TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: THE PUPPET MONSTER MASSACRE (2010) **

The Puppet Monster Massacre is a little bit like Meet the Feebles as the cast is nothing more than hand puppets who speak in a variety of four-letter words.  Most of this is crude, both in terms of the lowbrow humor and the ramshackle design of the puppets.  It might be good for a snicker or two, but ultimately, it’s a bit of a chore to get through.

A mad doctor (voiced by Steve Rimpici, the voice of Duke the Unicorn in the CarousHELL movies) with the aid of his penguin assistant incubates a monster inside an unsuspecting victim.  Meanwhile, a guy receives a letter telling him he can win a million bucks if he can spend one night inside the doctor’s haunted mansion.  At the mansion, he’s met by other contestants, including the girl he’s had a crush on for years.  Little do the contestants know, the doctor is scheming to get revenge on them by unleashing his ever-growing monster. 

This was probably better off as a short.  Scenes run on way too long without much of a comic payoff.  Unless, that is, you count lots of unfunny fart jokes as a “comedic payoff”.  It also doesn’t help that many of the jokes run on way past their expiration date.  (Like the unending geyser of blood.)  The monster itself is pretty neat looking, but it doesn’t have much of a presence and lacks personality.  There’s also an odd, animated WWII flashback that’s kind of lame and seems like it’s only there to bulk up the running time. 

In addition to Meet the Feebles, The Puppet Monster Massacre seems to take inspiration from Let My Puppets Come during the scenes of puppet sex.  Unfortunately, the instances of puppet nudity and gore aren’t particularly engaging enough to make it all worthwhile.  Even with the puppet nudity, bloodshed, and foul language, it all still somehow manages to feel lightweight and tame.

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: POOL PARTY MASSACRE (2017) ***

A group of catty, entitled, spoiled brats (who admittedly, look great in bikinis) gather at the home of Queen Bee Blair (Kristin Noel McKusick) for a pool party.  Little do they know a lumbering killer is lurking about the premises with an arsenal of garden tools at his disposal.  Before long, he’s making mincemeat out of the stuck-up sorority sisters.  Who will survive?  Probably Blair’s bestie, Nancy (Margaux Neme), seeing as she’s the only one at the party who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth. 

From the awesome 8-bit style opening credits sequence, you can tell Pool Party Massacre is going to be a lot of fun.  Writer/director/star Drew Marvick delivers a solid amount of T & A (not to mention some S & M) and blood and guts.  There’s throat slashing, a screwdriver to the eye, a hammer to the jaw, a pickaxe to the brain, an axe to the neck, an electric hedge clipper to the stomach, a power drill to the back, an axe to the head, and a machete to the chest.  He also gives us what is possibly the screen’s first Psycho shower scene homage involving a weed whacker.  That is to say Marvick is a talent to watch.  (Porn star Alexis Adams is especially memorable in her nude/death scenes too.) 

I have to hand it to Marvick, a lot of the girls’ bitchy dialogue is pretty funny, and they make a lot of pop culture references along the way too.  The film is also laced with enough random bits of goofiness to make it memorable (like the crazy old biddy whose creepy tea party is ruined by the heavy metal music blaring from poolside).  The twist ending is also extremely clever.

It's Neme, the Final Girl, who gets the best line of the movie during the climax after she hears the killer’s motive and asks, “You did all this to be famous?  Why can’t you make a sex tape like everyone else?”

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: THE PIZZAGATE MASSACRE (2020) **

I vaguely remember when the whole “Pizzagate” thing was trending on Twitter a few years ago, but I never bothered to even click on any of it because I figured it was just a bunch of crackpot idiotic bullshit.  Before I watched this, I did a quick search of Pizzagate on Wikipedia and it pretty much confirmed what I already suspected.  It seems Pizzagate was a right-wing conspiracy theory that (allegedly) linked Democrats to child sex trafficking by lizard people Illuminati members who apparently keep the sex workers in the basements of D.C. pizza parlors. 

The Pizzagate Massacre suggests the improbable proposition that all of this is true.  Not in a “Told you so!” kind of way, but rather, “It’s all real, but it just sounds so weird that nobody will ever take it seriously”. 

Karen (Alexandria Payne) is a fledgling documentary filmmaker who loses her job at a right-wing news network right after they break the Pizzagate story.  She joins forces with an alt-right militia nut named Duncan (Tinus Seaux) to make a movie about Pizzagate and expose the truth.  It doesn’t take long for them to get into hot water with the authorities, the militia, and (possibly) the lizard people who run the world.  

Writer/director John Valley shoots the film with style and the John Carpenter-inspired synth score is pretty good.  However, despite the title, it’s not a horror movie.  In a way, it’s kind of a high wire act for Valley as he’s presenting right-wing conspiracy theory gobbledygook as stone-cold fact while (presumably) not believing a word of it.  Unfortunately, the movie never really commits to the bit.  It could’ve taken some interesting turns, but Valley just opts to turn things into sort of an oddball concoction of Coen Brothers/Tarantino/Scorsese crime movie cliches in the third act. 

Seaux is solid in the lead.  He sort of resembles Chris Hemsworth playing a Phillip Seymour Hoffman character.  He has oddball energy to spare, but the movie itself never really clicks. 

AKA:  Duncan.

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: PILLOW PARTY MASSACRE (2023) *** ½

After an April Fools prank goes wrong, the prankee gets revenge by shooting the prankster.  Two years later, the friend group who witnessed and/or were involved with the prank hold a reunion and decide to party it up.  Predictably, a killer shows up to poop in the punch bowl.  (Well, not literally.)

Pillow Party Massacre has a snazzy ‘80s vibe and is packed with cool music and strong performances.  It also contains several scenes where the characters have honest, heartfelt, and dare I say, moving conversations about loss, guilt, and grief.  Look, this is definitely not something that’s necessary in a picture called Pillow Party Massacre, but I’m happy to know it’s here, especially when it’s played so nicely by actresses Laura Welsh, Chynna Rae Shurts, Allegra Sweeney, and Jax Kellington.  Heck, even the horror movie staple “Truth or Dare” scene plays more like a therapy session between the friends as they ask “Truth” questions that are more of the “checking in on your friends” variety than the typical “tell me something dirty” dialogue you’d normally hear in something like this.

Eventually, things erupt into a heated argument between the girls, and when all their pent-up feelings come out, they finally settle things with an all-out pillow fight.  Director Calvin Morie (An Amityville Poltergeist) McCarthy sure knows how to shoot one of these things.  He gives us lots of slow-motion shots of feathers floating in the air, plenty of close-ups of hot co-eds giggling, and gratuitous shots of girls ripping their tops off.  In short… Cinema.

McCarthy doesn’t rest on his laurels when it comes to the gore.  He delivers a knife through the back of the skull and out the eyeball, a geyser-riffic throat slashing, a hand hacking, a scene where a guy is cut in half LENGTHWISE, head smashing via pillowcase full of rocks, face burning, and one gal gets impaled to a tree.  The biggest takeaway here is that McCarthy shows us you can make a gory ‘80s style slasher with characters that are three-dimensional and that you genuinely care about while still delivering on the demands of the genre (AKA:  T & A and blood and guts).

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: PAINTBALL MASSACRE (2020) **

Paintball Massacre opens at a high school reunion filled with awkward encounters and annoying grown-ups stuck in a state of arrested development acting like doofuses.  The next day, the former classmates work past their collective hangovers for a game of paintball in the woods.  Naturally, it doesn’t take long for a killer to infiltrate the game and begin hacking the competition to pieces. 

Like Nutcracker Massacre, this is one of those low budget British horror movies where everyone speaks with muddy accents that are hard to understand (at least to these American ears).  I think the filmmakers were trying for a horror-comedy feel, but it’s never really successful as the slasher scenes are weak and the dismal attempts at humor fall flat.   The use of faux-Spaghetti Western music when the paintballers enter the playing field is groan-inducing and the scenes where one of the girls keeps trying to equate the group’s situation to a Fast and the Furious movie gets old quick. 

Most of the kills happen offscreen, which is the big problem.  Because of that, we usually just see the aftermath of the carnage.  We do get death by land mine, an impalement with a real estate “For Sale” sign, and a face peeling.  Ultimately, there’s just not enough here to really satisfy horror fans. 

It's a shame too because the set-up is sound enough.  (Well, maybe without all the unnecessary reunion scenes in the beginning, that is.)  I have to wonder if it all might’ve worked better if they just made the killer someone using real bullets rather than having a slasher in a paintball mask picking off the friend group one by one.  This would’ve made it closer to something like Masterblaster than, say, a feature length version of the paintball scene from Friday the 13th Part 6.  Seeing how the horror elements rarely click, the action movie approach might’ve been the way to go.  (All the Fast and the Furious comparisons would’ve made more sense too.)   

