DAY OF THE DEAD: BLOODLINE (2018) **

This Day of the Dead isn’t really a sequel to Day of the Dead 2:  Contagium.  Nor is it a sequel to the 2008 Day of the Dead remake.  It almost plays like another remake of George A. Romero’s original Day of the Dead, with a few weird additions.  I’ve seen plenty of terrible DTV zombie movies in my time and as far as they go, you can do a whole lot worse.  It’s certainly better than Contagium or the 2008 remake.

The world is overrun by “rotters” (zombies).  Zoe (Sophie Skelton) is a scientist living in a military compound along with some soldiers and other assorted survivors.  While out on a supply run, she stumbles upon a rotter named Max (Jonathon Schaech), who used to stalk her when he was still human.  He follows the soldiers and sneaks into the compound to see Zoe (once a stalker, always a stalker).  Zoe captures him, chains him up, and performs experiments on him in hopes of creating a rotter vaccine.

The character of Max is sort of a variation on Bub from the original Day of the Dead.  Having him infatuated with the heroine makes this just different enough to prevent it from becoming yet another run-of-the-mill zombie movie.  (There’s a scene where Zoe lets him lick her in exchange for a blood sample.)  I’m not saying this ever comes close to being “good”.  Let’s face it.  This was never going to live up to the original, but it separates itself from Romero’s universe in enough ways to justify its existence.  Sure, there’s still all the scenes of soldiers collecting zombie specimens, the asshole in charge causing trouble with the heroine’s research (although no one could’ve been as big of an asshole as Joe Pilato’s Captain Rhodes), and the large-scale zombie breakout at the end you’d expect from a Day remake.  If you wanted to see those beats recreated yet again, you’re in luck.

The opening scene of the outbreak is kind of fun.  (Students partying in a morgue store their booze in the freezers where they keep the bodies.)  The zombie attacks are fairly bloody (there’s a lot of arterial spray) and the Hateful Eight inspired blood puking scene was appropriately juicy.  The early scenes in the compound, while inferior to the original, are at least tolerable.  Once Schaech gets loose and the zombies start attacking, the whole thing begins to slowly circle the drain.  From then on, it becomes one interchangeable scene of zombies biting humans after the other.  It gets repetitive quickly and the gore is too brief to really put it over the top.

I will say I’ve enjoyed seeing Schaech’s transformation from potential leading man in That Thing You Do to DTV vet.  He stars in stuff like this every chance he gets, and he almost always looks like he’s having fun doing it.  His very appearance in crap like this usually guarantees I’ll watch it at some point.

DID BABY $HOOT HER $UGARDADDY? (1972) ** ½

A mobster is killed for a million dollars, but the money goes missing.  A detective is out to recover the loot and goes to pay a visit to the widow, who winds up being a nympho.  Her daughter, Baby catches them getting romantic and takes photos of them in the bath tub.  When his captain sees the pictures, he has him thrown off the case.   After Baby and her mother are murdered, the detective goes on the trail of the killer, a sexy stripper who works in a Mob-owned night club.

Did Baby $hoot Her $ugardaddy? is an uneven, but mostly agreeable ‘70s skin flick.  The strip club scenes are the best part.  There’s a memorable dance where a woman in a black trench coat brandishes a toy shotgun, but my favorite number was when a dancer wearing a motorcycle helmet shone a flashlight into the audience for some inexplicable reason.  Although you’ve got to wait a long time to get to the T & A, the short running time and snappy pace keeps things popping right along.  

The scenes with the detective are decent enough.  The actors aren’t quite strong enough to pull off their roles, but whenever our hero’s getting tangled up with Baby and her sex-crazed mother, it works.  (The reveal of the blue-faced corpse is effective too.)  While the ending is pretty much a bust, the dated ‘70s fashions and music go a long way to keeping Did Baby $hoot Her $ugardaddy? afloat till then.  Fans of ‘70s kitsch will love the song, “Baby’s Got a Fever” that plays over one of the stripteases.  That ditty alone is almost worth the price of admission.  

FRIEND REQUEST (2017) *

You know that one weirdo girl in a hoodie who always sits alone in the cafeteria?  You know how you get that feeling that maybe you should befriend her because society tells you that’s the nice thing to do?  Well, Friend Request is about the best argument for NOT doing that.

To add insult to injury, this gal has zero friends on (this movie’s fake, unauthorized, pleased-don’t-sue-us-Zuckerberg version of) Facebook.  That’s even worse than having no friends in real life because everyone on the golldurn internet can see what a loser you are.  Of course, if you take the bait and friend her on Fakebook, chances are she’s going to be a social media stalker.

In Friend Request, she’s not only a weirdo girl in a hoodie and a social media stalker, but she’s a witch too!  If you even think of unfriending her on Fakebook, she’s liable to hang herself, film it, and put it all over your social media to make you look like a complete asshole.  Then, she’ll probably use her witchcraft to make wasps kill off all your friends.

It’s like she’s unfriending you… LITERALLY!

Hopefully, that summation is enough so that you don’t even need to see Friend Request.  However, if you do take it upon yourself to see it, make sure you have a high tolerance for these lame “the internet is a scary place” movies.  I sure as shit don’t, and it was a chore to get through.

As horribly rotten as most of it is, I have to say that the performers were decent.  It’s just that they couldn’t elevate the shoddy material.  It’s better than Unfriended, that’s for sure, but that’s not saying much.

BURIED ALIVE (1990) **

A psycho in a Ronald Reagan mask likes to stalk scantily clad runaways from a school for wayward girls.  He wraps them in a straitjacket before walling them up behind a brick wall.  A new teacher (Karen Witter) comes to the school and almost immediately starts having weird visions.  She thinks she sees John Carradine coming out of the walls (and toilets), but no one, not even the head shrink at the school (Robert Vaughn) believes her.  More girls disappear, and she soon fears she’ll be next.

Produced by Harry Allan Towers and directed by Gerard (Edge of Sanity) Kikoine, this uneven (and very loose) Edgar Allan Poe adaption at least has the benefit of an awesome cast.  In addition to Robert Vaughn and John Carradine, we have Donald Pleasence (with a bad German accent and even worse wig) as a creepy teacher, Ginger Lynn (as the school’s resident bad girl), Nia Long, William Butler, and Arnold Vosloo.  Although all the plot developments are predictable, their efforts are enough to keep you watching.

Kikoine gives us a handful of effective freak-out scenes that feel like they came out of an Elm Street sequel.  (The breathing wall effect is pretty cool.)  The rest of the movie is something of a disappointment, especially considering how warped Kikoine’s Edge of Sanity was.  The kills aren’t all that graphic and are a letdown for the most part, but I did like the scene where one of the girls uses a mixer as a makeshift curling iron.  (Naturally, it ends badly.)  There’s also a decent shower initiation scene, although the nudity is rather fleeting.  Kikoine films it all in an atmospheric manner, giving us plenty of odd camera angles along the way.  Too bad much of the second act is plodding and the final reel is mostly a washout.

AKA:  Lost Girls.

FOUR DIMENSIONS OF GRETA (1973) ** ½

Pete (Frightmare) Walker already had a couple of softcore sex comedies under his belt before he made this, the first British 3-D movie.  A journalist named Hans (Tristan Rogers) is looking for a German au pair named Greta (Leena Skoog) on the streets of London.  He interviews four people, all of whom relate flashbacks of their encounters with Greta.  Each flashback is shown in 3-D (don’t worry, there’s a trippy red and blue visual cue so you know when to put on your glasses), contain lots of nudity, and are easily the best parts.  

In the first flashback, a former roommate reveals how Greta forced her to work like Cinderella while she participated in orgies.  In the second, Greta performs a sexy dance number behind a fluttering air curtain.  The third has her playing house with a soccer player (Robin Askwith).  They drink wine, she feeds him fruit, and then they hop in bed.  The final flashback finds Greta getting it on in a massage parlor with her boss.

Here’s a rundown on the 3-D effects:

·         3-D Bra
·         3-D Panties
·         3-D Feet
·         3-D Cigarette Holder
·         3-D Cigarette Holder (again)
·         3-D Feet (again)
·         3-D Punching Bag
·         3-D Wine Glasses (multiple)
·         3-D Grapes (multiple)
·         3-D Bananas (multiple)
·         3-D Robin Askwith
·         3-D Leena Skoog
·         3-D Whiskey Glass
·         3-D Broken Bottle
·         3-D Robin Askwith (again)

The effects themselves are a bit of a mixed bag.  The best effects are the ones where things come out of the foreground.  The effect of Greta riding back and forth on a swing really pops and the scene where she slowly comes forward blowing kisses at the audience is a showstopper.  The rest of the 3-D, especially the depth-of-field stuff, looks blurry and/or flat, but Walker does more with the gimmick than most directors.

Let’s make no mistake here, this is a gimmick movie.  Without the 3-D, Four Dimensions of Greta would’ve been completely forgettable.  The 3-D is just good enough to make it worthwhile.  It’s not as funny and fun as something like The Stewardesses, but it’s not bad, all things considered.

For a sex comedy, it’s not exactly funny, but there are a few chuckles to be had, most revolving around Robin Askwith.  (“Being with her was like getting a ball down the center!”)  As Greta, Skoog is a real find.  Admittedly, she’s not much of an actress.  She is incredibly sexy though and perks up the movie whenever she’s on screen.

It all kind of falls apart after the last 3-D sequence as the final act runs on a bit too long.  Still, there’s enough nudity to go around to keep you from getting bored.  As far as Pete Walker movies go, it’s probably the best one I’ve seen.

Walker’s next picture, The Flesh and Blood Show, also utilized the 3-D gimmick, but not nearly as well.

Rogers gets the best line of the movie when he says, “This is just like a cheap British sex movie!”

AKA:  Three Dimensions of Greta.

JEEPERS CREEPERS 3 (2017) ½ *

I wanted to check out Jeepers Creepers 3 last fall when it played in theaters for one day as a part of a Fathom special event.  I never got around to it and had to settle for catching it on Netflix instead.  Now that I’ve seen it, I can honestly say that keeping it in a theater for one day was one day too many.  This is by far,the worst horror sequel I’ve subjected myself to in some time.

The Creeper (Jonathan Breck) is back, and this time, the townspeople are ready for him.  With the help of a severed hand that produces psychic visions (don’t ask), The Sheriff (Stan Shaw) and an old granny (Meg Foster) set out to take him down once and for all.  Meanwhile, Meg’s granddaughter (Gabrielle Haugh) has been kidnapped by The Creeper and locked away in his rusted-out, gadget-laden car.  

We don’t see a whole lot of The Creeper in this one, which is odd.  I mean none of the Jeepers Creepers movies are any good, but Breck at least cuts an imposing silhouette as the main monster.  Instead, director Victor Salva wastes a lot of screen time on The Creeper’s booby-trapped car.  I don’t know why they did this, but I’d rather see a crummy monster attack than a scene of people accidentally getting killed by an old rust bucket car any day.

Jeepers Creepers 3 is loaded with awful special effects, maybe explains why they didn’t want to spend a lot of time with The Creeper.  Bad CGI effects are to be expected in something like this, but the practical ones are surprisingly shoddy.  Take for instance the scene where The Creeper’s severed hand comes to life and grabs the townsfolk.  The hand looks like something out of an eight-year-old’s magic show.  There’s also an effect involving an eyeball popping out of its socket that is so phony that all I could do was sing, “Jeepers… Creepers… where’d you get THAT peeper?  K-Mart?I?”

I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life, but I’m starting to think indiscriminately watching any horror movie with the numeral 3 is slowly becoming one of them.

Meg Foster and Stan Shaw deserve better than this mess.  All Foster gets to do is dig around in her backyard a lot and look spaced out like she’s in the midst of an Oxy high.  As the Sheriff, Shaw basically just barks orders out at his deputies without really ever doing much else.  He’s a job title in search of a character.

The only touch I like was the fact that this time The Creeper is equipped with a weapon that resembles the Glaive from Krull.  Fans of the series (if such a thing exists) will enjoy seeing how this one connects to the last entry.  Other than that, there’s not much here to recommend.

AKA:  Jeepers Creepers:  Ravenous.

If you’re hankering for more reviews of horror sequels (including my thoughts on Jeepers Creepers 2), you should check out my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, available now from Amazon.  You can order a copy here:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1542566622/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520113366&sr=8-1&keywords=mitch+lovell

If you’re tech savvy, you can get the e-book version on Kindle:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B6TBVG1/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1520120839&sr=8-2&keywords=mitch+lovell 

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (2018) *** ½

(Note:  I’ll try to keep this review as brief and spoiler-free as possible.)

The term “epic” gets thrown around a lot in Hollywood, but if any film deserves to be called epic, it’s Avengers:  Infinity War.  It’s a sprawling tale following over sixty characters on several different planets and sometimes on multiple planes of reality.  For ten years, The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been leaving breadcrumbs across nearly twenty movies to get to this moment and for the most part, it works as well as anyone could’ve hoped.

It’s overlong, sometimes unwieldy, and the seams threaten to come apart at any given moment.  There are a LOT of narrative balls to juggle.  YOU try to cram nine different franchises into a single movie.  Despite the massive length (which simultaneously feels too long and curiously rushed at the same time), the goodwill the characters have built up over the past decade and the sheer spectacle of the never-ending battle sequences and special effects set pieces glue everything together.

Infinity War really belongs to Thanos (Josh Brolin).  His presence dominates the film as the various Avengers, Guardians, and SHIELD agents splinter off and team up for their own side missions.  For an Avengers movie, I was surprised by how much the Guardians of the Galaxy were in it.  They are crucial to the narrative and help to bring much of the earthbound Marvel characters into the cosmos.  My favorite moments were the interactions between Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper).  (Thor calls him “rabbit”.)  The relationship between Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) continues to impress, and the addition of Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) into their dynamic was a nice touch.  I did feel like Captain America (Chris Evans) kind of got the short end of the stick from a narrative standpoint, as did Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), although the Wakanda-set finale is a real showstopper.

For sheer entertainment, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth.  It’s as close to a big comic book crossover as we’re likely ever to get.  I also liked seeing some familiar faces that we haven’t seen in a while popping up in cameos.

Some of the deaths of beloved characters seem like… well… overkill at times, especially near the end.  (I guess they were trying to make up for the lack of stakes in Civil War.)  That said, there was at least one moment that will probably get Marvel fans choked up.  Even then, I’m sure the filmmakers won’t have much trouble bringing most (or all) of them back at some point.  We won’t know for sure till the next one.

Spider-Man gets the best line of the movie when he gets to try on his Iron Spider suit for the first time and says, “It smells like a new car in here!”

Marvel Cinematic Universe Scorecard:

Avengers:  Age of Ultron:  ****
The Incredible Hulk:  ****
Iron Man:  ****
Thor:  Ragnarok:  ****
Spider-Man:  Homecoming:  ****
Iron Man 3:  ****
Captain America:  Civil War:  *** ½
Ant-Man:  *** ½
Guardians of the Galaxy:  *** ½
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:  *** ½ 
Avengers:  Infinity War:  *** ½
Black Panther:  *** ½ 
The Avengers:  ***
Captain America:  The First Avenger:  ***
Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  ***
Thor:  ***
Thor:  The Dark World:  ***
Iron Man 2:  ***
Doctor Strange:  ** ½