Day 5: Pernicious (2014) 1h 32min

My progression of internal emotions during the course of this movie was as follows:

I hate this ->  I want to like this -> I wish this was done better 

Pernicious starts with us watching a silhouetted blood sacrifice ritual.  We can tell that there is an adult being sacrificed as well as a child being involved somehow but we don't quite get the whole picture yet.  I really just wanted to know then and hope it would save me the next hour of whatever was about to come.  It didn't.  It made me wait.  Fuckin' jerk movie!

This film takes place somewhere deep in Thailand.  By deep, I mean that the entire opening credits sequence is our main characters taking a train, then a cab, and then a boat to the house they're staying at.  Apparently they are three American college girls that are coming there to teach English to children.  We learn quickly that these girls are quite likely going to be terrible protagonists as one of them starts their visit by stealing an amulet from a spirit altar out of just plain ignorance to the culture.  This is also followed by a brief "white savior" conversation that made me want to flip my coffee table.

They take a look around their new digs and find a gold statue of a prepubescent girl upstairs.  I guess they assume this is normal for Thailand and unpack and sleep.  The next morning they have to go to town where one of the girls does that thing Americans do in foreign countries and speak English really loud and slow to someone they already don't think speaks the language.  Of course the woman speaks perfect English, and she should have told our girl to fuck right off, but instead tells her the price of a purse in their currency and converts it to the USD for her.  Suck on that college girl!  Our ladies pick-up on two guys following them and attempt to confront them.  The guys bail because of creeper reasons and the girls go home and decide to go to a club.

This club starts with super loud dubstep music playing, but everyone is just sitting around like it's a coffee shop.  Also, there is the worst music cut I have ever heard in a film here where it goes from the dubstep song playing to some more quiet house music the moment the girls are about to talk with no transition.  The conversation sucks and they order a fishbowl of booze.  It's an actual fishbowl.  A British douche comes up and begins aggressively hitting on one of the girls that keeps giving him the brush off.  He leaves all pissed only to go sit with the two guys that were following them all earlier.

Here is where and why I reach the point that I can't stand this girls.  They decide to go sit and talk and drink with the guys.  Creepers that were following you are suddenly dudes you want to drink and make out with?  You have some serious issues ladies. Everyone ends up back at the girl's place, the girls drink from a flask and the threat of date rape has become seriously real as they black out.  Thankfully, that isn't what happens or I would've re-rolled for another movie.  We are then treated to 20 minutes of torture porn where the girls have tied up each of the guys separately and cut eyes or tongues out of them and kill the guys.

Morning comes and they all had "crazy dreams" last night.  The realize all their gold jewelry is gone as well as the statue.  They call the housing/teaching people only to find there was never a statue at all! OOOOOOOOOOOO 2SPOOKY 5ME!  This causes our girls to go back to the village and ask about the statue.  They end up following a small Thai girl (do I even need to say anything here), to what ends up being some sort of witch's shack.  This woman is so over the top I want to hang out with her.  Just constantly on a witchy 10.  The small girl vanishes and the woman produces a photo of the statue.  She then acts really vague about it but tells them it's a Kumari.

Here's where I'm going to break and tell you that it is not a fucking Kumari.  A Kumari is a "living goddess" basically where they believe the body of a living prepubescent girl is inhabited by a deity.  It is not a golden statue of a vindictive brat.

The girls find out that faux Kumari is made via some blood sacrifice ritual (remember the beginning of the movie?  I hope not, because you probably shouldn't watch this shit).  That night we finally see the girl spirit doing some serious J-horror type stuff such as crawling out from under things, hiding in your bed, sticking the the corner of a ceiling like Spider-Man, all that stuff.  The thing that makes her not scary though is that while her body is painted gold, they apparently gave her the WWE's Goldust's entrance wig instead of just spraying her hair gold.  Seriously, look at this shit!



Invisible blowjob!

I'm done talking about this movie so here's the sum up.  The family that used to live in the house was a father, pregnant mother, and daughter.  The wife was going to die from a disease so he decided to do this ritual where he would sacrifice himself, turn his daughter into this statue thing, and his wife would live.  His brother (now an old man next door) was going to help.  So they do the ritual and the brother finds the wife upstairs, dead from a suicide.  The spirit of the girl was now restless as the ritual had no way to do what it was supposed to and our trio of winners here became the targets after the amulet was removed from the spirit altar.

The youngest ends up being possessed by the girl spirit, kills the the other girls and the spirit itself kills like fucking everybody else in this movie.  I don't care.  These girls sucked, the old dude was cool, fuck those English dudes, and I can't stop looking at how dumb that picture is above.

