TUBI CONTINUED… WEREWOLF BITCHES FROM OUTER SPACE (2017) NO STARS

You know, just the other day I was wondering whatever happened to Janeane Garafalo.  Turns out, she’s been busy “starring” in this no-budget horror comedy.  You know you’re in trouble when she’s the only name in the cast.  That is, unless you count Lloyd Kaufman and… uh… The Toxic Avenger. 

Feminist werewolf women from the planet Uranus are sent by their alien leader (a chihuahua) to Earth.  Any time they encounter chauvinist men, annoying women, or just assholes in general, they spin around real fast, turn into werewolves (or wear Halloween werewolf masks that were probably purchased at Kmart for cheap on November 1st), and kill them.  There’s a lot of other stuff that happens (like an idiot cop who has a puppet for a partner), but it’s just way too mind-numbingly stupid to go into right now.  I may, however, discuss the rest of the movie with my therapist on my next visit.

I don’t know how the hell they roped Garafalo into this.  She’s the “star” but is only in it for like a minute as a pretentious art gallery owner who is killed by the extraterrestrial lycanthrope ladies.  Kaufman’s role is limited to a badly greenscreened cameo.  Don’t let his participation fool you into thinking this is going to be a bad sub-Troma wannabe flick.  It’s actually a godawful sub-Troma wannabe flick. The cringy humor is well below the low standards of your average Troma movie.  So is the painfully amateurish acting.  

The werewolf attack scenes are repetitive too.  These scenes might’ve been worthwhile if there was some gore or if there was any nudity in general.  Unfortunately, it’s heavily padded with weird asides (like a filmstrip on chiggers) and impromptu dance numbers that add nothing to the proceedings.  No less than three directors (including Nick Zedd) are credited to this fucking mess.  At least we do get a happy ending when the feminist werewolf women go back to Uranus, which is where the movie belongs.

TUBI CONTINUED… NOAH’S SHARK (2021) * ½

Did you know that the Devil, who first took the form of a snake to trick Eve in the garden of Eden, also transformed into a shark and deceived Noah’s son into sneaking him aboard the Ark?  Now, in the present day, a disgraced priest and a documentary filmmaker are on a quest to find the remains of the Ark.  They quickly run afoul of a crimson-cloaked cult that are determined to stop them from finding the Ark at any cost.

Noah’s Shark is much like your typical Mark Polonia movie, except with a lot more Jesus talk.  Although the scenes of the CGI shark are far from the worst I’ve seen in his films, they do lack the chintzy charm you’d expect from Polonia.  On the bright side, the premise is about as ridiculous as you could hope for, and there are a couple of genuine snickers to be had. 

That said, there is an overall sense of déjà vu that hangs over the picture.  The scene where the priest performs an exorcism on a piece of wood from the Ark is awfully similar to Polonia’s Amityville Exorcism, which was also about a haunted piece of lumber.  In fact, it’s the same priest character from that movie, which makes this a semi-sequel.  I think.  Or maybe it’s the beginning of the PCU.  (Polonia Cinematic Universe.)  I don’t know.

Strangely enough, the shark somehow gets lost in the shuffle in all this (Polonia keeps showing the same nightmare/flashback to remind you of the movie’s title), which is a little disappointing.  There’s also a subplot about a sexy redhead witch that’s a lot more interesting than the plot at hand.  Another subplot (about the first expedition to find the Ark) just feels like padding, as does the Found Footage camcorder POV scenes, not to mention the repeated footage of shit we already saw. 

Despite the great title, Noah’s Shark ultimately leaves viewers at sea.  I wanted to enjoy it, but it was ultimately a slog from the word go.  It took me four days to watch it all.  It might take viewers with a lesser tolerance for Mark Polonia movies forty days and forty nights.

TUBI CONTINUED… REVENGE OF THE EMPIRE OF THE APES (2023) **

The opening crawl contains no less than three spelling errors, which doesn’t give you a whole lot of confidence in this, the fourth film in director Mark Polonia’s Empire of the Apes series.  After the crawl, we get a recycled scene from the last one, Invasion of the Empire of the Apes, where a female prisoner is nearly raped by a horny ape.  Then, the plot begins. 

Two ape terrorists are arrested for trying to blow up a space station and are sentenced to an icy prison planet.  (Scenes of two guys in monkey masks walking in front of green screened images of a frozen tundra is what passes for “an icy prison planet” in this movie.)  As they seek shelter and warmth, they are pursued by alien “flyers”.  (They look like something out of How to Train Your Dragon.) Eventually, they stumble upon a crashed ship containing a warrior woman, and together they form an alliance to fix the spacecraft and get revenge on the evil aliens who condemned them all to death.

Revenge of the Empire of the Apes is an improvement over the last two outings in the series, although that’s not saying very much.  Once again, the effects are piss poor (the CGI space battles look like cut scenes from a 3DO game), although the ape masks are slightly better this time out.  (There were only two apes, so I guess they could afford to spring for masks that weren’t on the clearance rack for this entry.)  I’m not sure I can say this is the best one of the franchise or anything.  What I can say is that the ape on human sex scenes (including some ape on human S & M) certainly make it the most memorable.  Granted, the human and simian boinking isn’t exactly erotic, but it’s just weird enough to give it a reason to exist. 

TUBI CONTINUED… DEVIL STORY (1986) ***

The first ten minutes or so of Devil Story is enough to qualify it as some kind of demented work of genius.  A misshapen guy who looks like a melted marshmallow in a Nazi uniform, runs around the countryside indiscriminately stabbing people.  The funniest bit occurs when a stranded motorist asks the clearly unhinged individual for directions and gets stabbed for his troubles.  

Meanwhile, another stranded motorist almost gets struck by lightning and imagines a cat attacking her.  Then, she and her boyfriend go to a castle to spend the night with a couple of old coots who tell longwinded flashbacks about the town’s history involving pirate ships running aground.  

It was right about this time I began to get nervous.  It was here I thought the movie was going to start to run out of gas.  Luckily, Devil Story still some nutty WTF lunacy left in the tank.

You see, a horse gets loose and runs into a field where a toy pirate ship pushes through a little sand dune.  The audience was probably supposed to think it was the presumably regular-sized pirate ship the old couple was talking about as it began breaking through a mountain.  The fact is it looks like a four-year-old filmmaker’s backyard homemade version of Fitzcarraldo.

That is to say, it’s awesome!

Then there’s the scene where the wayward horse encounters our bald antagonist and gets into a fist fight (hoof fight?) with him.  When the horse kicks the baddie in the stomach, it causes him to puke blood for two straight minutes.  As Martin Scorsese would say:  “Cinema!”

Devil Story is one of those movies where the kitchen sink approach yields uneven, but sometimes hilarious results.  Like, I couldn’t tell if the bad guy was supposed to be wearing a Halloween mask or he was supposed to look like that, and the make-up was just piss-poor.  (It turned out to be a case of the latter.)  Or like just when you think things can’t get any weirder, a mummy shows up.  Because of that, Devil Story is sort of review-proof.  Sure, it’s bad, but depending on your mileage, this could be a minor camp classic. 

I mean, I originally was going to give it ** ½.  However, the day after I watched it, some people at work asked me if I had seen anything good lately.  So, I told them about Devil Story.  Folks, the LOOKS my co-workers gave me when I was just describing the plot makes it worth ***.

TUBI CONTINUED… ZOMBIE PIRATES (2014) * ½

Produced by Fred Olen Ray, Zombie Pirates tells the story of Linda (Sarah French), a sexy cat burglar who is coerced by a shady antique dealer (J.C. Pennylegion) into looking for some priceless pirate treasure.  The only way to conjure up the mythical booty is to offer up five sacrifices in five nights at the stroke of midnight to a boatload of undead pirates.  Naturally, when Linda fails to make the fifth and final sacrifice in a timely manner, the zombie buccaneers come after her.

I wanted to like this one, but there were just too many dreary stretches and extended periods where nothing happened.  If you dig long scenes of a guy who looks like Colonel Sanders droning on and on about the history of pirates, then this will be your Citizen Kane.  If you enjoy entire dialogue scenes that are filmed with the “Vignette” filter left on the camera, then this will be your Casablanca.

Once the zombie pirates finally show up, things slowly start to come alive (no pun intended), but not much.  The poster artwork and skeletal pirate make-up is very much inspired by the old Blind Dead movies, particularly The Ghost Galleon, as the scenes aboard the zombies’ boat harken back to that old flick.  The zombie make-up is also pretty cool.  (One even has a zombie parrot!)  The kills are serviceable too, and include a knife through the mouth, some gut ripping, and skull chewing.  

The final zombie attack is OK I guess, but it’s ultimately too little too late.  It certainly doesn’t make up for all the dull scenes that came before, especially the parts where our heroine disposed of the bodies, which had a tendency to drag.  (And I don’t mean because they involved her literally dragging the corpses onto a boat for minutes on end.  I mean they are repetitive and really bogged the pace down.)

TUBI CONTINUED… ATTACK OF THE GIANT TEACHER (2020) **

Kenzo (Makoto Kojima) is a lowly teacher who learns his night school is about to be shut down.  As a final farewell, he and his ragtag group of students decide to put on a musical for the last day of school.  Little do they know that’s when an alien invasion of Earth is about to occur.  Luckily, two of his students are tiny aliens in disguise and they give their beloved teacher a super pill that makes him grow to enormous proportions so he can duke it out with the giant alien menace.

Attack of the Giant Teacher has a potentially good idea.  It’s just a shame that you have to wait until the final ten minutes for the teacher to become a giant.  (Aside from the opening flash forward, that is.)  Till then, you’re stuck with a lot of boring Stand and Deliver-style stuff.  While the teaching scenes aren’t bad exactly, there’s very little for you to hang your hat on until the climax rolls around.  (Aside from the random scene where a lawyer fights a waitress wearing wrestling tights.)

The effects are kind of cheesy, although I guess that’s to be expected.  (The main alien looks like a cross between a burned-out lava lamp and Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000.)  However, the Ultraman-style fight scene at the end is rather ill-fitting with the whole teacher narrative.  I guess it would’ve been okay if the final fight wasn’t so damned brief.  If you’re more invested in whether or not the teacher and his students will rally together to put on the big musical rather than if the teacher will become huge and fight off the impending alien invasion, then you might dig it.  Personally, there weren’t nearly enough scenes of the giant teacher battling UFOs, which, to me, seemed like the entire goddamned point.  Because of that, I can’t give Attack of the Giant Teacher a passing grade.

TUBI CONTINUED… FROZEN SCREAM (1975) *

“Immortality?  Why would anyone want to live forever in a world like this?”

This question is pondered out of the blue by an unseen narrator early on in Frozen Scream.  The query is posed in between a scene of a floating head that’s superimposed over a starfield and a scene where a bug-eyed strangler murders a couple in a swimming pool.  Shortly thereafter, there are phone conversations where the camera never is on the person talking, which means it’s easier to dub in the dialogue after the fact.  (This is also known as “Pulling a Doris Wishman.”) 

I wasn’t even five minutes into the flick, and I already knew I was in deep trouble.

Five minutes later, the narrator comes back, identifies himself as a cop, and tells us how he’s been investigating the murders.  Unfortunately, he chose to do this during a long dialogue scene between the heroine and her doctor, so there’s narration stacked upon dialogue and overlapping to the point that it feels like a ramshackle Altman movie.  This technique is used throughout the film, which begs the question:  Why go through all the trouble to poorly dub your dialogue if you’re just going to dub narration over the whole conversation anyway?

Speaking of the dialogue, it’s spoken by actors who A) Flub their lines B) Speak in blank, expressionless monotone and C) Have accents so thick it sounds like Lili Von Shtupp impersonating Dr. Ruth.

In short, this movie is like a seven-layer cake of suck with each layer suckier than the next.

Bright spots include an OK nightmare scene, a few nifty (albeit brief) gore effects (including an axe to the face and a shard of glass to the eye), and a nude dream sequence.  The most hilarious scene involves a rock band singing covers of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Rock Around the Clock”, but slurring the words in such a manner that I assume was their slick way of avoiding paying any royalties.

Co-Written by Michael (Blood Diner) Sonye.