the next morning. So what? Katie sleepwalks and repeatedly stands frozen in one spot for hours during the night. So what? Rather than shoot for anything as ambitious as a plot, the project simply stumbles its way to the typical depressing ending that so many indy horror filmmakers confuse with real scariness. I hate to spoil the end of a story, but since no story is featured here I'll go ahead and warn viewers that PARANORMAL ACTIVITY actually ends with the growling, possessed girl jumping up toward the camera. If anything any less creative could possibly have been done for a final shot, I can't imagine what it could be. She might as well have shouted "Boo!" There's an alternate ending too, but it doesn't make any real difference in the course of the standard no-hope scenario. A strong online good promotional campaign got this weak chunk of cheese a lot of undeserved attention and helped it to speedily gain a reputation as some kind of modern classic. As with BLAIR WITCH, some perople were duped into believing it was all a true story. But don't be fooled. It's just one more undistinguished entry in the string of camcorder-themed attempts to kickstart some film careers by delivering a few startling moments.

 PENNY DREADFUL (2006)

Dir: Richard Brandes

The cleverest thing about this one is its title.  Released as part of the After Dark Horrorfest collection, this slick looking but vacuous slasher film is so bereft of logic that it borders on being insulting.  Rachel Miner is excellent as neurotic teenager Penny, a girl with a crippling fear of automobiles triggered by the gruesome road accident that killed her parents.  Some viewers complained that she was too whiny and melodramatic, but that's the way the character was written and Miner's performance is perfect, making this traumatized, hopelessly self-involved, paranoid girl seem very believable.  Her intense performance is about the only thing that might keep you watching.  She goes on an ill-advised, unlikely trip through the CA mountains with her female therapist as a means to finally overcome her fear of cars.  We keep hearing about a big snowstorm that's coming, but it never arrives.  You might wonder how a middle-aged professional woman could think it was a good idea to take a kid alone into a remote region in which a blizzard is expected, but that's one of the movie's lesser implausibilities.  The bulk of the film is spent with Penny trapped inside the car being terrorized by that reliable old cheap horror standby, The Escaped Murderer.  How this person got from the nuthouse to a mountain road that's miles from anywhere is anyone's guess. The script tosses logic to the four winds in order to make Penny's ordeal as torturous as possible, frequently ignoring the laws of physics to do so.  This is the kind of story that requires its protagonist to slip in and out of consciousness at just the right times in order to let villains carry out their evil deeds.  The biggest affront to common sense is the very nature of the girl's predicament: She awakes to find the car jammed between two trees that are squeezing its doors shut, a situation that would have been impossible for the killer to arrange.  Overlooking the fact that the on-the-run psycho just happened to know where there were two trees positioned at exactly the right distance apart to fit this particular car, I'd like to know how this feat was managed.  The car couldn't have been simply pushed between the trees, since it was left in park, and if it had been driven there, the killer couldn't have gotten out.   The heroine gruesomely loses a toe at one point but the intense pain, shock and severe blood loss this would cause is ignored.  The movie kills time with empty detours about some guy cheating on his wfie and other filler that only ties in to the main situation in that they provide a few random people for the killer to stab.   The big surprise twist at the end is that the psycho is a woman, but so what?  Big deal. This revelation makes no difference in terms of anything else in the movie and feels like a desperate attempt to tack on something unexpected, even if it's of no consequence.  She's still just a killing machine with no particular identity, stabbing everyone who gets near her for no reason other than that she's Crazy.  The last straw is PENNY DREADFUL'S failure to come up with an ending.  The movie concludes with one of the lamest "the killer's still kickin'" codas ever, which might make you realize how the last half-hour or so contained about half a dozen other points at which the film could've easily ended without having any effect on its overall content.  The cinematography is fine and the music and lighting work to good effect, but this slight "story" would barely fill a TALES FROM THE CRYPT timeslot and has to move in extra-slow speed to fill 90 minutes.  It's too bad the filmmakers were focused so intently on crafting an exercise in suspense that they couldn't be bothered show a bit more respect for viewer intelligence or to devise anything like a point or an ending, because this could have been a winner if it had demonstrated that Penny actually learned anything from her ordeal.  Just like its featured automobile, this story just sits in one spot for nearly the whole time and never does actually go anywhere.

 PERFUME OF THE WOMAN IN BLACK, THE (1974)

Dir: Francesco Barilli

 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, THE (1962)

Dir: Terence Fisher

After scoring big with updatings of Frankenstein, Dracula and Werewolf movies, Britain's Hammer Films decided to have a go at the Phantom too. Unfortunately their take on this tale resulted in an unpopular, rather dull outing that made too many changes to Gaston Leroux's original story to retain much of its mood or even its narrative. The reviewer who covered this movie for Phil Hardy's Aurum Encyclopedia Of Horror Films bizarrely stated that it was "closer to" Leroux's story than the 1925 or '43 versions, but that writer must have never actually read the book.  The earlier film vrsions took some liberties, but by this time there was very little of the original story left at all.  In this curious variation on the tale, the Phantom (here renamed Professor Petrie) is actually a likable sort. He never does anything so terrible and is so much a victim of circumstance that he comes off as a pitiful old man who's an interesting character in his own right but is nothing like the deranged Erik of whom Leroux wrote.  And he's not the least bit scary.  His creepy one-eyed face mask is suitably chilling, but this poor old guy is too sad and humble to inspire any fear. The real villains in this movie are Michael Gough as the arrogant, unscrupulous Lord Ambrose D'Arcy, who never has a single redeeming moment or feature, and a cliche' homicidal hunchbacked mute added to the story presumably to lend a hand since the film's Phantom is too feeble and sympathetic to carry out any murders or other crimes himself. ("I have no idea who he is", explains the Phantom, along with the screenwriter.) Even when the hunchback kills peripheral characters, it is never made clear that he was carrying out orders from the Phantom, so one must assume that he just enjoys murdering folks for no reason.  Heroine Christine is played by Heather Sears, who isn't especially attractive, struts through the movie in a variety of hideously unflattering hairdos, and never registers the slightest spark of any sort of personality other than being a generic Nice Girl.  Her handsome suitor is wooden even by Hammer hero standards, and with the Phantom showing up only occasionally and never doing anything that would really frighten anybody, the movie loses its focus.  Director Terence Fisher apparently thought of this tale as a romance, but there's so little in the way of insightful dialogue beteween the characters that nothing on the screen would lead one to think the old Professor has any particular feelings for the girl at all, apart from an appreciation of her (obviously dubbed) singing voice. He certainly never says or does anything to make us think he's in love with Christine, and never even objects to her having a proper boyfriend.  Even the Phantom's backstory is botched, as we're told he was disfigured after accidentally splashing himself in the face with nitric acid while trying to burn Gough's pirated printings of his music. The ending is a huge disappointment, as Gough's evil D'Arcy, after spending the whole film making life miserable for all those around him, never gets his comeuppance (he catches a glimpse of the Phantom and runs away) and the hunchback jumps onto the chandelier while trying to evade a workman who's seen him, which causes the chandelier's support chain to break, at which point Lom tears off his own mask for no good reason, tosses it aside, and leaps under the falling chandelier to push the dimwitted, slow-to-act Christine out of its way, getting crushed by it himself in the process.  None of this has much to do with the source material beyond the use of a few basic elements, and the film as a whole is easily one of Hammer's least satisfying efforts.

 PHOBIAS (2003)

Dir: Robert J. Massetti

Two short SOV projects are stuck together to make something resembling a feature, but the distributors had to stretch the opening titles and end credits out to absurd lengths in order to make this reach its barely feature length 75 minutes. In the first tale, a young woman kills her abusive redneck husband (she stabs him repeatedly with a kitchen knife, immediately after which her hands look like she dipped them into a bucket of red paint).  She ends up staying at the home of a stranger who uses a fake name and British accent for reasons that the writer is unable to explain. The mysterious, superficially helpful fellow thinks he has her trapped into confessing, but because of the careless nature of the writing he actually has no real evidence on her whatsoever. This segment gives it a good try in terms of camerawork and editing, but the story contains holes large enough to invite truck traffic and nobody's motivations or actions are the least bit realistic.  Neither is the stage blood.  The other bit is one of those "is he dreaming or isn't he?" things in the manner of JACOB'S LADDER, but it is completely without any point or real sense of focus. You figure there's a 50-50 chance the guy is already dead, and then it turns out he is.  Big surprise.  A couple of nice tries in the visuals department, but PHOBIAS is quickly down without a fight due to uninspired writing.  It might be nice to see these same people make another horror feature, but next time one hopes they will start out with some material that's worth shooting instead of this juvenile stuff. 

 

 PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, THE (1973)

Dir: Glenn Jordan

 PLASTERHEAD (2006)

Dir: Kevin Higgins

Meet Plasterhead, another idiot serial killer and pretender to the Leatherface throne.  A somber, overacting guy on the radio warns people to stay away from Plasterhead's turf but then refuses to reveal where that is and eventually just says that he could be anywhere.  Plasterhead is this big dumb truck driver, you see, who was beaten and left for dead by a gang of rednecks in a small community in West Virginia.  They did something to him that mangled his face but we're never told exactly what that was. At the beginning he is shown with a face that looks like a pile of wet, pulpy raw meat, and it's anyone's guess what they might have done to the poor guy to cause such a disfigurement. He covers his mutilated mug with a poor man's copy of Jason's hockey mask, which he makes out of a convenient handful of plaster bandages.  It seems unlikely that a truck driver would have access to the proper materials for that or know how to use them, but, whatever. Although his flesh is completely shredded at the beginning, once he starts clomping around in his plaster mask you can see that his ears, neck, back of the head and even the tip of his nose look completely normal.  Some dopey quarelling teens from The Big City find a backpack with someone's address written inside, and against all logic it turns out to be the home of the killer.  The town suffers not only from a series of easily solved but strangely uninvestigated murders committed by Plasterhead but also from an epidemic of the worst attempts at Southern accents ever recorded.  The corrupt sheriff, who sounds like a New Jersey thug with a speech impediment, threatens and kills people who rub him the wrong way.  Even though everyone knows he covered up the beating and let Plasterhead's attackers get off scott free, the unmotivated killer waits fifteen years to chop into the guy, and then it's only because he finally got around to wandering through Plasterhead's house in the dark.   At one point we're told about the many unsolved deaths and disappearances in the surrounding area, but later the sheriff says the town has been completely peaceful up until the movie's carload of generic teen victims came along.  For no apparent reason, the killer picks the night of the kids' arrival to finally stagger into town and bump off the innocent dunderheads who run the local diner.  Back at the house, the murderer smashes in a window to get to one screaming victim, yet the other people inside the same structure don't hear a thing.  Nothing in this silly movie makes any sense or even feels like it's taking place in the real world, including the absurdly repetitive scenes of slashed, hacked-up victims who drop and later get back up and crawl around a while before dying.  One girl suffers a sizable stab wound in her side.  The large open wound never bleeds, and after a lengthy scene in which she crawls away (being gouged in the side apparently rendered her unable to walk), she ends up actually pulling herself up with the arm right above the supposed mortal injury.   You'd think her natural reaction would be to at least put her hand over the big hole in her abdomen, but that doesn't seem to occur to her.  People who get injured in PLASTERHEAD tend to go instantly insane instead of reacting to the pain you'd think they would be feeling.   The soundtrack is good and creepy, but a horror movie can't get by on just a spooky score when everything else in it is so ridiculous.  This backyard feature is definitely more of a laughing matter than a screaming one.

 POLAR EXPRESS, THE (2004)

Dir: Robert Zemeckis

This computer-animated holiday film was a delightful surprise, combining breathtakingly beautiful imagery, touching sentiment, thrilling action and plenty of Christmas spirit.  I was not familiar with the children's book on which the film is based, but I can enthusiastically recommend this gorgeous feature as one of the best Christmas movies ever produced.  Sadly, it didn't make the killing at the boxoffice that its makers were hoping for.  Why not?  My own theory is that they jumped the gun a bit in releasing it a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving.  Don't yuletide films usually open on Thanksgiving week or weekend, a time when people traditionally have a day or two off, which many of them spend going shopping and going to theaters?  I don't think most people are quite in the mood for Christmas movies until Thanksgiving (or, as it is now more commonly known in America, "Biggest Shopping Day Of The Year Eve").  Now that so many people have seen THE POLAR EXPRESS so early in the season, it might never have a chance to catch up money-wise and make the bazillion dollars it deserves.  If I had to find a flaw, it would be the fact that the CG children never have the spark of life that real actors would have provided; all the faces are rendered with incredible attention to detail, skintones, mouth movement, etc., but they still suffer from a strange dead look in the eyes, rather like the eyes of people who are severely mentally handicapped or perhaps heavily drugged.  But it's still a beautiful movie overall, and after the first couple of minutes I got accustomed to the blank-eyed look of the people on board and found myself so impressed with virtually everything else that it no longer bothered me.  Some of the explanations given for the details of how Santa Claus could really pull off his fantastic feat every year are brilliantly thought-out and presented in a way that should be accessible to even very young children without ever becoming too silly or simplified for adults.  (I for one have never seen any Santa story before that, logically, depicted an entire city of elves, as opposed to the house-sized workshop and two dozen or so helpers most holiday TV specials provide poor old Mr. C. with!)  There's a dark side to life in this story, and the way in which it is touched upon makes for a movie that's quite involving and even likely to bring a tear to the eye of many.  This film deserves to become a holiday perennial on TV, hopefully supplanting to some degree the tired and over-exposed piece of Capra-corn IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  I'm not normally much for sentimental flicks, but THE POLAR EXPRESS is really moving, in more ways than one.

