Bear (2010)

In a cliche ridden first act, we see our unlikable characters take a short cut down a dirt road, drive recklessly, get a flat tire, discover there is no cell reception, and meet a giant bear who fixes their tire with a wink and a smile.  Well, I was hoping the last thing would happen, but I was not so lucky.

Instead we get some of the stupidest actions ever by characters on a deserted road in the middle of the night.  When one of them hears a rustling in the woods, she walks closer to see what it is.  Damn it, woman!  It's the middle of nowhere. It's woods. It's dark. It's either a wild animal or a cannibalistic hillbilly, and either way, you don't want to meet it.

So do her friends give her practical advice?  No, they all tramp even closer to the rustling sounds in the dark woods.  And look, it's a bear... a giant bear.  Again, do they do what normal people would do, such as run back to the van, or slowly back up to the van in hopes that they can get inside before being mauled?  Nope, that would make too much sense.  While everyone stands there, one guy runs back to the van, and returns with a gun which he proceeds to shoot again and again and again, until he's out of ammo and the bear is in a bloody heap.

What next, you say?  Well what else except a bigger angry bear shows up.  So everyone decides to run to the car, except for the guy who decides it would be a good idea to hide behind a tree to distract the bear from his friends.  Then he climbs the tree. Aaarrgggh!! Do you not know bears can climb trees?!

His friends in the van drive straight into the tree to rescue him. What?! Why not stop right before you hit it?  Why smash into it?  And when he jumps on the roof of the van, why not drive off?  So what we've got now is the guy on the roof vs the bear, who promptly tips over the van. They all manage to stay alive and then one girls starts fussing over the cake they have.   When they eventually right the van, it won't start.  So they work on the engine, talk loudly, and ignore their surroundings. Sounds like a plan.

This movie is a lot of talking and not so much bear.  The bear looks sad and the characters are idiots, so we couldn't take it anymore and stopped watching this mess.

Fever Lake (1996)

Albert invites his friends to a cottage on Fever Lake for the weekend.  The guys and girls are traveling separately and make plans to meet at the local diner.

The girls arrive first, head inside to get food ,and are met with stony stares and silence from the town folk.  The only friendly face is a teenage waitress who warns them not to go to Fever Lake because bad things happen there, what with the murders and the men whose eyes glow.

Meanwhile the whitest Native American in the land tells the Sheriff that evil is coming, but the Sheriff can't be bothered with that type of nonsense.

Cars die and later start working again, wolves wander through wooded areas while the characters fleeing in obviously different locations, and our friendly waitress dies... somehow.  It's a bit vague since all we see is her flailing around in an old campfire pit and a little bit of blood on her face.

When I saw the stupid looking face on the cover, I had no interest in watching this.  Then I noticed Corey Haim's name, and was surprised that he'd done a horror movie.  There's a lot of talking in this movie, but not a lot of killing.  The kids do stupid things and the outcast girl is the stupidest of all.  It doesn't really have any momentum to keep it going, and the last shot of Corey is not the big twist you can tell they thought it was.

Frozen Terror (1980)

While Jane runs off for a secret tryst with Fred, her daughter drowns her younger brother in the bathtub.  When Jane is apprised of the supposed accident, she and Fred rush home.  But in their haste, they go off the road and Fred is decapitated in the crash.

Jane is put in an asylum as she is understandably devastated by the loss of both her lover and son on the same day.  No one has caught on that the drowning was actually murder, so Jane's daughter is free to psychotically roam free.

When Jane is released, she takes up residence in the apartment where she and Fred used to meet for their trysts.  The landlord Robert is interested in Jane. She says she's not available, but that doesn't stop her from leading him on whenever she gets the chance.

Robert is blind. He never hears anyone else come to visit Jane.  Yet he seems to hear the sounds of sex coming from her apartment.  Robert tries to figure out what is going on, why Jane keeps her freezer locked, and who Jane is seeing, and the film gets creepier and more disturbing.

Watch Me (2006)

Watch you? Don't tell me what to do. You're boring and not at all what I expected. Let's try having a description that matches your content, okay?

