RINGS (2017) *

Julia (Matilda Lutz) is worried when her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) stops talking to her after he goes away to college.  She goes to the campus to investigate and discovers he’s part of an experiment by his professor (Johnny Galecki) who makes all his students watch the haunted videotape from The Ring.  Each student has a “tail”, someone they can pass the curse along to, so no one gets killed.  Of course, Julia fucks things up, leading to the death of one of the students.

So far, so not-as-bad-as-The-Ring.  It’s not great, but at least it’s interesting enough.  It takes the original premise, expands upon it, and (at first) breathes a little life into it.  Then it all goes downhill.  Big time.  

From there, it becomes a story of Julia receiving new visions from the tape.  This leads her on a quest to find Samara’s father (an actor too good for this nonsense who I can’t believe would’ve wasted his time on this bullshit) who instigated Samara’s abuse from the very beginning.  Like most useless, unnecessary sequels, it gives us a whole lot of new, pointless backstory that no one asked for or needed.  In fact, the movie dovetails into this plotline so quickly that it feels like the filmmakers took two scripts and Frankensteined them together.  (The fact the film had FIVE credited screenwriters kind of confirms my suspicions.)  

The first half-hour or so isn’t exactly great, but it’s watchable.  The next hour-plus is a boring, excruciating slog.  That’s not even mentioning the fucking atrocious, seemingly tacked-on “twist” ending that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.  

Say what you will about the original Ring, but at least the film LOOKED good.  This one looks like a double-digit Saw sequel, with lots of grimy-on-purpose cinematography and long stretches that are almost too dark to see.  I’m starting to think total darkness would be preferable to watching another Ring movie ever again.

AKA:  The Ring 3.  AKA:  The Ring:  Rebirth. 

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: MUTANT WAR (1988) *** ½

Matt Mitler returns as reluctant hero Harry Trent in Brett Piper’s superior sequel to Battle for the Lost Planet.  This time, Harry is more of a Mad Max-style hero, roaming through wasteland looking for gas.  He stumbles upon a girl named Fox (Alex Pirnie) whose sister has been kidnapped by mutants who are trying to propagate their race with any human woman they can get their hands on.  Together, they set out to rescue her. 

Battle for the Lost Planet was a marvel of low budget ingenuity.  This one ups the ante considerably; to the point where it looks just as good (and in some instances, even better) than its higher-budgeted contemporaries.  It’s crammed to the gills with great stop-motion monsters, fun special effects, excellent mutant make-up, and gorgeous matte paintings.  Just when you think it can’t get any better, Cameron Mitchell shows up as the villain!  

Even when you can spot the seams in the production, there’s no denying the DIY charm Piper brings to the table.  I’ve sat through many of these Mad Max rip-offs before, so I appreciate one that does a lot with very little.  Mitler once again makes for a fine hero and carries the film on his very capable shoulders.  Also, the large assembly of monsters and mutants more than makes it a better pairing for The 31 Days of Horror-Ween than the original.

Like Battle, it runs out of steam before it reaches the finish line, but it’s an impressive leap forward for Piper in just about every way.  In only two years’ time he was able to make a movie that looks much bigger and more professional than the original.  Even though it’s much more polished than its predecessor, it still contains the same spunky charm.  Not only that, it's just flat-out entertaining.  In a month full of forgettable horror movies, Mutant War is a breath of fresh air.

AKA:  Mutant Men Want Pretty Women.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: BATTLE FOR THE LOST PLANET (1986) ** ½

Harry Trent (Matt Mitler from The Mutilator) infiltrates a top-secret government facility and steals a precious tape containing sensitive data.  When the security guards give chase, Harry escapes in a rocket ship and winds up in outer space.  There, he witnesses a race of pig-faced aliens destroying Earth in a matter of minutes.  After five years in orbit, Harry makes it back down to Earth and teams up with a band of survivors to save (what’s left of) the world. 

I kind of love the way writer/director Brett (They Bite) Piper was able to stage a mass alien invasion with next to no money and still make it seem almost plausible.  The ships are all obviously models you’d find in a toy store, but it’s edited and choreographed just well enough to make it look pretty cool.  (The same goes for the low-fi spaceship interiors.)  The fact that he was able to pull off an opening escape sequence reminiscent of a James Bond opening speaks to Piper’s low budget ingenuity.  Sometimes, the cinematography is too a bit too dark, although I’m sure that was purposefully done to hide the seams of the sets, special effects, and make-up.

The early scenes are a lot of fun, but unfortunately, Battle for the Lost Planet kind of shoots its wad too early.  The long scenes of Trent trying to convince a biker kingpin (who looks like a long-lost Stallone brother) to join his cause drags the pace down.  Still, there’s plenty of stop-motion monsters, alien dogfights, and DIY charm on display to make it worth a look for fans of low budget cinema.  Although it might not always work, it’s impossible not to admire Piper’s ambition, even if it exceeds his grasp. 

Mitler makes for a likable hero.  He has a Johnathon Schaech quality to him, and looks right at home fighting mutants, monsters, and horny bikers.  He’s particularly funny in his last scene.  He returned two years later for the sequel, Mutant War.

Note:  I know this is more of a Sci-Fi movie than a horror film, and I apologize.  I had another film in its place, but Prime removed it from my Watchlist without notice.  I hate when that happens.  I wish there was a way for Prime to notify you when something is about to leave, but oh well.  Since I already had Mutant War planned for tomorrow’s movie (which has a lot more horror-themed elements), I decided to go ahead and watch its predecessor first.  While Battle for the Lost Planet isn’t exactly a horror movie per se, any flick that features stop-motion monsters attacking a naked woman and cool Evil Dead-style melting effects is good enough to get a pass from me.  (Oh, and the movie I had previously planned, Bag Boy Lover Boy, is available for free on Tubi, so I’ll try to watch that eventually before the month is out.)

SATURDAY THE 14TH (1981) **

Richard Benjamin and his real-life wife Paula Prentiss inherit a rundown old house and move in with their kids.  Jeffrey Tambor is the vampire who wants a book of evil that’s located somewhere in the house and is always hanging around in hopes of finding it.  When Richard’s kid reads the book, he accidentally unleashes a bunch of monsters that can bring about the end of the world on the titular date. 

This tame horror-comedy is mostly for kids.  Adults will find it dumb as the humor is painful and the monsters are rubbery, poorly lit, or just plain bad.  The good news:  It’s only 75 minutes and it moves like lightning.  In fact, it flies by so fast that it sometimes feels like whole scenes got lost on the editing room floor. 

The biggest problem though is Richard Benjamin.  He’s just fucking terrible.  I’ve enjoyed his work in other movies, but he just has one expression here that says, “I can’t wait to quit acting and start directing!”  Prentiss fares slightly better as the mom who gets bitten by the vampire.  Speaking of which, Tambor isn’t bad, but he could’ve been great if the material wasn’t so thin. 

In fact, the script feels like a first draft.  There’s a solid (if silly) idea here, but it really needed more (funnier) jokes and stronger characters.  In all honesty, this is probably a One Star movie...

HOWEVER.  (And that’s a big however.)  There is one awesome scene that almost makes it all worthwhile.  When Benjamin’s daughter takes a bubble bath, she’s interrupted by a Gill Man-looking monster who rises from between her legs and scares her out of the tub.  As a kid, I stumbled upon this scene while channel surfing and it freaked me out.  Heck, I couldn’t even use Mr. Bubble (the same brand of bubble bath the girl uses in the movie) afterwards.  I had nightmares for weeks and was scared shitless of the bathtub for months.  As a kid, just a few fleeting seconds of this movie scared me.  Seeing it as an adult, I can admit that it still has a little bit of a kick to it.  I have to admit, seeing this scene after all these years brought a big-ass smile to my face.  That smile alone is worth Two Stars.  The rest of the movie, not so much.

GOG (1954) ** ½

The creator of Flipper, Ivan Tors teamed up with the director of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Herbert L. Strock for this sporadically amusing 3-D Sci-Fi horror thriller.  Scientists working to cryogenically freeze monkeys for a top-secret space project become victims of their own work when the machine malfunctions and freezes them to death.  Richard Egan (from Love Me Tender) is sent to the underground facility to investigate the accident.  More scientists die in freak accidents and it’s up to Egan to figure out if it’s the work of saboteurs, or if the facility’s resident super-intelligent robots, Gog and Magog have obtained a murderous mind of their own.

Gog is slow to start.  Egan kind of makes for a dull lead, and the fact that most of the dialogue is filled with a lot of scientific gobbledygook doesn’t help either.  The mawkish romance scenes between Egan and Constance Dowling is stuffy too.  At least Herbert (The Fly) Marshall lends the flick some gravitas as the head of the project. 

Once the robots get loose, the movie picks up in a hurry and becomes a lot of fun.  There’s also a great sequence that plays like a precursor to Moonraker’s G-Force simulator scene.  What makes the scene a blast is that the “high-tech” machine looks like a piece of kid’s playground equipment.  I will say the robots themselves don’t have much personality to them.  (They look like silver parking cones with a lot of flailing arms.)  Fortunately, the carnage they create in the last reel is memorable.

The 3-D is utilized well enough.  There’s plenty of separation between the actors and the background, so you always know you’re watching a real 3-D movie, and not haphazardly thrown together rush job.  That said, not a lot comes out at the screen.  The first shot is of a needle going into the audience’s eyeballs, which is always a good sign.  However, the use of in-your-face effects are only intermittent as the film goes on.  Luckily, the 3-D gags featured in the climax are simply awesome.  It almost makes sitting through an hour and change of science jargon worth it.  

Here’s a complete rundown of the 3-D effects:  

·         3-D Hypodermic Needle

·         3-D Flames 

·         3-D Tuning Forks

·         3-D Gog

·         3-D Magog

·         3-D Antenna

·         3-D Gun

·         3-D Flamethrower (multiple)

·         3-D Magog (again)

AKA:  Gog:  Space Station:  U.S.A.  AKA:  Gog, the Killer.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (1963) **

After directing a bunch of Godzilla movies for Toho, Ishiro Honda decided to try his hand at a monster movie on a much smaller scale for a change.  The results are frustratingly uneven.  Ishiro, buddy.  Stick to big ass monsters instead.

Passengers on a yacht get lost in a storm.  They wind up shipwrecked on an uncharted island where the only vegetation seems to be giant mushrooms.  After their rations run out, they resort to eating the mushrooms, which turns them into living mushroom men.

The early scenes made me yearn for the directness of She Demons.  At least with that movie, it began with the characters already washed up on shore.  These opening scenes on the ship aren’t bad per se, just perfunctory.  The part where the supposed famous songbird warbles a tune is good for a laugh though as she sings “la, la, la, la, la” over and over again.

From then on, it’s a slow burn, with the emphasis on slow.  The subplot about the desperation and mistrust growing among the survivors was to be expected, although honestly, I was expecting a bit more.  When all the characters are at each other’s throats, it leaves little room for likability among the cast. 

There’s certainly plenty of atmosphere to go around as the fog-shrouded beaches and fungus-covered ships are appropriately creepy.  You just have to wait an awfully long time for the mushroom people to finally do their thing.  Even then, it’s not exactly worth the wait (although the first appearance of the mushroom monster is effective).  The fungus-faced toadstool terrors are memorable creations, but ultimately, they don’t get much screen time and aren’t given a whole lot to do besides stumble around.  If you stick around, there’s a good little twist at the end, although it comes too little too late. 

AKA:  Matango.  AKA:  Zombi 14:  Mushroom Zombies.  AKA:  Matango:  Attack of the Mushroom People.  AKA:  Curse of the Mushroom People.  AKA:  Fungus of Terror.  AKA:  Matango:  The Fungus of Terror.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: SCALPEL (1977) ** ½

Dr. Reynolds (Robert Lansing) is a brilliant but psychopathic plastic surgeon who is furious when a big family inheritance goes to his daughter Heather (Judith Chapman).  Problem is, she ran off a year ago when she saw her daddy murder her boyfriend and hasn’t come back since.  When Reynolds discovers a stripper with a mutilated face lying helpless in the road, he hatches a diabolical scheme.  Using his medical know-how, he makes her over to resemble his daughter just long enough to get his hands on the money.

To tell any more would spoil the fun.  All I’ll say is that there’s a twist halfway through that complicates their situation dramatically. Needless to say, it throws a monkey wrench into his plan.  There are other twists and turns too.  Some are expected.  Some not.  

Scalpel offers up nothing overly explicit, but it’s definitely disturbing and sometimes shocking the lengths to which Lansing will go through to get his hands of the family fortune.  It helps immensely that Lansing plays a twisted character with such nonchalance, which gives him real menace.  Chapman is also quite good.  You have to believe she’d go along with such an outrageous plot partly out of fear, and partly out of greed.  Or maybe because she’s just as warped as he is.

A few surgical scenes aside, the horror elements are really quite minimal.  Instead, director John Grissmer (who went on to helm the classic Thanksgiving slasher, Blood Rage), goes for more of a Hitchcockian style thriller.  I think even old Hitch would’ve enjoyed the section of the film in which Lansing makes over Chapman, as it resembles Vertigo in some respects.  I also liked the flashback scenes that contradict what Lansing has said on screen, exposing the doctor’s misdeeds to the audience, but not the characters around him. 

All of this is absorbing for an hour or so.  However, the movie kind of plays its cards a bit too soon, and the last half-hour sort of dawdles when it should really be ramping up the suspense.  The climax, though appropriate, is just allowed to go on far too long to be fully effective.  Maybe Grissner should’ve used the titular tool in the editing room to trim things up a bit more.

AKA:  False Face.  AKA:  Woman of the Shadows.