EATEN ALIVE! A TASTEFUL REVENGE (1999) ****

Okay, so when I watched Mail Order Murder, the W.A.V.E. Productions documentary, this was one of the titles that really stuck out.  The short clips that were shown don’t quite do it justice.  This is one of the nuttiest fucking movies I’ve seen in a long time.  I think I may be hooked on W.A.V.E.

Stacey (Debbie D) gives it all for her company, but is still passed over for a promotion by her bitchy boss (Barbara Joyce).  To make matters worse, the job goes to Stacey’s ROOMMATE (Tina Krause) just because she’s prettier than her!  The nerve.  What’s a gal to do?  If you answered, “Grab a shrinking gun, shrink her enemies down to size, and then eat them”, then this is the movie for you.  

I’ve never been one for drugs, but this movie left me high as a kite.  Director Gary Whitson gets maximum laughs from the hilarious concept and the acting and shrinking scenes have to be seen to be disbelieved.  Some of the greenscreen “special” effects will have you rolling in the floor with laughter.  

If you’re not familiar with W.A.V.E. Productions, they basically allowed fans to write in to them with a list of their fetishes and they would incorporate them into their next no-budget horror movie.  I don’t know who had a fetish for shrinking hot naked women and then eating them, but God bless them and keep them for all eternity.  I’m not sure if I too have the fetish now, but I kind of already want to see it again.  One thing’s for sure, it’s one of the most insane films I’ve seen in a long time.  

The movie is only about thirty-five minutes long, which is about all the running time this insane premise could stand.  It’s almost like they shrunk the movie down to size too.  That is a good thing, though.  When you strip down something like this down to its barest essentials, it makes the weird-ass sequences seem even weirder.  

Speaking of being stripped down and bare, there’s a lot of nudity here, which also helps make it an unadulterated classic.  There’s a sequence where Debbie D and Sunny try on swimsuits for like ten straight minutes that is cinema at its purest.  Heck, I’m not even gonna talk about the scenes that take place INSIDE Debbie’s stomach where the shrunken girls are digested on something that looks like a Slip n’ Slide from Hell.

Even though it’s only thirty-five minutes long, Eaten Alive!  A Tasteful Revenge is still somehow packed with flashbacks, an overlong end credits sequence, AND post-credits bloopers.  I usually object to so much padding, but these scenes were so nice the first time that I didn’t mind seeing them twice, if only to double-check that I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing.  If you thought you’ve seen it all, by all means, check this sucker out.

MILLIGAN MARCH: BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS (1970) * ½

Bloodthirsty Butchers is writer/director Andy Milligan’s version of Sweeney Todd:  The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.  Todd (John Miranda) is in cahoots with baker Maggie Lovett (Jane Hilary).  He slices his customers’ throats in the barber shop, and she bakes the bodies into her famous meat pies.  Problems ensue when customers start finding human hair and boobies in their baked goods.  

With this film, Milligan continues his tradition of starting things off with a bang (in this case, a pretty good hand hacking scene) before immediately letting things get bogged down with a lot of boring soap opera melodrama.  You would think that Sweeney Todd would be a can’t miss proposition for Milligan, seeing as his horror films are often 19th century costume dramas with occasional dashes of gore.  Even though the story is tailormade for Milligan’s sensibilities, he is unable to make it work, thanks in no small part to the frequent dull, talky passages in between the murder set pieces.  Or put another way:  You get a little gore, but it’s mostly a bore.  

It’s been a while since I saw it last, but I forgot that it takes FOREVER before the body parts start turning up in the meat pies.  Heck, Miranda and Hilary don’t even share any scenes together until the last act.  Before that, it’s just a lot of love triangles, rectangles, and pentagons as the young romantic leads’ premarital woes and Todd and Lovett’s marital strife seem to take precedence over the whacking, hacking, and body stacking.  There are ultimately just too many side characters and subplots that gum up the works.  I know he was probably just trying to flesh out the characters (or more likely, pad out the running time), but the further Milligan strays from the central premise, the worse the movie gets. 

