Patchwork (2015) 1h 26m

There's been such an interesting 80's revival happening over time.  Maybe it's starting to taper off a bit, but we've had this odd nostalgia with the uptick of 80's inspired synthwave and all of these remakes of old beloved things or just homages to that time period.  Stranger Things hit that hard, the soundtrack to Drive (which, let's be honest, is fucking great), and the It remake.  I know the original It came out in 1990, but I get some leeway here.  So with a poster like I have posted above, I was expecting some sort of nod or throwback, which I got concept-wise, but it was so much more...

Patchwork is a horror comedy where Dr. Frankenstein hung out with Herbert West and they just happened to have three recently deceased women to combine into one.  However, instead of being of a single mind, each of the three women still exist inside of this creature.  It's kind of like an old episode of Herman's Head only each of them can be in control at the same time.  Their plan is to find out who did this to them, but along the way they turn their investigation into an outright murder spree.

I'm getting this out of the way first, but before the 3-in-1 woman unifies her look, she looks like a genderswap of the anime character Blackjack.  Seriously, look at this shit!

After I got over that revelation I got really into this movie.  There's a reference to Reanimator with a glowing green-filled syringe being the device that reanimates the body, a character playing the original Castlevania and doing the Frankenstein's Monster/Hunchback boss fight, and probably the greatest 15-seconds of film ever with the release of the Owlcat.  The acting is fantastic as our ladies' body movements are jerky and broken in all the right ways.  We're also treated to a wonderfully done rampage section in a frat house where she just puts in ear buds and dances/dispatches douche bags left and right.

You should definitely add this to your must-watch list for horror films if you haven't seen it yet.  It's just a fun time with a great take on body horror.  I will most likely add this film to my personal collection when I have the money.

I give Patchwork 5 surgical staplers out of 5:

Little Evil (2017) 1h 34m

This is the third fuckin' horror movie I'm doing on here that has Adam Scott in it! Piranha, Krampus, and now the Netflix original, Little Evil!  Is he becoming the new Christopher Walken, popping up all over the place because he doesn't want to get bored?  I'm not complaining.  He became a boy mayor and blew the town's money on a giant winter sports complex named Ice Town!  And if you don't understand that then go watch Parks and Rec you uncouth fart!

Little Evil is a horror comedy based around the premise of The Omen... or maybe just an AC/DC album since the kid looks more like Angus Young than Damien.  Gary marries the woman of his dreams without having ever spent time with her son Lucas.  Lucas is literally the child of the devil, conceived through some strange cult ritual.  Gary just wants to be a good step-dad for his step-son, Lucas wants to bring about the apocalypse, the mother is oblivious.  It's a step-dad support group vs. a doomsday cult while Gary attempts to become the father he never had.

Netflix hasn't really been pumping out good content when it comes to their original horror films (ex: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House) but they do a much better job when it's a cross-up such as this.  It's like an America swing at making a film in the vein of Shaun of the Dead.  We get nods to The Shining, Poltergeist, and some Ghostbusters humor thrown in.  We're also treated to one of the best uses of Rush's "Tom Sawyer" for a device reveal.  I had a good time watching Little Evil.  It's one of those films where you could have some friends over, order some food, and make a Friday night of it.

I give Little Evil 3 copies of High Voltage out of 5:

Night of the Living Deb (2015) 1h 25m

Both on and off of this blog I've watched a lot of horror comedies.  Sometimes you want to be able to laugh while also seeing gore as opposed to laughing at the poorly done gore.  John Dies at the End, Tucker & Dale..., Shaun of the Dead, Deathgasm, all great examples of mixing hilarious comedy with fantastic horror.  So what happens when a horror comedy does neither their horror nor their comedy aspects well?

Night of the Living Deb doesn't have much going for it in the plot department.  Deb attempts to hit on a guy without knowing his fiancé is there and pissed at him.  They end up getting drunk and passing out back at his place.  The next morning is awkward but then so are the zombies that exist everywhere now due to water contamination by the water company owned by the guy's father.  That's about it.

There's an attempt at an awkward romantic angle here but the dialog feels really forced and disingenuous between our leading characters.  It's only made worse by 90% of the lines in this film attempting to be jokes.  I had a few laughs while watching this but to be bombarded with mediocre humor consistently made me dislike this film even more.

If I had to sum up Night of the Living Deb in a few words then I would say this is the equivalent of some college friends realizing one of them had a video camera and trying to make a zombie movie in a weekend.  Okay, that's more than a few, but we're not quite at "shit sandwich" level of bad with this film.

I give Night of the Living Deb 0 copies of Shaun of the Dead out of 5:

Scary Movie (2000) 1h 28m

 

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Unfortunately the Scary Movie franchise has passed the point of flattery by milking the horror genre for at least five films.  By some divine fate, I rolled the original movie from way back in 2000.  I remember being home from college for a holiday break and renting this film.  It's weird to return to it nearly 18 years later and view it through a more mature lens, but not mature enough to pass up giggling at a dick or fart joke.

Scary Movie takes the plot of Scream and mixes it with a bit of I Know What You Did Last Summer. After blending these together they threw in a ton of awkward adolescent boy humor and that's the film.  There really isn't much to the plot if you've seen the original Scream and know that there's a masked killer murdering teenagers and focusing on a central girl (in this case, Cindy instead of Sidney).

Scary Movie falls under those awkward guilty pleasure films for me.  I'm a fan of the Scream franchise and I like how they spoofed it.  The things that kill this film for me now are the rampant running gay jokes and just how much this film relies on locker room humor to exist.  It dates this movie and makes it feel out of place in today's world.  Then they ran this idea into the ground by making multiple movies full of adolescent humor and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I give Scary Movie 2 weed leaves out of 5:

13 Days of Christmas Day 13: Gremlins (1984) 1h 46m

When I set out to do the 13 Days of Christmas I knew that I wanted to end it with Gremlins.  I hadn't watched the film in years and, oddly enough, it might have been the first horror film I ever watched as a kid.  It was one of those films that everyone saw at a young age when it came out.  It also was one of three movies that I liked that had a jump scare that freaked me out at a young age (the other two being Large Marge in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and the librarian ghost at the beginning of Ghostbusters).  My big question coming into this was would Gremlins live up to my nostalgia for it?

If you've never seen this film, let me sum it up for you:  An inventor comes across a strange creature known as a Mogwai while in Chinatown.  He acquires it from the shopkeeper's grandson and brings it home as a present for Billy.  There are three rules with the Mogwai: 1) no bright lights and sunlight can kill him, 2) do not feed him after midnight, and 3) never ever get him wet.  Needless to say two of these three happen and what was once a cute a fuzzy Mogwai spawns a mass of horrible green gremlins which kill and terrorize the town.

It was weird to watch this after such a long time and actually attempt to keep track of the body count.  There are four confirmed deaths that we see and then a load of other unconfirmed ones that we never know for sure (except the guy playing Santa lives but you have to be paying attention to background noise to find that out on a newscast).  The puppets still hold up visually and there isn't a single weak link in the casting.  Even the fucking dog is a good actor!

There are a lot of plot holes with this film, mainly revolving around the rules.  I'm not getting into it aside from the fact that snow apparently doesn't count as getting them wet.  For people that want to argue the booze, that gets handled in the official graphic novelization.  As far as my nostalgia, it was hurt a bit because I realized that this film isn't far off from just becoming a B-movie.  It isn't, but it skates such a fine line that if the quality of this film drooped at all then it wouldn't be what it is.

On a side note, as mean as this may be, I still cheered when Mrs. Deagle shot out of that window.

I give Gremlins 4 ripped Santas out of 5:

And with that, the 13 Days of Christmas come to an end.  We'll be back to our regular reviews on Sunday, January 7th.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good holiday if you're celebrating something around this time.  If not, then I still just wish you well.  See you in a few weeks!