A chain letter is sent via email. If you watch the snuff film attached, a girl will appear out of nowhere and kill you.  All Tesa's friends die after receiving the video and watching it. Tesa doesn't have a copy of the video so she contacts a freaky student in her class who ties her up and tapes her eyes open, forcing her to watch the film to find out if the legend is true.  Um, how about looking to the side?  He can't stop your eyeballs from rolling around in their sockets.

There's a reason this movie is on a $5 compilation.  The best part of the film is that everyone has a modem and it would take forever to download the movie.

Roll Bounce (2005)

After their local roller skating rink closes, Xavier (known as X) and his friends go uptown to Sweetwater Roller Rink and enter a competition to win a $500 grand prixe.  The box description makes it sound like it's Electric Boogalo on skates.

Oh yeah, that's right. We've got a skate off!  The kids are going to skate against their idol, Sweetness, who turns out to be kind of an ass.

This movie has a ton of cliches.  There's a dead mother, an unemployed father, an ignored son, a sassy little sister, a father who pretends to go to work so his kids won't worry that he lost his job, a sexy new neighbor, the father starts dating and keeps it from the kids, the underdog skaters from the poor side of town vs. the king of the roller rink in his fancy duds, etc.  You can probably guess every twist and turn in this movie.

Yet for some reason, I'm a sucker for roller skating movies.  I don't know if there's ever been a good one. Usually they follow the same old cliched story lines of a skate off, kids against authority figures who are trying to close down the rink, and/or rival teams talking smack about each other.  Hurrah!

Rubber (2010)

A killer tire with psychokinetic powers causes people's heads to explode for no discernable reason.  I kept hoping the tire would launch itself onto a someone or into a crowd, but to no avail.

There is a group of onlookers watching the carnage with a tour guide, and some great dialogue by a Sheriff who explains that sometimes things happen for no reason.  The Sheriff provides some great examples of things that happen without reason in classic films.

I wanted to like this.  It had a clever beginning, but bogged down as it went along.  Great idea though.

Brain Damage (1988)

Wow, this is one odd little movie.  Brian isn't feeling well.  So he cancels a date with his girlfriend and goes to bed early.  When he wakes up, he finds a pool of blood on his bed and a wound in the back of his neck.  He also feels like someone is watching him and soon discovers it's Elmer the Aylmer, a little alien monster who is phallic in appearance and speaks with the voice of horror host Zacherle.

Turns out Elmer has been living with the people in the upstairs apartment who have been feeding him cow brains so they can control him.

When Elmer injects Brian's brain with a blue liquid via the hole in his neck, Brian starts hallucinating, sees colors, and has a euphoric high.  This also anesthetizes him so that he doesn't remember what Elmer has done while they're out.

With Brian as a source of transportation, Elmer starts searching for human brains to eat so he can restore his power.  Brian's fine with that as long as Elmer gives him a blast of brain juice.  Brian is addicted after one hit and enjoys the high. Plus he doesn't want any rememberance of Elmer attaching himself to some poor girls forehead and consuming her brain while she screams and flails in vain.

There is one scene in which Brian's pulling bloody gunk out of his ear, and his ear falls off. This starts a deluge of blood that is impressive.

This is a pretty cool movie overall.  Watch for The Swimming Pool Q's performing in the club scene.

A Cadaver Christmas (2011)

Bartender Eddie and drunk Tom are in the bar on Christmas eve when a man walks in covered in blood.  While he uses the restroom to clean up, Eddie calls the police who ask them to keep the guy there until they arrive.

The man turns out to be a janitor from the college. While he has a drink, he tells them about cadavers coming to life at the college.

When the local policeman, Sam Sheriff, arrives he doesn't believe a word of this, even though there are a few zombies outside in the parking lot.

After handcuffing the zombies together inside the bar, everyone gets in Sam's car to go to the college.  The janitor wants to make sure the cadavers are contained, and Sam wants to know whats really going on.

Once at the college, they are joined by a security person, and head off to the office of a professor that the janitor saw working late in the science lab. Hopefully he'll have an idea of what is going on.

We've got lots of intentional cliches here - people separate when they should stick together, no one believes the guy who really knows what's going on, a scientist doing strange experiments to cure the disease that killed his wife, an experiment going wrong, an inept sheriff, a town drunk, etc.

