Helldriver (2010) 1h 57m

If you haven't noticed by now, this week I'm going through my J-Horror collection and reviewing those things that I bought mainly because they looked cool.  Surprisingly, I only just realized that a majority of these films that I own have something to do with Tokyo Shock (The Asiatic cinema/television focus of the larger company, Media Blasters).  It makes sense though since most of my favorites have high powered blood sprays, lots of action, and insane creature design.  So with that fresh in your brain, let's jump into Helldriver!

Kika's home life isn't ideal. She comes home one day to find her mother and uncle eating her still living father.  During her escape attempt a meteor crashes through the mother's chest but her mom pulls Kika's heart out to replace her now missing one.  At the same time, the meteor was an alien which takes over the mother and encases her in some sort of amber-like shield.  Kika is thrown to the side but not before she gets the same shielding.  The mother than shoots space spores into the air which turn those that breath it in into zombies with strange fungal antenna on their forehead (like ophiocordyceps unilateralis in ants).  Kika is rescued and turned into a cyborg (although they say android here) with a metal chest plate and a chainsaw katana.  She and a small group of sudden friends attempt to take out this zombie queen and save the world.

Look at this Silent Hill shit!

All the things I love with these Japanese hyper-gore films are present here.  There's a lot of blood, intense action scenes, absurd and nonsensical things that only work for this movie (ie. a car made out of zombie body parts), and the overall feeling of not taking itself too seriously where it would ruin the film.  If I had any real complaint with Helldriver then it would be my usual gripe about pacing.  I was about 45 minutes into it before the title card appeared which made me feel like the whole first half of the film was meant to be an intro to the latter half, and in a way it really was.  We have so much time spent establishing our characters and the world that, when we get to the heart of the matter, doesn't really need to exist.  It's like playing an RPG and you have to grind for a few hours before you're even able to leave the first section and get to the actual adventure.

Helldriver is really a niche film.  This isn't something I could just drop on a friend and tell them to check it out without advanced knowledge of their cinema tastes.  In this case, it would have to taste like blood... a fire hose of blood all yelling at you in Japanese.

I give Helldriver 2 zombie ants out of 5:

Wild Zero (1999) 1h 38m

Holy shit, Wild fucking Zero!  I picked this up a few months ago at the yearly anime/J-culture convention.  There's one booth that is 90% anime sets but if you walk around to the side of the table they have a stack of movies and weird shit for you to sort through.  This has been on my list to get for a while now as I never had the chance to see it but I knew about it through the early 00's Pittsburgh punk scene.

Wild Zero has a lot going on in it so bare with me.  We start with a bunch of spaceships approaching the earth.  While that's happening a meteor crashes into a town and zombies begin to overrun it, a la Night of the Living Dead.  At the same time, we meet Ace, a Guitar Wolf fan that idolizes their rock n' roll machismo.  When Ace stumbles into a stand-off between Guitar Wolf and a club manager he stands up for rock n' roll only to get knocked out.  After Guitar Wolf shoots the fingers off the manger (while Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf comb their hair) he creates a rock n' roll blood brother pact with Ace and gives him a whistle to call Guitar Wolf if Ace ever needs them.  The next day Ace inadvertently stops a robbery where he meets his new love interest, Tobio.  Zombies attack, the club manager is attempting to track down Guitar Wolf for revenge, and the alien invasion eventually begins... and it's all turned up to 11.  ROCK N' ROLL!

Fuckin' right on, Guitar Wolf!

After watching Wild Zero, this film is definitely in my top 10 all-time favorites, maybe even top five but I'd have to spend more time than I want thinking about that right now.  For a movie that came out in 1999, it's surprisingly progressive.  It takes all the things that I personally like about punk and rock, n' roll and rather than pushing the say, Motley Crue model of excess, it pushes this acceptance of everyone in the name of rock n' roll.  It's almost like it's a polytheistic lifestyle, elevated above everyday life.  Are Guitar Wolf gods?  Is this their bible?!  I'd go to church if it were just going in and having the word "rock n' roll" shouted at me from a microphone that shot flames!

This movie is hands down amazing.  There's a drinking game on the disc as well if you're into that.  If you are, then just do so responsibly.  Drunk driving is not rock n' roll!

I give Wild Zero 5 copies of Joan Jett's I Love Rock and Roll out of 5:

Welcome to Willits (2016) 1h 24m

Meth, not even twice!

I think I can sum up my entire intro and general thoughts on this film with a single picture.  I'm very much a "do what you want" type of person, so long as you aren't hurting yourself or someone else, but there are many moments during this film where I wanted to just kind of reach over and say "maybe you've had enough."  Either way, that image to the right sums up everything:

Set in Northern California, a group of youths are heading out on a camping trip in the area of Willits.  They acquire a burnt out Rory Culkin from a gas station and find themselves set up not far from a cabin with a grow operation.  Unluckily for them, it also contains two people that have such chemical filled brains that one believes he was abducted by aliens and he assumes almost anyone he sees is one of them returning for him.

Once you realize the true horror here is chemical dependency and abuse this film isn't really that great.  I was on board when the party added Mr. Culkin, and even the over the top cop TV show (starring Dolph Lundgren) they kept showing would break things up in a fun way, but I don't know if Welcome to Willits was trying to be funny or scary or what?

This feels like the kind of movie that someone in middle school would be into, only to reach adulthood and deny that they ever liked it.  This film is to that person as Coal Chamber is to me.  Only I'm in my 30's and you can't prove I ever owned any Coal Chamber merch or CDs as all of that evidence has been disposed of... I mean, if there ever was any evidence, which there never was!

I give Welcome to Willits 1 copy of My Sexy Alien Girlfriend out of 5:

Aliens: Zone of Silence (2017) 1h 19m

 

Oh found footage films, we meet again.  Only this time you're on Netflix due to an inside job.  This is the directorial debut of Andy Fowler, also known as the Director of VFX for Netflix itself.  Yes, this film is on more streaming platforms than just Netflix, the fact that this was a direct to streaming production and had no theatrical release gives you an idea of what I had to deal with here.  So why am I'm being such a cranky bastard with this film?  Journey with me, into the zone of silence...

Based off of a real location in Mexico, Aliens: Zone of Silence follows a woman as she tries to find her brother after he disappears while searching for aliens for his YouTube channel.  Similar to the Bermuda Triangle, the Zone of Silence has issues with magnetic fields and the breaking down of mechanical instruments.  Lucky for our leading woman, she has the help of Goose, an ex-communications officer in the military that seems to have his own command station at his house.  They're able to keep in constant visual and audio contact except for times when the aliens are around.

This movie should be called the White Woman: Slog of Boring.  It's just a bunch of camcorder, GoPro, and computer screen shots that were so uninteresting to watch that I listened to this movie more than I watched it.  It reminds me of the night shots of Blair Witch only they're mostly in a tent or in the daytime so it takes away the suspense factor.  Also, Goose is the worst physical actor I have seen in a while.  There's a section where he's supposed to be having this inner panic of what to do since he lost contact with the woman and it was painful to watch.  Side note:  Don't name someone Goose in your film, it makes me think of Top Gun.

We never see the aliens.  Instead we get the fake hand of a grey pushing on the side of a tent.  The final shot we get looks like someone took a picture of Jesus and/or Mary statues and then put a bunch of vapor wave video filters on them.  That's cool with the kids, right?  We can make this ending relevant to youth culture, right?  Fuck off!

I give Aliens: Zone of Silence 0 photos of Goose from Top Gun out of 5:

Honeymoon (2014) 1h 27m

Don't confuse this with Honeymoon (a.k.a Luna de miel) that I talked about on Rank & Vile last month.  This is the other movie named Honeymoon, or one of the maybe dozen films named Honeymoon.  I just have access to these two.  Truthfully, I got the better end of the deal with this film as opposed to what I subjected Quincy and Ryan to.

