Wrestlemaniac (2006)

I am by nature a lover of many things that are traditionally considered to be in poor taste: bad movies, terrible puns, pro wrestling—you get the gist. It was my very lucky day when I found a film that combined all of these things (with some other…well, less enjoyable tasteless qualities like misogyny and racism) into one film not even long enough to be considered feature-length: Wrestlemaniac!

Clocking in at 75 minutes (that’s 1.25 episodes of ‘Law & Order’ on cable for those of you who, like me, use episodes of ‘Law & Order’ as a timekeeping mechanism) and also known as El Mascarado Massacre, this film is blissfully free in its entirety on Youtube (link). At the time of my viewing, it had a mere 298,220 views and one lone comment reading, “stupid movie~beside the chicks” so I knew I was in for a treat, particularly considering that in this world, a video of a baby panda sneezing can rack up more than 209 MILLION views.

I chose Wrestlemaniac solely based on its name and its free-ness on YouTube, and was really pleasantly surprised when the final actor credited during the opening sequence was Rey Misterio. If you’ve seen any WWE in the last 10-15 years, you may be familiar with Rey Mysterio Jr., who is inexplicably the nephew, not son, of Rey Misterio. I do not understand this naming convention. I cannot claim to know why there is a variation in spelling, either. Wrestling moves in mysterious ways, you know? It’s best not to question. Anyway, Rey Misterio the elder was very much a legend in Mexico in the 70s and 80s and trained his nephew, who is a pretty big talent within WWE, so I was excited.

Let me give you the premise of this film: six people set out in a van to Mexico to film a very low-budget porno. All of these people are big dumb dummies and I’m not sure who we’re supposed to like. There is, of course, the trope of 20 minutes with jerks but since this movie is shorter than a weekly episode of 'The Biggest Loser,' we are mercifully given a reprieve to make it about a solid ten minutes of character development. This is more than enough to decide that these people are big dumb dummies and I really don’t care about them. There is the Alpha Male, the Fat Guy, the Stoner Guy and three blonde porno actresses. I was not planning to refer to any of them by name to show how little I care about their impending doom, but I realized that two of them were named Debbie and Dallas. Nothing like a shout out to classic porn, right? The third is named Daisy and you need not remember that because she doesn’t have a single line of dialogue. She begins the movie passed out in the van. 

She wakes up, stumbles into the porno shoot, pulls out a boob, barfs, is murdered. Just like that. That's Daisy's character arc. 

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. The dumdums naturally get lost and really fantastic, thoughtful dialogue ensues. Regarding finding their way to Cabo:

Alpha Male: Aren’t you Mexican?
Fat Guy: Yeah but I was born in Seattle, dude.
Alpha Male: (pause) Whatever, still Mexican. I know you could find your way to a taco stand.

That’s pretty much Alpha Male’s ‘tude for the duration of his onscreen time. He stops the van at a rickety old gas station and they speak with the proprietor, who tells them of a nearby ghost town called La Sangre de Dios—which our Mexican character referenced above translates as “The Blood of Christ.” No sir, I took Spanish 4 in high school and I am fairly certain that would be La Sangre de Cristo and that dios means god... but whatever. This town has been abandoned because of a maniacal pro wrestler who, from what I could gather from the disjointed plot of this film, has gone bonkers and killed everyone in sight. Now he lives there alone—the luchador Mascarado (the masked man, I think? I don’t quite recall from the aforementioned Spanish 4 experience, lo siento Señora Glaser!)

As you may have guessed, Rey Misterio is Mascarado. His first two kills are of our most expendable characters (Stoner Guy and Barfing Daisy, who dashes off the porno set to barf and for reasons I cannot understand, runs about 350 yards before she slams her bare feet into a bunch of broken glass and then is murdered.) When the body of Stoner Guy is found, we see that his face has been peeled off his skull, which is actually a pretty excellent touch.

Mascarado comes for the rest of our intrepid porn crew less Dallas, who has set to repair the van that Alpha Male has wrecked—her dad’s a mechanic, see?—so she is basically oblivious to all of this. Alpha Male dies a decent gory death, his ugly mug smashed into brick by the back of his hair like a face to a turnbuckle. It is also in this scene that I first noticed the imaginative camera work to distract from the fact that Rey Misterio is only 5’9”. He’s pretty jacked in this movie, but it’s a little bit hard to be afraid of a villain who is significantly shorter than some of his victims. This is accomplished through a lot of killer-POV shots and also some creative backlighting.

