Trash Menagerie

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...

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...

aka Terminator II, Alienators, Contaminator Dir. Bruno Mattei An Aliens (1986) rip-off marketed as a sequel to The Terminator (1984), Shocking Dark is a mostly dull slice of Italian schlock hell from the tail end of the 80’s. And when I say Aliens rip-off, I mean Bruno Mattei (Vincent Dawn) and Claudio Fragasso (Clayde [not Clyde] Anderson) may as well have gone into a theater playing Aliens, filmed it, and sold a bootleg with new cover art. Obviously I’ve come to expect Italian trash cinema to be shameless; that’s no surprise. But I was taken aback at how bold this movie is in the almost beat-for-beat mimicry on display. Still there’s enough trashy charm to warrant a mild recommendation provided you’ve got a few friends and some potent potables on hand.   Sometime in the future, Venice has become uninhabitable due to water and air pollution. A group of researches from the (totally) Tubular Corporation, living in the tunnels under Venice to find a solution, send a...

 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...

Dir. William Fruet No Animal Attack movie will ever be as good as Jaws . This is painfully obvious, especially considering that this sub-genre is now almost exclusively relegated to the SyFy Channel. And that’s a shame. If these movies had more respect and bigger budgets they’d be able to have better effects than the low resolution gifs they use to render their bloodthirsty juggernauts. Puppets and animatronics don’t always look great, but 99 out of 100 times they’re better than the stock animations we see in these movies today. And if you combine them with with an interesting narrative hook or two, you might have a solid piece of schlock on your hands. Spasms is just this. A solid piece of schlock. It was never gonna be as good as Jaws , but Jaws doesn’t feature Oliver Reed getting into a knife fight with a giant snake. So which one is the real winner?   The plot begins in New Guinea, where indigenous peoples are performing a ceremony to conjure up a Snake demon-god...

aka Alien Prey, The Destructer Dir. Norman J. Warren What if the alien from Under the Skin walked out of that movie and into a Lifetime Original about a dysfunctional lesbian couple? And was also a handsome British man instead of Scarlett Johansson. Prey (aka Alien Prey), that’s what if. A carnivorous alien being named Kator lands in the English countryside on some sort of reconnaissance mission from his home planet and assumes the identity of an unfortunate lug called Anders. Very shortly after he is taken into the home of the naive, free-spirited Jessica and her domineering, jealousy-prone partner Josephine, who assume the man to be lost and injured. Jessica welcomes the prospect of a new man in her isolated life while Jo is immediately wary and hostile toward the stranger, because all lesbians either just a). need a good dicking, or b). hate all men entirely.  Soon Anders/Kator’s presence begins drive a wedge between the two lovers, as Jo becomes more and more angr...