It's getting harder to stomache this stuff.

Warlock II: The Armageddon


Julian Sands is back in his role as an evil witch out to do the devil's bidding...and this time I was routing for him.

This movie peeved my sensibilities. It opens with some scene in a Stonehenge-like place, with a bunch of druid-like men performing some sort of exorcism-like ritual on a very pregnant possessed women, with a bunch of cheesy looking sacred gems.  Wait, maybe they were a monastic order.  Anyway, they get raided and stomped by some baddies who weren't really defined by any crest or dialogue or anything save (I think) Sands presence.  Next thing you know two of the dru-monks are exchanging lines about saving the rune stones.  Wait a minute, rune stones?  Those semi-iridescent Jell-O mold rejects?  Granted this was probably before we had such informed words and phrases as "cultural sensitivity" or "syncretism", but rune stones were actual stones with runes on them.  That's all they really  needed to be sacred; not the triviality of doubling as sparkly New Age jewelry.

Fast forward to modern times:  Dopey, Dumbo-eared Chris Young stars as a one of two druid warriors conscripted to stop the ascent to our realm, of Satan.  In the meantime, the witch - who was born on the East coast and is now on an evil road trip to collect the gem-er-stones - ditches his zombie cab and steals an orange muscle car.

After he's brought back from a shotgun blast to the gut (chest? whatever!) Young proceeds to talk to trees and use hovering baseballs to hone his ability to use the force a la Luke Skywalker.  This part just seemed to go on and on and on.  There's also a girl warrior whom he shares a birthday with.  Sounds familiar doesn't it.  She comes late to the tree conversations and psychic ball lobbing, but together they work to seal the opening portal - which is a big stone dais, marked with runes, in a Stonehenge-like place in the woods (that apparently no one has noticed until now).

Did I mention that this is in like California or something?  I'm not even going to get on how there's no possible way that the first paragraph's scenario could have happened in America, but now it seems like they happened in California.  First, historians widely dispute the existence of a secret fraternal order of powerful, knowledge-hoarders and self-fashioned magicians, but if they existed it seems their disappearance would have predated the New England colonies.  Second, I think someone might notice a mini Stonehenge ANYWHERE in the United States.  Third, such a place would not have been in California just by nature of when it was settled.  Who would be on the west coast carving celtic or norse runes into stone gateways to hell...which (in its association with Satan) is Christian, anyway?  Wouldn't Latin be the necromancer's language of choice?

I can't believe I used to like this stuff.

Time to wrap this up

 Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger 4

     Try, for a second, to forget that the 2^nd and 3^rd movies ever took place. I know...it's like trying to forget that The Phantom Menace ever happened, but that's what the movie tells me to do! I'm not kidding! Right at the beginning, it apologizes for 2 & 3, and tells me to forget it ever happen. That in mind...

     Toxie and his lard-ass sidekick try to save a school of 'special' students from terrorists of some sort. I don't know, they're dressed as babies. It's all very strange. Anyhoo, the job goes bad and a bomb goes off (thankfully) killing Lard-ass, and transports Toxie to a parallel universe where he's a bad guy. At the same time, his polar opposite going by the name of Noxie is also transported to Toxie's universe. After that, there's a multitude of silly over the top violence that we've come to love Toxie for. Except for the fetus battle. That might have put it over the top even for me. Or maybe it was Noxie's Freddy Kruger-faced wanker. As usual, evil is vanquished and good reigns supreme. This might have given me a headache.

     This should have been the first sequel. I found this better than the other two by far. I also liked this Toxie's voice a lot better. It was deep, manly, and articulate. However...not much tone on the guys body. The old Toxie was a slab of muscle compared to this guy. The important thing to remember here is..It's over! NO MORE DAMN TOXIC AVENGER MOVIES!!!...till this jerk makes another...

I mix in a little banana peel into my weed. 

Toxie Facts!-->

Toxie now vomits green sludge when he reaches sexual climax.

Lemmy Kilmister shows up up at 5:26! FUCKING LEMMY!!!!...and that fucking dork Sgt. Kabuki-man NYPD is in several scenes. He's also the father of Toxies' girlfriends son. I guess that makes him a dick.

