Violent Shit (1989, Andreas Schnaas)

Yeah, "Violent Shit" pretty much sucks a bag of shit. I'm not completely against no-budget SOV splatter-trash. I've enjoyed a little bit of the Polonia Brothers' efforts, but THIS thing is fucking dryer than my cock at a lesbian convention...

The plot is pretty complex so please read my synopsis carefully: a retard with an over-sized meat cleaver runs around the woods killing and eating people.

Nothing more to say as far as the storyline is concerned... It's just THAT. Some asshole in overalls with Silly Putty on his face (supposed to resemble malformation, I guess) staggering around, endlessly. The film is basically just a compilation of gory, over-the-top death scenes strung together. A guy gets his dick hacked off with a cleaver, another dude is cut in half with a hedge trimmer and some bitch gets her vag sliced open and is gutted for an extended period of time. Many scenes in this movie go on for a fucking eternity! Retard-boy running around in slow-motion. Filming through the windshield of a moving car for, what felt like, 10 minutes straight. "Violent Shit" would've been much more tolerable if it had been chopped down to a sensible 15-20 minute run-time. To me, there's nothing worse than a shoddy DIY, backyard horror film-maker padding out his cheap gore flick just to make it a resemble a "feature". This shit is just over 70 minutes, but drags like a mother fucker! I seriously got drowsy and almost nodded over several times... Maybe at some point I'll check out the sequels just out of curiosity, but for now the original "Violent Shit" is one I happily throw on the trash heap... Sucks.

Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (1981, Andrea Bianchi)

Not a bad Italian zombie flick here. I can't say it's mind-blowing or all that original, but it does offer up a few stand-out snippets of rather incongruous material and a fair amount of sleaze and gore.

Some archeologist professor goes fucking around in some crypt and gets killed by a herd of robed zombies. This uprising of the undead goes on to target a group of couples who have arrived at the professor's mansion to talk curses or whatever... The rest is, more or less, just gut-munching...

"Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror" is decent. Cheezy as all hell, but very watchable and adequately sleazy and doesn't shy away from the gore all that much. There's decapitations, disembowelments and plenty of dumb looking paper mache zombie skulls getting smashed up. Once again, it's cheap looking, yet pretty entertaining. The action gets started early and once it does, it moves along at a nice clip and doesn't let up. Of course, the highlight is Peter Bark - that weird, mid-20's, pale-faced, Dario Argento-looking dwarf they cast as the twelve year-old boy who starts making out with and fondling his mother halfway through the film. This guy's presence in the film is fucking confusing and bizarre. He looks freakish and barely childlike and even the dubbing for him sounded like a full-grown man's voice...

Overall, "Burial Ground" isn't the best zombie film I've ever seen, but it's worth checking out if you don't mind a bit of schlock.

The Isle (2000, Kim Ki-duk)

Kim Ki-duk's "The Isle" is a terrifically pensive and introspective drama piece...

The film is set on a lake where people live in or rent these tiny floating houses that are ostensibly used for fishing and fucking prostitutes. The woman who operates the one and only boat that transports people to and from their floating domicile seems to have a 'thing' for the weird quiet guy staying in the yellow house. Problem is, the dude is having a little fling with a mouthy hooker and Boat Girl ain't havin' none of that! She lurks around the shacks at night, peering through the trap-door "toilets" and occasionally 'offs' a few folks, while, in the meantime, her and her love-interest share some awkward interactions...

So yeah, it's kinda hard to explain this one in a way that represents it properly since it's more of a visual experience than anything. It's a beautifully shot film with great cinematography and one hell of an interesting location. The concept of the floating homes and whole watery atmosphere really suited the rather bleak and tragically moving tone that accompanied these moody characters. Pretty solid blend of intensity, melodrama and 'arthouse' influence that allows the viewer to interpret a number of questionable scenes, without turning off those who don't much care for that type of heavily idiosyncratic style of film-making.

I guess one somewhat important thing I should mention is the legitimate depictions of animal cruelty, which, I don't support, though I didn't feel that this film took it "too far" like most people have stated. A frog is killed and skinned, live fishes are hacked up, a dog is smacked around and a caged bird is submerged in water and allowed to sink as the bird flaps it's wings. I guess this type of shit just doesn't bother me like it does with others... My heart is just cold and black... Sorry.

Gotta give "The Isle" a very high recommendation. It's exceptionally subtle and dream-like, though you can't go wrong with a chick inserting and then ripping out about a half-dozen fish hooks from her vagina. Ouch. Give this one a look...

Angel, Alien and UFO Encounters from Another Dimension (2012, Ken Klein)

This is, without a doubt, THE worst documentary I have ever seen. Now I'm a hardcore skeptic and I'll pretty much call "bullshit" on any reality-based movie or TV program focusing on the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors or supernatural phenomena, but I can safely say that I have never, in my life, seen a less convincing "attempt" at hunting and documenting the potential existence of UFO's, aliens and angels. I'm literally STILL in utter shock and awe at how fucking horrendous "Angel, Alien and UFO Encounters" was.

A balding old fuck is traveling around from New Orleans to Arizona to Pittsburgh, talking to various jack-offs who claim to have seen and photographed different types of alien space crafts and figures around their area...

The first guy they talk to is just a fat, bearded slob with fake-looking hair who claims to be a professional electrician who hunts UFO's, though every time you see him he's just holding a cheapie Sony camcorder and walking us through incomprehensibly blurry video of, what he claims to be, shape-shifting aliens. The next guy - another fat slob in a Hawaiian shirt - gives us a tedious rundown on a series of crude sketches he has done that apparently resemble various kinds of suspicious orbs he has seen hovering in the sky. He then shows off another sketch of a light pattern he witnessed one night... A SKETCH. Not a photograph. A fucking sketch... Then, there's about a 25-30 minute tour through the Arizona desert, courtesy of a scrawny moron with a hickey on his neck who attempts to explain vague Indian rock doodles and how they pertain to early alien visitors. The movie slowly wraps up after this by involving the mother a teenage girl who supposedly captured a UFO on camera and a group of morons hunting for "alien orbs" at night...

In all honesty, I'm not sure if the people in this really believed what they said and did or if they were just half-assing their way through an already shitty idea for an alien/ghosts doc. The latter possibility doesn't seem too far off, if you ask me, considering I just CANNOT bring myself to accept that there are actually people THIS fucking stupid walking this earth. I mean, pretty much anyone who claims to have spotted a UFO or ghostly apparition is an idiot or just a liar, but these dipshits... They were analyzing dirty camera lenses and pointing out alien faces in the fucking dirt specks! That's not even the worst! They were actually filming airplanes at night and calling them UFO's! Numerous times this happens! Also, they shined a flashlight beam on the back of a guy's head, snapped a photo and claimed that an "alien orb" was probing his mind... Streetlights glaring through trees. Balloons floating through the desert - captured on the most obscuring, shittiest quality video cameras. "Orbs" flying around that are clearly insects shot on night-vision cameras. Out-of-focus objects are studied ad nauseam by assholes asserting that the image is an alien morphing into demonic shapes. It goes on and on! These douche-rags saw UFO's EVERYWHERE!

"Angel, Alien and UFO Encounters" is either the most embarrassingly awful documentary ever made or the most hilarious 'mockumentary' ever made. If so, they really played it off well, cuz these fuckers looked dead serious. A fun thing to do while watching this movie is to play a drinking game my viewing companion and I invented. Put in this movie and every time one of these dumb shits says the world "anomaly", take a drink. That way, you'll get drunk and be able laugh your ass off at how goddamn asinine this piece of shit is. I can't in good conscience recommend it, but I still think it's a remarkable display of pure retardation that must be seen to be believed. It's quite an anomaly. Drink!

