From the Evil Mind of Don Coscarelli! John Dies at the End review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on April 10, 2013

If you did a retrospective analysis of Don Coscarelli’s film career and try to pinpoint Coscarelli’s area of specialty with in the realm of horror, you’ll wind up scattered all over the place unable to achieve an exact position of Coscarelli’s sub-genre schtick. His latest (and greatest) film endeavor John Dies at the End embarks on being Coscarelli’s next longevity cult hit. Unpredictable and captivating forces you to forget that this indie movie bares no no-named stardom and borders the edge of “crinchable” special effects, but the story grabs you, shakes you, chews you up, and spits you out wanting to know more while leaving you wondering what the hell just happened…in a good way.

Paranormal exorcists and best friends David and John are bound by the supernatural Soy Sauce, a jet black living drug that give David and John the outer body experience and is the source of their powers to fight evil. The Soy Sauce has a ying-yang affect and drive them down a path of sends them into another dimension to face off agains’t a monstrous being that wants to absorb their dimensions knowledge by digesting everything they know!

John Dies at the End won’t scare you. There are no thrills or chills. What it will do is give you a wicked acid trip. Where bits of meat conjure together to become a meat monster, where door handles morph into large veiny penises, and where eye balls burst out by soul devouring gnats! Only Coscarelli’s mind could be this warped and that warp sense mixture of humor and horror keeps our attention waiting to see what happens next. This mixture also drives the film which is a definite positive, but can also be a negative.

Coscarelli’s film feels all over the place that makes the concept hard to grasp. The non-linear plot places characters in our conscious in disorderly manner without any grounded statuses. By the end of the movie, I start to wonder if there are pieces missing from the story boards. The concept of time doesn’t seem to exist and that might be part of the film’s facade as the drug-fueled outer-body experience.

Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes are great as Dave and John. Dave’s a passive person with a sarcastic attitude but willing to stand John’s frantic personality. John, as I said before, is a bit spastic and has that carpe diem attitude. Their contrast draws them together to form a powerhouse team. Tack on Clancy Brown as a co-worker of their trade with a sleazy white hairdo and Paul Giamatti as a skeptic feature reporter and you have great talent supporting the the two leads who are already phenomenal as your slummy ghostbusters. Doug Jones (Hellboy) makes an appearance whose character doesn’t have enough time screen in my opinion as an other dimension mystic. Lets not forget the cameo of Angus Scrimm as a demon priest – fantastic.

John Dies at the End will smack you in the face and you’ll smile at the end. You’ll definitely get some laughs because this horror comedy is nearly in the same vein as the Bubba Ho-tep with the anal soul sucking mummy. Magnet Releasing brings you the next Don Coscarelli hit and you can purchase at Amazon.

Candarian Evil is Back! Evil Dead remake review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on April 6, 2013

Some moviegoers pride themselves as being a purist especially hardcore horror fans who are looking for an excuse to bash the shit out of anything that isn’t already the horror norm. Remakes are notorious for being made and resulting to being just a money-hungry cash-in and being an absolute piece of garbage bringing shame to the original crew of the original movie. Only once in awhile, a remake will come along to excite and thrill while still being true and respectful to the original movie. Evil Dead is very true and very respectful.

Four friends watch over a drug recovering addict going cold turkey in a woodsy remote cabin. They happen upon the Necronomican – a book bound in human flesh and inked in human blood – and release soul possessing and feasting demons that bring bloody havoc upon group of friends.

With Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Bruce Campbell backing and producing complete the remake project helmed by newcomer Fede Alvarez, you could call this movie a slam dunk and was from start to finish. Right from beginning, the blood begins and, boy, did the blood keep flowing. Raimi’s The Evil Dead intended to be a frightening movie with lots of gore with very little campiness. Alvarez’s Evil Dead just amplified the scary and quadrupled the gore with little to no campiness while keeping Raimi’s story practically whole through the film’s duration and even putting little tidbit easter eggs in film much like Raimi did with placing Freddy Kueger’s blade claw in the tool shed to show respect to Wes Craven and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is it’s own monster when being compared to the original film while still being a “Video Nasty.” I’d call Evil Dead a proud and gruesome spawn based off the original intent of Raimi’s The Evil Dead. If you’re Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness fan, you can completely forget about any humor being portrayed here; all the fun and games will be left out until Evil Dead 4 makes some kind of potential wave.

