So I spent some of this weekend watching a few things off my Roku-player, including a couple of Netflix movies. So I’m watching some sketch comedy shows, cheaply produced parody programs, and review-based shows that give rundowns on upcoming products on tech and fandom. There’s a ton of stuff out there that I think people simply aren’t aware of, alternative forms of media and entertainment that have developed through the internet instead of relying on corporate sponsorship with broadcast television. These are largely “labor of love” projects designed to get out there and be available for the people who look for it, but a growing list of companies have recently added their brief sponsorship to the programs with brief tags instead of elaborate time wasting commercials. To be frank, I think these companies may be on the cutting edge of finding cheap commercial advertising in a troubled economy.
Personally, I’d love to develop some sort of movie-hosting format internet show but I can’t honestly think of a format or style I’d like to go in. Also, Netflix is so readily available for a cheap monthly subscription that I can’t honestly believe someone would rather watch me introduce, discuss, and run skits on the same movies they might more easily be able to watch through Netflix. A lot of people know how much love I have for the Horror Host format, but I don’t really have the degree of personal faith in myself to do something with it. There are also several ‘net shows devoted to the art of burning some of these movies in comedic styles with only brief cuts and long-winded rants on everything from the effects, the scripts, to the acting and cheapness. Not a dismissal on what these hosts do, because I love spoonyexperiment and thatguywithglasses, but I don’t really want to mock the things I love so much as share an appreciation for them with others. Then again, I also love doing the mocking thing on occasion, especially when something warrants that mocking as you’ll read a little later.
Anyway, I doubt most of my faceless readers really want to bother reading about my lack of creativity. Here are my thoughts on some of the films I’ve been watching through Netflix, and maybe some of you folks will check them out when you get the chance or opportunity.
Revenge of the Living Dead Girls:
This one is a cheap little French import that virtually hits every note on the Exploitation check list. Three teen girls are poisoned by contaminated milk during an elaborate plot involving blackmail, prostitution, illegal chemical dumping, extra-marital affairs, and rampant environmental terrorism. They rise from the dead in order to exact vengeance upon all the individuals guilty of bringing about their deaths through their actions. We get some gruesome scenes here as the girls devour, stab, drown, and stab their victims. But remember that check list I mentioned? Run down that list and start checking off the graphic violence, sexuality, bad dubbing, wretched acting, and brutal production values and let your sleaze flag fly.
4 out of 5.
Severed: Forest of the Dead
Somewhat rambling and one act too long, Severed is standard “zombie” fare with a chemically altered moss managing to mutate the sap in a tree and infecting both loggers and protesters deep in a secluded forest. My early inclination was to avoid this movie, because I didn’t really have an interest in seeing some obvious demonization of the logging industry, but this film actually surprised me by avoiding a lot of the preaching you might expect and to spread the guilt around a little more and blur the lines of right and wrong. Collecting the standard cast of characters (rich kid, responsible father figure, rebellious girl, smarmy scientist, eager hero, and other somewhat likeable zombie bait) and sending them out to run through the woods while zombies chase them is as entertaining as it sounds. We get some good gore, a few elaborate traps for the zombies, the expected sacrifice plays, and betrayals, all leading up to a finale that suddenly falls flat because they seem to tag on an additional twenty minutes where the main cast suddenly joins together with a wholly new set of survivors from some “Other” logging camp on the other side of the mountain. All in all, not a bad film but there is better on the horizon. A standard zombie movie is like pizza… even when it’s not great, it’s still pretty good.
3 out of 5.
Truth or Dare
*blink* Okay, I can’t talk about this film without spoilers. I could give you a review, but nothing I could say in the context of an honest review would give this film any justice and I just want to yap about it a little. So here’s your only warning, big spoiler alert, and then you’ll get my rating.
Low Budget films are a labor of love for many of the cast and crew involved with the production. It is sometimes a misguided or badly put together labor that struggles to make the best out of their limitations. Even in the lowest rung of low budget travesties, you can see the passion someone had for developing the final product and giving you the most amount of bang for your buck. “Truth or Dare” is a bold and daring attempt to be one of the most horrible things ever caught on film. This is one of those “So bad it’s funny” films that stretches the boundaries of the absurd and tosses “implausible” out the window in an explosive result that may just threaten the sanity of its viewers. This is the kind of film that sets out to emulate magnificent success formula of “Troll 2” by extending itself as an exercise in endurance and a test of wills. So you’re going to have to stay with me a moment before I get to the premise for this shockingly awful monstrosity that Netflix believed would earn four stars from the Madman.
Mike is your average milquetoast sort of nervous wreck of a man whose entire existence seems to revolve around his wife and his work. Some years earlier, Mike had a nervous breakdown and has been in and out of institutions for quite some time when he returns home early and finds his wife and his best friend in carnal knowledge. The incident sends Mike on a tailspin that leads our protagonist to drive his car out to the beach and have several flashbacks to the clues that his wife may not have been a one man kind of gal, with a fantastic synthesizer soundtrack repeating the same heavy-handed theme throughout the entire film at various points. So Mike flashes back… and forth… back… and forth. He kind of wanders down to the edge of the beach, where the water actually manages to just barely reach up to his feet but never comes up with a surprise wave that flushes over his footwear… not a major impact on the film, but something I thought was actually noteworthy. He keeps flashing back… and forth… and back… and forth. He comes to some sort of a conclusion after he remembers playing Truth or Dare with a group of kids in middle school. Young Mike was played by one of the Backstreet Boys, I kid you not! He heads out, continuing to drive aimlessly. He picks up a hitch-hiker and starts to have delusions surrounding that old child-hood game of Truth or Dare, carving out his own tongue and thumb that miraculously grow back after a 13 month stint in the local sanitarium. PAY ATTENTION!!!! The tongue and the thumb GREW BACK!!! He was wheeled into the sanitarium without either and he’s wheeled out with the ability to speak with perfect enunciation and an opposing digit on both hands. Mike is a loonie, but he gets released from the Sanitarium long enough that he’s able to sneak back into the house of his ex-wife and kill his buddy before getting slashed by the chick and stumbling out to the front yard. He lies on the ground, clutching his bleeding gut, while some extras stand by and mumble out dialogue about calling for an ambulance and then an officer shows up just in time to tell the people milling about that we’re all going to wait for the ambulance. And we wait. WE ACTUALLY WAIT FOR THE AMBULANCE!!!! No no no no no.. I’m not done! Don’t stop reading yet!