Young Frankenstein (1974) 1h 46m

It has been ages since I've seen this film.  I think that this was the second Mel Brooks film I was introduced to (the first being Spaceballs because I was like nine or ten and rented it after some kids talking about it in elementary school).  It's always weird to go back to something as an adult and pick up on the humor you were too young to understand  It's not like this movie has a ton of it, but I did miss out on what there was when I was 12.

Young Frankenstein is a horror-comedy where the great-nephew (I think) of Frankenstein returns to his ancestor's castle and, despite his own aversion to being connected to his family's past work, creates a new monster.  Hi-jinx ensue during the entire movie.  That's the overall plot.

I'm don't want to ruin any of this film's jokes.  If you've ever seen a Mel Brooks film then you are familiar with they type of humor this has.  It is done in black & white like the classic Universal movies and stars Gene Wilder in one of his best comedic roles.  If you haven't seen this, you're missing out.  Unless you hate comedies or fun...

I give Young Frankenstein 4 real Frankenstein Castles out of 5:

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Cut 4 Begins! Day 1: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) 1h 29 m

There are some films that don't get the attention or notoriety they really deserve.  Maybe it's the subject of two "hillbillies" being the actual heroes of the film, maybe it's the fact that this film pokes fun at a lot of the foundations of the slasher genre, or maybe it's just because it has an actor from Firefly on it and that only carries an association with the more nerdy circles of movie fans... regardless, T&DvE really doesn't seem to get the love it deserves.  That includes from the studio because they shelved it for three years before releasing it.

Tucker & Dale focuses around two groups of people.  There are our title characters (there to fix up their new "summer cabin") and the other is a group of college kids that blatantly break every horror rule ever laid to celluloid.  After one of the girls gets startled by Tucker and Dale she almost drowns but gets rescued by Dale.  Her friends see the end and misunderstand the situation and think Tucker and Dale are kidnapping their friend for some hillbilly horror scene.

That right there is the crux of this film.  Everything that really happens is because the college kids have these preconceived notions that the country folks in this West Virginia area must all be some sort of inbred rednecks.  This is only bolstered by the story that one of them tells the others about a massacre that happened in those woods in the past and was blamed on country folk.  We find this later to be untrue, but it's that mindset that leads to the actions of all of the college kids.  It does help though that it seems like the person that owned the cabin Tucker and Dale bought seems to have been Ed Gein... but that's something else entirely.

This film is a lot of fun.  The kills are gory but all believable accidents.  Tucker and Dale are both charismatic and fun leading characters and you dislike the college kids from the start... especially Chad.  Fuck Chad... Chad-ass fuckin' Chad!  There is also a great nod to Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Tucker accidentally hits a bee's nest while chainsawing and this leads to him running through the woods like Leatherface.  This makes much more sense than Leatherface just standing in the middle of the road swinging a chainsaw like an asshole.  Was it that he was getting attacked by a bee trap the girl set before jumping in the back of the truck?  Was it the dogs with the bees in their mouth that shoot bees at you when they bark?!  I'm digging deep for that Simpson's reference...

I give Tucker & Dale vs. Evil 5 'Merica trucker hats out of 5:

Day 21: Killennial (2016) NEW ORLEANS HORROR FILM FEST SPECIAL EDITION PART 1 of 2!

I'm taking a break from my traditional routine with Netflix to review two films I ended up catching at the 2016 New Orleans Horror Film Fest this year.  The first of which was the short film entitled Killennial.

A true horror-comedy, Killennial focuses around a killer that puts his cabin up for rent on AirBnB to a group of millennials.  His goal is to scare and murder each of them but they're so focused with their Instagram photos and vlogging that they don't even seem to notice the man in the mask.  If you have a chance to see this film, I definitely recommend it for some good laughs and some relatively decent gore kills.

My only complaint was the overacting of everyone that isn't the killer.  If it were toned down just a bit I feel like it actually would've helped the comedy factor a bit more.