Call me impressed by Fede Alveraz who has all short films under his belt. I watched his robo-apocolyptic short Panic Attack and thought he had an eye for detail and the details for Evil Dead are right on the nose – the Cabin, the overzealous fog, the controversial woods scene, – but Fede did add his own. For example, there is no Ash (which might piss some people off more than the rest), the whole reason for being at the cabin, the explanation of the Necronomicon, the ending. Yet all these elements make the movie stand on it’s own two evil feet. It is mindless, it is gory, it is sick and it is fun – just like the original.

Evil Gets Sleazy! Sexcula review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on April 1, 2013

Alright! Vintage horror porn! Well, maybe not vintage, but definitely retro porn! Director John Holbrook directs his own horror spoof Sexcula in 1974 nearly 40 years prior to the more recent spoof entitled This Ain’t Dracula XXX. Neither flick will scare your pants off, but somehow your pants will still come off especially with Debbie Collin’s as the sleazy Countess Sexcula!

This campy sexcapade blends horror with hardcore, bushy pornography that includes a the horny Countess Sexcula, a buxom blonde that can’t wait to sink her teeth into the next willing male, and her cousin Dr. Fallatingstein, a saucy brunette who builds a pleasure mate with a serious flaccid problem. Sexcula is brought in to help her cousin in trying to “lift” her mate’s spirits with various seductive pleasures and other depraved methods.

Striptease Gorilla!

Striptease Gorilla!

Honestly, I’ve never heard of Sexcula so when I popped the Synapse and Impulse Picture’s disc into the player, I was pleasantly shocked that Sexcula turned out to be a full-fledged pornographic movie; once I saw the tip of the penis being swirled around the lips of Debbie Collins I knew I was in for a treat! Collin’s doesn’t just get naked, she gets naked plus performing scene after scene and perform the nasty after the nasty while a loose plot is woven in throughout…somewhere….you just have to kind of look past the sex to see the plot.

Sexcula becomes a bit kinky too. In order to get Dr. Fallatingstein’s man in working order, Sexcula conducts a striptease with a Gorilla involved! A sex-bot lies motionless on a table ready and willing to receive any throbbing member even from Orgie (prnounced Or-g) the lonely hunchback Quasimodo-type character. Also, and I think this is the most perverse part of the movie, the stick-it-to-the-institution-of-marriage porn scene where a couple can’t wait to say “I do” before a foursome madness ensues. The scene also brings a new meaning to “wife-swapping” as the bride takes on not only the groom, but the best man and the priest too!

If the plot was given more thought and a better writing to it’s campiness, Sexcula would have been a stellar hit in porno world. I’d would have liked to have seen more horror a long with the sex, but with any porn spoof like This Ain’t Dracula XXX or Evil Head you have to unbalance the plot with more humor than horror or else the feel of the film more turn more into a snuff film. With the lushness of 1970s horror with the UK Hammer horror films and the United States’ exploitative films, the Canadians could not capitalize or even utilize the horror elements and instead focused more on peace and leave – the way the 70’s are stereotypically viewed.

I’m also disappointed that Jamie Orlando, Dr. Fallatingstein, didn’t grace us with her body. But I shouldn’t be bashing Sexcula; I shouldn’t be expecting more than what meets the eye; I should take things at face value. What should I expect from a movie named Sexcula? Just a ravaging romp of lots of hot un-condomized sex ready to spread all the love and diseases one could handle! Bring on the Sexcula and I must have SEX on the mind because I just reviewed another sex-titled filmed Sexsquatch which you can read my review of the film here.

Reading Evil! Starship Troopers book review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on March 27, 2013

Like Paul Verhoeven’s intergalactic warfare movie Starship Troopers where mankind battles an arachnid army known as “Bugs?” Did you know that Starship Troopers is based off a novel of the same title and was published in the late 1950s? Well if you did not know, now you do! Written by a former naval lieutenant Robert Heinlein Starship Troopers bares little action similarities to the novel’s more recent movie counterpart.

Juan Rico decides to join the service against his parents’ wishes and embarks from a private in boot camp to non-commissioned office to finally commissioned officer. Rico’s backdrop is war; an intergalactic war with a nasty enemy known as the “Bugs,” an arachnid species that can calculate and that can strategize with the help of a brain caste pulling all the strings.

Johnny Rico getting slapped...on the ass.

Johnny Rico getting slapped…on the ass.

