Dangerous Worry Dolls (2008)

Eva's life is hell. She's in a woman's prison where the warden hates her.  A few women are beating on her because she won't be their drug mule.  One of the guards is making dirty movies with the prisoners in the basement (and Eva's next).  And her sister no longer wants to bring her daughter to visit and has threatened to take custody away even after Eva is released.

Eva's daughter gives her a gift of a small box of worry dolls.  So before she goes to bed that night, she whispers her worries to the dolls and puts them under her pillow.  The dolls are supposed to take away her worries.  But they didn't mention that it would be by crawling into her ear at night, living in a huge pimple on her forehead, and taking over her brain.

The most ridiculous thing about this film is that the pimple on Eva's forehead becomes this massive thing growth and no one seems to notice.  People have conversations with her as if there is nothing wrong.  If someone I saw everyday had a dinner roll sized pimple in the middle of their forehead and it wasn't there yesterday, I'd have to say something.

There's really only one active worry doll in the film.  All it does is crawl through her ear, and then stick it's head out of the pimple on her forehead.  Even worse, it has this high pitched voice that is so silly, you'll laugh.

And the whole thing with Carl the prison guard is just plain embarrassing, but what else would you expect from a Charles Band film.

Blood Beat (1985)

It's Christmas - time for the family to gather and celebrate the holidays to a Casio soundtrack.  Gary goes hunting in the woods while wearing a walkman. Seems like a bad idea, but he does manage to live through it and bag a deer.

As Gary engages in way too much deer gutting (bleech!), Ted and Dolly arrive home from college.  As they exchange greetings of love in front of the dead deer, Ted introduces his girlfriend Sarah, who he has invited home without telling anyone.  

Mom is an odd woman who looks like Cher if she'd never had plastic surgery.  She paints strange abstract art, is known to go into trances, and was expecting Sarah even though Ted didn't tell anyone he was bringing her.  Mom even has a present for Sarah, even though she stares at her as if she hates her when they first meet.

Sarah, who has one of the worst mullets ever seen in film, is a very odd girl.  She gets freaked out by Mom's paintings and sees a trunk with a samurai suit and sword next to her bed.  When the family goes hunting, Sarah screams, becomes solarized and runs off, eventually barreling full tilt into a gut shot stranger who bleeds on her and then dies.

Sarah's room becomes electrified, the family starts getting mad at her, the samurai stalks people in town, and we hear the blood beat, da dum da dum like a heart.  Heartbeat, it's a bloodbeat.

Gary's hand becomes electrified, Mom uses her powers to try to make the evil go away, food flies out of the cabinets to attack Gary, Ted and Dolly hide in the closet, Dolly screams too much and Sarah is a huge part of the problem.  Then it ends.  Huh?  Wtf?!?  What just happened?  They don't explain anything!

Out of Reach (2004)

Former government agent turned survivalist and animal activist William Lansing becomes pen pals with a thirteen year old orphan girl in Europe who is sold to a villainous fencer who traffics in young girls. 

I know Seagal wants to show his sensitive side, hence his bonding with small children in all of his movies.  But there is something super creepy about the fifty plus year old Seagal writing to a thirteen year old girl, and it's even creepier that she's an orphan.

This is another in the long line of Seagal movies where it looks like he's wearing a bad Bela Lugosi wig and his voice is partially dubbed by someone who sounds nothing like him.  It's confusing.

Bram Stoker's Burial of the Rats (1995)

Wow, this movie should have been called Bram Stoker's Boobs and Rats.    The plot follows Bram Stoker as he is kidnapped by a band of women who hate men. They are led by Adrienne Barbeau, who also controls the rats by playing her rat pipe.

The rats can pick a man clean in seconds, leaving only a gleaming white skeleton, which comes in useful to the man hating, rat loving women.

Bram is scheduled to be killed, but somehow avoids it, falls in love with one of the women, and starts becoming a favorite of the queen after she reads his well written prose.  In his initiation, he the hair on his chest looks like a question mark or a seven.  I truly have no idea whether he has odd chest hair or has been strategically shaved. 

When the military attack the rat women, there is grass on the ground, but when Bram crawls out afterwards the landscape is covered with snow. Huh?

Also, wouldn't a band of women prefer some sort of entertainment other than naked dancing girls?

Doll Graveyard (2005)

When Sophie breaks a vase, her abusive father forces her to dig a grave for her dolls in the backyard.  As she is climbing out of the hole, she slips and falls backwards into it.  Rather than seeing if she is okay, her father buries her with the dolls to cover up the accident. What a great dad.

Cut to current day, where a father and his two teenagers are living in the house.  The son, Guy, finds one of the dolls poking out of ground, and as he is an action figure collector, he cleans up the doll and displays it in his room.

While dad is out on his first date, DeeDee invites some girl friends over to drink and smoke pot.  Two overbearing jocks decide to crash the party and tie up Guy in the process.  Then the dolls go nuts and Sophia's spirit starts taking over Guy.  The teens are idiots as they continue to stay in the house after the killings start and neglect to call for help until several of them are already dead.

Another Charles Band movie in the tradition of the Puppet Master films - small dolls killing people with their small weapons.  The creepiest one is the doll with the jagged mouth, ick!

