The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto (2009)

I finally got around to watching this. As of this review I've watched it twice and I'll probably watch it again. Now, with that being said, here's the skinny:
I am not a Rob Zombie fan. I mean his music is alright and all and while I thought that House Of A 1000 Corpses was waaay too derivative, The Devil's Rejects wasn't bad. I refuse to watch the blasphemy that is the Halloween remakes so that left this flick.
What can I say? I'm a sucker for cartoons.
The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto is a mash up of old Universal flicks, Ralph Bakshi, masked wrestler movies and the madcap art stylings of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon gone horribly wrong. And for Ren & Stimpy that has to be pretty damned wrong.
There are werewolf nazis, zombie nazis, Hitler's head, Sleestacks, a rip off scene form Carrie, Paul Giamatti as Dr. Satan, the robot from the old Lugosi serial The Phantom Creeps and...well, I could go on forever, but I won't. Needless to say this thing has so much stuff going on in it that you have to watch it multiple times just to catch everything and then I'm pretty sure you'll still miss stuff.
The thing that makes me laugh everytime is the exchange between Velvet Von Black (Rosario Dawson) and Otto, the ape with a huge screw in his head (Tom Kenny). When these two share screen time I laugh out loud every time. The chemistry is amazing.
Watch this flick, you won't be sorry.
Here's a trailer:

Double Feature Time!

I had been missing out on a lot of movies I had recently acquired so I thought I would pop a couple of them in the DVD player now that most of my midterms have fallen by the wayside.
First up is Satan's Princess. I really thought it would have what I wanted in a late 80's flick;
Robert Forster? Check.
Boobies? Check.
Blood and gore? Check?
A ton of weird shit going on? Check.
I was bored stiff. Seems that some whacked out monk painted this picture of a chick and a dude who has a messed up face. Flash forward to the hear and then and it seems that this weird broad in charge of a modeling agency is actually the title character. Yeah she's pretty when she's naked and there is a lot of naked in this flick, but the movie is just dull, demon dull. Avoid at all costs.





It was with some trepidation that I decided to watch a newer flick called Hellbride. It's a micro budget affair lensed in the U.K. if I'm any judge of accents. It seems that this woman was supposed to get married. Yeah, then she caught her future husband schtupping some other dame. She didn't go all ballistic right on the spot. She let this hate simmer for a while. She offed people involved in the wedding and, on her wedding day bit off her finger and spit it at her groom, ring and all and then gutted him like a fish. So, naturally, this made it an evil ring and that made more and more people wanting the damned thing. Everytime it ended up in a huge body count. Now it's present time and the ring has changed hands a few times. It's being used for a new wedding and you might think you know what's going to happen and you couldn't be more wrong.
This movie had attitude and a fresh, whacked out sense of humor that I find missing from a lot of modern day fare. I think if it had been made here in the states that it might not have been as funny. Has that off kilter British humor coupled with a nasty vengeful ghost story.
I am really happy that I watched this. I would have enjoyed more nudity that the one out of focus pair of sweater puppies, but what are ya gonna do.
That's it for this little outing. I'll be back soon with more reviews.

Jamie Gillis Has Passed Away

At least according to 42nd Street Pete. This is more of a shame than just some porn star passing away. I met Mr. Gillis at the last Cinema Wasteland in October. He was such a gentleman with great stories. I got to say hello and shake his hand. He had such soft hands. The man was in porn when porn was a real movie with fuck scenes in it, not the gonzo bullshit you see nowadays. It is ironic that Jamie helped found the gonzo concept of porn, but he was always that guy with the crazy eyes who could act and fuck on cue.
The world is a little less of a fun place because he's gone.
We will miss you, sir.

Enjoy the video.



I'll be back later this weekend with reviews of Satan's Princess and Hellbride. Be safe.