Anyway, Fat Guy and Debbie discover Mascarado’s killing room in which he has crudely fashioned a wrestling ring out of rope and rusty barrels and the walls are covered with stretched, grotesque faces that have been removed from Mascarado’s victims.

Fat Guy realizes that Mascarado is playing by the rules of wrestling: in Mexican wrestling, unmasking a rival luchador is the ultimate humiliation that only occurs after a major loss. He puts on the luchador mask that he has been carrying around for reasons that are not explained to the audience and prepares for his own squared circle bout with the killer Mascarado.

Eventually Dallas fixes the van and then has a protracted chase scene with Mascarado. I would not normally do this, but I am going to describe for you, shot-for-shot, the end of the movie (I get it, this is a major spoiler, but were you really going to watch Wrestlemaniac? Be honest with yourselves. If so, skip the next two paragraphs.)

Daisy is told that she needs to remove Mascarado’s luchador mask and that will be the end of him forever because of the humiliation, presumably? This of course makes no sense because we have previously been told that he had been given “50 lobotomies and they didn’t work for shit” and I would imagine that the medical professionals involved took his mask off for these procedures. It’s unclear. Anyway, Daisy smacks him in the back with a board full of nails and then brutally impales him with a 5-foot long, 2-inch wide length of metal pipe that really ought to kill him. She reaches over to remove his mask but he grabs her arm, Carrie-style, and she runs out of the room, leaving him impaled and alone.

She makes it to the exit of the building and collapses on the floor in tears because she is a whiner. An unseen force blows the doors open and we can see that the van is parked just outside, headlights on. A renewed Daisy stands up. As mysteriously (misteriously? I’m sorry, I can’t help myself) as they opened, the doors swing closed. Daisy bursts through them, rushing towards the van and screaming. Suddenly she slows, stops, and looks down. Now she is impaled by the pipe and she slumps to the ground. WHAT. The next and final shot of the movie is Rey Misterio driving away in the van, listening to some country song. WHAT. I have no explanation for this-- I guess it's just another "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHY!" moment in horror.

I am also 1300 words into a review of a movie that probably had fewer than 1300 words of dialogue so I really need to wrap it up. In summation, this movie was most definitely so bad it was good. So much of the budget must have been spent on fake blood. One of the deaths is by a backbreaker, a classic wrestling move. Much like Barfing Daisy, Rey Misterio also has no lines and it truly doesn't matter at all. It’s great. Do yourself a favor and spend 1.25 ‘Law & Order’ episodes on Wrestlemaniac. One of these days I'll review something for you that's actually good--until then, WRESTLEMANIAAAAAC!!!

House (1986)

So. I could swear that at least one person recommended House to me as “really really scary.” It had also been languishing in my Netflix streaming queue for quite some time so I figured I’d give it a shot. About halfway through the movie, I started to feel like maybe I had missed something. I paused it and did a quick IMDB search, turning up a 1977 Japanese film by the same name which I think was probably the actual recommendation I received. Guys, when you recommend me something, please make sure I write it down. I’m the worst.

 Actually, I really don’t care that this was likely the wrong movie because I LOVED IT. First, let me tell you this: I feel that it would be a lie by omission if I did not tell you that I watched this movie while under the influence of barbiturates. It sounds like a fun recreational thing—or does it? I’m unsure—but it’s really just a migraine med that also has caffeine in it, presumably to counteract the barbiturate effect. Like all good Italian babies, I used to be given coffee in a sippy cup (it’s seriously stunning that I am a solid 5’8”) so I am pretty immune to caffeine at this point in my life and so this particular med still slightly messes me up in an “I’ve never seen ‘em fing” kind of way.

Oh wait, there they go.

So this may have possibly influenced my enjoyment of the film, just a little bit. As an added result, my initial notes about the movie are just bizarre scattered observations. Among them:

- This grocery delivery boy has a big butt and I’m pretty into it (I WROTE THAT ON A PIECE OF PAPER)
- Did Roger really just put something into the microwave for 30 minutes? Is he trying to grow a giant tumor?
- Roger is sort of studly even though he wears an excessively low V-neck sweater that is tucked into slacks to hang out and take out the garbage. I know it’s 1986 but c’mon.

Do you like how I always use the same clouds to indicate that someone is outside? I’m such a great artist, I really am.

There are also a few references to my excitement that both Norm from 'Cheers' and Bull from 'Night Court' feature prominently in this film. This is my real life in 2014. On barbiturates.

Roger, our protagonist, is a horror writer for whom things are going terribly wrong. His son mysteriously disappeared, his marriage fell apart and the aunt who raised him has recently committed suicide by hanging. Roger inherits her giant old house (where he grew up, and where his son went missing) and moves back in to work on his next book, which is a memoir of his experiences in Vietnam (which no one seems to want to read). Weird stuff starts happening, there is a giant monster thing in the bedroom closet and Norm lives next door and just wants to hang out and drink High Life.

I had gone into this with the expectation that it would be “really really scary” so I was surprised to find that this was, in fact, a horror comedy. I did not realize it was such until the scene in which Roger’s ex-wife Sandy turns up at his front door and then shapeshifts into a rubbery, jowly, grotesque yet feminine monster and it’s goddamn hilarious.

To defeat this monster, Roger cuts her into pieces and buries her all over the backyard only to have her hand dug up by Norm’s golden retriever. The hand sticks around until Roger flushes it down the toilet which, as the owner of a very old house, made me extremely nervous about the plumbing but made for an excellent visual.

Ultimately Roger realizes that the house has taken his son—a fact that his aunt told him at the time of the disappearance but everyone wrote off as being crazy—and is able to find him by smashing the bathroom mirror and crawling into this insane pit in the house. Here he realizes that his son was kidnapped by the undead entity of his old army buddy from Vietnam (Bull!) who begrudges Roger for not being able to mercy-kill him when he was wounded in action and instead allowing him to be captured and tortured by enemy forces. He appears as a crazy undead skeleton soldier D&D looking thing and I absolutely love him.

Good news though, Roger is able to defeat him and the house by no longer being afraid, a theme that has JUST NOW arisen in the 88^th minute of the film, and his son is rescued from the clutches of undead army Bull. This house is clean.

You’d think this would pretty much wrap up the movie but I have several unanswered questions. 1) Why was the aunt being haunted into killing herself? She didn’t leave Bull out to die. 2) Who were the other monsters in the house? There was the Sandy monster and the closet monster that I referenced earlier, and also a couple smaller monsters that tried to kidnap a neighbor’s young child that Roger is weirdly babysitting and BATHING, which is so upsetting that I won’t even get into it. 3) Why is being unafraid all it takes to defeat these monsters? That seems like a cop out.

Regardless of the loose ends and fairly chintzy special effects, and the fact that I was expecting a different movie entirely, House was super fun. I really loved this and would definitely watch it again.

The Hole (2001)

Since I’ve been doing this blog a bit more regularly, I’m trying to write at least part of a post pretty quickly afterward watching the movie. That has not been the case for the film that my horror lady friends and I watched this past week, The Hole (2001). Also the end of this post is going to spoil the end of the movie, so if you have any plans on ever watching this one, skip this post entirely please. 

Let me start with a few simple facts:
- This is not to be confused with The Hole (2009), a self-described “3D thriller that explores the fears and secrets buried deep within the human mind.”
- This is also not to be confused with The Hole (1998), described by Wikipedia as a Taiwanese drama-musical.
- This is a British film that, while set in 2001, screams 1996. That part is pretty excellent. There is a giant inflatable pink chair made of translucent plastic that I swear I saw in the Claire’s store at the Ross Park Mall in the mid-90s. 
- Thora Birch portrays the main female character and she does a serviceable British accent for at least 85% of the movie.
- This is one of Keira Knightley’s first movie roles and she is, of course, perfectly British.
- For a few days afterward, a series of emails and texts went back and forth between us trying to figure out some of the plot points, which is a little bit odd because (see next point)
- This movie was not good.
- Partway through, I commented that “this is like the shitty Rashomon of horror” which was, even with the qualifier “shitty”, still a fairly generous statement.

The movie begins with a cold open in which we see Thora Birch—whose character’s name is irrelevant because I will refer to her only as Thora Birch—staggering down a road, covered in blood. A missing persons sign flaps from a telephone pole. She lurches into what appears to be a school and screams. We see that she is covered in wounds and very agitated even before a doctor tries to examine her in the OB-GYN way which causes her to freak out.

