If Shadow Over Innsmouth was adapted as a Grade-Z horror film, it might play out something like Bad Fish, written and directed by West Coast indie filmmaker Brad Douglas.
Filmed for measly money over a two-year period in locations near Brookings, Oregon and Crescent City, California, Bad Fish follows alcoholic marine biologist John Burton (Jonny Lee) on a quest for clues in a remote coastal community where fishermen’s body parts keep washing ashore.
After confabbing with Sheriff Porter (Mark Schneider), Burton examines a mangled torso and concludes that this was no boating accident. But it wasn’t a shark either, he decides.
Giant squid? Not known to inhabit these water. And what’s driving away all the salmon?
Turns out it’s all the work of Abby (Abby Wathen), the beguiling bartender at the local boozer, who comes with a whopper of a backstory. Seems when she isn’t mixing martinis, Abby is the leader of a nasty deep-water cult in search of fresh blood (and other fluids).
Despite a few too many talky scenes enacted by amateur thespians, Bad Fish is an admirable, atmospheric, small-town mystery that concludes with Burton getting left without a leg to stand on in a very bad domestic situation.
Not to worry, Douglas has Bad Fish II in the works, so maybe someone will throw the poor sap a lifeline.
Ray Milland won a Best Actor Oscar courtesy of his spirited dip into dipsomania in Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1946), so let’s cut him some slack for Frogs, an unintentionally hilarious stinker from American International Pictures.
First things first: At no point in the film is anyone eaten by a giant frog. The poster is complete bullshit.
Since it’s a horror movie with an environmental message, Milland is cast as Jason Crockett, a venomous industrialist in a wheelchair ruling over a polluted private island plantation, fussed over by his feckless family intent on currying the old man’s financial favor.
Keeping Milland company is a naked-lipped Sam Elliott playing Pickett Smith, a hippie nature photographer in a canoe accidentally swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke), one of the patriarch’s progeny of sycophants and spoiled brats.
The exception is Karen Crockett (Joan Van Ark from Knot’s Landing), a lovely and luminous free spirit, who naturally gravitates to Smith, the stranger in the group, and the only other decent human being for miles.
It seems the senior Crockett wants his island free of frogs, and presumably snakes, spiders, gators, gulls, geckos, skinks, skunks, squirrels, and any other member of the animal kingdom that dares show its face.
“I still believe man is master of the universe,” he sneers at Smith.
Crockett instructs his minions to spray pesticides on the flora and fauna surrounding the estate. The flora and fauna don’t care for this one bit and mount a counter attack.
There is not a single sequence in the movie that isn’t punctuated (padded) with additional nature footage of creeping critters hopping and slithering closer to the Crockett house. Frogs are lobbed haphazardly into frame by production assistants, occasionally piling up in abundance, and photographed from menacing low angles to show they clearly mean business.
Directed by TV veteran George McCowan, Frogs boasts some of the most howlingly cheap and awful death scenes ever, rivaling poor Bela Lugosi wrestling an inanimate octopus in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.
I was reminded of this as I watched Stuart Martindale (George Skaff), a bald guy in a velour suit, forced to grapple with an unconscious crocodile.
A snapping turtle claims one victim! Another gets lost in the swamp chasing butterflies, and after what seems like several weeks of wandering and weeping, finally succumbs to a surfeit of snake bites.
Yet another of Crockett’s foppish relatives ends up poisoned in a closed greenhouse thanks to a bunch of reptiles shattering multiple bottles of industrial strength pesticide, as is their wont.
The best/worst demise, undoubtedly belongs to Michael Martindale (David Gilliam), which involves being cocooned by moss and having spiders spilled upon his person, including one right in the mouth.
As for Ray Milland, the conservative think-tank commander goes down with the ship, deserted by everyone including his dog. He is seen taking his final agonizing breath amidst another barrage of tossed toads, glaringly accompanied to the grave by Les Baxter’s shrieking, atonal score.
What a sorry way to croak!
Frogs isn’t so bad it’s good. But the low-rent laughs are all over the place, just like the titular terrors who pounce on Crockett’s star-spangled birthday cake, ruining his crappy family celebration.
Remember: Environment good! Old rich white men bad! Too bad this populist message didn’t help George McGovern in ’72.
As played by a thoroughly committed Larry Drake (Benny Stowitz from L.A. Law!), this titular sawbones could have been a contender, worth at least two sequels, minimum.
Dr. Giggles is an early release from Dark Horse Comics, so no reason for there not to be a franchise.
As a child, Evan Rendell Jr. (Drake) watched the angry citizens of Moorehigh haul his father, the town doctor, out of his home office and stone him to death. Apparently, the locals were none-to-pleased with Rendell Senior’s research methods, which included killing seven patients in search of a healthy heart to transplant into his own dying wife.
Hey! You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Young Rendell is institutionalized and grows up into an adult lunatic with a fixation on physicians. He escapes after dissecting his captors, and heads back to Moorehigh tittering like a freshly sprung Michael Myers.
Final Girl Jennifer Campbell (Holly Marie Combs, Piper from Charmed!) is an anxious high school student with heart valve problems set on a collision course with the hysterical healer, while a bunch of her friends and neighbors fall victim to Rendell’s house calls, dying horribly under the madman’s medical ministrations.
A hearty round of applause to Drake, who giggles and puns his way through the slaughter with verve and panache, a maniacal glint in his bulging eyes.
“Wait till you see my bill,” he crows after skewering another unlucky chump with his antique surgical implements.
Like any good doctor, Rendell is torn between his duty to the community (killing them), and carrying on his father’s quest to find a heart, in this case to “save” Jennifer.
The fact that he’s a self-taught surgeon doesn’t inspire much confidence, though. That’s why the patient needs to be strapped to the table—for her own good.
Dr. Giggles is premium slasher carnage punctuated with corny jokes. If it’s wrong, I don’t wanna be right.
I will begin by reintroducing a pair of the descriptive phrases I use when reviewing my HorrificFlicks.
Anonymous Industrial Walkabout: This means the majority of the action takes place in a generic location, usually festooned with pipes, control panels, and endless nondescript doors, offices, and hallways.
Serviceable Piece of Shit: A movie that transcends its budget constraints and offers genuine entertainment value.
Project Metal Beast is a shining example of both.
Our story opens somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, as U.S. agent Donald Butler (John Marzilli) and a red-shirt subordinate are on a dangerous, top-secret mission to acquire werewolf blood.
Pretty standard, really.
Butler watches idly as a nasty specimen noshes on his comrade before dispatching the beast with silver bullets and retrieving the precious blood sample.
We quickly discover that Butler is hot-headed and impulsive, as he ignores his orders and injects himself with the dreaded Type O Super Negative.
“I will be a new kind of warrior,” he boasts. “One that can shape-change at will! With senses of an animal and the mind of a man!”
Before he can take his powers for a proper test drive, Butler is immobilized by Colonel Miller (Barry Bostwick), his sociopathic commanding officer, and frozen for 20 years.
Eventually, Butler is thawed out of retirement and given metal skin by Dr. Anne De Carlo (Kim Delaney) at the direction of Colonel Miller.
When Butler changes into an armored lycanthrope, he goes on a reasonable rampage slaughtering a stereotypical Italian chef, a nerdy scientist, and a few other nonentities.
How do you kill a metal werewolf, anyway?
Writer and director Alessandro de Gaetano is definitely operating on the cheap side of the street. The werewolf effects are ok, but the costume (worn by Friday The 13th‘s most famous Jason, Kane Hodder!) looks like a gorilla suit that went on tour with Gwar.
Between the scenes of fairly awesome wolfen mayhem there are many, many interludes of educated characters contemplating their dire situation and spouting pseudo-scientific jibber jabber.
Feel free to mute these parts and invent your own smart-ass dialogue. It’s fun!
Project Metal Beast wouldn’t be nearly such a hoot if not for Barry Bostwick’s kooky performance as the power-mad Colonel Miller, a man who seems quite delighted with the havoc he causes.
In one scene, Miller gleefully shoots a superior officer in both legs so he can’t escape the werewolf, who, sure enough, comes along and shreds the poor guy.
And when the monster turns on Miller, he is disciplined enough to straighten his uniform before being disemboweled.
Once again, we observe that it’s those little human touches that make for a memorable metal monster movie experience.
Real estate is always a solid investment—unless you’re in a state where realtors needn’t disclose past tragic events, such as occupation by a sinister cult and lots of subsequent disappearances.
Like I said, a crap shoot.
Such is the case with Marcus (Antoine Harris) and Grace (Shannon Foster), who think they’ve found a perfect parcel of land near Ojai, California to set up a commercial cannabis operation.
To celebrate their new future as ganja growers, the couple invite friends Phillip (Peter Sabri), Dominic (Weston Meredith), and Patricia (Erlinda Navarro), down for a weekend of drinking games and exploring the property.
At first, guest and host alike have trouble sleeping. Patricia in particular is gripped by nightmares of bloodletting and dismemberment.
Meanwhile Phil and Dominic get into a lover’s quarrel, and Dominic storms off to find a signal for his phone. Never to be seen again.
Thanks to a gabby security officer, the group finds out that at least one ex-cult member (with cannibal tendencies) is still running around terrorizing the community.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of red flag that will cause most investors to bail out.
The maniac is a brawny dude, marginally scary, but nothing really paranormal happens until his victims rise from the grave seeking revenge.