THE WOLFMAN 2010

When I first heard about this film my initial reaction was...
Bleh!
See, here's the thing. I can't stand Benicio Del Toro. Everything I have seen him in I have not liked. I may have liked the movies just not him.
With The Wolfman this has changed. The movie has such a wonderful, lush, Gothic feel to it. They knew they were dealing with a pretty basic story and the film is under two hours. This is a good thing. The movie didn;t need to be any longer than this. Emily Blunt was fantastic and if Anthony Hopkins can manage to get into versions of Frankenstein, The Mummy and Creature Of The Black Lagoon he will have completed the Universal Monsters marathon.
I think that Del Toro was good for a couple of reasons;
First, watch The Wolfman, the original and then this. del Toro looks and behaves like Lon Chaney Jr. It is mind boggling how he manages to immerse himself in such an iconic role.
That being said I have a single complaint that is kind of a spoiler so shut your eyes if you don't want to see it.
Did we need the other werewolf to be his father? In the orginal the wolf that brought the curse to Lawrence Talbot was no more than a plot device to get the story moving.
I did like that they credited Curt Siodmak and used his little poem at the beginning.
In the end this is a worthy successor to the original and gives me hope that Benicio del Toro will prove me wrong again. His role in this film was magnificent.

Sixteen Tongues (1999)

The story goes as following: in an S&M hotel, where walls are full of porn ads and the TV screens show porn the whole time, unless you pay to turn the television off, stay 3 different people, who all must deal with their problems. The first is Adrian, a cop who was severely injured in a blast. His skin was replaced with the material from the tongues of 16 people (there's your title). Because of this he can literally taste his own clothes and everything he touches. The second is a female hacker, Alik, who's constantly accessing the Web in search for information. But, not with a computer. She hardwires herself into the system at a price. Third - Alik's lover, the assassin Ginny. She must deal with the urge to kill and with the artificial clitorises that are situated under both eyelids making her orgasm every time she blinks.
Doesn't this sound like a fantastic flick??? Doesn't it? Yeah, it ain't. Sure, I understand that we are talking about a flick with a limited budget, but that doesn't forgive some major problems. If you're gonna make a flick with sex as one of the drives of the film then it's time to make a porno. That is the one thing that might have set this flick above the rest. And I don't mean the boring porn of today. I mean intertwine an interesting storyline, which this movie has with some harcore. This is failure point number one.
The assassin chick, Ginny, is very cool and pretty damned hot. That works.
The whole thing looks like it was shot in a hallway of a shitty apartment building in New York. The interesting part; the various rooms of decadence were shown briefly and should have been explored a little more to give some depth to the environment.
Having people pay for everything from using the water to turning off the television was a bizarre lift from Phillip K. Dick's superior novel UBIK. I did like that the ice machine proclaimed that the ice was made of 92% water. Very funny.
In the end, the movie doesn't take the risks it needs to be a truly unforgettable film. This makes it a waste of time and I hope that I saved some people some time with this blast from the recent past.

THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN A.K.A. SNAPSHOT (1979)

So, THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN? Yeah, right. What they did was take a lukewarm thriller and slap a new title on it. SNAPSHOT is more indicative of what the film is about as we get the young and naive Angela (played by the ultra cute Sigrid Thornton of The Man From Snowy River fame) who poses for a new ad campaign where she walks through the surf with her top off. She has a lecherous old man after her, a washed up lesbian after her and her wacky boyfriend who drives an ice cream truck is also in this particular Mambo line. Sheesh!
Although I can't blame any of them as she is quite lovely.
So, what does this have to do with the John Carpenter film, HALLOWEEN. Nothing, Nada, zip, that's what. The people who owned the flick figured they could make a buck and apparently they did.
Does that make this a bad film? I don;t know about bad, but I do know that it was boring as all get out. Well, except for the nude scenes. Those were nice, but does that make the movie? Again, I'm afraid I must say no.
Look at this one as a public service from the folks at Divine Exploitation. We watch movies like this one so you don't have to. Go find something good to watch. We'll stay here and weep about our wasted lives.

The Alcove

Severin Films once again brings us more of the amazing career of Joe D'Amato. In The Alcove we get the international sex symbol Laura Gemser as an African Princess brought home by a military officer as a slave. It isn't long before she is sucked into the decadence of lesbianism, voyeurism, drugs and pornography and revels in it. It isn't long before the world she has come to know starts to crash down around her ears as she slips further and further into decadence.
While The Alcove sounds good on paper, this flick actually is kind of dull and predictable. I saw the ending coming from a mile away and that's a shame. If you are a die hard Gemser or D'Amato fan then Severin has given you a beautiful print of a gorgeous film. It just doesn't have much more going for it.
The DVD also comes with a small interview with D'Amato that doesn't give any huge revelations, but does show the master of sleaze in his environment.