THE ORPHAN (1979) **

A little boy named David (Mark Owens) loses both of his parents and goes to live with his aunt Martha (Peggy Feury) on her vast estate.  The withdrawn David starts playing with Tarot cards and makes an altar to a stuffed monkey.  He soon realizes he has more in common with the staff than his aunt, which pisses off the old battle axe.  Naturally, she fires the help, which further drives a wedge between her and David.  Tensions between the two grows intense when Aunt Martha accidentally kills David’s dog.  Eventually, the already disturbed David snaps.

The behind-the-scenes story of The Orphan is more interesting than what wound up on screen.  It was originally going to be called Friday the 13th but Paramount was able to finagle the title away from the producers.  The posters still kept the picture of a bloody calendar with the date of Friday the 13th in full display though, making people think it was somehow related to the popular franchise.  I’m sure anyone who watched this expecting Friday the 13th type of thrills were massively disappointed.

This is one of those slow burn kinds of deals.  The stabbing murder sequence isn’t badly staged.  It’s just that you have to wait over an hour to get to it.  The generous helpings of flashbacks and dream scenes don’t do much to speed up the sluggish pace.  Unfortunately, most of the suspense comes from Martha and David antagonizing each other.  If you’ve ever had to spend a summer with a bitchy relative, you’ll probably be able to sympathize with David.  

The Orphan is a mixed bag to be sure.  Some scenes are more weird than effective, the atmosphere is offbeat rather than scary, and the ending is more WTF than effective.  Sure, it doesn’t work as a whole, but it does have its moments.  (Like the tongue scene.)  Ultimately, the scariest thing about it is the awful love song by Janis Ian.  

AKA:  Friday the 13th… The Orphan.  AKA:  David.  AKA:  David (The Orphan).  AKA:  Killer Orphan.  

THE 15TH ANNUAL VIDEO VACUUM AWARDS: AND THE NOMINEES ARE…

Folks, you know what time it is.  It’s awards season.  And Hollywood likes nothing better than giving awards out.  Here in Delaware, I like to give out awards too.  In fact, I have been handing out Video Vacuum Awards for 15 years now!  Some of you have been there since the beginning, and for that, I thank you.  Who knows what the future holds for The Video Vacuum?  Well, I know what the present holds, and it’s a bunch of nominations!

BEST PICTURE

The Amusement Park 

Death Rider in the House of Vampires 

Nobody 

Pig 

Spider-Man:  No Way Home 

WORST PICTURE

Cosmic Sin

Eternals

Halloween Kills 

Paranormal Activity:  Next of Kin 

Willy’s Wonderland

BEST DIRECTOR

Glenn Danzig for Death Rider in the House of Vampires

Ilya Naishuller for Nobody

Michael Sarnoski for Pig

George A. Romero for The Amusement Park

Jon Watts for Spider-Man:  No Way Home

BEST ACTOR

Nicolas Cage for Pig

John Cena for The Suicide Squad

Josh Lawson for Mortal Kombat

Lincoln Maazel for The Amusement Park

Bob Odenkirk for Nobody

BEST ACTRESS

Kim Director for Death Rider in the House of Vampires

McKenna Grace for Ghostbusters:  Afterlife

Alana Haim for Licorice Pizza

Jennifer Lawrence for Don’t Look Up

Chloe Grace Moretz for Shadow in the Cloud

BEST ACTION MOVIE

F9

Mortal Kombat

Nobody

No Time to Die

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

BEST COMIC BOOK MOVIE

Black Widow

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings 

Spider-Man:  No Way Home

Venom:  Let There Be Carnage

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

BEST DIRECT TO VIDEO/STREAMING MOVIE

The Amusement Park

Coming 2 America

Don’t Look Up

The Resonator:  Miskatonic U

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

BEST HORROR MOVIE

The Amusement Park

Death Rider in the House of Vampires

Don’t Breathe 2

Godzilla vs. Kong

Shadow in the Cloud

WORST HORROR MOVIE

The Conjuring:  The Devil Made Me Do It

Halloween Kills

In the Earth

Paranormal Activity:  Next of Kin

Willy’s Wonderland

BEST SCI-FI MOVIE

Fried Barry

The Matrix Resurrections

Psycho Goreman

Reminiscence

The Resonator:  Miskatonic U

BEST SEQUEL

Coming 2 America

Don’t Breathe 2

Godzilla vs. Kong

The Matrix Resurrections

Spider-Man:  No Way Home

BEST TRAILER COMPILATION

The AGFA Horror Trailer Show

The AGFA Horror Trailer Show:  Videorage

The Best of Doris Wishman

The Curse of VHS Delirium

Drive-In Delirium:  The Final Conflict

Winners will be announced in the coming weeks after the votes have been tallied, the judges have been bribed, and/or when I get around to it…

DEFCON 2012 (2010) NO STARS

Well, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you wistful for the end of the world hysteria surrounding 2012.  Remember the good old days when the Mayan calendar foretold we were all gonna croak?  Memories.  Anyway, all the nostalgia in the world ain’t going to salvage this horrible mess.  

