XTRO (1982)

 I'd first seen this movie back in the VHS days and thought it sucked except for that one scene, the only memorable one really, where a lady gives birth to a full grown man after being raped by an E.T. Fast forward some 30 years later and I figured I would give this another chance since I've heard a few people claim to really like this one for some reason. Well upon my recent rewatch I have to say this one is still pretty crappy. I mean there's a couple of cool things, a guy getting his throat cut by a toy top, midget clown hijinks, alien bloodsucking and some really bizarre imagery that almost make this feel like an attempted art-film. Unfortunately the boring Britishness of it all tends to outweigh the positives and the fact that nothing makes much sense and it all ends with nothing being resolved or explained doesn't help. I guess I was right the first time.
 Somehow there were 2 sequels to this made by the same director(Harry Bromley Davenport) in the 90s but I'm in no hurry to watch them. Also I think they are sequels in name only and don't have anything to do with this movie's nonsensical story at all.

Italian VHS:

Spanish DVD:

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD II (1988)

 I thought I had seen this one before but apparently I had only viewed the first and third entries in this series. This doesn't really matter much because this one is not actually a sequel at all and is basically a really crappy remake of Part 1 with extra helpings of really dumb retard humour thrown in because I guess the director, Ken Wiederhorn, felt that the first movie wasn't dumb enough for 1988?? The first film, while not my favorite zombie movie of all time, at least has some cool punk-rock characters, naked Linnea Quigley and rocking tunes. This one has none of that. It does bring back Thom Mathews and James Karen to basically play the same parts they had in the first movie but this time they have different names, are extra-annoying and yell a whole bunch for no reason. There's barely any gore this time, there's no nudity, instead of punk rockers you get stupid little kids and only a couple of people actually die from what I saw(though I did doze off due to boredom at one point so maybe something exciting happened then but I doubt it). I'm not even sure why this one is rated R. Stick with the first one or if you're a big fan of piercing check out Part 3 which also has the common decency to throw some nudity into their zombie flick.

 


             Goofy-ass German poster(under the title GREAT ARE THE WILD ZOMBIES, I think?) that is way more fitting for the stupidity of this movie!:

MARTYRS (2016)

 Of course remaking director Pascal Laugier's French horror/downer epic into an Americanized version is completely retarded. I mean going in you know they aren't going to top the insanely depressing mode of the original and regurgitating something that was so fresh at the time only 8 years later is totally pointless. For about the first half of this film it's a pretty straight-forward remake. Then there's a point where the films diverge a bit. I will give this version credit for one thing, and one thing only, they sorta shift the focus from the main character of Anna to the original victim and vengeance-seeker Lucy which makes a bit more sense plot-wise. Sadly I think this was the only good idea they had. The rest of the "originality" involves stupid out-of-place action scenes with Anna(Bailey Noble) gaining some super powers after being buried alive. The ending tries to pack the same punch as the original but by then it's gone too far off the rails to garner much of an emotional response. Luckily I think this thing will pretty much sink into obscurity as a footnote and the original will continue to be remembered as the nihilistic masterpiece that it is or at least I hope that's the case.

SKULLDUGGERY (1970)

 Burt Reynolds meets Bigfoot?? Kinda, sorta. Bigfoot here is actually a whole clan of ape-people, or Tropi as they are called. Most of the movie though is just a typical jungle adventure until our group discovers these primitives. Then Burt uses the Tropi as slaves to work a mine, then his drunken partner bangs one of the female creatures and impregnates it, then Burt gets upset because some rich guy wants to also use the Tropi as slaves. Amazingly the film then devolves into the worst of genres before it ends, the dreaded courtroom drama! William "Blacula" Marshall plays an attorney who calls everyone a filthy racist if they don't think the ape-people are human-beings deserving of the same rights as everyone else. Finally a militant black power dude with an afro shows up to make fun of the mother ape and it all ends on a very downbeat note. Apparently the original cut of this film was more intensely about race-relations but in this finished version that only comes up in the last 15 minutes or so which seems a bit jarring and out of place.  Ultimately this film sounds a lot better when describing it then actually viewing it but it is odd enough that it keeps you watching just to see what the hell is going to happen next. Sadly the payoff is pretty dumb.




                                                      TROPIS: MAN OR APE?

HARD ROCK ZOMBIES (1985)

 HARD ROCK ZOMBIES is a film that on the surface I feel like I should hate. It's a really dumb 80s film that doesn't take itself very seriously. Unlike the majority of other stupid 80s flicks though I find this one really entertaining and I've rewatched it so many times over the years that I have long ago lost count. I think it's the fact that they just throw everything into the mix that I find so appealing. Of course you get the zombies of the title, who do rock out after being turned into flesh-chomping ghouls, but in addition to that there's an old-lady werewolf, a couple of midgets, a bald Nazi weed-whacker killer, a pervy peeping-Tom, a sexy slasher-lady and to top it all off Adolph Hitler himself shows up. The music itself, while perhaps a bit on the soft and poppy side to be truly called "hard rock" is still catchy enough in that bubblegum-rock kind of way(or maybe that's just because I've heard these songs so many times that they have ear-wormed themselves into my brain!). There's boobs, blood, a Nazi monster-faced midget eats himself down to just a skull, there's an "homage" to PSYCHO and Thing from THE ADDAMS FAMILY gets zombified and kills a guy, what more could you want from a stupid horror flick designed to be viewed whilst drunk and in a partying mood?

