THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR WEEN: PUPPET MASTER: THE LEGACY (2003) **

Puppet Master:  The Legacy is the eighth entry in the long-running franchise and the first one to be directed by producer Charles Band (using a pseudonym, “Robert Talbot”).  He didn’t have much work to do as this is essentially a “Best of” clips show masquerading as an actual sequel.  (The editor was the real hero here.)  Fans of the series will probably be disappointed by the lack of new puppet action, but for a guy like me who hasn’t seen these movies in a while, I guess it was an okay refresher course (especially since I plan on watching the rest of them in the next few days).

A thief (Kate Orsini) holds Andre Toulon’s apprentice, Peter Hertz (Jacob Witkin) hostage and forces him to divulge his puppet mastery secrets.  He eventually relents and begins to bring her up to speed on the history of the puppets.  And by that, I mean he just shows a bunch of clips from the Puppet Master series.   

Since The Legacy is basically a recounting of the entire franchise thus far, that means we get quite a lot of killer puppet action with the bare minimum of plot.  I mean I can’t say any of the Puppet Master films ever came close to anything approaching a “good” movie, so whittling seven of them down to make one passable eighty-minute flick wasn’t really a difficult task.  Even if we’ve seen all this shit before, it’s hard to hate any movie in which people get offed by killer puppets about every five minutes or so.  

The new scenes that help to string the flashbacks together are adequate at best.  They take place on one claustrophobic set and look like they were filmed in a day.  Unfortunately, they feature no new Puppet Mastering, which is disappointing to say the least.  Even with these lackluster wraparound segments, Puppet Master:  The Legacy is still one of the better movies in the franchise (which really isn’t saying much).

AKA:  Puppet Master Legacy.

PRIME EVIL: FANGS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1973) **

Anita Ekberg inherits a crumbling old castle and heads off to the old country to claim the title of countess.  She stops for a drink at an inn where she learns everyone in the countryside is afraid of her family.  When Ekberg arrives at the castle, she discovers she comes from a long line of vampires and that her uncle (Gianni Medici) is a master of “necro-biology”.  Naturally, he plans on making Ekberg a vampire too. 

Fangs of the Living Dead comes to us from Amando de Ossorio, the director of the Blind Dead movies.  Although those films were atmospheric and unforgettable, everything about this one is thoroughly ordinary.  There’s nothing here you haven’t already seen hundreds of times before.  We have busty barmaids serving drinks in taverns full of suspicious townsfolk, flashbacks of women being burned alive at the stake, angry villagers brandishing torches, lap dissolve vampire deaths, and crumbling castles complete with spooky graveyards, creepy crypts, and a torture dungeon. 

De Ossorio relies heavily on these durable clichés and proudly wears his influences (the Universal horror movies of the ‘40s and the Hammer horror films of the ‘60s), but never quite finds a way to make them gel.  It mostly feels like a greatest hits package of horror clichés than a real movie.  All of this is watchable certainly, mostly because of Ekberg’s heaving bosom.  Even then, it isn’t quite enough to make Fangs of the Living Dead a winner. 

AKA:  Malenka.  AKA:  Bloody Girl.  AKA:  Malenka, the Niece of the Vampire.  AKA:  The Vampire’s Niece.  AKA:  Malenka, the Vampire.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN (2018) ***

Goosebumps were not my bag.  By the time they came out, I was already reading Stephen King, so I had no interest in them whatsoever.  I only saw the first movie because my daughter wanted to see it and while she enjoyed it immensely, I was not so amused.  I’m happy to report that Goosebumps 2:  Haunted Halloween is a considerable improvement in just about every way.  Not only that, it’s a lot of fun for grown-ups too.

A couple of kids find Slappy the evil ventriloquist dummy in a creepy abandoned house.  When it comes to life, they think it’s cool because it helps them fight off a nasty bully.  When Slappy tries to become a permanent member of their family, the kids dump his ass in a river.  This makes Slappy angry and he gets his revenge by bringing all the Halloween decorations in town to life. 

