Man, it has been fucking FOREVER since Zaborgar, huh? I guess I should get back to reviews, since I’m not otherwise occupied by gainful employment. So, to get back into the swing of things, we’ve got Super Hybrid. That’s a helpful title, isn’t it? It tells us SO much about the movie. So what is this movie about? A killer Cyborg? An alien-human hybrid? Some genetic chimera?

Nope.

It’s about a goddamn car.

I don’t normally do this, but here’s the Japanese cover as well, because it is much more awesome.

Anyways, yes, this is another killer car movie. Hooray. These things usually follow an evil car that runs people down, because that’s what cars can do; there’ll never be a movie about a car that rapes-

I would also say that no one would ever make a movie about a car that eats people, but guess what, that’s exactly what they fucking did.

The movie starts off on the wrong foot with an almost unbearably long tracking shot of Chicago traffic at night, slowly zooming in on our killer car, a nondescript black sedan, as it weaves in and out of traffic. As the car pulls into an alleyway for a snack we see a generic swirly red POV shot (complete with heartbeat) through its windshield, which, as we’ll see in a bit, doesn’t make sense. Actually, a lot of things in this movie don’t make sense. But I’m stalling.

Anyways, it sees a couple of drunk douchenozzles stagger out of a bar, so it tails them. The drunks probably wouldn’t have even noticed it, had it not decided to shapeshift right behind them, making a sort of squelchy sucking noise. Turning around, they see a red sports car, which they decide it would be a good idea to steal. They soon find that they can’t get out, as the handles have disappeared from the doors, and naturally, they get eaten by the tinted windows.

It drives off in search of more unwitting (or to be more precise, witless) prey, but since it drives like it’s in goddamn Liberty City, it crashes into some poor schmuck, killing him, and wrecking itself in the process.

After it gets dropped off at the garage where we’ll be spending most of this train wreck, we’re introduced to our bland protagonist Tilda, played by one Shannon Beckner, in case you care (you don’t), who is in her underwear, because hey, what’s a horror movie without pointless fanservice? She’s off to work, so she says bye to her useless tool of a boyfriend who I wouldn’t have mentioned if he didn’t show up again. Protagonist’s inner conflict over staying with the douche is a running thing in the movie, not that you’ll care.

So she arrives at work, which is coincidentally the same garage where the Badmobile got dropped off, and her boss is Oded Fehr. He’s an asshole. What else is new. By the time she gets there, the carbeast has already offed one of the mechanics at the garage, but no one notices for a while. Oddly enough, it doesn’t eat him, it just rams him into a shaft full of water, which doesn’t really make sense, but hey, at least it’s acting like a car.

Tilda’s first chore at work is trying to figure out exactly what the carbeast is, as it doesn’t match any known make or model, because of course Tilda knows fucking everything about cars. She notices three things about it: one, it’s not made of metal or fiberglass, two, it just seems off in some imperceptible way, and oh yeah, three, IT’S GOT A GODDAMN HEARTBEAT. They’re all pretty nonchalant about this though, and go to get a rig to tow the carbeast.

Meanwhile, this obviously stoned Shaggy-esque fuckwit is out searching for the dead mechanic, obviously not knowing he’s dead, when he gets nommed. Tilda just happens to be there when it happens, and tries to save Shaggy. She fails.

In a rather elegant cut, mind the sarcasm, we go from Tilda screaming for help, to Oded Fehr ripping her a new asshole for saying that haggy (and presumably the dead fucker)were eaten by a car, and wow, I never really thought I’d ever have to use that particular phrase. “Eaten by a car.” Fuck this movie is stupid.

Naturally Oded Fehr thinks she’s crazy, which is an entirely reasonable response. This isn’t helped when one of her coworkers(the fat fuck who asked her to ID the car) brings up a previous mental breakdown. Tilda just looks on, hurt, as she does her best to look like Elijah Wood.

Unfortunately, she gets proven right when the car, which had driven off earlier after eating the hippie, scuttles on back in a different form, sans doorhandles, and after hearing its heartbeat, Oded Fehr decides it would be a good idea to pry open its hood with a crowbar. As you may have guessed, this is the exact opposite of a good idea.

After it chases them down, shrieking like a banshee with strep throat, Tilda’s nephew (who also works at the garage), gives us the closest thing to an explanation this movie gives us to what this thing is. Are you ready? Brace yourselves- according to nephew, it’s a mimic octopus. He thinks it’s a natural terrestrial predator, using cars as camouflage while it hunts. Granted, that is what it does, and sure it has tentacles, but I call bullshit. I’m sorry, but there is no way this thing could ever be a natural, earthbound organism. I mean this fucking thing is able to perfectly mimic the interior and exterior of any goddamn vehicle it wants, and we’re supposed to believe this is an ordinary animal? No way. Then again, this shithead also said it looked insectoid, so take anything he says with a grain of salt. Now, if they hadn’t given us any explanation at all, I would have been fine, but this is the explanation they choose to stick to.

While Oded Fehr and they others try to catch the carbeast, and turn it in for money, Tilda is sent to keep an eye on the thing. While doing so, she finds Shaggy’s crucifix in a pile of what, up till now I had been assuming was its blood, and tries to get the garage’s secretary to call the cops. Said secretary is an a braindead, obnoxious twat, and doesn’t take her seriously. It’s a moot point anyways, as Oded Fehr has already gone ahead and told the secretary that Tilda is nuts.

Secretary Bitch continues to be stupid and useless, even as the carbeast attempts to kill her, wrecking the garage’s office in the process. In the chase that ensues, the carbeast ends up crashing into a a fusebox, electrocuting both the fatass and itself. The carbeast survives… but fatass does not. Shame, really, he was probably the most likable character in the movie.

This ends up knocking out the power, and since Oded Fehr had the emergency doors welded shut to keep out junkies,and the key to the main door is lost, these assholes are now trapped in the garage, with nothing but the emergency lights, with a murderous, hungry car monster.

So, for the next half hour, the trapped rats spend their time trying to kill the sumbitch using the elevator trap they were setting up from the start (with the added twist of spikes added to the bottom), and just generally wasting time. While doing so, they find the dead mechanic’s body, which freaks Tilda out more than watching Shaggy get eaten

It is during this time that we finally get to see the carbeast transform on camera… and it’s okay. The CGI is passable on its own, but the transformation makes the creature’s already ambiguous anatomy even less clear, and the transition between the computer-generated model and the prop car is handled… okay, I guess. It isn’t spectacular, but it isn’t completely atrocious. It does leave me with one question though: during the transformation, we see that the car frame is comprised of the creature’s tentacles holding this slimy membrane in place. It transforms into a car with a tarp over it, and said tarp comes off, revealing a yellow Camaro-ish car with  black stripes on it(gee, I wonder where they got that idea?). Umm, how? Logically, the tarp should have been a part of its structure, so how would it come off so easily? Sure it makes this sort of organic squelching noise as it comes off, but still, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

As they put the finishing touches on the trap, Tilda goes to distract the carbeast, and just before it flattens and/or eats her, nephew comes in on a motorcycle and hits it with a Molotov cocktail. They drive off, carbeast in hot pursuit, and Secretary Bitch dies when she tries to toss a Molotov at the thing only to have it rebound and hit her. On fire, she runs around like an idiot, and ends up plummeting on to one of the spikes in the trap. Wait, what? Whatever, I’m all torn up because this character was so compelling, and we got to know her so well.

The nephew ends up dying when he gets into the SUV that Tilda had parked in front of the shaft, only Tilda hadn’t parked it there. Tilda herself didn’t realize it until she shined her flashlight on the actual SUV, and I’m left wondering, not for the first time, how fucking stupid are these people!? How did it sneak upon them, when they had been standing right there!? It’s a police SUV! It’s kind of hard to miss!

Anyways, after Tilda regains her composure, she and Oded Fehr trap and kill the beast, finally giving us a look at its true form, which is kind of, uhhh…

So the thing is dead, they’re alive, and Oded Fehr proves just how much of a dickcheese he is by revealing that he had a spare key in his pocket the whole time, and mentioning that since everyone else is dead, they can split the money 60/40, with him getting the bigger share, of course. Tilda’s shithead boyfriend shows up, being a stupid tool the whole time, and promptly gets told to shove it. The film ends as a pack of growling cars, implied to be more carbeasts, drive by Tilda and corner Oded Fehr in the garage, end movie, roll credits.

This was another weak one. Sure, it wasn’t as bad as Parasitic, but it was still pretty shitty. The CGI was okay, if a bit cheap looking. It was an interesting take on the whole “killer car” subgenre, but interesting isn’t enough to carry the movie.  For one thing, the explanation they give for the creature, implied to be correct but not confirmed, is extremely weak; this is one of those cases where no explanation at all would be better than the one they gave us. Another problem is the acting; almost everyone in the film is boring and/or unlikeable, with Oded Fehr being the only one to turn in a passable performance, but said performance was so prickish that he might as well not have. Bottom line? Avoid this movie, if you can.

SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE HELL JAPAN?

This one’s going to be… challenging.

Why?

 Well, just like the eldritch horrors writhing in the shadows beyond time and space, our pitiful human mouth-words are woefully ill-suited to describe the sheer bugfuck insanity that is Karate-Robo Zaborgar. Like I said before, this one Is really fucking weird. How weird, you may ask?

Well, it is exactly  this  fucking  weird.

Before I get into this, I should explain a few things; I’m something of a bit of a tokusatsu freak so as soon as I logged onto Netflix and saw this, I couldn’t help but squeal a bit. You see, this is an adaptation of a 70’s tokusatsu series, Denjin Zaborgar. Now, I haven’t personally seen Denjin Zaborgar, so I can’t speak to its weirdness; but after doing some research, I found out that the  entire plot, minus some of the more headfuck-y elements, is pretty much a straight copy-paste job. So, if we keep that in mind, and remember that Seventies toku also gave us this glorious thing, chances are it was pretty goddamn weird.

We open on a shot of our hero, special officer Daimon Yutaka and his slightly ridiculous motorcycle riding off into the darkness.

We then cut to a government building under attack by the eeevvviiilll terrorist organization Sigma and its cyborg army. This little attack force is led by a woman’s flying head, no wait, she has a body. Her name is Miss Borg, and she makes a big show of not liking men. But of course, since this is schlocky and written by a guy, she of course winds up being the love interest.

But anyways, she’s joined in the attack by an army of masked grunts and the imaginatively named Samurai Robot, and yes, that’s that pucker-faced thing from the top of the page. Its job is to suck out the DNA of important people, namely government ministers, to create a giant robot to conquer Japan.

Wat.

Just as things look bleak Daimon shows up and reveals two things: firstly, that his motorcycle is actually the eponymous Zaborgar, and two he commands it by yelling into a silly looking helmet with a microphone on it. So Zaborgar transforms and proceeds to have an epic battle with the thankfully non-puckered Samurai Robot(seriously, dafuq?) over the title sequence as a seventies-tastic theme song blasts out in the background.

So the battle ends, Miss Borg teleports to Sigma’s flying castle where the other members of Sigma, and oh yeah, Daimon stands there flipping his shit. In the fortress, we’re introduced to the other Sigma generals besides Miss Borg(but they’re kind of useless, so we’ll just ignore them), and then they go all “heil Hitler” on us, and we meet the real villain: some wheelchair-bound shitstain named  Dr. Akunomiya, and great now I’m hungry.

Anyways, blah blah, he announces his plan to take use his DNA-based humongous mecha(again, wat) to, wait for it, take over the world.

After we finish watching the villains being woman-hating asshats, we get some backstory on Daimon. It turns out his mother died in childbirth or some shit, leaving their old as shit father to raise them, which apparently includes nursing the twins, which may or may not be the reason twin brother died; it’s not like the movie gives a fuck, so why should we? And yes we have pictures.You’re welcome.

Anyways, it turns out that Daimon hates Sigma because Akunomiya is the Count Rugen to Daimon’s Inigo Montoya. As a parting gift, Dr. Dad gives Daimon Zaborgar, which admittedly is a pretty fucking awesome inheritance. Daimon then swears vengeance against Sigma, and not just any kind of vengeance, but goddamn VENGEANCE.

Zaborgar tracks Miss Borg with a helicopter launched from his head, and it seems she’s holding a government asshole and his mistress hostage, to melt him down with Sigma’s latest weapon, an acid-spewing robotic humanoid ant with pliers on its face, called the Diarrhea Robot, and I swear to fucking god I’m not making this shit up. Told you.

Anyways Daimon and Zaborgar show up to kick ass, culminating in the Diarrhea Robot shitting itself, when the other Sigma Generals show up to betray Miss Borg. After Daimon kicks their asses, they act like little bitches and send a cyborg truck with a bulldog’s head to kill them. It tries to eat Miss Borg, but Daimon has bikeman save her and kick its ass. Which the robot then proceeds to do. And it is awesome.

However, government douche got injured in the whole clusterfuck, and fires Daimon for it. As he rides off, Miss Borg pulls up on a bird-themed motorcycle that that transforms into a female version of Zaborgar, and they fight. I won’t spoil the glorious insanity of said fight for you, save to say it involves boob missiles. And robotic panty shots.

Naturally, this leads to them fucking. Oh and also Seven of Nine here apparently has a beaked… thing… for a tongue. No really. And yes, this is where that shot with the tentacles comes in.

After this, the movie, proving that Iguchi Noboru is the goddamn master of subtlety, cleverly implies that she got pregnant in the process.

After that little bit of SUBTLE foreshadowing, we’re introduced to Dr. Okonomiyaki’s latest creations: the Miss Ruggers, cyborg women in football-padded bikinis, and I’m not even surprised anymore, who he sends out to kidnap Japanese leaders, and you know the drill. So when the cops show up to stop them, the Miss Ruggers start flying around, and grow pink Godzilla heads.

From their tits.

And in one case, their ass.

For the record, in the original show, they looked like this: Whatever Iguchi is on, I want some.

As the cops surround Miss Borg, she gives Daimon the hardest choice a woman can give their boyfriend (or one-time fuck-buddy): his friends(the cops) or her. Since this movie has gone to great lengths to establish that Daimon doesn’t use the right head for much in the way of thinking, you can probably guess which side he chooses.

Zaborgar doesn’t help him fight cops, however, and just starts crying. Pussy. The robot then attacks Borg with a machinegun in its mouth, and they both go all Michael Bay on us.  Some weird fleshy egg thing with a fetus in it gets launched out and sucked up to Sigma HQ.

The film then skips ahead a few decades, and we discover that Daimon has become a complete loser. Well, more of a complete loser. He gets fired from his job as the government douche’s chauffeur, because he stopped short so as not to run over an old bat who doesn’t know how crosswalks work. He goes to a bar and sees his old buddies from the force, who have also been reduced to worthless bums, who dole out exposition; it seems that without Daimon and Zaborgar to stop them, Sigma has been abducting people for decades to, I reiterate create a giant robot from their DNA. Hmm. Not so much wat that time. I think I’m adjusting to the insanity.

Anyhoo, it turns out that a young woman with antennae in a silver fuku (because why the fuck not) is escaping from Sigma’s clutches, so Dr. Okonomiyaki sends his top agent, Akitsuki Gen, to track her down by finding Daimon before she does.

He finds Daimon  in an unemployment office and starts kicking his ass, only for Daimon to call a time-out. Due to his love of pastry, he now has the diabeetus, and cue the PSA.

This brutal ass-whomping is interrupted when, right the fuck out of nowhere, Mecha Schoolgirl 5000 up and fucking Skull Bashes Gen in the face. It’s super effective! I mean she’s all POW! RIGHT IN THE KISSER!

She then introduces herself as Akiko-

Oh.

No.

Fuck no.

Sorry, lost the happy, but the happy’s back.

So then she grabs Daimon and flies his decrepit ass back to the cave where he and Miss Borg got freaky(in a more literal sense than most), and you can see where this is headed, can’t you?

Yup, she’s Daimon’s weird-ass cyborg daughter, and she proves it by playing a recording of the whole tentacles thing from Miss Borg’s perspective, and states that she has her other’s eories, and feel free to shudder, I know I did. Can you imagine how fucked up that must be, remembering your parents conceiving you? From one of their points of view? I take it back, I don’t want what Iguchi’s smoking. Oh, and Sigma wants her back so she can be the giant robot thing’s heart or some shit.

So anyways Gen shows up again just to be an asshole, and he brings a rebuilt and evil Zaborgar with him. Zaborgar starts killing Daimon until Akiko knees it’s fucking head off, and reveals that Gen can’t kill Daimon, because he’s their father, not just her father. He counters that she’s full of shit, because he’s completely human, and she tells him the single most fucktarded abortion of genetics I’ve ever heard: they’re fraternal twins, with Akiko being comprised solely of Miss Borg’s cyborg DNA( because apparently that’s a thing), whereas Gen is solely comprised of Daimon’s human DNA.

I… what?

I actually think that explanation made me dumber. Let’s see, do I still know math? One plus tacos equals pineapple. Yup, still good.

Moving on.

So Dr. Okonomiyaki has a meeting with government douche, who’s been working with Sigma, and reveals two important things: one, Gen really is Daimon’s son, and two, you shouldn’t trust evil scientists because they are fucking evil and will murder your ass, and you already know he was trying to take over the world, so why the fuck are you shocked by this government douche?

Akiko and Daimon bring the wrecked Zaborgar back to Damon’s hobo friends’ place to rebuild it so it can kill her, and there’s a hilarious gag in which the bums think Daimon his having sex with Akiko when she is actually flipping her shit most egregiously and kicking his ass. Get it? It’s funny because she’s his daughter! Oh ha ha ha, movie you so funny.

After that she runs out crying like a dumbass and promptly gets abducted and put in the robot, which Okonomiyaki gets into.

Mecha-Akiko rampages around for a bit, and the hobos end up launching a wheelchair at her with a lit fart. They die on impact. Daimon then rebuilds Zaborgar, and they race off to save the day, fighting off Gen the whole way, even all the way up Mecha-Akiko, who’s fighting off the urge to squash them so Dadmon can stop her.

Inside Mecha-Akiko’s body, Daimon has his epic final battle With Okonomiyaki, who is able to shoot an endless stream of knives from his knee. Just as all seems lost, with Daimon bloody and more full of knives than a goddamn silverware drawer, Gen leaps to his father’s aid, giving Daimon and Zaborgar the chance to Rider Kick Oknomiyaki out of Mecha-Akiko.

He then asplodes.

Hooray!

This causes Akiko to die, and she sees her mother who tells her that she’ll be reborn as a human. Hooray again! After she comes back, she and Gen leave to go travel the world together, and we close on a shot of 90-year-old Daimon riding Zaborgar, who’s been rebuilt as a wheelchair, into the sky.

And that was Karate-Robo Zaborgar. It was strange, to say the least. Sure, it had some pretty major flaws, but it was a pretty fun ride, and it’s a must see for fans of Seventies tokusatsu.

That’s all for now, and next week I hope to return to a regular schedule, starting with the abominable shitfest that is Super Hybrid.

Dosvedanya!

OH GOD WHY DID I WATCH AREA 407

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that this is late.

I’m sorry that I’m not all that funny.

I’m just so, so sorry.

I take it back. I take it ALL back. I thought V/H/S was bad. I thought Monster was bad. But this? This movie… this goddamn movie…

This is Area 407, and it takes terrible to a whole new level. I know you don’t know who I am, and I know you probably don’t care what I have to say, but I’m begging you, please, whatever you do, just don’t watch this fucking movie. I actually feel dead inside for watching it. Well, more dead inside than I already was, and that’s saying something.

Fittingly enough, this movie is about a plane crash, seeing how low watching it has left me. After seeing something like this, I have to ask… why?  Why do I do this to myself? Why do I force myself to watch terrible movies, day in and day out? It’s not like there aren’t good ones available. And it’s not like anyone gives a shit; in the end, I’m basically just whining to thin air.

I’m sorry; I’ll try to keep myself under control.

We open with two teenage girls on a plane headed home on New Year’s Eve, and this where the hate begins to fester. Their names aren’t important, because by the five minute mark you WILL be waiting for something to eat them. Alive.  But, like in any torture worth its salt, death is slow to come, making the agony all the more unbearable. One of them, the one doing the filming, just won’t stop, despite getting dirty looks and making people uncomfortable. What’s worse, she simply will. Not . Shut. The. FUCK. UP.

We’re soon introduced to a jaded war photographer who just wants to get away from the violence, and the woman sitting next to him, and OH GOD I’M ONLY TEN MINUTES INTO THIS THING, SOMEONE HELP ME…

Ahem.

Sorry about that.

Anyways, due to jokingly trying to get our intrepid cameratwat to shut up, and (sadly) jokingly threating to break her legs and arms, Mr. Photographer the closest thing to a favorite character I have in this movie.

In a shot that lasts an unbearably long time, the soulless automatons masquerading as people ring in the New Year, just before everything goes to hell. There is some solace in knowing that many of them died quickly in the crash, but we are not so lucky, because the Amazing Dumbass Sisters are still alive, with the more annoying of the two having injured her arm in the crash, leaving her sister to film the unending horror that is this movie. Despite, or perhaps for the fact that her own head is gushing blood, another flesh puppet, possibly the woman who was sitting next the photographer, seems intent on getting the girl medical attention. As Photographer man makes the twat a tourniquet with his own belt, you can clearly see that one extra in the background has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing, a thing that would make me laugh, in a less awful movie.

After the flesh mannequin portraying the stewardess tells him what his lines are, he storms of to find his wife, and hopefully find civilization. Suddenly it’s been forty-five minutes, and the people who left, haven’t come back. What’s worse, the writers have no originality, and, as painfully cliché as it is, no one’s phone has any signal.

At this point I should admit I was sort of lying when I said that the movie is about a plane crash; no this movie is actually about the assholes survivors of said crash being stalked by a government experiment.

They spend the next eternity singing goddamn kumbaya around a campfire, by which I of course mean that they shriek obnoxiously at each other, until they hear what is obviously a man screaming in pain, but are too dumb to recognize this fact at first. After everyone but this contrarian fat fuck come to the consensus that the screamer is in fact “human”, they then ignore the clearly audible roaring, and ask the man who is clearly being rent limb from limb, to come to them.

It turns out that the screamer was the asshole who left earlier found the dead bodies of his wife and everyone else, and that “something big”  is out there. In a sterling example of how wonderful these “people” are, Fat Fuck asks the guy, who just found his wife’s mangled corpse, if he found any food. He then spectacularly fails to see why this pisses anyone off.

They go back into the plane for supplies, Fat Fuck acts stupid some more, and oh yeah, the monster was on the plane, and attacks the stewardess. Oh well. The woman next to the photographer turns out to be an Air Marshall, and pulls her gun on the thing, which she later helpfully describes as being “big.”

After we get this startling revelation, the still unseen monster attacks the plane again, causing everyone to run to a nearby abandoned cabin for cover. Gee, I do hope that building up suspense like this until the monster’s reveal is worth it, and that the monster doesn’t look stupid at all.

As it turns out, the monster of the week is actually a pack of shitty looking raptors, but since this is apparently a parallel universe where Jurassic Park doesn’t exist, everyone is too stupid to realize this.

So they find some military equipment in the cabin, which is to say, flashlights and a radio, which is exactly what you need when besieged by raptors, and call for help as a jeep drives up, and they start signaling for help like jackasses. A soldier gets out, and drives off either in fear of the raptors, or to let daring jackasses die, and I know that the eeeeeeeeviiiiil military is supposed to be the bad guy in this, but really, ‘m honestly hoping it’s the latter option.

In the chaos that follows, the only competent members of our little adventure party get picked off, leaving only the Intrepid Sisters and Fat Fuck, who skedaddles, only to come back a moment later to help up the younger, twattier one who has fallen, and she can’t get up.

Eventually, they reunite with Photographer and Air Marshall, and we find out that the other guy is dead, and this is terribly devastating, given all the character development he got.

Our merry band of jackasses wanders into an abandoned military base, which they seem to think is a town, and despite her bleeding arm and injured ankle, Twatty the Younger charges ahead, screaming hello like an idiot, and God DAMN do I hate this movie. Oh well, it’s almost over.