The first twenty minutes of this movie (if it can even be called that) feels like a bunch of different scenes, ideas, and leftover video game footage that was cut up with a hacksaw and fed into an UNO Attack game.  Then, the UNO Attack spit the footage all across the room where it was then edited together by a chimpanzee with ADHD.  

A guy finds a DVD that purports to be a documentary of how the world will end in 2012.  Then, we inexplicably jump thousands of years into the future where we see a bunch of spaceship special effects that look like they came out of a PC game from the ‘90s.  After that, we focus on a bunch of scavengers shuffling through the ruins of Earth, which is to say a bunch of guys in Laser Tag uniforms stumbling around an abandoned mall.  Eventually, they meet another group of survivors who can speak telepathically, which is good for the actors because they don’t have to remember their lines, but bad for the audience since they have to listen to the echo-y dialogue that is dubbed over the (non) action.  This dialogue competes with an already overcrowded soundtrack that is filled with constant narration by the alleged hero, which is stupefyingly abrasive.  After every two or three sentences, he quips, “Like I give a shit.”  Buddy, if you don’t give a shit, how do you expect the audience to?

It feels to me like the filmmakers couldn’t sell this piece of crap if their souls depended on it.  So, what they did was slap bookending segments that were tenuously related to the imminent 2012 apocalypse and put 2012 in the title.  That alone was probably enough to get a distributor in 2010, when the world was still curious about the possible destruction of the human race.  If they had made it in 2022, I’m sure they would’ve had to put a COVID plotline in the beginning and called it Defcon COVID-19 in order to secure distribution.    

A few weeks back, I declared The Nasty Rabbit the worst movie I had ever seen.  At least that flick had the benefit of Arch Hall, Jr.  Defcon 2012 can’t even boast that dubious distinction.  What I’m getting at here is that I kinda wished the world ended back in 2012 so I didn’t have to sit through this garbage.

AKA:  Worldend 2012.  AKA:  2012:  Armageddon.

RATPOCALYPSE (2015) *

Casper Van Dien stars as an American senator who’s been having nightmares of being attacked by rats.  He believes the dreams are a message from a higher power, so when he goes to Russia to give a speech, instead of sticking to the script, he launches into a bizarre tirade.  Live on global television, he states that Russian politicians will turn into rats unless they give up their corrupt ways.  Naturally, people laugh off his little outburst until, of course, politicians start turning into giant rats.  Soon, everybody looks to Van Dien for a cure, but he prefers to go into hiding with the help of two sexy Russian hookers (Victoria Summer and Linda Bella).  

Van Dien has the look of someone who’s only doing it for the money.  Who can blame him with a script like this?  Catherine Oxenberg (Van Dien’s real-life wife at the time) co-stars as his long-suffering wife.  I think she was only in it for a free trip to Russia with her hubby.  Both Summer and Bella have brief nude scenes, which helps somewhat.  

Writer/director/producer Vladimir Uglichin is kind of like a modern-day Russian equivalent of Ed Wood.  He wears his heart on his sleeve, but just doesn’t have the budget or talent to back up his unlikely premise.  For all I know, there might’ve been some deeper meaning to all the rat symbolism in the picture.  Maybe it would make more sense if I was Russian.  I guess I can give him a mulligan on that and assume something must’ve got lost in the translation.  Or maybe he’s just certifiably looney tunes.

When it comes to the rat people, the CGI effects are about as bad as you’d expect.  Maybe even a little worse.  With a title like Ratpocalypse, you may be expecting something in the vein of Sharknado.  However, this is more of a political satire than a horror movie, and a rather unfunny one at that.  It all adds up to one of the most perplexing bad movies I have seen in some time.  Uglichin might not be talented, but he is earnest, which at the very least keeps it from being a completely unwatchable mess.  

AKA:  Higher Mission.  AKA:  Rats or Love Women.  

THE WITCH (1956) ** ½

A doctor is working on a revolutionary anti-aging serum.  When he refuses to share it with his colleagues, they send some burglars to his home to retrieve it.  The burglars kill his daughter in the process, which drives the good doctor over the edge.  He then enlists the help of a tragically ugly woman to exact revenge on the men who murdered his daughter.  The doc uses his serum to make her beautiful and she in turn helps lure the killers to their death.  Complications ensue when she falls in love with one of her potential victims.  

The Witch is an odd blend of genres and inspirations that never quite mesh.  It’s one part mad scientist movie, one part Freaks rip-off (the doctor has a band of amputees that do his bidding), one part Les Misérables (the underground network of poor and unfortunates who aid the doctor), and one part My Fair Lady.  In fact, there are some stretches of the movie that play like Pretty Woman, but with lap dissolve transformation scenes.  

While it’s semi-amusing to see where the wacky plot will go next, it ultimately comes up short.  That said, I’m a sucker for these old school black and white Mexican horror movies.  They always feel like they are stuck in some kind of time warp.  Even though it was made in the mid-‘50s, it often feels like an American horror flick from a Poverty Row studio from the early ‘40s.  Director Chano Urueta (who would later go on to direct the classic Mexican horror shocker, The Brainiac) does deliver on the atmosphere, even if the plot kind of goes around in circles.  