If you'd like to check out info on this film you can go to its Facebook page at facebook.com/killennial/.
You can also check out the New Orleans Horror Film Fest page at nolahorrorfilmfest.com

Overall, I give Killennial 3 this dude in a gas mask out of 5:

Day 11: Kill Zombie! (2012) 1h 30m

Don't be distracted by the hand throwing up the Dio horns on the poster.  I feel like there should be another hand next to it making an asterisk.  I don't know how, but it is that other hand's responsibility to figure it out!  People need to know that this movie isn't as rock n' roll as they hope.

Kill Zombie! comes to us from the Netherlands.  It's mostly with subtitles except for the Russian (which might have just been Russian sounding gibberish) and the few sentences in English.  While I'm mentioning the English, words like "zombie," "bitch," and "fuck/motherfucker," haven't been translated to Dutch.  So a lot of the time when you know they're saying something else, the subtitles were something entirely different.  Also, as a native English speaker (although my writing may not always reflect that) I'm kind of disappointed that the use of "bitch" as a negative term for another person has been adopted by other languages.  'Tis a dark day for our vernacular history...

Back to the matter at hand,  Kill Zombie! is a poor man's combination of Shaun of the Dead with a bit of Scott Pilgrim.  A few survivors attempt to survive with a bunch of meh jokes.  One of them wants to go save his "girlfriend" and on the way zombie hijinks ensue.  Suddenly, vampires!  The end.

There wasn't much substance here and it's hard to be a zombie horror comedy with something like Shaun of the Dead having done it so well.

I give Kill Zombie! 2 bowling ball hands out of 5:

Day 29: Scary Movie 3 (2003) 1h 24m

I wish I could hate this.  I wish I could sit here and say that this film was absolute shit and not good as a horror comedy.  In truth, I definitely laughed at parts of this movie.  Not all of it mind you, but some parts of it.

Scary Movie 3 is the center point of the Scary Movie franchise.  If you're not familiar with it, Scary Movie takes popular horror and non-horror films and spoofs them in a single movie.  This one takes 8 Mile and The Matrix and fits them in with a combined plot of Signs and The Ring.  The only actors I even cared about were Queen Latifah and Leslie Nielson (a true Canadian treasure!) and I didn't even realize one of the people was Simon Rex (probably because he wasn't naked or introducing a video).

There's not much to talk about here.  You either like these or hate them.  It's the same humor you'd find in a middle school locker room: farts, homophobia, sex humor, misogyny, and add in gratuitous breasts.  Unfortunately, as I said, it still made me laugh.  I'm apparently a terrible person. *sad face*

I give Scary Movie 3 2 censored Simon Rex porn movie boxes out of 5:

Day 16: Burying the Ex (2014) 1h 29m

Keeping the horror/comedy train rolling is 2014's Burying the Ex.  While I can't place my finger on it, this film reminded me a lot of John Dies at the End.  I thought it could be something like they shared a director, but that's not the case.  In fact, the only thing Burying the Ex's director did that I care about is five episodes of the TV show Eerie Indiana back in the day.  I hope they have that on Netflix.  I'll binge watch the shit out of that tomorrow if they do!

Burying the Ex has a plot on par with pre-Comic Code horror comics.  Evelyn, the girlfriend of our main character Max, makes a promise to love Max forever while standing next to some Satan Genie thing which apparently has real magical powers.  Evelyn gets hit by a bus and dies but returns from the grave to be an even crazier person than she was in real life.  In the meantime, Max was going to break up with her when she got hit by the bus and has since moved on to a much cooler girl that makes ice cream with horror themed names.  She made a Fruit Brute ice cream for satan's sake!  Who wouldn't love a girl like that?!  Well, I guess gay men.  That's the obvious answer there.

You can kind of guess what's going to happen during this with an undead ex and a new cooler girlfriend.  Over all I really liked this film.  I even recommended it to my fiancé because I figured he'd like it too.  I recommend it to you too if you like horror/comedy movies.

I give Burying the Ex 3 IDKWTF this stockphoto is out of 5: