It will freeze your blood!

In honor of the late Farley Granger (3/27/2011 R.I.P. good sir!) I spun my BOO-ray of The Prowler last night; a juggernaut of unnerving brutality that will make your face turn blue and your blood freeze.  If you haven't seen it, run for your nearest sleaze depot and pitchfork anybody foolish enough to stand in your way of a copy!  One of my favorite stalk and slash deals that kicks me in the gut every time.

The Burning coming to BOO-Ray!

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/3645/burning.html

VHS movies are my passion, but too costly to collect now.  Ever since the old custodian shack burned to smoldering ruins I've had to switch to the buying fancy pants BOO-ray format, and boy am I glad I did.  it definitely adds some sheen to old dusty classics...now THE BURNING is coming to boo-ray...and I'm stoked!

The Mutilator!

The MUTILATOR

One day Big Ed picked up a cold brew and a battle axe and never but them down again.  He’s hunted bears and antelope; he’s hunted the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, but during this fall break Big Ed has his sights on a new kind of game….by knife, by sword, by axe…bye bye!

The Mutilator is a movie that reminds me of dancing to your own grave; it starts out all nice, and sweet, and soft, and plushy…then BAAAAM…mutilation. Everyone is having a gas, good times on fall break, boozing with buddies, mingling with Monopoly and other grab ass drinking games, not a care in the world….then Big Ed shows up and disembowels someone.  A woman is baited like a worm on a large hook.  The party is pooped.  Big Ed hangs them up like trophies in his man-cave (aka a garage).  The MAN sleeps with an axe and dreams of revenge; revenge on an estranged son for the accidental shooting death of his wife.  Happy birthday Ed, I took from you the one thing you loved more than life itself.  All you have left is the hunt Ed…lions and tigers and bears…oh my…but it’s not enough…not enough to sate the loss…only revenge remains…

Ed junior seems to know the score.  He knows his father’s acting strange; acting off….but he’s had to have forgiven him…after all these years he can’t possibly still be upset…he can’t still be mad…his own father couldn’t kill…not a human anyways….not Big Ed….but never mind that…it’s FALL BREAK!  We’re going off to have a good time at Big Ed’s man-cave by the beach!  Drink some beers, relax, forget finals, and let the good times roll...except Big Ed’s got other plans.  Drunk on whiskey and rage, he wants to see heads roll, not good times.  He wants to laugh at you in the dark then stab you in the face.  Big Ed’s down with evisceration, vivisection, and most of all…mutilation….and what a grand gore show it will be, full of flying bone, mangled cartilage, and twitching limbs.  One that I will thank him for, even as he departs this world severed from the waist down….laughing hysterically like the beer soaked maniac madman you are…bless your smile Ed. 

    

The Toolbox Murders

The TOOLBOX MURDERS (refake)

Is the hotel haunted?  Cursed?  Is Hooper up to his old tricks again?  You bet your ass turd nugget.

Leatherface reborn it ain’t, but it is still more fun than a barrel full of the decrepit remains of a mummified midget, or scrabble, monopoly, tiddle winks, and battleship family fun night.  Actually, that’s only the last half an hour of the flick, where this pup starts to really warm up, but never reaches anything close to the boiling hot horror of TCM (that’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, maggot meal).  Fer shame.  Boo hoo, cry me a river….it’s still got some nifty kills, and by garn, it’s Hooper playing with power tools yet again.  WEEEEEE! 

All the old stalk, slash, and scare tricks don’t work on modern audiences, at least not like they used to.  That’s what Tobe Hooper seems to be saying with his film “revision” of the old slasher classic of the Toolbox Murders; a film set in an old Hollywood hotel with mysterious cult connections where movie wash out and asssss-piring actor alike find themselves getting eviscerated by the  menacing “Coffin Birth” (my nickname for him, he was born after his mother died and was retrieved from her coffin, freakin cool), a killer that lives in the walls of the odd building.  Negative space perception is not something the tenants seem to have. 