From there, we are treated to 20 minutes of backstory: Thora Birch is a mean girl in this prep school; she’s in love with this guy Mike who is the son of an American rock star and recently became single; she’s BFFs with both this weird sociopathic guy Martin and the beautiful but vapid Frankie (Knightley). Thora Birch realizes that Mike doesn’t even know she exists (the quintessential teenage pain) and Martin says he can help her. He takes her, Frankie, Mike and Mike’s toadie Geoffrey to this World War II bunker in the middle of the woods where they can have a three-day party because they have somehow managed to bail on a field trip to Wales. On the third day Martin is supposed to come and let them out…but he never arrives. They are trapped in the bunker.

Okay, first major issue. Being locked in this underground hideout was clearly meant to give you a feeling of claustrophobia except that the bunker is legit bigger than my house. It contains a separate bathroom that has multiple urinals. There’s a balcony. It’s not even a remotely small space, and I felt like that was a huge missed opportunity.

Eventually we realize that we are in a flashback as told by Thora Birch to the lady cop who is working on her missing persons case. We then meet the lady cop's partner, whom I mention only because we decided he looked like a weird combination of Jay Mohr and Dave Coulier. It was uncanny. Is this bunker made of………wood?? Anyway, Thora Birch tells a version of the story that basically could never have happened in a million years, which leads into a different version of the story but now it’s being narrated by Martin, who has been brought in for questioning about the matter.

You know, the more I’m thinking about this the less I feel like trying to explain what actually happened/ how we came about it and instead I am just going to complain.

Nobody dies a scary death. All three of the deaths that happen in the bunker and the one death that happens outside the bunker are pretty dull. One character seriously just dies of heart failure in the middle of night off-camera. Like, imagine you’re a horror screenwriter and you’re like “Yes, yes, good, now we need this character to die…what is scary, what is scary…hmm…ah yes! A cardiopulmonary failure! That’ll get ‘em! That gets ‘em every time!”  *clears off spot on bookshelf for Oscar*

The one character that dies outside of the bunker is pushed off a footbridge into raging waters... but this person is also CASUALLY SITTING ON THE EDGE OF A BRIDGE WITH THE PERSON HE KNOWS TO BE THE KILLER.  JUST WHISTLING AWAY HERE ON THE EDGE OF A BRIDGE. What! What! There is no real suspense, we don’t even see him get pushed off (this movie seems to have blown its entire budget on Thora Birch, who apparently pulled down seven figures for her role and thus they could not afford to make a dummy to toss over the edge.)

Even the death of “hunky” Mike, a moment that is seemingly meant to be the denouement of the story, is actually pretty lame. I am putting hunky in quotes because in several scenes in this movie, he looks like he’s wearing a wig that may have been worn in a high school production of Spartacus. It’s not a good look. In fact, nothing about Mike is good and he is most definitely not worth all the trouble that Thora Birch goes to in order to seduce him. He doesn't even participate in the full frontal nudity scene involving Geoffrey that appears in a flashback. Oh, did I not mention there is full frontal male nudity in this movie? God bless you, British cinema.

In the case of Netflix good or garbage, it’s hard for me to come down on either side of the line with The Hole. It’s definitely not a good movie, but it’s not garbage either. It’s not scary, it’s not particularly violent and there’s no real suspense—it’s almost more of a weird crime drama than anything else. We discussed it quite a bit afterwards but I don’t know if that’s because it was thought-provoking (which seems unlikely) or because there were so many bizarre red herrings in the story. It did incorporate something you don't see very often in horror, which is a woman as the villain, so that was actually pretty fun. Ultimately, I guess you’re on your own with this one-- I am no help to you whatsoever. Sorry boutcha!

Satan's Little Helper (2004)

Let me tell you about a terrible way to choose a movie on Netflix: Step 1) Open the ‘horror’ section. Step 2) Continually scroll until you have loaded every possible option. Step 3) Wildly scroll up and down the list and land on one at random. In using this selection method, you run the risk of having to watch Satan’s Little Helper.

I wanted to do a Netflix good-or-garbage review, but there are just so many possible choices on Netflix that I completely psyched myself out and decided to pick at random. I deserved what I got for such indecision, but I do regret that I kind of forced Rob to watch it with me.

The entire plot of Satan’s Little Helper is predicated on the notion that on Halloween, everyone becomes incapable of believing that anything is actually wrong, instead assuming that all bad acts are just part of some larger performance art of the holiday. A man dressed as Satan is arranging a corpse on a porch swing in broad daylight? Now he’s hanging a FULLY ALIVE elderly woman with a noose in front of her house? Oh, your friend who is a middle-aged adult woman comes to a Halloween party visibly upset and taped from mouth to hips with packing tape, mummy-style? Well, it IS Halloween so…I’m sure that’s fine. Nothing to see here. 

I’d like to try to sum up the plot in fewer than 250 words because that’s really all I can muster for this particular piece of art: there’s this shitty little kid named Dougie who is obsessed with a video game called “Satan’s Little Helper” (which features graphics whose quality rival those of this blog) wherein you kill people and dogs, I guess, to score points. He plays this on a generic handheld gaming system.

Dougie has a crush on his hot sister but is pissed to find out that she has a boyfriend—who, by the way, has serious daddy issues—and rebels by befriending a silent man in a Goatman-type of costume who is arranging a corpse on a front porch in broad daylight as described above, believing him to be the Satan of the game. Apparently this means that GameSatan has the ability to kill people without consequence. After all, it’s just a game. This last bit requires an extreme stretch of the imagination because we are never told that Dougie has any sort of mental problems that would actually allow him to believe this. The kid’s dumb, but come on. For nearly half the movie, the sister Jenna believes Satan to be her boyfriend Alex in costume, which makes total sense because Satan has about 6 inches and 80 pounds on Alex. Seems legit. There are five total cops in this film and Satan kills them all, then chaos reigns supreme. I think it may be an indictment of a video game violence-obsessed culture but truly I can't be sure. It was extremely stupid. 

242 words…not bad!

I did some research on this movie after watching it, and was surprised to see a number of positive reviews. People thought it was really funny and original. I am here to tell you that those people are wrong. I can get down with horror comedy, but I think my issue with Satan’s Little Helper was that at no point did I laugh (except perhaps the awkwardly delivered line, “and Jesus is Satan!”) because I was just kind of dumbfounded. I basically spent all 90 minutes like this:

Am I missing something? Am I not fun? I guess I just don’t feel that stupid always reads as funny and maybe that’s my loss. Anyway, this movie weirdly stars people you might know from other things: Amanda Plummer, who has been in a number of things including Pulp Fiction, The Fisher King and So I Married an Axe Murderer (one of Rob’s personal favorites) and Katheryn Winnick, whom I think is actually pretty great on the History Channel series “Vikings”. None of them are particularly good in this. Is that part of the joke? People on the internet seem to think so. 

I’m not saying that Satan’s Little Helper was without its moments: the house number of this family of big dumb stupids is 66, and upon entering the house with Dougie, Satan casually spray paints a third 6 on the doorjamb.

Satan does not speak a single line throughout the entire movie and communicates solely in gestures and boob-grabs (lots of boob-grabs). He gives a number of other characters in the downtown area the finger, which I guess is sort of funny in its stupidity…right? I guess? It’s okay. It's decent.

All in all, I just could not get behind this one. At one point Rob asked me for clarification on a plot point that he missed, and I realized that I’d missed it too because I’d just been staring at some pretzels. If I can’t even focus for 90 minutes on a movie in which a serial killer dresses as Satan on Halloween and murders a bunch of people—a pretty great concept!—then how can I ever recommend it to you? 

In the question of Netflix good or garbage, this one is basically recycling. You want better things for it, but you know you still have to put it out at the curb.

The Descent (2005)

You guys, I love this movie. It has so many stellar things going for it: an entirely female cast of relative unknowns who all kill it in their respective roles, it is shot absolutely beautifully and it is legitimately terrifying in both a claustrophobic tension way and a getting-one’s-throat-ripped-out-by-monsters way.

Horror movies almost never have all-female casts. In fact, horror movie are almost never very kind to women. There is certainly the trope of the Last Woman Standing but more often than not, women in horror have throughout history tended to exist chiefly as monster food. Google isn’t turning up much info in the way of all-female horror casts—though I did break my rule of never reading the comments to find this gem: “They already made one. It was called Beaches.”—other than The Descent.

Shot in the UK with primarily European actors, The Descent is about a group of thrill-seeking ladies who enter into a large cave system somewhere in the southern United States, get lost and are stalked by a tribe of underground dwelling monsters. Fittingly, I watched this movie with my lady movie/gaming friends who, like me, are somewhat less-than-thrill-seeking. As the women in the film descended into the narrow, horrible, claustrophobic cave tunnel, we quizzed each other on whether we’d prefer to go skydiving or caving. This was meant in a “if you were forced to do one of these activities which one would you hate less?” kind of way. I had a tough time with this scenario because why can’t I just stay home? Or go swimming at the community pool or maybe play a game of pickup soccer? That’s about as adventurous as I get (for the record, everyone but Kelly picked skydiving. No thanks, cave.)

I am a fairly claustrophobic person, probably as a result of being the younger sister of a bully who did things like folding me into a sofa bed, putting the cushions on it and flopping down.  I went to a haunted house several years ago that had one of those inflatable pressure tunnel things and had a panic attack. On the other side of the tunnel was an actor with a chainsaw and when I came stumbling out, wheezing and flailing, he started to rev the chainsaw and then was like, “oh, shit” and backed away. Small spaces are just not for me and there is a several minute sequence in the beginning of the second act of The Descent in which our protagonist Sarah gets stuck crawling through a very narrow tunnel that is beginning to collapse and it makes me want to die... or at least spend some time casually breathing into a paper bag.

After the narrow tunnel collapses and nearly kills Sarah, we learn that the group’s organizer, an overly smug alpha female named Juno, has taken everyone into an unexplored portion of the caves. No one knows they are there and they are trapped. Interpersonal feuding ensues (I am really minimizing the personal aspects of the plot, but it's a pretty entertaining arc and it also uses one of my favorite horror movie tropes: Something Bad Happened About One Year Ago, Give or Take.)

Much of the second act is the group trying to find their way through the caves, including a disgusto broken leg/exposed bone scene. Really cringeworthy. The budget of this movie was practically nothing (something like $3.5M) and it still looks so, so good, particularly in these scenes. It was filmed on a sound stage in the UK which is actually stunning--the cave looks so real and so imposing. The women are [carabining? rapelling? I’m not sure what the proper term would be] across large gaping chasms in the cave and the camera swoops around them, showing them dangling precariously from every angle, giving you a vertigo sensation and really making you feel that they are 1) in serious danger and 2) total badasses.  It’s also lit beautifully—you really believe that they are in pitch darkness throughout; it’s not like that horror movie thing where someone flicks open a Zippo and suddenly an entire room is cast in light. The portrayal of the darkness really adds to the claustrophobia effect, and I grab for my paper bag again. 

I don’t have any actual numbers on this, but I feel like this movie goes on for at least 70 of its 99 minutes without showing you a single monster. These humanoid creatures have evolved to live underground and crawl about on all fours but are spectacularly buff and fast, and attack by tearing at your insides. They are definitely frightening, but I honestly feel that they are secondary to the cave itself as the scariest threat of the film.

 The ‘crawlers’, as they’re called, are predators who hunt by sound like bats but can’t seem to sense their prey in any other way. I remember seeing this movie in the theater when it was released in the US and then going home to write a semi-snarky review somewhere on the internet about how it was just a liiiiittle absurd to think that creatures who live only in darkness and thus, lose their sense of sight, wouldn't also evolve into a stronger sense of smell to find their prey. That was eight years ago, though, and I no longer care about such plot points as long as stuff is scary. Also apparently bats can’t smell either, so who knows?

Luckily for our cast of cavers, the crawlers can’t differentiate between the feel of a rock and of human skin, nor can they sense fire (I truly am trying hard not to be snarky about this), because there is a pretty great scary scene where our heroine Sarah lies still on a rock while her torch burns nearby and one duder crawls right over her. I realize that in this depiction, the crawler looks like a weird laughing albino monkey man but I promise that they look better on screen. 

This scene comes pretty much back to back with my other favorite scene, in which Sarah fights a crawler in this disgusting pit of blood in the cave and emerges victorious, at which point (IRL) Amanda asked Kelly, “so would you rather skydive or swim in a pit of blood?”

We watched the DVD unrated director’s cut, which had a completely different—and darker and better—ending scene than the theatrical release. I highly, highly recommend tracking down this version of the movie because you will not regret it, I promise. It doesn't appear to be available on Netflix streaming but you can get the disc if you, unlike me, haven’t had a copy of Harry & the Hendersons for like well over a year. You can also stream it for just a couple bucks on Amazon or Google Play. You could also torrent it if you are an internet thief but I will tell you in a very stern voice that I am NOT currently torrenting The Descent Part 2 right now. I’m not.

I mean, I’m probably not. Well, I’ll let you know how it is.  

YouTube Presents: B-Movie Sundays, part 2 of 2: Clownhouse (1989)

Oof, Clownhouse.
Where to begin? It should be noted that I watched this back-to-back with Mausoleum because the internet is addictive and I need more hobbies. I would describe it first and foremost as not nearly as fun as Mausoleum and significantly more disturbing. Like Mausoleum, it is available on YouTube (link).

The film revolves around a trio of preteen to teenage brothers who could really benefit from increased parental supervision—this definitely feels like an indictment of the late 80’s latchkey kid-ism. The first few shots of the movie depict these young boys in tightie whities and eventually shows one of their bare butts. It’s pretty uncomfortable; I turned to Rob and said, “this is really pedophilic and also not a movie you could ever make today.” As it turns out, the director Victor Salvo was molesting the youngest of the actors on set and would eventually go to jail for it. So, that’s pretty much as horrible as it gets. Salvo would go on to direct Powder and the Jeepers Creepers franchise after his release from prison, so it’s nice that he didn’t let being an awful human get in the way of his career. Guh.

Anyway…Clownhouse. The movie itself is kind of madness. The premise is that this kid Casey is afraid of clowns and pretty much everything else, and his oldest brother Randy (played by an actor* whom Rob recognized as a character with one line from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which made me a little sad) is basically a dickhole, and the middle brother Geoffrey is overly protective of Casey. Their dad, much like the husband in Mausoleum, seems to be a busy important businessman who is never seen but is spoken to on the phone. Is this an accepted horror movie trope? The unavailable business patriarch? If not, it should be. About 15 minutes into this movie, their mom straight up disappears. They keep referencing the fact that she won’t be home but we are never told why.
*Editor’s note: I had written most of the draft for this post before I told my very knowledgeable and hilarious friend Amanda (who writes an excellent blog at The Film Stage) about this movie, and she was like, “isn’t that Sam Rockwell?” and I was like, “yeah, I didn’t really know who he was,” and she was like “SAM ROCKWELL HAS BEEN IN EVERYTHING!” which a cursory IMDB search proves that to be true. You guys, this is why I write this blog: because I am a goddamn expert.

Meanwhile at the local asylum for the criminally insane, which is conveniently located a few blocks from the teens’ home—their house is giant, maybe it was purchased really cheaply because of this proximity?—three inmates have escaped. We are to learn nothing about them—not their names, not why they were incarcerated, not their motivations, nothing. In fact, I could be wrong but I don’t believe that any of the three of them utters a single line and they are on screen for a good 70% of this movie.

 After breaking out, the lunatics head to the local circus where Casey had earlier been frightened by a clown, causing him to run out of the circus tent and thus humiliate himself in front of THE WHOLE TOWN. I love how in horror movies, this kind of shit always happens in front of THE WHOLE TOWN. So effective in terms of shame. Anyway, you can see where this is going: the lunatics kill the real clowns, who are innocently just trying to slam some whiskey after the show, and take their clown gear.

(true story: it took me an extra day to finish this post because I was like “WHAT DOES A CIRCUS TENT LOOK LIKE?" Answer: NOT THAT.)

Why would they kill the clowns and take their identities, you ask? They don’t try to assimilate anywhere in the circus or the town as clowns so really, it doesn’t matter why! In fact, I sort of feel like that should be the tagline of this movie: IT DOESN’T MATTER WHY.

Speaking of things that have no actual cause, the three lunatic-fringe clowns then cruise over to the enormous home where the three boys are alone and seemingly just decide to kill them. Why? IT DOESN’T MATTER WHY. The clowns are actually pretty scary, though—I don't normally do this but I wanted to include an actual still from the film so you can see for yourself. This is the leader of the lunatic clowns, impersonating local folk hero clown Cheezo.

Why is the image of a clown waving so horrifying?

The clowns chase these kids pretty much up and down the block and around their house. These kids, I swear—I know that I have never been chased by a bad guy in my own home so it’s hard for me to say what exactly I’d do, but recently one of my cats caught a bird (in my house! it broke in by pecking a hole in an upstairs window screen) and when I went to see what all the commotion was, I guess I surprised the cat and he opened his mouth, releasing a terrifying flying creature that came RIGHT AT ME. I thought it was a bat and I turned heel and ran right out the front door. NOT UP THE STAIRS.

Why are people always running up the stairs? There is no escape from there! You are trapping yourselves! I don’t even care if you die at that point.

Another day, another horror movie where I have decided that people deserve to die. Am I a bad person for thinking that? I couldn’t tell you, but I guess I would actually recommend Clownhouse if only because clowns are the worst possible things on the planet and because stuff that's free is the best. You're welcome!

YouTube Presents: B-Movie Sundays, part 1 of 2*: Mausoleum (1983)

Sometimes I worry about the kind of person I am.

There’s something to be said about being someone who really enjoys horror in general—does it mean that you tend towards being a darker, more cynical person? Behavioral science has long looked at what makes some people gravitate towards horror, and it often has to do with the adrenaline rush of fear. I am certainly not a ‘thrillseeker’ by any means and I won’t set foot into a haunted house (let alone PAY for it, jesus) but I can really get down with the fear that comes from watching fictional people get messed up by some supernatural being. I want them to get messed up.

Maybe it’s aging that makes a person more cynical, though. I remember the first time I saw Scream at age 13, how I felt so desperately that I did not want to see Drew Barrymore’s character die.

Now I watch horror movies all the time and just kinda wait for the characters to die. Most of the time, I even feel like they deserve it. To me, there is no subgenre where this is truer than B-movies, specifically of the 70’s and 80’s.

Holy shit. You guys, holy shit. I want to talk about Mausoleum (1983) but I seriously cannot even figure out where to start. It was recommended to me by my friend Allen, who has made several appearances on this blog by virtue of being 1) a horror aficionado, 2) a wonderful human and 3) one of the only people to give a shit about the blog, and he extolled one of its greatest virtues: it is available in its entirety on YouTube (link). I Googled it to find the YouTube link (why not go to YouTube and search for it there? BECAUSE GOOGLE IS FOR EVERYTHING.) and just saw the first two lines of the Wikipedia result: “Mausoleum is a 1983 supernatural horror film directed by Michael Dugan and starring former Playboy Bunny Bobbie Bresee.” Oh. Oh good. Michael Dugan doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page but, according to IMDB, has something in development for 2015 called “Chubby Chasers.”  (This paragraph was brought to you by: websites of the internet!)

It is certainly apt that Wikipedia plugs our girl Bobbie as “former Playboy bunny” because she is straight up nude for at least 45% of this movie, which truly makes it kind of hard to illustrate. Her character is Susan, a housewife to a very busy important businessman who does a lot of important business involving “contracts” and “signatures”. Her biggest problems are that she’s pretty bored, and she’s like MEGA HOT so all dudes are pretty much always hitting on her. Oh, and she’s possessed by the devil because she went into her family’s mausoleum as a child and the only way she can be released from this possession is by placing a crown of thorns on her head (all in all, not that difficult of a task). So I mean, that does complicate matters. Susan is normally a very sweet, vacant girl but when the devil inside her rears its ugly head, her feathered bangs fall away from her forehead and she bares her Playboy bunny teeth and her eyes glow otherworldly green.

Susan’s husband Oliver is dumber than a sack of wet mice. At one point in the movie, he’s told by her psychiatrist that she’s possessed by the devil and, hey, maybe you might not want to get too close to her. He goes home, finds her in the bathtub (boobs) and in the course of their conversation asks her, “What’s gotten into you, anyway?” DUDE, IT’S THE DEVIL, THAT OTHER GUY JUST TOLD YOU.  Then he hugs her with intent to bone. At that point, you kind of deserve it, right? Also, I should make it clear that apparently this is a sexy devil (not the college girl Halloween costume) because this devil wants to bone down with and then kill every man in sight. How? Sometimes with a brutal face clawing, sometimes by dangling them over the balcony at the mall and sometimes with BOOB-DEMONS. This woman’s boobs turned into demons as she got out of the bathtub. BOOB. DEMONS. They moved and snarled and everything, god bless America.

 

 I should also take this opportunity to point out that Susan's family surname is Nemod and it took me literally half the movie to figure out why.

Mausoleum is really really fun and is absolutely worth your free on YouTube, even though it ends with the weirdest, most perplexing “twist” in the final scene. I cannot figure out what in the world they were trying to do there so if you’ve seen it and would like to offer an opinion, please post it in the comments. I just do not understand.

*The reason this post is titled as part 1 of 2 is because when Mausoleum ended, YouTube suggested that I might also be interested in Clownhouse (1989). AND BOY, WAS I INTERESTED. I was going to put them together into one post but I feel like maybe Mausoleum is enough to chew on for right now.