Sooo technically, it's a government housing project for undocumented...um....guests?

Strange Invaders

     Quick backstory: I've been looking for this movie for about 10 years. I remember seeing it on HBO or Cinemax in the mid '80s, but I could never remember the name. I would describe it to people, and they'd have no clue what I was talking about. Internet searches didn't help much either because I could only remember a couple of scenes. Then about 6 months ago Comet TV was running an ad and BAM, there it was. I went to Amazon and they had plenty of copies so here we are. My last movie for the season. I don't remember it being a great movie, but there's scenes that take place in the basement of a church that creeped me out when I encountered nearly the same design when visiting another church in Minnesota. And when you're 8, that shit is real!

     In 1950-something, aliens invade a small Midwestern town and make all the residents disappear. Fast forward to 1980-something, and we meet our university entomologist hero, The Professor. His ex-wife stops by to inform him that her mother has died and he needs to care for their daughter. After weeks go by, he tries to find her in that very same small town, now populated with human skin wearing aliens that look stoned and kinda chill. Their hobbies include walking, creeping people out, and turning humans into blue glowing balls. Professor must have harshed their mellow because they start making his life hell once he's home. After involving a tabloid writer in his strange story, his ex shows up and explains she's one of them and she fell in love with him blablabla..had a kid with him blablabla...not really sure how the biology works here. On top of everything else, the Feds knew about the aliens and had an agreement with them to provide a place to stay, why they shared some tech with us. Typical. A bunch more stuff happens and at the climax, we're treated to a face ripping march towards a flying saucer filled with aliens working on steam valves inside a space ship. I guess interstellar travel still involves steam. 

And it's really phallic too!

     So how does it hold up to my memories from 30+ years ago? Pretty good, actually. The only 2 scenes I remember were very skewed compared to tonight's re-watch. Without my bias, it's really just a forgotten sci-fi movie from the mid 80s, and not really a horror film at all. As a kid, the face ripping part made me think it was a scary movie, but it was actually just a small plot detail to let us see the aliens take off their human suits.

Shout out to Comet, I guess. I don't know what the etiquette is.

     And wow. I'm done. 31 days, 31 movies, and for only the second time since we've been doing this, it was completely uninterrupted by any of the usually things that throw it off course. I'm happy to say I've seen every Halloween film, and sad to say the same thing about the Evil Bong series. In the unlikely event that you read this, thank you for doing so. And speaking of reading, I'm tired of movies. I'm going to go read a damn book or something...

See you Oct. 1st, 2018.

Infinitely Stupid

Infinite Santa 8000

     Over a thousand years ago, humanity died out, and (for the most part) only robots, cyborgs, and mutants walk the earth. So does Santa. And when we first see him, he's in the middle of a competitive blood sport. After winning, he heads back to his ranch and we meet his herd of robot reign deer and Martha, his robot companion. During the night, Martha is kidnapped by some guy that looks a rabbit, but he's not the Easter bunny. Santa rescues her, but then they're ambushed and captured. That's when we meet our really uncharismatic antagonist Dr. Shackleton. She's got some sort of world domination plot cooking, and she needs Santa's DNA to build her army. Yeah, strong writing.

     This is not the first time I've watched animated Halloween features for this blog, but this is the crappiest I've ever seen. It was like watching a Flash cartoon from 1999. This was something that should have only been 45 minutes maximum. Somehow they stretched this out to over an hour and a half. There wasn't anything funny, edgy, or even interesting. The dialog is painful to listen to and the voice talent is partly to blame. And I almost feel bad trashing this because somewhere out there is a group of people that busted their ass to make this happen. Was it a horror movie? No, probably not intentionally. It's a good candidate for this years Horror Movie Mulligan, and you can test yourself to see how far you can get into this movie by watching it here:

Infinite Santa 8000 via Youtube

Tuesday: Final film for 2017!

Rest in peace, Angus Scrimm

Phantasm 5: Ravager

Never put 'Final' in your title. Nobody believes it.

     I'm not sure how the last movie ended, but we find Reggie walking in the desert, mostly lost, battered, but alive. Within minutes, the balls this series is known for start chasing him around. After fending them off, he wakes up in an asylum. Mike, the person he's been looking for since #3, appears and informs him that he has dementia and needs to keep him 'engaged', so he asks Reggie to tell him the story from the beginning.

