Dr. Squid's B-Movie Reviews: 03/11/17

Saturday, March 11, 2017

Review: The Tenament

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

I got a big kick out of The Tenement and the main reason is that it kept me guessing. And for a guy who has seen quite a few horror movies, that's a real compliment. While the execution is sometimes rough in terms of production values and acting, the clever stories in this horror anthology really make it sing. Case-in-point, we start off with a popular genre cliche: a couple making out in a parked car who, in short order, are attacked by hooded figures. Next thing you know the girl's tied-up and the figures are spouting quazi-satanic stuff. I was started to get annoyed: while the cult was talking about this girl having to pay for her sins (which I assume was making out in a car), a couple of leather-clad lesbians started making out. This was flying in the face of logic and as I was just ready to scream out loud at the screen that this didn't make any sense...I was hit in the face with a clever plot twist. I was impressed. As the building-related stories began, I was thrilled at the interesting left-turns that the stories took.

The building of the title is merely a device to link several stories together - each one is about someone who has lived in this building. The horror movie fanatic who falls into an audition for his favorite director, only to be shot down in flames. We peek inside this fanatic's mind and question what is real and what's not. We're next thrown into a tale of a mute girl and a man stalking her. Their cat and mouse game is engaging and played fairly straight. The next tale starts off with so much humor, it really jerked me out of the vibe of the movie, but before long, I was hip to the dark humor moving this tale of a neurotic man who may or may not be a werewolf. Then we meet a serial killer whose unique way of getting victims causes an encounter with a woman who doesn't react as most victims would. To tell too much more about any of these stories would be too much of a spoiler, but each has it's own share of plot twists and shocking moments.

Overall, you get a lot going on: there are movies within movies, stories with various story threads woven back and forth, bloody deaths, clever nods to all kinds of horror genre stuff and even a nice bit of skin. Some of the scenes are nicely done, others are harshly lit with too little set dressing and sometimes the handheld camerawork is a bit distracting. Frankly, it reminded me of some of the better stuff I've seen on the local college station, which isn't that bad: look beyond that for several roller coaster rides of horror.

Things to watch out for: Fangoria's Mike Gingold's over-the-top performance as the horror movie director. It was a bit much, but I did laugh several times which I think was the point. Also check out Syn DeVil as the stripper who meets up with a werewolf: Yowza! Kudos to director Glen Baisley and Light and Dark Productions for an entertaining horror anthology! Dr. Squid says check this one out.

Drifter from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.
Beyond The Wall of Fear from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.
Blood Creek Woodsman from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.
Odd Noggins from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.
Twisted Fates from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.
Beneath A Dead Moon from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.
Deadly Premonitions from Joe Sherlock on Vimeo.

Review: They Live

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

This is a pretty cool, quirky film. The time is a near future and obnoxious wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper plays drifter who comes to the big city to work. He meets up with this big black guy and they bulge their muscles together working (and living) at a construction site. The gap between the very rich and very poor is widening and weird things are going on at a church. Director Carpenter was apparently trying to make an analogy to some of the right-wing social and political trends going on in the real world (actually, I think he does that in most of his movies). Anyhow, Piper finds some sunglasses and when he looks through them, all the rich people look like toadfaced aliens. In fact, THEY ARE toadfaced aliens! All of the billboards and signs have hidden words painted on them, seeming into our subconscious, but revealed with the aid of the sunglasses.

The basic premise here is that the world has been taken over by these aliens who can look like humans and subliminally keep the world's people under control. They communicate with Dick Tracy 2-way wristwatches and have a secret base underground where they can transport back and forth to their home planet. Roddy gets to wrestle/fight the black guy for a r-e-a-l-l-y long fight (I read that John Carpenter just kind of let those guys go and left the camera rolling) and join an underground group who are fighting the aliens. He also gets a gun and kills a whole bunch of them.

Whenever I used to catch Rowdy Roddy Piper on Portland Wrestling, he was a total jerk - I hated him. Of course, I think that's all part of the act - you're supposed to hate him. In this movie, he was kind of cool. This film has a classic line that is at once really stupid and really hilarious. Roddy walks into a bank full of the rich aliens with a big gun and says, "I came to chew bubble gum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubble gum."

There's a lot of cool effects with the glasses showing the world alternately as we see it and the world as the aliens have made it. What they need to do is have John and Roddy come back and do a sequel, where humanity and the aliens battle in a massive apocalyptic war with guns and zombies and lasers and spaceships and all that stuff. Hee hee hee! As I recall, They Live got a rather cold shoulder at the box office, so I don't know that a They Live II is likely in the near future. In this meantime, this movie's pretty neat. Oh yeah and another killer John Carpenter soundtrack. Check it out!

Review: Body Melt

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

I first read about the Australlian film Body Melt in an issue of Fangoria Magazine. The article was peppered with supergross photos of goopy, melted heads. When I saw that it was out on video, I just had to rent it. Oh, well, you live and learn. The first 10 minutes were great - opening with a TV commercial for a health farm/vacation resort, then cutting to a sweat-soaked, couple, apparently taking a break from some sexual activities. The woman, seen as the spokesperson in the aforementioned commercial, injects the delerious guy with some sort of syrum. We next hear her telling someone over the phone that her injections will assure the guy's death by the morning. The injected guy looks up an address on a computer, leaves the health farm and, after a brief stop at a convenience store, leads a high speed chase that ends with his crashing into a van at the end of a cul-de-sac.

Oh, did I mention that this whole time his neck was disinegrating?

The basic premise is that the health club is experimenting with some superdrugs, designed to alter the body's gene structure. They're disguising the drugs as vitamins and experimenting on the resort's guests. The man residing at the address on the computer receives a free sample of said vitamins in the mail. So much for the set up. What we get for the next hour or so is a lot of dull dialogue, a couple of young dudes who run into a family of inbreds when they get lost on the way to the resort and a couple of cops asking a lot of questions.

Finally, in the last 15 or so minutes of the film, the body melting begins and, I must admit, is pretty gross. The whole inbred family sequence (which seemed to be dropped in from a different movie when I was watching it) finally is linked into the plot and the cops arrive on the scene. Topped off with a trite twist ending,

Body Melt seemed to be stretched out way too far. Apparently, it was based on a short story and probably should've been a shorter film. When they finally pile on the cool FX at the end of the movie, they were all of the scenes I had already seen stills of in the magazine article I read. If you want to get some cheap thrills watching some gorey effects, rent Body Melt and fast forward through the middle.

Review: Green Slime

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

This is a classic hokey sci-fi classic if you ask me. Maybe I'm a little fonder of it than most because I first saw it when I was a kid, but it still is hilariously entertaining. It starts out with a great psychedelic rock song entitled, Green Slime. Any movie that is called Green Slime and then actually uses a song of the same name in it has to be good. There's this space station hanging on wires out in space and Richard Jaeckel is on board, sweating along with a bunch of clean-cut guys in drab outfits. They ride around in the vehicles of the future - golf carts! There's some sort of research going on and these spores get into the ship and start turning into this green slime which then turns into these giant cucumber-shaped monsters with lots of eyes and tentacles. Remember that show Sigmund and the Sea Monsters? Well, if you do, think of a really pissed-off Daddy Sea Monster wildly flailing his floppy rubber arms around and you'll get the idea. Anyway, then everybody sweats some more and they bring in the golf carts. They try to contain the green slime monsters in the hallways by closing off sections of them like the ending sequence from Get Smart. A bunch of guys get slimed and there's lots of dramatic tension and sound effects of beeping and computer-type noises. I have since read that this was some sort of Japanese/American production, which doesn't surprise me. This green slime cucumber monsters looked like the guys that Ultraman fought every week. The explosions in space highlight all of the wires holding everything up. Now, let me pause for a moment to note that it may seem like I'm pointing out all of the bad points of the film, but those are what make it entertaining. I've seen my share of movies that were supposed to be "so bad, they're good," and they were just...bad. However, this one is so colorful, action-packed and cliche'-ridden, that it really is fun. Really.

Another memorable thing about this film was the sound made when a bunch of people were running. It was obviously dubbed in later and sounded like a couple of guys typing on a word-processor.

As with a lot of these movies, don't expect Out of Africa or Academy Award material here. If you except them for what they are and don't place your expectations too high, you'll end up being entertained. I'm not really sure if this is out on video, but I've seen it several times on local stations and often in TNT sci-fi festivals.

Review: The Brood

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

I had heard about the Brood as being one of David Cronenberg's earlier films and since I am a fan of many of his works, I tracked it down and rented it. It is an odd mix of classic Cronenberg and hokey monster movie. The eerie, psychological stuff comes from the set up of a new-age clinic out in a big, nifty-looking cabin the woods in Canada. Run by the imposing and secretive Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), the clinic uses intense forms of therapy, usually involving some type of hypnosis, regression and acting out of past experiences. This intensity results in a physical manifestation of some sort, most notibly a bunch of scars and wounds appearing on a patient during a demonstration of the therapy. Frank's wife, Nola, has been holed up at the Doc's clinic for awhile and he and her daughter miss her very much. But when Nola's mother is killed, the Doc won't let her out for the funeral claiming that to break the therapy process would cause too much damage. Slowly, the movie's tension builds as more killings occur. Each time we get to see more and more of the killer(s). They first appear as little jumpsuited munchkins - not very scary if you ask me. Later we get to see that they are mutant little girls. After some more investigation, Frank discovers that his wife, through the whacked-out therapy, has manifested her little problems with little mutant kids that have gone out and done away with those that have caused her pain in her past. It's a nifty little plotline and there's a pretty disgusting "birthing" scene, but I just couldn't get scared by the little girls. Here's a bit of obscurity - one of the mutants is played by Felix Silla, who played that annoying little robot, Twiki on the Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century TV show.

Biddi-biddi-biddi!

The movie had what I feel is the Cronenburg spookiness about it and some intense performances, but when the actual "monsters" came on screen it seemed a little silly. Not a bad flick, kind of talky and a little slow at times, but more of an interesting look at the guy who would freak us out with Scanners and The Fly.

Review: Dead Space

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

The video box looked like an Aliens rip-off, the plot description looked like an Aliens rip-off and, indeed, Dead Space is an Aliens rip-off. We open with Marc "Beastmaster" Singer and his robot sidekick intercut with FX scenes from Battle Beyond the Stars (which were also used in Space Raiders, Cyberzone, and probably some other films I haven't seen...yet). Anyway, he gets a distress signal from a research outpost where some virus research experiment has gone awry. He lands to check it out and then we are treated to scens of various vaseline-covered rubber critters hiding in air shafts and sticking to people's faces. Unfortunately, there are just too many long, dull sequences of Marc and the crew walking through corridors between the excitement. Finally, at the end, the creature has grown to about 10 feet tall and looks like a cobweb-covered mother alien from Aliens. The movie is only about 78 minutes, and there's a nice sex scene with El Beastmaster, but overall it was a little slow for me. If you love Marc Singer the way I do, you'll need to check this one out, if only to be a completist.