Notable Milligan motifs:  Like Nightbirds, Milligan shot the film in England.  As with The Body Beneath and Torture Dungeon, it’s essentially a 19th century costume drama with high school drama level costumes and acting that’s punctuated by occasional gore scenes.  Milligan’s overuse of library music and inexplicable shots of the camera looking straight up the actor’s noses also permeate the film.  As for his stock company players:  Miranda later turned up in The Weirdo and Surgikill, Berwick Kaler was previously seen in Nightbirds and The Body Beneath, and William Barrel also turned up in The Body Beneath.

AKA:  The Blood Butcher.  

Here’s my first stab at reviewing the film, which was originally posted on July 17th, 2007 on my old site.  As you can see, my feelings on the flick haven’t changed:  

BLOODTHIRSTY BUTCHERS  (1970)  * ½

In 19th century London, Sweeney Todd (Happy Days’ John Miranda) cuts hair and throats and makes off with his customer’s valuables.  Meanwhile Ms. Maggie Lovett sells human meat pies to her clueless customers.  They fall in love and kill each other’s respective spouses.  Everyone else seems to be in love with everyone else’s spouses too, so the movie is basically a soap opera with high school drama class production values and costumes.  A couple of choice gore scenes (hands hacked off, a human breast in a meat pie, meat cleaver to the face) and Todd’s speech about “women’s happiness” saves this from being a total loss.  Director Andy (The Ghastly Ones) Milligan returned to the 19th century in The Rats are Coming!  The Werewolves are Here!

TUBI CONTINUED… LOVE AFTER DEATH (1968) ****

Here’s an incredible jaw-dropping horror comedy skin flick from Argentina.  If you haven’t seen it yet, what the fuck are you waiting for?  Guaranteed insanity awaits!

Mr. Montel (Guillermo de Cordova) is prone to cataleptic fits.  His scheming wife Sofia (Carmin O’Neal) and his doctor (Roberto Maurano) are secretly in love and conspire to bury him alive when his latest bout of catatonia hits.  It seems Sofia is still a virgin because her poor hubby is afraid of sex and she’s hoping the good doctor can give it to her.  

At the funeral, Montel wakes up in his own casket, but is unable to make anyone realize he’s still alive.  His silent pleas for release from his coffin go unanswered, and he is entombed in the local cemetery and left for dead by his sexpot would-be widow.  Little does she know Montel wakes up and is able to claw his way out of his grave to freedom.  After stumbling around the graveyard for a bit, he cleans himself up and sets out to get some action.  

First, he attempts to rape a woman by pushing her into an old lady’s apartment and tries to do the deed on the couch while the geezer granny looks on.  When Montel is unable to perform, he runs away in disgust, leaving the naked woman all hot and bothered.  She then tries to seduce the little old lady, who politely declines and muses, “If I was ten years younger!”  

If you can’t already tell, this movie is fucking phenomenal.  

Montel has other surprise encounters with a stripper and a pair of lesbians, before finally being able to make time with a random babe he picks up on the sidewalk.  Meanwhile, the cops question the doctor, and get close to figuring everything out.  That is, until the surprise twist ending.  You won’t fucking believe it.  

Man, you never know where this movie is going next.  The opening is played completely straight.  Think an Argentinean Poe adaptation.  Then, it turns into an Argentinean Doris Wishman flick as there’s lots of black and white roughie sex, hilariously unsynchronized sound, and random shots of feet.  Other scenes play like everything from a film noir to an all-out bedroom farce.

Everything from the cool camerawork to the atmospheric cinematography to the inspired use of library music (I had fun spotting several tracks that have appeared in many of the Andy Milligan movies I’ve been watching lately) is just spot on.  The bad dubbing helps to put it over the top and make it a delirious work or trashy art.  Sure, the climax may run on a little long, but that final twist is surely something.  

Trust me folks, you’re gonna love Love After Death.  

AKA:  Unsatisfied Love.

