Kangaroos Loose In The Top Paddock: Safety In Numbers (2006)

Safety In Numbers (Australia, 2006)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Jessica Napier, Ben Tari, Henry Nixon

In this rare Aussie export, six former reality TV stars find themselves going to an island for what may have been a reunion show, only to find the place seemingly deserted and trashed. Unknown to these chuckleheads, a jealous ex-contestant who got booted from the show have been waiting for them to get there, biding their time for the perfect opportunity to murder the bunch, or at least have enough deadly traps set around the island for these wankers to walk into.  

Now, see, Safety In Numbers (2006) could have been a good enough slasher film with that premise alone. Not a great slasher per se, but at least entertaining enough to earn an occasional watch should one be looking for a casual island-set survival bodycounter to pass the time with. Sadly, the film simply fails to execute any form of genuine interest from this simple plot, not with its characters being as bland as stale bread and twice as dumb despite the actors themselves being competent in their roles, or the kills, though bloody, mostly done either offscreen or edited in a way that we only see the weapon or trap approaching before it smash-cuts to a scream. Camera work is as dull as the near-barren island setting, too, and there's not much drama, atmosphere or tension to speak of here since, again, the victims are too dim and cliched to feel invested in. 

The killer doesn't show up in the flesh until the third act were it suddenly goes full cat-and-mouse mode and, once more, it could have been a great deal of fun with the perp chasing down the obligatory final girl while more or less surviving at most four attempts on their lives, but this is soon tarnished by a clumsy twist reveal and finale where it hints the possibility of another loonie offing people, but never bothering to do anything of actual substance with it so we're not even sure if this is what they're suggesting! 

Bestrewed with a poor script, lackluster characters, tame kills and an infuriating ending, Safety In Numbers (2006) is a rarity that deserves its obscurity. An ocker mess of an uninteresting slasher, we'd be better off watching or even doing almost anything else...

Bodycount:

1 male bludgeoned on the head

1 male trips a spiked spring trap, impaled

1 female killed offscreen, later seen impaled in the mouth with a spear

1 female hit by a hurled log trap, killed

1 male found murdered in a pit

1 male found murdered in a pit

1 female shot with a harpoon

1 male missing, presumably killed

1 female killed offscreen, dismembered arm seen

Total: 9

Rave a Cave to The Grave: Bone Cave (2011)

Bone Cave (2011)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Justin Rose, Jeremy Jusek, Andrew Hartl

...Yeah, I'm not even gonna beat around the bush, this is just terrible.

Two college slackers named Mike and... T Rad... want to earn some good cash so they throw the mother of all raves inside a secluded cave for novelty's sake. Lights were set. Tunes were played. Stolen drugs were passed around as party favors. Things were going great - until it isn't. The cave just happens to be the lair of some face-painted creep who goes by Bones Magee and, for the lack of a better term, he has aspirations to be the next wise-cracking slasher villain. Like, he utters terrible one-liners before and/or after hacking someone to death with his assortment of bone-related weapons. So, yeah, Bones Magee soon crashes the party, forcing Mike, T Rad, some hot goth-punk chick named Annora and the few remaining partygoers to try and survive the Bone Cave.

Honestly, I wanted to like Bone Cave (2011). It has cheese factor, a stupidly entertaining villain and some of the kills were gruesome enough, but its pacing is atrocious, taking a very long while with us just watching two boring bozos trying to plan a rave before anything interesting happens, all in the meantime enduring acting chops that range from stiff to dull just to pour salt on the wound. The murder spree wouldn't takes place after almost an hour of lackluster plot building, and its insultingly done and over with no soon after, leaving the last fifteen minutes or so focused solely on Bones Magee hammily monologuing this movie's excuse of a twist, while our survivors equally cheese it out with responding banter. 

Throw in a couple of dated computer graphic effects here and there, plus an entire massacre that happened offscreen, implied only through blood splashes on prop rocks, looped audio of actors screaming and annoying heavy rock playing in the background, and you have one of the cheapest slashers to come out of celluloid. Seriously, Bone Cave (2011) earned its spot on the crusty bottom barrel of horrid horror lameness for not only how crappy the overall quality of it is, but also for how braindead boring it is. 

Avoid it.  

Bodycount:

1 male skewered with a pike

1 female impaled through the forehead with a pike

1 female had her face melted with acid

1 male bashed on the head with a skull-decorated pickaxe

1 male hacked on the side with a bone hatchet

1 female had her throat crushed

1 female hacked on the head with a bone hatchet

2 females slashed with a bone hatchet

A number of victims massacred with a skull-decorated pickaxe

1 victim seen crushed in a grenade-triggered cave-in

1 male had his head crushed with a stereo set, electrocuted

1 female hacked on the back with a bone hatchet

1 male hacked on the head with a skull-decorated pickaxe

1 male falls to his death

1 male dies from a bone hatchet hacked unto his back

Total: 15+

Party Til' You Puke (And Then You Die): La Central (2006)

La Central (Spain, 2006) (AKA "The Central")

Rating: *

Starring: Eduardo Lupo, Yasmina Córcoles, Ana Cánovas

All play and little bodycounting work makes La Central (2006) a rather dull and forgettable slasher.

