Star Crystal - 1986

Star Crystal –

When I was a kid I rented this movie based on the box art alone and watched it in the dusky morning hours before school started; when the rest of the family laid asleep I subjected my fragile young mind to horrors from beyond, unimaginable snot covered nightmare beings that sucked the blood right out of you with thorny tentacles dripping with slime leaving you a spongy, mummified, ooze covered corpse.  Star Crystal terrified my school boy psyche with images of a glowing snot monster squeezing limbs with tentacles until they burst with blood.   A scavenger mission to Mars yields a strange discovery, a large 300,000 year old crystal formation that behaves more like a computer than a rock.  Shortly after recovering the object the scavenger crew’s shuttle suffers an oxygen malfunction and all aboard are killed through asphyxiation, leaving only frozen corpses drifting through space.  2 months later the rudderless shuttle craft is intercepted by a floating space station but soon after docking with it, the station suffers a critical “blackout 7” malfunction, and explodes killing thousands.  Only a handful of technicians survive by escaping on the same craft that holds the mysterious Star Crystal.  Within the first ten minutes of the movie the body count already racks up considerably, then the creature gore begins.  The crew discovers there is another life form on board, one that corners its victims smothering them with horn covered tentacles, sucking their life juices from them until they prune up into a desiccated corpse.  The creature kills several members of the crew in short order, prompting some pretty funny freak out moments from the survivors “Damn it, DAMN IT!”  They also realize the creature is intelligent as it uses its crystal to hack into the computers systems.  In a goofy unforeseeable twist they learn that the creature’s viscous attacks were all part of some sort of misunderstanding, stupid humans.  What follows is an 80’s montage of the snot creature (which calls himself Gar) working with the surviving 2 crew members on the ship, playing games, goofing around, calling people jerks.  Gar the snot creature from space that feasts on human blood ends up being a real sweetie and the movie ends with hugs and high fives.

New Halloween posters

Check out these sweet new Halloween posters done by the original artist of the Nightmare on Elm Street movie poster.

The Terror Within/Dead Space double header

Deep space; the promise of endless exploration and discovery, and unimaginable horror; these movies were meant to push the boundaries of imagination and fear, they often push the boundaries of good taste and patience instead, but the faithful shall be rewarded.  True believers in the cult of the VHS and champions of sci-fi trash will find these movies delightfully obtuse B-rated bundles of joy dripping with slime and gore; staples in the gorehound elite’s diet.  Fans of face ripping, throat slashing, acid spewing, gut tearing, monster melting, head stomping, bone crunching alien horror should look no further than these forgotten sci-fi gems of yesteryear.

The Terror Within –

“You’re an ugly son of a bitch!”

George Mother Fucking Kennedy leads a group of survivors in a search for a cure to a plague that has ravaged the planet, leaving legions of flesh hungry mutant gargoyles in its wake.   The movie begins promising enough, two men wander the desert, one man with a beautiful mullet, great plumage, and already I like the on screen mullet to man ratio.  The group is low on supplies, they eat rattlesnake (tastes just like chicken) and drink moon shine but soon the party is crashed by horny gargoyles on a mission to rape.  The mutants surround the Mojave Desert underground lab complex George and crew are holed up in; let the rape party begin.  Soon one of the female survivors is pregnant with mutant spawn; George attempts a C-section surgery to study the freak but the little fucker tears out of her chest instead, blood and visceral splatter everywhere, the operating theater is soaked in gore, and the hunt for the creature begins.  Pretty much the pinnacle of this trash fest, because the rest of the movie is spent awkwardly bumping around air vents in the dark.  There’s a dog named Butch, and Butch was the only survivor I cared about making it out alive.  It’s discovered that the creatures have super sensitive hearing, which is kind of a surprise because they don’t look like they even have ears, but whatever, they must not like metal, fuck them.  In the end duct tape saves the day.  Duct tape.

Dead Space –

Technically a remake of Mutant, just you know without any of the over the top cheese and sleaze that makes Mutant so damn endearing.   Maybe they should have called it Dead Air instead.  The most interesting part of this movie is that it stars Bryan Cranston in a role that heavily foreshadows his later work on Breaking Bad; he plays a scientist searching for a cure to a lethal disease that plagues him.  

Knowing his time is short he takes radical risks and disregards all safety protocols to create his cure for the deadly Delta V disease, and to the surprise of absolutely no one something goes horribly wrong.  The lab calls upon Captain Kregger Intergalactic Troubleshooter for help (the dude that plays Beastmaster), who seems to spend a lot of time chilling in his space sauna.  However when Kregger reaches planet side Cranson doesn’t want him to kill the mutant because “it’s not a monster” or something, but ultimately loses the argument when it starts impregnating people with giant slugs that crawl in through the nose and burst out from the chest.  It can also kill with a scratch infecting victims with “every disease known to man”.  So it spreads herpes?  Gross.  In the end it mutates in a cross between a dragon and a xenomorph, Kregger kills it, and then happily returns to his steam bath in space to relax.   

New Mondo Posters

Check out these new Mondo Slasher posters displayed at the Frightmare Fest in Texas.