There is a play...it really was a thing, it really happened, and I guess it's the only thing I have left to see. 

Dear God, make it rain fire on these dipshits.

     That's it for me. I've watched 27 movies, in 31 days, almost all in a row. I'm tired of movies. But in the interest of full disclosure, here's what I had to postpone due to the business trip: Prince of Darkness, Dark Tower, RetarDEAD, and Ticked Off Trannies With Knives. So yeah...I had to pass on some 'quality' films...till next year, that is.

What do you call something that's half frog and half duck?

The Toxic Avenger 3: The Last Temptation of Toxie

     Once again, Toxie's back and spends the first 12 minutes in a flash back scene brutally slaughtering those pesky tools from the Apocalypse Corp. After that, it looks an awful lot like Toxic Avenger 2. This time, Toxie sells his soul to the Devil so that his girl Claire could have some new eyes. In doing so, he turns into Tromavilles biggest asshole and a bit of a corporate tool. And Claire, by the way, needs to swallow a damn cheeseburger once in awhile ..anemic little skank. Anyway, Toxie finally realizes what a shill he is, and starts tearing Apocalypse thugs new buttholes. The final battle(s) is between the CEO of Apocalypse, which just happens to be the Devil. During the battle, Toxie is reverted back to his original nerdy self and trust me, you'll want to punch and kick him to sleep the second he opens his mouth. Naturally, truth, justice, and toxic waste prevail and the movie closes with Toxie and Claire getting hitched. Awww.....

     I've made the accusation that Lloyd Kaufman smoked a lot of weed while directing/producing this film. Now I'm starting to think I was the stoned one. I never touched the stuff in junior high, but how do I explain watching these movies sober and liking them? Most likely I was hopped up on Cherry Coke and Heyday bars. As stated in before, parts 2 & 3 were to be a single movie but there was so much footage, they produced 2 sequels. Despite knowing this fact, I didn't like this as much as the 2nd and it's nowhere near as good as the 1st.  However, there's one more sequel and one more shot at redemption...but I'm not holding my breath.

 Toxie Facts!-->

Toxie takes lightning dumps and doesn't have to take his pants off to do it. Not even to wipe!

Toxie can now pee like a fire hose, but the green sludge has made way for a more normal clear liquid. Maybe it was just a bladder infection.

Wednesday: Finale

It's...there was this fish-guy...um...not sure what the sumo wrestlers for...Christ, did everyone drink the bong water but me?

The Toxic Avenger 2

     OK, let's get to work. It's been five years since the events in the first film. Toxie is super bored because there's no crime, therefore there's nobody to violently impale on kitchen equipment. Then some insufferable prick blows up the Home for the Blind that Toxie worked at in order to turn it into a toxic dump. So, within the first 15 minutes, there's a super duper fight. There is nowhere else in the world that you can see an over the top ultra violent fight between Toxie and a biker, a tranny, a man-dog, a midget basketball player, a Klansman, and Indian. Oh, I forgot, it also breaks in to a very short dance number. And in case you were wondering, the fight with the midget was the best (Toxie turned him into a basketball). After that, it's off to Japan to find his dad. His dad's a jerk, so he kills him. Apocalypse is ruining Tromaville, and Japans ass needs whooping, so everyone has a taste of Toxies' fist of fury. All along the way, things just get super freaking strange and it make me wonder if Lloyd Kaufman spends most of his time sucking off a bong.

     Once back in Tromaville, Toxie starts cleaning house. And after a silly final confrontation (until the next sequel), the truth about his father is revealed and it's party time.

     The violence is waaaay over the top compared to the first film, and there's just too many goofy things to list. I've heard some mention of it being darker than the original, but that's bunk. It's just as messed up as the first. It's probably been close to 20 years since I've seen this mess, and I was damn glad to witness it again. I'd forgotten most of it, so it was like watching it for the first time.

BEFORE

AFTER

NOTHING MAKE SENSE IN THIS MOVIE!!!

Toxie Facts!-->

Part 2 and 3 were originally one movie, but Lloyd had taken so much footage that he had to break them up. Now I understand why I confuse the two so often.

Yes, that's Michael Jai White in his very first movie. Welcome to the skids, kid.