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: NUTCRACKER MASSACRE (2022) ** ½

Okay, so, imagine you’re Patrick Bergin.  One day, you’re playing Robin Hood.  The next day, you’re co-starring with Julia Roberts, the biggest movie star in the world, in Sleeping with the Enemy.  Life is good.  Then, in the blink of an eye, thirty years goes by and you’re starring in a movie about a six-foot-tall sentient homicidal nutcracker.  I guess there are worse ways to pay the rent.

Bergin plays a Russian toy shop owner who literally twirls his mustache, so the audience knows he’s evil.  He also ominously hums “The Nutcracker Suite” while rubbing his hands together like a villain in a silent film.  That is to say, he’s pretty great in this.  

Bergin tells a long, confusing origin story of the Nutcracker before selling one to a babe who just broke up with her boyfriend.  She buys it as a Christmas present for her auntie, whom she’s spending Christmas with.  It doesn’t take long before auntie’s prized six-foot-tall nutcracker comes to life and begins knocking off her relatives. 

The deaths, it must be said, are solid.  One person is murdered by an ice skate, and another is strangled with Christmas garland.  We also get a great scene where the nutcracker not only cracks a guy’s nuts but rips them off too.  Admittedly, the rest of the movie is kind of ho-hum, but this scene is badass enough to boost it an extra Half Star. 

I guess I should’ve known this was going to be better than expected because it was produced by Mark L. Lester.  Yeah, THAT Mark L. Lester, the man that gave the world Commando and Showdown in Little Tokyo.  It was also directed by Rebecca Matthews, the director of the greatest fake Amityville movie ever made, Amityville Witches.  With a pedigree like that (not to mention Bergin’s fun performance), Nutcracker Massacre should make for breezy fun for seasonal horror film fanatics.

PRISCILLA (2023) *** ½

Elvis was the King of Rock ‘n Roll.  As such, he was the closest thing America has ever had to royalty.  By proxy, that would make his wife, Priscilla, a Queen.  Millions of girls would’ve killed to be in her shoes.  As Sofia Coppola’s poignant and melancholy mood piece shows, those shoes weren’t exactly a pair of ruby slippers.  

Priscilla isn’t so much a biopic, but a snapshot of a life.  It shows only Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) from her first meeting with Elvis (Jacob Elordi) till the moment she leaves him.  It shows how a (very) young girl can get swept off her feet by the most famous man on the planet.  The catch is, she has to be at his beck and call 24/7.  She’s gotta stay in Graceland and keep the home fires burning for him while he’s off making movies and shaking his pelvis.  She’s got to wear what he says and do her hair just so.  Even when this grows tiresome for her, at the end of the day, she’s still dating Elvis freakin’ Presley. 

Once they are married, she finds being Elvis’s wife has its ups and downs.  Just like every relationship, I suppose.  Except when you’re married to the King, those ups and downs were often extreme and volatile. 

There’s still genuine love and affection between the two.  His overreliance on pills to keep him going eventually transfers over to her too.  Snippets of his hot temper come out and his erratic behavior and womanizing threatens to derail the relationship.  Still, she stands by her man because at the end of the day she’s married to Elvis freakin’ Presley. 

The film is a fascinating look at when enough is finally enough in a relationship.  Their romance is a lot like any long-distance relationship.  Resentment, unfulfilled longing, and boredom cause the two to further drift apart.  Of course, when you add fame and drugs to the mix, it tends to put a magnifying glass over every bump in the road the couple has.  Naturally, the road this couple is on is a lot more surreal since we’re talking about Elvis freakin’ Presley here.  

Priscilla might be the first love story where the main character’s suitor buys her an expensive wardrobe AND a handgun to match each dress. 

Spaeny is excellent as Priscilla.  Coppola gives her lots of closeups of her to show that Priscilla is putting up a pleasant front for Elvis, the Memphis Mafia, and the press, but her eyes suggest deep sadness and loneliness.  Elordi is good as the King.  He dials down the persona we are accustomed to, but he captures Elvis’s boyish fidgetiness (especially in the early scenes) rather well.  He doesn’t quite show off the King’s larger than life personality during his Vegas era, but I think that helps to ground the film as it’s essentially a two-character relationship drama. 

Much has been made of the lack of Elvis music in the picture.  Even as a die-hard Elvis fan, I can’t say I really missed his music, mostly because it would’ve taken away from Priscilla’s story.  Consider the final scene of Priscilla walking away from Graceland.  If you put “Suspicious Minds” on the soundtrack instead of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”, it stops being a scene about Priscilla and becomes a scene about Elvis, even if he isn’t even present.  This scene (one of the best in the film) deftly shows Priscilla has left the building.