Trash Menagerie

Dir. Michael Dugan Possession is a great tool in the horror genre, ripe for any number of representations of human agony. Throughout the years we’ve seen possessions, demonic, ghostly, or otherwise stand in for (among other things) puberty ( The Exorcist [1973]), alcoholism ( The Shining [1980]), grief ( The Babadook  [2014]), and mental illness ( Hereditary [2018]).   In less “classy” films, demonic possession is mostly an excuse for a gore free-for-all, showcasing gnarly facial prosthetics, color contacts, and bodily evisceration. Here you find The Evil Dead ( 1981), Night of the Demons (1988)   , Demons (1985), Demon Wind (1990), et al. Mausoleum falls squarely in this latter camp, though there is a small glimmer of aspirations toward the former. Young Susan has just attended her mother’s funeral, where she is drawn to the Nomed family tomb by the call of a choir eerily chanting her name. Once inside, she encounters spooky green and purple lights, while...

Dir. Damien Leone Terrifier feels like if Party City and Monster Energy teamed up to produce a horror movie as quickly as they possibly could. Like they had a checklist consisting of; 1. Creepy Clown and 2. Gore. And nothing else. What little plot there is seems to revolve around the idea of, now wouldn’t it be fucked up if the clown... I get that it’s a slasher movie but it’s so barebones that there’s nothing to enjoy. Ok I’m getting ahead myself. So...plot. Girl 1 and Girl 2 (I can’t remember their names) get out of a Halloween party and run into Creepy Clown. Girl 2’s car tires are slashed so Girl 1 calls her sister (to be referred to from here on as Girl 3) to pick them up. Girl 1 goes into dilapidated building to pee. Creepy Clown begins killing and continues to kill until the end of the movie. Now a movie this devoid of substance can work. But there has to be something to latch onto. Likable characters, interesting visuals, inventive kill scenes. Terrifier...

aka The Presence Dir. Kevin S. Tenney Witchtrap is not a sequel to Witchboard (1986). And that’s a good thing. They’re more or less the same movie; a group of people get picked off one-by-one by an evil spirit and eventually the main girl gets possessed by said spirit. The evil spirits are even both played by the same dude and look pretty much identical. And while ‘ Board is arguably a better movie from a production standpoint, ‘ Trap is just so much more damn fun, thanks in large part to James W. Quinn, whom Witchboard , as its greatest sin, kills off in the first 20 minutes. There’s also no Zarabeth in Witchtrap , which is a huge plus.   The film begins with a Tony Clifton-looking entertainer type being chased around a house by swooping camera shots before getting thrown out a second story window to his death. This is a problem for Devon Lauder, who has inherited the house from his dead uncle Avery, but cannot sell the house to to a stipulation in his will. In or...

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 Bryan James Bryan and Renee Harmon are dynamite. They’re magic. They're no slouches individually when it comes to low-budget exploitation, but paired together they are unstoppable. How else would you explain Lady Street Fighter? By all accounts it should be an unwatchable piece of crap. The plot makes no sense, the acting and dialogue are uniformly terrible, the action is clunky, and the eroticism is painfully awkward. But somehow Bryan and Harmon are instead able to turn these ingredients into a golden nugget of cinematic insanity that must be seen to be believed. The film opens with a woman being tortured to death by men trying to extract from her the location of a stuffed dog containing sensitive materials. The woman’s twin sister, Linda Allen, arrives in L.A. with said dog, apparently unaware of its significance and is promptly attacked by two thugs in a parking garage. One of the thugs drives a car into the other’s face, but luckily this leaves him only wit...

Dir. Cirio H. Santiago The theme song that plays over the end credits of this film contains the lyric, “they’re vampire hookers and blood is not all they suck,” so that’s the level of tomfoolery we’re dealing with here. And while it doesn’t need to go to the top of your Must Watch List, Vampire Hookers , directed by exploitation juggernaut Cirio H. Santiago, is still a charmingly dopey, if dated, horror-comedy that is smirk inducing and chuckle producing...and a little cringe worthy too. It’s strange. Sociopolitical insensitivity is to be expected in exploitation films usually presenting as women getting raped in service of the plot, women getting naked in service of selling movie tickets, and instances of casual racism. Maybe it’s just from years of desensitization, but these things don’t really phase me anymore when I see them in these kinds of films. While there’s no rape going on in Vampire Hookers , there is a scene where our two leads head into a bar to pick up women, st...

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...