After going into another cabin and finding a radio, they manage to get in touch with someone who tells them that if they want to be rescued, their only hope is to go back to the wreckage, find the emergency flare gun and fire it into the sky so they can be found, while BEING CHASED BY FUCKING RAPTORS. Meanwhile, he closest thing they’ve got to a map is a functionally retarded thirteen-year-old navigating by what she thinks is the North Star.

Along the road to the plane, Photographer gets sick and horks up a bunch of eggs, revealing himself as a replicant and… no, sorry, my bad. Apparently these are SPESHUL raptors that can inject you with eggs by biting you. I especially like how said eggs wound up in his gut despite the fact that he was bitten on his leg.

Eventually the idiots find the jeep from earlier, and commandeer it, only to be stopped by raptors. Photographer, deciding that he’s boned anyway, decides to lead the lizards away, but much like everyone else in this movie, comes back just in time for Twatty the Elder to run over Air Marshall with the jeep.

After they get back to the plane and Photographer fires off a flare, he predictably gets nommed, and since I forgot about Fat Fuck getting killed earlier, this means The Twatty Twins are on their own, and with less than ten minutes left in a found footage movie, are most likely going to die. So it’s not all bad I suppose.

It looks like I’m wrong as they manage to survive till morning when  a guy driving down the road to a secret military base – seriously, did that not raise any red flags for these two- picks them up, and after making sure they’re the only survivors, shoots them, and reveals he’s a big bad military man, and that them being dead means everything is code green. Unfortunately for him-and the audience- karma is paying attention, and sends a raptor to eat him. Yaaaayyyyyyyyy.

And with that, this clusterfuck is finally over. No more found footage movies for me, not for a while anyway. I know this one didn’t seem too bad, the way I described it, but trust me, it was worse. It was terrible. It was just so… just so…

Fuck, I can’t take it anymore. I need a break from shitty movies, so next time, we’re taking a movie that isn’t bad, per se, but it is really, really goddamn weird.

Tune in Wednesday for a… CHANGE… in our usual fare.

V/H/S? MORE LIKE P/O/S.

Sorry this one was little late, anyone who actually gives a fuck.

When you see a movie that you already know is going to suck, and it does, you aren’t disappointed by it. Sure, it can be that special kind of awful that just makes you pissed off about its general existence, but you expected it to be shit anyway, so whatever. But what about when a movie’s inherent terribleness surprises you? What if it’s marketed in such a way that it looks like it’s interesting, maybe even entertaining?

Well, that’s why V/H/S pissed me off. See, if you’ve seen the trailer, and given the fact that they marketed the fuck out of this turdfest, you no doubt have. You probably thought it looked cool, maybe even scary, which is a rare sight indeed in modern horror movies. Here’s the thing, though:

This movie kind of sucks ass.

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not absolutely unwatchable. I suppose it might even be entertaining, if you are of a certain mindset (read: stupid). But if you go into it expecting a serious horror movie, you will almost certainly be disappointed.  And the major reason for that is the trailer, which pretty much consists of scary shit on camera, and doesn’t really tell you what the movie is about.

So let’s rectify that.

V/H/S is essentially an anthology film, in the vein of Creepshow, but focused entirely on found-footage movies. Like any anthology movie, there is an overarching framing device: in this case, a bunch of rapist assholes that’ve been hired to break into a house and steal a specific tape, despite having no fucking clue what the tape they’re supposed to take. Of course, the fuckwit that hired didn’t tell these MENSA candidates  exactly what they were looking for.

So they go in, find a corpse and a bunch of tapes, and I think start watching them, the movie’s kinda vague on that detail. Oh and there’s a plot interwoven between segments about the corpse running around and murdering the fuck out of them, but who really cares? IT’s a found-footage flick, they were gonna die anyway.

The first subject is about a bunch of douchebags trying to make an amateur porno, which involves sticking the least dickish of the bunch  in pair of ordinary glasses that somehow record sound and audio, despite not being hooked up to anything. Oh, and judging by the title of the movie, must be connected to a VCR somewhere. Whatever.

So they go back to a motel with two girls they picked up at a bar: a blonde who is drunk off her ass, and this… thing, whose only real line is “I like you.”

 

That is actually the scariest fucking thing in the movie. So they try to fuck her, all except for POV jackass, who hides in the bathroom and for good reason: after she gets naked, she fucking EATS the other two assholes. Sure, they were a bit molest-y, but still, what the fuck. Specs then runs out, down the stairs, and ends up falling and breaking his arm. At least, to its credit, the movie has good gore effects, what with the scene of the two douchebags getting eaten(and the lovely blood spatters all over the room), and it doesn’t end with those scenes.

The she-thing proceeds to come down and suck him off, and, oh yeah, did I mention she looks like this at the time?

Upon realizing that Specs “No like”, as she so eloquently puts it, she breaks down sobbing, and Specs makes a break for it. He doesn’t get far before we hear a loud screech, and something lifts him up into the air. It turns out the creepy bitch is actually a bat-person.

Of course she fucking is.

The next segment is about a couple who went out west on their second honeymoon. This one seems to be the odd one out, as the other segments have a paranormal touch to them, but this one doesn’t, unless you count a possibly-eerily-accurate fortune telling machine, which says that the wife is going to reunite with a loved one. Very little actually happens in this one, but I’ll make it straightforward as possible: husband is a pushy douche, wife is a passive aggressive bitch. A woman asks them or a ride, but they say know. In the middle of the night, someone come into their room, films them, steals a hundred bucks, and oh yeah, strokes wifey’s ass with a knife. The next night, said person comes in, slices husbands throat, ten goes into the bathroom, and takes off a mask revealing a woman who then proceeds to make out with the wife and then they drive off together.

Woo.

The third segment is about a bitch who brings her asshole friends to a lake that she supposedly goes to every summer, except she doesn’t. She tells them a story about how a serial killer murdered a bunch of kids a few years before but was never found. After said serial killer murders a few people, we find out the teenagers he killed were actually the bitch’s friends, and she brought this new batch down to act as bait, so she can kill the motherfucker. I know I said that all the stories but the second one have a paranormal bent to them, and this one, despite being about a serial killer, seeing as said killer always appears glitched when being filmed, and manages to survive this shit:

 

He then proceeds to disembowel her, in another excellent display of gore, and the tape ends on her corpse spasming on the ground with her intestines hanging out.

I’m not going to lie. The fourth tape pissed me off a bit, due to the absolutely fucktarded twist. See, it’s about college student Emily, who’s Skyping with her med student boyfriend about how she thinks her dorm is haunted, and her arm being swollen and painful. During one of their conversations, we see a child in what looks like rain gear run in and out, slamming her door. Boyfriend helpfully suggested it was possibly the wind.

It turns out her landlord dispels her entirely reasonable assumption that a child’s ghost is haunting the dorm by telling her that no children have ever lived there, and you can guess the twist now can’t you?

That’s right, the fucking cheapest looking aliens ever, who then proceeds to knock her out.

And since we clearly see that she’s lying on her stomach, that must mean that her back is pregnant, as her boyfriend, who’s supposed to be in Michigan, comes in, slices her back open, and pulls out Dave Bowman(please tell me you get that joke). It turns out that Dr. Boyfriend is in league with the aliens, who are using her in incubate hybrid space-fetuses(feti?), and the thing in her arm is a tracking device. He makes it look like she ran into traffic, and we then cut to the next day, when Emily is all bruised up and wearing a sling, and tells boyfriend that she’s been diagnosed(by one of boyfriend’s friends) as schizoaffective, and breaks up with him so he can be with someone “normal” and signs off. The pigfucker then opens up another chat window, with the woman on the screen bitching about her arm hurting.

Dun DUN DUN!!!

The final story focuses on four asshats on Halloween night, 1998, and hinges entirely on the improbable fact that one shithead dressed up as a teddy bear, which is actually a nannycam, with a working camera. Who the fuck even does that!?!

Anyways, these four shitheads get lost on their way to a party, and wind up at what they think is a haunted house set up for the party, what with  the spooky shit happening to them, but, big surprise, totally fucking isn’t. In the attic they interrupt the exorcism of a young woman, and when it turns out that the people in the attic aren’t fucking acting, they decide to save the woman. They free her from the ropes she’s tied up with, and make their escape, despite dishes flying around, windows sealing shut, doorknobs disappearing, and arms literally growing from the goddamn walls to stop them.

They manage to escape through the basement, and they even manage to drive away, only for their car to stop working on a set of train tracks. And, wouldn’t you just fucking know it, bitch actually is possessed, and teleports out of the car, and leaves them to get pancaked by an oncoming train, as the assholes can’t open the door, and like with the first one, I honestly have no fucking clue how the old guy got this fucking tape. Apparently the DVD has an alternate ending where they survive, but who the fuck wants to see that?

After that, it’s just the title and five minutes of credits over various scenes from the movie, including the initial rape scene. Did I forget to mention that?

In summation, the movie sucked. Not as badly as Parasitic, but still pretty bad. It’s just more proof as to why you shouldn’t trust movies that are hyped up like this shit; it’s never as good as you think it’s gonna be. But if you’re into gore effects, or if what I just described interests you, well knock yourself the fuck out. Don’t blame me if you hate it though.

Oh well, at least I only have one more of these fucking things to go before it’s back to regular old shitty movies. Toodles.

THE ASYLUM ISN’T VERY GOOD AT COMING UP WITH TITLES

Every so often, here in the Dungeon we’ll have a theme week, where all of the movies that I bitch about will be bound together by a certain recurring element, be it subject matter, motif, or genre. This week, we’re gonna zero in on a subgenre of film that has produced a sheer deluge of bullshit: the found footage movie.

Now, don’t get me wrong; if handled right, a found footage movie can be entertaining, and even scary. If it’s a horror flick, you have to show just enough of the monster/killer/whatever to leave an actual impact, but not enough to have the audience become desensitized to it. And you gotta have actors who are actually capable of, you know, acting. Now, I don’t mean Oscar-winning performances here, but it has to feel like these are real people reacting to real terror; if not, just trash the whole fucking thing, you’ve already lost.

Like I said, a properly-handled found footage movie can be excellent. But here’s the thing; most of the jackasses out in Hollywood? Yeah, they DON’T know how to handle it properly, resulting in an unwatchable shitstorm of bad acting and shakycam induced vomiting.

And that last note makes a perfect segue into discussing Cloverfield. Let’s go back; it’s January of ’08, and this new J.J. Abrams movie is coming out, and we have no idea what the fuck it’s about, aside from it being about a giant monster attacking New York, and even that was pretty much just guesswork for a long-ass time. But if Abrams knows how to do one thing, it’s how to string the masses along, and boy, do we ever take the bait. So we finally see it, and it’s okay. I mean, it’s not good, but it’s not terrible either, it just sorta… is. But with all that anticipation, there was money to be made, and who better to swoop in and take advantage of the confused and anticipatory public than our old friends at The Asylum?

Now, for those of you fortunate or stupid enough not to know who the kind folks of The Asylum are, well, they’re the pigfucking cashwhores responsible for all those knock-off movies that Sy-Fy runs all the fucking time. You know, like when you press the guide button on your remote, and see that “The Terminator” is on, and you squeal in delight like a pig, only to immediately scream “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT” upon being confronted with a clusterfuck of bad CGI. You then check the guide, see that it actually says “The Terminators”, and in a moment of pure, beautiful hate, realize you’ve been had, your voice joining a wrathful choir of malice, screaming a single word towards the heavens, hate punctuating every syllable: “ASYYYYYYYLUUUUUUMMM!!!”

Now, don’t get me wrong; not all their movies are knockoffs; they have an entire market of movies about shitty giant CGI animals killing each other. Nor are all their movies painfully bad; some are enjoyably bad, with their Sherlock Holmes movie being particularly glorious. If you haven’t already seen it, here’s the trailer. Yes, Ianto Jones was Watson. Yes, there was a dinosaur and a fucking robot dragon. And yes that was Malcolm Reed in a steampunk Iron Man suit.

Watch it.

WATCH IT NOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWW.

Sadly, that’s not the movie we’re talking about today. I’m not that lucky. We were talking, figuratively speaking, about Cloverfield? Remember? Then we talked about The Asylum and their shitty knockoffs. Can you see where I’m going with this?

That’s right, a shitty Asylum knockoff of Cloverfield, the oh-so-imaginatively titled “Monster.”