The plot to this movie is really good, cultural fuck-ups aside.  I guess this is a case of liking the story, but not the means in which the story is told to me.  There's something there, but it needs a better person to really bring it out.

I give Pernicious two Goldusts out of five:

Day 4: Hellraiser (1987) 1h 33min

I have to be honest up front and say that I've seen all nine Hellraiser movies.  That's including the one where Doug Bradley finally said "fuck this shit" and didn't reprise his role as the iconic Pinhead.  Truthfully, I don't blame him.  Toward the end of the series a lot of the movies were not originally Hellraiser movies but the studio said they'd only put out the project if they somehow fit the Cenobites in so they could try to sell it under the franchise in hopes of making any money on it.

Hellraiser starts with our introduction to Frank buying the Lament Configuration (or as most people know it, the puzzle box) from a Chinese man in Morocco.  This of course raises the question of why was this Chinese man in Morocco?  Who knows.  Different strokes for different folks I guess.  Also, Frank somehow simultaneously has the cleanest hands and the dirties fingernails.

The film next shows us Frank shirtless in a square of candles and working out the puzzle box.  He eventually does and we are treated to some hooks on chains tearing apart the most fake flesh I have ever seen in extreme close-ups.  I'm not sure if it was the times or the budget was spent on making the Cenobites look cool, but for real, step that shit up if you're going to zoom in on it!  Frank is torn apart and we get our first view of Pinhead putting together the flesh of Frank's face... which somehow has eyeballs in it?

Cue Larry (originally Rory but changed to be more American for the US audiences, Frank's brother and Kristy's father) and Julia (the most frigid British woman, wife of Larry, and turbo tramp for Frank's sick dick).  Larry and Julia are moving into Larry's childhood home which is English looking as fuck but I think supposedly set in the U.S. since there's a guy wearing a Yankee's hat later.  We're treated to a tour of a house that should not be flipped unless it's directly into off a cliff into the sea.  Rotted food, bugs everywhere, peeling paint, some parts have scorch marks which is undefined as to why, and Frank's apparent squatter nest in the upstairs.  Julia goes through Frank's stuff and finds a bunch of semi-offensive pornographic pictures of women Frank is having sex with, while he's still fully clothed (?), and eventually takes one of the pictures of Frank for herself.

If you haven't realized that Frank is a scum fuck until now, the icing on the scum cake is Julia's flashback where she has awkward and rigid sex with Frank on her wedding dress the day before she marries his brother.  We're treated to a few more flashbacks of this later but Julia is so frigid she doesn't even know how to have a wank fantasy properly aside from standing still in an empty room.  Go jill-off in the bathroom, Julia! GOD!

I'll speed this up because I could describe the whole movie:  Larry cuts his hand on a nail while moving stuff in.  The blood drips on the attic floor where Frank was torn apart by the hooks and dragged into the Hell realm/Leviathan.  The blood allows Frank to escape from his torture and his body to begin reconstructing itself but he requires more blood in order to do so.  He enlists help from Julia to bring home strangers under the pretense of creepy attic sex only to get hit in the head with a hammer and given to Frank.

Kristy has been introduced at this point.  She doesn't like Julia and vice-versa.  There's a really good dream sequence that Kristy has that's like a Stevie Nicks video gone wrong.  It's bird feathers flying around, a slab with a body under a cloth, and a baby crying.  The body starts to bleed and cover the sheet and when Kristy removes the sheet she sees her father! DUN! DUN! DUUUNNNN!

Kirsty stumbles upon Frank and his drippy skinless body and she freaks out, steals the puzzle box, and passes out somewhere on the street.  She wakes up in a hospital with some minor amnesia and is given the Lament Configuration by a doctor who says she had a death grip on it and it might jog her memory.  Kristy works out one of the box configurations that opens a wall in her hospital room and leads her to encounter The Engineer.  The Engineer would be cool if you couldn't see the wheels on the bottom of him.

After she escapes she returns to her room only to be introduced to our four Cenobites, Pinhead, Butterball, Chatterer, and "The Female Cenobite" (a.k.a. Sister Nikoletta, a.k.a. Vagina Neck).  They attempt to take her to Hell but she spills the beans on Frank and offers a deal to trade Frank for her freedom.  This is the scene where all the most well known lines come from: "angels to some, demons to others" and "we'll tear your soul apart."

