Trash Menagerie

  Dir. Pierre B. Reinhard Three young women in the French countryside die suddenly after drinking poisoned milk from a batch sabotaged on the back of a transport truck. Events start to unfold in plots of corporate blackmail, pollution, and embezzlement at the the local milk plant as the plant manager scrambles to avoid a scandal. Soon bodies start to pile up as the poisoned women are reanimated by the plant’s toxic waste, rising to take revenge on the corporate snakes whose greed has taken their lives...or so we think. Helmed by pornographer Pierre B. Reinhard, Revenge of the Living Dead Girls is an incredibly horny movie. There are at least four sex scenes, only one of which really drives the plot in any way. Everyone is fucking and cheating on each other. There’s a scene that goes on for about a minute after it should have ended so that one of the main characters can take off her sweater and play with her breasts for no one’s benefit but the audience. The movie also manages to o...

  Dir. Toshiharu Ikeda You’d think a movie called Evil Dead Trap would be some sort of rip off of Sam Raimi’s seminal splatter opus, and perhaps that’s the association American distributors were trying to create, as the exact translation of the title is closer to “Death Spirit Trap”, but even that doesn’t accurately describe what unfolds; at least not in a literal sense. There are no deadites or demons or ghosts in this movie. But there’s plenty of evil doing. And a bunch of people do end up dead. Nami Tsuchiya hosts a late night TV program in which viewers send in home videos hoping to get them played on the air. After receiving a tape that shows a woman appearing to be tortured and killed, she jumps at the chance to produce an investigative piece, hoping to confront the tape’s creator. Using the footage on the tape as a map, Nami and her team are lead to an abandoned industrial site, where all manor or horrors unfold by the hands of a raincoat adorned murderer. As her coworkers ...

Dir. Barry J. Gillis The world is a pretty terrible place and many people do many terrible things. Violence constantly plagues us and oppression is omnipresent. This is not a thesis statement, but merely an observation, and a reductively pessimistic one at that, the appropriate response to which is probably, ‘Yeah, ok. So what?’ Barry J. Gillis doesn’t seem to be interested in the ‘how’ or the ‘why’ of it all. Or maybe he is, but with all the time in the world, he could not develop the filmmaking skills to properly communicate his ideas. To try to explain the plot of Wicked World would be a futile endeavor. Even if I could, the plot is irrelevant to the experience. And Wicked World is very much an experience. The film starts out as a slasher movie, albeit one that has been filtered through the mind of some extra-dimensional alien being. Groups of young people are killed by a middle aged man in a gas mask. He is able to walk right up to these people undetected until he actually t...

Dir. David A. Prior Of Sledgehammer , Bleeding Skull’s Zack Carlson said that, “ if you survive it, you’ll never forget it ”. That’s not true. I first saw Sledgehammer a few years ago and remembered nothing of it, except that there’s a ridiculous food fight scene, and that the movie as a whole was quite enjoyable. After watching it again tonight as part of AGFA and Alamo Drafthouse’s digital Terror Tuesday, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that, for the most part, my memory did not fail me. On paper, Sledgehammer is a pretty formulaic slasher; a group of twenty-somethings played by a group of thirty-somethings head out for a weekend of debauchery to a secluded house in the country where ten years earlier, a boy brutally murdered his mother and her lover. After a hefty serving of relationship melodrama and the aforementioned food fight, the group starts getting picked off one-by-one by a sledgehammer wielding maniac. Pretty rote stuff. Notable for being the first SOV ...

Dir. Andrea Bianchi Bimba’s in trouble. In a gothic castle, her family has conducted a seance to try to contact her dead mother, accidentally releasing the spirit of a dead relative that finds its way into Bimba’s body. As Bimba begins to act out in a series of escalating naughty behaviors, it’s up to Sister Sofia, the family’s resident nun-in-training to free Bimba from the curse and save her soul from eternal damnation. Maybe. You’d be forgiven for concluding that Malabimba is a horror film based on the above description. Centered around a young girl being possessed by a spirit in an old gothic castle, the premise is ripe for all the sorts of Exorcist style shenanigans that only Italian rip-off artists can deliver. But director Andrea Bianchi and writer Piero Regnoli have something more important on the mind; lots of sleazy sex. This is much more a psychosexual soap opera than it is a horror film. If you’re looking for blood and gore, or ghosts and ghouls and goblins, you’l...

Dir. Herman Yau Being a fan of splatter movies, more than any other genre, seems to invite people to demand an explanation as to one’s enjoyment of them. No one will roll their eyes at you for watching a period drama, no one will think your sick or depraved for seeing the latest comic book movie, and romantic comedies seem to always squeak by as a guilty pleasure. Even more mainstream horror movies will get a pass if they’re “artsy” enough. But many people still seem to have this puritanical aversion to gore films and the people who enjoy them. I can’t really explain why I like gore movies. Maybe it helps me process my anxieties regarding death. Maybe I find it cathartic to see such extreme displays of bodily carnage. In any case, I don’t need to explain it to you. I like em’ and that’s reason enough. With that out of the way, Ebola Syndrome is a completely indefensible film. Within the first five minutes there is dick stabbing, head crushing, tongue cutting, and an attempt...

Dir. Matthew Bright The older I get, the more I appreciate going into a film as cold a possible. It’s a fallacy that trailers are more spoilery than they the used to be, especially for low budget/horror/exploitation movies needing to ensure maximum ticket sales. But trailers are more ubiquitous today, available anywhere with a screen and internet access at any given moment. It takes a lot of discipline to steer clear of any trailers, reviews, discussions, etc. that might skew your expectations, not just for contemporary films, but really any film that may have been even just a little popular at any point in film history. Of course this isn’t a good thing or a bad thing (or maybe it’s both a good thing and a bad thing), as an overwhelmingly saturated media landscape constantly battles with our brains for attention and money, time seems to become exponentially more limited, and sometimes you just don’t want to risk wasting it on a movie that you’re not at least likely to maybe...

Dir. Kieth Li Love. Death. Mystery. Vengeance. The sins of our ancestors. These are the ingredients of compelling melodrama. But what about spirits, wizard battles, exorcism, astral projected reanimated chicken skeletons, and centipedes? Lots and lots of centipedes? It all goes hand in hand in the world of Hong Kong Category III Exploitation, where bugs and black magic reign supreme. Wai-Lum is called to Southeast Asia (that’s as specific as the movie got regarding location) after his sister falls ill and eventually dies, with doctors having no idea why, saying only that her condition was indicative of radiation poisoning. Of course the audience knows already that she was attacked by a horde of carnivorous centipedes after encountering a man who can only be described as “clearly the movie’s villain”. Investigating with Yeuk-Chee, an old college friend and love interest, Wai-Lum eventually discovers that his family is the subject of revenge for a wizard crossed by his grandf...

Dir. Glenn Danzig Modern “so-bad-it’s-good” movies are hard to come by in 2019. The market is almost hilariously oversaturated with Direct-to-Streaming crap that’s either expectedly boring and inept, or so winking and ironically self-aware that it becomes painfully cringe inducing. Shielding one's eyes from the screen should be induced by horror or tension, not embarrassment by proxy. The point is that when filmmakers set out with the intention of making a movie that’s “so-bad-it’s good”, they are doomed to failure from the start because they are missing the fundamental point; sincerity and delusion. The joke is not that the filmmakers are playing dumb and trying to make the audience laugh, it’s that they’re not even in on the joke. People don’t like The Room , Birdemic , Troll 2 , Manos , Neil Breen, Ed Wood etc. because they give they represent misunderstood, independent, outsider art; it’s because they find it amusing that the visionaries behind these films set out with b...