 PREYLIEN: ALIEN PREDATORS (2004)

Dirs: John Polonia, Mark Polonia

It's hard to believe we've reached a stage at which people are making even cheaper versions of old Don Dohler movies, but here's a copy of Dohler's late 70's monsterfest THE ALIEN FACTOR, made with such a lack of conviction that it makes that old drive-in item look like STAR WARS.  Prepare yourself for the most embarrassingly phony aliens since KILLERS FROM SPACE (1954), as a crashed spaceship (the wreckage looks like a construction site) disgorges some bloodthirsty monsters and the alien hunter in charge of their capture. The main threat is a guy in a nondescript tan monster mask, a gorilla suit with the legs ripped out in the middle, a padded vest, and a pair of bright green rubber hands. This killer beast wouldn't cut it at a reasonably sophisticated Halloween party.  Along for the ride are two other creatures: A one-eyed, snaggletoothed hand puppet and a floating eyeball with tentacles and a tendency to keep meowing until the annoyed hand puppet eats it. The eyeball thing is actually pretty creatively designed (if inadequately wrought) and one wishes they had spent more time on this interestingly Lovecraftian creation instead of quickly killing it off and then devoting endless footage to shots of the guy wearing the mismatched mask-hands-fur suit embarrassment lumbering around.  The hunter alien is a guy in a hunting vest and snowmobiler's mask, and his toy ray gun causes bursts that make the image flash to negative for a few frames (a simple effect that can be done with most home camcorders).  Even though his blasts have no effect on the monster, he continues to fire away at it, losing both a substantial amount of ammo and audience patience. The human characters are two guys and an obese suicidal widow, who is at least an unusual heroine. Other cameo victims show up for acts of monster-related violence, but when heads and arms are torn off, nobody bleeds!  Apparently the budget didn't extend to a bottle of Karo syrup and some red food color. The editing is so poor that the ground constantly changes from white and snow-covered to fall and leafy every few shots, and nearly the entire feature is just people walking around in the leaves and/or snow. The culprits behind this tedious non-movie are the Polonia Brothers, who call themselves experts in "micro cinema" and whose combined lack of talent and imagination make them the two-man Andy Milligan of the 21st century. Heck, even Milligan's films were unusual enough to allow for some discussion and analysis, but the Polonia's work remains consistently free of the slightest iota of inspiration, suspense or realism. Other equally unbearable home-videos by these guys include NIGHTCRAWLERS, RAZORTEETH and THE DINSOAUR CHRONICLES. Even if you enjoy backyard projects, you'll have a tough time sitting through any of these depressingly unimaginative stinkers.

 PROJECTED MAN, THE (1966)

Dir: Ian Curteis

PSYCHO SANTA (2003)

Dir: Peter Keir

Making a worse Christmas-themed slasher movie than 1996's SANTA CLAWS might have seemed like an impossible task, but this backyard bore manages to be even more tedious and puerile. Playing like something cut together from scraps, it offers barely enough content for a decent prologue, much less an entire movie. Thus every scene goes on three or four times longer than it should have in order to make the finished product reach feature length. Most of PSYCHO SANTA is bland footage of various victims standing around, sitting around or wandering around while absolutely nothing happens. It's all too easy to call a cheap slasher film 'boring' but the lengths to which empty walking-'n'-stalking sequences are stretched in PSYCHO SANTA is remarkable, if not incredible. If a 10-year-old made his own horror film, believing nothing more than shots of people walking through a forest, a junkyard or an ordinary house while the viewer knows there's a killer at large would be sufficient to generate suspense, the result might look a lot like this. A halfwit named Chris with a burned-up face (evidently he's so ugly they didn't dare give audiences a clear look at him) shuffles around with a machete and clad in a Santa suit he stole from a confused Salvation Army volunteer who was standing and ringing his bell out in the dark at the end of a row of motel rooms with no one else in sight. (How would you like to be the poor soul trying to sleep in that last room?) Whenever he hears 'Silent Night' he stops dead in his tracks and drops his weapon for a few moments, although this angle goes underused. The people in this movie (I can't bring myself to refer to them as characters) all seem mentally challenged and none of them is capable of making an intelligent decision. Many of the interminable stalking scenes don't culminate in an attack or anything else; they simply stop, after which a guy in a car tells his wife that this or that victim was the next to be killed. Once in a while, though, the killer swings his machete in the air and some vacuous extra is seen with some red paint smeared across his or her neck or chest. Other than that, there's nothing in the way of makeup effects except a few glimpses of leftover Halloween props like a fake cut-off head. One girl gets slashed in the shoulder, falls down and spends the next five minutes slowly dragging herself across the floor by her hands, inexplicably unable to walk though her only sign of injury is three ounces of blood trickled down a six-inch area from her shoulder onto her chest. Nobody bleeds anywhere near enough to look like they've really been cut, and what blood there is never looks particularly convincing. At the end, the filmmakers finally present a scene that was a foregone conclusion after the first five minutes and the credits roll. They weren't even trying with this one. It's about as bad as slasher films get.

 PUMPKIN KARVER, THE (2006)

Dir: Robert Mann

 PUMPKINHEAD: ASHES TO ASHES (2006)

Dir: Jake West

PUMPKINHEAD: BLOOD FEUD (2006)

Dir: Mike Hurst

The fourth movie in the PUMPKINHEAD series is a vast improvement over Parts 2 and 3 (although that's faint praise indeed).  If it's possible to be both clever and dumb at the same time, this sequel accomplishes just that by using the infamous feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans as the basis of Pumpkinhead's latest rampage.  Romania (where filmmaking is cheap) makes for a strange looking version of the American south, but at least it gives the film an interesting, atmospheric look.  The warring families are busy ruining each other's lives as part of their business as usual, but the mean, violent rednecks on both sides are unaware that a McCoy son and a Hatfield daughter have fallen in love a la Romeo and Juliet.  When the lovestruck McCoy boy's innocent sister is killed during a run-in with the most vicious members of the enemy camp, he determines to wipe out the Hatfield clan once and for all...with the help of everyone's favorite supernatural instrument of revenge, the demonic Pumpkinhead.  The creature is summoned and sent on its grandest killing spree yet, instructed to wipe out all the members of the Hatfield family except the guy's girlfriend.  Why he thinks she'll still love him after he's had her entire family slaughtered is hard to figure out, but there you have it.  The bitter ghost of Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen, excellent as usual) tries to prevent the ensuing horror but the stubborn kid won't listen and soon Pumpkinhead is eagerly crushing more bumpkin heads than ever before.  There's plenty of gore as the various nuts and bolts of the Hatfield clan get clawed to ribbons, decapitated, disemboweled and otherwise messily dispatched by the hard-working monster.  Most of the characters are pretty unsympathetic at first but it's to the writer and director's credit that once they come under siege you actually start to feel sorry for them in spite of their bad behavior.  Once everyone figures out what's really going on, a cold aura of real dread kicks in. The acting, characterization and effects are consistently impressive and the movie has more suspense and a darker mood than the two previous installments. The sense of grand tragedy missing from those sequels is back and even the plot mostly makes sense this time.  Perhaps the worst gap in logic is the local sheriff's inexplicable failure to stop the monster when he gets an opportunity.  Since he knows the "rules" surrounding Pumpkinhead, he really should have seen his chance when it came along.  (You'll know the scene I'm referring to.)  The monster looks the same as in Part 3 (ASHES TO ASHES), with which this was filmed back-to-back.  The climax probably goes overboard with the strobelike lightning effect (especially since it isn't raining) but at least it's stylish.  PUMPKINHEAD: BLOOD FEUD might not be as memorable as the original 1988 film but it's a very watchable, solid monster movie just the same.             

 RAVEN, THE (2006)

Dir: Ulli Lommel

This unfathomable mess would be hilarious in its pretentiousness if it wasn't such an affront to the memory of Edgar Allan Poe (whose name is misspelled in the closing credits) and to his millions of fans.  Ulli Lommel's movies were never anything one would call outstanding, but his older works (THE TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES, THE BOOGEY MAN, THE DEVONSVILLE TERROR, etc.) tended to be at least mildly interesting on some level. Not so with this shot-on-digital-video slasher movie that offers viewers nothing but a flavorless lump of indigestible imagery devoid of any real meaning. A female singer named Lenore (naturally) has dreams about Skinner, a crazy thug who goes around stabbing women to death. He once raped her and she killed him but he's back anyway. The emotionless knife-wielding ripper has a shaved head, fake plastic fingernails and the ugliest pants seen in any film released since 1973.  He mutters sub-par Mad Killer gibberish, which is usually spelled out right on the screen in twitchy red letters.  Lenore, who grew up obsessed with Poe and thinks the black bird of the title is some kind of guardian spirit sent to protect her, is crazier than a bedbug herself.  Skinner stabs all her backup singers and other friends in broad daylight in the middle of a city but nobody ever sees him because the other characters in this movie are all as stupid and oblivious as Lenore.  He drags the corpses out to an open field somewhere but nobody ever sees him do that either.  He repeatedly makes bloody messes of his victims but when he drags their bodies away there's never even a trail of blood to follow.  Sometimes Edgar Allan Poe stands around looking worried, presumably trying to help out with the script.  Most of the movie is just a randomly edited series of hyper-fast cuts that annoyingly fling empty, would-be artsy images at the viewer.  Most of the time it's the same few images shown over and over again, like quick shots of telephone poles accompanied by a jacob's ladder sound effect or a flock of black birds in the sky.  The acting and dialogue are beneath consideration and the ending is an incomprehensible continuation of the same nonsense that's been wasting the audience's time throughout the rest of the film.  If this pile of pretentious drivel had been cobbled together by some self-indulgent film school nerd just starting out in the movie business, it would at least be somewhat forgivable.  For it to have come from a man who has been working in movies for over three decades is appalling. Lommel must have either been completely senile at the time or else doing a very poor job of imitating the way he thinks young horror directors make films circa 2006, with lots of repetitious high-speed cutaways and random plotting.  Even the most pompous "art film" eggheads will find this one difficult to defend.   The background score, oddly enough, is excellent. It was wasted on this claptrap and should be re-used in connection with a real movie some time. 

REDEEMER, THE (1978)