After returning to her father and Julia's house we find out that Frank killed and skinned Larry and is now wearing his skin.  How Kristy doesn't know that something is wrong right away despite Larry's skin being covered in blood in all kinds of weird ways I'll never know.  Frank eventually reveals he's Frank and accidentally stabs Julia while trying to attack Kristy.  Frank doesn't really care though because he was just using her anyway and drains Julia's blood and she is later taken to the Hell realm by the Cenobites.

The Cenobites return and reclaim Frank with the hooks and chains and Kristy is told to leave as it's not for her eyes.  The line here that is said before Frank is torn apart is "Jesus wept," which is much better than the original line of a simple "fuck you!."  The Cenobites then try to take Kristy to the Hell realm, but it isn't until the second movie that we really realize that it was more to offer her the chance to become a Cenobite.  The second movie actually explains a lot about the Cenobites and their back story, such as Pinhead being a British military pilot, and Chatterer actually being a child.

So Kristy solves the puzzle box and sends the Cenobites and The Engineer back to the Leviathan, except for Butterball who gets crushed under house rubble.  It's odd to say, but here is where Hellraiser takes a weird twist.  Kristy and fake 80's John Cusack attempt to burn the box in a field where there are apparently just a ton of fires in it for no good reason other than burning things, such as a chair which is next to them and engulfed.  You know, every city has one of those fields where shit is just on fire!  Fake America England is a weird place.  At this point bootleg Alan Moore comes up (we meet him briefly when he's eating handfuls of crickets at the pet store that Kristy works at), turns into a skeletal dragon Satan thing and flies off with the cube and the scene transitions into Morocco again and the Chinese man once again selling the Lament Configuration to someone else.

This movie isn't perfect and I'm not sure if that's the movie maker's fault or the studio's choices.  A lot of the voices are overdubbed because they were too British sounding for the U.S. audience, some effects are great while others are rough, and at times the story feels loose because it was originally a novella (The Hellbound Heart) that was turned into the film and you always loose a lot in that.  Also, as I said, the second movie goes into explaining a lot that you would have questions about in the first film.  I like these films because the universe was expanded in various forms of media so there's a lot to sift through and learn about.  For example, the configuration of the box as you're working it depends on who or what gets called.  Also there are more groups of Cenobites than just Pinhead's, including one that is lead by a Cenobite that used to be Jack the Ripper before he opened a box and was pulled into the Leviathan.  If you're willing to take the time to look into the stuff, it's worth it.

Before I jump into my rating I wanna recommend my friends' Allen and Katie's horror podcast Werewolf Ambulance where they also review and break down horror movies.  They did Hellraiser for episode #51, and yesterday's movie Zombeavers for episode #37.  So check them out, it's awesome!

I give Hellraiser four Lament Configurations out of five.

Day 3: Zombeavers (2014) 1h 17min

I have a single note for this film, and it's "Fuck everything about this movie!!"

This movie was definitely made for teenage/college age males, and I'm way beyond that age range.  So watching this movie was like dragging my dick through broken glass.  Which is honestly a downer because I love terrible b-grade horror movies.  I have a collection of Troma films for christ's sake... A COLLECTION!  Not just the Toxie movies but random shit like Rockabilly Vampire.  So let's see where this movie shit the bed.

I don't remember anyone's name in this movie, so from here we're going to go with the nicknames I give them.  Lisa Loeb, Obligitory Blonde Girl (OBG), and Not Aubrey Plaza (NAP) are heading to a cabin for a girl's weekend since OBG's boyfriend apparently made out with some other girl at a party.  OBG doesn't know who it was, but to save time here it was Lisa Loeb.  Everyone knows but OBG.

They arrive and go for a swim in the lake which leads to the only instance of bare breasts as NAP wants to be topless for no tan lines.  I agree girl, tan lines are the worst!  So they see a beaver dam and decide to check it out.  Earlier in the film there was a truck that lost a canister of some sort of waste container into the water and it sprayed all over dam and some Caddyshack groundhog looking beavers.  So they go to the dam and see what they assume is green "beaver piss" all over the dam and the beaver lodge.

Night comes and Lisa Loeb is getting freaked out by banging noises and NAP goes to investigate.  At this point we are introduced to their boyfriends by NAP's running up with a hood on, turning around, and farting loudly.  You know what NAP, you can do better.  Seriously.  In fact, everyone in this movie can do better.  In every way.  Become better people, find better lovers, get acting lessons and land good movies?  I don't know.  I hate every character in this movie aside from the dog, and that's because the dog just has to be a dog and fucking nails that perfectly.  Oscar dog right fucking there!

