BAD TASTE (1987)

I couldn't believe that a Peter Jackson flick is in the public domain. That's how these 50 packs work. They take a bunch of public domain movies, build a basic theme for them and slap them all together. Don't get me wrong, I love these things, but I never expected to find this one in there.
I decided last night to watch this one with the kids. They were reluctant at first. They saw the Chilling movie box and immediately groaned. I could hear their choruses of
"Aw, not another crappy movie of Dad's!"
I assured them that this one was done by the guy who made King Kong and Lord Of The Rings. This seemed to placate them a little. They still didn't seem all that enthused. The two girls ran off in search of other forms of entertainment. The boys were too lazy to move and sat through it. It didn't take long for the gore to hit and the boys were riveted. By the end with the big assault on the house, I had all four of them watching the thing and having a really good time. It was nice to share with them a flick I had seen 20 years ago on the big screen. They thought that Jackson as Derek was hilarious and they even asked me if there was a sequel where Derek landed on the planet of the aliens and started kicking butt. They were sad when I told them no, but it sure sounded like a good idea for a flick, didn't it?
Ah, as for my review for this particular flick? Yeah, it's been done to death, we've all seen it and it's been commented on so often that anything I might add would be outdated and futile. You don't get a review with this one, just happy memories of the corruption of my lovely children.
Now, sod off!

NAKED MASSACRE (1976)

My apologies for the small image, but this was really the only one I could find. If anyone out there who reads this can suggest something I can use to capture images from DVD on my computer please get in touch with me at this blog. Also you may notice the name on the poster is different than the name of the movie. Well, there is no poster of Naked Massacre that I could find so we are stuck with it's original title.

Naked Massacre tells the tale of one Cain Adamson (quirky, biblical name, there ain't it?) It seems that Cain is fresh from Vietnam where he tried to kill himself with this wicked switchblade that his buddy Jimmy gave him. Seems that Jimmy was also porking his wife back home in Wisconsin in the good old US of A. Cain is not all that fond of women. So, he leaves Vietnam to arrive in downtown Belfast. I know, I shook my head, too. Why in the Hell would you pick Belfast? Well, Cain seems to have realized his mistake and is trying to get a boat out of town. Problem is he has no cash. enter a house with eight nursing students. Cain figures he can bust his way into the house and steal some cash from them. easy in and easy out, right? Wrong. Once he's surrounded with that much woman around him he starts to lose it. especially since one of the girls looks like his whore of a wife back home. From then on it terror and bloodshed as Cain proceeds to make the title of the movie, Naked Massacre, not Born For Hell, live up to it's name. See, I get screwed a lot on movies with these lurid titles. Barn Of The Naked Dead is the first to come to mind. Sure it had a barn and there was some dead, but what was it missing? That's right...naked. At least this time I got what it promised. But, I got much more. More than I really wanted. I expected lurid exploitation and I get a man who is completely insane terrorizing and slaughtering a group of women. It might be one of the more disturbing things I've seen in a while. And it didn't need a bunch of high tech special effects to pull it off. Setting it against the all too real violence of Belfast gave the film a gritty, realistic feel to it. I knew I was in trouble from the opening of the movie.

Our lead is walking along the docks and asked for his papers by a military man. Then the next scene is in a church. everyone is singing and the scene makes for a relaxing one.

Then the side of the church explodes, killing a few of the people inside. It comes out of left field and jolts you into a feeling that you have no idea what will come next. Definitely, a stand out movie that manages to rise above it's trashy title.

Now, if I could get someone to help me out on that program so I could get some still pictures for this blog. HELP!!!

THE LEGEND OF BIGFOOT (1976)

So, were at the second flick in the chilling movie pack and all I can say is WOW! This is a documentary about a guy named Ivan Marx and his hunt for the ever elusive Bigfoot. Marx supposedly got exclusive footage of the beast back in the 70's and it is some of the most famous footage of the beast. It has been called a hoax by many experts and it does, indeed look like a guy in a really bad monkey suit. The quality of the pictures are so bad that it only seems to add to the feeling of the hoax. Now, Marx only had a few minutes of this footage so the rest of the 77 minute running time is a lot of nature photography and Marx' droning narration.
This flick reminds me of those Sunn Classics like In Search Of Noah's Ark and it's ilk. I liked the grainy 16mm feel to the entire proceedings and you do see a side of 70's America that has vanished from the country and it works really well as a cinematic time capsule. The truly horrific scene would have been of these two squirrels. They are playing on a dirt road and kissing and being cute and then one gets hit by a car. The other one tries to drag the wounded one off the road to safety to no avail. Then the hawks show up. The wounded one manages to crawl to hole to safety narrowly escaping being a bird's lunch. The only way they could have gotten this shot would have been to chase the wounded squirrel with a camera. I think the squirrel was running from them instead of any bird that never shared a shot with the animal. If you like nature footage then you will like this flick. Any wild animal you can think of in North America is represented here.
Listening to the narration you can hear a man who started out being one of the best trackers in the world and then got consumed by this obsession with Bigfoot. You can even hear him lament about having to rely on second hand information to track this elusive beast. A tracker prefers to work with what's in front of him, not what people tell them so you can feel for this man's increasing sense of frustration.
Overall, the film seems disjointed. One scene runs into another fro not apparent reason. My wife, Martha said it looked like this guy did a nature documentary, added the Bigfoot shots and then did an entire narration to loosely link the Bigfoot plot line with what we were watching.
I would have to agree with her.
Ivan Marx died five years ago and the secret of his footage died with him. Most experts agree that it is fake, but his widow, Peggy Marx insists that what he filmed was real. Ivan Marx even made a sequel called BIGFOOT, ALIVE IN '82 where he is assaulted by a Bigfoot and has to shoot at it to save himself and his wife.
This is the only documentary in the 50 pack and it is definitely odd enough that it warrants at least one viewing. The bizarre, disjointed imagery of a nature documentary coupled with the constant, droning narration of a man who has lost it make for fine viewing.