 

Known in France as just regular ROCK ZOMBIES which I suppose is a bit more accurate:

WEB OF THE SPIDER (1971)

 Klaus Kinski doesn't look very much like Edgar Allan Poe but that didn't stop director Antonio Margheriti from casting him as such in this goth tale. It all starts off with a raving mad Kinski making a bet with Anthony Franciosa that he can't stay the night in an old haunted castle. After Franciosa gets there he runs into some ghosts. It's all a bit too slow-moving for me but Margheriti as usual delivers on the creepy atmosphere so if you're into old dark castle flicks this might be of interest. Of course if you've seen Margheritis earlier CASTLE OF BLOOD you've basically already seen this except now you don't even get Barbar Steele to ogle. Perhaps if Kinski had a bigger role this might have more to recommend it for.  AKA IN THE GRIP OF THE SPIDER and DRACULA IN THE CASTLE OF BLOOD(weird title since there's no vampirism going on)

DRACULA IN THE CASTLE OF HORROR!!:

KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941)

 It's kinda hard to find any movies that starred Mantan Moreland. Outside of the all-black cast films he made in Harlem, many of which aren't even around anymore, he usually just plays a supporting role. In this one he's pretty close to the top though. Mantan, as Jefferson Jackson, crashes on an island along with 2 not as entertaining white fellows and ends up in a mansion that happens to have a mad doctor, played by Henry Victor but was originally supposed to be Bela Lugosi and then Peter Lorre who both backed out, and some old-timey shambling zombies. At one point a couple of zombies try and put the bite on Mantan but this was was before zombies were synonymous with flesh-eating ghouls so perhaps it was just some coincidental general monstrous hijinks they were getting up to. This is a pretty good example of a not very serious but still entertaining goofy classic and it was so popular at the time that they cranked out a sequel, REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES, 2 years later which I need to check out pronto.

 

SATANIC ATTRACTION (1989)

Brazil gave us the great Coffin Joe back in the 60s and then like 20 years later they crapped out this slasher flick concerning a Satanic cult. The movie itself doesn't make a bunch of sense. A radio DJ(Gabriela Toscano) tells spooky stories about a serial killer and then a real-life serial killer acts out the murders in real-time. They do give us some HG Lewis-levels of gore to make up for the deficit of logic. There's one especially over-the-top sequence where a lady on a hammock is gutted by an over-sized Ali-Bab type sword and a bucket full of intestines falls out of her. I guess practical special FX were not quite as advanced in South America as they were in the U.S. by 1989.
 I may have enjoyed this movie a bit more if it looked better. The version I viewed last night was a blurry VHS version blown-up and projected on a wall which made it even blurrier. As far as I know there is no DVD release of this so I guess this may be as good as this thing is going to look for now. Luckily it's a pretty simple film that's not hard to follow. The director, Fauzi Mansur, made a ton of pornos starting way back in the 60s and then finished his career with this and some other horror flick titled RITUAL OF DEATH a year later. I doubt that it reaches the subversive grandeur of any of the Coffin Joe epics.


                                               

                                                   The Motley Crue-looking VHS cover!:

SATANIC SISTERS (1977)

 The DVD I have of this says its title is SEXY SISTERS but the movie itself says they are SATANIC. Either way this is one of those softcore(but bordering on hardcore) Jess Franco Eurotrash spectacles that shows how much better porn was back when they put at least 2 seconds into thinking up some kind of a storyline. The story here deals with a blonde lady(Karine Gambier) who is a nymphomaniac and her manipulative sister(Pamela Stanford) who, along with an evil doctor(Jack Taylor) is trying to get her committed to an insane asylum so she can be the sole heir to a bunch of money. I was expecting things to get a bit more nihilistic towards the ending but Franco keeps things fairly predictable which is a little unfortunate. Still an ok watch if you need tons of Eurobush, frolicking lesbian incest, naked boobs, ass and floppy penises on display. I made the mistake of watching this back-to-back with Franco's MARQUISE DE SADE movie with Lina Romay and while separately they're both entertaining enough they're also far too similar to make a very good double feature so watch this with something like EUGENIE instead. AKA THE DEVILISH SISTERS and SWEDISH NYMPHO SLAVES

                                            More ominous in German!:

GOLDEN TRIANGLE: THE GHOST ISLAND (1985)

 Having never seen a Columbian horror flick before I was somewhat hyped to check this one out. Maybe this was a bad one to start with because now I'm not too sure I want to see anymore from that country. I can certainly overlook the micro-budget but the monotonous repetition on display made this one a rough watch. A man ends up dead after traveling to a mysterious island, which I guess is somewhere in the vicinity of The Bermuda Triangle, to find a big valuable solid golden triangle that was placed there by aliens. Then our hero, Jorge Pinilla, who's a large chubby man who kinda looks like Mr. Clean and has this one acting credit to his name, goes on his own quest to bring back the triangle and figure out what the hell is going on. A lot of the movie is taken up by endless scenes of walking, there's an annoying little boy character and a green alien kid that shows up. On the plus side there are a couple of humorous clunky kung-fu scenes, some man-eating shrubbery and the score(lifted from 1978's SUPERMAN soundtrack) is pretty epic. To be honest I did doze off a couple of times so I'm sure I missed at least a couple of important plot points. Unfortunately I could not sleep through the whole movie because whenever anyone gets near the big titular golden triangle it emits an ear-shattering high-pitch noise that makes for a harrowing alarm clock.
 There was a second Columbian feature playing right after this at the theater I was in titled STRANGE REGRESSION but after reading a pretty crappy review of it online I figured I would cut my losses at that point and split. Maybe one day I will regain enough courage to give this country another chance.