I like zombie flicks and holiday horror flicks, and overall, this was a good one. At first I found the cliched characters a bit annoying. Sometimes the comedy fall flat and there are times the dialogue will make you cringe at bit.  But as the movie went on, those things all worked themselves out and it works.  I ended up really enjoying this.

Rare Exports (2010)

Pietari and his friend Juuso sneak across the border from Finland to Russia to spy on an excavation project. Under the ruse of drilling, the crew is trying to find a rumored burial chamber in the mountain.  But when they reach it, they find there is something alive in there.

When Pietari and Juuso's fathers go on their annual reindeer hunt, they find the herd have been killed, which they blame on wolves displaced by the blasting.  But Pietari suspects something else is going on. He has seen footprints in the snow outside his window and now there's a bloody human footprint under a dead reindeer carcass.

Pietari has been reading up on Scandinavian folk tales which say  that Santa Claus is actually a scary guy.  So he is suspicious when strange things start to happen in town.  Children are disappearing and creepy dolls are left in their beds.  All the radiators in town are stolen.  Then Pietari's father finds a man in his wolf pit who appears to be dead. But he seems to come to life whenever he smells gingerbread or children are around. Never has a frail old man been so menacing.

I really liked this movie.  It has a creepy atmosphere, (so if you're looking for gore, this is not the film for you.)  The kid who plays Pietari goes a great job. His character figures out what is going on long before the adults, and of course the adults do not believe him.  There is some dark humor and the film is well shot, which is a nice change from a lot of the crap films I sit through.  I saw this last year with some friends and then watched it this year with others, and it's been unanimous - everyone really liked it.

Here's the trailer if you're curious.  It couldn't be smaller than this size as you need to be able to see the subtitles.

Deadly Little Christmas (2009)

When will parents learn that you should never get freaky while dressed like Santa?  Little Devin witnesses Santa and the maid getting busy. Next thing you know, they're both dead and Devin is on the front lawn with a bloody knife in his hand and a dazed look in his eyes.

Fifteen years later, Devin is still locked in a sanitarium and is not impressed with Mom's visit to bring him his Christmas presents, since it can't help remind him of killing Santa and all that. But Mom's not having any of his shenanigans and yells that she put him in there to get well. Say what now?  Were the police not involved in his incarceration?

Back at the family home, Devin's sisters Taylor and Noelle bicker about Devin and how Mom hasn't really talked about him since the murders.   Noelle wants to continue to ignore this issue or confront Mom.  You see, the writing isn't always consistent so it gets confusing.

• Noelle: "If it weren't for Mom, you would have done what I did - block it out so you can get on with your life."

• Taylor: "We need to confront Mom about this."
• Noelle: "No kidding! I've been telling you about this since High School." (She only graduated a few months earlier).

When Devin escapes from the asylum, the family isn't notified until the next day.  The asylum claim their protocol is to call the cops. But the cops are practically useless as they theorize Devin is probably curled up in a ball sleeping and totally harmless.

We run into some continuity problems as Devin is seen at the family home, then back in the Asylum basement slashing some orderlies... and now back at home again watching his younger sister.  It's just not possible for him to teleport like that.

Meanwhile Taylor is producing a play at the community theater (oh yes!) and Noelle is one of the leads.  Their rehearsal is in two hours, but only two of the four actors show up to rehearsal.  Apparently the play consists of a total of four actors and no crew. But Taylor doesn't seem to notice that half her cast is missing, and never figures out they've been murdered.

When the play is performed, there are only eight people in the audience, which includes the cop investigating Devin's escape, Taylor, and some guy who was working on the stage.  The missing two actors are never mentioned.   Why such a low turnout?  They comment on how the play is a total success. Really?  Maybe turnout is low because the play is on Christmas Eve.  Did they not promote it?  Is that just a bad day for a play, what with church services or family parties?  Would a community theater really hold a play on Christmas eve?

This movie does give us one of the most ridiculous murder scenes ever when a guy is murdered with an obviously collapsible knife and overacts the hell out of his death scene.

Also we get brilliant lines like:

• I keep having to tell you to calm down. I don't want to keep having to tell you to calm down.

Felissa Rose, famed lead from Sleepaway Camp, is the mother in this film.  I'm rooting for her, but boy she was as bad as the rest of the cast.

This movie is far better than Christmas Massacre, Psycho Santa, and Satan Claus.  But those were so bad, that isn't saying much.  At least this one has lighting and the acting is so over the top that its pretty funny in places. Plus the dialogue is ridiculous rather than just plain lame. Still, not recommended.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 (1987)

If you missed the first movie, don't worry. There's at least thirty minutes of it repeated in the first part of the second movie, including all the kills, nudity, orphans, and mean nuns that you can handle.

Ricky, younger brother of the hulking Billy from the first movie, tells the story via flashback.  Ricky, locked in an asylum,  is being interviewed by his thirteenth psychiatrist.  I'm not sure what happened to all the others. But I damn well know you shouldn't leave a big musclebound insane man locked in a room with a whisper thin, milquetoast psychiatrist.

After our recap of the first flick, we discover that after Billy's death, Ricky was adopted by a nice Jewish couple, (you see, to avoid the whole Christmas issue).  So far so good. But if you go out on the street, you can't avoid Santa, nuns, the color red, or the fact that his brother Santa Billy was killed in front of Ricky's very eyes.  Yeah, I don't think things are going to work out so well for poor Ricky.

As an adult, Ricky is a big buff guy who can't act his way out of a paper bag, but that's part of the enjoyment of this movie.  How did this guy get the role?  I suppose he's able to squint and look evil, and he's got big muscles, but the acting, yikes!  Mostly Ricky serves up his brand of psycho justice to those who are naughty, and a few other poor souls who get caught in his way.  Plus he laughs, oh how he laughs, in an extremely fake, awkward way that made me giggle.

Airborne (2012)

With a storm rolling in, the last flight takes off from the airport.  The huge plane only has about fifteen passengers so when people start disappearing, it is obvious.  The stewardess doesn't seem to take the missing passengers seriously, or  show concern when the Doctor questions why the plane is altering course.  When they discover the pilots have been murdered, it's all out panic to figure out what is going on and who is killing people.

Mark Hamill plays Malcolm, head of the control booth.  It's his last night on the job.  That doesn't bode well, does it?  Hamill seems to veer in and out of a questionable British accent.  He has it in some scenes and not in others.  Maybe they told him to stop trying.

Nothing special about this one.

Buried Alive (2007)

A few friends take two college pledges to an isolated ranch for a sorority initiation.  The creepy caretaker tells them not to go in the subbasement, but they go in anyway and find he's been digging down there.

One of the guys decides the caretaker must be searching for the treasure that was rumored to be buried with one of their ancestors first wives, a Native American who was buried alive.  Yeah, not something I'd really want to be digging up. Plus why would they bury treasure with someone they killed?  Think, people, think!

There is a creepy incestuous relationship between one of the girls and her cousin, and as in most cases of sorority hazing, the pledge master is not likable.

The movie is not very interesting and you won't care about the characters. But I did enjoy the effect of the guy cut in half (although everything inside his body stays in place), and the guy who gets his face sliced off.  Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't say enjoy, I just liked the effects.

Psycho Santa (2003)

This is one of those films that isn't really even a movie.  It's a couple of ideas for a short film padded with mundane actions and a lack of dialogue.

This anthology is held together by Ron and Jess, a bickering couple on the way to a Christmas party.  Ron hates Christmas, and notices "... we're heading up to where that whole Santa incident happened."  I'm thinking he's going to lay down some traumatic tale about a holiday tragedy he experienced. Instead he tells us stories of things that happened to strangers, which never explains his dislike of the holiday.

The stories are told via flashback.  Ron tells us the first one involves "three girls... who meet at this cabin... every Christmas... sort of like a tradition."  Uhhhh, sort of?  Wouldn't a repeated annual gathering be the very definition of a tradition?

Every year the girls have a slumber party on Christmas Eve at a remote cabin.  After lots of footage of driving and awkward staring out the windows, two girls arrive at the cabin, but find it empty. When they see presents under the tree with Sarah's name on them, they assume Sarah has gone out.  So does Sarah usually only bring presents for herself?  Because I'm thinking that's odd.

As they wait for Sarah to return,  we see them talk, sit, shower, look for rocks, sit awkwardly in lingerie, and dance. They also play a game where you write your name on a rock and throw it into the fire.  The next morning if your rock is gone, it means you'll die within the year.  Whaaat??  Oh hell no, I am not playing that game.  What sort of Christmas game is that?

