"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Heebie Jeebies

Happy Boxing Day to all of the boxers out there. I have a new review today that to be frankly honest is not gonna be very exciting for anybody because it’s a total obscurity that you never heard of and I’m not recommending it. But for some reason I wrote it, so I thought I should post it before it’s 2018 and I have to stop using  the Slasher Search 2017 logo.

Ordinarily when I’m slasher searching I pin my hopes on movies from the ’80s. That was the prime time for filmatists to have caught the bug from HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, before they stopped the outbreak of Tom Savini fever and everything got too clean and slick and bland. If a slasher movie came out in the 2000s and I never heard of it I gotta assume it doesn’t have any of the things I’m looking for in the genre.

But I found this random one from 2005 that had a quote from the late great Dan O’Bannon on the box:

“…A CUT ABOVE THE COMPETITION… A THINKING MAN’S SLASHER FILM.”

So I decided to give it a shot. You can’t blame a guy for trying.

At first it’s unclear if there will actually be a slasher involved. The premise (explained concisely in first person narration at the beginning) is that Cassandra (Bobbie Jo Westphal, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP) once dreamt of her mother being murdered, and then what she dreamed really happened. Now she’s having dreams of old friends from school dying, so she’s invited them to an old farm house to try to keep these prophecies from coming true. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 26th, 2017 | 2 Comments »

Sheitan

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to a movie, which I can prove because I seriously have been meaning to see this movie SHEITAN since it was the hot new horror movie out of France, and that was 11 years ago!

It’s about a group of young horny deadbeats – Bart (Olivier Barthelemy, MESRINE PART 2: PUBLIC ENEMY #1), Thai (Nicolas Le Phat Tan, no other credits) and Ladj (Ladj Ly, OUR DAY WILL COME) – who go clubbing on Christmas Eve Eve. They have no money and might get kicked out for not buying drinks, and they hassle their poor bartender friend Yasmine (Leila Bekhti, MESRINE PART 1: KILLER INSTINCT, A PROPHET) trying to get freebies. Bart is the biggest pain in the ass though because he hits on a girl who’s with her boyfriend, calls her an “ugly skank” when she won’t give him her phone number, ends up starting a fight and getting hit over the head with a bottle by a bouncer before getting thrown out. Well deserved.

But Yasmine introduced them to her childhood friend Eve (Roxane Mesquida, RUBBER) who sexy-dances with Thai and is super hot so these doofuses are all sniffing around her and are very amenable when she suggests “We can go to my place, in the country.” And they don’t know they’re in a horror movie, so they don’t know NEVER GO TO ANYBODY’S PLACE OUT IN THE COUNTRY. EVER! (read the rest of this shit…)

December 21st, 2017 | 16 Comments »

Elves

Sometimes you want a great Christmas movie, sometimes you want ELVES. This is a crappy still-only-on-VHS one, but it’s pretty fun. Two things you should know:

1. The title is completely fraudulent. There’s only one elf in it.

2. It’s a pretty different interpretation of elves from ELF or something like that. In this version he has nothing to do with helping Santa Claus. He’s a monster created by Nazi occultists to mate with a human and create the master race. On Christmas.

Our heroine is Kirsten, played by Julie Austin (EXTREME JUSTICE, TWISTED JUSTICE [that’s two titles, although it would also be cool as one title]). She’s either a teenager or a young adult who’s a waitress at a department store “snack bar,” hates Christmas and wants it to snow. She doesn’t know that her grandfather (Borah Silver, BLUE COLLAR, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) is a Nazi who buried an elf out in the woods and also is her father and that she was inbred to be “perfect” because she’s the one who’s supposed to mate with the elf on Christmas Eve. Which are all things that are important to know. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 20th, 2017 | 7 Comments »

Better Watch Out

BETTER WATCH OUT is a non-supernatural, non-Killer-Santa Christmas horror movie with a fun feel to it, but with deeply uncomfortable undertones. Or maybe it’s overtones. In fact I’m gonna say it’s deeply uncomfortable overtones and undertones with just a thin layer in the middle of that fun feeling I mentioned. It’s not particularly gruesome or anything, it’s just that the psychology of the villainy is fucked up in a way that got under my skin. There is a physical threat, but it’s more about creeping you out that there are people out there who think like this.

