Day 5: Sendero (Path) (2015) 1h 25m

You know, I was really excited to get back into doing this cut.  The holiday was over, I got my shit sorted, so I turned to Netflix in hopes that it would just feel the motivation and child-like energy I was ready to put back into this blog.  Then it gave me Sendero.  A film that moved slow and tried sooooooo hard to be edgy that all I could do was fart on the couch and count the minutes until I could play video games.

Sendero is set in Argentina and exists in some sort of time warp where I can't tell if it is the 80's or if it's modern times and this section of Argentina is so far behind that 80's style only just arrived.  We meet a group of 20-somethings getting together for a road trip.  For all horror films, this plot is fucking dead!

The group eventually encounter a woman sitting in the road, bleeding from multiple wounds.  Another vehicle shows up and the two guys inside get out and wreck our co-ed New Kids tribute act.  From here we meet the "family" of the two guys and some sort of mother-ish figure.  I'm not really sure what she is because she seems close to the same age, if not younger, and just dressed older.  This is where the ultimate fuckery begins.

We're treated to some confusing dialog, unnatural and excessive props (such as a web of chains keeping a guy chained to what I assume was a free standing window frame), and hyper-aggressive sexual displays.  It's like they saw an Eli Roth film and thought "we can do that," and then got drunk while coming up with ideas of what's edgy.

Here's a great example.  The guy chained the window is getting checked on by one of the two "family" guys.  The family guy eventually whips his dick out and starts jerking it in front of the chained man.  The other family guy, comes in and makes a scene about how the prisoners "aren't ours" and to never do that again, but then proceeds to bend the first guy over a chair and butt fuck him in front of the chained guy.

It's such a "man, this is fucked up, but let's make it more fucked up!!!" scene.  It was things like this that made me roll my eyes.  Add the fact that the subtitles were 1-2 lines behind what was being said onscreen made this film a goddamn knife to my eyes!  I rolled my eyes right into a knife, then rolled knives around my orbital cavities!

I give Sendero 0 Argentinian flag out of 5... but also a million couch farts:

What's going on?! The Update!

Hey everyone.  Let me apologize for my sudden absence so short into a cut.  I was hoping to get a clean 30-days straight done and posted on time this run, but this month is proving to make it difficult to do that.

With that said, this does not mean I'm abandoning this cut or this blog.  I will be doing more sporadic posts over the next few weeks due to personal obligations as well as the holiday season.  While I honestly only recognize Halloween as the one true holiday season (fuck other teams!) I must admit that it's hard to escape all the hustle and bustle of this month.

So I will be posting again soon and once again, I apologize for me lameness.

- Cimba

Day 4: The Stranger (2015) 1h 33m

To some of us, the "stranger" is known as a masturbatory technique where you cut off circulation to your hand just long enough to numb it up and then you jerk yourself off with it.  The idea is that since you've lessened the feeling in your hand then it feels like someone else is giving you a handy.  In truth, the "stranger" and The Stranger share something in common... both are a bit different than the norm, but in the end it's still just jerking off the same cock.

The Stranger takes place in bad neck tattoo, U.S.A. where a man returns after 16 years and is looking for his wife. Upon finding she is dead he promptly gets beaten, stabbed, and peed on but the shittiest antagonist and his circle jerk crew.  The 16 year old boy who told him that his wife was dead (sure, you can do that math real quick) sees the attack and tells a police officer about it.  The shitagonist is the cop's son and they attempt to dump the body.  Our boy brings the barely alive man home and this establishes the base for this film.

To be short and to the point, this is a vampire movie.  The stranger is a vampire that only refers to his vampirism as having a curse or a disease.  The one creative take on stale vampire lore is that vampire blood can be used to heal, but it will only heal properly if it is blessed first.  We see this take place when his son is badly burned and performs the ritual and the application.  If it isn't blessed first, and it comes in contact with a wound of any kind, it only heals but doesn't restore and it will pass the vampirism on to the patient.  I don't recall seeing or reading anything like this before.  I've seen the healing with vampire blood or spit before, but I like the idea of taking something impure like that and imbuing it with some form of sanctity for healing.

In the end, this film felt like a slog.  I wasn't super impressed with it but I wasn't totally put off by it either.  However, to put this film in the middle of the road means you might like it and you might not.  I already passed on the only interesting bit of info you can glean from this film so take that and run with it.  Run away from The Stranger!!!

I give The Stranger 2 stranger danger images out of 5:

Day 3: Fright Night 2: New Blood (2013) 1h 40m

I didn't realize that they made a sequel to 2011 remake of Fright Night.  That's probably due to a combination of this film having a totally different cast from the first one and the fact that this was a straight-to-video release.  With the death of Blockbuster, or just the family video store, I haven't seen a true "new release" wall (or any good online equivalent) so this one slipped by.  Bring back Blockbuster video!  I want to rent overpriced N64 games!

Fright Night 2 focuses on the other well known real life "vampire," Elizabeth Bathory.  Charlie, Amy, and "Evil" Ed have all traveled to Romania for some form of study abroad.  Charlie realizes their instructor is Elizabeth Bathory and Elizabeth realizes that Amy is a virgin born at midnight during the new moon (oddly specific) which can free Elizabeth from her curse of having to bathe in blood to maintain her youth.  Evil is just annoying through the whole film.  Peter Vincent returns in character but not as David Tennant.  As I type this I'm actually wearing a Dr. Who t-shirt with him on it, so this is of course a downer for me... that David wasn't in it, not that I'm wearing this shirt.  That would be weird if it were the shirt.

All in all, if this film were a standalone and not an attempt at being a sequel to Fright Night then it would be good.  I actually enjoyed it overall.  There are some great shots and make-up effects in here too.  I found out early that this was a straight-to-video release and I didn't have high expectations so maybe I set the bar low.  However, I wouldn't be adverse to watching it again, just not at my own choice.

I give Fright Night 2: New Blood 2 Elizabeth Bathory paintings out of 5:

Day 2: Bound to Vengeance (2015) 1h 33m

I don't know how to start this post, let alone talk about this film.  It's not as if I was floored by it.  Far from it.  If I write the basic plot on here then it sounds like an interesting concept.  The issue is that Bound to Vengeance doesn't execute it well.

Bound to Vengeance follows Eve, a woman that was kidnapped but she turned the tide on her captor and has the chance to escape.  While going through the house she's in she comes across photos of other girls that are kept around town.  She forces her captor to lead her to the other kidnapped women in an attempt to free them.

See?  That sounds like a decent plot.  It's not even an issue of acting or directing as everyone plays their part well and some of the shots are really well done.  The issue comes with the overall script and presentation.  I find myself not caring after the second of the freed girls is found.  It tries to out-twist itself and, rather than keeping my interest, it goes off the rails in that horrible train wreck form... a train that was carrying orphan babies. TRAIN BABIES!  TRABABIES!!

I give Bound to Vengeance 1 bound erotic Tarzan out of 5:

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:

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: