Sheitan (2006)

So every year the Big American Picture Companies put out their annual quota of horror films (about one) targeted at the current generation of teenage moviegoers. Scream. I Know What You Did Last Summer. Etc, etc, ad nauseum. They're the perfect movie to go see with cute Susie Jones or hot Bobby Smith because Susie gets an excuse to scream and Bobby gets an excuse to put his arm around her. The movie can be as shitty as it wants to be because until the day when there aren't any teenagers and/or movie theaters there will always be a market for one-and-a-half hours in a dark room with excuses for teenage courtship.

But if you're like me, the question burning in your mind right now is: what are these movies like in France? (Ooo la la!)

Yeah... it wasn't exactly burning so hot in my mind, either. But I'm here to tell you that if "Sheitan" is any indication then perhaps the French cousins of our American teen horror films are a notch or two above the usual fare.

What you get:

• Some creepy scenes and at least one that's downright gross


• A hot female lead who gets delightfully naked


• Ample laughs

Which essentially translates to: scares, sex, and fun: the essential ingredients of any good horror film.

But Evil Dead II this is not.

The plot is another variation of "kids stumble into a house of evil" and in this case is of the big mansion variety (ala Satan's Blood). Nothing new there. The film also has its share of minor cliches and plot holes.

What makes it watchable is that all of the elements are presented with technical merit: there's some great editing (the sunset sequence), clear and colorful processing (emphasizing natural colors rather than using oppressive color filters), and good acting: Cassel is brilliantly creepy. I even liked the soundtrack.

The Tartan DVD release is presented in 5.1 DTS Surround along with the standard Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio tracks, per their usual (very welcome) standard. It's nice to see Tartan bringing us a film from a non-Asian country! How many more times do we need to witness a horror scene end with a punctuated cut of a pale-faced kid in a long black wig?

Although the film's dialog is in French, English subtitles are available and are done rather well.

This sure isn't a classic but I'm guessing it will beat the hell out of Saw XIV.

4 Georges.

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

The simplified moral I came away with from this bit of celluloid is ‘Americans can be real jerkwads’. I know what you are thinking, that really isn’t something that the world doesn’t already know. Well maybe the world was a bit hazy on the point back in 1980.

It’s a movie about an anthropologist who goes off into the deep green jungle to find out the fate of a team of documentarians. The anthropologist finds the remains of the team, along with all the footage they shot. The footage is reviewed and it turns out the documentarians are a bunch of real jerkwads: killing the local fauna, killing members of the various tribes they encounter by gun and mass immolation, the occasional rape of some local lucky lady; you know, general dickholery. The natives eventually kill all members of the group one by one, most of it caught on film.

Most of the deaths of the humans seemed realistic, apt for the “real documentary footage” feel of the film within the film, but the error the director made was having the footage be all nice and spliced together. There were two cameras in the documentary crew and the footage the anthropologist recovered from the jungle was seemingly already through the editing room, rather than separate reels from the separate cameras.

The big negative that just completely distracted me for the length of the film was the killing of animals that happened throughout the “recovered” footage. 7 different species are killed on film, purely for the sake of the film. For a shitty cannibal movie like this, the director was seemingly scrambling for anything to gain some sort of notoriety. This kind of bullshit stunt erases any positives his movie may have accrued. I guess Italians can be real jerkwads, too.

0 Georges





Sidenote: There was a bigass billboard ad for J&B whiskey in the movie, staple of Italian horror of the 70s.

À l'intérieur (2007)

Dang, a dearth of posts, now a plethora... that's how the Dudes roll.

À l'intérieur

Well, goddamn, those French sure are a stabby bunch of people. If ever there was a reason not to contract sperm poisoning, this movie is it.

Highlights include some of the most creative arterial I’ve seen in a while spray (In fact, I laughed so loud at one scene, the people walking by stopped and looked in the window and backed away slowly*), a number of cringe worthy stabbing scenes (Boys take note – look away after La Femme stabs the guy in the knee – trust me its for your own good.), a cesarean section and tracheotomy that I’m sure the AMA would frown upon, and the clever application of what I can only imagine is oven cleaner. Not to mention the creepiest final frame I’ve witnessed in ages.

À l'intérieur runs about 83 minutes (9 of which are the credits, and speaking of credits, the opening ones are worth watching just to figure out what it’s supposed to be, and the music, which reminded me A LOT of Irreversible.), uses at least 780 gallons of fake blood, kills all but three of the cast members, and features about 15 different kinds of stabbing with various implements. Actually, everybody sort of gets into a stabby frame of mind, if they’re not being stabbed, they are stabbing something.