It mostly stars the youths. There’s the kid that played Peter Pan in PAN (Levi Miller) and the two kids from THE VISIT (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould). There are other characters, like Patrick Warburton (THE WOMAN CHASER) and Virginia Madsen (CANDYMAN) as the parents of Miller’s character, but much of the movie is just between those three kids. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 19th, 2017 | 13 Comments »

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

This is an ALL SPOILER review, written assuming that everybody has seen THE LAST JEDI before reading.

* * *

If you’re not familiar with my take on the Star Wars, I’m a devout follower, but a heretic. I’m out of step with the mainstream because I hold George Lucas in high regard and I prefer the innovation, ideas and idiosyncrasies of his prequels to Disney’s more polished and socially acceptable continuations (though I like those too).

I’ve also been pretty alone in my skepticism about director Rian Johnson. That might be overstating it – I thought BRICK was very well made and I did like LOOPER – but some of the ideas are a little corny to me, and I never related to the effusive praise from my friends and colleagues. So I wasn’t over-the-forest-moon about him doing a Star War.

After THE LAST JEDI, though, I’m sold. And worried about him not doing the next one. In his capacity as the first sole-writer-and-director on a Star War since Lucas, Johnson succeeds in so much more than I could’ve hoped: continuing and deepening the characters from THE FORCE AWAKENS, bringing back Luke Skywalker for a powerful completion to his arc, thrillingly upending some of our expectations, putting a personal mark on the world of Star Wars, and saying new things about the meaning of the saga as a whole and its application to the world. Also there are some weird new creatures, and Luke milks one of them. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 18th, 2017 | 411 Comments »

The Land

THE LAND is a movie that played Sundance last year, that I watched because its writer-director, Steven Caple, Jr., was just announced as the director of CREED 2. And I hate to start out a review this way, but it’s fucking 2017, so… I need to say that I’m not sure where we’re at on Sylvester Stallone. Horrible allegations were published, but not in one of these exhaustively researched and backed up pieces that have taken down Harvey Weinstein and others – this was in the tabloid the Daily Mail. The only additional reporting I’ve seen was on TMZ, in a post where Stallone’s ex-wife Brigitte Nielsen swears it could never have happened, and a person said in the Mail story to have introduced Stallone to a fan denies that he ever did or would have done anything like that. More significantly, TMZ says that Vegas police do not have a record of the police report that was the entire basis of the Daily Mail story. But they offer no further details and I have seen no followups from any serious journalists.

Stallone’s work means so much to me that obviously I would prefer to live in the world where he’s officially cleared of being a piece of shit. But if the unidentified accuser in the Mail story really exists, I don’t want any part in debating what she says happened. So I don’t know what to do on this one.

In the happy world where everything is fine, the CREED sequel is my most anticipated movie. So forgive me if this is wrong, but I have allowed myself to have some excitement for it. The other day it was announced that Michael B. Jordan and Stallone had chosen Caple Jr. to direct on the strength of his debut THE LAND. Obviously I was curious, so I rented it. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 14th, 2017 | 13 Comments »

Brawl in Cell Block 99

When we last left novelist and heavy metal drummer turned filmatist S. Craig Zahler, he had made a distinctive directorial debut with BONE TOMAHAWK, a nice western with great characters and dialogue and that turns into a little bit of a gory cannibal movie by the end. I liked that one quite a bit but I think film #2, the crime movie BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99 (which is coming to video on the 26th but I splurged for VOD) is a huge leap ahead for him.

