House of the Seven Graves (1982, Pedro Stocki)

"House of the Seven Graves" - a.k.a "La casa de las siete tumbas" - is an obscure witchcraft/surrealist movie from Argentina that is so incoherent that it was borderline unwatchable.

What I gathered from the incomprehensible premise was: there are two women - childhood friends - whose past fears involving a haunted house leads them into a dark nightmare of paranoia, ghosts, and satanic rituals...

Had the film been moderately coherent, certain aspects may have proved redeeming - such as the gloomy atmosphere and bizarre imagery. However, "House of the Seven Graves" is such a disjointed snore-fest that any sense of enjoyment the film could've provided was clouded by the muddy look and nonsensical pacing. Nothing memorable here, only tedium and dullness... 1.5/10.

Monster Dog (1984, Claudio Fragasso)

 

"Monster Dog" is what you'd call the lowest form of 80s horror cinema that basically presents it's ineptness as an intentional means of providing hilarity through inscrutable film making. Due to the directorial doltishness of Italian schlockmeister Claudio Fragasso - the man behind the well known and unforgivably vile "Zombie 3 & 4" as well as "Troll 2" - "Monster Dog" is extensively lacking any kind of chilling atmosphere, originality as far as plot is concerned, and acting ability that doesn't prompt the viewer to wash their eyes with glass...

Shock-rock icon Alice Cooper plays a lawyer... Nah, ya got me. He plays a rock band front man and I doubt I fooled anyone! He and his posse - a group of douchey imbeciles - drive out to Cooper's childhood town to film his new music video. Turns out the area is infested with a pack of stray dogs that are causing quite a commotion among the residents, who are turning up mauled. We get some nice filler consisting of terrible music and cliché Alice Cooper video sequences along with some muddled drek involving a werewolf curse and Alice Cooper's father's death...

It is apparent that "Monster Dog" was hoping to cash in on the Alice Cooper trend of the time which completely over-shadowed the half-baked premise. If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't have nearly enough material to even cover a runtime as short as 83 minutes... The embarrassingly awful song "Identity Crisis" is shown at the beginning and then AGAIN at the end, inner-cut with a pointless re-cap of various scenes from the movie. Ugh. In turn, you barely see dogs, let alone the Monster Dog due to all of this redundancy and padding.

On a positive note, it's an easy movie to laugh at, if you're in a easy-going mood. The dubbing is ridiculously bad, the effects are atrocious (though mostly concealed by thick fog), and Alice Cooper running around "intensely" in leather pants with a shotgun made me smirk in several scenes. "Monster Dog" is a typically BAD Fragasso film, but full of unintentional humor if you're interested... 2/10.