Honeymoon takes us to a lakeside cabin in the woods.  Just married, and looking to get away from the city, Bea and Paul plan to spend their honeymoon swimming in a lake and having tons of sex.  It's too cold to swim but Paul is apparently ready to go all the damn time.  Our couple has a strange encounter with a childhood friend of Bea's and the friend's wife warning our duet to get away from the area.  That evening Paul wakes to find a naked and sleepwalking Bea somewhere in the woods.  Bea's behavior becomes strange, Paul becomes paranoid, and this honeymoon has become a horror moon!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!  That's a terrible joke, I'm sorry.

 This film tries hard to pull an ace out of its sleeve, but in the process of doing so it fucks up and shows its hand too early.  I was taken in by the plot and the development of Bea's changes but as we get information everything starts to point toward one explanation.  I'm not gonna say it's aliens, but it's aliens.  I was hoping for some sort of lycanthrope or cryptozoological creature, but I got gross things I can only describe as cervical huggers.  Pretty much the whole third act of this film is a let down, or a beam down... am I right?  I'm not, I'm sorry again.

I give Honeymoon 2 Ancient Alien memes out of 5:

Pod (2015) 1h 16m

Hey.  We haven't sat down in a while and talked about a good tin-foil hat style movie.  What happened to those kind of films?  I feel as though that plot has just vanished from existence recently.  Maybe it was the government getting too worried about us getting close to flat earth lizard people working for the Illuminati and running the world's governments while the Greys prepare to enslave humanity!  Did I miss anything there?

Pod revolves around a set of three siblings.  After receiving a strange message from one of the brothers, the remaining two siblings fear for the brother's mental stability and drive out to check on him.  What they find is a crazed man talking about being experimented on while he was in the service and that he has captured one of the "things from the pod," which is locked in his basement.  Is this man losing his grip on reality?  What's in the basement?  How did he fire off a bunch of shots from a bolt action rifle without using the bolt? *cue X-Files theme*

I have two complaints which I'm going to throw here first because they're brief.  First is the initial dialog between one brother and the sister where he informs her about the message. This is the most uncoordinated five to ten minutes of script of the film.  It felt bumbling in the way a play goes awkward when an actor forgets the order of their lines and the scene is a mismatch of dialog.  It could've been much shorter and to the point as opposed to this drawn out hostility.  Second, I'm not entirely sure what the point was meant to be in regards to certain character development points.  Why was the sister drinking so much?  Was the scene with the guy she just slept with leaving and her drinking to show that she's not as straight laced as the one brother?  If so, why is she such an emotionally lose cannon in the film?

Those few things aside, after that awkward scene, I really liked Pod.  While I could tell where things were going to go most of the time, it would occasionally swerve into the other direction just enough to leave you a bit freaked out.  The creature looked great when we get the reveal and was this great mix of alien/cryptid/undead design.  The acting from the military brother and the sister were fucking stellar.  The brother's manic behavior and later the sister's breakdown and crying actually resonated with me.  What can I say?  I was entertained... except for about five minutes where I got distracted on my laptop with the Ryan Gosling not eating his cereal video, but that's entertainment in itself.

I give Pod 3 Dana Scully rolling her eyes out of 5:

Antibirth (2016) 1h 34m

What the fuck did I just watch?  For real,  what the fuck is this film?  I spent so much time trying not to fall asleep and then just... fuck it.  Let's get into it.

Antibirth takes one of the girls from Orange is the New Black and fucks her up on all of the drugs.  After a night out at a party she wakes up and begins to show signs of being pregnant.  She doesn't remember much from the party but is pretty sure she didn't have sex with anyone.  The pregnancy has weird side effects like skin peeling or lactating blood or the grossest blister drain scene I've seen in a while.  The final payoff in this film consisted of me yelling "what the fuck is that?!" or "what the fuck is going on?!" at the screen multiple times.

I've complained of slow burns before but this was like a fuse that never let.  Most of the film's story is told while people are getting high and then faux artsy drug induced shots of TVs or scenery.  A lot of the music was baby's first Casio pre-programmed drum beats with mumble lyrics and effects pedals over it.  There was one song that sounded like it was a Brian Jonestown Massacre song but it could just have been a rip off.

Then the ending, Jesus barebacking Christ, the fucking ending.  If you ever wondered what it'd look like if Bigfoot fucked the Creature from the Black Lagoon then look up the last 10 minutes of this movie.  Don't watch the rest, just watch the ending because the rest of the movie does not fucking warn you!  I can't handle this.  I'm done.  Fuck this movie!

I give Antibirth 0 boys wearing an "I'm preggers" shirt out of 5:

Dreamcatcher (2003) 2h 14m

It's been a long ass time since I've read a Stephen King book.  My husband has read a bunch though and told me that the movies are always bad versions of the books because they miss a lot of explanation.  Holy fuck does this movie have a lot that feels random and I just need to accept.  Dick biting lamprey creatures, the greys, psychic powers that might as well be the Shining, Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman's giant eyebrows, mind libraries, neurodiverse individuals with greater psychic powers, Jason Lee...

Dreamcatcher has a group of friends that all share some form of psychic connection.  We find out that these are gifted to them by Dudits, the neurodiverse boy they rescue from some teenage assholes in a really uncomfortable scene.  When the group is getting together for one of their planned Winter cabin bro-outs the animals all start running away and then a dick biting lamprey comes out of some stranger's butt.  From there we get more aliens, psychic crap, and then even weirder alien stuff all mixed with Morgan Freeman's crazy eyebrow extensions and covert military stuff.

Like I said, there was entirely too much going on in this film and not enough explanation.  It had a decent cast, acting, and effects (for 2003) but I still don't know why the fuck Morgan Freeman was so obsessed with this shit or ordered there.  Or why the fucking monsters went straight for the dick!  The ending was not bad but once again more fucking random alien shit and then it's just over.  Done.  Just like I am with this review.

I give Dreamcatcher 1 lamprey out of 5:

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Day 28: V/H/S/2 (2013) 1h 36m

I think I've seen all of the V/H/S series.  It's tough to remember because there are a lot of these horror compilation style films out there now.  Looking back at Creepshow and moving all the way up to more modern ones like Southbound, they all begin to melt together.  I do remember seeing V/H/S/2 though.

Technically there are five films in one here.  The first involves a man seeing more than he bargained for when he gets his new experimental eye implant.  Number two, which is my favorite of the group, is a zombie with a GoPro.  Our third film involves a strange Indonesian cult and a documentary crew.  The fourth pushes the focus more into a sci-fi/horror realm with a group of hormonal teens and tweens.  The final one is the very shoddy glue of V/H/S/2 which focuses on some private investigators trying to track down a college student, breaking into his home, and piecing things together by the VHS tapes and a laptop video.

I call the final one shoddy because I feel like they really had no clue how to fit together each of those shorts and they just created this component to make it work.  It's more like duct tape, or bubble gum and tooth picks.

Out of the remaining four, V/H/S/2 has two strong shorts, one decent short, and one that is forgettable. It's not bad, just forgettable.  The great thing about these short film collections is that if one isn't that great you know something else is coming soon.  For that, I say V/H/S/2 is pretty strong.

I give V/H/S/2 3 Betamax tapes out of 5:

Day 5: Hangar 10 (2014) 1h 23m

This movie was The Blair Witch Project with the military and aliens instead of a witch.  That's it.  "Found" footage, getting lost in the woods, weird events, losing one of your members and finding them in the place where the big bad is; it's all there.  The only thing that was kind of interesting was the military helicopter doing sick air burnouts before it explodes and crashes.

I'm not wasting time writing more because I checked the fuck out mid-way through this movie and it just became background noise.

