THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #28: DRACULA’S WIDOW (1988) ***

(Streamed via Freevee)

Two things I learned from the title of this movie:  Dracula’s 1) Married and 2) Dead.  Shit.  Had I known that, I would’ve sent flowers… to both the wedding and the funeral.  

All kidding aside, Dracula’s Widow was the first movie directed by Christopher Coppola, who would later go on to direct the immortal classic, Deadfall.  It would make a great triple feature of Late ‘80s/Early ‘90s Coppola Vampire Movies, alongside the Nicolas Cage-starring Vampire’s Kiss and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  

Lenny Von Dohlen is the temperamental owner of a Hollywood wax museum who winds up receiving the remains of Dracula’s widow (Emmanulle’s Sylvia Kristel).  Before long, she bites him, makes him her familiar, and goes out into the night turning her victims into hamburger.  This is why you should always inspect your packages before you sign on the dotted line for them.

For a first-time feature, it’s pretty good.  Coppola bathes many scenes with lots of cool colors (many sequences are lit like a giallo) and gives the whole thing a look that’s a lot artier than you might expect.  Despite being the titular character, Kristel doesn’t seem to be in it a whole lot.  She doesn’t really look like she’s having a lot of fun either, but at least she looks great (even in her bad wig).  The biggest debit though is all the scenes with a hardboiled detective (Josef Sommer) investigating the murders, which aren’t exactly bad, it just feels like they came out of an entirely different movie.  

These quibbles are relatively minor in the long run.  For the most part, Dracula’s Widow is briskly paced, looks slick, and it contains lots of blood, guts, and gore.  Since Kristel is “both beauty AND beast”, she not only drinks the blood of her victims, but turns into a rubber-faced monster and eats them.  The highlight comes when she rips apart a bunch of Satanists during a black mass.  There’s also a solid bat transformation scene near the end which puts lots of today’s CGI crap to shame. 

AKA:  Lady Dracula.

SLASHERMANIACS VOLUME 1 & 2 (1990) **

I remember seeing the video box for The Original Slasher Mania and Slasher Mania 2 double feature in the video store back in the day, but I never got around to renting it.  I may have enjoyed it back then, but as they say, I’m a man now, and my tastes are a bit more refined.  That’s not exactly true.  As a die-hard fan of horror movie compilations, even the most slapdash affairs are usually right up my alley.  Despite my astonishingly high tolerance for the genre, my resolve was periodically tested by this one.  

You can tell it’s going to be a slipshod affair right from the opening title sequence, which proclaims the title as “Slashermaniacs Volume 1” (the title I’m reviewing it under) and not Slasher Mania (or even “The Original Slasher Mania”).  You know you’re in trouble when the compilation can’t even get the title right!

Unlike most horror comps, Slashermaniacs Volume 1 culls from only a few titles, and most of them are public domain.  That’s not the worst thing in the world, but the clips are shown at random and go on seemingly forever.  Sometimes, they’re so long you wonder where one clip ends and the other begins.  

The clips from Volume 1 include Night of the Living Dead (not exactly a slasher, is it?), Alice, Sweet Alice, and another flick I couldn’t identify.  (It would’ve been nice if they had listed the movie titles in the end credits.)  Then, things end with trailers for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Dr. Phibes Rises Again.  The trailers are obviously the highlight, and it’s a shame there weren’t more previews sprinkled about.  It sure would’ve broken up the monotony.

Since each volume is only a half-hour long, I decided to roll my thoughts on Slashermaniacs Volume 2 into this review.  It offers up more of the same, and it’s a slight improvement over the original, if only because the clips are better.  This installment relies heavily on scenes from Night of the Living Dead (again), Horror Hotel (like Night of the Living Dead, it’s not a slasher, but at least the most atmospheric parts are used), and Alice, Sweet Alice (again).

The trailers are much better this time too, even if there are only a handful of them.  The best part is the iconic trailer for Psycho starring Alfred Hitchcock.  Since this is the greatest trailer of all time, I’m immediately inclined to give Volume 2 the edge over Volume 1, but it’s still kinda rough overall.  The tape wraps up with trailers for Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs, but despite the strong finish, the whole thing feels like it was put together by someone hooking two VCRs together than a professionally edited and distributed horror compilation tape.

AKA:  The Original Slasher Mania.  AKA:  Slasher Mania 2.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #27: BLOODY MUSCLE BODY BUILDER IN HELL (1995) ****

(Streamed via Midnight Pulp)

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell is basically a low budget, hour-long, shot-on-video Japanese remake of Evil Dead 2.  After reading that sentence, you should already know if you are the target audience for this sort of thing.  Even if you didn’t dig it as much as I did, you have to admit:  It has one of the greatest titles in movie history.  

Shinji (writer/director Shinichi Fukazawa) is a bodybuilder who takes his girlfriend and a psychic to investigate his father’s supposedly haunted house.  Before long, the vengeful spirit of his father’s former lover possesses the psychic and uses his powers to lock the couple in the house.  After being tormented endlessly by the possessed psychic, our hero eventually uses his love of weightlifting to smash the demon once and for all.

Some scenes follow Evil Dead 1 and 2 pretty closely, and the recreations are quite impressive considering the time and resources that were available.  Fans of Sam Raimi’s trilogy will enjoy these moments to be sure (everything from the headless corpse attack to the iconic “Groovy” scene is here), but I was even more impressed by Fukazawa’s original flourishes and twists on Raimi’s standbys just as much.  The eyeball stabbing scene is great, and the part where a necklace comes out a person’s mouth and digs into their eye is kind of freaky.  The film even manages to one-up Raimi when the dismembered hand fuses together with a severed head, creating a Bride of Re-Animator-esque creation.  Also, those who were always incensed that Evil Dead 2’s poster boy, the skull with human eyes, was nowhere to be found in that movie will be pleased that a very low budget version shows up here.

In front of the camera, Fukazawa mimics Bruce Campbell’s performance rather closely and nails many of his facial tics.  Weirdly enough, this was his only movie, and it’s sort of a shame.  Even though it’s clearly a riff on Evil Dead (I hesitate to call it a “rip-off” as it’s more of a homage than anything), his own unique spins on Raimi’s films are enough to make you curious what he might’ve been able to do with a completely original premise.  

“Sayonara, baby!”

AKA:  The Japanese Evil Dead.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #26: ADVENTURE AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1966) ** ½

(Streamed via Otherworlds TV)

Julia (Carmen Molina) and her boyfriend are taking a tour of a cave when they sneak off for a little hanky-panky.  They fall into a hole and her man is killed by a giant rubbery reptile.  A professor (Jose Elias Moreno) then gathers together an expedition to find the monster responsible.  

Directed by Alfredo B. (Santo vs. the Martian Invasion) Crevenna, this Mexican sci-fi horror flick suffers from a lot of padding.  The opening narration is especially longwinded, there’s an inexplicable musical number that brings things to a screeching halt, the diamond smuggling subplot goes nowhere, and the slow-moving scenes of the expedition traipsing through the caverns are likely to bore you.  The funniest form of padding comes during the hilarious scene where the professor preps his team for the journey by showing them footage from One Million B.C. and Unknown Island.  Usually, these kinds of films try to incorporate shots from other movies into the action, so it was nice to see monster fights from other flicks being passed off as “research” material.  

If you can get past the scenes of real animal cruelty and casual racism, you’ll be treated to some terrific rubbery monsters.  There’s a cool cyclops, a giant bat monster (who has a hilarious flying scene), and a big ass fuzzy spider.  The shots of the monsters’ eyes glowing in the dark are quite atmospheric and the monster attacks are even a little bloody.  Another memorable sequence occurs when the expedition is attacked by bats while perilously dangling above a lava pit.  

For a film filled with so much padding, it sure ends awful abruptly.  I mean, appreciate it when a movie wraps things up before it wears out its welcome, but it’s still a little jarring.  However, for all its faults, when the monsters are front and center, Adventure at the Center of the Earth is cheesy fun.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #25: PAGANINI HORROR (1988) ***

(Streamed via Plex)

Paganini Horror starts off with some of the worst/funniest scenes of terrible musicians performing awful rock n’ roll numbers since Pod People.  The band’s manager is understandably upset and hates the song almost as much as the audience.  “I know the difference between a hit and the mundane!  We need another hit… not rehashed bullshit!”

Concerned, one of the band members gets in contact with a poorly dubbed Donald Pleasance who sells him an old parchment of a lost song by Paganini.  To double down on the whole Paganini-Mania the kids obviously go gaga for nowadays, the band decides to film their music video in Paganini’s old villa (ran by Daria Nicolodi, who also wrote the flick).  Here, we are treated to another hilarious/awful rock video segment where a guy in a gold mask stalks the band.

I’m sure you probably can guess that the real Paganini (who allegedly sold his soul to the devil for fame and fortune) comes to life and starts to make mincemeat out of the band and the video crew.  You probably didn’t predict he would do so with a switchblade violin.  (Then again, you might, if you saw it under its alternate title, The Killing Violin.)  