 For some lame reason, Melvin Ferd's new last name is Junko.

Tuesday: The Toxic Avenger 2, part 3

Not quite what I was expecting...

Howling
2012


So I thought this was some kind of Korean remake but it turned out to be a police drama about a newbie female detective trying to solve a series of murders involving a trained wolfdog, amid a sexist force that devalues her work.  I was really surprised to see a coworker slap her in front of everyone and not even the captain said a word...in 2012.  Anyway, the story was about a wolf-dog hybrid that was trained to specifically to kill the people behind a drug and child prostitution ring.  Justice gets served but it's up to you whether you think it truly had a happy ending considering Eun-yung really solved the case but still got busted back to cycle patrol.  However, I never saw an Asian move where there was a truly happy ending.  Still, she was relentless where everyone else was just looking to get a quick bust.  It's probably one of the better films I've seen in the last few weeks.

A long way from Candy Man

Blood Wars
2008

This was so boring I just had to stop watching it.  Tony Todd, how could you?  His mortgage must've been overdue.  He gave it his all but this was just intolerable:

Tai-chi practicing tree hugger kills a sadistic rapist who turns out to be some kind of druid (again with these people) sentry, and gets bitten by a vamp for his troubles.  Now he's a buff sex machine.  Blah blah blah. Bite bite snarl. Glowing explosive hand rays and bad Latin.
 

Lukewarm

Snow Creature
1954

I'm waylaying my bitching about the Warlock sequels for a bit.

So in this black and white farce, some Americans (a botanist and a photographer) are shanghaied by their Sherpa guide, whose woman was just carried off by a yeti.  The search leads them to a yeti family.  They manage to capture one and transport it to Chicago (?) where the question of  - I'm not kidding - immigration status delays movement of the creature.  It gets loose, scares some woman to death, caresses a side of beef in a packing plant, and gets taken down in the storm drainage system (where it's apparently learned to navigate even better than the map-wielding police).

For a snow creature, it wasn't white at all and looked more like Bigfoot.  Okay, no, it actually looked like some really tall doofus in an intermittently plush bodysuit.  This was during the time when monster makeup was limited to everything looking like some kind of modified wolfman in the face.

I could go into some sociopolitical discourse about the treatment of foreigners and the reason female victims are depicted but why bother.  In the end it was about getting the specimen.  They never did find the Sherpa's woman either.

Cremated over a basket of live cats?

Warlock
1989

Synopsis: Julian Sands is a witch practicing the dark arts who has his execution stayed by Satan so that he can find the Grand Grimoire - the ultimate book of shadows.  He's tossed  three centuries into the future and, unbeknownst to him, followed by a witch-hunter named Redferne.  They both end up in Lori Singer's home...eventually.

Sands was just made to portray supernatural - or in the case of The Turn of the Screw, disinterested - villainy.  It's hard to say anything bad about him or his character.  However, swaddled in furs like he was, Redferne looked more like he stepped off the 15th or 16th century highlands (minus the kilt) than the 17th century New England settlements.  While we're on wardrobe, broad-shouldered Lori Singer looked like a linebacker in drag.  Her hair was a frizzy, red mess that made her head look abnormally small and her wardrobe was truly horrible even for the 80s.  She actually looked better after she was be-spelled.  Well, not wearing those white hightops with black stockings and leather but better than the disco-diner waitress outfit she had on the first day..

Anywho, this is actually a highly tolerable movie.  The special effects are not ever the top so, even being dated, they were survivable.  Terrible fashion choices aside, the film's logic is easy to follow and more suspenseful than actually horrible.  It's comical the things people used to believe about the signs of witchcraft and the wards or counters for them - which sometimes sounded more like witchery themselves.  Now on to the sequel.

Grimm Indeed

Grimm: La Llorona

::sigh:: If it wasn't for the fact that school has been preventing me from keeping up my end, I would not even be bothering to list this one.  Of the American depictions of The Weeping Woman (a Hispanic Legend), Supernatural was definitely scarier (and the Hellboy story from the collaborative collection was more moving).  This lackluster offering really did nothing to define the character in terms of the show's perimeters or even to add a new layer to it.  Also, it made me want to watch/read up on Grimm specifically for conspiracy revelation and I hate it when shows like this make you more interested in to mundane workings than in the things that are supposed to set them apart - namely the monsters and plot.

But anyway, a Mexican-American ex-agent helps the lead character keep some kids from being drowned by this undefined creature, with whom she has a personal grudge.  She herself is some kind of cat-thing, which just seemed thrown in for measure and really contributed nothing to the storyline.

If I end up watching this show I'm going to be mad.

There was no baby bear...

Mockingbird Lane

This re-imagining of cult fave The Munsters stars yummy Jerry O'Connell (the fat kid form Stand By Me) and Portia de Rossi (Mrs. Degeneres) as the lead pair, Herman and Lily.  However, Eddie Izzard's Grandpa steals the show with his anti-conformist antics.  This time around the Munsters are forced to move after a "baby bear" attacks Eddie's Wildlife Explorer scout troupe...or at least that's what they tell him.  Truth is that Eddie's hit puberty which for him means turning into a werewolf.  Lily and Herman disagree with Grandpa on how (or even if) they should reveal this to Eddie, creating the central conflict of the pilot.  While Herman and Lily want to feign normalcy - living in the hobo-murder mansion - and dance around the issue, Grandpa makes neighborhood-enslaving cookies and struts his position "outside the circle of life."

Personally, I liked the show and see how it would be an interesting series.  The depart from the campy in favor of the macabre is a welcomed change.  That said...I don't know.  Considering they aren't projecting a series until next year, based on reception, I feel they should have made more of an effort to make a longer, feature-length special instead of a mock pilot.  Plus, it made me watch Grimm.  

Fave scene: Grandpa swaying to the blues while using a steampunk artifact heart as an exsanguination aid.

Does my head look infected? Does this tutu make my ass look big?

 The Toxic Avenger

     Dateline: Tromaville, New Jersey. Melvin Ferd the third is a pathetic nerd. He works as a janitor in a health club and is bullied and pranked by a couple of psychos. After a prank goes right, then wrong, poor Melvin jumps out a window and into a vat of toxic waste, forever transforming him into Toxie, The Toxic Avenger. This would also be the last prank ever played on him. Throughout the movie, Toxie battles crime, corruption, and bad manners. He even helps open a jar for a suburban wife. 

     This is what I would consider a foundation movie. Films like this were the start of my steep descent toward the B-side of movie-land. I also think this should be one of the first low budget movies you should ever see.  My favorite scene is still when a mans head is crushed by the weight lifting equipment. Another thing I found funny was the  inconsistent voice over. He went from whiny nerd to a bit on the suave side. And look! I still have my original VHS:

Go Toxie!

Toxie Facts!--->

Toxie urinates green sludge.

Marisa Tomei is also in this film. I don't feel bad for not noticing.

Monday: Required Sequel

I'll just assume that's cocoon building material...

Ghidorah: The 3 Headed Monster

I needed one giant monster movie this year, and 3 heads are better than one.

     Um, plot-wise, this one is a bit of a mess. Super Big Important Princess Whats-her-tush is on her way to Japan, aka city of monsters, and disappears when her plane explodes due to bomb infestation. Then meteors, then she shows up as a demigod from mars...see what I mean? This isn't even the first 3^rd of the movie. But, check out the all star cast:

Mothra!

Rodan!

The Peanut Sisters!

Ghidorah!

And Mo-Fo GODZILLA!!!!

     Naturally, 'Zilla and Rodan start going at it immediately. They have such a deep hatred for each other, it takes Mothra to break up the fight...by spraying them both with silly string. Mothra never changes into a moth, and at one point is seen riding on the back of Rodan, spewing his silly string all over Ghidorah. Godzilla, ever the tactful warrior, can be seen chucking rocks at Mr. Trios Head. I don't recall him ever lighting up G-Head once and that's a bit odd because it's one of Big G's trademark moves.

     In the end, they defeat Ghidorah. However, it should be noted that all they really did was chase him away and that's where they end it. Nobody goes after him, nobody knows where he went. Seems to me, that's something you'd want to do or at the very least, follow up on.

Next Up: The Final 4