DECAMPITATED (1998) *

Decampitated is a terrible low budget horror spoof released by Troma that at least has the benefit of a great pre-title sequence.  It revolves around a sexy coed being chased by a killer in the woods.  During the pursuit, she keeps inadvertently keeps stepping into bear traps and must resort to drastic measures to free herself.  I really enjoyed this scene.  It’s a lot of fun and offers up a satisfying balance of humor and gore.  It was enough to make me think this was going to be a better-than-average no-budget Troma flick.  My hopes were almost immediately dashed after the credits rolled.  

A bunch of would-be campers accidentally crash their car in the woods.  They decide to walk the rest of the way and immediately get lost.  A demented killer in a beekeeper’s mask soon pops up to take out the campers one by one.

The opening sequence aside, the humor throughout the rest of the film is obnoxious and unfunny.  Most of the movie is just slight variations of characters running through the woods while being pursued by the killer.  The gore, including a beer tap plunged into a guy’s gut, a fishing hook landing in a girl’s cheek, and plenty of severed limbs, is okay.  Too bad the running gag of campers being brutally murdered only to turn up later with minor injuries later gets old quick.  The overuse of stock library music and “comedic” sound effects quickly get annoying too.  Maybe I would’ve felt differently if the actors had been anyone but annoying amateurs that screamed incessantly and pathetically mugged for the camera.  

So, if you want to laugh, check out the first five minutes of the flick.  If you want to experience the cinematic equivalent to nails on a chalkboard watch the rest of the movie.  In short, Decampitated is nothing to lose your head over.

THE ADDAMS FAMILY (2019) ** ½

If you need something to tide you over in between Hotel Transylvania sequels, you can do a lot worse than this CGI animated Addams Family remake.  It has character designs and art direction similar to the Hotel Transylvania franchise, but with a sharper edge that adults will enjoy.  As far as Addams Family movies go, it’s much better than either of the limp big screen adaptations.  Still, it’s somewhat lacking the charm of the original show. 

I especially enjoyed seeing the Addams Family origin story during the pre-title sequence, mostly because it’s something we haven’t already seen before.  The rest of the picture plays like an overlong episode updated for modern times.  There are a few amusing one-liners and sight gags, and at least one big laugh-out-loud moment, courtesy of Thing’s shall we say… internet habits.  Unfortunately, the laugh ratio is about the same as an average episode.  That’s okay for a half-hour TV show, but for a ninety-minute movie, it needed a few more guffaws to really make it worthwhile. 

The voice cast is great.  Charlize Theron maybe vamps it up too much but is nevertheless amusing.  Getting Oscar Isaac to play Gomez was pretty much spot-on casting.  He has the same enthusiasm John Astin brought to the role without the gratuitous overacting of Raul Julia.  It’s Chloe Grace Moretz who steals the movie as Wednesday.  Her most memorable scene plays like a cross between Frankenstein and the frog scene in E.T.  It’s almost enough to make you wish they made a live-action version with the same talent. 

Too bad you’ve got to sit through a plot thinner than Gomez’s mustache.  Even Allison Janney is unable to do much with the shrill home makeover show villain.  The updating of characters interactions with the family are fairly obvious too.  That said, it’s a nice little rainy-day afternoon matinee for kids to enjoy with just enough a bite to keep the adults from squirming in their seats.  

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: SLICE (2018) *

Slice starts off with a massive exposition dump that is so goofy and more than a little stupid that it immediately takes you aback.  You try to get your bearings, but the movie just hammers you with more and more useless world-building shit that you just have to fucking give up halfway through the longwinded explanation.  The film never recovers from that opening sequence as it kind of plateaus into a sea of unending, unfunny comedy shtick with an occasional horror movie cliché tossed in there for no good reason whatsoever. 

You see, when the local asylum was torn down, the ghosts that haunted the place had nowhere to go.  So, the town displaced them and made them live in… (are you ready for this?) Ghost Town.  A pizza delivery joint was placed on the ruins of the old asylum, and now it seems like their delivery boys are being killed off one by one.  Is it the work of a werewolf delivery boy (Doritos Spokesman, Chance the Rapper)?  Or are there other sinister forces at work?

Writer/director Austin Vesely has a lot of half-baked ideas, but there’s nothing to stick them to.  (More likely, he was fully baked when he wrote the script.)  I will say that the cinematography is kind of cool and the constant use of neon colors make the whole thing look like an overlong music video.  There’s style to spare, and absolutely no substance to be found.  Vesely probably thought he was making a statement about America being built on a burial ground, but he’s just not smart enough to see it through or come close to sticking the landing as the whole thing is pretty much a mess from frame one. 