Beatrice Dalle gives new meaning to the term “scissor sister.” In fact, I wonder if the band didn’t come up with the name after watching this movie. She’ll use a gun, but watch out, if she has her scissors, you best be runnin’.

So, would the “Dudes” like it, well it’s hard to say, no one gets their kit off, as mentioned above there’s an ouchie scene for the boys, however, it’s everything Haute Tension and Hostel could have been but wasn’t. 4 George’s just for the copious amounts of gore.

Sorry kids, I’m out of practice, I’m sure the posts will get better...

*Why yes, I do use humor as a defense mechanism, why do you ask?

A Big Fucking Rat!

I have a sinking feeling that this post's title might aptly describe the 2007 After Dark Selections quite well. With good ol' Karl at my side, I took in three of the selections now that they have been released on DVD.

They largely sucked.

Why does the local bar stock a frying pan on Mulberry Street? If the answer is "to be prepared in the event that rat people unexpectedly attack our patrons" then how about stocking some cheese-scented guillotines or even a handy shotgun?

Why was the sound editor allowed to make the decision that rock songs and ominous you're-about-to-be-scared score selections should eclipse the impact of the actual scares being attempted? Why do I even care when this movie is nothing more than a failed attempt to ride the coat tails of 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake?

And we all know that if you want to improve an already great movie, you simply replace the key antagonists with crazed rat people. Casablanca didn't need Nazis... it needed more rats, damn it.

I like that the writer tried to get us involved with the individual characters before they all met and interacted to fend of the rat people... but it sure would have been nice if those characters did or said anything that I could- pardon the expression- give a rat's ass about.

5 Georges go to Karl for providing the actual entertainment during this viewing. When a character explained "They're Rat People! Fucking Rat People!" Karl replied "We need some Fucking Cat People! Fucking Cat People to chase out these Fucking Rat People!"

The Ghost of George was scurrying around nearby when this was said. George overheard Karl's comment, laughed his ghostly ass off, and left it for Mulberry St. to have as its rating.

3 Films to Get Slightly Bruised For

At chez Karl, Jeff and I plopped down and watched 3 of the 8 Films to Die For 2007.
Here is my brief take on them.


Mulberry St. (2007)



a.k.a., 28 Rats Later, or Dawn of the Rats. No, not really. But it sure seems like the writer/director was a big fan of both of those movies.. Take the remake of Dawn of the Dead, change zombie to rat-person, center the story around one crappy apartment building in New York (on Mulberry St), and do it on 1/4000th the budget and VOILA!
It has all been done before and done better. It really didn’t bring anything new to the horror table, and it committed (in my distorted opinion) one of the most egregious errors that a movie of this low caliber can commit. If you are going to be unoriginal, crappily acted, and unscary, then at least do the viewer the service of granting a gander at some bewbs or at the very least, a messy/creative death.
1 George, only because it made me feel unclean due to the general gunginess of the apartment building/environs.





The Deaths of Ian Stone (2007)



Great concept, decently executed on a decent budget. Oh, and a Stan Winston production. So already, we are way ahead of Mulberry St.
The main character, a poor man’s Johnny Lee Miller, gets killed every day. And each day he comes back as a different person. Groundhog Day for the horror crowd.
There is a deeper story behind that idea and I won’t spoil it, but it eventually all makes sense.
Some decent visual effects as well as blood and gore appropriate to the story keeps the view engaged throughout. I was excited to see the crazy British antagonist from the second season of Dexter (Jaime Murray), but disappointed that she didn’t shed any vestments for the movie, as she did for the series. So my review takes a negative hit for that.
3 Georges (could have been more but Jaime had to go and get shy on us)





Unearthed (2007)



An archaeological dig and small town get terrorized by a creature in the middle of New Mexico. Been done. Not a lot of new ideas here. The creature looks like a rejected design of H.R. Giger and one of the scenes is a DIRECT rip off of the Alien series. Really bad animation on the creature’s movements and attacks, however the film does have a few great stuntman stunts, with people being blown through the air from explosions and such. When the creature starts attacking, it isn’t totally clear as to why it is doing what it is doing or if and why it has changed its intentions, even though there are several scenes which are very heavy handed plot explanation sequences. I did enjoy the ‘loogie shrimp’ though. Occasionally the creature would attack by spitting these little guys a victim and these little shrimp-like projectiles would stick in their skin and burrow inside.
Bonus point for having Charlie Murphy as one of the stranded motorists in the town, to grace the film with his Charlie Murphy-ness. He also had a pretty sweet death.