If you’ve seen the movie, the plot pretty much describes the movie, right? Most of the Heinlein’s novel follow’s Juan “Johnnie” Rico’s career through the trials and tribulations of Service, from boot camp to being a lieutenant, in becoming a citizen, but the action and bloody mess that was experiences on the big screen was not translated from the book as most of the Mobile Infantries whom were killed in action were described as “buying the farm.” You can’t blame Heinlein as this book was written in 1959 mentally constructed as a totally different mind set than from our generation. The words on page are seriously outdated and can be technical for the most of the novel due to Heinlein’s military background.

The novel touches more upon the power suits which make an appearance in Starship Troopers: Marauder (“Marauder” is a name of one of the many power suits). These suits give Rico and the other M.I.s a superhuman ability and give them an even playing ground with the Bugs. I rather prefer no power suits as like in Verhoeven’s film that make the bugs seem like an unstoppable force. The novel does delve a bit more into the Bug society and hierarchy as well as how the Bugs reproduce endlessly. Much of James Cameron Aliens was inspired of Heinlein’s novel in the aspects of “Bugs” and their being a Queen to produce the “warrior Bugs.”

Brain Bug and Carmen

Brain Bug and Carmen

Heinlein touches mainly on civic duty and the social norms of a military lifestyle through the confines of war. We live through Juan Rico much like we live through Johnny Rico in the movie, but don’t expect to read much about Johnny Rico’s companions. Ace, Carl, Carmen, Dizzy Flores, Sargent Zim are a few characters that you might remember from the film that are in the book, but Ace, Carl, Carmen and Dizzy are brief mentions that probably span no more than a page and half out of 260 plus pages. Zim is all through bootcamp and near the end of the novel. Instead, Juan Rico encounter various people and ranks that stem from privates to cadets to sergeants to generals.

Starship Troopers can be an interesting read for anybody with a military frame of mind or a curiosity for it. But don’t expect the chaos of battle scenes or the gore of the arachnid M.I. slaughter. Robert Heinlein’s novel will not be everyone, but a good read none-the-less.

Evil That Is Hard to Swallow. Bad Meat review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on March 24, 2013

Not quite sure I want to review Bad Meat. Analyzing a project that never saw completion is like trying to teach terminally ill 3 year old how to manage a bank account. As I do a little more back ground research on Bad Meat, I’ve come across some very interesting and almost discouraging tidbits about the history behind Bad Meat. First off, the director is named Lulu Jarmen. Right now, you might be asking yourself who the hell is Lulu Jarmen and what else has she directed? Some people think Jarmen took over the project from Rob Schmidt, the director behind the inbred cannibal movie Wrong Turn and who promised fans that Dead Meat would be the most vile move ever seen quoted in 2011. However, many other people believe that Lulu Jarmen is a pseudo-name for Rob Schmidt because of how embarrassedly bad Bad Meat turned out financially and plot-wise.

Six troubled youths are sent to the isolated Camp Hardway under the cruel thumb of an hitler-esque figure and perverse, sadistic counselors. When the camp cook feeds the counselors rotten meat, the counselors transform into raging, flesh eating psychopaths.

The premise is a shortcoming much like the ending of Dead Meat. Literally, the film just ran out of money from Capital films and immediately shut down production half way through the movie. Is it a good thing that perhaps Schmidt (or Jarmen) shot the movie from first sequence? One would think. Yet, Dead Meat ends right at the middle of the movie and in the midst of an attack none-the-less. The characters’ fates, the six teenage renegades, are left unexplained by an open ended, most likely reshot, ending that has left us to conjure up our own imagination to seek an ending to Dead Meat.

Dead Meat from the beginning had no promise even though fun to watch. The perversity is awkward, the fluids flow in chunky green vomit and think warm red blood, and the dialogue is as colorful as all the spectrums of the rainbow. The first 82-83, give or take, manages to at least make your time worth wild, but the last ten minutes are severely butchered with reshot with scenes of a severely burned (maybe?) survivor of the camp laying in a hospital bed and typing away on a bedside computer. Typing what? Yo no se. Most likely the story behind how this survivor came to be mangled and so horribly disfigured. These scenes, which are interjected into the original film, barely have any connections besides the name of the main character Tyler being thrown about by his apparent older brother who looks old enough to be his father.

Dead Meat is not the “sickest move you’ll see this year.” Besides, I most likely would not even call it a full film. Intriguing, gross, and hilarious but a grand let down by Jarmen (or by Schmidt, who cares?). Any bit of Dead Meat’s success died with Capitol Films the production company. Revolver Entertainment’s pickup of Dead Meat would have rejuvenated life into this film, but instead arbitrary reshoots baffles and confuse.