Sunday, March 30, 2008

Dr. Alien (1989)

Oh Dr. Alien, you are so horrible...and yet I find you somehow appealing. Uber-nerd Wesley agrees to help new science teacher Ms. Xenobia with an extra credit research project, unaware that Xenobia is an alien and that he will be her subject.

After Xenobia gives Wesley a shot, he turns into super stud, complete with upturned collar. Every time a mini-tentacle like appendage with lips protrudes from the top of his head, women can't resist him. There's never any explanation of why the girls don't see the creepy thing bobbing around atop his head, but it emits something that makes women throw themselves at him.

This is a bad 1980s teen comedy, whose charm is perhaps due to it's ridiculousness. Make no mistake, this is a horrible movie, but for some unknown reason, I enjoyed it.

Minotaur (2006)

Village youths are sacrificed to a Minotaur who lives in an underground maze beneath a castle. Our hero Theo, who is not supposed to be sacrificed as he will later be chief of the clan, goes along with those who are to be sacrificed as he plans to save his true love, who was taken a few years earlier. Though it is the Iron Age, the youth are mostly stereotypically good looking and have dirt smudges on their overly pretty faces.

Problems arise due to the slow pacing, overly dull exchanges, and the self-titled beast not actually being a minotaur at all. The film begins with an explanation that the minotaur is half man, half beast. But the Minotaur in the film can best be described as the body of a hairless bull with the skull of a bull, which is inexplicably dripping with goo. It's decent CGI, but it does lead one to wonder how this creature gains sustenance by eating the teens since it doesn't seem to have any way to swallow anything it eats.

Feast of Flesh (1967)

aka Deadly Organ

An organ playing fiend in a bad wig, rubber monster hands and rubber mask kidnaps women and renders them useless by using the hypnotic qualities of his keyboard and shooting them up with heroin. While in a trance, the woman willingly get physical with the freaky organist who wears his mask as he gropes them, yeech!! A slow paced film which features a volleyball scene in which the teams play by catching the ball and then throwing it over the net.

Night of the Bloody Apes (1968)

When Dr. Krallman hears that his son Julio has leukemia, he decides to save him by replacing his heart with a gorilla heart. Some nauseating real surgery footage later, his son has a heart which randomly turns him into a massive man with a gorilla-esque face who stalks the night while wearing pajama pants, rapes, and kills women.

In an almost unrelated subplot, a full figured lady wrestler gets in the ring and does her wrestling thing. Turns out her boyfriend is the detective who is investigating the ape man murders. Yup, that's the only connection between the two stories.

Though the title promises bloody apes, there is only one guy in an ape suit, and Julio, who is only sometimes a gorilla man.

Zu Warriors (2001)

Beautifully shot story of a demon in a mountain and the warriors who fight to defeat him. Unfortunately the good versus evil plot line is nothing special and I didn't care about the characters.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Cheerleader Camp (1988)

Alison is haunted by nightmares and hallucinations of death and blood. She joins her cheerleading team for a trip to Camp Hurrah, where there are competitions for the cheerleaders, mascots (who are second class citizens), and queen. There doesn't seem to be any criteria to win the queen competition.

The mascots are excluded from the cheering activities and even have a separate dinner time where they must eat while wearing their massive mascot heads. Why would they think this was okay?

Alison's nightmares continue and her boyfriend Brent, played by Leif Garrett, is a total sleazebag as he hits on other cheerleaders right in front of her, and even pursues the easy girl on their own cheering team. When Alison voices her dismay, Brent apologizes and then dumps her when she has qualms about having sex at camp. What a great guy. Soon cheerleaders are getting killed and Alison's teammates are disappearing.

The film boasts the worst rap I have ever seen, which is done by Brent and Timmy, the two male members of the cheerleading squad. Their role on the team appears to be dancing badly in the background as the girls do some elementary moves. You can't appreciate the awfulness of their rap without seeing it. It is the whitest rap ever.

Watch for the scene in the camp office where there is a copy of Leif Garrett's 1978 "Feel the Need" album sitting on top of the record player and leaning up against the wall.

Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe (1991)

A random woman gives birth - with her pants on - to Tommy, the child of an alien being. The child has the anti-life equation in his head, which is some sort of mathematical formula.

When the child gets into grade school, Secundus returns to take the formula from his head. Abraxas, the good guy, also returns to earth to save Tommy and his mom. Havoc ensues as Abraxas and Secundus fight in slow motion while eighties style soft rock instrumentals underscore the ridiculousness of the scene. Truly horrible.

Omega Doom (1997)

Rutger Hauer is Omega Doom, a robot who wanders into the middle of a robot gang fight in a bombed out town. The two gangs, the Roms and the Droids, are looking for a hidden treasure of guns.

While it might seem like this would be action oriented, it mostly involves lots of talking and a decapitated droid head that gets kicked around a lot and then reattach itself to spare bodies without heads. Omega Doom wears a Russian hat, drinks lots of water, and kills half the robots in town before wandering off, none the worse for wear. Not very exciting, is it.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Creature From Black Lake (1976)

Joe Canton and a friend are checking their traps in the swamp, when a hairy hand reaches up from the water and drags the friend out of the boat. Joe manages to get away and we are treated to a shot of him escaping that is framed by the furry wet crotch of the creature, ewwwwww!!!

Two college students, who are older than your typical college kids, head into town to do research on the stories of the Bigfoot creature. The small town Sheriff warns them not to go round scaring the towns folk with their creature talk, which they proceed to do because they are clueless idiots.

The two end up finding a young man whose parents were killed by the creature and meet up with Joe Canton, whose story has been told outside of town. Joe also lives in a shack with newspaper on it's walls, wears a stained union suit, and drinks from a moonshine jug. But he is a creature believer and thus alright with them.

Any hopes of excitement are dashed as the two students spend most of the movie riding around in their van talking and having run ins with people who don't want there to be any creature talk. In the best Bigfoot scene in the film, the creature rolls their van down a hill and shortly afterwards it bursts into flames. Take that, college boy.

Action Jackson (1988)

Policeman Jericho "Action" Jackson is framed for the murder of a businessman's wife and goes into hiding with the businessman's mistress, played by Vanity, who is a junkie and a singer. Vanity keeps insisting that she needs a fix, yet her withdrawal appears to be nothing more than needing to freshen her makeup and redo her poofy hairstyle.

They stay at a hotel run by Jackson's friend, a former pro boxer who looks like Bo Diddley and has a raspy cartoon character voice. Several of Carl Weather's co-stars in the Predator have roles in this film and Craig T. Nelson is the evil drug dealing businessman who's hair is the same color as his suit. Standard eighties action flick with not much going for it other than Weather's unbelievably cut abdominal muscles and a bad guy minion whose hair is right out of an eighties metal band.