After some awkward sex scenes between NAP and her boyfriend Asshole, where he says "I feel like a Power Ranger" during, and Lisa Loeb and Jock, we are eventually treated to our first shot of an actual Zombeaver when OBG goes to take an angry shower (her 40-something leather jacket hairy chested bad boy now ex boyfriend came too).  The puppet sucks, but not as bad as the CGI beavers later in the film.  Anyway, it's beaten with a bat and put on the porch in a garbage bag.

The next day the beavers get their revenge while the kids are swimming in the lake and they take Asshole's foot off and kill the dog. (RIP Oscar dog... best supporting actor)  Some of the teens/"adults" are bitten too before they make it to the cabin.  From here it's the typical horror movie tropes:

"we have to get this guy to a hospital"
"oh shit! the bad guy blocked our exit"
"I'm a random stranger, I'll help. Oi! I'm the dead"
"This place is safe.  Nope, it's full of death."

The twist of this being that everyone that was bit begins to turn into zombie beaver people.  So they get gross nails, zombie teeth, and in some cases beaver tails.  I should have turned this movie off at this point, or grabbed the nearest object and scooped the eyes from my orbital sockets in protest of the hell I hath just witnessed, but I soldiered on.  So in the end Lisa Loeb and NAP escape, but Lisa Loeb changes, NAP kills her, and then NAP is killed by the same truck that lost the waste canister in the beginning.  Everyone is dead now and the zombeavers and man-zombie-beavers are still alive back at that lake.  Hopefully they all die of infected dick splinters and a sequel is never made.

One hour and 17 minutes was still too long for this movie to have existed.  The thing that makes bad movies awesome is that those people originally set out to make a good movie but it became what it became.  When you attempt to purposely make a good bad movie, you will fail as spectacularly as this film did.

I give this movie zero dog Oscars out of five:

Day 2: The Relic (1997) 1h 50min

Surprisingly, both The Relic and The Fury had a few things in common: First, both are primarily set in Chicago; Second, both heroines say "you go to hell!" before the big baddie explodes; Third, both of these movies fucking suck!

The relic starts out with an anthropologist photographing an indigenous Brazilian tribe during a ritual.  At one point he is handed a cup of something to drink which he does without question.  Now, I know this is a horror movie but there's still that part of me that thinks that he is the dumbest person ever for just blindly drinking something that no one else has had yet.  This of course leads to a terrible psychoactive response and he cowers on the floor of a hut crying and hiding from the Kothoga (a.k.a. Mbwun) while the tribes people kind of fuck with him.

Eventually he stows away on a ship that he thinks the items he bought and/or stole from the tribe are on, only to realize they're not.  He breaks down and the camera shows a ton of crates still on the dock as the ship leaves.  How the dock workers missed something like 15 big crates I'll never know, but this movie needed something to add plot because up until now I haven't cared.  This is a trend that will continue through this movie.  Not the poor plot progression, just that I couldn't be bothered to care.

So the ship arrives, everyone is dead with their heads cut off.  We meet our detective and are instantly made aware of his obsession with luck and superstitions.  This works out great because guess what the Chicago Museum is about to open a giant exhibit about?  Which is a total lie as none of the things in the exhibit are superstitions!  They're all the religions of other cultures past and present from across the world.  There is a statue of Pan and a door which has an orphic egg and the veve for Baron Samedi on it as well as some other symbols some set designer stole from a sacred symbols book.  It's the most bullshit and offensive thing in this movie next to when the one professor makes a comment that totally ignores the religion of the Brazilian tribe and puts it into the catholic mythology.

To once again pull from my notes, the description I have of the exhibit is as follows:
"What faux pagan bullshit is this?  Orphic Egg, Ghede veve, tribal shit, jungle, pyramid, Pan? Bullshit superstitions exhibit!"

Anyway, crates arrive, one is full of leaves that have some strange fungus/parasite on them and the crate and leaves are ordered to be burned... except our heroine, Dr. Margo Green (whose name I had to IMDB because I didn't remember) decides that keeping a few in a fridge is a smart idea.  Everyone is fucking up in this movie in the worst ways.

From here comes the best anti-drug PSA when the night security guard goes to the bathroom for a little "smoke break."  He only gets about three hits in when the monster grabs him, pulls him into the next stall, bites his head off, and eats his hypothalamus.  Actually this might be a PSA against hooking up in men's rooms too.