Wolf Creek (2005, Greg McLean)

Caught this one in the theater back when it came out and a few times since, including the other night and, despite all the love horror fans have given this one, I still don't see what the big fucking deal is... And I've granted it multiple views over the years.

Two girls and a guy are driving through the Australian outback, looking to visit a massive crater left by one of the biggest meteor strikes ever. After hanging around the big hole in the rainy desert, they come back to their car to find that it won't start. Thankfully, a helpful Aussie outdoorsman just so happens to be rolling through and offers to tow them back to his dwelling where he'll fix up their car. They chill with him for a little bit before falling asleep and waking up all bound and beaten in the clutches of the perverse madman...

Obviously, John Jarratt is fucking awesome as the burly, tourist-killing psychopath, Mick. Unfortunately, he feels underused here. Hell, the whole "horror" element feels underused in "Wolf Creek". It's just way too basic and I can't help but feel as though I only saw a small portion of a film, rather than a full feature. We've got an hour-long "build up" with the trio of dull soon-to-be victims before transitioning into the CHAOS in the blink of an eye! The tension hardly seems like it had a chance to register with the viewer before you're suddenly launched right into Mick roughing these bitches up. I just got the sense that an 'act' was missing from "Wolf Creek" - like a real ending, which was abrupt and unsatisfying here. And the whole "based on a true story" thing is a bit of a stretch. Apparently the film IS based LOOSELY on Aussie serial killer Ivan Milat (aka. The Backpacker Killer). Again, loosely based!

Like I said, Jarratt is really good and incredibly threatening and vicious as the killer here, but there just wasn't enough of him. All n' all, "Wolf Creek" is nothing special when it comes to backwoods horror. In fact, it's downright forgettable and FAR from "shocking" or "extreme", which was all I heard when this thing hit the cinemas some years back. The look of it is nice and the killer is cool, but it just wasn't enough for me. Sorry.

Ed Gein (2000, Chuck Parello)

I've heard quite a few people refer to "Ed Gein" (aka. "In the Light of the Moon") as a dull, soporific biographical representation of the notorious Wisconsin cannibal-killer's life and crimes. I don't agree, though 'viewer beware' - this is NOT a legit "horror" movie to be compared to other Gein-inspired flicks like "Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "Psycho". So, in THAT regard, I could see some people being a bit 'put off' by the lack of out-and-out 'terror', but I certainly think that "Ed Gein" had it's strong points...

In case you're a fucking idiot: Ed Gein - also later known as "The Plainfield Butcher" - was a necrophiliac/cannibal/grave-robber/killer who was pegged for the murder of two local women around the mid-to-late 50's...

First and foremost, Steve Railsback pulls off a pretty fantastic Gein in this wacky, mentally disturbed and often sympathetic role. His awkward interactions with the other small town residents definitely give you some pertinent glimpses into a troubled mind and it was done well, in my humble opinion. They go into Gein's fucked up childhood pretty frequently - showing how much of an insane, Jesus-freak mother was and how lil' Eddie grew up all sexually repressed and distant. However, I DIDN'T like the whole mother-controlling-his-mind-from-beyond-the-grave angle they took during the Bernice Worden murder. That was a little ridiculous.

In terms of violence and gore, the film is very light. Most of it is implied, such as Gein being shown frying up gobbets of meat after Mary Hogan dies and another, very random shot of him decorating a 'severed' vagina with a bow. There's also the required scene of him dancing around in a flesh mask and human-titty shirt which is brief but kinda cool. Basically, it gives you what you'd expect from a biopic on Gein without being copiously 'abrasive' with the gore.

Overall, "Ed Gein" works as the more "official" cinematic rundown on the body collecting murderer, though the aforementioned films still reign supreme, of course. Check it out for Railsback's nutty, Gein-like performance and a fairly factual depiction of the true crimes he committed.