Abominable 2-Disc + Extras (MVD)

We're coming back at you with another Saturday Screamers!  This time we're going to talk about the MVD 2-disc release of the 2006 film Abominable as well as the extras included.  A quick shout out to MVD for hooking us up with a copy of this to review.  You may remember that they sent us last week's The Return of Swamp Thing.

In the "making of" featurette with this film, the director (Chris Schifrin) sums Abominable up perfectly:  What if a monster movie met Rear Window?  After a climbing accident killed his wife and left him in a wheelchair, Preston returns to his cabin in an attempt to overcome his trauma.  A group of college aged girls arrive to spend the weekend at the cabin next door.  Preston just happens to see a large beast drag one of the girls away in the night but he isn't accustomed enough to his condition in order to warn the other girls and no one else will believe him.  Can he save himself and the girls before this sasquatch claims them all?!

This movie has some star power in it.  Rex Linn, Lance Henriksen, Matt McCoy, Paul Gleason, scream queen Tiffany Shepis, and Herbert West himself, fucking Jeffrey Combs!  The film poster/cover was done by Drew Struzan who you might know from doing the Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Harry Potter movie posters.  It's just an odd collection of who's who.

As for the Abominable as a film, I have an oddly specific way to describe it.  It made me think of being a teenager in the 90's and being stuck inside on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  This is the kind of movie that I would end up watching on the USA Network at like 2p during those kind of days.  It's a B-movie with a little bit of budget and clout.  The practical effects and the monster all look great and the acting is solid as a rock.  My only complaint is a small one and that's in the beginning when the farmer couple goes to check a noise they assume is coyotes there's a shot of the wife shining a flashlight in the tree tops.  What fucking flying coyotes are you looking for?!

EXTRAS:

This release has a great set of extras.  We have the "making of" I mentioned above, some deleted scenes, and a short blooper reel.  There are also two short films added on.  The first being a student film Chris did entitled Shadows which, let's be honest is capital "S" Student film.

The other short though is what makes all of these already great extras even better.  The second is an adaptation of a comic book I never heard before named The Adventures of Basil and Moebius.  What starts off seeming as a heist at a private high-roller apartment casino turns supernatural as fuck quick.  With Ray Park (Darth Maul) as one of the leads, Malcolm McDowell in a crime boss roll, Kane Hodder playing a goon and a monster, and a monkey fighting with a straight razor, you're in for a good time!

If you like cheesy monster movies then this set is a must.  Amazon currently has this set around $20 so if you click on the link there then you can pick it up and also help out the site because we are part of Amazon Associates and any money from that goes into paying our domain name fees and energy drinks.

Thanks again to MVD for sending us this disc for review.  If you have a horror film or book release that you would like us to review, or you just want to say "hi," you can reach us at 30daysofplight@gmail.com.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006) 1h 30m

The title of this is kind of misleading.  The boys don't really "love" Mandy Lane, but that sounds better than "All the Boys Think With Their Dicks and Objectify Mandy Lane As Some Sort of Reverse Sword in the Stone, Where the Swords are their Dicks and the Stone Is Her Lady Parts."  Fuckin' teenage boys are gross.  I feel shame that I was ever a teenage male, and I don't even like women!  They have cooties!

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane focuses around (surprise surprise) Mandy Lane!  When her best friend (at the time) convinces the biggest of jocks that to woo Mandy he must drunkenly jump from the roof of his house into the pool, things don't quite work out that way.  One massive head trauma and a year later finds their friendship a thing of the past, and Mandy's current friends are inviting her to a farmhouse for a end of junior year party.  En route to the party, every male that isn't around Mandy at the time makes their intention known that they want to attempt to parade their dick through her thorofare.  At least, those are the plans until people start dying.

Straight up (now tell me) this movie is awful.  It's filler in the sense that (I assume) this studio had space to crap something out and we got this.  If this film were a bit older it would've been straight to VHS with a cover that would be a million times cooler than this movie could ever hope to be.  The plot is incredibly generic and predictable.  It's a b-movie with a budget and because of that it suffers the fate of looking nice while suffering greatly on content.

Most of these actors look like if they showed up for a high school junior class then the cops would be called on them.  What's even worse is that at the party in the beginning of the film, for the end of the sophomore year, the jock guy looks like he's someone's fucking dad!  This movie should be called  "Hello, Child Protective Services?  A group of adults are creeping in our high school and all the men seem like they're potential rapists!"  Fuckin' trash flavored trash!

I give All the Boys Love Mandy Lane 0 Mandy Ln street signs out of 5:

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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Turkey Day Special!! Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) 1h 43m

Happy Turkey Day!!  Nothing celebrates that more than a horror film about a fast food chicken restaurant!  In truth, my internal dialog of deciding what film I should review for Thanksgiving lasted all of five seconds.  It was pretty much me thinking of Poultrygeist, deciding to do Poultrygeist, and then five minutes later realizing I could do Thankskilling instead but I had already committed my body to Poultrygeist.

I've brought up Troma films at least 20 times on this blog.  If you're not familiar, or you're just joining us here at 30 Days of Plight, Troma is an independent film company mostly known for having made the Toxic Avenger films.  They also put out some non-Troma Studio films such as Cannibal the Musical (a college film done by Matt Stone and Trey Parker).  At its core, Troma carries a brand of low budget and offensive toilet humor that only a B-movie addict can love.

