Trash Menagerie

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. 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...

aka Sewage Baby Dir. Francis Teri The Suckling (1990) is what happens when community theater skill and Troma-esque gonzo shock sensibility meet to deliver what appears to be heavy handed Catholic propaganda packaged in a scuzzy D-Grade creature feature. It’s like the husk of an after school special lying in the gutter after a meth bender. The story begins with a Texas Chain Saw Massacre  (1974) style title crawl claiming the film is based on true events (wink, wink). Then there’s a dream within a dream, and then finally a frame story about two very small doctors discussing the sole survivor of a bloodbath weeks earlier. Finally in the story proper, we see a dude who looks like Archie Andrews leading his girlfriend, our main character, to a decrepit house that houses a brothel/abortion clinic. There’s some cringey nudity during a scene showing one of the prostitutes with a john. It’s purpose in the film seems to be to garner a few laughs via slapstick. Mostly it’s...

aka Blue Passion Dir. Niko Mastorakis If Alfred Hitchcock and Brian DePalma teamed up to produce a film for a Pay-Per-View softcore channel, but only had a small fraction of their combined skill, and an even smaller fraction of their normal budget, the result might look something like In the Cold of the Night , a bonkers neon-noir thriller with more skin than sense. Our protagonist, Scott Bruin is living the coke-fueled, late 80’s/early 90’s American West Coast dream. He’s got a successful fashion photography studio/loft in L.A., swaths of conventionally attractive women ready to throw themselves at him, and a glowing waterbed on which to sleep with said women. The only trouble is he’s having recurring nightmares in which he murders the same woman in the same house by different means, causing him to question his own sanity and setting him on a search for this mysterious dream woman. In the Cold of the Night’s biggest issue is pacing. The running time is 113 minutes, generally...

Dir. Ngai Choi Lam Consuming the amount of exploitation films that I do, I find there are starts and lulls in the kinds of trash I’m interested in. It generally goes that I focus on one genre and dig through it until I hit the bottom of the barrel. Zombie, Slasher, Giallo, Cannibal, Killer Kids, Post-Apocalyptic Mad Max Ripoffs. When you watch to many of one category in a row, the subgenre starts to lose its luster, especially once you’re left with only the dregs of what it has to offer. So it’s always exciting to sink teeth into a new genre, to explore some new territory. In this instance, new territory means the Hong Kong genre cinema of the 80’s and 90’s, and if The Cat is any indicator, this new territory is goddamn glorious. The Cat concerns Wisely*, an adventurer/novelist? investigating the theft of a priceless artifact (dubbed simply, The Octagon) from a museum. He soon discovers the culprits are a young woman, an old man, and a cat, from outer space. The Octagon i...

 Dir. James Cummins A small scale zombie flick that doesn’t really follow too many zombie movie mechanics, so it’s really more of a creature feature/monster movie if you care about semantics, The Boneyard is a fun romp through a mortuary if you can make it past the first half of it. The film begins with two detectives breaking into what appears to be a derelict house. The younger detective (who looks like Hoover from Animal House ) encounters a blanketed figure who smacks him with a pillow; so naturally he pulls out his gun. It’s the kind of overreaction that would be funny if policing in America weren’t what it is today. Anyways we learn that the figure, and owner of the house, is Alley, a medium the detectives want to recruit to help them solve a child murder case. Alley, having been scarred by the last child murder case, initially refuses, but later accepts after having a dream about a decrepit zombie girl giving her a hug. After we learn that prime suspect Chen ha...