The Void

The Void is a movie that proudly displays its influences on its sleeve; part The Beyond, part Re-Animator, part Prince of Darkness, this movie owes a lot to the gonzo horror classics of the 80's, however the story doesn't seem to really gel, seemingly critical details are left unanswered or entirely up to the viewers interpretation of alluded off screen events involving cult ritual and discoveries about life beyond death.  In the end it is a movie that has some great visuals and bloody practical FX with an emphasis on the splatter, but a dodgy story that comes off better when considered as a fevered nightmare rather than a logical progression of events; which is fine by me.  The ending was certainly a riff off of Fulci's classick The Beyond, where the protagonist are left somewhere beyond death; whether it be heaven, hell, or somewhere in between is entirely up to the viewer.     

Popcorn Steelbook collector's edition blu-ray

Finally, Synapse is releasing Popcorn on booooo-ray:

http://synapse-films.com/dvds/popcorn-collectors-edition-steelbook-limited-to-3000-units/

Rad cover art.

Phantasm Ravager

Phantasm Ravager marks the end of one of the most original and creative horror movie franchises in history, and more importantly wraps up the epic story of Reggie the ice cream man and his lonely quest to save his friends and humanity from the schemes of the Tall Man, a seemingly omnipotent being that can travel through dimensions, time, and space to reap the dead for his own nefarious purposes.  It seems impractical to recount the entire story thus far, as the newest entry is really a love note for the long time “phans” of the series, anyone wondering about the story at this point is better off watching the series and forming your own informed opinion about what is really going on in Phantasm, where seeing is easy, but understanding is the hard part.

When we last saw Reggie he was chasing the Tall Man through a dimensional gate while Mike laid dying on the desert floor after the Tall Man extracted a large dark metallic sphere from his skull; a wound he was very unlikely to survive.  Reggie’s back “home” now, we are not sure where the dimensional gate led him, or for how long he has been chasing the Tall Man since Oblivion, but it looks like he has returned to his original dimension.  He begins to recant his story, pointing out that even he is unsure of reality anymore after dealing with the Tall Man’s tricks for so long. 

I believe this opening dialogue leans into the idea that what we are seeing in Phantasm movies isn’t real; it is a dream state, a psychosis to deal with the idea of passing from this world into the next.  The first four movies were all in Mike’s head; when we see him in a coma in bed in part 3 those are actual glimpses of the real world.  He’s been in that twilight state between life and death since the crash that killed his brother and parents.  Reggie is his last friend trying to ease his passing bedside.  Mike is caught in a dream and refuses to accept death until the end of Oblivion, where he finally accepts what is happening to him, explained by the last sequence of the film, and allows him self to pass on.

I think that theory ties the series together nicely, but doesn’t apply to Ravager.  If the first four movies were about Mike dealing with his passing, Ravager is about Reggie dealing with getting old and being stuck in a nursery home with senior onset dementia.  Reggie is dealing with his passing, but in a different way.  The movie quickly shifts between Reggie being the bad ass undead ass kicker in the past, to the nursery home in his present, to an apocalyptic future where the Tall Man has conquered the planet, sometimes within the same scene or in the middle of a speech.  The transitions are so jarring and sudden that Reggie has trouble coping with it all.  He refuses to accept the nursery home reality; he believes it is all a trick by the Tall Man.

But I don’t think it’s a trick at all.  I think Mike truly passed on at the end of Oblivion and finally accepted his fate.  Reggie had a family at one point and somehow lost them, we aren’t sure how, but Mike was the only support he had left, and he died at the end of Oblivion, leaving poor Reggie alone and destitute.  He began grasping at the epic tale Mike told him bedside while coming in and out of a coma, perhaps embracing the fiction because it painted him as a hard luck warrior trying to save humanity from the legions of the dead invading our dimension; a lovely fantasy when Reggie felt he was at his lowest.  The early onset dementia only exasperated matters, Reggie began believing Mike’s story to be real, and started living through the adventure in his mind.  The few moments he is lucid he is brought back to the reality of the nursery home, where he struggles with the idea of being old, dying in bed, and being “shoved into some box”.      

When Reggie makes the speech about dying on his feet with his four barreled shotgun at his side fighting the forces of evil he is completely rejecting the reality of the old folk’s home, and a dimensional portal appears.  He goes through it and is completely lost in the rat maze of his mind, jumping from past to present to future without warning.  The Tall Man appears and offers him a chance to be re-united with his loved ones in death, but Reggie refuses.  He’s not ready to die yet; instead he demands that the Tall Man return his friends Mike and Jody back to him.

The rest of the movie is a check list of classic Phantasm-like moments for the “phans”; Reggie is stalked by the undead in a massive mausoleum resembling the same complex from part 3.  He’s re-united with Mike and battles the Tall Man in the red dimension all the while experiencing random lucid moments in the reality of his nursery home room.  He is finally re-united with his friends “in the future”, but in the real world Reggie is slowly passing away in his bed.  As the trio rides off into the sunset in the series staple 1971 Plymouth Barracuda, Reggie accepts his fate and dies with his best friends by his side, welcoming him into the afterlife.

Even writing that makes me emotional.  As a “phan” of the series I thought it hit all the right beats.  I would have wanted a bigger budget and less CGI, more polish, but this series has always made the most out of a dime store budget.  I didn’t like the addition of the new character “Chunk” so late in the franchise, I thought he was essentially terrible comedic relief, but rest of the movie is hot as love.  After watching this I’ve been spinning through the other entries of the series and have no intention of stopping anytime soon.  The Tall Man LIVES!  BOOOOOYYYY!