In short, this is some of Luigi (Starcrash) Cozzi’s finest work.  Although he can’t quite sustain the WTF momentum of the early scenes throughout the entire running time, Cozzi gives us enough face melting and flesh dissolving to make this a cut above your typical rock n’ roll horror flick.  If the shoddy musical numbers didn’t endear Paganini Horror to you, or if the sight of Donald Pleasance throwing money from the top of tall buildings failed to make you smile, or if the brightly colored balls-out scene of horror didn’t leave an impression, then the dialogue will at least make you sit up and take notice.  There are howlers aplenty here.  I think my favorite line came when the band gets the idea to film their horror-themed music video and one of the gals says, “No one has ever done anything remotely like it before!  Except for Michael Jackson and his fantastic Thriller video clip!”

AKA:  The Killing Violin.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #24: RETURN TO… RETURN TO NUKE ‘EM HIGH AKA: VOL. 2 (2017) **

(Streamed via The Halloween Channel)

The title of Troma’s Return to… Return to Nuke ‘Em High AKA:  Vol. 2 is a little unwieldy and chaotic.  That’s okay because it perfectly suits the movie itself.  Following up the fun Return to Nuke ‘Em High Vol.1 was an unenviable task.  Although this belated (even though they were shot simultaneously) sequel is an often disjointed mess, there are some truly memorable moments here to still make it worth a look for Troma fans.  

Heck, the first scene qualifies it as some kind of manic classic.  It’s a fun, gory, and surreal rip-off of the shower scene in Carrie.  While it’s pretty much all downhill from there, this scene will be etched into my brain for months to come.

After being raped by a duck in Vol. 1, Lauren (Catherine Corcoran) gives birth to a mutant duck baby.  She and her lover Chrissy (Asta Paredes) ease into their parenting roles surprisingly well, all things considered.  The couple’s bliss is soon shattered when the glee club-turned-gang of mutant bikers, The Cretins kidnap Lauren and her newborn.  Meanwhile, the head of Tromorganic (Lloyd Kaufman, who also directed) turns into a fire-breathing mutant monster and it’s up to Lauren’s duck monster boyfriend, Kevin to save the day.

Like most Troma sequels, Return to… Return is heavily padded with flashbacks to the other movies in the series. The editing is slapdash at best, and the whole thing feels cobbled together from leftovers from the previous film.  “Meta” scenes of Kaufman arguing with his wife (and producer) about editing gore and dicks out of the final cut feel more like a way to pad things out than anything.  (Extra padding occurs in the form of outtakes and even a musical number over the credits.)

Overall, it’s less assured and certainly messier than Vol. 1.  Despite a grand set-up, it pretty much falls apart in the second act.  At least the gross FX, dumb gags, and abundance of T & A keep it from completely spinning off the rails.  

Your enjoyment of the film may hinge on your ability to go with all the duck stuff.  I’m not sure why Kaufman leaned so hard into the duck humor.  If I had to guess, I’d say it was the natural progression of the foul humor (no pun intended) of Poultrygeist.  Who knows?

Monique Dupree gets the best line when she sees Corcoran giving birth in the shower and screams, “She’s not dying!  She’s dilating!”

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #23: TAG (2015) *** ½

(Streamed via Horror Movies by Fawesome)

I first became aware of Tag when they played a clip from the opening scene on an episode of The Soup.  It involves a bus full of Japanese schoolgirls on a field trip that wind up being cut in half by an unseen force.  This jaw-dropping bravura set piece features some janky CGI in some spots, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work.  This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the film’s unexpected, surreal, and gory sequences.

Tag is sort of like a mix of Evil Dead, Final Destination, and The Butterfly Effect.  A Japanese schoolgirl runs afoul of mysterious forces that cause her classmates to die in horrifically ghoulish ways.   Just when she thinks she’s escaped death’s grasp and everything has returned to normal, she finds herself in an alternate universe where yet another grim fate awaits those around her.  

Tag is full of spectacular carnage and over the top gore.  The film contains a wonderful scene where a Japanese schoolgirl takes a crocodile to the crotch, as well as one of the greatest wedding scenes in movie history.  There is a school shooting sequence that may be too much for some viewers to take, however, so fair warning.  Some of the stuff in between the gruesome set pieces feels a tad like padding, but since these scenes include several instances of Japanese schoolgirls getting into slow motion pillow fights, it’s hard to lodge a complaint.  The camerawork is also impressive as it is at times reminiscent of both Raimi and Kubrick.  

The ending is a little on the underwhelming side, but then again, anyone would be hard-pressed to tie together all these wildly disparate sequences in a satisfying manner.  That doesn’t necessarily diminish the overall impact as it certainly fits the unpredictable tone throughout the rest of the film.  Tag may have its flaws, but this is one movie I had no idea where it was going from one scene to the next.   Even if some parts didn’t work, I didn’t care as being along for the ride was part of the fun.  

AKA:  Tag:  A High School Splatter Film.  AKA:  Real Tag.