DRIVE IN MASSACRE (1976)

It seems that there's a drive in in California that used to be the site of a carnival owned by a guy named Van Heusen. He tore the place down and built a drive in in its place. Van Heusen eventually left to retire in Hawaii. To run the joint while he enjoyed his retirement, Van Heusen had one of his former barkers, Austin Johnson, run the drive in. Johnson hated the job.

Then the killings started. The opening scene of a couple making out is interrupted when the guy decides he needs to watch the beginning of the picture. As he he reaches out to grab the speaker, a sword slashes down and takes off his head. His girlfriend starts to scream and she is cut short by a sword through the neck.

Well, now the cops are worried. They can't have someone using a sword to whack the patrons of the theater. But who could be the killer? The manager, Johnson doesn't care about his customers. He thinks they are the scum of the earth, but he loves to take their money. Could it be Germie, the odd little fella whop picks up the place and used to be a sword swallower in the carnival? Maybe it's the pervert who parks next to people while they are making out and smacks his meat around outside of their cars? The red herrings are pretty thick in this flick, but they start dropping as quick as the slaughtered theater patrons.

Both of the cops on the case seem to be members of the Joe Don Baker School of acting and we have a hard time believing that either of them could catch a cold.

There are a few plot points that seem a little fuzzy. The major one is rthat the killer whacks the second couple and leaves the sword behind. This doesn't seem to stop him from killing again. Exactly how many swords does this looney have? And, while we're on the subject; Who thought of swords. These are big, heavy civil war cutlasses. Not an easy weapon to use in the first place and it seems out of place in the film. I think it might have been more interesting if the killer had used various things around the drive in the kill people. You know, strangle them with the speaker cord, drag a body to the swing set in the front, cool stuff. Hell, the snack bar alone has ten or eleven forms of lethal just lying around. But instead we get a sword.

The effects are passable for the time period. A movie that concerns itself with a California drive in in the 70's comes across as a little chaste with only one magnificent set of breasts and not for very long I might add.

This is the first of the 50 flicks in the box set I mentioned earlier in the blog. As a start it was okay. Cheesy, but not quite cheesy enough. I will give the producers props for the ending. Pure exploitation and a good way to play a flick that was geared for the drive in.

CHILLING 50 MOVIE PACK

It finally arrived! I was totally unprepared for the design of this thing. What they did is make a DVD case like you expect, but then they have the front secured with Velcro and when you open it it has twelves stiff, cardboard sleeves that give a brief description of each movie. I do not have a lot of these already so I keep my promise and review each and everyone of these bad boys. And for those of you keeping score, here's the list of flicks;

THE ALPHA INCIDENT

BAD TASTE

BELL FROM HELL

THE BLANCHEVILLE MONSTER

BLOODY BROOD

A BUCKET OF BLOOD

CATHY'S CURSE

THE COLD

DEATH RAGE

DEEP RED

THE DEMON

THE DEMONS OF LUDLOW

DEVIL TIMES FIVE

THE DEVIL'S HAND

DR. TARR'S TORTURE DUNGEON

THE DRILLER KILLER

DRIVE-IN MASSACRE

FUNERAL HOME

THE GHOST

GOTHIC

HANDS OF A STRANGER

HAUNTS

HORROR EXPRESS

HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND

HOUSE OF THE DEAD

I BURY THE LIVING

I EAT YOUR SKIN

JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER

LADY FRANKENSTEIN

LEGEND OF BIG FOOT

MAN IN THE ATTIC

MEDUSA

MESSIAH OF EVIL

METAMORPHOSIS

THE MURDER MANSION

NAKED MASSACRE

OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES

PANIC

THE REVENGE OF THE DOCTOR X

SCREAM BLOODY MURDER

SHOCK

SILENT NIGHT BLOODY NIGHT

SISTERS OF DEATH

SLASHED DREAMS

SNOWBEAST

TRACK OF THE MOON BEAST

VIRUS

WAR OF THE ROBOTS

WEREWOLF IN A GIRL'S DORMITORY

THE WITCHES MOUNTAIN.

Now, I'm not doing these in alphabetical order. I'll do them as the mood approaches. Some of them, like Argento's DEEP RED that has been written to death will get a much shorter entry unless I can come up with a unique slant. So get ready for tomorrow folks.

This will either be fun or torturous. For now I'm going with fun.

Gotta go!

A Quick Note

For my birthday I got some cash and have purchased various things. There are two things that have not hit the comics stores yet, but I will get them when they do. One is a comic called The Mice Templar. I'm a huge Templar Knight freak so I must have this comic. The other is Marvel reading my mind again and releasing a Devil Dinosaur omnibus. This will be the most awesome thing ever. I can hardly wait.

In other news; I bought one of those 50 packs of flicks recently and as soon as it arrives I will begin the watching and reviewing of each and every flick in the set. Sound ambitious? Yup, sounds that way to me to. What was I thinking? So, sorry for the lull.

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douglaslanawaltz.blogspot.com

Seeya!