Filmed on a micro budget by director Demetrius Navarro, Warnings isn’t a good movie, but it’s good enough if gruesome events taking place in a scenic location float your boat.
Wow, two Oscar winners in one low-budget, 40-year-old slasher!
Jack Palance and Martin Landau are half a quartet of escaped lunatics paying a surprise visit to their new mental health practitioner in Alone in the Dark, a New Line Cinema oddity from writer-director Jack Sholder (The Hidden, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2).
Palance is underutilized as Frank Hawkes, a paranoid schizophrenic, but Landau chews the scenery like a great herbivorous swamp dinosaur as Byron Sutcliffe, a pyromaniac pastor with a permanently deranged countenance.
With the arrival of Doctor Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz, from The A-Team), the new shrink at the Haven Mental Hospital, Hawkes takes it into his head that Potter must have murdered their former doctor, and that he will soon kill all of them.
Donald Pleasance does the heavy lifting as stoner psychiatrist Leo Bain, the director of Haven Hospital. Bain’s ludicrous touchy-feely therapy encourages the patients to truly explore their various psychotic “trips.”
“Preacher likes to set fire to churches, that’s his trip. Unfortunately he does it when there are people inside,” Hawkes explains to Potter.
Along with monstrous pedophile Ronald “Fatty” Elster (Erland van Lidth, The Wanderers) and a vicious (but shy) maniac nicknamed “The Bleeder” (Phillip Clark), Hawkes and Preacher escape captivity during a power blackout caused by theatrical punk band The Sick Fucks, who are playing at a nearby bar.
Could happen.
The showdown, the siege of Dr. Potter’s house, ain’t exactly Straw Dogs, but Pleasance does his zany best confronting his runaway loonies with platitudes and mumbo jumbo.
Taken as a whole, Alone in the Dark isn’t a very good movie. It’s light on gore, characters appear and disappear randomly, and at least one subplot, involving Dr. Potter’s wife and sister going to a Nuclear Power protest, stretches credulity beyond all known limits.
Somehow, through the awkward combination of dormant star power, budget-constraint innovation, and tongue-in-cheek pseudoscience, it remains a kooky curio worthy of attention even 40 years later.
When Potter tells Bain that the escapees are armed and have killed several people, the latter shrugs, “Well, what do you expect? It’s a violent world out there.”
If your expectations are not currently residing in a lofty skyscraper, then It Waits should do the trick. The time passed and I was engaged, despite the teensy budget and a general lack of dramatic ability from the cast.
First and foremost, this is a story about redemption. Yes, there is a winged monster that dismembers campers, and plays cat-and-mouse with the lovely Danielle (Cerina Vincent), an alcoholic ranger stationed at a lonely tower in the forest primeval.
See, Danielle recently got shitfaced with her friend Julie, and was at the wheel of their jeep when it crashed, killing her bestie. Since then, she’s retreated to the solitude of her fire-watch perch to sulk and drink some more, with a wisecracking parrot as her primary companion.
If only there were some way for her to save the day, and earn back her self-respect!
Meanwhile, a bunch of stupid college students blast a hole in the side of a mountain, freeing a demon/gargoyle that’s resided there for ages and ages. After dispensing with the hors d’oeuvres, the monster plays the long game with Danielle, waging a gruesome terror campaign and reducing everyone around her to bloody mulch.
Director Steven Monroe recognizes that Danielle is the focus of the feature, so she’s never far from the camera, an aesthetic gamble that pays off. While her emotive capability seldom rises above school play levels, actress Cerina Vincent pumps the gas when action is called for and spends the majority of her screen-time looking absolutely ravishing.
The creature also gets a fair amount of camera time, and it’s a sturdily built costume that wreaks plenty of havoc, resembling Pumpkinhead with a wingspan. In fact, the diabolical monster seems rather too formidable for the plucky ranger.
Fortunately, dynamite is a great equalizer. Keep expectations on the ground floor and you will be reasonably pleased with It Waits.
You can tell Screamers is pure Italian schlock because the monsters are dripping with olive oil.
Originally titled Island Of The Fishmen, it’s a bit of an H.G. Wells mashup of Mysterious Island and The Island of Dr. Moreau, as Claude, a young naval doctor (Claudio Cassinelli) washes ashore in the Caribbean after the sinking of the prison ship to which he was assigned.
He and two surviving prisoners are taken to the wicker plantation home of wealthy misanthrope Edmond Rackham (Richard Johnson) and his stunning lady friend Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach, aka Mrs. Ringo Starr). Together they preside over a household of voodoo enthusiasts, led by high priestess Shakira (Beryl Cunningham).
A tired-looking Joseph Cotten shows up long enough to play Amanda’s mad (but seemingly decent) scientist pappy, who is determined to create a new race of oily gill men to populate the oceans of the world. His experiments are then employed by Rackham as cheap labor to loot the treasure vault of a nearby submerged temple.
Oh yeah, and it’s a volcanic island that’s gonna blow any second.
Directed by giallo veteran Sergio Martino (Slave Of The Cannibal God, Torso, Blade Of The Ripper), Screamers isn’t nearly good enough to be lost treasure, but it’s brisk, watchable trash with a decent budget, and Barbara Bach is radiant.
I already checked, you don’t have anything better to do.
Sam Raimi and The Evil Dead = The Velvet Underground.
I accept that it’s not a perfect analogy, but you get where I’m coming from. It’s an undeniable influence.
Nearly 10 years after Raimi and Bruce Campbell caught lightning in a bottle, Charles Phillip Moore and his crew unveiled a delightfully unfettered homage, Demon Wind, about another bunch of old teenagers assailed by occult forces in a rural location.
Corey (Eric Larson) and his girlfriend Elaine (Francine Lapensée) meet up with a group of friends and stereotypes to solve the mystery of Corey’s grandparents, who perished under mysterious circumstances during the Great Depression.
Turns out the family farm (more of a tattered theater set, really) is on land originally claimed by a devil-loving preacher and his followers who were set ablaze by townsfolk with no taste for human sacrifice.
Once Corey and his comrades reach the farm, all hell breaks loose, and suddenly, we’re at a Dead show, with ghouls coming out of the woodwork.
I’m not recommending Demon Wind because it’s a brilliantly conceived film that was nurtured to life by the artistic vision of writer-director Charles Phillip Moore.
Rather, it’s the sort of slap-dash amateurism (it was filmed in seven days) that drove Ed Wood to create flying saucers out of paper plates and a cockpit from a shower curtain.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and the makeup and practical effects on Demon Wind, though plentiful, range from barely adequate to comically half-assed.
Moore employs a similarly scattergun approach to the narrative, seizing and abandoning ideas with random enthusiasm.
One of the doomed kids, Chuck (Stephen Quadros), is a magician with a black belt. His friend Stacy (Jack Forcinito) has a shotgun with unlimited ammunition.
Chuck still carries a torch for Terri (Lynn Clark) who now belongs to homophobic meathead Dell (Bobby Johnston).
Poor Bonnie (Sherrie Bendorf) gets turned into a doll, and no one seems to care.
Magic spells are cast. You can tell because that’s when the bloopy, hand-drawn animation appears.
The entire cast looks as though it just stepped out of a Huey Lewis video. Feel free to hit pause and ridicule the myriad lame looks available to pre-grunge adolescents.
And don’t worry about Corey’s friends dying. When the pack gets thin, Amazon thoughtfully sends more.
Nothing like a little light entertainment to help shake those quarantine blues.
Can we interest you in a first-person, point-and-shoot craptacular, with a side of zombie dressing?
Sporting a tagline of “You are humanity’s last stand,” Pandemic puts the viewer squarely behind rotating POV cameras in a breakneck race to save uninfected survivors in post-plague Los Angeles.
Nutshell: A virulent contagion has swept the nation, transforming average citizens into berserk cannibals. After the fall of New York, survivor Lauren (Rachel Nichols), heads to LA where doctors are in short supply.
Assigned to a four-person rescue team tasked with rounding up survivors and testing them for infection, Lauren, Gunner (Mekhi Phifer), Wheels (Alfie Allen), and Denise (Missi Pyle), cruise the streets in a retrofitted school bus, dodging and dispatching meat-seeking freaks and armed gangs of plunderers.
Although the team has been specifically ordered not to go in search of family members, this directive somehow gets lost in all the excitement, and personal agendas threaten to derail the mission.
My wife commented that Pandemic is more of a sketch than a movie, and there is truth to that. With only minimal time given to character exposition, it’s the seat-of-the-pants mayhem that’s designed to carry the story, and indeed, there’s no shortage of high-speed splatter.
Unfortunately, director John Suits doesn’t generate much actual adrenaline, and the action seldom rises above (old) video game quality. When the POV perspective shifts rapidly to different characters, it becomes disorienting trying to follow the identities amidst a barrage of choppy, spastic editing.
Instead of freely reveling in post-apocalyptic/undead shenanigans, it took Dustin Benson’s screenplay shifting its focus to Lauren’s private mission, to keep me involved on a basic level.
Rachel Nichols brings surprising depth to a role that could have been adequately filled by a CGI sock puppet, and her supporting cast, particularly Phifer and Pyle, more than pulls its own weight.
Pandemic does not break new ground or offer much in the way of spectacle, but time passes quickly, allowing us to put our own viral anxieties on the back burner.
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