There’s some hocus pocus, voodoo Aliester Crowley-esque vibe going on with Coffin Birth that is never really explained in the story..  The killing and slashing is pretty straight forward.  Nothing to write back to moon base one about., just enough pizzazz to keep the viewer from slumping over in absolute boredom as the main character tries to unravel the mystery of the missing people in the old hotel where hammering is heard constantly through the night.   Hooper regurgitates the old “look, I found some teeth” act from Texas Chainsaw Massacre; he must have a thing about the pearly whites.  Who knows, maybe Hooper’s real passion in life was to be a tooth fairy.   

The Toolbox Murders is a movie that doesn’t break any new hollowed ground, but it does make for an entertaining, old school-esque, slasher, so check it out if you get a chance.

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TOOLBOX MURDERS

The original Toolbox Murders is a monolith of exploitative weirdness, a virtual triple decker grinder of oozing cheese and sleaze and bright, red, shiny, hemoglobin.  The movie begins with its feet firmly planted in giallo-land with a ski masked handy man listlessly killing 3 sultry female apartment attendants with tools while casually humming along with radio rock (Craftsman lifetime guarantee?  More like DEATH-time guarantee harharharharharharhar).  He then breaks the pattern and kidnaps another girl (Laurie) after an extended murder scene featuring a masturbating young nubile exhibitionist getting nailed (literally) in the forehead with a pneumatic nail gun.  The exploitation warp drive reactor overloads at this point and the movie switches its grime gears down a peg.

The police begin their insensitive and odd investigation into the crime (they bring all the suspects to the crime scene with mutilated bodies in full view to gauge people’s reactions) and it is soon apparent that the owner of the Californian apartment complex, Vance, is behind the toolbox murder spree (his ill fitting ski-mask pretty much gives this story trinket away).  The kidnapped girl’s brother Joey understandable believes the detectives behind the case show a disturbing (and quite characteristic slasher movie cop) disinterest in actually finding his sister, believing instead that she simply ran away(!?) and soon enough Joey is giving it his best Hardy Boys go to piece the clues together.  He soon meets up with Vance’s slick southern nephew in the apartment complex and amid the bro-mance that follows Joey earns a job cleaning up crime scenes.  I thought there were special people for that, but not in this 1970’s eye candy world (love the deco).    

Subplots crop up that don’t seem to go anywhere and when the movie seems to hit a rut the exploitative weirdness rears its odd shaped melon, and the slummy b-film fun begins again.  Vance treats the kidnapped girl Laurie to a sideshow of neurotic insanity, revealing that he only kills “sick dogs” because of some crazy funda-MENTAList reaction to his daughter’s untimely motor vehicle demise.   A dead girl’s dildo glides gracefully through the air.  We learn how to spell lollipop from a loon.  Joey gets barbequed and soon it’s apparent that the entire Vance clan must be chock full of psycho-murderer genes and that Kathy’s death affected a wider scope of song singing nut jobs than just Vance.

Misogynistic, dirty, raw, gut churning, with a sprinkle of sharp cheese; the Toolbox Murders wear’s many different hats, all in en vogue for 70’s fashion, all worthy of a trash purveyor’s time.  It even throws in gut churning rape for good measure; nihilistic and sure to offend those sensitive baby types, I’d recommend this any day of the week (especially Slasher Sunday) over the Tobe Hooper “revisioning”.     

Final Terror goes for the THROAT!

Final Terror

There’s a camp fire story around these parts…an old wives tale really…of a young girl raped out in the deep wilderness by her intolerable, alcoholic uncle…driven insane with guilt….she’s locked away by her own kin…but some ugly secrets have a way of never staying buried for long…..and soon a son is born…..a son that will come back and free her from the asylum…a son that, out of love for his mother, releases her from her prison…sends her back to the forest where it all began…back to Mill Creek…in a vague hope that she’ll find some form of peace amongst the serene wild life…hoping that nobody ever travels there again….that nobody uncovers the secret again….