I'm skipping to the end now because the rest is pointless and I was so far from being entertained with this movie I can't be bothered to write about it.  The monster eats the fungus/parasite on the leaves to live and the same chemical is in the human hypothalamus.  A gala happens and it's an all-you-can-eat-rich-asshole buffet for the Kothoga.  We finally see the monster, and if you ever saw the first Ghostbusters movie, then think of the demon dog things that Rick Moranis and Sigourney Weaver turn into, with the mouth of a Predator, but not as cool as it sounds.  Margo eventually covers a lab in chemicals, makes a bomb with science, and blows the thing up while hiding in a water tank meant to rot the flesh off of specimens.  Oh, P.S. the monster was the original anthropologist transformed from drinking that stupid shit I said at the very beginning he shouldn't have drank!

I can't picture myself liking this if I had seen it when it came out, but I also had questionable taste in music and film then, so I might have really liked it and hated myself for it later.  Every character in this film can fuck off on a flaming rocket ship into the sun.  This movie made me want to watch Ghostbusters which is a far superior film with great story telling, plot, and characters.  The Relic is a turd sandwich on a paper plate that's been left in a locked car with the windows up on a hot day.

I give this movie one Kothoga statue out of five:

Day 1: The Fury (1978) 1h 57min

  

If I hadn't seen other, much better, horror films from the this time, then based on this movie I would assume that people in the 70's would piss their pants in fright every time bread popped out of their toaster as toast.  Seriously, look at that movie cover and you'd think that Kirk Douglas was trying to get away from some sort of two headed monster.  I could get into that.  In reality though this movie is more akin to a shitty version of Taken with secret government agencies and ESP powers.

For a majority of the movie it's two parallel plot lines where Kirk Douglas is trying to get his "gifted" son Robin back from a shady government agency that makes him think that Kirk is dead. The other story line is of a teenage girl named Gillian that also has ESP powers and horrible friends.  I assume the writer of this movie was really into the Silva Mind Method because there's a huge explanation of how you can channel Alpha waves to have psychic powers followed by a strangely long "look at these people's faces over and over" scene while Gillian moves a model train with her mind.  The train eventually wrecks... RIP tiny train passengers...  Gillian is clearly a monster.

The two eventually cross paths and lameness ensues as they then try to track down Kirk Douglas' son, who in truth, has turned into a huge douche-cicle.  Robin has now intensified his powers through what I assume is some form of forehead kegels which make two of his veins throb while doing telekinesis.  It's gross.  It makes me think of the antenna on the old Sectaurs toys (go ahead, look them up, I'll still be here when you're done).

Eventually Robin goes completely off his shit, kills his professor/girlfriend-ish-person by making her bleed from everywhere, then subs the actress with a terrible mannequin and spins that around in the air like some lady-dreidel.  Kirk Douglas and Gillian do a shit job of sneaking in thanks to Gillian screaming like an idiot and are caught by John Cassavetes' men.  I didn't mention he's in this up to this point because his character is the generic government bad guy but he has a sweet death coming up, so get hyped!  Kirk Douglas and Robin eventually meet again, Robin flies (literally flies) at Kirk and both tumble out a window and down the roof.  Kirk tries to save Robin, Robin claws Kirk's face and Kirk promptly drops that asshole to his death.  After a moment Kirk realizes what he's done and throws himself sloppily from the roof too.

My notes for that scene are as follows:

"I'll save you son! Nah! Fuck you, son! Nah! Fuck me!"

Before Robin dies he looks into Gillian's eyes and their eyes glow for some reason.  Maybe this is the "fury" this movie is supposed to be about?  I don't fuckin' know!  But this leads a scene at a later time where John Cassavetes is telling Gillian that everything is okay and he's going to help her.  She kisses his eye which then blinds him and turns him into the Frankenstein monster apparently as he just stumbles around the room with his arm out, yelling and swinging wildly at the decor.  Gillian says "You go to hell!" and I instantly began wishing for a Scanner's style death, which I got in spades!  In the 70's doing things like full body explosions was a one shot deal, so you got every camera you could get, in every angle, and then film that shit!  The last two minutes of the film is just different angles of John Cassavetes exploding over and over.

This movie was awful, but at least it ended on a high note.  However, the low notes during the movie are pretty fuckin' low.  Nobody can take a bullet in this movie, including the person that gets shot in the center of his forehead and then continues to drive a car for about a minute.  Kirk Douglas slaps Gillian at one point, and that's not cool.  Don't give me that "it was a different time" shit. It was bad, and you should feel bad.  There is also a scene where a woman goes through a windshield and the glass is just straight up window glass, not safety glass.  Also, a car crashes into a lake and then explodes on impact.  Fuck this movie.

I give it two soulless Kirk Douglas heads out of five, and that's only because there's a scene where Gillian is playing a Fairchild Channel F video game console .