The dangers of fake suntan - mass suicides!

So, this mixtape, B-Videos 101, Vol.1, starts off with this really creepy looking old guy. Not only is he babbling on about the end of the world, but he sports an amazing fake tan.

Oh, wait, it’s just the Heavens Gate crackpot.

After a stop-motion toy shop orgy with dildos and inflatable dolls we get some old clips from The Daily Show followed by some mad preacher clips. I do like mad preacher clips.

After a clip of a dancing midget we get a rather hot contortionist chick dressed in a white leotard. Oh my!

Next… well, even this had me staring at the TV and thinking ‘what the fuck?!’ It’s a sex-ed video with a rather retarded looking girl asking about periods.

And remember: never trust anything that bleeds for days and doesn't die.

That’s right, periods. So for the next ten minutes we have her mother and sister explaining a Japanese flag to her. Very odd, but then we get to rock out to some KISS which is actually a news item about some God-squad nuts who were trying to get their concerts banned. Can I start a non-religious movement where we go around closing bibles and burning churches? Oh no, sorry, burning bibles and closing churches. Oops, my bad.

Dancing, deformed, strip-show anyone? I’m not even going to try and explain it. Behold:

Yes Alex, she does go topless...

After the half-way mark we get a couple of spoof ads, short films and animations oh, and a lengthy segment of what looks like The Osmonds doing Star Wars on stage. We finish with a rather arty chick who sticks paint up her ass and fires it at a wall, I should try that, might actually sell them.

If that's not paint, she needs to stop eating her veg with tomato sauce.

It’s a solid mixtape full of unusual weirdness (aka: retarded kid asking about periods) it’s only downside is that it’s obviously from the VHS era so the picture quality isn’t top-notch, but that didn’t bother me.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Psychedelic Hell Trip begins with some very professional presentation! Not only does it have a cool warbly Country & Western song playing over its menu, but it has some nice extras too! But we’ll get to them at the end.

Our trip begins with a good old fashioned celluloid countdown then were in to some quick, rapid fire, clips introducing us to the Hell Trip logo (left). Proper clips now are some hippy chick making doped up cookies, a very gay looking dancer, an American Gladiator who sounds like a reject from Bill & Ted, a horrible white rapper song then a most bizarre Japanese clip…

I'm not even putting a comment here...

God I love Japanese TV shows!

The madness continues with several clips among which are a porn Exorcist, some very embarrassing black dancers, someone having way too much fun with a sex doll and a black and white clip which looks like it’s from a fighting game, but I don’t think it is. Is it? Keep me right here folks…

Is it a video? Is it a game? Dunno, but either way it's cool...

Quarter of the way in and we hit various dope scenes (LSD rants, kids buzzing aerosol fumes etc.), some incredibly well done fake sex videos starring someone who I assume is famous somewhere, some leprechaun sex, and a music video starring Ron Jeremy. Then a highly informative clip which has given me the knowledge that it is in fact possible to poop deep underwater. Discovery Channel never told me that. Midget wrestling, creepy looking clowns and poodle exercise classes are at the half way mark…

I have no fucking idea what is going on here...

Heading in to the last quarter we get some sex advice and history lessons then some more amazingly well done fake celeb sex videos. Then some Vanilla Ice and midget sex. The End is the infamous Mr Hands video which, for one man, really was the end. Ironic.

Like I mentioned at the top of the review, this is very well presented, the extras include drinking recipes, a party mode, some music videos and ‘the restroom’ with some extra clips which aren’t in the main feature.

Psychedelic Hell Trip is easily one of the best mixtapes I’ve seen, most of the clips were new to me, even though PHT is from 2008, and must have taken God-only-knows-how-long to make. But we’ll find out soon enough, check back soon for an interview with the creator of that hellish trip.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Xtro (1983)

This is one weeeeeird movie! Xtro starts off as your bog standard happy family movie with dad and kid playing in the garden… then things go a bit pear shaped. Bright lights appear and little Junior stands gawping as dad is sucked into a UFO. No, seriously.

Step forward several years and the kid swears blind that dad was abducted by ET, but his mother is convinced he ran off with some two-bit trollop and abandoned them. Meanwhile a whopping great ‘thing’ has crashed in to a woodland area, with fire everywhere, and a creepy alien appears. Next thing we know daddy is back on the scene picking up Jr from school and barging his way back in to the life of his kid and wife, much to the chagrin of her current boyfriend.

Much to my delight is the scene of the kids hot, fit, nanny going topless. Maryam d’Abo is absolutely smoking hot in this film!

YESSSSSSSSS!!!!

Things take a turn for the worst (a turn for the better, regarding the movie) when it turns out dad is in fact an alien and has converted little Jr in to an alien also, which means that he can bring things to life, and make things happen, just by thinking about it. It’s at this point the film becomes nothing short of bonkers. Stark raving bonkers. After making a spinning top spin on its own, the kid decides to bring one of his toys to life, thus emerges a midget, dressed like a circus ringmaster/clown, wielding a flashy yo-yo thing!

Is this surreal and trippy enough for you?...

After the midget fiasco, bringing the toy soldier to life was a bit more down to earth:

This is one of the more sane moments...

Alien dad and normal wife decide to revisit the cottage where he was abducted to see if he can regain his memory of the events that night while Jr (and his midget clown pal) bump off all and sundry in various nasty ways.

Aww... no more nudie Maryam

I don’t want to give away the ending as it was quite a surprise to me, it had me thinking of several meanings, but suffice to say, it’s not a ‘happy-ever-after’ ending.

The main let-down of the film is the English accents, they make the actors seem completely wooden. Maybe it’s just because I’m used to American accents in movies, but there’s definitely something about the accents… Either way, it started off a bit boring, heated up (Maryam topless) then hit its peak with the surreal midget/solder scenes, finishing with an OK ending.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (that’s including a +1 for Maryam going topless)

"Get Your Heart Broken" Certainly a nominee for best tag line of 2009, and maybe of all time.

When I heard that the powers that be in Hollywood were remaking My Bloody Valentine, I actually WASN’T all that upset.  The Original MBV (see our dual review here!) is a GREAT 80′s style slasher flick that was unfortunately largely overlooked due to the genre being over saturated with soulless clones.  Even though the original still holds up amazingly well, and the recently released uncut version adds a  lot more bite from a gore and brutality standpoint, it feels dated enough to warrant a….”heartfelt” (see what I did there?) remake.  Fortunately for old school slasher fans, the remake does a decent job of retelling the story of Harry Warden, while staying true to many of the devices that made the original so memorable and sought after.

“Tom returns to his hometown on the tenth anniversary of the Valentine’s night massacre that claimed the lives of 22 people. Instead of a homecoming, however, Tom finds himself suspected of committing the murders, and it seems like his old flame is the only one will believes he’s innocent.”~IMDB

Harry Warden does NOT fuck around.

So we have a small mining town, tucked away in the middle of “the land time forgot” America.  Great, because we all know those are the safest places when the town tries to hide a secret.  Anyway, what little plot that imdb synopsis doesn’t fill you in on, the opening credits do.  Is it just me, or does anyone else LOVE IT when the opening credits are actually useful?  It seems like such a waste to just have some music playing and credits and titles going.  MBV already gets a bonus half star for not wasting my fucking time by having me listen to a lackluster score while they rattle off names of actors and actresses who are in the movie for 30 seconds.  We are off to a great start.

Speaking of actors and actresses, MBV manages to avoid a major pitfall that sinks many of the remakes us horror fans have had to endure over the last decade; casting.  Jamie King, known for her titillating role in Sin City, does a fine job as being our “main girl” ala Laurie Strode.  She brings a morsel of nuance to her character, and also doesn’t just rely on looking slutty and screaming, but I suppose that is because she is one of the young female stars of Hollywood who can actually act, which is paradoxically why she doesn’t a ton of work. (Who needs an attractive female lead who can act? Pfft, just be a mannequin like Megan Fox.  Since I’m on the topic, fuck Megan Fox.  Bitch seriously looks and acts like an android.) As for leading men, we get Jensen Ackles from the popular Buffy rip-off show Supernatural, and Kerr Smith who is a noted TV drama (Yup, he was on Dawsons Creek for spell!) actor.  They do an OK job of fighting over the affections of Jamie Kings characters and driving the narrative forward, but ultimately there roles are not only secondary, but right on the verge of expendable.  There are better suited actors for these roles, but I guess the casting called for the females to get some good looking guys to look at too, so we are stuck with these dolts.  On the upside TOM MOTHERFUCKING ATKINS is in this movie, being as gruff, ancient, and downright legendary as he always is.  If you don’t know who Tom Atkins is, kill yourself.  Buy a gun, crash your car, drink crystal drano, whatever you gotta do to get the job done.  I kid, I kid.  But seriously, Tom Atkins is horror royalty, mostly thanks to his monumental performance in Night of the Creeps.

I HEART YOU TOM ATKINS!

Patrick Lussier, horror director…semi-extraordinaire, is at the helm for this one.  He is responsible for a long list of mostly “meh” horror movies such as Halloween H20, Cursed, Red Eye, The Eye, and White Noise 2: The Light. (which is MUCH better than White Noise 1, and highly recommended by me as a great little ghost story flick starring Nathan Fillion)  Lussier seems to capture both the best in him and the worst with MBV.  What I mean by that is, one moment he is staging and filming a great little stalk-and-kill sequence, while the next he hovers from a helicopter, shooting the same fucking bridge we have seen in the movie 6 times already.  We get it Lussier, we are in a small town with one bridge leading into it, we haven’t left, give us a damn break with the establishing shots already.  Lussier, I’m sure, was having fun with the possibilities laid before him with 3-D aspects, but still, some shots seem to linger on much longer than necessary, and some really feel like a complete waste of time.  The movie clocks in at 1 hour and 41 minutes, and surely Lussier could have shaved 11 minutes worth of bullshit of it if he wasn’t so concerned with 3-d shots that linger and and footage of ONE FRIGGIN’ BRIDGE.  Besides his love of arching, over water infrastructure, Lussier does show some flair when it comes to his kills, which are thankfully clearly shot, defined, and incredibly grisly.  Some of these kills are hall of fame quality, and they are deserve to be rewound at least once to see how truly brutal they are.  For a slasher movie, as long as the director films the kills good, everything else can be a distant second as far as I am concerned.  It just hurts when someone directs a SLASHER movie, but doesn’t know dick about filming a murder.  Lussier passes, but only with about a C+/B-.

Maybe not as iconic as a William Shatner Mask painted white, or a Hockey Mask, but if I saw this fucker coming my way, I would be running in the opposite direction.

From a technical standpoint, MBV is a great looking and sounding movie.  The cinematography is crystal clear, and the aforementioned establishing shots look really good, all 81 times we see them.  There are also some shots in the mine and surrounding wooded area that feel really alive.  The use of color here is sometimes surprisingly vivid.  The sound is also nice, nothing revolutionary, but nothing to complain about either, which is always a major plus.  Also, no bullshit teeny-bopper-dick-sucking soundtrack.  No Nickelback.  No Creed.  No Avenged Sevenfold.  Just a nice, relatively tense score that amps up at the appropriate times.  It is really refreshing when the first thing you here isn’t some horrible band that wrote a song “inspired by” the movie you are watching.  Besides the audio and visual departments, the lighting is also superb, as many of the nighttime shots aren’t hampered by the “I can’t see what is going on, but I probably should be able to” disease.  Lastly, the gore is very nice, striking a clean balance between practical effects accentuated by some noticeable, but unobtrusive cgi work that was probably required to get the 3-D affect to the blood and flying body parts.  I said it before and I will say it again, whoever had a hand in designing some of these kills and bringing them to life, deserves some credit, because the opening scenes alone are filled with some very disturbing and visceral kills.

Young Lady, put your GODDAMN seat belt on!

The 2009 remake of MBV supassed almost all of my expectations, which is saying a lot since I am a pretty die hard fan of the original.  Besides some inconsistencies and strange directing decisions, and a third act that doesn’t quite cash-in fully of the previous two, MBV 2009 is a rock solid slasher deeply rooted in the history of the artform.  It tries some new things, but just like a good student in an interesting class, it knows when to sit down, shut the fuck up, and play by the rules of the slasher movie bestowed upon them by giants of the sub-genre like Carpenter, Miner, Cunningham, and others.  In a year that will remembered for the Friday the 13th remake/re-imagining/sequel clusterfuck, don’t sleep on My Bloody Valentine 3-D.  It is likely the most fun and genuine throwback horror experience you are likely to have in ’09.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rcoc46onlE

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Now playing: Queens Of The Stone Age – Turnin’ On The Screw

via FoxyTunes

Tod Browning's Freaks

Freaks is an old black and white movie from 1932, but don’t let that fool you. There was no political correctness in those days, and it certainly shows in this movie, but not in a bad way.

A beautiful trapese artist in the travelling circus falls in love with Hans, a midget. Coincidence that he is to come in to a large inheritance? We think not. The other midget in the circus warns Hans that she’s after him for his money but he isn’t convinced. Later Hans falls ill and the rest of the travelling circus are suspicious of the trapese artist and her sneaky lover Hercules. They find out she’s been poisoning Hans and gang up on the money grabbing pair, turning the one lovely trapese artist into a freak like them. As the narrative in the movie says, if you insult one freak, you insult them all…

Special effects are zero, all the freaks in the movie are genuine human oddities. There’s everything from midgets, dwarves, people with odd shaped heads, human skeletons, and watch out for the ‘caterpillar dude’ (TM, Ronnie) who is just a torso with a head, no seriously… he has no limbs what-so-ever and just crawls about like a caterpillar, VERY spooky. As if that’s not bad enough there’s a guy with no hips/legs who runs using his arms and hands! It is easily the spookiest thing I have ever seen in a film. At one point in the film he’s ‘sitting’ on the ground, but it just looks like some dude thats been buried up to his waist.

Cleopatra (the trapese artist) and Hans (the perv)

It (unfortunately) wasn’t in the version I viewed, but apparently there is an alternative, now considered lost, ending where Hercules is castrated and ends up as a castrato. That ending would have been the icing on the cake for this film, I want it found and restored!

one of the ‘pinhead’ kids

Other than the freaks themselves, the ending (below) is extremely creepy, it’s like a miniature/deformed Dawn of the Dead with midgets walking, toward Hercules, through the rain with nothing but evil in their eyes.

Run away! It’s a ginormous wagon wheel!

I’m not quite sure how this managed to get a DVD release, as I’d have thought the PC freaks (pun intended) would have interjected and demanded a ban, but no, and thank God for sense and reason! Although apparently it was banned for thirty years in the UK, hardly a surprise for the UK.

Freaks is a good film, the ‘people with unusual physical characteristics’, while in a circus, are shown living (relatively) normal lives and seem to enjoy what they’re doing. Although one actor did denounce the movie as offensive. But I’m sure he/she still accepted their wage. Freaks is a classic movie, and deserves at least one watch for it’s curiosity factor.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022913/]