Really, this is all we ever want to see. Skip the ugly little grave Jawas

     From there we're given the back and forth through time, reality, not reality....it's trope that's a little tired, but far more inspiring than the last film. The problem is, you ALSO don't know what direction the film is going and that makes it really hard to keep up or simply give a damn. It happens so much that it takes over the movie, and pretty soon you start to lose interest. And the ending? Um....I'm not touching that. It was ambiguous, then the credits started rolling, then stopped and the movie started up again. Then the credits rolled again. I'm not sure who was in charge of editing, but they flubbed it.

     Now the $20 question: Will they make another? They treated it as a franchise finale, but we all know that's crap if someone comes up with the money. The only other thing that could prevent it would be the death of Angus Scrimm, who died shortly after filming this. The Tall Man was a staple of the franchise, and the one thing truly haunting about it. Though he was really showing his age and couldn't move like before, he still banged out his lines, and you still listened to every word. His was a commanding voice and I'll miss it.

Monday: My Halloween needs more Santa...

FFS, STOP CROWD FUNDING THESE!!!

Evil Bong 666

Face the face of Evil, Face the face of Stupid.

  

     OK, so maybe I've gone too far. Maybe I've pushed myself to the point of futility in watching these terrible movies. And yes, I've been stoned to the point where I thought I couldn't move my arms, hands...eyes. Limited experience, but I have a background and I have to admit, there's no way in hell that I would have ever found this funny. It helped me with Pink Floyd's Animals, but this would be a pile of shit under any kind of influence. I could have been watching the Devils play they Coyotes, but no...I said 'I have to do this' because I have masochistic integrity. Damn it.

     Rabbit has sold EeBee's Boutique to a hot Satan worshiper named Lucy Furr and somehow she springs EeBee the Evil Bong from Sexy Hell (fuck, this is fan-fiction written by a 12 year old). EeBee tells her about Sexy Hell and Lucy will do what ever she has to go get there. I'm not really sure what's so great about Sexy Hell, but it's ran by a guy named Beelzebud. Two of the mainstay hotties from the other 5 movies also get sucked in to the Sexy Hell and for some stupid reason, Rabbit and EeBee get together to try and bring them back. Then they send Gingerdead Man as an enforcer, then they make their own 'Gingerweed Man' and then you realize that even though this movie is only 1 hour, 5 minutes...you've wasted your entire Saturday night. It's now ruined because you spent an hour watching characters in a franchise that should be burned to the ground, and the ashes blasted into space. Who cares how it ended (though I did watch it all), I just know it's over.

….but you know damn well there's going to be a sequel, on top of the teaser for the next Gingerdead Man film....I've created my own hell....

Sunday: The Final 3...

I'm not even sure why they bothered with a movie poster...

Attack Of The Vegan Zombies

     God, the levels I stoop to. A wife turns to her occult mother to help boost her husbands failing vineyard. It helps to have a wiccan mother. Naturally the fallowing year is a bumper crop and some idiotic co-eds are hired to help pick grapes. 2 completely over the top geek-nerds, and 2 bargain bin blondes. The vineyard's good fortune is noticed by the other local farmers during a bad season. One of the neighbor farmers decides to sneak a sample out and is attacked by the vine. I'm not making that up. I guess they have a taste for blood and start eating people or something. It's not really made clear and I don't think I care. As the vines continue to grow out of control and make it impossible for people to leave the vineyard, other people start disappearing and the wife starts owning up to what she had her mother do. I'd like to note at the one hour mark, NO FUCKING ZOMBIES YET.....

     After being trapped indoors, the vines start to move into the house and take over the body of one girl....that they painted green. That's all they did for makeup. Green paint. Green paint means zombie? Green paint means zombie if you're a broke-ass budget. In fact, I'm pretty sure the highest expenditure was for the gallon of green paint used sparingly on 4 or 5 of the local talent that showed up for the casting. There's no way they could have recruited for this film. Alley Sheedy and Molly Ringwald aren't doing much right now. You could have gave them a call. Hell, you could have rounded up ¾ of the Brat Pack on a tight budget and turn this pile of shit into a piece of crap!

Saturday: One more turd to fish out of the punch bowl....

Giving robots a bad name since 1984...

Class of 1999

     Released in 1990, it looks like it came from 1985. But there's a decent explanation for that: The short of the long is that bankruptcy forced a delay. Granted, 1989 vs.1990 doesn't' seem like a huge jump, but I remember a considerable change in attitude in the new decade. Then again, I may be taking a myopic view of history. Due to a couple of years sitting on the shelf, this movie never made any big news. But that's also because it's kind of crappy and about 5 years past it's expiration date. Had this shipped in 1985, it'd been a classic.

     OK, this is a little confusing. The year is 1999, and certain areas of large cities are overrun with crime, and cops cannot go anywhere near them. They're called “Free-Fire” zones and there's no laws within those areas. Yet, somehow there's a school smack dab in the middle of the Seattle FF zone and...there's armed guards making students check in their weapons before entering? That sounds like a little more control than a lawless zone usually has. Anyhoo, a group of robotic teachers are now part of the academic staff and they're not fucking around. Snapped necks, brutal beat-downs, forcing druggies into OD'ing. They seem to have sadism in their programming because they just love to discipline students till they stop breathing. And the programmers don't seem to mind. And why would they? The head programmer is Stacy Keach sporting white hair, a ponytail, and creepy contacts. Not exactly what I would consider a quality thinker.

As the film progresses, we learn the android teachers were converted military units and old habits die hard. Eventually, they label every student as a threat and start a gang war to kill off the bulk of the miscreants. All the student gang-tards figure this out and go on the offensive in what ends up a battle at the...oh, you'll never guess this.....at the High School. Because hospitals, dances, and schools are where every climax needs to take place. That's called that 80-90 rule that I just made up. Naturally, at the end, our victorious warriors emerge from the ruins of the school knowing that they're the champions....but they seem to forget that they're still in a war-zone and everything sucks.

Yes, this was a bad movie. But, I have to put it in the Saturday Afternoon class because even though you know it's crap, it's still kind of interesting. However, I get the impression from this cast that some people need this gig to pay their mortgage:

Stacey Keach

Malcolm McDowell,

Pam Grier

Friday: PC Zombies are the most pretentious soy latte-swilling jackasses you'll ever meet...

Making Pumpkinhead look like an intellectual...

Rawhead Rex

     A little history: I first read this story somewhere around 1988-1991 in one of Clive Barker's Books Of Blood. That series  of books also spawned Cabal (aka Nightbreed), Midnight Meat Train,  and  The Last Illusion (Lord of Illusions). Each of these stories made it to film, but it was years before I knew that Rawhead Rex had also been adapted.  Each of these films had a questionable quality, and clearly a super low budget, but I still enjoyed them (mostly). I was never really motivated to watch this one because nobody, and I mean NOBODY has much good to say about it. But I've chosen this as the year to watch it...

     So I guess it's an Irish thing to bury immortal tooth-faced beasts under phallic pillars in the middle of fields. In the first scene, we're treated to a handful of farmers (?) trying to remove this centuries old pillar with the help of a tractor and, I can only assume, a bottle of Jameson. After tugging and wiggling, smoke starts spewing from underneath, and Rawhead jumps out. Rawhead Rex looks like this:

Toothy bastard would have ruled the WWE.

     Next we meet our protag, Howard Hallenbeck,  an American traveling around Ireland doing research on holy places and such. He's brought the whole family with him, I might add. That proves to be a mistake as Rawhead eventually tires of mature human flesh and puts some focus on human veal in the form of Howard's son. From there, we have a man hunt (or Rex hunt, as it were) involving a not-quite convinced police force, and one creepy Deacon that's in love with Rawhead. Enough so, that he willingly partakes in "water sports" with Rex in some sort of baptism.

Giggity.

     After some useless scenes of people running around, doing nothing urgently, we're treated to a climax in the graveyard of the local church featuring a rock as the deus ex machina. But as always, there's rules to this sort of thing and that means the 'God rock' will only work in the hands of a woman. Good thing Howard's wife ignored his pleading to 'stay someplace safe'. If it weren't for her, glowy worms wouldn't have shot out the of the rock and turned Rex into an old, gray, dusty corpse.

Despite the simple effects, simple plot, un-charismatic cast, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was by no means great, the only scene you're likely to remember is the pissing baptism, but it has its place in the deep dark corners of the horror film archives.


 For another take on this, Ms. Gucci has covered this movie here : http://sghorrorfest.blogspot.com/2013/10/ireland-will-never-be-same.html

Thursday: This happened both before and after I graduated from High School....