Well, Cloverfield was about a bunch of assholes trying to find their friends and survive after a monster attack. What’s Monster about? Well, it’s about two obnoxious bitches trying to survive after a monster attack. In Japan. Of course it is.

The movie opens with text stating that two American filmmakers were in Japan on January 17, 2003, when a killer quake hit, killing seven thousand people. What, don’t you remember that? It was all over the news. Anyways, the text then goes on to inform us that… there was no earthquake! Considering that the cover looks like this

I should fucking hope this movie isn’t about a goddamn earthquake.

Suddenly,  a wild foot appears! Obnoxious, vapid, bitchy main character, I choose you! We’re introduced to our assholes du jour, because here in the Dungeon, our movies don’t have “heroes”, although a significant portion of them do have whores. So there is that.

Their names are Sarah and Erin Lynch, and here’s a fun game: one “actress” is named Sarah Lieving, and the other is named Erin Evans. Can you guess which “actress” plays which “character”? Bet you can’t. It’s a moot point anyway, as these two annoying twats are so indistinguishable from each other that you will neither know nor care which bitch is which(heh) by film’s end. For brevity’s sake, I call ’em Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Things 1 and 2 are leaving their native Los Angeles to go to Tokyo to shoot a documentary on global warming, which is apparently something you do if you’re from California. Although this raises several important questions. Firstly, why the fuck are they going to Japan to do this? Can’t they just find Al Gore aerating his jowls at the local beach, and interview him? If you’re dead set on going to Japan, why the fuck are you shooting a documentary on global warming there? Shouldn’t you save the plane fare for topics that you can’t just go up and ask any asshole on the street about? This is California, for fuck’s sake. You can spit and it’ll land on either a hippie or an ecologist. And, most importantly, why these jackasses? Were they hired to do it? If so, wasn’t there anyone, ANYONE AT ALL, more qualified than these unprofessional assclowns? Are they famous filmmakers, or reporters, or something? There’s nothing to suggest they are, and yet somehow these apparent nobodies manage to set up an interview with a Japanese governmental minister from several fucking CONTINENTS away.

Sorry, got distracted by the stupid.

So, we’re off to Japan. But before we get there, we have to earn it by suffering through several minutes of nothing happening as the characters just fuck about camera for no good reason other than to establish that these are “real people” in the “real world” where crazy shit, like whatever the fuck this particular found footage movie that you’re watching just happens to be about, doesn’t normally happen. Unfortunately, if the “characters” in question, like Thing 1 and Thing 2 here, are bland and stupid, it just makes the audience more bored than they normally would be. And found footage movies almost always do this. Good ones use it to sneak in subtle hints that something is off. Bad ones don’t. As such, this isn’t the last time this bullshit is going to show up in one of these movies. Hell, it’s not even the last time this week.

So after they finish filming themselves being stupid jackasses in their house/apartment/mud hut, and filming themselves being stupid jackasses in an airport(!), they’re finally filming themselves being stupid jackasses IN JAPAN. Weren’t they filming a documentary again? What, is this going to show up in the DVD’s extras? Do documentaries even have DVD extras? Sorry, I’ll try to focus.

So they wander aimlessly around Tokyo, and I just realized that since this shit actually appears to have been filmed in Japan, then the plane fare alone would mean it has the highest budget of anything The Asylum’s ever released, and if I seem to be having trouble focusing, it’s because this movie is boring as hell.

So they have their little interview, about THE TERROR OF HEDORAH, I mean global warming, until the building starts shaking and shit starts exploding, and they head down to an emergency shelter in the basement of the building, and try to speak to everyone in English, which leads me to wonder exactly why the fuck they didn’t bring a fucking phrasebook with them, as saying “y hovercraft is full of eels” in perfect Japanese is still better than screaming “ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?” at the terrified people whose home is getting fucked in the kidneys by Cthulhu’s undead partial-birth abortion.

Eventually, a white guy who I swear to god did my taxes once explains that shit is going south, and tells them that they have to go to the Tokyo American Center, and after whatever the fuck is wrecking Tokyo this week roars underground, the decide that he’s right, and leave. I especially love how they put total emphasis on saving their own asses, and give not one fuck about the other people trapped there.

So they leave, through the sewers no less, which is what expert agree you should do in an earthquake, and then the footage goes to shit, at which point the movie helpfully tells us that the Things’ third tape was completely corrupt, and that the fourth tape picks up some time later. Oh, if only the rest of the tapes had been wrecked too, then I wouldn’t have to watch this.More shit blows up, and the accountant guy bites it, leaving the audience alone with camera glitches and two annoying tourists.

Eventually Thing 2 is able to convince her sister that she saw a monster in the explosions by showing her the tape, which is fan-fucking-tastic because that shot never shows up in the tapes, but don’t worry, we see it eventually… and it turns out that this is about the only  time that Asylum movie’s cover was accurate, as tentacles are all we ever see of the titular monster. Say what you will about Cloverfield, it least what we saw of its monster was slightly threatening.

So for the next hour or so of the movie, they run around Tokyo, as both American and Japanese planes try in vain to stop the almighty Squidward, who according to a crazy old man in a restaurant, is apparently a legendary godsquid pissed off by foreigners being in Japan. Or something. I honestly don’t know.

Much like Parasitic, you can rest easy knowing that Thing 1 and Thing 2 get crushed by tentacles at the end of this movie, although their father somehow gets a hold of the tapes, and puts them out as a movie… which we just watched, despite the massive coverup that supposedly ensued.

So that was Monster… and honestly I just didn’t give a fuck about it. But don’t worry, there are worse found footage movies to come… oh yes, so much worse…

PARASITIC, OR STUPID ASSHOLES DYING HORRIBLY DUE TO A COMBINATION OF SPACE PARASITES AND THEMSELVES BEING STUPID, STUPID ASSHOLES

Alright, let’s start this blog off right, with a recent shitty movie: Parasitic. First off: do not pay to see this movie. I’m still trying to get Netflix to reimburse me for inflicting this on me. I don’t care if you see it lying in a clearance bin for a dollar at your local Fuckington’s, tantalizing you with its false promise of a shark-jawed grey woman with tentacles coming out of her ear.

