"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Frankie Freako

FRANKIE FREAKO is the new one from director Steven Kostanski, who I started paying attention to when he did PSYCHO GOREMAN (2020). He’s Canadian and he’s part of this group called Astron-6 who also did MANBORG, THE VOID, LEPRECHAUN RETURNS and others. I’m gonna have to give those a shot. He was also prosthetic makeup effects lead for IN A VIOLENT NATURE, among other things. They got a fun scene going on up there, those Canadians.

This one is primarily the Astron-6 version of a li’l bastards movie like MUNCHIE or GHOULIES, but it’s also kind of a RISKY BUSINESS “party while the parents are away” movie, and also they work in some 976-EVIL – the kid whose parents are away summons a little guy called Frankie Freako by calling his phone line. Except it’s actually not a kid, it’s a sexually repressed adult man who does this while his wife is out of town on a business trip. The beginning part is lit like a noir-inspired erotic thriller and it plays like a dangerous foray into forbidden sexual desires or some shit. But it’s actually just funny puppets. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 11th, 2024 | 14 Comments »

Thelma

THELMA (2024) is a cute little comedy about a 93 year old lady (June Squibb, NEBRASKA) spending a couple days feeling like her life is an action movie. She’s widowed and lives on her own, but her very nice twenty-four-year-old grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger, EIGHTH GRADE) visits often, drives her places, helps her with checking her email and things.

Then one day she gets scammed by somebody who calls her pretending to be Danny in trouble. In fact Danny is fine, but sleeping in and not answering his phone, so she puts the whole family in a panic, and by the time they figure out what happened she’s already mailed ten thousand dollars cash to a p.o. box. The police can’t do anything except tell her don’t worry, you’re not the first to fall for this, and apparently “Zuckenborg” can’t even do anything even though they might’ve gotten her information from social media. She specifically asked about that. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 10th, 2024 | 9 Comments »

Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin’ Out

Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the holiday spirit, the cozy, crackling fire is back. ADULT SWIM YULE LOG 2: BRANCHIN’ OUT is a sequel to the brilliant 2022 Christmas surprise ADULT SWIM YULE LOG. If you’ve never heard of that, it was a yule log video that aired without explanation at midnight on Adult Swim, now viewable on [HBO] Max or on a special edition blu-ray from Dekanalog. As you watch the fire in the fireplace you start to hear conversations in the cozy cabin where it takes place, and someone comes to the door and there’s a murder. It becomes a found footage horror movie slowly zooming out to show more of the cabin and eventually changing format as the story turns increasingly absurd and surreal.

And now, in secret as far as I know, writer/director Casper Kelly (Too Many Cooks, the Cheddar Goblin commercial in MANDY) has made a continuation with a totally different, but still very impressive, Christmas/horror/comedy conceit. It centers on part 1 character Zoe (Andrea Laing, Step Up: High Water), revealed to have survived the massacre at the cabin (though her fiance did not). She wakes up in a hospital, haunted by hallucinations of the ultimate villain of the first film – the cursed yule log that flies around bashing people to death. Her failure to adjust to the trauma ends up costing her her job, so her fun gay friend Jakester (Chase Steven Anderson, “Ticket Booth Operator,” THE COLOR PURPLE [2023]) convinces her they should go to Cancun to get away from it all. But their car breaks down at the exit to a picturesque little town called Mistletoe, in time for “the festival.” You know – the annual yule log festival. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 9th, 2024 | 7 Comments »

Sting

STING is a 2024 killer spider picture, but it’s not the French one that I already reviewed. That’s INFESTED. This one is set in New York City but hails from Australia. I remember seeing a trailer and being interested, I think I heard not-great things when it came out, but then when I saw it was on Hulu I noticed that the writer-director was Kiah Roache-Turner. That’s the guy that did WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014) and WYRMWOOD: APOCALYPSE (2021), two fun movies about people roaming a post-apocalyptic world with cars powered by zombie breath. Well shit, yeah, I’ll watch his spider movie.

Just like he did in WYRMWOOD, Roache-Turner uses an absurd and inexplicable sci-fi disaster to set up the scenario he wants to tell a story within. A news broadcast tells us we’re in the midst of the worst ice storm in New York state history, and that it’s believed to be connected to the asteroid shower that came unusually close to Earth. During the opening credits a tiny rock from space shoots through an apartment window and a dollhouse inside the apartment.

The rock cracks open and a spider crawls out and through the floors of the miniature home. The sequence is very stylized, and foreshadows that this spider will grow to this scale in relation to the actual building, so I wasn’t sure until after the credits that yes, this literally happened in the story – a spider fell from the stars, like the Blob or the Body Snatch plants or Venom in SPIDER-MAN 3. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 5th, 2024 | 7 Comments »

Blue Giant

Look, I’m not trying to be a role model here, I’m just telling you what happened. I saw that there was an anime movie about jazz musicians, and I was intrigued. It’s called BLUE GIANT, and it’s from 2023, directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa (DEATH BILLIARDS), based on a manga by Shinichi Ishizuka, adapted by someone who goes by “NUMBER 8” and served as “editor and story director” for the manga. The studio behind it is called NUT. You can get it on blu-ray and it’s also on Netflix.