Dir: Constantine S. Gochis

Retitled CLASS REUNION MASSACRE for its early '80s VHS release so it could ride the coattails of the holiday- or event-themed slasher hits, kicked off by John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN, that were so big at the time (MY BLOODY VALENTINE, PROM NIGHT, GRADUATION DAY and others), this is rather different. Quite a bit of the story does indeed focus on former classmates being murdered at a class reunion, but this metaphysical, borderline surreal movie has more going on than that. Short on exposition and explanations, it opens with a young boy (presumably from hell) rising out of a lake. Sporting a strange second thumb on his left hand, he silently sets out on foot (it should be noted that he has a very creepy walk) and is promptly picked up by a bus (also presumably from hell) that takes him to a nearby community, where he apparently enslaves and possesses a priest (played by an English teacher named T. G. Finkbinder). The extra thumb now appears on the hand of the priest, who prepares for an elaborate faux reunion set up to lure six "sinful" characters to their deaths. If the boy is indeed the son of the devil (some prints bore the title THE REDEEMER: SON OF SATAN!), it's funny how he goes to such an incredible amount of trouble just to bump off a half-dozen people who all seem utterly insignifcant and, in some cases, not even particularly "sinful". Some of them are at least unappealing, like the greedy lawyer and the heartless rich woman. But one poor slob, doomed for the sin of gluttony, isn't even particularly fat. He just eats a lot of cheeseburgers. Other alleged evildoers lured to the slaughter include a woman who wears too much makeup and a lesbian. Pretty wicked, huh? Which makes it all a bit hard to tell exactly where the devil stands in all this. For one thing, he should like sinners, shouldn't he? But anyway... the six graduates of the Stuart Morse Academy meet grisly deaths at the hand of the possessed clergyman, who plays to the back row as he rants and raves, appearing in a different disguise (for no good reason) each time he appears. At various times he dresses as a clown, a puppet, a hunter, a heavily-made-up vampirelike character, and a Grim Reaper in a Don Post Studios Skull mask (the same model that would later be featured prominently in HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH). The acting and dialogue are unspectacular but they get the job done, and some of the kills are quite extreme for a feature shot in 1977. One man is burned alive with a flamethrower, another is brutally stabbed in the head, and in a prolonged and violent sequence a woman is mercilessly thrown around and battered before being drowned in a sink. Some of the kills must have shocked 1978 audiences, but horror-hungry video renters who found this obscure independent production later on were doubtless disappointed by the fact that no fewer than three of the victims are simply shot to death. The slasher films that were around when this made its home video debut were delighting gorehounds with much more unique and creative deaths than THE REDEEMER offers, although the nastiest of them are still pretty nasty even today. After a total of eight people (one of whom doesn't appear to have been guilty of anything) die violently, that weird extra thumb disappears from the hand of the priest and shows up back on the kid, who lopes back into the lake and disappears. It is never clear just how much the priest was actually aware of during the time of his possession, nor why, out of all the bad people in the world, these specific individuals would have been worth so much effort to punish. The religious message is muddled and can be read several different ways, but that's one of several odd qualities that at least set this dreamlike excursion into low-budget mayhem apart from the pack. It was the only credit for both Mr. Finkbinder and the director.

 RED MONKS, THE (1988)

Dir: Gianni Martucci

 RED RIDING HOOD (2003)

Dir: James (Giacomo) Cimini

If you can get past the obnoxious soundtrack, you might enjoy this demented Italian giallo movie with numerous parallels to the classic fairy tale. The closest thing to Little Red Riding Hood herein is a cunning, vengeful 12-year-old girl named Jenny. Jenny's politician father was killed (it's one of the least realistic shootings I've ever seen in a movie) and her trashy mother ran off and left the kid to fend for herself in Rome. At least she left Jenny some cash and a good line of credit. The child has a very inflexible sense of justice and has made it her mission in life to punish sinners in gruesome ways. She buys power tools and studies up on anatomy and medicine so she'll know just what kind of horrible injuries to inflict.  When she catches people telling fibs or stealing, she sentences them to violent death. "Sinners" are stalked and attacked with a nail gun, a power drill, a meat cleaver, a butcher knife or a baseball bat. Jenny is aided in her murderous missions by George, a hulking silent phantom in a black cloak and an all-white hard plastic wolf mask with sort of an art deco look. Is George, as Jenny believes, her small black puppy grown up into a man-sized bipedal monster?  Is he a psycho who's using Jenny's guidance for his own murderous purposes? Or is he really not there at all, merely a product of the child's overactive imagination? (Hint: you won't have much trouble guessing which of the above is correct.)  Instead of having "Red Riding Hood" go to visit Grandma, it's the grandmother who comes to visit her in this case, with disastrous results. Gran wants to take the girl back to live with her in New York City, but Jenny is happy in her solitude and resorts to borrowing ideas from MISERY to keep Grandma a prisoner.  (It's true that the movie copies too much from MISERY, but at least there's a line in the script to acknowledge this.)  Most of the acting in RED RIDING HOOD isn't very convincing, with much of the cast tending to overact, but this appears to have been a conscious decision probably meant to give the film a larger-than-life quality.  The gore effects and bloody deaths are outrageous (although the blood usually looks too dark) and little Jenny is an interesting character with a morbid Wednesday Addams vibe mixed with the outrage and frustration of Claudia in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. Unfortunately the actress here isn't able to pull it off except in a few isolated scenes.  The camerawork and editing are mostly excellent, and a few artsy directorial touches help too, like when an adulterous husband's wedding ring rattles noisily and significantly to the floor in a big bright closeup.  If RED RIDING HOOD was just a little more stylish and clever, it could pass for a Dario Argento movie.  Its major flaw, sadly, is an enormous one. The wacky soundtrack makes repeated use of a loud, ugly Broadway show tune type of song ("Family") which tends to work at cross-purposes with the otherwise dark mood. One can only imagine how much creepier and more shocking the movie might have been without that tacky, annoying song self-consciously kicking in all the time and distracting you from the story at hand. The end makes no sense at all, but RED RIDING HOOD contains enough oddball characters,  interesting setpieces and shocking gore effects that I'd give it a very mild "thumbs up" despite the drawbacks. It isn't as clever as it thinks it is, but at least it's not quite the same old thing.

 REDSIN TOWER, THE (2006)

Dir: Fred Vogel

 REINCARNATION (2005)

Dir: Takashi Shimizu

The man behind the popular GRUDGE movies also made this similarly disjointed and gloomy excursion into J-horror themes, which was released in the U.S. as part of the "After Dark" Horrorfest series.  Viewers of post-GRUDGE, post-RINGU Japanese chillers will find much of the ground covered here overly familiar, but at least REINCARNATION is one of the better examples of the form.  The shocks work as well as in any of the films in this subgenre, the photography and camerawork are stylish, and the plot actually makes some sense if you're willing to follow it closely, give it a little thought and go along with Shimizu's episodic storytelling style.  A film crew is making a movie about a massacre that took place 35 years earlier when a college professor lost his marbles and slaughtered 11 people, including his own children, at an odd-looking out-of-the-way motel.  A young actress who lands the part of one of the victims begins to experience ghostly visions, causing her to question her own sanity as the project progresses and the threatening phenomena increase to the point of the girl being periodically thrown through both time and space and seeing the bodies of her fellow cast members pile up, all dying in the exact same ways as the original victims.  In a particularly effective scene, she watches a still photographer take shots of actors lying on the floor in the places where the original bodies were found.  Every time his flash goes off, she catches a split-second glimpse of the real, blood-soaked corpses of the past.  Meanwhile, other members of the cast and crew are having weird hallucinations of their own.  Is the worried girl one of the original tragedy's casualties reincarnated?  Is there a reason she's being singled out for persecution by angry spirits? Or is there even perhaps a living, breathing human agent overseeing her mental breakdown?  There's no denying there are too many overworked elements in REINCARNATION, including a little girl ghost with long black hair, a creepy doll with a broken face, a child's rubber ball bouncing slowly through an empty hallway, and yet another encounter with a ghost in an elevator.  But Shimizu at least puts the cliche' images into an interesting and carefully constructed story, holding audience interest even though there's a strong feeling of having seen all this before, in terms of visuals. 

