Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

It had been quite a few years since I had seen "Last House on Dead End Street" so I figured a revisiting was surly in order. So as I was recently re-experiencing it, my recollection came trickling back and I feel that my latest experience with the film was a bit more 'warm' than my previous one - though I still find that I don't like the movie as much as many people seem to.

A dirtbag reprobate gets out of prison and decides to get into the movie-making business. He assembles a crew of weirdos and they start making psychedelic snuff films in an abandoned building for jaded porn distributors...

I definitely appreciated it more this time around - as it WAS a very shocking and mean-spirited film for it's time - containing graphic scenes of torture, dismemberment and a chick's corpse being gutted. There's also a fairly unsettling and nightmarishly surreal sense to these scenes that gives the film a bit more 'character' than your average gore flick, I'd say. Not to say the film isn't completely trashy and depraved 'exploitation', cuz it certainly IS. For example, a prolonged scene of a chick in black face getting whipped at a party and a guy forced to blow a deer hoof dick (?).  According to historical records, the majority of the film's budget was frittered away on drugs during filming, which clearly shows in the final product. This movie obviously wasn't shot using the most high-end equipment and film stock... Despite these favorable qualities, I still find the film to be a bit lacking, overall. Like it's just missing something that I can't quite figure out. Still, it definitely needs to be recognized as an important early breakthrough in the realm of 'extreme' cinema and, for that, it comes recommended.

A Fucking Cruel Nightmare (2010)

There's some truly bad German splatter flicks out there, but "A Fucking Cruel Nightmare" is fucking BAD. This makes "Violent Shit" and "Das Komabrutale Duelle" look masterful and I can't even believe I'm saying that...

A guy is having a nightmare that he's walking through a maze of plastic tarps, peering into rooms where random people are being brutally tortured and killed by sadistic masked men. About halfway through this boring shit, the victims come back and exact revenge on their killers.

The movie is just comprised of dozens of scenes of torture and mutilation, strung together in an endless... nightmare of self-indulgence and pointless, cheezy gore. Absolutely no plot, no dialog and some of the most brain-splittingly irritating dubbing and sound mixing imaginable. The movie is so repetitive and dull and just poorly made that it fails at being even mildly "shocking", despite it's obvious efforts to be so 'balls-out crazy'. If there's not even the framework of a story or anyone at least savvy enough to doctor up some decent gore FX for the nonstop scenes of nails pounded into skulls and spines, babies being bashed with hammers and various cock mutilations (all of which feature the most unconvincing looking plastic dildos on the market...), then all of that shit has absolutely zero impact. This one just blows...

Tusk (2014)

I'm still in the 'camp' that believes Kevin Smith's transition to horror is pretty much a fail despite a glimmer of potential behind his two attempts, thus far. After seeing the ambitious, yet muddled horror debut, "Red State", I got the impression that Smith has very little "sense" of the genre and with his newest outing, "Tusk", he further proves that he's more interested in cobbling together bland, derivative narratives, based solely on a Michael Parks performance...

A successful 'cringe'-podcaster travels to Canada to pursue a story on a viral video character for his show, only to have the plan fall through. He finds a flier in a men's room offering a wealth of fantastical stories from a rich, seasoned old man. The podcaster arrives at the man's estate and, after a  chummy dialog, collapses from his drugged tea. And... yeah, turns out the old guy has a boner for walruses after having been rescued by one following a shipwreck, decades ago. The movie cuts between the walrus 'transformation'/walrus training to the guy's podcast partner and impractically hot girlfriend (who typically hook up when he's out of town...) looking for him.

There's no way I'm gonna say that "Tusk" was better than "Red State". Both pretty much sucked, although I somewhat appreciated the self-awareness in which Smith went about "Tusk", as opposed to the straight-forward, unduly politically topical bore-fest that preceded it. Even if I didn't find it all that amusing - which I didn't - I did GET that it was a complete joke. I've heard from too many people who are legitimately confused by how ridiculous this "horror" movie was. It's just an overly long Saturday Night Live parody of "The Human Centipede" with Smith, again, trying to give us our fill of Parks' exemplary acting ability (which is obviously out-of-place here...). But how many times can this be used to carry a film? Other than Parks, "Tusk" has nothing going for it. The only chuckle I got out of it was the reveal of the Ed Gein-ish walrus skin suit and how stupid and rubbery it looked (again, intentionally, no doubt...). Otherwise, Justin Long is a one-dimensional, Kevin Smith-style smartass. Johnny Depp is downright annoying as the cross-eyed Canadian detective, and Long's never ending walrus screams drove me fucking nuts!

This should've been some kind of short Youtube project or something... It's just too long for what it is and pretty much everything about it just gets irritating or boring. I wouldn't say it's unwatchable as long as you acknowledge it as a 100% gag and try to derive some kinda enjoyment out of that if you can, but, ultimately, the gag was a miss.

Pizza Girl Massacre (2014)

"Pizza Girl Massacre" is a 'slasher' take on the 'found footage' format that isn't going to revamp the ever-dwindling sub-genre, by any means, but it's an entertaining indie- horror/comedy in all fairness.

A group of community theater actors drive out to a cabin in the woods to rehearse for a performance of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", along with a documentary film crew. The night before their first rehearsal, they get drunk and order some pizzas, only to have the hammered director sexually harass and stiff the delivery girl on her pay. She promptly returns, however, and slaughters the cast and crew while it's captured on their numerous recording devices...

The film had a few chuckle-worthy moments and the incredibly (yet clearly intentionally...) obnoxious cast of characters were amusing. There's also a decent amount of gore and general chaos, involving The Pizza Girl and her deadly pizza cutters. As for the 'cons' - I got some pretty heavy motion sickness at times and I felt the ending with the lone survivor dragged on a bit too long. Still, overall, "Pizza Girl Massacre" is enjoyable and definitely the best 'found footage' flick I've seen in a while.

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Ouija (2014)

Yet another forgettable piece-of-shit supernatural studio 'horror' flick for the teenage popcorn crowd. "Ouija" is actually dumbed down to a level that I could hardly even fathom and just plodded along, dryly, like the completely soulless and slapped together 'product' that it was.

We got a group of Gap models playing with a stupid board game after one of them dies...

Consisting of the most painfully bland cast of characters imaginable, obnoxious shrieking CGI ghosts - complete with that stretched out jaw bullshit, ultra-tame PG-13 child-friendliness... And they even threw Lin Shaye in there, because apparently she's in all of this type of loathsome, dime-a-dozen toilet waste now. Fuck "Ouija" and fuck all this supernatural horror drivel. It's reached an all new LOW, here.

It Follows (2014)

My expectations are rarely anywhere but at their lowest when it comes to 'mainstream' American horror films (which should go without saying if you've read any of my past redundant horseshit 'reviews' on the subject...), but based on a few things I had heard, "It Follows" sounded like something that might be worth checking out. The trailer didn't make it look like anything particularly exceptional, but something about it seemed to show promise over much of the other supernatural/possession/PG-13 horror garbage that intermittently trickles into the lamentable cinema-plex these days. And - lo and behold - "It Follows" actually turned out to be an entertaining and reasonably "fresh" horror flick compared to the comprehensive stagnancy of the horror genre.

After some backseat sex on date night, a teenage girl learns from her boyfriend he has passed on to her a malevolent curse that will follow her until she passes it on - via sex - to the next poor bastard. "It" comes in the form of random people or people she knows and will apparently pursue her until it either gets a hold of her or she can unload the burden on someone else...

There's no denying that "It Follows" has it's flaws and is far from the most original concept, but I definitely appreciated how it didn't bombard the audience (i.e. me...) with the same tired genre conventions that 'modern' horror movies lazily rely upon. Aside from a few expected 'cheap scares', the film is much more up-front with it's tension building - holding on the 'action' much longer than supernatural-themed movies of late tend to do, with slamming doors, creeping shadows and other fleeting, tiresome cliches that only jolt the audience momentarily out of their social media-sedation while promptly alleviating them of said tension before it even gets started. "It Follows" takes a bit more of an inexorable approach to it's style of tensity - along the lines of "The Shining" (though coming nowhere close to it's excellence, of course...) which I found rather commendable. Also, attention is placed on musical scoring (heavily John Carpenter-inspired...) and cinematography - actually taking the time to capture details in the locale that gives the film's environment a sense of purpose and "character", which is another thing that I find doesn't stand out in enough recent horror films.

My gripes on "It Follows" lay more in certain details in the premise that seemed a bit unclear - such as a scene where one of the targets of "It" is attacked and some kind of strange, violent, sexually-charged 'process' (aka. MOTIVE) is taking place that isn't shown in full or explained. Also, do you have to cum to get "It" on your tail or is it just the penetration? Do blowjobs count? Aside from these "burning" questions, I thought there were just a few unnecessary and/or somewhat drawn-out scenes here and there, but nothing that bogs the movie down too much...

Like I said, it's not a perfect flick, overall, but for a theatrical horror joint I dug it quite a bit. It's got much more "style" than any of the supernatural/demonic possession retreads that have reduced the genre to a dubious, mundane, infantile farce in past years. There's a touch of gore and nudity and a decent enough premise involving basically invisible zombie STDs and a detectable affection for the genre. Check it out.