VERY CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND (1978) ***

If you took Revenge of the Nerds, Private Lessons, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, threw them in a blender, and cranked the setting to “Italian Comedy”, then you might have something approximating Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.  

Three college pals pull a prank on their sexy astrology teacher (Maria Baxa) and are expelled.  (In their defense, it was a pretty cool prank as they substitute naked slides during her presentation so that when she talks about a “black hole”, it shows a bare butt.)  Knowing their teacher has a thing for UFOs, they decide to dress up as aliens and try to seduce her.  Much to their delight, she willingly submits to the extraterrestrial in-and-out.  (“We are guinea pigs to them…  If they want to study my body, they can do what they please!”)  Eventually, she convinces her hot friend (Monica Zanchi) to join in on the interstellar probing.  When the trio of pseudo-aliens bang Maddalena (Marina Daumia) the sexy wife of a hunter (Mario Maranzana), he goes out looking for them with a shotgun.  

Since this is an Italian comedy, much of the so-called comic hijinks are lame.  Even worse is that they are usually punctuated with annoyingly juvenile music.  That’s okay though because you can always just turn down the sound and enjoy the silly and sexy sci-fi shenanigans.  The alien costumes are pretty well done (they look like a cross between the Gimp costume from Pulp Fiction and a low budget Star Wars Darth Vader knockoff, but with purple dildos on their heads), and the encounters themselves are surprisingly decent.  

Seeing Baxa slowly getting turned on by her E.T. encounters is real a treat.  There’s an especially great scene where the aliens get scared off by the hunter, leaving Baxa and Zanchi all hot and bothered.  Eventually, they decide to fulfill their desires with one other.  And just when the encounters threaten to get repetitive, the film decides to spice things up with some even racier material (like when the aliens probe their teacher with their dildo helmet).  I’m not going to pretend this is high art or anything, but if you have a fetish for aliens in S & M gear fondling nude Italian bombshells, you will find Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind to be out of this world.

AKA:  The Coming of Aliens.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #19: CLAWS (1977) **

(Streamed via Creature Features)

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’s Jason Evers stars as a logger who is mauled by a bear.  Five years go by, and he still is unable to let it go.  His wife finally has enough of his bitter and hateful ways and takes his son to start a new life.  However, when his son is attacked by the same “Satan Bear”, Evers finally mans up and goes out for revenge.  

Claws is one of those When Animals Attack flicks that were so popular in the late ‘70s after the success of Jaws.  Oh, and the title rhymes with Jaws just in case you didn’t already pick up on that.  This one also came in the wake of Grizzly, a far superior killer bear movie.  Even though parts (OK, most) of Claws are laughable, dumb, and confusing, I’ll be damned if there aren’t a few moments when it almost works.  

The biggest drawback is its structure, which relies heavily on the use flashbacks.  The second act is particularly spotty as characters have flashbacks left and right.  All these scenes are mostly there to flesh out their motivations, but honestly, they are really unnecessary as the exposition-heavy dialogue makes many of the flashbacks redundant.

The way the nature footage of grizzly bears is edited into the action is pretty funny though.  The film stock rarely matches in these scenes as some of the wildlife shots are tinted and/or faded, which further makes them stick out like a sore thumb.  Plus, the print I saw was already in shambles to begin with, which didn’t help.  Just when you think you’ve reached your limit with all scenes of the hunting party traipsing through the woods, there is a great payoff involving the Native American guide having a trippy freakout that is good for some unintentional laughs.  

If you can stomach all the corny flashbacks (including a slow-motion romantic interlude in a field), boring custody drama, Native American mumbo jumbo, and sloppy editing, the kill scenes are sporadically effective.  The best one involves a bunch of Cub Scouts camping in the woods who cry wolf about seeing the “Satan Bear”.  Naturally, the real bear shows up later on and tears their camp to shreds.  The editing in this sequence is surprisingly strong (especially compared to the other attack scenes in the movie) and the carnage is rather jaw-dropping.  Although much of Claws is sloppy, shoddy, and idiotic, this sequence, as the kids say nowadays, “goes hard”.

The whole movie is a case of “Good News, Bad News”.  For every quality moment, there’s a bunch of schlock that gets in the way.  Although Evers’ intense performance keeps things from completely unraveling, the rest of the cast act rather embarrassing.  The while demise of the bear is pretty epic, the whole build-up to that choice moment is unbelievably lame as the last five minutes or so of the film are mostly all in slow-motion.