Yeah, that doesn’t happen. Hell, I don’t even think she’s in this movie at all. It’s hard to tell though, as the main “characters” (and I do use the term loosely) are so bland and uninteresting that they’re essentially a formless, shapeless mass of human garbage, which incidentally would make for a MUCH better movie. And do note that I don’t use the word “protagonists” at any time while discussing this alleged movie, as the connotations of said word paint them in an almost positive light, which simply won’t do for these irredeemable assholes; but I digress. As boring and forgettable as the characters are( I literally cannot remember their names, nor do I give enough of a fuck to watch again and find out, because this movie hurts me), I’ll try to lay them out for you here. We’ve got the bitchtacular slutty one; the-slightly-less-bitchy-but-still-slutty one; the one who isn’t really a slut at all, but is still rather bitchy; two ambiguously gay black security guards who are really trying far too hard when they talk about wanting to fuck women; a douchey hipster; a fat lazy pigfucker who spouts off obnoxious pop culture references; and finally, a horny couple who get knocked off in the middle of getting off. Right, got all that? Good, I can go back to not giving a fuck.

So the movie opens with a shot of a terrible CGI meteor(how original) crashing into a bay, followed by a cut to one week later as a package of fish coated in green slime arrives at a fast-food sushi place. In the only scene in this movie that is grounded in reality, the grungy looking white guy making the sushi drops the fish on the floor, picks it up, and proceeds to use it anyway. You know what, fuck it. That’s where the parasites came from. Not the fucking meteor, like the opening shows, but from a dirty kitchen floor.

I like my interpretation better anyway.

We then cut to a nightclub, where hipster douche has delivered the sushi, which, again, is coated in green slime, to Slutzilla McBitchface, clearly hoping to get in her pants, and getting shot down; I’ll just let you know right now, that’s his entire subplot, trying to get laid, and it ends with him lighting himself on fire in a walk-in freezer(he’s kind of a dumbass). There. Aren’t you glad you were told that? Doesn’t this character just add so much to the plot(what little there is)? Anyways, despite looking at the sushi and seeing the aforementioned GREEN FUCKING SLIME, Slutzilla decides to eat it anyway. We’re then introduced to the rest of the moving standees, and since we already went over which barely animate block of wood was which, I’m going to skip that.

Basically, it’s closing time at the club, and everyone wants to leave, but Slutzilla gets sick from the sushi(big shock; it’s almost as if eating green sushi that isn’t normally green is a bad idea), and as it turns out she’s the manager, and has the only key to the building, so no one can leave. Meanwhile, she’s in the bathroom horking up green slime with blood in it, and not wanting to ruin her pretty clothes, so she takes her top off, which naturally leads to her taking her bra off after a GIANT FUCKING PENIS-WORM explodes out of her throat. Fun fact: she reacts to her throat ballooning up and exploding rather, uh, interestingly, if you know what I mean. I’m going to assume this all is supposed to be titillating, but may I remind you that she is COVERED IN GREEN SLIME AND HAS A PHALLUS-ANNELID IN HER NECK.

She then spends the rest of the movie going around topless, using her gulletworm’s spear-tentacles to inject the other assholes with space parasite larvae, at which point this becomes a standard zombie flick, albeit one with an extraordinarily small cast.

Read that last sentence and see if you can see what’s wrong with this movie.

The rest of the movie consists of everyone dying or getting turned, save for Non-Slutty Bitch, because, as I said, they are all a bunch of stupid, egocentric, stupid, horny, lazy, stupid assholes. Did I mention that they’re stupid? Special genius points go to Slightly-Less-Slutty Bitch who goes into the bathroom where Slutzilla was puking earlier. She finds her boss’s clothes in a pile of the bloody slime coating the entire john, and an airvent busted open, and her first thought is that Slutzilla is crawling around the vents, topless and drunk, and this doesn’t bother her in any way. An honorable mention goes to Hipster Douche, who before going all “Come On Baby Light My Fire”, finds some alien slime in the freezer and licks it.

I initially thought that the cast was entirely comprised of amateur porn actors, until I saw during the credits that the actors playing the horny couple having sex in bondage masks are different than the ones playing them at the beginning of the movie. Which I guess would mean that neither on was willing to get naked on camera, if not for the fact that the masked actors had their pants on the whole time.

So the climax is basically the surviving jackasses (I’d say who, but really, does anyone give half a fuck?) barricade themselves in the club’s foyer till morning, when the not-zombies attack. Suddenly Non-Slut, who up till now has been just as stupid and useless as her cohorts, grows a pair, becoming the closest thing this shitpile has to a-ugh- protagonist, and uses a bat to smash away the worm queen in Slutzilla, seemingly killing it and the not-zombies. However, the Queen worm splats out a little maggot thing that scuttles off. We then cut to later in the day, when the owner of the club (actually played by and named after the woman who owns the club they filmed at) comes in and finds the place abandoned, save for a bathroom, with a sink full of bones and viscera; with Non-Slut cowering in the corner, who warns the owner not to look behind her, and she sees this:

She then proceeds to piss herself.

Thankfully, the movie ends on a happy note, as the creature prepares to eat the two survivors, with similar events presumably taking place all around town, possibly (and preferably) even the world. After all, any world that spawned these shit-weasels deserves to die.

Now, what did I think of the movie, in the end? Well, to quote the esteemed Harlan Ellison,
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”

Except in my case, you can replace the word “humans” with “this goddamn fucking movie”. Almost everything about this movie fails on very nearly every level; the only slightly redeeming quality it has is the passable quality of the creature effects, but even that, in and of itself is part of the problem. See, this is director Tim Martin’s first outing at the helm of a movie, having previously worked on the SFX crew for quite a few movies, some of them pretty good; check his IMDB page if you don’t believe me. But sadly, that doesn’t mean he’s any good as a director. Nor, as it turns out, as a writer, as he’s credited for doing that too. And I’ve already commented on how bad the acting is (although to be fair, it’s not Birdemic-level bad, which might have actually helped this movie), but even the best actors will suffer the effects of a shit script. All that aside, the camerawork is shoddy, giving everything a blurry, grainy look, and the audio balance is shit too. We all know that some movies are so bad they’re good- but this sure as shit ain’t one of ‘em.