It’s about this young guy named Dai Miyamoto (Yuki Yamada, SHOPLIFTERS, GODZILLA MINUS ONE) who’s introduced living out a Bleeding Gums Murphy fantasy, playing saxophone alone, outdoors by a river bank on a snowy night, the sound of the wind and his gasps of breath as prominent as the squawks of his horn. He vows to become the greatest jazz musician in the world, and moves to Tokyo, where he surprises Shunji Tamada (Amane Okayama), an old friend from back home in Sendai, by showing up at his doorstep. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 4th, 2024 | 9 Comments »

Skinned Deep

SKINNED DEEP is a movie released direct-to-video in 2004 by Fangoria and Gorezone Video. For that reason I recognized the cover but never paid any attention to it until Mr. Majestyk recommended it. Turns out it’s a really interesting one – if not great, at least very distinct. It’s the directorial debut of Gabriel Bartalos, a makeup effects guy who worked on DOLLS, the LEPRECHAUN movies and the BASKET CASE sequels. More recently he did the zombie horse in ARMY OF THE DEAD and worked on DESTROY ALL NEIGHBORS.

Different parts of it reminded me of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, THE ROAD WARRIOR, THE HILLS HAVE EYES and TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 2, except with acting out of a John Waters movie and a few characters that would work in FREAKED or a Brian Yuzna movie. It has a grimy indie look to it and okay, I’m doing the math in my head here and it does seem that 2004 was 20 years ago, but I definitely would’ve guessed this was older than that – in a good way. This does not seem like the same year as DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, SEED OF CHUCKY, CURSED and EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING. I don’t know, maybe it’s that low budget rawness.

It opens with a (reportedly done for real) scarification ritual branding an S and a D into skin, which is not part of the story, just an intense way to lead into the title card. Next an old man driving at night is killed by a monster-faced man with goggles bolted into his head and a bear trap jaw who swings a grappling hook at him and causes his car to flip. This is intercut with close ups of a bodybuilder flexing. We don’t see the muscle man’s face, and much later we’ll learn that he doesn’t have a head at all. This one is pretty different from other movies, is what I’m getting at here. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 3rd, 2024 | 5 Comments »

Nutcrackers

NUTCRACKERS is a new David Gordon Green movie that went straight to Hulu. Since 2018 he’s directed four Blumhouse horror sequels (HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN KILLS, HALLOWEEN ENDS, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER), at least three of them controversial/hated, plus 15 episodes of television. Personally I like his horror phase and wouldn’t mind if he kept going, but I’m also excited that he’s returned to standalone indie films.

Ben Stiller (NEXT OF KIN) stars as Michael Maxwell, an obnoxious Chicago real estate guy happy to tell you about the big deal he’s in the middle of or complain about the young guy Devon trying to steal it from him. Before he can get back to work he has to drive (in his yellow Porsche) to Wilmington, Ohio, he thinks to sign paperwork for his four nephews to be adopted after the death of his sister and her husband in a car accident. But as soon as he shows up the social worker (Linda Cardellini, CAPONE) tells him the foster family didn’t pass the background check so it’s on him to watch the kids until another one is found. Sorry dude. (read the rest of this shit…)

December 2nd, 2024 | 9 Comments »

Happy Sweet Potato Day

Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate. I can’t stop worrying about shit but I have much to be thankful for, including/especially all the great people here, the fact that anybody still reads my reviews, takes my recommendations, recommends things to me, and wants to hang out and talk about it with me and the community here you’ve all helped create. I hope you can have some good food today, maybe see family or friends, maybe avoid them if that’s better. I’ll keep striving and I hope you do too. Thanks everybody!

November 28th, 2024 | 26 Comments »

Fantastic Planet

FANTASTIC PLANET (La Planète sauvage) (1973) is a wholly unique experience in animated features. It was made a couple years before I even was, and to this day they don’t make ‘em like this. Soon, though. One of these days it’s gonna catch fire the way anime giant robots did, or fairy tale musicals, or computer animated comedy adventures with a high concept and it’s funny but then it’s serious but don’t worry also it’s still funny, yet surprisingly sweet. Have you seen any animated movies like that? I’ve seen a couple.

That’s gonna be the pattern with FANTASTIC PLANET, too – every entertainment conglomerate and their sister company is gonna come up with their variation on a bizarre alien world with strange creatures and plants, set to kinda funky psych music, animated with cut-outs of ink and colored pencil drawings, looking like the cover of an old sci-fi paperback that you read and can’t quite figure out which scene they’re depicting there. That’s what the people want so there will be a hundred movies like that and they’ll all blend together and be okay but never as good as the original.

This is the story of a guy named Terr (Jean Valmont, IS PARIS BURNING?), who lives on the planet Ygam. He’s an Om, which is Ygam for human – they were transplanted here, like mogwais (if you, like me, believe the GREMLINS novelization). He narrates the story and in the opening scene he and his mother are chased by Draags, the blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoids who are the dominant species on Ygam. Relative to a Draag, Oms are tiny, maybe bigger than a bug to us, but smaller than a mouse or a smurf. (read the rest of this shit…)

November 27th, 2024 | 7 Comments »

Wishmaster 2-4

WISHMASTER was a theatrical release, and given its low budget a profitable one. A year later, producer LIVE Entertainment was acquired by Bain Capital, restructured and rebranded Artisan Entertainment. While distributing real movies in theaters (including absolute classics GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI and THE LIMEY), they also started dipping into DTV sequels like the appalling CANDYMAN: DAY OF THE DEAD, the enjoyable THE SUBSTITUTE 2: SCHOOL’S OUT, and yes, a whole trilogy of WISHMASTER followups, starting with WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES (1999).

The sequels are not presented by Wes Craven, but funny enough the writer/director of part 2 is the same guy who did A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2, Jack Sholder. Sadly this is not on the level of FREDDY’S REVENGE, much less THE HIDDEN. He told interviewer Hellter from Gruemonkey that he’d turned down the first WISHMASTER and “didn’t especially like” it, then “needed the work” when part 2 came his way. But he was happy that he got to write it and “had a lot of creative freedom as long as I could do it for the budget.” (read the rest of this shit…)

November 26th, 2024 | 13 Comments »

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