2 Georges (this movie could have been so much more)

Blood Sucking Freaks (1976)

Originally Released As: The Incredible Torture Show



In a nutshell: A slave ring run by a guy that looks like Gene Wilder’s creepy uncle and his midget assistant uses some of its “recruits” as part of a twisted stage show that involves presenting torture and death as “art”. Typical chick flick.

This movie is the grandpappy of torture porn (Hostel, Saw, etc.), but with a super low budget and all the visual sensibilities that the late 70’s brought us. Looooooooow budget. So low that all the torture and murders scenes come off as unintentional camp. Quite a few actually occur off camera, keeping the budget to the low 100$.

Dialogue/Acting: mostly awful, and not a good awful like a Troma production, where the script is self-aware and luxuriates in its awfulness. There were a few Troma-worthy groaner puns sprinkled sparingly throughout, though. One came at the end of a scene where Sardu (Gene Wilder’s uncle) played Ralphus (midget assistant) in a game of backgammon and they used the freshly chopped-off fingers of a couple of nekkid slave girls as wagering chips. I can’t even remember what the bad pun was, I just remember groaning.

Ralphus is a super excitable little guy in this pic. Most of his emoting involves a big shit eating grin (that did not happen in this movie, this isn’t Salo) and him bouncing around like a hyper 8 year old on Christmas morning. He was happy feeding the almost-feral and cannibalistic guard slaves in their cage, happy head-bonking the slaves trying to get out of their cardboard (?) shipping containers, happy just to bounce around sporting his bushy little van dyke beard and white guy afro.

Why is this movie called “Blood Sucking Freaks,” you ask? Well there is a scene that involves a demented doctor that Sardu uses to tend to his “product”, where the doctor does some unnecessary surgery and sucks some blood and viscera out of someone’s head with a straw. So there you go.

I think this movie has the highest disparity ratio of nekkid bodies to total lack of erotic content that I have ever seen. Really. Maybe I am jaded, but with all women in the movie who weren’t audience members at Sardu’s show getting naked, one would think at least a respectable portion would be respectable. A series of disappointing presents.

There were a few fun spots in this picture, but there was too much unrewarding crap in between. A budget would have helped: sets, effects, script, acting talent, skin talent. This movie might improve with a lot of booze and a large group of people.
2 Georges.

Alucarda (1978)

If you like or have a high tolerance for screaming, then you should acquire and feature this Mexican horror movie prominently in your collection. If you can get past the nigh ubiquitous screaming, then you are still in for a treat.

Justine, an easy on the eyes orphan, arrives at a convent and makes friends with Alucarda, a lusty little spitfire who eventually introduces her to a group of gypsies that broaden the girls’ horizons and introduce them to Satan.

The leader (?) of the gypsies is a creepy hippie homunculus who eventually gives the girls a dagger blessed with gypsy tears or somesuch, which he uses to perform some kind of nekkid blood sharing ceremony betwixt the two lasses. (Yes, fellas, it is a good scene).
Oh, and the gypsy camp has a big ole’ nekkid conga line/ritual. See kids? There are viable alternatives to Christianity!

The girls begin acting out and screaming a lot and screaming during religious instruction and spinning around and getting up to all kinds of hi-jinks (both clothed and unclothed).

The convent is run by a bunch of nuns whose habits make them look like bleeding mummies. We find out that the primary reason for this is because of their flagellation sessions, to whip the sin and temptation out of their minds (and skin). The convent itself has many rooms that look very organic, like they were carved out of stone or used a system of caves, very non-standard convent housing.

The nuns decide to exorcise the two girls. This involves chaining them to large Xs of wood and stripping them down so one of the nuns can cleanse(?) Justine by sticking her repeatedly with a convent shiv. Well, needless to say, she doesn’t pull out of her possession, so she gets laid to rest in a crypt that serves for a great scene when she pops out of a coffin (nekkid) that is literally filled with blood (so she is all bloody and nekkid) and fully throws down on a nun and then chomps her neck.

The movie ends with a nice big scene with Alucarda using her satanic screaming and yelling abilities to cause the mummy nuns to spontaneously menstruate and/or burst into flames. I know, pretty sweet.

I give this movie 4 Georges.