Friday's Choice Cuts: Yakuza Demon Killers (IDW Publishing)

Keeping with the new format, Fridays are going to be a kind of grab-bag day for me to keep myself from getting too swamped with bad films.  Hence, Friday's Choice Cuts, where I going to cover something I like that's horror related.  So for our first entry in the FCCs I'm presenting the comic series Yakuza Demon Killers; written by Amit Chauhan, with the artist Eli Powell, and published by IDW Publishing.

Currently spanning four loose issues (with a hardback version of these on the way), Yakuza Demon Killers ties Eldritch horror with modern day Japan and throws in a sprinkle of Silent Hill-esq character design.  The art style reminds me of the earlier Walking Dead comics but more frantic.  Its sketchy moments add to action of the panels and helps to add a certain sense of "edge" reminiscent of the small publisher comics of the 90's.  Story wise, it's pretty solid.  If they never make a 5th issue then I wouldn't really be too torn up because I always like a good "the villain wins" reveal.  I know that's kind of a spoiler, but without the story you have no clue who I'm talking about anyway.

I bought all four issues at once solely based on the name, covers, and a quick flip through an issue.  I can say that I am definitely not disappointed with my purchase.  I recommend checking it out or at least waiting until the hard bound version comes out because I'm sure it'll have some extra stuff thrown in as well.


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1920 London (2016) 2h

I've seen horror films from India before but never an actual Bollywood horror film.  While there is only one short dance section, we still get treated to three or four montages set to epic songs.  The sets are elaborate and remind me of the early MGM big budget films.  Also, this movie is long as fuck for no real reason other than Bollywood makes long films.  Fuckin' way too long...

1920 London revolves around a prince/princess couple getting a cursed locket in the mail.  The prince becomes possessed by an evil spirit and the wife returns home to seek help.  Eventually she has to turn to her ex-love that at some point learned all kinds of magick during or after she sent him to prison.

Unlike most of the films I rant about on here, I'm not going to spoil this one.  I was really into 1920 London.  Sure, it was long and at one point I picked up my 3DS and played a bunch of Project X Zone because I got tired of another flashback/song section but everything that this film brought to the table was well done.  Some things I've seen before but nothing felt recycled.  They kept old ideas fresh and had some great scenes and special effects with it.  Some great special effects... not all.  There were smoke effects that looked really bad for modern CGI.  We also had a scene where an exorcism is being performed and the possessed girl is almost always in red light.  This may be for a visual sense of "evil", but it's also a very lazy tool to make bad make-up look good.  The classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film had the character transitions done by switching the lighting color.  You couldn't tell because it was black and white, but he had colored make-up on that only shows up when a green gel was showing or a red gel was showing.  That's a little horror history.  I went off track with that...

I give 1920 London 4 possibly haunted lockets out of 5:

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The Dead Room (2015) 1h 20m

"Hey guys!  I have access to this empty house for the weekend, do you want to make a movie?"
"Sure, whatever."
"We'll call it 'The Dead Room' and it will have minimal explanation for what happens!"

And that's the story of how The Dead room was made... or at least how I assume it was made.  I'm sure this had a budget in the sum of money I will never see at one time in my entire life, but I honestly have no clue what was really going on at the end.

Two paranormal investigators and a psychic come to a house in the middle of fuck all New Zealand after being called by a family we never see.  The house is haunted by the ghost of a "giant" man.  Initially they think that he is trying to attack them to get them to leave but they discover that he is trying to get them to leave in order to save them.  Save them from what, you ask yourself (or you don't.  Whatever.  I don't blame you).  Save them from the mummified woman that is chained up in a secret basement under the house that you have to bust through the dry wall which you only know because of a ghost hand print on a thermal image scan.  That's a long sentence.  It took a long time for this movie to get up to this point when watching it.

Cops are called, the body is gone, and they realize the ghost was trying to save them from the Mummies Alive!  Everybody dies super fast and the ghost/mummy/witch/whatever moves at the camera quickly and we're done.

This movie sucked.  I was briefly excited at the prospect of this weird corpse in the basement but it's like they've been edging this whole time just to fucking shoot their spooky load in the last 10 minutes.  While I'm complaining about this movie (as it's pretty much what I do on this blog), the choice to have a cage of birds in this film was a poor one.  First off, the birds don't care when they get fed after supposedly not eating for a few days.  I've seen pigeons pull a knife on other pigeons for french fries after having just ate one.  Goddamn pigeons and their adorable switchblades!  Second, these birds are horrible actors as they don't react to anything the people are.  Third, their cage gets thrown across the room at our group of losers and in the next shot the cage apparently righted itself and the birds are totally ready to just nap.  Like the ghost was like "Oh shit! Sorry birds!  Let me fix that for you."  Birds fucking suck as actors.  Kick them out of SAG.

I give The Dead Room 1 parakeet out of 5, and this is only because of a mummy woman being chained in the basement and that was briefly cool:

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The Devil's Dolls (2016) 1h 25m

Netflix didn't even spell the name of this film right.  That's how little they cared about The Devil's Dolls.  When you have an image with the correct spelling for reference and you just completely ignore that to fuck right off and do your own thing, you really don't give a shit.  Kudos to taking that shit to an all new level, Netflix.

The Devil's Dolls are literally small dolls made out of coffin nails, string, and fabric.  After tracking down and shooting a serial killer, a police officer has them as evidence.  Like a true professional he just puts the box of them in the back of his car for his daughter to find.  She thinks that they are for making jewelry.

This child is not the brightest bulb in the bunch.  I have some coffin nails and they're heavy.  You wouldn't want to make a necklace out of dolls made from them.  She does though, and since they're imbued with the essence of Satan, the farts of a demon, or were up a donkey's ass, they have evil power which causes the person possessing them to snap and kill people and do sick graffiti in the blood.  The daughter has an episode while holding on to one and it's enough to get sympathy from those that see, so they end up buying the other necklaces.  Let this go to show that children are the tools of the devil, to work their child trickery, and make you get possessed by rejected Etsy arts n' crafts!

We find out that the daughter will most likely die from her exposure unless the dolls are collected and given to this film's "magical negro" character.  Never, in my entire life, have I seen someone take that trope so literally as they have a woman of color that is a straight up hoodoo/root worker trying to save the day with magick.  P.S.  the cause of this entire film... this woman right here.  She set this shit in motion by being a dumbass.  She does have a good fire-run into the swamp towards the end.  Speaking of which, I don't know where this film is set or I just didn't care.  I assume the South, probably Louisiana with the swamp and root worker and racism of that character.  Whatever.  It's on the fucking North Pole for all I care.

When I looked this film up on IMDB I noticed that there's a section for plot keywords.  For some reason there are "tied up while barefoot" and "tied feet" as two of the seven keywords.  I don't know who the fuck fapped to this film, but you're already on the internet.  You can find much better foot fetish porn without having to waste your time watching a shit movie for a freeze frame to do a five-knuckle shuffle.  Google that porn shit.  I'm not judging your fetish, I'm judging you for putting this shit film in your spank bank.  Close that account and open one up somewhere else.

I give The Devil's Dolls 1 Ebay haunted doll listing out of 5:

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) 1h 30m

One of the things I've always liked about our iconic monsters was the fact that we were given a quick back-story but had the assumption that these characters were different and evil to begin with.  Jason had deformities.  He was picked on and eventually murdered at summer camp.  Freddy was a child molester and murderer that was then hunted down and burned alive.  Leatherface came from a bunch of weird rednecks that were cannibals and he was based on the killer Ed Gein.

At some point in the mid-to-late 00's horror films felt the need to humanize these characters more, to further develop their backstory.  It's something I feel was unnecessary because every gap we filled in with our imagination was most likely scarier than anything that ended up coming out.  I want my monsters to be monsters, not humans.