Since I was not a fan of the original, I went into Goosebumps 2 with absolutely no expectations.  Much to my surprise, it was fast moving fun with some real laugh-out-loud moments along the way.  I can’t even remember cracking a smile throughout the first one.  The fate of Terry, the slow-witted pumpkin in particular made me laugh a very long time. 

It felt like the first Goosebumps movie was trying to cram all the stories into one place.  This feels more like a one-off.  Because it has a narrower scope, it handily accomplishes what it sets out to do.  The design work on the creatures is impressive and there are a few moments that may be intense for young ones, something which couldn’t be said for its predecessor.  Speaking of young ones, my daughter was on the edge of her seat the whole time and was cackling throughout the entire movie. 

Although not quite up to the standards of The House with a Clock in its Walls, this is still my second favorite Jack Black kid’s horror movie of 2018.  Sure, he isn’t given a whole lot to do, which may be disappointing for some, but I felt the younger actors were strong enough to sustain your interest without relying on Black’s constant mugging.  He is around just long enough to set up another sequel though (not to mention take a funny jab at It).

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: TREMORS: A COLD DAY IN HELL (2018) **

Graboids have been found in the Great White North.  Naturally, it’s up to Burt Gummer (Michael Gross) and his son (Jamie Kennedy) to stop them.  They eventually learn Burt is suffering from a life-threatening illness due to a run-in with a graboid in a previous installment.  That of course means they must trap one of the giant worms alive to make an antidote.

The long-running Tremors series is more consistently mediocre than your average DTV franchise.  This sixth installment is on the lower rungs of the Tremors ladder, but it’s a slight improvement over the last entry, Bloodlines.  You can say one thing for the Tremors movies:  At least they keep the always great Michael Gross employed. 

Bloodlines did the tried-and-true sequel formula of taking the same premise and putting it in a new location, Africa.  That didn’t really add anything to the Tremors lore besides giving Burt a son he could hurl insults off.  A Cold Day in Hell once again changes the location, this time to the Canadian Arctic.

Now this change showed a modicum of promise.  The opening scene in particular is a real showstopper as several scientists get attacked by a graboid hidden somewhere under the ice and snow.  This sequence also showcases some surprising gore for a PG-13 movie (the frozen severed head was a nice touch).  Too bad the rest of the movie takes place in a thawed stretch of land that’s home to a boring government lab set-up.  From here on out, most of the attacks occur when graboid tentacles crash through windows and/or floorboards.  We do get a nifty “ass-blaster” graboid that flies, but it doesn’t stick around for very long.  In other words, it’s just like any other Tremors movie, but with snow-covered mountains in the background.

It was a shame Kevin Bacon’s Tremors TV show didn’t get picked up.  Maybe now he can finally return to the franchise and give it a proper send-off.  That’s about the only way you’re going to breathe a little life into these movies.  (Or at the very least, get Fred Ward back.)  

Gross gets the best line of the movie when he says, “My balls are in the Guinness book of balls!”

Hey, are you wondering where my review for Tremors:  Bloodlines is?  Well, you can find it in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  To get your copy, follow this handy link:  https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Book-Horror-Mitch-Lovell/dp/1542566622/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538450805&sr=8-3 

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: DUDE BRO PARTY MASSACRE 3 (2015) **

Well, the last film in our 31 Movies of Horror-Ween celebration, Thankskilling 3 didn’t have a Part 2, so what better way to follow it up than with a movie that doesn’t have a Part 2 or a Part 1.  Of course, I’m talking about Dude Bro Party Massacre 3.  Remember how Thankskilling 3 claimed that all copies of Part 2 were destroyed?  This one claims to be the only copy of Part 3 in existence.  It’s the next logical extension of the Grindhouse rip-off.  Instead of being a sleazy movie being shown in a fleabag theater in the ‘70s, it’s a flick someone taped off television in the ‘80s (complete with fake commercial breaks).

