Blood Reaper (2003)

A group of friends goes camping for the weekend and meets up with a serial killer in a gas mask.  A guy with a guitar wanders up to the group's campfire the first night, warning them to leave and playing a song he's written about the serial killer.  For some reason, they aren't alarmed.

Lots of nonsensical things happen and there is never any information revealed about the killer or why he is doing the killings.

One Man's Justice (1995)

aka One Tough Bastard

After John North's daughter is killed by a man in federal protection, North decides he will seek justice - which includes teaming up with a drug dealing kid and lots of killing.  Fairly forgettable action flick with a title that should have been used by Steven Seagal.

Marina Monster (2008)

Idiots who fall or are pushed off docks in the marina are eaten by a shark, which consists of a fin in the water.  The people flounder, then submerge.  Yup, shark got 'em.

Meanwhile Earl Molar must call his father Commodore, which leads to a standing joke that will make you want to shoot yourself.  "Father... I mean, Commodore Molar..."  It's endlessly repeated and not funny the first time.

At the beginning of the movie, there are around four minutes of nothing but sailboats in the distance on the water. Then at the end, there are minutes full of a shot of ripples in the water.  Since there are no credits anywhere in the video, I'm assuming this is where they were supposed to go. 

One of the worst movies I've ever seen, and that's saying something.

Raptor Island (2004)

A group of ill-prepared navy seals set out to rescue an elite operative held hostage by terrorists and end up on an island inhabited by dinosaurs.

Oh Lorenzo Lamas, why must your navy seals be so inept?  They have an inflatable boat, but no repair.  They are weighted down with high tech equipment and huge knapsacks, but they do not seem to have anything they need.  

And let's not even talk about the cave full of dinosaurs or the ridiculous female operative, who seems incapable of taking care of herself.   

Warriors of the Wasteland (1982)

aka I Nuovi Barbari

Post-apocalyptic ridiculousness ripe with bad hair, future cars, explosions, laser sounds, big should pads, and a beheading all in the first ten minutes!   This is a combination of fourth rate Mad Max mixed with Megaforce's motorcycles and gangs dressed in white. It would seem like a bad idea to dress in white after the apocalypse, but their outfits are spotless.

The Templars want to kill everyone, while Fred Williamson is a mercenary who helps out our loner hero, Scorpion.  There are cars with bubble tops, a little kid mechanic, a bad guy with a disturbing cod piece, and cars so slow that a woman wearing high heels in sand can out run them.  Yup, everything in the future looks super cheap.

Bad hair and big shoulder pads.

The Gore Gore Girls (1972)

Another Herschell Gordon Lewis film with gore and strip clubs.  Obnoxious detective Abraham Gentry is hired by a newspaper to investigate a series of stripper murders.  Gentry carries a walking stick, has a distinguished mustache, wears a suit, and demands a clean glass when ordering his seltzer water.

The strippers are dispatched by various methods involving gore, such as cleavers, meat tenderizer, and boiling oil.  A woman's liberation group is protesting the strip clubs, and one stripper says the leader of the group has threatened to kill the strippers.  There is also a large insane gentleman who sits at the bar, draws faces on vegetables and then smashes them to bits.

Gentry is too clever for his own good, but does crack me up with the question, "please tell me everything you can about Suzy Creampuff."  Also amusing is the bottle brought to the scene by the killer, which has a label on it that states "Acid, Made in Poland."

The Wizard of Gore (1970)

I don't like gore, but I love Herschell Gordon Lewis's movies.  The music is great and the actors sound like they just came off the stage at a community theater.  Montag the Magician has a delivery similar to Criswell from Plan 9.

Montag's show consists of him telling his audience that they will see live gore on stage, and then asking for a volunteer.  Surprisingly, the audience does not look alarmed.  

When the poor woman gets on stage, Montag butchers her, pulls her guts out, and at the end of the act, shows that it was all an illusion as she doesn't have a mark on her.  Later that night, the woman is found murdered by the same method that Montag used on stage.

A sports reporter, who was at the show with his news reporter girlfriend Sherry, figures out this connection.  His first thought is that a maniac at Montag's shows is following the girls and killing them in the same fashion.  Later he begins to suspect Montag.  His girlfriend is skeptical, as are the police.

After five women are killed after being on stage with Montag, Sherry volunteers to be the next woman who Montag performs his trick on.  When her boyfriend professes his concern, Sherry cluelessly asks, "What can go wrong?"  

There is bad acting all over this film and some of the hairstyles are ridiculous.  Perhaps my favorite moment was when two of the reporters eat at a place called Chicken Unlimited!  Wow, I would totally eat there. With that name, how could you not?

There is a twist ending that I didn't see coming, and which is now cliche.  But at the time I believe it was less common, so is forgivable.

Bite Me (2004)

The owner of a failing strip club stashes a crate of government marijuana in his back room, not realizing that it also contains some strange bugs.  The bugs attack his bartender and strippers, so an exterminator is hired.  The bugs resemble those Cootie kids toys, and are totally unscary.

I'm not a fan of this movie, but my friends thought it was pretty good.  What I liked best about the movie was that the strip club had a giant dinosaur behind it, which didn't figure much into the movie but was amusing nonetheless.

Torso (1973)

aka I Corpi Presentano Tracce di Violenza Carnale

Female students are being strangled and stabbed, but the police have no clues except that the killer has a red and blue scarf.  One co-ed suspects a man she knows until she realizes his scarf is a blue design on red.  I was unaware that they were being so specific in their scarf descriptions.

A few girls decide to go out of town to get away from it all at a big estate overlooking the village. Unfortunately terror follows them and they become the next victims.

I'm not sure what it is about Italian films, but they are so creepy and leave me feeling disturbed and slightly sick when the movie is over.  So although I don't enjoy them, they are quite effective.

This movie also reminded me that CGI has robbed us of all the fantastic falling dummy scenes.  There is nothing better than a body going off a cliff when it's legs bend unnaturally and it's obvious that it is only a lifeless dummy.

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.