When the story is over, we cut back to Ron and Jess.  At this point, it occurs to me Ron just told Jess everything we just watched.  So he described everything they did in mundane detail?  Because that dancing scene alone was five minutes long and can best be summed up by saying a stripper dances while wearing lingerie and a Santa hat ,while an older woman in lingerie sits on the couch and stares at her.  So... that was probably ten seconds of dialogue but it was five padded minutes of film.  Aaarrggh!  A perfect example of having an idea, but not enough of an idea to make a movie.

Oh and we never see the killer or any of the girls get killed. How do you like them apples? Onto the next killer Santa segment... with less killing and less Santa than ever before!

Yes, it's more padding and no dialogue in this next segment where robbers break into a house to rob a safe.  Again, please realize that I have summed up in one sentence what took five or ten minutes to watch.

Even though no one is home, there are lights on.  While the robbers are digging through the safe, a woman appears and goes into the bathroom.  Then she heads out into the kitchen.  How can she not notice the robbers?  She's blind!  Of course, she is. And how do we know she's blind?  The confirmation is a white cane leaning against the kitchen wall - which is actually sticking out into the floor space at a dangerous angle and should trip our little blind friend.... wait a minute, if she's blind, then why are the lights on?

Apparently your other senses don't get better when one doesn't work, as she doesn't hear our robbers following her around.  But we do get to see the blind woman make coffee, so that's... no, that's nothing but padding.

Then for some inexplicable reason, the robbers kill her.  So do they run away so they won't get caught for the robbery and murder?  No!  They decide to investigate the odd noises coming from the other end of the house. Really? Why? What if it's another blind chick or a deaf guy?

They discover a padlocked door and decide to open it.  Come on!  You've just robbed a safe and murdered a blind woman, but you've just got to know what's making that weird noise?  Too bad for them it's a nut job psycho locked in a closet.  Apparently he's used to be in the "Asylum for the Dangerous Insane" and you know how difficult they are to deal with.

And now they're not even trying as we get even shorter segments where we watch a girl read, a goth kid smoke and a little kid playing piano. Good thing we saw these in detail before they each gets killed by Santa. And hurrah for piano boys mother who gets slashed, drags herself to phone, pulls the cord out of wall, drags herself to wall to plug it in and dies. Come on!  Are you kidding me?  You don't have a movie, just padding to fill out time.

The last segment is a young couple whose car breaks down, walks randomly through the woods to find help, and ends up being chased by a junkyard Santa.  Serves them right for visiting a junkyard Santa.

It's almost like there was no script, just a couple ideas.  Oh let's just pad this out with people doing things. We don't need any dialogue.  Good god....

This is exactly how you'll feel while watching this movie.

Guess which one takes a shower?

Is that her hat or is it her hair?

Yup, this scene totally screams Christmas Eve.
And who wears pants that are slit up the side?

Nothing awkward about that posture.

What a great tradition.

Bigfoot (2012)

Harley (played by Danny Bonaduce aka Danny Partridge) and Simon (played by Barry Williams aka Greg Brady) used to be in a band in the 80s, but had a falling out.  Currently Harley is a DJ who is putting on an 80's rock festival in the woods.  But first they need to cut down a bunch of trees in Deadwood, South Dakota to make room for the crowd.

Simon has become a tree hugging environmentalist, who shows up at the concert site with his harem in tow. In an effort to stop the destruction, they chain themselves to the bulldozers.

But Harley has an in with the mayor and shuts down Simon's protest.  He also offers Simon a spot in the show as he figures that will keep Simon from trying to disrupt things on the day of the concert.  Too bad Simon chose to do acoustic environmental ballads rather than songs from the old band that the crowd (such as it is) want to hear.

When Alice Cooper takes the stage, the loud rocknroll disturbs our sleeping CGI Bigfoot, who goes on a rampage.  You haven't seen anything until you've seen Alice crushed under a CGI Bigfoot foot.

With Bigfoot on the loose leaving a trail of carnage in his wake, Harley decides to kill the beast and calls in a favor with the best hunter in the world.  On the other hand, Simon wants to save the poor, fragile, giant, killing machine. He believes he can commune with nature, including Bigfoot, and the poor critter just needs to get his forest back.

The rest of the film involves Bigfoot chasing cars and stepping on people, while everyone tries to either  kill him or save him.  This is a typical Asylum film, with a good premise but tedious execution.

The Telling (2009)

Horribly nasty sorority girls make three pledges tell scary stories, then humiliate them, which is what ties the segments of this anthology together.

The three stories are:

1. Killer doll - enough said
2. Thirty year old has-been actress finally gets a role, but doesn't realize the real purpose of the film she's in
3. Sorority girls make prank call, hear a murder, and are afraid the killer will track them down.  They are idiots, especially the girl who finds her roommates dead and locks herself inside the house.

I'm not a fan of anthologies, and this one didn't change my opinion of them.

Jason X (2001)

After escaping from captivity, Jason kills everyone he can, except for a scientist who cryogenically freezes him and unfortunately herself.  Forty years later, an exploration team finds them intact and brings them both onto the ship in an attempt to reanimate them. Oh no, not a good idea space cadets, because while the team is busy working on the woman scientist, Jason reanimates on his own and starts killing everyone.  It's Jason in space!

The Entitled (2011)

Paul is unable to line up a job in his career field, so he works as a bike messenger.  His mother is ill and although his dad works, they do not have insurance.  His family can't afford to buy medication for his mother and their house is under foreclosure.

So Paul devises a plan to kidnap the children of three wealthy men and demand a ransom.  He enlists two misfits from college to help with his plan, but his accomplices turn out to be loose canons who are unable to follow directions or control their emotions.

When this showed up,  I had no recollection of putting it in my queue.  There is a twist at the end that I didn't see coming, but there is also something that doesn't make any sense.  Overall it was okay, but nothing special.  It does have Ray Liotta and Stephen McHattie though and they are both good.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Billy has not had a great life.  As a small child, he witnessed his parents murders by a man dressed up as Santa Claus.  Then he and little brother Ricky end up in an orphanage run by a cruel nun overlord, who thinks its a good idea to make Billy sit on Santa's lap.  Yes, nothing like facing your fears by being forcibly dragged to the source of your trauma.

Billy grows up to be a strapping young lad who can lift boxes and move heavy things from here to there.  So the kind, supportive, well meaning, but temporarily brain dead nun at the orphanage helps Billy get a job... at a toy store. Oh damn, that doesn't seem like the best idea.

While Billy was a model employee, the holiday season makes him ill at ease, what with Santa seeing kids in the front of the store. Luckily Billy spends most of his time in the stock room. Well at least he does until the temp playing Santa hurts himself and Billy gets drafted as the new Santa.  As is expected with Santa trauma, Billy eventually starts a-killing adults who he deems naughty.

When this movie came out, parents went crazy.  There were protests at theaters and I believe the film was pulled before it's run was up.  I actually had to walk through a line of protesters to get into the theater.  I can still remember people with protest signs shouting that I shouldn't go into the theater.  The local news even had a feature on the protest.

The acting isn't the greatest, but I still like this movie - except for the mothers death scene.   That really disturbed me when I first saw it and it still isn't something I want to see.

Can't wait to watch Part Two again, which I also saw at the theater.  At the time, I was ticked off that a lot of it was footage from the first movie.  But Rickys horrible, horrible acting won me over.

The Wraith (1986)

Packard Walsh and his teenage gang force kids with cool cars to race for pink slips.  They always win even if they have to cheat.  When Packard discovers that Keri, a girl he wants for himself, is dating high school student Jamie, he and his gang decide to murder Jamie.

When stranger Jake rolls into town on a motorcycle and enrolls in the local high school, he befriends Jamie's brother Billy and charms Keri, who is now dating Packard.  Keri is afraid of Packard as he's a psycho stalker who will beat up anyone who talks to her.  When Billy gives her a ride home after work, he pummels Billy to teach him a lesson.

For reasons never explained, the Sheriff doesn't do anything about Packard's gang.  So there are some happy people in town when a mysterious car and driver arrive on the scene, start drag racing the gang, and the gang involved with Jamie's murder start having accidents.

I saw this movie years ago and didn't like it.  But recently my friends forced me to watch it again, ignoring my protests of hatred, and I actually thought it was okay.

