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...

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. 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...