Slice is all over the place.  It tries for an ‘80s horror-comedy vibe, but the tone and the performances are wildly uneven.  (The actors often feel like they’re acting in entirely different movies.)  The horror stuff is just too goofy to click, and the comedy shit is painfully unfunny.  It also doesn’t help that the chintzy effects (coupled with the lame humor) make Slice feel like a slightly more respectable version of a Troma movie.  The witches’ magic effects are horrible and the less said about the werewolf make-up, the better.  I mean I kept wondering why the hero never turned into a werewolf.  Then, with eight minutes left to spare in the film, we finally see the werewolf and it becomes painfully obvious why.  It looks fucking terrible. 

Another problem is that there are just too many characters.  All of them are thinly sketched and don’t leave much of an impression.  Vesely is just unable to wrangle the various subplots in any kind of meaningful manner.  These subplots include (but are not limited to) a political conspiracy involving witches, a whodunit involving delivery boys being murdered, ghosts trying to coexist with the living, and a lycanthropic Wild One kind of thing.  A movie about any one of these elements might’ve been okay.  Having all of them together just doesn’t work at all. 

THE RING (2002) *

I went to a horror convention back in the summer of 2002 and there was a vendor who had piles of unmarked VHS tapes for free.  I took my copy home and played it on the old VCR (RIP) and it turned out to be the black and white tape featured in The Ring.  It was a great promotional gimmick, and like many of you, I went out and saw the movie on opening night.  Unfortunately, that old tape is infinitely scarier than anything in the actual movie. 

I hated The Ring when it first came out.  I probably hate it more now in retrospect due to the fact that it spawned an entire genre of Little Ghost Girls on a Bad Hair Day horror movies.  That is to say, American remakes of Asian horror movies.  Every few months during the ‘00s, one of these turds like The Grudge, Pulse, and Dark Water would land in multiplexes, much to the chagrin of true horror fans wanting a REAL horror movie.  

At least this flick solidified Naomi Watts as a leading lady.  It was a big hit, so she was able to generate a career from it.  She’s not exactly good in it, but she looks hot.  The only thing saving The Ring from a No Stars review is the fact she’s in almost every scene and since she’s so easy on the eyes I couldn’t bear to give it anything less.  

After all these years, it still pains me to say that a guy named “Gore” Verbinski directed a horror movie that had absolutely no gore in it.  I still can’t believe it.  I liked his Lone Ranger flick, and one or two of the Pirate movies are okay, but his horror films are just total crap.  I will say the opening sequence is effective.  However, the payoff is utter shit, and the rest of the movie just gets worse as it goes along.

That’s not even getting to the stupid “rules” of the movie.  If you watch a haunted videotape, you receive a mysterious phone call, and then seven days later, you die.  The villain is even worse.  Little Ghost Girls have never been, nor will they ever be scary.  The only good part is when a horse gets eaten by a boat, but even that’s not all that great. 

Like, The Sixth Sense, it’s also a Creepy Kid movie.  No, I’m not just talking about the Ghost Girl, I’m talking about the kid who plays Watts’ son.  He’s one of those cliched precocious, wide-eyed, know-it-all, annoying-as-fuck brats.  Not only that, but the kid delivers what is probably the worst child performance in the history of film.  After his first line of dialogue, I was already rooting for the Ghost Girl to drag his ass down the well. 

Here’s a hint to just how dumb this movie is.  When you play the DVD, there’s a tape roll during the FBI Warning label to make you think the DVD is haunted.  However, only a VHS tape would do that.  A DVD would just freeze up or get pixelated if there was something wrong with it.  The target audience (it’s one of those useless PG-13 horror movies) is probably too stupid to realize the difference.

FILM HOUSE FEVER (1986) **

Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Junior star as two video junkies who run out of movies to watch at home.  While looking through the paper, they see an ad for an all-night film festival, so they hop in their car and speed down to the theater.  There, they are treated to the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” commercial, drive-in ads, and trailers for The Psychic, 2000 Maniacs, and Blood Feast before the show begins.

The “show” as it is, is nothing more than clips, snippets, and montages of old horror and exploitation movies.  This stuff is a lot of fun, but the scenes with Buscemi and Boone are corny, unfunny, and sometimes painful to sit through.  Their screen time would’ve been much better spent on more trailers or clips.  The useless cutaways to them eating popcorn in the theater get annoying fast and ruin the flow of the compilation.  

It’s really not their fault though.  I like both actors a lot.  It’s just that the shtick they’ve been given is awful thin.  Also, with an hour-long running time, that means you only get about forty minutes of clips and twenty minutes of their mugging, which isn’t a good trade-off if you ask me.

The clips themselves are pretty good though.  They include:  Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Rocktober Blood, Something Weird, The Gruesome Twosome, The Wizard of Gore, Color Me Blood Red, Daughter of the Sun, She-Devils on Wheels, Sex and the College Girl, Living Venus, Bad Girls Do Cry, Warrior and the Sorceress, Just for the Hell of It, Suburbia, Sno-Line, Steel Arena, and Scum of the Earth.  Even with an impressive line-up like that, it pains me to say that the best segments aren’t always shown.  The best snippets come from a black and white Indiana Jones spoof called Cleveland Smith:  Bounty Hunter, starring Bruce Campbell.

I’m a big fan of horror movie compilations and I’m here to say, this is not the way to do it.  If you’ve got your heart set on showing the bozos gawking at the clips, do it in such a way that it doesn’t disrupt the flow of the movie.  I did like the segment about then-unknown actors (like Harvey Korman and Charles Grodin) paying their dues in schlock, which is fitting because Buscemi and Boone are doing the exact same thing.  

Still, I can’t completely hate any horror compilation that has such a heavy concentration of Herschell Gordon Lewis movies.  It also contains a montage of his work that is very similar to the one found on all those Something Weird releases.  Because of that, Lewis fans will probably want to check it out.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) **

Vincent Gallo and his wife (Tricia Vessey) are on their honeymoon in Paris, but he keeps putting her off to bug a bunch of doctors about a latest miracle drug.  Meanwhile, Core (Beatrice Dalle) goes around the city devouring men while her husband (Alex Descas) cleans up her messes.  We eventually learn they are both afflicted with a strange disease that turns them into cannibals whenever they are sexually aroused.

Claire (High Life) Denis’ Trouble Every Day is a deliberately paced variation on the vampire legend.  It explores the loneliness and isolation that comes with savage bloodlust, and does so in a moody, artsy-fartsy way.  It stops just short of being absorbing, but it does give you enough tantalizing glimpses of the female form and/or vomitous bloodletting to keep you watching.

Gallo is one of my favorite actors, and he is perfect for the lead.  (He also has one of the best websites on the planet.)  At all times, he looks sheepish and sad, with his melancholy suggesting something sinister lurks just below the surface.  Dalle is quite good too, and her performance reminded me a bit of Anne Parillaud in Innocent Blood. 

For a while, it works.  However, it ultimately falls apart due to the lethargic pacing.  I’ll admit, I started to zone out during some of the long takes where nothing happens thanks to the droning soundtrack.  

The more interesting passages deal with the practicality of living with the disease.  It’s decidedly less so when the concentration is on Gallo’s search for a cure as many of the lab-based scenes are the weakest in the film.  Still, stick with it and you’ll be rewarded by a scene where Gallo literally eats a woman out.  Even then, it’s not quite enough to make up for the movie’s more lackluster passages. 

Still, if you ever wanted to see Vincent Gallo shoot his load, this is the movie for you.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: DON’T MESS WITH MY SISTER! (1985) * ½

Usually when I do The 31 Days of Horror-Ween, I pick the movies out ahead of time.  Sometimes, in an effort to cover all genres, I accidentally wind up with a movie that Isn’t Really a Horror Movie.  It looks like a horror movie.  Sounds like a horror movie.  It even comes from people with a pedigree for making horror movies.  However, for whatever reason, it’s anything but.  That’s pretty much the case with the awesomely titled, awfully made Don’t Mess with My Sister!

Steven (Joe Perce) is stuck in a dead-end job working as an accountant in his brothers in-law’s junkyard.  Steven’s wife, Clara (Jeannine Lemay) hires belly dancer Annika (Laura Lanfranchi) for his birthday party.  When she leaves her costume at his house, Steven agrees to return it to her.  He then gives her a ride to her next client, who tries to force himself on Annika.  Steven intervenes on her behalf, accidentally killing the guy in the process.  In the throes of passion, they wind up hooking up, and when Clara learns of Steven’s infidelity, she sends her burly brothers out to teach him a lesson. 

Don’t Mess with My Sister! gives director Meir Zarchi another opportunity to explore his penchant for giving men with oddly shaped faces long, disgusting close-ups.  Unlike his classic I Spit on Your Grave, there’s no real payoff to justify the slow-burn opening.  It gets bogged down right from the get-go with lots of annoying family drama and it never really recovers.  To make matters worse, much of it is just plain boring.  

Badly acted, and crudely put together, it lacks the punch to the gut feeling of I Spit on your Grave.  I don’t know if Zarchi set out to recapture lightning in a bottle, but there’s absolutely no lightning to be found here.  Heck, you’d be hard-pressed to find a bottle.  

I will give him this, he always fills his movies with weird touches that make them memorable.  I mean most filmmakers would’ve just made the Annika character a stripper and called it a day.  Zarchi instead turns her into a belly dancer and gives her lots of long scenes of her fluttering her belly around to Moroccan music.  He also has an undeniable knack for coming up with a great title.

Sadly, to my chagrin, this isn’t really a horror movie.  It’s more of a tale of white trash relationship woes.  At times, it almost feels like a scuzzy version of a Lifetime movie.  There was a kernel of an interesting premise here.  Unfortunately, it just devolves into a lot of scenes of family members shouting, pushing, hitting, and discharging firearms.  You know, typical domestic disturbance stuff.  Hardly the sort of thing you’d expect from the guy who made I Spit on Your Grave. 

AKA:  Family and Honor.  AKA:  American Junkyard.  AKA:  N.Y. Fire Street.