Bottom Line:  Whenever Claws bears its claws, it’s rather grizzly, but it’s more than likely to make you hibernate.

A stoned hippie gets the best line of the movie when he comes face to face with a bear and inexplicably says, “I’m a rock singer, not Walt Disney!”

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #18 BITTEN (2009) ***

(Streamed via Crackle)

Jason Mewes stars as Jack, a paramedic struggling to get over his cheating ex-girlfriend.  He finds an unlikely new love in Danika (Erica Cox) when he finds her in an alley covered with blood.  He brings her home, cleans her up, and to show her gratitude, she turns into a vampire.  Since it’s love at first sight, Jack keeps the relationship afloat by finding her victims so she can feed.  

Mewes is surprisingly good in his dramatic scenes while still being able to deftly delve into his usual Jay persona when needed for comic effect.  Cox is also effective as the pathetic, obviously dangerous, but… you know… hot, vampire.  She is especially good while covered in blood and wanting sex.  She even participates in a three-way with Mewes and another babe, although director Harve Glazer unwisely chooses to get arty and make it into more of a dimly lit montage.  Cox only appeared in a handful of movies, and it’s a shame she wasn’t in more stuff because she is great in this.  Richard Fitzpatrick is a lot of fun too as Mewes’ foulmouthed paramedic pal.  

Bitten doesn’t exactly break new ground, but it remains a simple and entertaining vampire flick.  Although using the vampire as a metaphor for addiction is a tad obvious, when it switches gears and uses it as a metaphor for dating someone with a lot of baggage, it works much better.  It helps that some of this is often quite funny.  I especially liked the love triangle between Mewes, Cox, and his old girlfriend.  (When she turns into a vampire, she hisses “I want my TV back!”)  I also admired some of the odd choices, like the inexplicable use of Spanish title cards and the random-ass Spaghetti Western opening title sequence.

While Bitten is surprisingly sturdy for the bulk of its running time, the ending offers more fizzle than sizzle.  If anything, it’s good to see Jay stretching his acting muscles a bit and showing he doesn’t always need Silent Bob by his side to carry a picture.  It’s Cox though who gets the best line of the movie when describing her vampire hunger:  “It’s like I want to fuck you and eat you at the same time!”

AKA:  Vampire Apocalypse.  AKA:  Bitten in the Twilight.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #17: PORN SHOOT MASSACRE (2009) ** ½

(Streamed via ConTV)

Few words stir the blood like “Porn”, “Shoot”, and “Massacre”.  When you put all three in the title of your sex-filled horror movie, I’m bound to watch it, even if the results are mixed at best.

Things kick off in spectacular fashion with Shelly Martinez’s epic shower scene that continues to only get better as it goes along.  After stepping out of the shower, the camera follows her as she dries off and applies lotion to her nude frame.  She does get dressed to answer the phone, but only her panties, which means she’s already one of the best actresses I’ve seen in a long time.  Sadly, she gets Janet Leigh’ed early on, but since she goes out via an A+ pantyhose strangulation, it’s hard to be too mad.  

Then, the plot begins:  A bunch of porn starlets arrive at a seedy warehouse set where an oddball director is making his latest XXX flick.  As the cameras roll, the cast and crew are unaware there’s a masked killer lurking about who gets his jollies from axing porn stars and making his own snuff movies.  

The cast includes a mix of lady wrestlers, one-and-done starlets, and actual porn stars.  They are all beautiful and their voluptuous measurements are so stacked that it would make them overqualified for a Russ Meyer movie.  My favorite was Kasey Poteet AKA:  porn star Diana Prince AKA:  Joe Bob Briggs’ mail girl, Darcy who gets a great lesbian scene with porn star Naomi Cruz (who plays “the Fetish Queen”).  Martinez is a wrestler with limited acting credits, but her brief but memorable appearance here is evidence she could be a top-notch Scream Queen any time she decides to come back to the horror genre.  Her opening nude scene in this is right up there with Betsy Rue’s in My Bloody Valentine 3-D, and folks, praise doesn’t come much higher than that.  