The premise is simple enough; a group of twelve friends go to a big house in the woods to party. And party they did. On the lakeside beach. Inside the house. Then at the beach, again. In the backyard. Back in the house, again. At an indoor swimming pool. Hell, they even continue to party when one of their friends disappears after falling off a cliff, dismissing it as just a prank. It's nothing but obnoxious partying and shrill drunkenness, decibels of loud talking and hyperactive shrieking with unpretentious gay-bashing and sexism mixed into the mess. 

It isn't until about halfway into the movie when anything remotely interesting happened as the gang decided to play hide-and-seek in the woods (At night. While drunk and high) and one of the girls finds herself attacked and her arm carved with something sharp. The more responsible few of the group decided to drive their injured friend to a nearby town to get her patched up, leaving the rest of the crowd to fend for themselves when someone wearing a dark hoodie crashes the party and starts ending them, sometimes creatively (tricking someone into swallowing bulb shards, rigging a car for shocking results), but often uninspired. (plain axe hackings and wrench bashings, mostly offcamera and bloodless) 

The rising bodycount makes its way to your usual slasher flick stalk-and-stab between the final girl and the killer, with a few casualties along the way, accusations thrown around and the typical reveal/motive monologue combo once the stabby shmuck gets unmasked. (Or for this case, casually unhooded) This would have been a redeeming swing for La Central (2006), but not only was it hard to make out what's mostly going on thanks to the movie's shoddy lighting, but the killer's reason behind the murder spree hardly sparks any volume of creativity or originality, thus adding to the lack of any respectable characters in this train wreck and overall blandness of the movie. 

And that's pretty much what La Central (2006) is. Bland. The story is uninspired, the characters are irritating and most of the kills are boring. The only good things to come out of this are a couple of ingenious murders and the unintentional hilarity of the killer having that much durability despite looking so, well, normal, but these are nothing but a little nibble of good crumbs out of an entire headache-inducing dreck of dullness. It just ain't worth it! 

Bodycount:

1 male hacked in the back with an axe

3 males and 2 females electrocuted inside a rigged car

1 female hacked to death with an axe

1 female bashed to death with a wrench

1 male shot, had his throat cut with a hunting knife

Total: 9

Another Baghead In The Woods - The Trilogy: Terror at Black Tree Forest (2010), Escape to Black Tree Forest (2012) and Black Tree Forest III (2012)

Welp, here we are. Across the wide open plains of a cheapjack franchise involving another bag-masked loonie killing people in the woods, channeling their inner-Jason Voorhees. How original...

Terror At Black Tree Forest (2010)

Rating: 1/2

Starring: Allison Scott II, Paul Albers, Steve Carty

So for the first six minutes of this mostly hour long-trek, we see a 1970s married couple and their boy Brian Mellows out in the woods, with mom and pop deciding to leave lil' Brian alone to play while they go hanky-panky in the forest. This private baby-making session is unfortunately interrupted by a random killer in a sack mask who proceeds to stab dear hubby dead and go rapey on dear wifey. Brian hears the commotion and arrives there just in time to see his mother get snuffed out by the masked man, leading to a chase scene that kinda goes forever with both the kid and the killer tripping on stuff. The boy eventually outruns his assailant and was soon found tuckered out near the road by a passing driver.

Cut to the present and we now follow four friends out to camp at the very same woods Brian Mellows had his haunting experience and, wouldn't you know it, Mr. Mellows, now fully grown yet mentally broken from the trauma, has just escaped from an asylum and made his way to the very same backwoods with a murderous streak. Take a wild guess where all of this is heading to...

There's really not a lot go by this one; the story can be easily shortened down to "kids go to the wood, kids go dead" and nothing much else, all shot and edited in that psuedo-grainy "grindhouse" aesthetic then popularized by the Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature throwback Grindhouse (2007), only with more eye-straining colored tinting that I'm sure would fry some people's eyes blind if they look at it too long, as well as brain-numbingly dull rock acoustics and synthesizer music to bore our ears, too. All the characters were written unremarkably generic and, worse even, acted with the flair of a wooden stump, so, really, this is honestly one of the most forgettable slasher titles out there, which makes the fact this thing got a movie series even more shocking.

I honestly see very little appeal in this one. Sure, you could call this title an attempt to capture the good old days of hacking and slashing, but it just doesn't feel like it tried too much. Everything about it look, sounds and feel half-assed and it shows. If y'all are looking for a throwback slasher, you can do better than this limp piece of work...

Bodycount:

