Leprechaun: Origins (2014)

Two couples vacationing in Ireland decide to visit a small Irish town. Their driver leaves them at a large rock covered with symbols and tells them they must traverse the rest of the way by foot because he doesn't want to go into town.  No suspicions are raised by this behavior.

When they arrive in town, they visit the local pub to get a drink.  As Sophie talks about her college plans next year and her interest in historical research, a local man named Hamish turns to them. He tells them if they're interested in history, there is a site they should see that is not in any of the guidebooks.

Only Sophie's boyfriend is hesitant, but since he's outvoted, the couples gladly accept a ride from Hamish and his son.   The site is a seven mile walk and since it's toward the end of the day, Hamish has kindly offered the use of a cabin where the kids can stay for the night.

No one is suspicious that the house has a padlock on the outside of the front door. They just troop into the home like lemmings, as the viewer awaits the inevitable discovery that they are locked in the cabin and a leprechaun wants them dead.  In another twist on our leprechaun tale, years ago the town stole all the leprechauns gold and in penance they provide him with people to consume.  

No one shall ask why the townsfolk don't move (since the creature is confined to a specific area by stone monuments and couldn't follow them).  Also please don't even consider how much a leprechaun can eat. It kills numerous people, but leaves them essentially whole. Is it a really picky eater? Stupid leprechaun.

Based on the title of the film, I thought this was going to be a prequel to all the other leprechaun movies. But this has nothing to do with them.  It's essentially a remake, which unfortunately eliminates any humor and becomes just another slasher with kids in a cabin in the woods - and not an original one at that. Also there's that pesky problem where they've eliminated anything that looks like a leprechaun.

The only way we know this is monster is a leprechaun is because they tell us it is, and the film is called Leprechaun.  The Irish characters are dressed like they're right out of the potato famine, but our title creature looks more like a cross between a goblin and an insane chimpanzee.  If they made the exact same movie but there was no mention of Ireland and no accents, this could be a movie about an alien, a goblin, or a mutant.

mutant-alien-goblin-chimp-rechaun

River of Darkness (2011)

Wrestler Kurt Angle is small town Sheriff Will Logan whose town is the scene of a series of grisly murders. All the crime scenes have the word Hix scrawled somewhere and Logan figures that is the key to the crimes.  I was thinking that since it takes place in a small town that someone was trying to spell hicks, but not so.

Turns out three members of the Jacobs family were murdered by a mob of vigilantes headed by Henry Hix because his daughter became pregnant after a rape.  Legend has it that the Jacobs boys are back for vengeance.  Why do people back from the dead for vengeance always kill random people who had nothing to do with the original crime?

In an abrupt shift 35 minutes into the movie, three new characters are introduced via the line, "So how long have you been chasing ghosts?"  Yes, it's paranormal investigators who've come to town to get in a boat to find ghosts and hope not to die.

The movie is bookended by a college student and a voice over. You'll forget you've seen her before until she shows up at the end again.

Angle seems likeable enough, but he's no actor. Then again, neither is anyone else in the film.  Hix is played by Bill Hinzman, Romero's original zombie in the cemetery. Hinzman does some lame screams while having a nightmare that are so bad they're notable.  Two of the Jacobs boys are played by wrestlers.

The film is super low budget and looks like it's shot on digital.  It's kind of boring, but it reminded me of the older, no frills homemade films on VHS from the 1980s. I don't know why I kind of liked it, but I did. Make no mistake - it's not good. It's horrible and sometimes boring.

Looks like the ambulance boys have an ironing board.

Do police stations usually have counters near their desks?

The Sheriff is not keeping these crime scene photos private.

I got the Mud face.

As spooky as this movie gets.

Monster Brawl (2011)

You would think that a film featuring all the classic monsters  paired up to fight to the death and find the ultimate champion would be a good thing.  The matches are in a cursed graveyard.  There is a wrestling ring, announcers, managers, and it's handled as if it were a wrestling broadcast.  Also Dave Foley and Art Hindle are announcers, and Lance Henricksen is a disembodied voice who makes comments on the moves and outcomes, like in the game Mortal Combat.  Plus who didn't spend time as a kid wondering how monsters would stack up against each other if they ever came to blows?

Unfortunately even with all the monsters and everything going for it, it is one of the most tedious movies I've ever managed to sit through.  It's like watching a pro-wrestling match from the 1960s.

Each monster gets a back story, none of which are fun to watch.  Also if you don't know the back story of classic movie monsters, have you been living in a hole or what?  There are times where it appears they were going for comedy, but it's so unfunny that you'll question whether that was their intent.  Dave Foley has a slightly Howard Cosell announcer thing going on, but even he isn't funny.  Damn it, movie!

Girls Gone Dead (2012)

Back home for Spring Break, Rebecca goes away for the weekend with her friends, much to the chagrin of her ultra religious mother.  The girls are staying at one of their father's rental houses, which turns out to be in a town mostly populated by retirees.

At one of the local bars, they meet some guys who are involved with Crazy Girl Unlimited, a series of videos in which girls take their tops off for the camera.  The girls make plans to meet up with the guys the next day, and decide to have a party at their house.  Things are going good until someone in a Monk's robe and wearing a weird baby mask while carrying a medieval weapon starts taking them out one by one.

Based on the name of the film, I thought there were going to be zombies in it.  So while waiting for the non-existent zombies, I was also waiting for the killings as there are probably only two within the first hour.  This means the film is long on bitchy drunk girls who might take their tops off, and short on dead girls.

The best thing about this movie is that Asbetos Felt has a cameo as Rodney the karaoke singer, and wrestler Jerry Lawler plays the Sheriff  who gets to pile drive the killer.  Other than that it's more like a spring break movie rather than a horror movie.

Plaga Zombie: Mutant Zone (2001)

When the FBI unleashes an alien virus on test subjects in a small town, the virus quickly spreads turning amost everyone into zombies. The town is quarantined and three friends who've survived are dropped off in the center of town. The FBI theorizes that once the zombies kill them, no one will ever know what happened there.

Med student Bill, computer geek Max, and pro wrestler John West (complete with theme song on a vinyl 45) try to find a way out of the city and avoid being killed by zombies. They wind up with a disk that contains a map which shows the only exit, but decoding the disk takes 12 hours. So they must try to survive the night stuck in a town full of zombies.

The film was made in Argentina on a tiny budget. The comedy sometimes falls flat and there is an overly long sequence involving John West and his memorabilia room. Over all though, it was entertaining and much better than I would expect for this type of budget.

Feast III: The Happy Finish

Picking up where Feast II left off, there is a very brief recap as the group of survivors is still trying to figure out how to escape from the town without being killed by the monsters.

There are some funny scenes in this one, including an accidental shooting right after a rescuer drives into town and some scenes with a martial artist named Jean Claude Seagal.

A man called the Prophet shows up out of nowhere and appears to have some sort of power over the monsters. The group follows him into the sewers and the creatures come after them. By the time they realize how the Prophet is controlling the creatures, they're in trouble.

Again, creatures in the daylight? Not scary. Creatures in the dark stairway? Scary. At one point, there is a huge fight scene lit with strobe lights and you can't tell who is fighting who or what is going on. At the end there is a very long song, which got on my nerves.

I'm not sure if I liked this one better than the second one, or if I had just gotten used to the characters, wanted to find out how it would end, and knew it wasn't going to be as good as Feast.

Feast II: Sloppy Seconds (2008)

Picking up the next morning after Feast left off, a biker chick shows up at the bar and swears revenge after finding part of her dead sister. She and her gang take the surviving bartender hostage and ride into the neighboring town to get revenge.

The town appears deserted, but that is because the monsters have gotten there before them and are still wandering around. The group teams up with two midget wrestlers and a few other survivors and spend their time trying to figure out how to escape from the creatures.

I really liked Feast, but this sequel didn't thrill me. First, it takes place in the day light so the monsters look like what they are - guys in monster suits. Second, I didn't care about the characters. Third, the script wasn't as good and the comedy often fell flat. Fourth and lastly, the movie doesn't end. It stops abruptly and you need to see part three to find out how it ends. Again people, give me a warning that I will not get a resolution to the story.

The scene with the baby seems to polarize people. They either think it's funny or sickening. I was so shocked that I laughed. I couldn't believe it, but also I know the difference between reality and a movie. It was a great take on the average guy who tries to be the hero. But if it happened in real life, it would be awful and horrifying.

Half Past Dead 2 (2007)

There is a gang war brewing between the Hispanic and African American gangs at the prison. Burke, played by wrestler Bill Goldberg, likes to keep to himself and so does Twitch, who is only biding his time until he can break out of prison and find a large cache of gold hidden by one of the characters in the first film.

One of the gangs kills the leader of the other gang and frames Burke for the killing which starts a gang war that happens right when Twitch's girlfriend and Burke's daughter are in the prison. Oh no, hostages for the gang members!

Oddly enough this movie does not have much action in it. I'm not sure who this movie was made for since it is lacking in plot, action, and nudity - and you've got to have at least one of those to sell this type of film.

There are so many plot holes, it'll take double digits to count them all. But the ones that bother me the most are the following:

1. The lock down doesn't lock all the doors, only the ones convenient for the plot points.
2. Burke is in the kitchen serving food when the killing is framed on him, yet his daughter has not managed to leave the prison yet.
3. Having never personally been inside a prison, do visitors really have to go through the prisoners corridors to get to the visitor's room and conjugal visit area?
4. There are no cameras in the guards control rooms, which is a shame since the prisoners can override any lockdown by flipping the switches here. Also it makes it easy to pin the killing of the two dead guards on Burke and Twitch.

See No Evil (2006)

Co-ed college aged convicts are assigned to clean up an old hotel and in return for three days work, have a month taken off their sentence. The hotel is over eight stories high, so I'm not sure why this task would ever be assigned to around eight convicts with no real supervision.

The group randomly split up and roam around the building, which is going to be converted into a homeless shelter. A couple of the guys have blueprints of the hotel in hopes of finding an old safe which is supposed to house lots of money. But when they stumble across a hobos corpse, one runs away right into the grappling hook of serial killer Jacob Goodnight, who likes to remove the eyes from his victim's heads.

I'm not sure if the young prisoners are supposed to be completely unlikable or if teenagers are supposed to think they're cool because they're total jerks who constantly sass authority figures.

When people start disappearing, one of the characters asks if there is anyone else in the building and is told that they did a sweep of the building before the kids arrived to clean out all the homeless people. Too bad they didn't also make it a priority to clean out the hobo corpses because I find that creepier than living, breathing hobos.

The movie has a million plot holes and the entire premise of prisoners, who wear street clothes, have backpacks, aren't shackled in anyway, are allowed to roam a huge hotel without guards or tracking devices, is completely idiotic.

The Condemned (2007)

Tv producer Breckel decides to broadcast the ultimate reality show in which ten convicted murderers are dropped off on an island and the last one left alive is set free. Doesn't seem like a good idea in any realm of thought, especially since at the end there's going to be a murderer released into society.

Breckel and his overly enthusiastic crew bribe wardens all over the world to get the ten best fighters, and then drop the ten prisoners off on the island. Unfortunately the brainiacs also put their control center on the island, which isn't a good idea when you have ten killers running wild.

As no tv channel will touch the show, Breckel broadcasts it as a pay per view event via the internet. Too bad for Breckel that one of the killers is really undercover special ops Conrad, played by wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin - not to be confused with Colonel Steve Austin, the six million dollar man. Conrad is a good guy so he doesn't want to participate.

The movie portrays the killers as much more likable than the entire film crew and when Conrad heads to the control tower, you're ready for him to kill everyone in sight, which of course he doesn't as he's really a nice little hard working special ops guy who got wrongly imprisoned.

The only thing I can think as Breckel wracks up millions of viewers on his pay per view internet extraveaganza is that his server is going to crash.