Vince Vaughn (PSYCHO) stars as Bradley Thomas, a burly tow truck driver who, after a really bad day, decides to go back to the drug business for a while. Cut to 18 months later, when his bedroom is almost as big as the whole house we just saw him in, and his wife Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter, BATTLE IN SEATTLE) is pregnant. Their dreams are finally coming true, but some things go wrong at work (as they do) and he ends up in prison, where he must protect himself on the inside and his family on the outside from the enemies he’s made. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 13th, 2017 | 40 Comments »

Dead End City

If you, like me, enjoy the occasional muddy VHS war against out-of-control Street Toughs, you may enjoy 1988’s DEAD END CITY, starring a bunch of people I never heard of being overshadowed by the menacingly inflated features of Robert Z’Dar (MANIAC COP, SAMURAI COP, BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME).

Here he plays Maximum (at least that’s what the credits say his name is), who leads a gang of white biker dudes with headbands, sunglasses, gang vests, chains, fingerless gloves and spiked gauntlets into a neighborhood to shoot random people, invade homes, blow up cars, etc. Maximum is mysterious in his fashion choices – he wears a suit and tie with the end of the tie ripped off, then later he adopts a studded biker look and then a band-t-shirt-sewn-onto-long-jacket punk look. The gang is called the Ratts, and they have names like Zim and Ripp, but I can’t tell any of them apart except for “Ratt Queen” (Isis Richardson, PHOENIX THE WARRIOR) because she’s the only female and the only one with big hair with a streak in it like an X-Man or a Jem and the Hologram.

Jack Murphy (Greg Cummins, Bosch) owns a factory in the area – I never figured out what type of factory – and isn’t too concerned about the radio reports or the government official (Don Barber, “Man in Bathroom,” DEATH CHASE) who comes to tell him to evacuate. The next day he gives in and sends the staff home, but, not wanting to relocate to a shantytown, he decides to stay in the factory with his friend Brett (Durrell Nelson, AN AMERICAN CAROL, stuntman in THE TOXIC AVENGER), his secretary Nancy (Aleana Downs, WITCHCRAFT III: THE KISS OF DEATH) and her visiting blind brother Malcolm (Rob Wuesthoff, stuntman in TEEN WOLF TOO). (read the rest of this shit…)

December 12th, 2017 | 5 Comments »

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI is playwright turned IN BRUGES/SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS director Martin McDonagh’s exploration of a grieving mother at war with the local PD. Her teenage daughter was raped and killed seven months ago, and she’s mad that they haven’t made any arrests, so she rents three billboards that bluntly explain the situation and blame the police chief by name.

I probly don’t need to tell you that this creates some tension in town. Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, SEVEN POUNDS, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS, TRIPLE 9, THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN, 2012) tries to reason with her politely about taking it down. His deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES), who is locally infamous for an unexplained incident involving the torture of a black man, is not as cool-headed about it, and threatens poor Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones, GET OUT) at the billboard company. The woman’s son Robbie (Lucas Hedges, MANCHESTER BY THE SEA) is traumatized and hurt by the graphic details of the murder he had previously avoided knowing. Her ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes, STEEL), a domestic abuser and a cop, is embarrassed by it and doesn’t think it helps anything. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 11th, 2017 | 21 Comments »

American Assassin

The trailers for AMERICAN ASSASSIN had me confused. Here is this mainstream, slick and expensive looking movie, Michael Keaton is in it, they’re advertising it before respectable movies. And then the plot is that a guy’s fiancee is killed in a terrorist attack, so he trains himself into a super-duper-badass warrior and master of covert ops and goes on a personal mission undercover into the terrorist cell to get revenge on the motherfuckers. That sounds exactly like a movie I would watch if it starred Scott Adkins or Jason Statham or The Rock or somebody. But this just stars some guy. Some actor.

Well it’s on video now so I had to find out the deal. Turns out the actor is Dylan O’Brien and additionally it turns out that Dylan O’Brien is the guy that starred in those movies THE MAZE RUNNER that somebody has probly watched at some point. Also it turns out that there is still a serious TV show based on TEEN WOLF and the show has Teen Wolf’s wacky buddy Stiles in it and Dylan O’Brien plays this Stiles. We are learning alot here today in my opinion. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 7th, 2017 | 21 Comments »

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