 REST IN PIECES (1987)

Dir: Jose' Larraz

Slapdash Spanish knockoff of THE SENTINEL is so patently ridiculous that it might make a fun party video in that it's the sort of thing that is easily made fun of.  The characters behave like complete morons, the scares are too hokey to work and the ending is such an irritatingly dumb cop-out that it will leave you wanting to rip the disc out of your player and hurl it directly into the path of oncoming truck traffic.  It doesn't help matters that the lead role is played by a stupefyingly bad actress. Loren Jean Vail is terrible as dull-witted American heroine Helen.  She and her tennis coach husband inherit her crazy aunt's estate, which consists of eight old houses inhabited by assorted mixed nuts who have all lived there rent-free for years.  The aunt (Dorothy Malone fixed up to look like Carol Channing), who left a will consisitng of herself talking into a video camera and then taking poison, supposedly had eight million dollars hidden somewhere on the property but we never find out where it is.  The decadent cult of weirdos includes several regulars of Spanish horror (Patty Shepard, Fernando Bilbao and the ubiquitous Jack Taylor).  Cornball spooky events happen, including cars starting by themselves and a plastic shower curtain attacking the empty-headed heroine. It's typical of this movie's carelessness that clothes repeatedly get shifted around inside a bedroom closet, but we never learn why or by whom.  As in THE SENTINEL, all the tenants turn out to have committed suicide (they leave documentation of this rather startling fact out in plain sight).  Now they can live forever (we're never told how) as some sort of bored immortal hedonists who pass the time by holding church services (?!) and killing the occasional string quartet, who apparently won't be missed. (Everybody's a music critic, I guess.)  At one point Taylor's face splits open and starts to bleed, presumably because the same thing happened to Chris Sarandon at the denouement of THE SENTINEL.  The idiot heroine runs around topless for some time before finally getting angry enough to grab an axe and start knocking the hood ornaments off some classic cars.  Among the undead killers is an Irish Catholic priest in yet another senseless slap at organized religion. (His character is more or less an equivalent for Burgess Meredith's in THE SENTINEL).  Also on hand is a crackpot doctor who figured out how people can live forever by killing themselves, and that's as much sense as it ever makes in the script.  Truly an amazingly stupid production from the guy who made the overrated softcore sex vampire cult item VAMPYRES back in '74.

 REST STOP (2006)

Dir: John Shiban

An undistinguished addition to the early 21st-century "torture film" canon. This one is more illogical than most, populated with some frustratingly knuckleheaded characters and too many coincidences and writer's conveniences to be believable.  It copies Steven Spielberg's old TV-movie DUEL and stirs in generous portions of  WRONG TURN, THE HILLS HAVE EYES, THE HITCHER, HOSTEL and others. Jaimie Alexander is nice looking but she's a wholly unappealing heroine, coming off as a spoiled impatient twerp even before anything scary happens.  The title location is an implausibly isolated and neglected spot where a deranged truck driver has been sadistically torturing and killing people for the past 35 years for no reason. You might wonder how a murderer could possibly get away with committing a vast number of brutal killings at the exact same place year after year and never be found out. One supposes the explanation is that the police officers in the area are total morons, which is how they're depicted here. The killer is helped in his heinous (and entirely pointless) misdeeds by the fact that 35 years' worth of missing persons reports have apparently been ignored and/or forgotten by oblivious, idiot cops who have obviously had no real police training. The killer slices folks up in an old school bus (which is out in plain sight) illuminated with strings of Christmas lights, an idea he must have gotten from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. Also on hand, to make a cheap movie style shot against organized religion, is a family of inbred religious idiots in a mobile home.  Is the mad killer a quasi-supernatural entity like Michael Myers, or merely a crazy guy who's still slaughtering young dolts even though he's well into his 60s?  I wasn't sure, and it isn't worth the time nor the serious consideration it would take to try and figure it out. Some of the individual stalking sequences are fairly suspenseful and the early stages of the girl's growing awareness of the killer (and what he's capable of) are effectively ominous, but REST STOP is too far-fetched and unoriginal to maintain viewer interest and the whole thing seems more inarticulately angry and nasty than authentically scary. Flush it unless you really feel you have to see every single slasher flick made around this time.  

 RETRIBUTION (1987)

Dir: Guy Magar

This possession thriller was lambasted by critics when it was new, but it's hard to know why. It's actually pretty good, with convincing performances, a reasonably intelligent script and sophisticated camerawork, and it deserves reassessment. After a smartly edited high-energy opening sequence, we meet poor George (Dennis Lipscomb), a lonely, nerdy, depressed artist living in a fleabag L.A. hotel. He attempts suicide on Halloween but survives and is released from the hospital a few weeks later with a limp and a new friend, a woman psychiatrist who is especially concerned for her pitiful patient. But he also has a new problem. When he falls asleep, his ghostlike image is "borrowed" by a man with the same birthday who was brutally murdered by four sadistic gangsters, dying at the exact moment George's suicide attempt caused him to lose consciousness. The vengeful spirit tracks down the thugs and kills them in horrific gruesome ways using newly-acquired telekenetic powers. As each victim dies, the killer's eyes turn green and he screams the last words he spoke in life. George wakes up afterward thinking he's had a nightmare, but then sees disturbing news reports of the exact murders he dreamed about. Other strange events contribute to his gradual mental breakdown, as when objects seem to move by themselves, his presence causes nosebleeds in some people, and his paintings begin to take on an ominous and bloody new look. Various characters try to help and solve the puzzle, including the sincere shrink, a kind hooker and a determined cop (Hoyt Axton), but the truth of what's happening is so weird that it's not likely to be easily figured out by ordinary folks. One of the most unique aspects of this movie is its almost unheard-of fair-mindedness. The other residents of George's building are hookers, winos, deadbeats and various examples of life's losers, but these characters are treated sympathetically and are presented as basically decent people who may have made some bad choices in life but still have the same needs and feelings as everyone else. It's especially refreshing to see a character in a movie who owns a motorcycle and wears a denim vest and a sweatband who isn't painted as a stupid violent troublemaker just because he's a biker. The other tenants throw a surprise 'welcome back' party for George in a genuinely touching scene, which is in defiance of Hollywood movie stereotyping that too often depicts underprivileged people as stupid and dangerous. Dennis Lipscomb gives a shattering performance as the confused protagonist, going from polite calm to crying hysteria to leering malevolence with ease and making every change of emotion impressively realistic and believable. The murders are extremely gory and feature excellent effects work. One character is stuffed into an animal carcass and killed by a slaughterhouse buzzsaw, another is compelled to horrible self-mutilation with a butcher knife, and another has a hand literally severed with a welding torch. The deaths are graphic, intense and painful, which may account for some critics being so turned off by RETRIBUTION.  But this is a horror movie, after all, and it is to the film's credit that the nasty mutilation murders work so well when juxtaposed with scenes of real feeling between characters. Sure, some parts seem a bit talky, but the character development is so good that it never seems boring. Fine acting, camerawork, editing and gore.... what more could one ask of a late-'80s shocker? Ignore the critics and check this one out.

 RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (2007)

Dir: Victor Garcia

 RETURN, THE (2006)

Dir: Asif Kapadia

Sarah Michelle Gellar is one of the most talented and watchable actresses working in horror fare around this time, but even her pleasant presence doesn't save this dreary scare tale. It's a familiar slog through Leatherface's America, a landscape littered with sun-bleached refuse and rusted scrap vehicles and populated by ignorant rednecks. Stuck with one of the world's least memorable titles, the expected washed-out blue-gray tinting and some hideous camerawork that includes frequent use of a jumpy zoom that draws attention to itself instead of complementing the action, this attempt to capitalize on the relative success of Gellar's star turn in the American THE GRUDGE remake is strictly mediocre. She does her usual fine job, here portraying a troubled, pushy saleswoman who is haunted by ghostly voices, hallucinations and other supernatural phenomena. Sometimes she catches glimpses of another woman looking back at her in mirrors. She hears the same few seconds of music played on a scratched LP over and over and has confusing flashbacks involving a childhood car crash and a big threatening drunken goon.  You'll figure out long before she does that this is yet another case of a murder victim seeking vengeance and that S.M.G. is possessed by the dead woman's spirit. The story is confusing and badly told and relies on some very unlikely circumstances to push it along. A scene in which a jealous male co-worker tries to rape Gellar, apparently forgetting there are laws against such behavior, is just dumb. There are a number of effective scares of the "pop-out-and-go BOO" variety, but nothing that works very well on an emotional level. The drab, depressing little film should have gone straight to video.  There's nothing new except Gellar's hair color. (She's a brunette this time.)

 REVAMPED (2008)

Dir: Jeff Rector

The Los Angeles "Stake Squad" struggles to protect citizens from vampire attacks in this fun low-budget action/horror spoof.  The main character (played by Rector the director, who also wrote and produced) is a guy who deliberately has himself turned into a bloodsucker by responding to a late-night informercial.  Due to some very bad planning on his part, he stays well and truly dead for five years before being accidentally resurrected (in Christopher Lee Dracula tradition) by some spilled blood.  He falls in with a secret clique of human-vampire halfbreeds who are working at a private clinic to find a cure for vampirism. Complicating his afterlife are stake-happy cops out to exterminate all the undead, as well as the diabolical cult of head vampire Vladimus (Billy Drago), who plans to plunge the world into eternal darkness via an absolutely preposterous ritual and who fears our stressed-out undead hero because he appears to be the first vampire in centuries who retained his human soul.  The most successful aspect of REVAMPED is the way it manages to maintain interest as a story while never taking its horrors remotely seriously.  Vampire comedies have been around for decades, but this one is loaded with funny lines and fresh new gags.  It comes up with more clever dialogue than all the BLADE movies combined, not to mention more creative things to do with vampire mythology.  A doctor invents a "blood patch" to help the undead wean themselves off the red stuff.  A constant threat is the scheming "hemoterrorists".   A centuries-old sacred Italian crucifix filled with holy water is bought on eBay.  There are funny TV commercials and a script that keeps silly remarks coming almost nonstop.  A cop asks his partner, "Since we're after vampires, is that why they call this a stakeout?"   Many jokes have to do with equating vampirism with drug addiction.  A weak, down-on-his-luck homeless vampire making a late-night blood deal in an alley tries to get credit from his supplier.  The unsympathetic blood pusher responds with, "What do I look like, The Red Cross?"  A cop later tells the undead vagrant "Keep your fangs clean."  An impatient vampire growls "Just because I'm immortal doesn't mean I've got all the time in the world!"  The script goes on and on in this manner, and while most of the individual jokes aren't laugh-out-loud funny, they have a cumulative effect that's sure to keep you smirking.  At the climax, the evil Vladimus transforms into a monster with a head that looks more like a pig than a bat.   Some of the major characters are played by actors who look uncomfortable and fail to pull off the mixture of horror and humor, but the incredible supporting cast is a once-in-an-after-lifetime collection of B-movie greats.  In addition to Drago, you get appearances by Fred Williamson, Vernon Wells, Anne Lockhart, Sam Jones, Mickey Jones, Carel Struycken and R. A. Mihailoff.  (What, no Brinke Stevens??)  Of course not everything works as intended.  Drago's "head vampire" character is bland and devoid of personality.  He's nowhere near as scary as his blonde-haired musclebound henchman who displays a violent hatred for the living--- for my money, that bloodthirsty psycho (who resembles a pro wrestler with fangs)--- would have made a far more interesting and intimidating leader for the undead pack.  This silly, comic bookish blood-suckin' saga won't be to everyone's, err... taste, but the lighthearted tone and fast pace kept me entertained.  Was I just in an especially forgiving mood when I watched it, or is REVAMPED a cut above similar fare in the era of post-Anne Rice, post-BUFFY horror pop culture?   Check it out and decide for yourself. 

 REVENGE OF BILLY THE KID (1991)

Dir: Jim Groom

REVENGE OF DR. X, THE (1970)

Dir: Kenneth B. Crane

 RIGOR MORTIS: THE FINAL COLOURS (2003)

Dir: Timo Rose

Idiotic homemade splatter from Germany, the country that took a tragic nosedive from being the home of the horror genre's original classics (THE GOLEM, CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU, etc.) to the source of the world's poorest gore rubbish thanks to talent-barren guys like Olaf Ittenbach (who was involved with this stinker) and Andreas Schnaas.  Mercifully short but mercilessly stupid, this one doesn't even try to come up with a coherent story. It's just a tedious mess of gory violence, mostly taking place in a small room lined with scrap lumber and plastic dropcloths, as various crazy evil guys kill each other in a vague dispute over a CD that contains un unidentified, super-powerful computer virus.  Naturally the specific workings and purpose of the virus is never explained, because that would have required too much actual thought.  It was far easier to just have guys shoot, stab and mangle each other into quivering piles of red goo. So that's really all that happens.  A lonely perv and his mentally hanidcapped wheelchair-bound brother get involved but most of the time the bad guys conveniently kill off each other after their frequent (possibly ad-libbed) shouting matches. There's not much that could qualify as characterization and of course everybody ends up dead because this is the kind of low-intellect nonsense that thinks it's making some sort of statement simply by being as nihilistic and mean-spirited as possible.  For what it's worth, the camerawork is awful, the editing (handled by the director) is surprisingly creative, the splatter effects are varied in quality and realism, and the bright, colorful lighting is overdone but at least looks like some honest effort went into setting it up.  Several characters are named after places in the U.S. ("Denver", "Dallas", "Queens").  Scary Euro-thriller character actor Dan van Husen shows up as one of the many over-the-top psychotic criminals.  At one point he asks (in the English language subs, anyway) "Are we professionals or stupid kids?"  He was supposed to be referring to his gang of self-destructive thugs, but one might ask that same question in regard to the "filmmakers" who churned out RIGOR MORTIS.  And don't let the name of this "movie" fool you into expecting any supernatural element, or even anything to do with factual rigor mortis.  The title, like the rest of the project, is meaningless.

RITUALS (1976)

Dir: Peter Carter

 ROBOT HOLOCAUST (1986)

Dir: Tim Kincaid

Tacky and incompetent, this chintzy sci-fi adventure is only good for some nasty laughs at the expense of its participants.  In the future, mankind has been mostly wiped out by rebellious robots.  It would have required a budget and some clever art direction to convincingly depict this, but since neither were available we don't get to see much of the decimated wasteland.   Most of the story takes place in what looks like the basement of a closed down factory during a janitors' strike.  The surviving humans are forced to work in some kind of mines to procure fuel for the ruthless machines, whose leader calls itself The Dark One.  The Dark One, who talks like Plankton on SPONGEBOB cartoons and who is revealed at the climax to be a very large avocado, has taken over a power station with the help of a jaw-droppingly bad actress (Angelika Jager, whose movie career started and ended right here) who struts around in capes and feather boas.  Ms. Jager appears to be trying to do some kind of vague European accent but it's hard to tell if she was going for French, German or Russian.  She gets to threaten people a lot, and it must have been very difficult for the other actors to keep a straight face during her cliche' rants. She serves her avocado master by periodically turning off the air supply to the human workers' quarters when they get mouthy. One guy (called an "old man" although he looks about 45) invents a way for people to breathe the poisoned atmosphere without the aid of The Dark One's AC system, so he and his vapid daughter become targets. To the rescue comes a guy called Neo, who wears a fake fur tunic and a belt with a coin changer on it.  If you thought Keanu Reaves' Neo character was boring in THE MATRIX, wait till you see this Neo.  (Some have suggested that the makers of THE MATRIX took their hero's name from this movie, but since "neo" both means "new" and works as an anagram of the word "one", it's easy to believe that more than one writer could have thought of using it for a heroic character's name.   It seems harder to believe that the people who made THE MATRIX would have felt any need to either borrow from or pay homage to a hopeless project like ROBOT HOLOCAUST.)   Also on hand is a guy in a terrible "freebot" robot costume (whose fretful character was obviously influenced by STAR WARS' C-3P0), a musclebound barbarian type guy, an evil robot in a spangly cape, and a man-hating Amazon type skank who has to refrain from killing the male characters after one of them bests her in a fight.  The props and costumes are ridiculous, especially with regard to the array of craft fur and shiny accessories and "the pleasure machine", a glass chamber that apparently gives people some kind of sexual gratification by showing them one of those lighted plasma balls they sell at Spencer Gifts.  There are other problems too.  The same prop severed head is used for more than one victim, and one of many lowpoints comes when our heroes have to face "the beast of the web".   It is assumed that said beast is a gigantic spider, but all we ever see of him is one leg, when what looks like a mop handle wrapped in fur dangles in front of the camera for a few seconds.  Another threat is the evil sewer worms, obvious hand puppets who can't do much damage because they can only emerge from the holes in their papier-mache' corridor as far as a stagehand's arm will reach.  With no interesting characters and horrendously bad acting, this preposterous project stands as a textbook example of the very worst of late-'80s, STAR WARS- and MAD MAX-inspired science fiction cinematrocities.  

 ROBOTS (2005)

Dirs: Chris Wedge, Carlos Saldanha

Another computer-generated cartoon feature in the tradition of TOY STORY, SHREK, ICE AGE and SHARK TALE, this one never acknowledges its huge debt to the superior TV series FUTURAMA, a show whose uniquely witty view of robot society clearly served as a template here.  The similarities to FUTURAMA are too numerous to list, but a couple of obvious ones are a greedy-old-lady villain (here called "Mother" as opposed to FUTURAMA's "Mom") and the presence of a seedy robot named "Fender", whereas FUTURAMA had (the much funnier) "Bender".  There are a lot of genuinely creative robot gags in this movie, and the joke writers clearly have a lot to be proud of.  Unfortunately the jokes are hung on a by-the-numbers, unimaginative story that seems more like a succession of pointed slams against the Disney corporation than an honest attempt at a fun kids' story.  There isn't anything even remotely surprising that happens in ROBOTS, as it throws brightly colored wiggling and swooshing images across the screen on its way to a 100% cliche' conclusion.  Luckily there are enough ingenious robot-themed one-liners and inspired sight gags to keep one mildly entertained along the way, and the animation is (of course) superb. Robin Williams' robot character (the above-mentioned Fender) is exactly what you'd expect, a fast-talking inept con man who keeps lapsing into various foreign accents and pop culture voice impersonations that aren't particularly funny.  There's a lot of good work in ROBOTS, but its lack of a good story and grossly oversimplified "you can have anything you want if you work at it" message that never rings true make this movie a lot like a badly-built, expensive, malfunctioning robot: It's a whole lot less than the sum of its parts.  Also with the voices of Amanda Bynes and Drew Carey.  

 ROOM 6 (2006)

Dir: Mike Hurst