Overall, The Witch is still kind of fun as far as these things go.  The version I saw didn’t have subtitles, but I still had an easy time figuring out what was going on, which is also a testament to Urueta’s direction.  It’s just that it has one or two subplots too many to make for a crackling horror flick.

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL (1941) ***

People are all gaga for superhero cinema nowadays, but can you imagine a time when there were no superhero movies?  To find the first one, you have to go all the way back to 1941 with this twelve-chapter Republic Pictures serial.  The producers originally wanted to make a Superman serial, but when DC wanted too much money, they went to Fawcett Comics instead and secured the rights to Captain Marvel.  Naturally, DC later sued and bought up the rights to Captain Marvel before dropping the name and calling the character by his catchphrase, “Shazam!”  Then, Marvel came out with their own Captain Marvel and made her a woman, so you wouldn’t be confused that there were two Captain Marvels running around.  Got all that?

Anyway, Tom (The Mummy’s Hand) Tyler stars as Captain Marvel.  The young Billy Batson (Frank Coghlan, Jr.) accompanies an expedition to Siam to investigate a tomb.  When he refuses to raid the treasure, he is rewarded with the powers of Captain Marvel by the wizard Shazam.  All Billy has to do is say the word, “Shazam!” and he becomes Captain Marvel.  Meanwhile, the scientists from the expedition are targeted by the evil Scorpion who wants to build a death ray using artifacts found in the tomb.  

The flying scenes must’ve been really something for the time and remain OK by today’s standards.  In fact, many of the flying techniques pioneered here (a mix of rear screen projection and a dummy zipping around on a wire) would be used for decades after.  Also, Shazam’s powers (flying, deflecting bullets, and feats of strength) were most certainly the blueprint for the future screen versions of Superman.  What makes Shazam different from Superman is that when the chips are down, he will grab a machine gun and mow down a bunch of henchmen.  Rambo eat your heart out.  He also throws henchmen to their death (or at least their dummies anyway).  I know Batman has a “no killing” rule, but thankfully for the audience, Captain Marvel does not abide by it.  I mean this is the ‘40s we’re talking about here.  The Captain doesn’t have to follow all that Comics Code crap.  He can gleefully kill a bunch of henchmen, and all is right with the world.  

As is the case with most serials, it’s a bit tough to watch the entire thing in one sitting as it clocks in at over three and a half hours.  At least the cliffhangers have some variety to them, which makes Adventures of Captain Marvel a little better than your average serial.  The cliffhangers include exploding bridges, a cool motion-activated guillotine, exploding planes, runaway cars, and molten lava (a scene that was later repurposed in Radar Men from the Moon).

Tyler (who later went on to play another superhero, The Phantom three years later) is pitch perfect as Captain Marvel.  Although you just know he will escape each week’s episode unscathed, you still root like Hell for him.  It also helps that he only appears whenever Billy says “Shazam!”, which means he doesn’t wear out his welcome.  Coghlan, Jr. also does a good job as Billy Batson.  He has the right blend of “aw, shucks” wholesomeness but can still hold his own in a fight.  Sometimes, he doesn’t resort to transforming into Captain Marvel to save people, which is a nice touch.  It was also fun to see Ed Wood regular Kenne Duncan as The Scorpion’s right-hand man.  

THE MEATEATER (1979) **

Mitford (Peter Spitzer) is a family man who retires from his swell paying gig selling shoes to open a rundown old movie theater with his family.  Opening night does not go well.  The projectionist is electrocuted, and a dead body is found hanging behind the screen.  Despite that little hiccup, our hero is still determined to keep the theater open.  Unfortunately, there is a crazy old man (Arch Joboulian) who’s obsessed with Jean Harlow lurking about the premises.  He starts offing more people and eventually sets his sights on Mitford’s daughter (who is a dead ringer for Harlow) as his next victim.

Let’s get this out of the way.  I don’t know why the heck this is called The Meateater.  I mean the old guy chows down on a rat in the opening scene, but that’s about it.  So, if you go into this one thinking it’s going to be about cannibalism or something, you’re going to be massively disappointed.  

Sure, there are some long, dull stretches, but The Meateater has a weird energy only a late ‘70s homegrown horror production can offer.  There are a couple of fun bits (like the electrocution scene) and Z movie touches (the detective’s mustache disappears midway through) to ensure it’s not a total waste.  I especially dug the fact that the family books a nature documentary about a jungle safari as their first feature.  They advertise it as a “wholesome movie”, but it contains a scene of animals humping.  

These moments only crop up sporadically, so I can’t quite recommend it.  However, this is one of those movies that’s more fun to think about in retrospect.  I was kind of restless while watching it, but I found myself smiling a lot while writing the review.  The pacing is erratic, and the finale is weak, which didn’t help.  At least there’s some decent gore in the final minutes.  

The dialogue is good for some chuckles too.  I liked it when the detective gets his inept partner to cut the corpse down from the rafters.  When its head pops off, he yells, “Be careful!  That used to be a human being!”  Mitford’s wife gets the best line of the movie while cleaning up the theater:  “There’s pigeon B.M. everywhere!”

AKA:  Blood Theater.