So why this rant?  TCH:TB gave what was probably the dumbest set of scenes to set up Leatherface's background.  It starts with a meat inspector in a slaughterhouse going into labor/dying on the work floor while newborn Leatherface climbs out of her lady parts.  The baby is ugly so he's wrapped in meat paper and then thrown in the dumpsters out back.  He's later found by Mama who is going through trash for raw meat scraps to eat.  She takes him home and they keep him.

That's it.  Ugly meat baby adopted from dumpster.

Anyway, our protagonists are two couples where one brother is reenlisting and the other is drafted for Vietnam.  They end up in a wreck while someone I can only describe as Sarah Connor chases them down to rob them.  Maybe the cow they hit was sent back by Skynet to stop Matt Bomer from reenlisting.  The "father" of the family, now posing as a police officer, comes upon them, kills Sarah Connor which sets up Doomsday since she can't give birth to Edward Furlong now.  You can guess what really happens.  It's not like this varies much from the formula.

Now, the Vietnam war lasted from about '54/'55 until '75.  This movie has the feeling of wanting to be set in the 70's but is very obviously being made in 2000's.  It's so bad that even with the period pieces I couldn't buy it wasn't modern.  Couple this with the shit-ass back story and this movie was a hot turd.  There are some shining moments in this film.  First, some of the gore is great.  One of the girls gets pulled out of a moving vehicle by Leatherface sticking a meat hook in her shoulder and yanking her out.  It was one of those scenes you tense because you can feel it as you see it.  There's also a post-kill with the chainsaw where our boy Leatherface just swings the chainsaw so the body on it slides off and thuds into a wall.  It sounds simple but the shot is great.

Overall, despite liking some of the reboots or remakes, I wish my monsters were still just monsters...  not dumpster fuglies.

I give The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning 2 dumpsters out of 5:

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Midnight Meat Train (2008) 1h 40m

For years my mom kept talking up how good Midnight Meat Train was.  Previously I had watched about a half-hour of the film before falling asleep or doing something else.  You know, man stuff!  I find it fitting though that when I'm coming back in and really making a serious attempt at keeping up with this blog, the movie I would end up rolling would be this one.  I started this blog shortly after she passed away, partially out of our shared love of horror.  So this one is for you mom. *cue "Crossroads" by Bone Thugs n' Harmony*

Midnight Meat Train focuses around a photographer named Leon (Bradley Cooper).  After realizing a woman he photographed on the subway has disappeared he becomes obsessed with a series of missing person cases.  His obsession leads him to discover an underground cabal of murder in order to maintain a balance between the known and unknown world.

I think I might have made this movie sound way better than it actually is (sorry, mom).  Somehow a short story was adapted to an hour and forty minute movie (of course, Hellraiser was based on a short story too).  Mostly they did this by padding it with scenes of the train murders, which was probably smart.  Some of these kills were great and the CGI stuff of eyes popping out and arterial sprays made this much more interesting.  There were talks of Barker making this into a trilogy but, despite being a Clive Barker fan, I wouldn't watch this again, let alone two more films.  I've got man shit to do!

I give Midnight Meat Train 2 hotdog trains out of 5:

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Updates from the lab...

Hello from the 30 Days of Plight lab!  So, much like Herbert West, I'm looking to reanimate this blog.  I have come up with a new and more structured set-up.  So here's how it's going to run:

Sunday thru Thursday will continue the typical 30 Days of Plight structure with the random movies from Netflix and reviews from that.

Friday is going to be kind of a grab-bag day.  I plan to use it for reviews on films I may have seen in the theatre or at a film festival, books I've read related to horror, horror themed toys, horror video games, things like that.  I hope this will keep me from breaking up the regular posts but also give me that decent break to talk about something else horror related.  This also gives me a day at the end of a cut to do a recap.

Saturdays are going to be nothing.  I scheduled a day off.  I'm my own boss!

So right now I'm in the process of doing small graphical updates that will be up and running by the time the 30DoP 2.0 launches which will most likely be May 7, 2017.  It's then because I know I have to travel in the next month and I don't want a shitty break in the middle of things.

So with that dear readers, I'll see you in just over a month!