Gritty survival horror that goes for the throat, or more specifically, Daryl Hannah’s throat; Final Terror is a different treat than most slashers.  Where other horror films play fast and loose with the rules that govern reality Final Terror settles on a more grounded approach to the genre, supposing that, what if a real group of people were stalked in the woods by a single psychotic killer?  How would they react?  How would the killer be able to slip around them undetected?  Final Terror tries to answer these questions in a believable way.  The killer wears a makeshift gilly suit that makes her invisible to the naked eye while entrenched amongst the ferns and moss.  The group of teens and twenty-somethings that find themselves the target of the killer’s murderous attack attempt to blend into the forest by donning camouflage, take turns watching over each other at night, and generally try to stick together and fight back.  Most films would have played out in some pseudo-realistic predictable cat and mouse game where the nameless horror victims would prod on through the woods, panicking, separating, and eventually being snuffed off one by one by the killer until one person, one “final girl” remains.  Thankfully this played out scenario isn’t the case here.  Even injuries are dealt with in a more realistic way, typically when someone gets their throat slashed in a horror film they die instantly, with little blood, and little fuss.  In this film, when one of the unfortunate campers gets a grotesque gash in the throat, she doesn’t die right away, the injury bleeds out naturally, and quick medical assistance ends up saving her life.  Well played Final Terror; you really butter my bread!    

Superstition

SUPERSTITION

Welcome to Black Pond tours…if you’ve never been to Black Pond before please allow me to explain a little history about this cursed land.  IN 1692, during the peak of the witch hunting, a women said to be possessed by Satan himself was tied to a cross and drowned in this murky pond, cursing all future occupants of the land as she disappeared below the murky waters.  Ever since then there has been an innumerable amount of cases of strange, unexplainable occurrences….a local prankster found cut in half…his friend’s mutilated head found in a nearby microwave….a priest eviscerated by a seemingly possessed saw blade…a family found dead…ravaged by some unseen force…faces petrified in an eternal undying gaze of pure horror…all in that house over yonder.

So many missing people...folks who wander into Black Pond…ignorant or too callous to believe the legends….never to return…

It is said a creature rises from the bog and mire at night.  The scaly green apparition is always described by witnesses as being cloaked in dark robes…the only visible feature its long, writing reptilian fingers topped with sharp, beastly talons.  Some say it’s the old witch…cursed to walk the eternal twilight between life and death…heaven and hell…undead…unstoppable in its unholy service of Satan…

Superstition is a supernatural, ghostly terror tale with gore show glam.  The movie depicts an increasingly powerful and terrifying force in its pursuit in annihilating any living being foolish enough to trespass the land around Black Pond.   The forces of good seem woefully unprepared to deal with the evil poltergeist that repeatedly attacks the residence around Black Pond, specifically the people who live in the mansion near the pond, a recently refurnished dwelling provided by the church, who rent it out as “a matter of economics”. Ignoring the warnings of the hermit-like caretaker, the priests ironically dismiss her as a superstitious old coot, the sheriff blames the mysterious murders on the hermit’s retarded son, but when a golden cross is removed from the grounds, and the evil force seemingly intensifies, one young priest thinks there might be more to her story....like DUH! 

Superstition is a curious, watered down blend of visceral punch of The Omen, the psychological terror of The Exorcist, and gobs of hot liquid Velveeta.  The soundtrack is a few Casio keyboard strokes away from The Exorcist theme, but the movie plays more like a blood soaked slasher film with a ghost, where some people might grace the screen for a few precious moments before facing a brutal end at the hands of the witch, who is pretty much established as invincible.  Between the priests, the alcoholic, cowardly father, his bitchy daughter “Your decisions so right…your will soooo strong”, and the rest of the listless cast there isn’t much hope to overcome this minion of Satan, but you got to ask, why not just high tail out of town?  It’s no surprise that in the end the creature’s power intensifies to a point that nobody is able to survive…God…a little help here?  I love on any horror movie where evil ekes out a win in the end.