976-EVIL II (1992)

This starts off okay, with a passable dame showing off the dynamic duo before being impaled, but after that it's all over the fucking map. There are some cool bits -- like when one guy is blasted by a semi truck -- but then they go and give us a scene where the main dude is attacked by a kitchen, complete with frozen pizzas flying out of the freezer at him like deadly frisbees. (My spell-check kept trying to capitalize "frisbee", but I wasn't having it. Fuck you, Wham-O.) It's also got a part where Red Sonja reads her lines off a piece of paper she has (not so) cleverly hidden in a book (what a dumb, unprofessional twat), and the infamous scene where a ninja pops up in a chick's car and drives it into an electrical transformer, which I've seen re-purposed in at least two other movies. Cheap, lazy fucks. And could someone please explain to me how a ghost can be "killed" by falling off a cliff? This disaster's sole saving grace is the main chick's best friend; she is so goddamned fine there aren't even words in the English language to describe it. You'd have to speak French:

Seriously, we are talking total destination fuck here. Plus she digs horror movies, and is the only character in this movie who knows how to dress. Too bad she's ultimately sucked into a television and killed by the zombies from It's a Wonderful Life. No, that's not a typo. If these chuckleheads had been smart, they would've come up with some viral marketing campaign where you call the 976-EVIL number and an actress purporting to be the actress playing this chick talks dirty to you. Of course, if they were smart, they wouldn't have made a sequel to 976-EVIL in the first place.

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Why does It's a Wonderful Life secretly suck? Find out here.

Scarecrow (2013)

You can keep your werewolves and Frankenstein monsters and Freddy Kruegers and even the Boogens; for my money, the best movie monster of all is the killer scarecrow. All I ask is that the scarecrow be scary, and that it recognizably be a scarecrow. None of that avart-garde nonsense is what I'm getting at here.

Ah, yes. Terrifying.

So, as we open, taxpayer resources are being casually squandered to bus a scant half-dozen high school students to Saturday detention, which, in this movie's world, is held at a haunted farm. Because that's not stupid. Before you can do the Molly Ringwald though an evil scarecrow is dragging these punks off into the corn, and oh my god can you imagine the lawsuit? "You took my teenage daughter where? And she was eaten by what? After having sex with Mr. Satan who?" The movie initially adopts the trite-and-true "barricaded-in-the-old-house" format, wherein the good guys spend the entire running time barricaded inside some building or another while something else tries to get in, which is inarguably a good way to save money on sets and trying, but tends to get old pretty fast. Fortunately, they are ousted from their stronghold in fairly short order, but then they just end up running around the woods so I'm not sure if that's one for the "win" column or not. There's not much atmosphere (too much of this movie takes place during the day), and not only is our monster a cartoon, but it looks and behaves less like a scarecrow and more like the ghost of a really pissed-off tree, and most closely resembles the comic book version of Swamp Thing. What did I say about the avart-garde shit? Dammit, I really wanted to like this one, but they screwed up nearly everything. If they only had a brain...

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For your Halloween reading pleasure...

Electric Dreams (1984)

I kid you not, I taped this movie off the television back in 1986 and am just getting around to watching that very same VHS tape now, "now" being most of the way through the year 2013. Mr. Satanism gets shit done.

Bonus: There was an old Traci Lords video stuck in it.

Our hero is some sort of office drone who's trying to develop an "earthquake-proof brick". Okay, what? Anyway, he buys a home computer (a pretty ballsy move in 1984, when most people would've spent that money on a Michael Jackson Thriller jacket, or at least some more coke), and, if I understand what I'm seeing correctly, tries to download the entire Internet while simultaneously getting the motherboard drunk on champagne. (Hey, it was the 1980's; people assumed computers could do anything.) Result: the A.I. falls in love with him (after all that porn and booze, who can blame it?) and tries to sabotage his relationship with the cellist he's boning. Failing that, it ultimately does what any self-respecting third wheel should do and commits fucking suicide. Yeah, you read that right. Take the hint, Scott. It's a silly movie even by "What's a computer?" standards, and full of dumb, forced scenes, like the part where the main guy hides the computer from his girl in a slapsticky fashion (why?) or the part where his pager keeps going off during a classical music concert, resulting in more unnecessary slapstick (just take the battery out, asshole). There's more of this shit, but really, it's just embarrassing. You know how some movies are made by talented amateurs? Well this feels like a movie made by untalented professionals - it's slick and pretty, but wrongheaded in nearly every other way that counts. Features obscure 1980's touchstones like the best Philip Oakley song ever (not difficult), and a box of Powdered Donutz cereal. Remember Donutz cereal? That shit was the bomb. Man, fuck health.

Shit tasted just like motherfuckin' donuts!

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Legendary House of Haunted Hell. It's the perfect Halloween gift for the horror fan who has everything, except a copy of Legendary House of Haunted Hell.

Iron Sky (2012)

Despite an impressive budget and a slick, second-tier Hollywood look, Iron Sky is not a big, soulless, empty-headed Hollywood movie, and what's tragically ironic about this is that soulless, empty-headed Hollywood actually would have done a better job. Really, this could've been such a cool movie and it's such a piece of shit. The time is the near future (you can tell because there's a woman President; previous near-futures have always featured a black one), and, as it turns out, the Nazis have been hiding out on the dark side of the moon this entire time, just waiting for a chance to get their hands on a cell phone battery to power their ultimate death weapon and conquer the world once and for all. Opposing them: an irreverent black guy who, quite frankly, is more like a parody of a black person as envisioned by somebody who's never actually met one before. (Imagine your little sister's idiot boyfriend doing his best Will Smith at a party and you'll have some idea what I'm talking about here.) In fact, this entire movie feels like a parody of itself, except minus the parts where it's aware of this or in any way funny. Here's an example: a guy tells a chick she's a knockout, and then... wait for it... he's knocked out! Ha ha! Wow.

Nazis haven't been this zany since Hogan's Heroes. And the invasion of Belgium.

There's inappropriate comedic music when super dramatic shit is going down, the main black guy is transformed into a white guy (This necessitates covering the black actor with whiteface. Er, is that racist or not?); the Nazis' second-in-command tools around the 'hood in a stolen VW Microbus; all the female characters seem to think they're in a porno, making every important decision based on whether or not it will get them laid; the political commentary is so heavy-handed that it makes Tom Tomorrow look witty and subtle by comparison; and the big spaceship battle at the end is so flat and uninvolving that it could have been lifted from the Star Wars prequels. Pluses are limited to a hot Nazi chick in her underwear (which just gave me an awesome idea for this weekend), two good jokes, and an admirably-cynical final shot. Other than that this movie seems to have been crafted by some sort of pod people who have no working knowledge of anything: women, the law, history, politics, jokes, the military... It's like something an unsocialized four-year-old would come up with, except we could simply spank the four-year-old and then give him a time-out, effectively nipping any more of his nonsense right in the bud. Too bad that isn't possible here, but rest assured that, in protest of this movie, I will symbolically spank a girl dressed as a Nazi, very, very soon. And maybe get some in return.

This weekend is gonna be so awesome.

SO awesome...

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