Porn Shoot Massacre is a lot of fun until it hits a wall in the third act.  It’s here where we get a needless “twist” that doesn’t do the movie any favors.  It’s not exactly “bad”.  It’s just that once the twist is sprung, there isn’t really anywhere for the film to go.  (It’s also a little hard to take that the filmmakers expect us to start sympathizing with the killers in the late stages of the flick.)  And despite the great opening, it all leads up to a rather unsatisfying non-ending.  It’s disappointing that the ho-hum third act puts a wet blanket on what otherwise was a solid T & A gore-drenched horror flick.  However, that first hour or so is solid enough for me to give this one a marginal recommendation.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #16: KILLER PINATA (2015) *** ½

(Streamed via Cinehouse)

I went into Killer Pinata expecting to see a pinata kill people.  I got that, but I also got more.  A lot more.  

Killer Pinata is one of the best horror movies I have seen in some time.  It takes a Troma level premise and gives it the A24 treatment.  There is a tongue in cheek aspect, sure.  This is Killer Pinata after all.  However, there is an offbeat artiness to the entire enterprise that is enormously endearing.  

The film is essentially a variation on Child’s Play, except, you know, with a pinata.  A father buys a bunch of pinatas for his kid’s birthday party.  After seeing his friends smashed to pieces, the devilish donkey pinata sets out to get revenge on his fallen comrades.  He singles out a bunch of college kids partying it up and proceeds to take them out one by one.  

The scene where the pinata watches in horror as a little kid beats another pinata in super slow motion is downright hauntingly beautiful.  I never thought I would ever type that sentence but here we are.  Trust me, the movie still gives you the sort of hijinks you’d expect.  In one scene, the pinata strings up a dork and beats him until his teeth splay out onto the pavement like hard candy.  There’s also more than one scene where the pinata shits tainted (no pun intended) candy that kills whoever eats it.  However, despite these broad, obvious moments there’s a funky, vibrant, swagger to the film that makes it unique and tons of fun.  

It does have a little trouble stretching its admittedly thin premise out to a feature length.  One undercooked subplot involves the pinata possessing a human and forcing him to do its dirty work.  However, some of the padding works surprisingly well (like the great animated flashback detailing the origin of the killer pinata), and director Stephen Tramontana pulls off several unlikely sequences with unexpected pizzazz.  (The Pinata POV shots are very well done.)  Besides, as I said at the beginning of this review:  Killer Pinata gives you what you expect, but brother, does it give you a whole lot more.

Bottom Line:  This pinata is chockfull of goodies.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #15: HALLOWEEN ENDS (2022) ** ½

(Streamed via Peacock)

I was not a fan of David Gordon Green’s previous pair of Halloween sequels.  Because of that, I had little excitement and next-to-no expectations for Halloween Ends.  Maybe it was the lowered expectations, or the fact I knew (or cared) very little about the film’s plot that helped me enjoy it much more than the last two outings.  It’s still not “good” exactly, but it’s an interesting (if flawed) attempt to breathe a little life into the franchise.

If you go in expecting a big, action-packed trilogy capper, you are bound to be disappointed.  It seems by now that Green’s M.O. from the get-go has been to thwart fans’ expectations.  If that really was the case, then Halloween Ends is his master thesis on the subject.  It almost feels like the Halloween franchise’s version of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi as it acts as a deconstruction of the series.  A sort of litmus test to see how much you can color outside the line of the franchise while still very much adhering to what makes the franchise work.  (The fact that there’s already a petition by angry fans to have the whole movie reshot bears that theory out.)

Without giving too much away, the bulk of the film revolves around Corey (Rohan Campbell), the new Haddonfield urban legend.  A couple years ago, the kid he was babysitting for wound up dead in a freak accident.  Harassed, bullied (by roving gangs of marching band bullies, no less!), and pushed to the brink, the mixed-up Corey has a fateful run-in with Michael Myers that…  Well… you’ll see.

From the very beginning, you can tell Green and Co. are out to subvert our expectations as he uses the same font for the opening title sequence as Halloween 3:  Season of the Witch, the first Halloween film to polarize the fanbase because it dared to take Michael Myers out of the equation.  Green does a similar bit of redirection here.  However, he wisely keeps Michael around (a little bit), allowing for Myers’ legend to still cast a long shadow over the town.  It’s an interesting, if only sporadically effective way to go, and certainly a more enjoyable ride than the previous Green-helmed sequels.  