Five months later, back at the Sanitarium: Mike is wheeled into an empty room where he’s asked to wait while we get some expository dialogue between his doctors. You see, the lunatic is having delusions and these delusions are intruding on his reality while… DID HE JUST STUFF A GRENADE DOWN SOME DUDE’S MOUTH?!?!?!!! Yes, back in the room, Mike is playing Truth or Dare with some imaginary friends… at least they might be imaginary and part of a delusion, but we’re not so clear on it. He’s already whipped out a big ol’ Rambo knife and dared one guy to cut off two random limbs and the other guy has a grenade shoved in his mouth. Mike? Oh, he accepts his own dare and he starts to cut off his own face with the knife… CUT OFF HIS FACE WITH THE KNIFE!!! So we flash forward a few more months, maybe years, I don’t know… I’m not really in the mood to keep track when we have some orderlies discussing the new copper mask that Mike is refusing to take off. I guess Mike now has Pac Man Fever, because the funky copper mask comes off as this big yellow lump of clay cut in a circular pattern with a wide line for the mouth and two small slits for eyes. Let’s just cut this a little shorter than the movie actually wound up doing, because Mike manages to break free of the sanitarium and go on a killing spree that includes the use of fully automatic guns, chainsaws, vehicular manslaughter, a machete, A FREAKIN’ MACE, and this thing never seems to freakin’ end! It just goes on and on and on….
The cop is back! The guy who earlier called for an ambulance seems to be in charge of the manhunt and he tries to track down Mike and put an end to his psychotic rampage. It is only through the grotesquely moronic antics of his overweight and overbearing partner that we even begin to suspect that he might just be the most qualified officer on the force, because this guy is NOT Columbo by any stretch of the imagination. So while Mike drives around in the same car he stole at the beginning of his killing spree, snatches some weapons from a storage shack rented in his name (The ONLY storage shack on what seems to be a dirt road dead center in the middle of freaking NOWHERE!!!), slaughters pedestrians with a variety of bizarre weapons, and pretty much just heads over to his ex-wife’s house with hopes of finishing the job he got caught doing a few months back… the police manage to NOT set up any road blocks or patrol his old neighborhood or do anything worth while to stop him. They do, however, manage to burn down the old shack after NOT confirming whether anyone is in there and they also manage to catch the town drunk in the blaze and than shrug off his accidental death at the hands of an utterly incompetent officer in a too tight floral shirt exposing the girth of his stomach for the world to see. And, boy, did that cop screw up badly… he MIGHT have derailed the whole investigation! Sure, he killed the town drunk by unnecessarily setting blaze to some badly manufactured shed in the middle of nowhere, but that’s nothing compared to the valuable time and resources lost in putting out that blazing shed no bigger than an out-house.
In one of the most hilarious moments of the film, Mike pulls up to the curb and gets out of the car in order to arm himself up with a variety of weapons that include nunchucks, a machete, a chainsaw, knife, sub-machine gun, and… wait for it… an IRON MACE! So an elderly lady comes waltzing up and starts yapping about his rudeness and wanting him to leave and some other nonsense. She’s just yapping away at him, and Mike is staring at his old house with this big copper mask on his face and a variety of hardcore weaponry hanging from his personage. He whips out this huge iron mace, glances at the woman, and brings it SMACKING down on her head. Obviously made out of some sort of foam rubber, the mace just bounces off and the actress collapses as the scene cuts to show that she’s lying in a sudden puddle of blood. The movie is finally coming to some sort of conclusion because there’s no way he’ll just be sent back to the lunatic asylum after all this, right? He stalks up to the house and heads right into … a trap! His doctor from the asylum is waiting for him in the running shower, and he just blasts away with his gun until Mike falls in the hall. The doc heads out, calls for the wife to come out… but she’s dead already! Mike is up, he kills the doctor, and… and… the police show up! And they warn him to put down his weapons… and they bring him back to the asylum.
There! I spoiled the whole movie for you! You don’t need to watch it, you don’t need to waste your time, and you don’t need to do anything if you don’t want to do it because I’ve just told you all the important moments of the film unless you want to see particular death scenes. This movie isn’t some labor of love, it isn’t some strange ode to the bad movies of a bygone era, this is the bad stuff straight from the tap and there isn’t anything left to do but watch it for yourself or don’t. Just because I told you what happened doesn’t in any way ruin the shocking surprises this movie has in store for you, because you shouldn’t be watching this thing with that sort of expectation. You should be reading this and thinking, “This sounds so terrible, I have to see if it’s true… is this really what happens?” You’re thinking about that grenade in the mouth and you’re wondering, you’re thinking about the implausible series of events wanting to know if there’s something I missed, and you want to endure this film as a test to your own will. That’s what these movies are for! They are tests to the indomitable will of the human spirit and the boundaries of the human mind. Truth or Dare? I dare you to watch this movie.
2 out of 5.
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