The Resurrection Game (2001) 1h 31m

Welcome back for the start of our 10th Cut!  This time I decided to change things up and go to the 30DoP vaults (a.k.a. my DVD shelves) and pull out all of the random horror films and collections that I've picked up over the years but have never watched.  When it comes to horror I have the Robocop mentality of seeing something and saying "I'd buy that for a dollar!"  So I have a lot of crap.  A lot.  Lots...

On my last trip home I was able to pick today's film up from a used media store.  Filmed mostly in and around Pittsburgh, PA, The Resurrection Game was put out by Happy Cloud Pictures.  They're from McMurray, PA.  You've probably never heard of it.  Hell, I barely even known of it.

Bare with me on this plot description as this is going to be a lot of random.  Seemingly based after the initial zombie outbreak of Night of the Living Dead, the world has become a strange mix of cyberpunk retro-future tech and the 1990's.  The outbreak has become less of a threat and more of a nuisance.  Shambling zombies can just be outrun or drop kicked.  Our main characters are a private eye, a nun that is a zombie exterminator/relationship consultant that solves things via BDSM, and some goth-punk zombie exterminator.

Just glue this to the zombie's face!

When the PI is hired by a horror author to find a cure for the zombie virus (because real zombies existing hurts his book sales) everyone ends up teaming up after there are suddenly zombies with cyborg implants and possess greater strength and speed.  I think it's because the implants look like they're made from Warhammer 40K terrain pieces.  This all leads to a showdown with what I think is a corporation but the building is mostly built out of fog machines, darkness, and ominous lighting.


The Resurrection Game is a capital fucking B-movie.  Our story has a lot of loosely tied elements to it which I assume were fixed in the novelization the director released in 2002.  We get solid acting from our main characters but most of the secondary line is a bit rough to watch.  It's poorly paced as well which isn't helped by the occasional TV screen cut-ins that always bare the production company's logo.  There are also some issues with digital artifacting with the transfer of this film which take away from it.  Unless their goal was to look like a Sega CD game.

I'm assuming this was the first film put out by Happy Cloud Pictures.  Their site doesn't help with the chronology of their releases and IMDB wants me to pay for Pro to view the company page, so it's a fail on all ends.  That said, I'm definitely going to hold on to this because it's Pittsburgh.  I was born there.  A part of that city will always be with me... mainly because I'm pretty sure there's a piece of glass or metal eternally lodged in me from a punk show.

I give The Resurrection Game 1.5 Night of the Living Dead remasters out of 5:

photo credit: imgur.com user AndrewAskedall

Mad Ron's Prevues from Hell (1987) 1h 23m

I can't really do a real review for this one.  It came up in the horror section but it's a combination of old horror film previews (apparently from some sort of cable access show?) mixed in with a plot of zombies watching the previews and some guy with a zombie ventriloquist dummy making bad dick jokes.

The previews were at least interesting.  They tended to group some together by common threads.  So you'd see Texas Chainsaw Massacre backed with Deranged.  Both films were based on the serial killer Ed Gein and actually look similar, minus a giant with a chainsaw.

A few of the other previews have crazy gimmicks added to them where you don't even see much of the film but instead something like a reporter showing up and saying that someone has gone insane while watching the movie.  You get throwbacks to the older horror warnings but instead of the times where they say things like "if you're scared to death then we'll pay for your casket" you get something like a bell cue during the movie so you can turn away from the graphic sex or violence.

Speaking of sex, holy fuck!  There are just naked people everywhere.  One film was pretty much just billed as having tits in 3D.  One of the pairs of tits shown though had some weird inverted nipple hole thing going on.  I don't want to see your weird 3D 70's hide-your-weed-in-there tits!  There was also some sort of film with necrophiliac cult where a bunch of people were naked at the end of it.

There there were a ton of Exorcist rip offs.  It was interesting overall to see just how many films wanted to cash in on something a bigger budget film did, or how many went in the other direction and made absolute randomness.  Racism is also rampant.  People of color depicted as savages and attacking white people.  There was one film named something like Africa: Blood and Gore which looked like a Faces of Death of terrible things that happened in Africa, but it comes across as just "look at how horrible and savage these black people are!!"  Fuck that film ever existing.  It's no wonder shitty racism existed then and still exists.  It's the kind of shit I'd hear about growing up in a small mountain area and people believed that shit.  Now I'm angry again.

It was good though to see some previews for some better known films; Night of the Living Dead, Wizard of Gore, Corpse Grinder, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  I actually forgot I own Wizard of Gore and have yet to watch it until I saw it pop up there.  Maybe on a day off I'll get to that.

So, as I said, I can't review a collection of previews with some shitty skits in between.  The skits would get a one just for juvenile behavior, but that's it.  I would say that overall Mad Ron's Prevues from Hell is worth watching if, for nothing else, you want to see some horror history.