1 male knifed through the head

1 female had her throat cut with a knife

1 female knifed in the gut

1 female knifed to death

1 female knifed in the eye, killed

1 male had his throat sliced with a knife

1 male found murdered, method unknown

Total: 8

~~~

Escape to Black Tree Forest (2012)

Rating: 1/2

Starring: Paul Albers, Brandon Aylor, Karrie Bauman

Taking place two weeks after the events of the first film, now dubbed in the news as the "Black Tree Terror Massacre", lone survivor Mare Strode is still reeling from the fact that she narrowly escaped being butchered by the mad masked slasher Brian Mellows and her recent stay at the hospital to recover did little to help. So much so that, the moment she got home, Mary picked up a pillow case and turned it into a mask before going Halloween (1978) opening sequence on her own mother, knifing her to death. 

Yep, it looks like we're going down the route of Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985), only this one's a lot more open with the fact that our then-final girl is now a mad slasher, returning to Black Tree Forest to start another killing spree. And everything from there is basically a repeat of the first film as we have yet another set of four teens visiting the titular woods to camp out, all the while doing some dumb shenanigans like stopping by a grocery to buy some supplies and pig out on free samples, as well as skinny dip on a pond albeit some footages missing. (Yep, they're still doing the Grindhouse (2007) shtick here) These tomfooleries are mostly intertwined with Mare's dad and a detective out driving to the same site in hopes of finding the girl, unaware that she'd gone cuckoo for murder and is about to go Michael Myers on our main gaggle around (and I kid you not) the last fifteen minutes of the damn movie.

Frankly, the whole thing simply failed to bring anything with actual substance as despite the plot implying a lot of interesting directions, like Mare's sudden turn to the stabby side, her father's desperate search for her or the suggestions that the first film's original killer may still be out there seeing no actual body was found, none of that really mattered as these are all set aside for what basically amounted to nothing but a lot of padding and even more padding. There's no real urgency to the pace here and by the time we do get some actual slasher horror, the fucking shit is rushed like hell with cheap kills, one uninspired chase sequence and an ending that I'm certain would have been more impacting given we actually gave a shit.

Much like the first film, this sequel is damn forgettable. Heck, even more so as practically nothing happened here to earn any genuine form of thrills, scares or intrigue. It doesn't help too that the writing is as bland as the talent acting them out, as well as the sound design and editing are basically shit. It's simply a boring follow-up to an already boring film and I would rather eat a laundry pod than subject myself to another helping of this movie. Throw it out on a pile of dog doo and carry on with your day...

Bodycount: 

1 male knifed in the eye

1 female knifed to death

1 male knifed in the back

1 male implied brained, bloody rock seen (flashback)

1 female knifed

1 male impaled on a tree branch

1 female knifed to death

1 female killed offscreen with a knife

1 female shot with a shotgun

1 male shot through the head with a shotgun

Total: 9 

~~~

Black Tree Forest III (2012)

Rating: 1/2

Starring: Brandon Aylor, Jennii Caroline, Breana Mitchell

Wow. Like, actual wow. You couldn't even see shit most of the time in this one!

So apart from being a backwoods slasher, this third entry to a franchise that doesn't even need to exist is also a holiday bodycounter, taking place around Halloween. Here we follow Chuck, a character from the prior film who survived the massacre that took the lives of his friends and girlfriend. He's now locked up in a nuthouse where we see a doctor interviewing him about the events that led to them camping at the titular Black Tree Forest, which meant half the running time of the entire run focusing on random shots of him and his girlfriend having fun at an amusement park before eventually showing us the clip note version of the second movie. (Think Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987), only less funny, less 'Garbage Day!' and grainer)

Chuck also now believes he's part of a cycle of violence which may or may not be an actual curse inflected by the Black Tree Forest and it is this belief that motivates him to escape the nuthouse, don a raincoat and dollar store mask, as well as steal a knife from an old lady's house ala Halloween II (1981) before legging it back to the woods. All the while, yet another set of four characters planning a Halloween night bonfire at Black Tree Forest and, well, you know what comes after...

...That is, of course, if you could see goddamn anything! Seriously, there's little to no lighting done in this mess so most of the time I'm trying to figure out what half of the crap I'm looking at whenever a scene takes place either at night or in the dark. And because of this, I couldn't even make out most of the killings and for those that I did see, they're nothing to clamor about, making Black Tree Forest III's talky direction, muddled audio, padded pacing, and overly grainy and irritatingly saturated shot-on-video visual aesthetics not really worth sitting through.

I mean, I can give it some respect for perfectly capturing the feel of an 80s local channel midnight Halloween viewing, this film definitely replicated the look. (complete with a shlocky TV host and an intermission courtesy of a black-and-white Trick 'r Treat safety PSA!) I can also appreciate it for trying some type of twist in the form of a random red herring involving a woman being tortured inside someone's basement which eventually ties up to this movie's ending but, aside from these, Black Tree Forest III is just a big bore of a movie and a headache to watch. What really else is there to say about this movie but 'fuck off' !

Bodycount:

1 male murdered, seen strangled with a cord

1 male found dead with a missing eye

1 female had her throat cut with a knife

1 male stabbed with a knife

1 male stabbed with a knife

1 male hit on the temple with a nailed wooden board

1 female brained with a hammer, body later seen dumped off a bridge

1 female killed, method unknown

Total: 8

~~~

And that's all of them. All three of the original Black Tree Forest movies and, my god, I think I need a strong drink to cleanse away these horrifically atrocious exploitation throwbacks I just subjected my eyeballs to. I'd be even more fortunate if I pass out drunk and get a hangover in the following morning because that would have been a far more engaging experience compared to this movie, too! But oh, what's that? Why did I phrase these three films as the original? Well, dear reader, you curious scamp, you! The franchise found a way to be remade in United Kingdom back in 2021! In fact, I reviewed that movie first and swore then that I wouldn't even touch this franchise for how horrible that movie was but I'm a completist. 

A fucking stupid completist...

You're welcome.

Boogie Bop Flop: 1962 Halloween Massacre (2023)

1962 Halloween Massacre (2023)

Rating: 1/2

Starring: Ariel Ash, Caroline Beagles, Will Branner

Yeah, this one is a real doozy of a slasher movie. And here I was thinking watching the side of my painted house dry was terrible, I have no idea there's something even more boring!

This hogwash of a film is actually based on an internet urban legend involving a vintage photo of a 1960s Halloween party. Among the people in the picture is a figure wearing a simple black mask and story has it that the fella would soon lock all the guests in and start attacking them, killing seven before disappearing into the night and leaving the FBI the black mask as the only piece of evidence from the massacre. 

1962 Halloween Massacre (2023) basically tries molding a story out of the urban legend, focusing on four friends who happen to be members of an elite circle of pharmaceutical families, driving to a remote cottage in the woods for a Halloween party. As they enjoy the spirit of the night and the debaucheries that comes with it (mainly sex, booze and a game of hide-and-seek apparently), an unexpected guest drops by to skulk around and say random doomsayer shit to himself, before soon enough trapping everybody in the cottage by tying the doors with heavy duty rope and going around stabbing people to death.

Now, see, this would have been exciting given that the film wasn't so focused on way too many conversations between its main casts or the random spouting of nonsensicals from the deranged maniac, so much so that 1962 Halloween Massacre (2023) is mostly jabber and little horror action from the maniac stabber. It's slowburn beyond slowburn, a direction littered with dull yakking about things that barely made the movie's dry run intriguing, something that doesn't help the fact that the low budget is more than evident from the cheap sets, use of CG blood and lackluster visual work that's obviously shot by some guy walking around with a camera. Most of the acting is okay(ish) at least, although I can't help but feel awkward watching some of these actors line read 1960s lingo with the enthusiasm of a highschool theater play. 

Damning of it all, though, is how this film concludes; without giving out a lot, too many survivors ran away scott-free with the killer leaving them be under the reason that they prefer a "captive audience" and "when you buy a ticket to the movies, you don't have to chase the picture to watch that". Uh, bullshit! Just tell us you're lazy, you self-glorifying asshat! This is then followed by more mad ramblings from the jerk before they phone in the killings to the police while pretending to be some sort of cross between a murder victim and an entitled bitch who cries "lawyer" when shit doesn't go their way. (No, really) The scene then simply cuts to the following morning, with FBI detectives weirdly scoping out the place and ending with heavy implications that the killer is among the investigators. Riveting, it ain't.

1962 Halloween Massacre (2023), as a concept, has the potential to be a good time capsule slasher flick set in the 60s, but its cheap and rushed production unsurprisingly results to one of the most nerve-wreckingly unexciting slasher to ever disgrace the face of horror. To be plain and simple, this one is just a drag. 

Bodycount:

1 male had his throat cut with a knife

1 female knifed to death

1 male knifed to death

1 male knifed to death

1 male knifed to death

1 female knifed to death

1 female knifed to death 

Total: 7

Voyage of The 'Duh': Moon In Scorpio (1987)

Moon In Scorpio (1987)
Rating: *

Starring: Britt Ekland, John Phillip Law, William Smith

I remember the day I first saw Moon In Scorpio (1987). It was years ago and I was coming home from work, a storm just hit my country so it's heavy rain and strong winds throughout the afternoon. Foreboding, ain't it? As if the universe was giving me all of the signs to call it a day then and take a break. Sleep it off. Well, dear readers, if the idiot writing this review was a tad smarter then, he should've saw the fucking signs and doze off like the dead instead of wasting a perfectly fine evening being bored off his arse by this shipwreck of a movie.

Word around the grapevine says that this movie didn't start out as a slasher during its production and it was more of a Lovecraftian supernatural horror flick about soldiers in Vietnam encountering an evil snake goddess and something about a child hunting down the men years later in revenge. But the big wigs producing the movie got too involved and wanted it to be more stabby-stabby, so reshoots, rewrites and editing came in the way and butchered the entire thing into this incohesive travesty of plot holes, lousy directions and overcooked cheese, all under the cheap leftover budget of another film.   

Told as a flashback narration by the only survivor of the eventual murder spree (which means we get to see and hear what's going on in the movie technically twice), Moon In Scorpio (1987) follows three Vietnam vets and their partners taking a yacht pleasure cruise, unaware that one of them just broken out of a mental asylum and has armed themselves with a knife and some weird spearhead weapon that would have been cooler in another slasher film. Insert Nam' flashbacks of the veterans fighting in the jungle and one of the gals in the boat spouting psuedo-Astrology about the moon being in Scorpio (which according to her meant that the cosmic force of vengeance is acting upon them or some shit like that), the yacht population soon starts to dwindle as our killer hunts them down one by one, sparking an intrigue of paranoia and distrust that's dulled down by the droll narration accompanying it and the hammy acting from its casts.

Any means of tension is dead on arrival given the lifeless pacing and paperthin story clashing horribly with the hodge-podge production behind the film, making Moon In Scorpio (1987) just unbearably tedious to follow from the start. The sheer ridiculousness of the plotting and its execution is more insulting than entertaining, so much so that not only was the identity of the killer damn obvious (not hard to figure out seeing there are only six of them aboard that fucking yacht), but the motive behind their murder spree also had shit to do with anything this movie was building on so there's little to no reason for the damn psycho to be there anyway, fucking up what little attempt remains on making the whodunnit angle interesting!

The only good thing about this movie is that its tone is so weird and over-the-top, those with the stomach for the odd (and/or just plain masochistic) could still find something entertaining out of this rancid mess. Moon in Scorpio (1987) is, without a doubt, tailor-made for their strange taste. For me, however, I'm better off abandoning this sinking ship of a war time trauma meets boat-set bodycounting and those who value their time and brain cells should consider doing the same.

Bodycount:

1 male knifed in the back

1 male knifed in the gut

1 male stabbed in the gut with a spearhead weapon

1 male shot (flashback)

1 male shot dead (flashback)

1 female shot (flashback)

1 male shot dead (flashback)

1 male shot (flashback)

1 female shot, left for dead (flashback)

1 male knifed, throat cut with a spearhead weapon

1 female knifed in back and hacked with a spearhead weapon, eye stabbed

1 male shot with a harpoon

1 male knifed in the back, throat cut with a spearhead weapon

1 male had his throat cut with a knife

1 female stabbed in the back with a spearhead weapon

Total: 15

The House of Goatface: Kill Her Goats (2023)

Kill Her Goats (2023)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Arielle Raycene, Ellie Gonsalves and Danielle Mathers

From Steve Wolsh, the creator of 2015 Saint Patrick's Day-set swamp slasher Muck, comes another slasher film that's just as bad! Why bother, Mr. Wolsh. Why bother?

Described as an 80s style home invasion-turned-slasher flick, the plot revolves around an infamous local Massachusetts property known as The Tupp House and the bimbo who now owns it as a graduation gift thanks to daddy buying it for her. She invites two of her gal pals to get soaked up and topless at the beach, get drunk on quality wine, and do whatever else doomed ladies in eveningwear do during a housewarming party. Some weird stuff happens at the house that night and one of the girls gets a surreal dream sequence involving a goat, a cemetery and a booby goat demon emerging out of a puddle, all of this leading to this movie's goat head-wearing psycho "Goatface" to pop up and attack the girls (all the while sparklers are attached to their weapon for some reason), thus starting our stalk-chase-kill act fifty minutes into the film...

As you can tell, not a lot happens for almost an hour after the opening murders, which would have been alright if the slowburn approach is anywhere as interesting as it imagined itself to be. For a long while, we are practically just sitting through girls doing whatever it is they feel like doing to get the run time reach feature length, a quite a dulling experience considering these Playboy playmates have the acting chops of a braindead mannequin playing easy-on-the-eyes but unlikable, boring characters. Once "Goatface" finally shows up (played by none other than Kane Hodder), Kill Her Goats (2023) had the opportunity to glow as a potentially wicked throwback to golden age slashers and it did look like it was going with that angle with its fairly decent chase scenes, brutal attacks and a fair dash of bloody slayings done in pure practical effects, but this is soon squandered by a lackluster twist, two sisters having a catfight with axes and bad puns, as well as a last act where one of them goes on a random killing spree that's nowhere as shocking as it sounds. All that good stuff, ruined by dumb writing direction...

The whole thing is just one tedious mess. The story just hardly made any sense at the end of it, the production is handled clunkily with its lack of budget and any shots taken by the film to be cheeky and hokey is just infuriatingly terrible. A tired and messy affair of girls in skimpies running away from a big, powertool-wielding loon in a mask, Kill Her Goats (2023) is just cheap, run-in-the-mill and paperthin, even for a slasher. 

Bodycount:

1 male slaughtered to death with modified hedge trimmers 

1 female had her throat cut against modified hedge trimmers, forced to bleed to death after killer hoisted her by the neck

1 female found slaughtered to death

1 male decapitated with a sword

1 male hacked to death with an axe

1 male hacked to death with an axe

1 female beaten to death

1 female impaled on a sharpened wood, smothered with a pillow

Total: 8

"Golden Title": Frozen Flesh (2001)

Frozen Flesh (2001)

Rating: LEGENDarily bad

Starring: Frank Gillis

I found it. I've seen it. The horror movie to end all horror movies. A macabre masterpiece of maniacal madness. A psychological shocker of surreal sins. An aberration of abnormal anguish. A presentation of putridness unmatched by many classics I've seen in my entire existence. A heart-stopping horrifying horrors of horror simply known as Frozen Flesh (2001)!

With a running time of almost two hours, we see the methodic mindset of a masked mass murderer expertly played by the one and only Frank Gillis, as they showcase to us what goes in the mind of a deranged individual as they feast upon what's not meant to be feasted. A gruesome buffet of human viscera and gore fills the screen every minute, artistically shot in red tint and sickening close-up, surely to sear it in our minds as we sit through this nightmare play of devilish directions. A true art of hellish sensibilities and a daring display of deadly malice, we would soon see this monster wield their blood-caked knife with furious frenzy, either to battle their own invisible demons or to succumb in their need to defile the human form with a swift carve of their blade, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

And over...

Okay, truth be told, that's two hours of my life I'm not getting back. Frozen Flesh (2001) is a weird little shit of a "movie" where we literally just watch a guy in a striped shirt and bag over their head just sitting there, while a plastic body part that you can buy at a Halloween goods store being passed on as this garbage's "gore effects" gets cooked inside an oven before our wannabe horror star just starts wielding the knife in the air repeatedly, in different angles. All of this in almost two hours of running time! Two fucking hours of red tint and bad score, while we watch what's basically some guy's take on a performance art without the striking and though-provoking sensibilities of actual art. I'm sure this is all good on paper at some point, maybe even philosophical or psychological even, but in practice and execution, I think a shitload of things got lost and tossed away, resulting to this head-on attack on our endurance and patience.

It's only fitting to cover this pile of cinematic excrement on April Fools Day as that's what it is. A joke. A big stupid joke of a movie that I guess only those with a certain warped mindset (or high on something both powerful and illegal) would find entertaining. If you're one of the people who enjoyed Frozen Flesh (2001) then more power to you! I'm glad this movie gave you joy while you find yourself strapped in a straightjacket and locked inside a padded room that one time you had a mental breakdown. In the meantime, the rest of us here would be better off seeing other movies to cleanse our palate of this worthless filth and that includes cheekier and hammier bad films that are Oscar winners when compared to this...

Bodycount:

1 victim seen with their pieces being cooked. For an hour. 

Total:1

Just A Couple Of Dummies: The Dummy (1995) and The Dummy (2000) Double Bill Review

From the titular Devil Doll of 1964 to Slappy of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps franchise, ventriloquist dummies have been a minor staple of horror media, tapping into the pediophobic creepiness of the dolls' uncanny valley looks. Entrust this trope to capable hands and we'll get horror cult classics like Magic (1978) and Dead Silence (2007) treating us to a chilling good time. On the other side of the coin, the more clumsy low budget side, we'll unfortunately get messes such as these instead...

The Dummy (1995)

Rating: *

Starring: Lisa Cook, Todd Jason Cook and Sabrina Cook

Directed and starring Todd Jason Cook, who I'm sure a few of you reading this would know as the same guy who brought us underground cult films like Evil Night (1992), Death Metal Zombies (1995) and Zombiefied (2012), this shlock starts with a newlywed couple visiting a gypsy psychic for laughs and insulting her readings. This obviously enrages the woman, so she casts a death curse upon them and calls forth a demonic ventriloquist dummy to end the couple as well as basically anyone they come across. The rest of the story is practically a rinse-repeat cycle of the couple visiting, getting visited or receiving a phone call from friends and relatives, only for those folks to get attacked and slaughtered by the killer dummy while heavy metal plays in the background, up until only the newlyweds are left for the dummy to terrorize.

As one can expect from a shot on video Z-grade flick, The Dummy (1995) has the production quality of an aged moldy peanut with grainy and dull camera work, an uninspired repetitive direction and appalling audio quality. The characters are outrageously hammy and their dialogues are equally dim, unsurprisingly, and the killer dummy itself is practically just a dummy getting wiggled around while kitchenware is taped or glued on their hands. I will say at least that the hokey gore effects have a little sense of cheesy charm to them, coming fact that there's some effort made to make them as gruesome as possible, but there's only so much random people talking and doing crap on low budget standard that I could take before a boring movie absolutely shoots down any interest I have with it. 

If anything, the whole dreck is more of a collection of kill scenes held together by a very thin and unremarkable excuse of a story, trailing along the creepy killer doll fad that's ineptly and, dare I even say, hilariously executed here. Fans of extremely low-budget do-it-yourself horror flicks may have a fair time enjoying this, but for the rest of us, this one might be a difficult fling to sit through...

Bodycount:

1 male stabbed in the eye with a dagger

1 female repeatedly slashed with a knife, stabbed in the mouth

1 male had his throat cut with a dagger

1 male whipped on the face with a length of chain

1 female stabbed in the gut with a dagger

1 male stabbed in the throat with a dagger

1 male shot on the head

1 male stabbed in the knife (dream)

1 female had her throat cut with a knife (dream)

1 male ran through with a fire poker

1 male stabbed in the back with a knife (dream)

1 female hacked on the neck with a machete 

Total: 12

~~~

The Dummy (2000)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Keith Singleton, Irina Björklund and Jocelyne Lopez

Saw this one when I was just around a single-digit age and I can clearly say that, after seeing it recently, nostalgia isn't what it used to be with this title.

This little obscurity centers around a ventriloquist named Paul (Keith Singleton, who also happens to be its director, producer and writer!) coming back to his home town and making a career out of his talent at a comedy club after a lengthy 20 year stay at a mental hospital. Things were going as fine as a jittery puppet master could try make it to be, even bringing home a couple of women from the club to sleep with, but it all starts to unravel for the worse when Tommy, his ventriloquist dummy, seemingly comes to life and murders one of his coworkers at the club. The following morning comes and a local snarky entertainment critic bites the big one next with a poisoned blow dart after bashing Paul's performance.

Hearing about these recent deaths, Paul starts to freak out and reaches out to a few people he could trust for help, including a new lady friend who wanted to write a book about people with special conditions and a psychiatrist who treated him back at the ward. It seems this isn't the first time the man had some problems dealing with dead people and he believes all of this has something to do with a few blackouts he have been getting lately, as well as his own foul-mouthed homicidal ventriloquist dummy...

I'll give The Dummy (2000) this; it tries to mold itself as this low budget Hitchcockian stride of hero-antagonists struggling with their dark pasts, a "Jekyll and Hyde" premise coupled with some efforts to deliver genuine suspense and thrills as seen in some scenes such as Paul trying to dispose the body of one of Tommy's victims, and too the few kills that focus more on build-up rather than blood and gore. The whole strive has its potential to be effective but it mostly fails due to the fact that plentiful of the talents involved couldn't act to sell what the movie's offering and the plot itself is just as basic as they could come, very much predictable from the start to finish even with all the red herrings thrown in to try sway us away from figuring things out too soon. You could say it overstayed its implications to what's going on in our lead's head to the point that its little reveal in the end comes to no surprise, in turn leading to a letdown of a finale regardless of whether you see this film as a straight-to-video psychological thriller or a killer doll slasher flick.

It's cinematography is shaky at its worse, lowered down further in quality thanks to this movie's inept editing and uninspired lighting. The only thing The Dummy (2000) would probably be best remembered for is its long gratuitous sex scene between Singleton and Irina Bjorklund, a Finnish Jussi Award winner in her first American movie role, basically handing this film its obligatory B-grade sleaze. Other than that, this film is a rather overly familiar walk down the psychodrama path paired with slasher film bodycounting and risqué business and, honestly, there isn't much you're missing here. In fact, it can get darn tiring if you don't have the patience for ludicrous bargain bin Hitchcockian thrills but should you find yourself curious about this little mess, a word of warning: Avoid the UK DVD release! They zoomed in the whole thing so much that it cropped heads and credits! The US VHS release does fair a tad better, but it is getting shorter in supply...

Bodycount:

1 female knifed in the gut

1 male knifed in the neck

1 female knifed to death

1 male shot on the neck with a poison blow dart

1 female hacked to death with an axe

1 male ran through with a spear

Total: 6

Down The Familiar Road: Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012)

Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012) (AKA "Punishment", "Down The Road", "Slasher In The Woods")
Rating: **

Starring: Jen Dance, David J. Bonner and Shaun Paul Costello

Among the types of slasher flicks out there, the backwoods ones are the easiest to follow and replicate as the bare bone point of its plotting is simple: have a group go to the woods for one reason to the next, show them having a good time and/or some drama, throw in a couple of killings of random extras to keep the momentum going until you get to the climax wherein the stabby fella goes to kill the group one by one. Throughout the years, we got titles that did a little more effort into bringing flair and creativity into their personal variant of forest-set bodycounting (I'm looking at you, The Cabin in The Woods (2011), The Final Girls (2015) and You Might Be The Killer (2018)~!), but there are, of course, those that opted to ride along the simplistic route of clichés and tropes. Most of them are cheap but passable enough, particularly those that cheesed its writing and/or added a little more chunk and blood in its kills, but there are a few that add very little to the backdrop that it's vanilla compared to its splashier kin. 

Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012) is an example of these paint-by-numbers backwoods-type, opening with a group of 2000s teens getting hammered in a forest and partying until daybreak. The gang eventually drives back home, still drunk from that night's debauchery and accidentally mows down a young girl playing an early morning game of hop-scotch. 

Forward ahead to the present, troubled teen Jen was just sent home from a hospital after being treated for clinical depression when her parents, in a concerningly dumb move, forces her to go out and have fun with her friends as they fear she might become an agoraphobic if she continues to coop up in her room. (Yeah, something tells me these douches was never clinically depressed) Jen begrudgingly agrees to get them off her back and it's more or less down the familiar trail from here: she joins her buddies in their trip down the woods, beers get bought, townie doomsayer says their doom sayings, there's a minor conflict between some locals and, as usual, scary stories are shared in a campfire.

One scary story, as you would also expect by now, involves the opening vehicular manslaughter and what happened afterwards. It's basically the whole Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) treatment with the girl's father, Hunter Isth, going nuts and retreating to the forest where the teens who killed his daughter got drunk, murdering any troublesome youngsters with similar affairs in mind.

You can take a quick guess where Jen and her little gaggle of friends are hanging out right now.

Apart from the truckload of recycled plotlines and clichés, Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012) has the unfortunate grace of being awkwardly riddled with odd pacing, amateur dialogue and bland deliveries from its talents, leading to an excruciating direction following these characters and their clumsy interactions that more often than not paint them as irritable and uncaring, if not bland. Unsurprisingly, these result to a lack of point building around these casts, making their camping misadventures a chore to sit through and the fact that this movie's camera work is average and there's a lack of inspired scoring practically dulled the experience even further. 

Still, I find Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012) worth its while on a degree as at least it has its kills and villain going for it; though the murders are nothing too out of the ordinary, they do a fine enough job of looking graphic with the make-up and special effects without overly relying on heavy gore and bloodletting, giving a genuine old school feel to these slayings which works very well with the movie's moderate-looking budget. The same can be said to the hammer-wielding villain Hunter Isth, looking awfully generic as a slasher and bearing a murder motive that's have been done to death, but I still find him workable for how grounded and 3tragic he is, particularly during a scene where he monologues the trials and tribulations he went through as a widowed husband and father, making him somewhat relatable and putting him in a more sympathetic light. These little elements are what made the film a bit more tolerable, a welcome blessing seeing how considerably testy it can get.

Honestly, that's all I can say about Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012). It's a backwoods slasher flick and that's pretty much all what it is, routined down to the very last scene, nothing standing out from it, so not too hard at all to picture why this one is so obscure. If you want to see it, by all means go. You could do worse, but you can do a lot better, too...

Bodycount:

1 girl hit by a car

1 male brained to death with a sledgehammer

1 elderly female had her throat cut with a hunting knife

1 male stabbed in the gut with a machete, meat hook through his throat

1 female had her neck broken

1 male brained in the temple with a sledgehammer

1 male had nails hammered into his head

1 female beaten to death with a brick

1 male brained with hammers

1 male brained with a hammer

Total: 10 

Oh, and Clint Howard was here. 
That's, uh, that's it, really.
Thought you guys would like to know...

Court Cases and Courtships: Hanging Heart (1983)

Hanging Heart (1983)

Rating: *

Starring: Barry Wyatt, Jake Henry and Francine Lapensée

It appears everyone has the hots for Denny (Barry Wyatt), may it be his lady co-stars from the experimental homoerotic play he leads or Elliot (Jake Henry), the middle aged lawyer renting a room with him. Life for our little actor goes very hairy one day though when, after making love in the theater with one of the actresses, Denny becomes the prime suspect after he was found holding the girl's lifeless strangled body. He gets thrown in jail, roughed up a bit, witnessed two inmates getting what-what in the butt, but he's soon released on bail with the help of Elliot, who then proceeds to defend him in the case, much to the anger of the police and lead prosecutor.

 

From that point on, Hanging Heart spends less as a slasher movie and a lot (and I mean a lot) more as a psychological courtroom drama reeking of nasty cheese, misplaced dark humor and tons of homoerotic themes and imagery. The only time the film ever remembered it's a bodycounter flick is during a couple of murders involving the other cast and crew at the theatre as the killer dons a slasher-friendly get-up of a creepy black wig covering their face and long black coat with matching gloves inspired by Italian gialli. Apart from that, we're mostly forced to sit through Denny breaking down as he gets repeatedly blamed for the killings, defend himself in court while opposing parties antagonize him, relive a childhood trauma involving a horrible child rape and a matricide, all the while interjecting scenes of him and his bare ass in the showers, behind a mental psych gown, as a hallucination of a crucified Christ, etc., for interested parties to ogle at or ponder about its clumsy implications of equating homoeroticism and homophobia with assault and mental illness.

Any attempts to build up its own mystery is lackluster at its worst considering its blatantly obvious red herrings and the unsurprising revelation at the end. If anything, Hanging Heart's all in all direction can be summarized as a test to how much bull the producers and writers can pull off to get the movie pass an hour (and overstay its welcome for another hour) as the overall story just barely made sense. (I mean, I really doubt a suspected killer can be released through bail as often as Denny did, or can anyone be that luscious of a man that almost every woman would look past the supposed crime he committed just for a chance to ride him) To simply put it, this film is one huge mess; its this lack of solid structure and consistency in tone makes it all the more of a chore to sit through and it's little to no wonder why it didn't even get a release in its native land, the good ole' US of A, and instead got video releases overseas. 

Bottom line, Hanging Heart is dry for a slasher, boring for a thriller, offensive for a homoerotica and too cluttered to be a working drama. Not a big loss if one simply decided to skip over this, frankly...

Bodycount:
1 female strangled with a pair of pantyhose

1 female strangled with a pair of pantyhose

1 female strangled with a belt (flashback)

1 male strangled to death

1 male shot in the mouth

Total: 5

The Hitman Blues: Safe House 1618 (2021)

Safe House 1618 (2021)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Matison Card, Jasmine Day and Maddie Steele

In this mish-mash of psychological thriller, crime drama and home invading slasher horror, three sisters kidnap and murder a senator's scumbag son in revenge for a past crime he committed. Tagging their getaway driver along, the trio lay low at the titular safehouse until the heat of their vigilante killing blows over, unbeknownst to them that the senator, well aware that they're the ones responsible for his boy's death, has sent a hitman against them, a supposed professional killer with a murder count high enough to be called a "grim reaper". (all the while wearing a suit made from tape and garbage bags, mind you)

A commendable plot, one that has the full potential to be an interesting sub-genre hybrid if only the execution itself is anywhere as good; once the sisters and their accomplice settle in the safe house, the movie opted to drag this experience to a slow burn crawl as we get into the psychological troubles of living with the crime they committed, the trauma that started the vigilante killing and good old-fashioned cabin fever with a side of some guy tripping on drugs for padding's sake, I guess. In fact, the killer gets introduced twenty minutes into the nearly two-hour running time and the asshole mostly spent his screentime skulking around, murdering one guy who knew one of the girls and ordering an copious amount of take-out salads as he waits for more need-to-know information of the girls' whereabouts.

Add in the pain of sitting through the casts' underwhelming acting chops, obnoxiously artistic editing and a weak sound design, the film was nearly a lost cause for me if it wasn't for the alright last act where the hitman finally makes his way to the girls and starts eliminating them one-by-one. I say "alright", not "great", as while I do find it nifty that the kills were a mix of standard slasher stabbings and action thriller gun shots via rifles with silencers, I still cannot get past the fact that this "professional" goes around doing jobs looking like a do-it-yourself slasher villain with his attire of ski masks, goggles, black garbage bags, duct tape and dishwashing gloves. You gotta be snorting a lot of cheese to think this would look badass onscreen. 

For a little film made with about eight grand, I again commend its high concept story but I'll be damn lying if I say the experience was painless and exciting. For fans of low budget filmmaking may find a cozy stay with Safe House 1618 (2021) but, personally, I think I'm gonna feel more at home with something exploitative, cheeky and not overly draggy.   

Bodycount:

1 male had his arms slit open, bled to death

1 male shot on the head

1 male stabbed to death with a buck knife

1 female shot on the head (flashback)

1 male had his throat cut with a kitchen knife

1 female shot on the head

1 male attacked, presumably killed

1 female shot

1 male ran over with a car

Total: 9