TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: THE MANSON FAMILY MASSACRE (2019) NO STARS

The Manson Family Massacre is one of the worst films I have seen during my year of watching (almost) nothing but movies on Tubi.  It jumps around all over the place so much that you never quite get your bearings long enough to make sense out of any of it.  The fact is, I don’t think there was ever a chance of this being any good, even if the editing wasn’t so… ahem… helter-skelter.

The film is set in 1992, with a recovering addict musician trying to write new material at Sharon Tate’s old address on Cielo Drive.  Then there are flashbacks to Tex and Manson fucking around with some criminals to organize a half-assed drug deal that naturally goes wrong.  Meanwhile, the musician has odd nightmares and visions, and she’s convinced they are connected to the house, so she goes to see a psychic.  Eventually, the Manson murders play out and the musician also comes to a predictably untimely end.

I knew this was going to be bad right from the opening credits scene that rips off the photo flash sound effects from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  It only got worse once the back-and-forth narrative, complete with title cards straight out of a fifth-rate Tarantino knockoff was introduced.  It’s almost like two different movies stitched together and heavily padded with nightmare sequences that add zilch to the proceedings.

I understand the temptation of wanting to make a Manson movie.  The murders are a fascinating subject ripe with possibilities.  Heck, even if you went the straight-up exploitation route, it could still deliver a powerful kick if the material was in the right hands.  At least it tries to do something different, albeit with spectacularly awful results.  Too bad the ‘90s scenes never intersect with the ‘60s sequences in any meaningful way, other to state that the house rests on a “negative energy fault line”.

A drunk British guy gets the best line of the movie when he derides the musician’s song as being “as deep as Danzig!”

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER: THE MANSON BROTHERS MIDNIGHT ZOMBIE MASSACRE (2021) **

Stone (Chris Margetis) and Skull (Mike Carey) are a pair of washed-up brothers who eke out a living on the independent wrestling circuit.  Some of the lesser-known and significantly less beefy grapplers in the arena try to make a name for themselves by injecting illicit human growth hormones to help them bulk up in a hurry.  Unfortunately, it has just one side effect:  It turns them into flesh-hungry zombies.  Once the entire arena becomes infected, it’s up to Stone, Skull, and a few surviving wrestlers to make it through the night.

Wrestling and horror have always gone hand in hand, both in terms of their fandom, and the fact that sooner or later, every wrestler-turned-actor winds up appearing in a horror movie at some point in their career. (This one features Randy Couture.)  Directed by actor Max (Sabotage) Martini, The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is kind of a mess, but there is some good stuff here.  The humor between the good natured, but dim-witted brothers is hit and miss, and their Bowery Boys-esque malapropisms work about 50/50.  The wrestling sequences are solid, and the backstage, inside-baseball scenes of the wrestlers going over the matches in the locker room before the main event are entertaining.

Some of this, admittedly, doesn’t work.  The framework scenes of a trailer trash family reading a Manson Brothers comic book are odd and unnecessary.  It also takes way too long to finally get to the zombie action.  Still, it features two scenes I’ve never seen in a zombie movie before, which makes it marginally worthwhile.  First is the scene where a character gets one look at a zombie and immediately drops dead of a heart attack.  The second involves a wrestler waving a cape like a matador at a zombie dressed in a chorizo costume who charges at him like a bull.  So, there’s that.

Margetis and Carey (who also wrote the screenplay together) are OK in the leads, but the film really needed two guys with stronger presences to carry the movie on their shoulders.  It's nice to see Couture here, although he really isn’t given much to do as one of the other wrestlers.  D.B. (Eight Men Out) Sweeney seems out of place in something like this, but he looks like he’s having fun as the Mansons’ energetic manager. 

TUBI-WEEN HANGOVER

Well, it’s November once again, and like every November, I spend the entire month catching up on all the horror movies I didn’t get around to watching in October.  Since I’m still behind on my Tubi Continued… column of trying to watch 365 movies on Tubi in 365 days (as of October 31st I’ve seen 284 movies in 304 days, which puts me 20 movies behind schedule), I’m going to combine the Tubi Continued… column with the annual Halloween Hangover and turn it into Tubi-Ween Hangover…

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: JERSEY SHORE MASSACRE (2014) ** ½

God, remember when Jersey Shore was a thing?  Now you can relive those horrifying days with this tangibly related horror flick.  Oh, and by “tangibly related”, I mean because both have “Jersey Shore” in the title and the fact that it’s executive-produced by Jersey Shore cast member Jenni “JWOWW” Farley.

A bunch of Jersey girls head down the shore for a girls’ weekend.  When they learn their rental is double booked, they go to stay at a relative’s house in the spooky Pine Barrens.  Eventually, they are picked off one by one by an unseen menace.

The Jersey girls are thoroughly annoying, but that just means the actresses all did their job.  I can’t say you’ll root for any of them to make it out alive, but there is a sense of relief when one of them gets slaughtered.  The slaughtering, it should be said, is juicy.  We get throat slashing, death by tanning bed, a meat cleaver to the tiddy, double impalement via samurai sword, a dildo to the eye, some robust gut spilling, and in the film’s best scene, the killer uses an electric sander to sand away one juicehead’s chintzy tribal tattoos.

For most of the movie, you don’t know who is doing the killing.  Is it one of the inbred locals from the Pine Barrens?  Or is it the mythical Jersey Devil?  I wish the majority of the kills weren’t the work of an unseen killer from just offscreen.  Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter who the killer is as long as trashy Jersey Shore tourists get massacred. 

The movie is not without its faults.  A lot of the screen time is devoted to the girls hanging out on the beach, partying, and arguing.  There are also sequences from a film within a film (Fat Camp Massacre) that helps pad things out.  That said, it gives the viewer a reasonable amount of T & A and blood and guts (once the kill scenes finally occur), so I have to say, it was better than expected.  (It’s certainly more fun than watching an episode of Jersey Shore.)

Ron Jeremy has a cameo as a stoner landlord.

AKA:  Extra.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: HOMECOMING MASSACRE (2020) ** ½

When he was just a boy, Jonathan (Derrik Wynn) witnessed his mother being raped by her abusive boyfriend on Halloween night (which also happened to be Jonathan’s birthday… bummer), so he stabbed them both to death.  Ten years later, he’s released from a mental hospital into the care of his aunt and her family.  Has the painfully shy Jonathan truly been reformed, or is he merely biding his time until his next massacre?

Homecoming Massacre is a solid low budget effort that gets high marks for the better than average acting.  No one is going to be mistaken for Olivier here, but the performances are all better than the audience would expect (or even better than the movie probably deserves).  It’s almost a shame the paltry budget lets the cast down (especially near the end).  While writer/director Kenny White (who also wrote the decent Curse of the Snake Woman) gets a lot of mileage from the shoestring budget (it’s mostly a two-location film), the seams start to show as the flick approaches its climax.  The worst thing I can say for it is that some of the blue-tinted day for night scenes are hard to see.

Strangely enough, I liked the early scenes of the psycho kid trying (and ultimately failing) to reconnect with his family than I did the slasher-centric scenes in the second half.  In many ways, Homecoming Massacre is sort of a precursor to Halloween Ends as the film examines the repercussions of violence and how many are often doomed to repeat the cycle no matter what kind of interventions are tried.  The killer’s costume, which is a simple, but effective clown works too.  Sure, some of the kills are weak, but White delivers at least one memorable chainsaw death.  

Overall, Homecoming Massacre is a solid effort.  I just hope next time out, White has a budget befitting his vision.  Hopefully, he’ll keep the same stock of actors, as they were all believable and helped keep the movie afloat throughout most of the running time.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: HITCHHIKER MASSACRE (2017) ** ½

A killer is driving around the desert picking up sexy hitchhikers and selling their organs on the black market.  No one apparently told Sally (Ely LaMay) and she foolishly accepts a ride from a weirdo named Slim (John Blyth Barrymore).  Before long, Sally finds herself chained up in his basement with her vital organs ready to be put on an inventory list.

Usually, whenever some low budget filmmaker tries to ape the Grindhouse aesthetic, it comes off looking cheap.  Most of the time it resembles someone using an iPhone filter on the camera to recreate a scratchy print.  The opening scene of Hitchhiker Massacre is one of the best emulations of the Grindhouse look I have seen outside of Grindhouse.  They actually went through the trouble of making the lighting and camerawork match the old exploitation movies, so the illusion is near perfect.  If it wasn’t for the modern dress and cellphones, you’d swear this was a ‘70s flick.  They even use the “Missing Reel” gimmick to good effect and cap everything off with a great homage to Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.

Too bad they drop the aesthetic after the opening credits as it looks like a “real” movie most of the time.  They do dabble in some various artistic flourishes.  During one gore scene, the film switches to black and white, which I guess was an homage to Kill Bill switching color palettes for the bloody sequences.  The rest of the flick is OK (there’s a decent impromptu surgery with an Exacto knife), but I just wish they kept up the old timey look throughout the entire running time.  As it is, they pretty much shoot their wad in the first ten minutes.

I did like the fact that it co-starred lesser-known relatives of the Barrymore, Carradine, and Cronyn acting families.  That helps to keep the Grindhouse tradition going by trading in on nepotism.  Oh, and it was (posthumously) produced by Ivan Nagy (remember him?), which gives it a bit of cred too.

THE 31 DAYS OF TUBI-WEEN: GHOUL SCOUT ZOMBIE MASSACRE (2018) **

A mad scientist invents a formula to turn Emo band twinks into mindless gay porn stars.  In order to distribute formula, he gets his sister, the warden of girls’ reform school, to dress up the inmates as “Ghoul Scouts” and pass out drug-laced cookies to unsuspecting musicians.  Naturally, the cookies turn them into flesh hungry zombies, and the girls must band together to stop the impending zombie apocalypse.

Before we go any further, let me get this off my chest.  No movie with the words “Ghoul”, “Scout”, “Zombie”, and “Massacre” in the title should ever run one-hundred-and-eleven minutes.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s some good stuff here, but for every decent moment (like when the girls are “re-educated” by being forced to watch ‘50s housewife filmstrips) there’s one that flat-out doesn’t work (like when the doctor’s put-upon assistant stops the flick cold for an unnecessary musical number).  The set-up is long winded too, and the rock concert sequence eats up a lot of screen time.

It also takes forever to get the ball rolling.  I mean, did we really need to see every one of the Ghoul Scouts’ back stories?  Probably not.  Then again, since this sequence ends with the pregnant warden giving them a whipping, I guess it’s okay.  (This stretch also contains a solid Carrie homage.)  

The humor is hit and miss too.  Much of the stuff involving the mad scientist is borderline painful, and any scene with his assistant is even worse.  Fortunately, the parts with the Ghoul Scouts are sort of fun.  (The sex scene offers one of the biggest laughs.)  I mean, the zombie baby scene alone ensures this won’t get any lower than **.  If the running time was a good forty minutes shorter, the rating would’ve been much higher.

Oh, and be on the lookout for a cameo by Bloodsucking Freaks director, Joel M. Reed.