Decadent Evil II (2007)

Sugar and Dex are back, and with Morella gone, try to track down the next head of the bloodline.  Once again, they end up in a vampire strip club with a mystery bloodsucker closing in on 10,000 kills and all the power that it brings.

With even less of a story than the first one, we boringly watch Dex and Sugar bumble their way through another evil bloodsucking strip club - it's so much less entertaining than that sounds.

Decadent Evil (2005)

Beginning with footage from a previous film to explain the back story, such as it is, the plot involves Morella, a vampire who runs a strip club.  When she hits 10,000 kills, she will become the leader and ruler of all those she's bitten.

She has two vampire strippers, Sugar and Spyce, who help her procure victims.  But Sugar is really a good vampire who has fallen in love with a mortal.  Morella warns her off mortals as she once loved a mortal who cheated on her.  But she got him back by turning him into a little creature that she keeps in a cage in her room.  

Not a good movie by any means, the puppet in the cage is fairly useless.  It just makes little whiny noises and at one point manages to crawl up on the bed with naked chick about to be killed.  From the ending and the video of behind the scenes, the film makers were way too enamored with the rutting puppets.  It's probably only funny if you're there when they film it... and maybe even that is giving them too much credit.

Wicked Little Things (2006)

Hey, another horror film about miners!  Yet this one has a twist because it's about children ghost zombie miners. 

A widow and her children move into an old family home which has been abandoned for years. Unfortunately it's in a mining town where there was a collapse at the mine that killed the child miners inside.  Now they roam the woods at night, tearing people apart. 

At first I didn't find the children scary at all. But as the film goes on, the group of zombie ghost child miners gets larger and their eyes get blacker.  By the end the swarm of dead childrenwith black eyeballs running through the night woods carrying picks is really creepy - other than the bad wigs on some of the kids. And when the kids kill, blood flies into the air as if they're beating on puddles.

While an interesting concept,  but there are too many questions left unanswered.

1. how can anyone move their children to a house that hasn't been lived in for twenty years without ever checking it out to make sure it is actually inhabitable?  She didn't make sure the utilities were working, that it was clean, that it had any usable furniture, or that the skeleton key works in the lock.  Plus she only brought a couple of suitcases. 
2. when the mother keeps finding the front door open in the middle of the night, she seems totally unconcerned as to how it got open.  She doesn't check on her daughters or check to see if someone else is in the house. Way to go, mother of the year!
3. the townsfolk know to stay out of the woods and don't go out after dark, yet the plumber does not leave before dark and the teenagers go parking in the woods.
4. why are the kids indiscriminately killing everyone they see? how do they discern who is descended from the mine owner and who is from a mining family? why have they become cannibals and how does giving them a butchered pig help keep them from killing?
5. when the mother is looking for Emma, she goes into the mine to find her.  But she has to walk through cobwebs, so obviously no one has gone in there for years.
6. if a lawyer or real estate agent looked at the deed, then shouldn't they have been able to tell her it is a miner's deed rather than actual ownership of the land?

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

Years ago on Valentine's Day, some miners left their posts to head off to the dance and there was an explosion and cave in that killed some miners.  Since that day, no one in the town has celebrated February 14th - until now.

The young folk in town decide that it's time to have a Valentine's dance. But when the decorations go up, the mayor gets a human heart in the mail and promises of a massacre unless he cancels the festivities.

The young miners and their dates are outraged and decide to hold the dance anyway at the local mine owned by TJ's father.  As the young folk blow off steam at their drinking, dancing, sexing party, some of the group goes into the mine to get romantic and scare the girls.  Unfortunately there's a killer who knows the mine and he's after anyone having a good time.

This is one of the better slashers of the early 80s.

Dead Silence (2007)

After a ventriloquist's dummy mysteriously shows up on his doorstep and his wife is murdered, Jamie goes back to his hometown where he delves into the legend of Mary Shaw, a vaudevillian ventriloquist who was murdered and buried with her dolls.  

Oh sweet jesus, why are ventriloquist dummies so freakin' scary?  Mary Shaw and her wall of dummies was unnerving and I slept with the lights on after I watched this.  It's not that it's the scariest thing you'll ever see, it's what your imagination does with it.  Plus the look on the victims faces and the end of the film are disturbing.  

Honestly, if a ventriloquist dummy ever shows up unannounced on my doorstep, I am not bringing it into my house.  I have also emphatically told my friends that they can never buy me a ventriloquist dummy, (which they had considered for comedic effect.)

Evil Bong (2006)

A nerd moves in with three stoners who buy a mail order bong that turns out to be filled with evil and a strip club.  So basically this move is bout pot and boobs.

That stupid looking thing on the cover is actually the evil bong.  Although it talks, it's mouth can hardly move, which makes one wonder why they bothered to make it move at all.  

Miner's Massacre (2003)

A group of friends head out to the dessert to look for a secret cache of gold that was hidden years ago by an evil miner.  In their pursuit of this treasure, they run into the ghost of the miner, complete with pick axe and killing anyone who comes anywhere near him.  Luckily you won't care as all the characters are annoying and unlikable. 

The makeup on the miner is as bad as the cover makes it appear.  The movie has cameo's by Richard Lynch, Karen Black, John Phillip Law, and Martin Kove.  

The only amusing thing about the film is that the gold in the mine is already processed.