Hangar 10 gets 0 stupid alien clipart pics out of 5:

Day 27: Alien Abduction (2014) 1h 25min

See the credit "original concept by" at the end of this film is kind of laughable because Alien Abduction is a combination of films that have definitely been done before and done better.  This isn't to say that it's all bad but it was definitely not great.

Alien Abduction is a "found footage" film where what you see is all from the camcorder of an 11 year old autistic boy.  This camcorder must be the most expensive one you can buy because they didn't even try to make it have any kind of filters to make it seem like it was anything less than a real movie camera.  This camera also somehow functions in the cold blackness of space at one point, does not burn up upon reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, and survives falling and crashing into the ground all while still recording.  This is the kind of camcorder that would be handed down to man by Greek gods!

Set in Brown Mountain, N.C... yes, Brown Mountain....  The amount of poop jokes made at the expensive of the location were great.  Brown Mountain apparently has UFO light anomalies and strange things happening to people.  You would think the family in this movie would have thought to research where they're going to camp and seen some of this.  I can't fault them though.  Something like this would kind of be a selling point for me to go camp there.

As expected, alien encounters occur and family members are picked off one by one.  The aliens also have the power to throw and make it rain dead birds.  They are apparently three year olds.  The aliens though are mostly shown through brief jump scares and it works well.  I jumped.  It scared me.  Successful jump scare accomplished.  Aside from these though it wasn't keeping my attention though.  It did feature the song "smell yo dick," which is a real song.  It exists and has a video.

There's a backwoods redneck that pops up and helps them, then he's sucked into space after being broken in half.  All of the family gets sucked up.  The camera films a bit in the ship before it's shot out of a tube and somehow has enough force to jettison it right back to Earth.  Maybe the ship was just at the top of the atmosphere to allow for gravity to effect it.  I don't know.  Camera of the gods!

Overall, this film gets some points for the aliens, but loses more because it's nothing I haven't seen before.  I like a good "found footage" film, but there are too many that are just not worth the time.  If you want to see a scarier alien film then I would suggest watching The Fourth Kind, or Fire In the Sky.  I think I might have mentioned both of these before, but that's because they're worth it.

I give Alien Abduction 1 Alan Rickman from Galaxy Quest out of 5:

Day 11: Ejecta (2014) 1h 22min

Ejecta is the equivalent of a really fucked up episode of the X-Files minus Gillian Anderson's eye rolls at everything.  Our main person (William) is played Julian Richings.  You may remember him from something you've seen a million times but can't place it, and IMDB is no help because it's none of those things on that list, or if you're a Supernatural fan.  William is this ghost to the world.  Not in the incorporeal sense, but more in the sense that he is reclusive and hard to find.  He is known for posting information on aliens and how he was abducted and implanted with a device that lets him be controlled.  He also can't sleep for long, is in constant pain, and apparently he can't die while the implant is in him.  The immortal aspect is tested a lot in the "present day" scenes from the movie.

The past scenes are of an attempted documentary a blogger (I guess) named Joe that William contacts.  Everything from this time line is shown through the eye of the camera lens.  The two lines meet during a raid of William's house by some group that must be the government.  Maybe it's Scully's leather jacket motorcycle riding evil doctor twin in charge of it?  I want to believe.

Post raid, all the scenes are of William being tortured but surviving without much of a scratch.  Pre-raid ends up catching a UFO crash, the capture of an alien body, and then paramilitary raid.  Let me just say, these military people are dumb as fuck because there is some slime all over things, and people are just touching it with their bare fingers.  You don't know what that is!  It could be that the alien felt like rubbin' one out on that truck door!  You don't know that alien's fetish for a 2010 Dodge truck!

The ending was okay, so for once I'm not going to spoil it on here as this was a pretty middle of the road movie.  It could be worth a watch if you want.  Although, there are far better alien abduction horror movies that exist.  I would suggest watching Fire in the Sky or The Fourth Kind if you want an alien scare fest as both are supposedly based on real events, and putting something in the possibility of the real world always makes it scarier.

I give Ejecta 3 kind of sexy alien butts out of 5.