TUBI CONTINUED… DARLING NIKKI (2019) *

Nikki (Nicole D’Angelo) is a beautiful woman stuck in a boring marriage to her musician husband (James Duval).  Or is she the co-hostess of a cooking show?  Or is she a high-priced call girl?  Whatever she is, she gets bored of all that shit, and begins taking drugs until she occasionally starts to slip into a half-assed DTV version of Alice in Wonderland, further infuriating/confusing/confounding the viewer.  There’s a guy dressed like the White Rabbit, a Cheshire Cat wannabe, a hookah-smoking pimp, and Lisa London is the Mad Hatter.  

This movie is like the White Rabbit as it hops from place to place so much that you can never get your bearings.  Tubi describes the flick as such:  “A busy bachelorette with her hands full of romantic prospects plunges into a fantasy world that becomes indistinguishable from her secret life.”  It’s one thing for a character in a movie not to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.  It’s another thing when the audience can’t either.  

The big problem is that director Gregory Hatanaka (who also made the equally awful The Awakening of Emanuelle with D’Angelo) makes the early scenes so chaotic that it’s hard to tell if Nikki has already gone off her rocker or not.  He should’ve at least grounded the early scenes in some semblance of mundane everyday reality to better disassociate it from the Alice in Wonderland shit.  Is the cooking show scenes part of the Lewis Carroll-inspired nonsense?  Is the hooking scenes (she never has sex, so I don’t know why they made it a big deal that she was a prostitute) part of the Wonderland sequences?  It’s almost impossible to tell.  Since nothing makes a lick of sense, it’s hard to care one way or the other about Nikki’s fantasies, or her reality for that matter.  Oh, and naming the movie after a Prince song does nothing to clarify any of the resounding plot questions posted above.  

TUBI CONTINUED… KITTY KILLS (2017) ***

After her parents’ brutal murder is left unsolved, Susie (Lina Maya) takes it upon herself to bring the killers to justice.  While trying to gather evidence, Susie is kidnapped, raped, and left for dead by the drug dealers responsible for her parents’ death.  On Halloween night, Susie returns from the brink of death, now calling herself “Pussy”, dressed in a sexy skintight catsuit (complete with cat ears and tail) and seeking vengeance.

Kitty Kills is a low budget affair, but it’s highly entertaining.  Writer/director Gabriel Black has a knack for economical storytelling (especially early on) and keeps things moving at a steady clip.  Most of these faux-comic book movies spend way too much time setting up the origin story.  This one breezes through the set-up and cuts right to the chase, which is appreciated.  Black makes good use of color-tinted scenes (green, purple, blue, etc.) to heighten the comic book atmosphere and does a solid job directing the various shootouts and fight scenes.

Despite the fact that it is essentially a Rape n’ Revenge picture, Kitty Kills isn’t as exploitative as you might think.  Most of the unpleasant stuff happens offscreen and Maya remains fully clothed throughout the movie.  It also earns points for allowing its heroine time to come to terms with not only the ramifications of vigilante justice, but her sexual assault as well; something you normally don’t expect to see in something like this.  Don’t worry though, there’s still plenty of good comeuppance scenes as drug dealers, bad guys, and henchmen die via axe, strangulation, cyanide hidden in cocaine, and (lots of) stabbing.      

The film also benefits from a strong central performance by Maya as Susie/Pussy.  She’s equally memorable during her psychotic episodes as she is dishing out vigilante justice.  The supporting roles are also much better than you might expect.  

In short, if you’re looking for a badass vigilante thriller, Kitty Kills is the cat’s meow.

AKA:  Pussy Kills.

TUBI CONTINUED… LADY OF THE DARK: GENESIS OF THE SERPENT VAMPIRE (2011) *

Boy, how’s that for a title, huh?  

When her husband goes away on business, housewife Eve (Melanie Denholme) is left home alone.  She spends much of her time frittering her day away, much to the audience’s chagrin.  While meditating in the garden, she gets bit by a snake.  After sucking the venom out, she celebrates by eating an apple.  You don’t have to be a biblical scholar to realize the shit will hit the proverbial fan soon after.  Eventually, Eve turns into a vampire and begins keeping a gimp in her basement to feed on.  

As its title suggests, Lady of the Dark:  Genesis of the Serpent Vampire is all over the place.  Some scenes feel like a low rent Playboy Video Centerfold of a scantily clad woman walking around her home and narrating about her daily routine.  Some scenes feel like a shaky-cam horror flick.  Some scenes feel like they came out of a film student’s short film.  Some scenes feel like an amateurish music video.  Some scenes look like a Skype call.  Some scenes look like a cheap bondage video.  None of it sticks.  

Mostly though, the flick is nothing more than long, irritating scenes where nothing much at all happens.  When something does happen, it’s little more than Denholme wandering around her house.  I mean, she looks hot and all, and the scenes where she gets naked and/or seductively exercises and does yoga help to alleviate the boredom… a little.  It’s just nothing to base an entire movie on.  I wouldn’t be against seeing her in something else, provided that it actually had, you know, a coherent plot.      

Lady of the Dark:  Genesis of the Serpent Vampire reminded me in a lot of ways of a Chris Alexander film.  It’s got a cast of (mostly) one actress who wanders around one location for most of the running time with a blank look on her face, oh and there’s some occasional nudity.  That, if you can’t tell, isn’t exactly a compliment.  However, I will say that this is probably the best biblically themed vampire movie starring one actress (and a gimp) that was filmed in someone’s mom’s house for $20 I’ve ever seen. 

SCREAM VI (2023) **

Scream VI continues the great horror movie sequel tradition of setting your sequel in New York City and then doing absolutely nothing with the concept of setting your sequel in New York City.  Like Friday the 13th Part VIII:  Jason Takes Manhattan, Ghostface doesn’t hack people up in The Empire State Building, stab victims at The Statue of Liberty, gut teenagers at Yankee Stadium, or splatter someone’s brains all over Broadway, which is bullshit if you ask me.  In fact, the only sequence that really feels like it’s set in New York, is the subway scene you’ve already seen in the trailers.  

I guess this wouldn’t matter if the film had a strong hook.  All the previous Scream movies skewered the concept of horror movies, sequels, remakes, and “requels”.  This one never decides what its intended target is.  When the movie nerd gives her big speech, she says the murderer could be following the pattern of Scream 2, or maybe sequels to requels (since this is basically the second film with the “Legacy” cast) or even franchises, but the killers never follow through with either pattern.  In fact, one of them even says, “Fuck the movies!” at one point, and you have to wonder if the filmmakers didn’t feel the same way as this is probably the most soulless (but not worst… that would be part 4) entry yet.  

The opening sequence is rather strong though and suggests an interesting concept the rest of the film never follows up on.  I don’t want to give too much away as it is the most worthwhile scene in the whole movie.  All I’ll say is that if the killers continued going after their own copycats, it could’ve been a neat meditation on the assorted rip-offs and cash-ins that litter the slasher genre.  Unfortunately, the movie never commits to this intriguing idea.  (This sequence, while having a clever twist, loses points however for being a criminal waste of Samara Weaving.)  

There was some pre-release talk about this being the goriest Scream yet, but I have no idea what they were going on about.  Other than a knife to the mouth scene, there’s a fair amount of blood, but nothing remotely gory.  Actually, this movie might set a record for how many times someone gets stabbed and DOESN’T die.  I mean, I think the body count is only about five or six because the kills are so fucking weak that they don’t even register as kills because the person survives.  All this wouldn’t matter if the suspense scenes (aside from the opening) weren't so watered down and routine.  I did like the killers’ shrine though, which looks like a Scream version of a Planet Hollywood.

The absence of Neve Campbell (who held out for more money and got shot down) is sorely felt here.  She wasn’t given much to do in the last one, but her presence at least made it feel like a legit Scream movie.  Courteney Cox is still around, although in a limited capacity, and (to make matters worse) she basically does the same shit she always does in these movies.  That is to say, write a book, get punched, and then grudgingly help out the rest of the cast solve the killers’ identities.  With Neve nowhere to be found and Courteney stuck with a reduced role, it’s up to “The Core Four” to shoulder much of the movie.  While the new cast members did an OK job in the previous Scream, the screenwriters do very little to make them memorable this time around.  You know it’s a desperate move when they bring Hayden Panettiere, the most forgettable character from the most forgettable Scream back.  (Yet another person who got stabbed and didn’t fucking die.)