The movie features Charlie Sheen before he was old and crazy.

Feeders 2: Slay Bells (1998)

Feeders is not required viewing before seeing Feeders 2: Slay Bells.  That's because Slay Bells has nothing to do with the first movie.  There is some recapping done at the beginning with interview footage of Derek from Feeders.  Where is Derek, who is he talking to, and why are they taping his interview?  No idea, it's never explained.

There is a flashback to the first movie at around 45 minutes. I have no idea why they would do that. It is also never explained why Bennet from the first film looks exactly like Alan.  This makes it even more confusing as to why they would insert the flashback.

Plus at the end of Feeders, Derek is cowering in the street while the city is under attack from the aliens, buildings are being destroyed, and it appears the Earth is going to be demolished.  Guess that didn't happen because it's a calm, peaceful Christmas in town until the aliens arrive... again.

Alan, Mary and their kids are preparing for Christmas eve and decorating their tree.  Alan has to work for a mean old boss and doesn't know what time he'll be home that night.  Meanwhile aliens have landed and are trying to eat anyone they can get their strange little alien hands on.

That night while Santa delivering presents, Santa and an elf are attacked by aliens. Santa is knocked out of his sleigh, landing in a heap in Alan's backyard.  It's Santa vs. Aliens, which could potentially be exciting - but not in this case, even though Santa has a raygun.

This is painful to watch. As with Feeders, theres lots of padding in this film.  We get to see Alan look up UFOs on his computer, his wife wrap Christmas presents, their kids watch cartoons, and aliens run around in the basement or outside the house.  And these are two foot tall aliens with chopstick arms and styrofoam heads, so it's not as exciting as you'd hope.

Is it Jesus or Derek insanely babbling about aliens?

Flashback to Feeders and an alien eating a head

You know it's going to be an exciting film when
these are the main characters.

Look... a UFO?

Alan shows his acting range as a ceramic goose looks on.

Her 90s hairstyle is getting bigger.

No one notices the alien by the side of the road.

These teeth can rip nothing to shreds.

The dead cat effect - now this is just confusing.  Is this a
photo of a cat with ripped edges painted red?

New Aliens - now with styrofoam heads

Alien vision captures a typical 90s housewife

Don't you die on me.

Santa's raygun

Feeders (1996)

Derek and Bennett are traveling cross country to the East Coast so they can go to the beach and check out the chicks.  On the way, they  stop to take photos of devastation, meet some girls, go camping, and run into an alien invasion.

The aliens aren't very threatening as they're only about two feet tall and have spindly little arms.  However they do have antennas.  Unfortunately by antennas, I mean radio antennas which they use to poke people in the neck.  On the one hand I applaud the creativity of the filmmakers since this movie cost them about $500 to make.  On the other hand, it's hysterically funny to see a radio antenna slowly coming in from the side of the frame towards someone's neck.

The film has a ton of padding - driving, walking, running, and alien vision while the little creatures scamper around the woods.  The soundtrack is something right out of a Peanuts/Charlie Brown special. This is not good, but its much better than Feeders 2: Slay Bells.

Ridiculous dialogue:

"Come on. Let's got into town. I want to grab some photos of the devastation." -- Derek

After hearing reports on the radio about a meteor or fireball seen in the area: "These people watch too much television." -- Bennett

Enjoy some of the low budget madness that is Feeders....

Aliens interactions with humans explained

The opening scenes have a fog over the top part of the
screen. I'd think it was a light leak which affected the
film, except this was recorded on VHS.

To avoid confusion, let me confirm that this is a UFO.

This aliens head is too heavy to stay upright
and flops up and down as he moves.

Derek takes ten photos of the same scene.

Derek and Bennett are overwhelmed by the devastation....

...there is no explanation for why Dereks photos of
said destruction contain mail trucks.

The not so scary radio antenna probe. Also is it just me, or
does anyone else want to smack that hat off his head?

Derek and his fabulous hair

 Doppleganger for Hyde from That 70s Show

Fashionably oversized hair and glasses of the 1990s.

Stomp on an aliens head and you get yellow paint.

Alien vision captures the skinniest leg known
to man wearing a tube sock.

Alien abduction!

Let the probing is begin.