The best part is the flashbacks highlighting what happened in the last two entries, which gives us scene after scene of unrelenting gore and several clever moments.  Once the actual movie takes over, it becomes increasingly uneven as it goes along.  That said, that opening montage alone is almost worth the price of admission.

A killer known as “Motherface” kills a frat boy named Brock (Alec Owen), the star of the last two installments.  His twin brother Brent (also Owen) pledges at his brother’s fraternity and tags along to a bros-only weekend in the woods.  Naturally, Motherface shows up to pick the dudes off one by one.

The hit-to-miss ratio gets more sporadic the more the movie wears on, with the pendulum of quality swinging wildly from annoying to genuinely amusing.  Some of the kills are funny (like when a guy is about to get sick and Motherface cuts his throat, so puke comes out of the wound instead of blood), but the film is less and less successful the further it gets away from the slasher parody concept.  The stuff with the pair of idiot cops isn’t very funny either and takes up way too much screen time.  No matter how uneven the gags are, it’s hard to hate any movie that borrows from both Die Hard 2 and Amazon Women on the Moon, not to mention features cameos by Nina Hartley AND Larry King.  

RETRO NIGHTMARES DOUBLE FEATURE: SWEET SIXTEEN & THE CONVENT

Well, last week’s Bloody Disgusting’s Retro Nightmares double feature of Amityville sequels was canceled, which sent me into a deep week-long depression.  Luckily for me, their screening of Sweet Sixteen and The Convent didn’t suffer the same fate.  As I learned from their showing of The House on Sorority Row, you should never turn down an opportunity to see a slasher from 1983 on the big screen, especially one that stars Bo (Time Served) Hopkins!

SWEET SIXTEEN  (1983)  ** ½ 

Sweet Sixteen has an incredible cast for this kind of thing.  In addition to Hopkins, who plays (what else?) a sheriff, we have Dana Kimmell, who played one of the greatest Final Girls in screen history the year before in Friday the 13^th Part 3-D as his mystery-solving daughter, as well as Steve (“Andy… You… GOONIE!”) Antin as her tagalong brother.  There’s also Patrick (The Howling) Macnee as an archeologist, Video Vacuum favorite Michael (Halloween 4) Pataki as the sleazy town elder, Don (Licence to Kill) Stroud as a racist redneck, Don (Halloween 5) Shanks as a Native American, and Susan (The Manitou) Strasberg in a part so small that she must figure into the twist ending because why else would they give Susan Strasberg such a seemingly small throwaway part if they weren’t going to somehow give her a doozy of a scene in the last five minutes?

The movie really belongs to Aleisa Shirley who is excellent (and gets naked a lot) as Melissa, the girl who’s sixteenth birthday is just around the corner.  It seems that every boy she flirts with winds up stabbed to death.  When she casts suspicion onto some of the local Native Americans, it stirs up a lot of bad blood within the town. 

Despite the great cast, they’re all sort of wasted.  There’s also a lot of plot stuff that gets set up that never has a proper payoff.  I mean why hype Kimmell’s character up as the amateur sleuth if all you’re going to allow her to do in the finale is run around and scream her head off?  Speaking of which, the final scene requires a ton of last-minute exposition, most of which is overexplained to the point where it starts to get annoying. 

I guess there was an okay mystery movie lurking somewhere within the confines of Sweet Sixteen, but the producers decided to retool it to fit within the slasher formula.  The subplot about racism towards the Native American population is noble I guess.  However, the Native’s involvement is more of a strung-along red herring than an earnest attempt at racial harmony.

Still, the cast makes up for a lot (though not all) of the film’s shortcomings.  I mean, how am I not going to see a movie in which Bo Hopkins plays a sheriff?

 

Oh, what's this?  Just me and Bo Hopkins!

Kimmell gets the best line of the movie when she tells Antin, “You heard what dad said!  There’s a killer on the loose!  I don’t want to be turned into cole slaw!” 

THE CONVENT  (2000)  ***  

Throughout much of The Convent, you can hear director Mike Mendez screaming, “Hey, look at me!  I’m the next Sam Raimi!”  You can certainly do that if you have the chops to pull it off.  Done the wrong way, The Convent could’ve been an embarrassing Troma horror-comedy.  Mendez however has a knack for combining gross-out humor, badass action, and over the top gore and making it a damn good time. 

A crazy orphan named Christine (Oakley Stevenson) apparently kicked down the doors to the titular nunnery and killed several nuns.  Forty years later, some college kids break into the convent as part of a Rush Week prank.  Little do they know some half-assed amateur devil worshippers want to revive the undead nuns.  Once the nuns possess the teenagers, they set out to hold a virgin sacrifice to bring about the Antichrist.  It’s then up to the lone survivor (Joanna Canton) to enlist the help of the now-grown Christine (Adrienne Barbeau) to send the nuns back to Hell.   

The plot is a little on the funky side.  Sometimes it feels like it’s making up the “rules” as it goes along.  Other times, it feels like there might’ve been a reel is missing.  The ending is also rushed, abrupt, and very cheap looking.  (It looks like they ran out of money.)  However, it’s hard not to love a movie in which Adrienne Barbeau rides a motorcycle like The Terminator and blows away zombie demon nuns.

The Convent doesn’t always work and is crude in places, but the gusto Mendez puts into the film is admirable and the results are often a lot of fun.  I mean it’s hard not to like any movie that starts with nuns being beaten with a baseball bat, set on fire, and then shotgunned to death. The make-up is reminiscent of Night of the Demons, but with Day-Glo effects and the slimy gore effects, though inconsistent, will leave you with a big stupid grin on your face.  

Barbeau is a lot of fun as the ass-kicking Christine.  It’s a shame she doesn’t show up until the last act.  It’s also fun seeing Coolio and Bill Moseley being teamed together as cops who confiscate “marijuana substance” from the teens.  It’s Megahn Perry though who gives the best performance as the sexy goth virgin who knows all about the convent’s sordid history.

PRIME EVIL: AENIGMA (1988) *** ½

Lucio Fulci is one of my favorite directors of all time.  I mean I have a Lucio Fulci T-shirt.  I can’t say the same for Alfred Hitchcock.

Because of that, I’ll watch anything Fulci directed, no matter how bad it is, and trust me, he made some pretty bad ones in his time.  For every Zombie, there’s a Manhattan Baby.  Luckily for me, Aenigma contains some of the most bonkers imagery Fulci ever put on film.  He made it just after The Devil’s Honey, and if you thought your jaw dropped on that one, wait till you check this out.

Aenigma plays like a cross between Carrie and Patrick.  A prank goes wrong at a girls’ college, leaving a student brain dead and in a coma.  Soon after, the perpetrators of the prank begin dying off in increasingly bizarre ways.  Every time someone dies, the girl’s brainwaves spike.  She also takes to possessing the new girl in school and using her as an instrument of revenge.

I’ll concede that some of the kills are stupid (like when a statue comes to life).  For the most part though, they’re flat-out amazing (like the cannibalism sex dream).  Fulci (who also has a cameo as a cop) goes for an over the top Argento vibe for these scenes and while some may argue that none of it makes sense, there is a sort of Elm Street-style logic to it all (like when a girl keeps running from room to room and finds the same decapitated body).  

Whatever faults the film may or may not have, you have to admit, it’s centerpiece sequence packs a wallop.  The snail attack scene has to be seen to be believed.  What makes it great was that the actress really was covered head to toe in slimy slithering snails to accomplish the scene, which to me is an impressive feat.  Seriously, fuck CGI.  For my money, this sequence (which begins with a single snail hanging ominously from a Rocky 3 poster) ranks right up there with the spider scene in The Beyond.  

Am I being a little to generous showering praise upon Aenigma?  Maybe.  Did I have a blast with it from start to finish?  You bet.  It may not be perfect, but it’s hard not to love any movie that contains a scene in which a poster of Tom Cruise portends the appearance of an evil spirit. 

AKA:  Enigma.