However, I can’t help but feel a little shortchanged.  We’ve been waiting over forty years for Michael and Laurie’s final face-off.  As a payoff to that storyline, it comes up a bit short.  I think they should’ve called it Halloween Aftermath.  It would’ve been a more fitting title.  Although, honestly, this might’ve worked better as a TV show called Haddonfield.  It could’ve focused on the characters of the town that have had their lives impacted, shattered, ruined, or poisoned by Myers’ reign of terror.  You could’ve brought Jamie Lee Curtis in for the intros (the scenes of her writing her memoirs feel very TV Movie-ish) and spent various episodes fleshing out the new characters.  I know John Carpenter always intended to turn Halloween into an anthology, but given the evidence here, it might just work, as long as there is at least SOME connective tissue to the Myers legend.

I didn’t mind the way Green paralleled Corey and Michael’s ascension to boogeyman status.  Sure, it’s the old nature vs. nurture deal, but it kinda works.  I really liked seeing Laurie opening up a bit and starting a potential romance with the sheriff (Will Patton).  The movie could’ve used a lot more of these scenes and less of the Romeo and Juliet stuff with Allyson (Andi Matichak) and Corey.  I never really believed they were in love, and the arc of their romance feels forced and rushed.  

One thing I did enjoy was seeing Michael taking Corey on as sort of an apprentice.  I mean he’s sixty-five years old.  He can’t keep on killing forever.  It would make sense to for him to train the next generation of psychos.  Corey himself sort of has an Anakin Skywalker vibe going on.  He even has an understanding girlfriend that doesn’t seem to mind when he slaughters innocents.  

Throughout the film, I went back and forth on whether I liked it or not.  The longwinded romance scenes in the middle of the flick made me want to give it **, but then, late in the game, we got that great kill scene in the radio station set to The Cramps’ “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”, which is worth at least another Half-Star my book.  I mean, if Return of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Near Dark have taught us anything, it’s that any horror movie can be made even better by including a needle drop on a Cramps song.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #14: SHOCK CINEMA VOLUME 3: BLOOPERS, BABES AND BLOOD! (1991) ** ½

(Streamed via Tubi)

Producer Brinke Stevens returns with another installment in the Shock Cinema series.  Although she provides narration over the chapter breaks, she doesn’t have any formal hosting sequences this time around.  (She does appear on the opening graphic and shows up in clips from Nightmare Sisters though.)  Unlike the previous two Shock Cinema Volumes, this is less a video magazine and more of a compilation tape.  There are no interviews with B-Movie directors and not as much behind the scenes footage as you might expect.  Instead, it’s broken up into several chapters devoted to various horror/exploitation elements.

The first (and best) chapter is devoted to “T & A”.  We see scenes of Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer, and Brinke appearing au natural in Nightmare Sisters, as well as Linnea taking it off in clips from Murder Weapon and Deadly Embrace.  The next segment is on “Blood and Gore” and it features assorted stabbings, bludgeonings, flesh rippings, and exploding heads.  (Mostly from Robot Ninja.)  “Trailers” contains coming attractions for Deadly Embrace, the Scream Queen documentary Something to Scream About, Murder Weapon, Robot Ninja, Skinned Alive, and Ghoul School.  “Bloopers” contains outtakes, flubs, and follies from Nightmare Sisters and Dr. Alien.  These bloopers aren’t exactly funny, but they do offer a tantalizing (if fleeting) taste of what it was like to be on those sets.  The volume is rounded out with “Action and Special Effects”, a collection of fights, bites, slashes, gashes, shootouts, mutants, monsters, and musical numbers from the previously mentioned films.  

Since it’s only drawing from a small pool of titles (mostly Tempe releases), the clips have a tendency to get a little overfamiliar as the tape goes on.  (Some scenes are even repeated by the end, which tends to get a little annoying.)  The short running time (under an hour) helps somewhat, though the overall sense of déjà vu sort of diminishes the fun.  Even though it’s not as informative or as entertaining as the first two volumes, it’s still worth a watch just for the T & A segment alone (especially if you’re a fan of Scream Queens Stevens, Quigley, and Bauer).  

AKA:  Shock Cinema Volume 3.