Truthfully, I forgot about how offensive this film really is at times.

The plot of Poultrygeist revolves around a fast food restaurant that is built upon what used to be a native burial ground and thus becomes cursed.  Our main character, Arby (it's all fast food chain names and puns) gets a job there after he runs into his girlfriend protesting the chain.  She had just left for college and suddenly become an overly political lesbian.  That's kind of par for a teenage male.  Do something dumb as an act of revenge in order to win love...

As the film rolls on, staff keep getting killed, patrons become chicken zombies, there are a lot of tits and gore, a gay character (Paco Bell) gets pulled into a meat grinder after jerking off into the meat and comparing it to an act of Che Guevara-esq rebellion, and we find out the protest and lead lesbian was doing it all as a ruse to promote the restaurant.  That's a fucking long sentence of random shit.

Oh, did I mention this is also a musical?  Because it is.  The songs are actually well written even though the lyrics are middle school boy humor.  In fact, as far as Troma films go, it seems like Lloyd Kaufman must've pulled some decent scratch together for this one.  The costumes, effects, even the title sequence showed some backing and thus a greater sense of effort.  This is not a slam on Troma's other films, it's just a big step up.

All in all, while I'm sure some of the things I brought up in this review have probably turned you off from ever watching it, Troma was my first and my continual personal motivation toward the idea that I could make a horror film.  It's not about big budget, big effects, big names, big bullshit... it's about making something fun and having fun.  I know from Lloyd's book that making a movie isn't easy, but these films make it seem attainable.

So I give Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead a solid 3 drumsticks out of 5:

Day 27: Final Destination 3 (2006) 1h 33m

Note to self:
Here is a list of things to never do:

- ride a roller coaster endorsed by Satan
- use a tanning bed while listening to bad compilation CD's
- use a drive-thru at a burger joint while being a douche bag
- lift weights under a pair of scimitars
- work at a Lowe's or Home Depot no matter what discount I could get
- be around a "Don't Tread On Me" flag (even before this film I was doing a good job of this one)
- be under a cherry picker while looking like a member of Good Charlotte
- ride a subway that is way too clean and thus untrustworthy
- go to wherever the fuck this movie is set

Surprisingly I've managed to live a long and fruitful life without having seen a single one of the Final Destination films.  Even without having seen them, I knew that the premise would be this:  A group of teens/young adults survive a horrific tragedy by exiting or getting off whatever is supposed to kill them (in this case, a roller coaster).  After that they die one by one.  I want to say something dramatic and metal here like "because death comes to claim them for escaping his icy grasp!" but there was no image of the Grim Reaper to be found and I really wanted a giant skull face to show up at some point.

I will say that this movie has some great gore kills.  Color me impressed (or crimson) because I really didn't think these would be as bloody or gut filled, but I guess it's a good way to keep people engaged.  The CGI felt a bit excessive at times, although I might just be splitting hairs since this movie is 10 years old and that's like saying Frankenstein sucks because it isn't in color.  Frankenstein doesn't suck for the record.  It's pretty great and set a lot of the standards that we see in monster movies.

Frankenstein aside, I actually think I might watch the rest of this series at some point.  My only concern is that he first film will feel like they were trying super hard to make a great movie as opposed to bad/good gore fun that I assume the others could be.  I just hope there's such great lines as "Fuck you, Ben Franklin" and an improvised background line of "What the fuck is a bruin anyway?!" floating around in those movies too.

I give Final Destination 3 3.5 weird naked Ben Franklin fan arts (?) out of 5:

Day 9: Day Watch (2006) 2h 12m

I fell like Netflix needs to add a disclaimer before sequels that states that something has a predecessor.  Sure, things with numbers such as Friday the 13th Part 3, or Halloween 2, let you know that you're skipping ahead, but a little help sometimes would be good.  Especially since I really wish I would have seen the first film in this series to understand everything a bit better.

Day Watch is the sequel to the Russian horror film Night Watch.  I'm sure you're saying "no shit" to that tidbit, but I felt the need to say it.  Aside from the absurd length of this (being that it's a modern film), my chief complaint was just that I was treated to a wonderful recap of Night Watch all in English, but then all of Day Watch was in Russian.  With the subtitles for this film taking on some playful and artistic twists, I wish the whole thing would've been in Russian with English subtitles.  Maybe I'm being nitpicky while looking for something to complain about.

The overall world was set in a combination of our reality mixed with magic and supernatural creatures.  I hesitate to use the term "vampire" here (even though the film does) because they aren't your run of the mill vampires.  I really need to watch the first film to get the whole story.  What I do know is that there is a sense of "light" and "dark" within the two vampire groups and each patrols the other.

As for the magic, there are your typical witch characters, but also a story of the Chalk of Fate which takes an eventual center stage.  With the Chalk one is able to change events and rewrite history... with some small restrictions.  The story telling of the Chalk is one of my favorite parts of the movie becauseit could have been ripped from any Mike Mignola comic.

I know this review is shorter than most.  Truthfully I feel I need the whole story.  If I sat through a 2+ hour movie, in Russian, then just know it was a good film.  Not quite in my top tier, but a good film nonetheless.

I give Day Watch a solid 3 Gorbachev birth marks out of 5: