A belated sequel to 1994’s hit Interview with the Vampire, the flop follow-up Queen of the Damned is, to me, the more enjoyable work, because it doesn’t try to be an important, arty film like Neil Jordan’s laborious adaptation. Recognizing the source novels of Anne Rice as purely B-level material — Jane Austen she ain’t — Queen sets out to be nothing more than a B movie.

Stuart Townsend (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen‘s Dorian Gray) takes over for Tom Cruise in the role of Lestat, the ancient vampire who has now become a rock star, singing terrible death-metal songs (penned by Jonathan Davis, the guy behind the terrible nu-metal band Korn). By informing his fans of his bloodsucking status, Lestat has raised the ire of the vampire nation, which seeks to silence him permanently. In making his evil music, he’s also raised the titular queen (R&B singer Aaliyah, who eerily perished in a plane crash before the film’s release) from the dead, and she wants to extinguish the human race.

Queen is more campy than anything, especially with the majority of vampire action given silly ghost-trail effects that cheapen the film. The direction by Michael Rymer (In Too Deep) is flashy and showy, befitting of the piffling material, which grows confusing as it heads toward Act 3. But with bloody bosoms and combustible corpses, who’s expecting Shakespeare?

The end seems to be a direct setup for another sequel, unlikely to surface given this chapter’s tepid reception. —Rod Lott

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Hollywood set decorator Charles B. Pierce ventured into the directing/producing game with The Legend of Boggy Creek, which takes a docudrama approach to the Bigfoot myth. The influential result is a weird mix of homespun homilies, flattened animal carcasses, more country songs than should be legal and such deeply Southern drawls, it nearly could have made an Academy Awards-qualifying run for Best Foreign Language Film.

Boasting a population of 350, the Arkansas town of Fouke (which sounds close to “fuck” every time it is spoken) is “a right pleasant place to live … until the sun goes down.” That’s because it is home to several stores, two gas stations, a motel, two cafes … and one big ol’, hog-stealin’ sasquatch!

With a poetic lilt that sounds like he should be reciting Rod McKuen verse, Vern Stierman narrates the movie, driving what little story there is: that a monster from the Texarkana swamps roams free. Typical of his voice-over: “Excitement in the community reached a peak when a farmer named O.H. Kennedy discovered these strange, three-toed footsteps in Willie Smith’s bean field.”

However, the oddly G-rated Boggy Creek is mostly, rightly remembered for its re-enactments of sasquatch attacks. Local yokels say things like, “Uh herd sumthin’!” (translation: “I heard something”) or, “Les git outta her!” (translation: “Let’s get out of here!”), and sure as shit, out pops the hairy creature. He’s not picky about who he frightens, either, whether it’s kids playing outdoors in the daytime or some poor sap attempting to move his bowels on a toilet.

The super-indie indie holds a cryptozoological cornpone charm. Pierce took the more traditional route with the belated sequel, 1985’s Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues, which deservedly ended up lampooned on Mystery Science Theater 3000. —Rod Lott

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Written, directed and produced by some guy named David Schwartz, Las Vegas Blood Bath is a homemade horror film shot on video and so thoroughly, gloriously incompetent that it’s best enjoyed as a rollicking comedy. Camcorder sound, sub-amateur actors, zero sense of pacing, nonexistent editing: It’s all here, folks!

Ari Levin stars as an average Joe named Sam. He looks like Jerry Seinfeld, but has the charisma of Jason Alexander; he’s so remarkably inept as an actor, he’s ineptly remarkable. He’s just closed the business deal of his life when he decides to buy his wife, Ruthie, that little red sports car she’s been wanting and drive it back home to Vegas to “surprise the hell out of her.” He keeps himself awake by singing songs to himself (“Ruthie, Ruthie / You’re so pretty”), but when he arrives, he finds that he’s the one surprised. You see, Ruthie — some skank in a blonde Elvira wig — is sleeping with a naked cop. Sam snaps, shoots them both and goes tooling around town with Ruthie’s disembodied head in tow.

“All women are the same! They all deserve to die!” Sam screams, which is all the movie allows in way of motivation and plot. Still clad in tie and slacks, he’s going to exact his revenge on the female species, one slut at a time … in broad daylight along highly trafficked areas. Said plan begins when he spots a hooker (“There’s one!”) and picks her up. Some guy drives by and flips them off; she wonders why. “Oh, I don’t know,” he bellows bitterly, “maybe he doesn’t like daytime whores!”

Following the lengthiest driving sequence in which the audience is spared no left turn, Sam takes Daytime Whore to an apartment complex parking lot, where he ties her up, pulls off her top, introduces her to Ruthie’s head, stabs her through the chin and yanks off her leg with his car. No one seems to notice the bloody limb being dragged from the back bumper — this is Vegas, after all, and as the ads say, whatever happens here, stays here.

From there, it’s off to shoot a bartender in the head and — yes! — more driving. Another guy pulls up alongside Sam to give him the bird, but this time Sam responds by shooting off the man’s middle finger, demonstrating impeccable precision aim for such a nerdy salesman homebody.

His thirst for blood finally takes him to a home of one of the Beautiful Ladies of Oil Wrestling (that’s B.L.O.W. for short; subtle, this film is not), where the not-at-all-beautiful, not-true-ladies have gathered this night to scarf down sausage pizza and watch themselves on TV. But first, the frizzy haired girls — christened with monikers like Bambi, Cherry Blossom and Tuff Tiff — all try on bikinis that the most horse-faced of the bunch brought back from New York, because apparently, in a town where prostitution and gambling are perfectly legal, garish swimwear must not be.

Even Barbara, the lone pregnant one of the group, models a bikini, much to the disgust of the other girls. “Someone should harpoon that whale,” snaps one after the expectant mother leaves the room. This prompts such a litany of anti-Barbara barbs that one half-expects the girls to say, “At least we terminate our pregnancies!”

Finally, after offing a nosy neighbor with a shovel, Sam bursts in and has his way with each of the smoky chicks, and that means tying them up and drilling a head or pulling out an arm here and there. After tying up one of the girls in the bathtub, he asks what she does for a living. She responds meekly and with no sense of irony (or any semblance of emotion, really), “I’m a professional oil wrestler and also a TV star.” This sends him into a psychotic rage — “Ruthie loved oil wrestling!” — and he stabs her.

But the most pain to be inflicted Sam saves for the preggo Barbara. “C’mon,” he says, dragging her upstairs, “we’re going to play obstetrics and gynecology!” And he’s not joking. After he feels up her milk-engorged breasts and compliments her “dark silver dollars” (in a scene so humiliating, you hope the woman was handsomely paid, but know in your heart she was all too glad to do it for $20 and a corndog), he slices open her abdomen, retrieves the fetus and then hurls it against the wall! It’s all right, however, because the bedroom walls are conveniently adorned with butcher paper, should anyone ever break in and want to toss around an unborn child.

That’s the highlight of this Blood Bath, and really, where can a movie go from there? Oh, it tries its damndest, what with Sam decapitating a Jehovah’s Witness and dispatching a cop who looks like Freddie Mercury, but really — once you have a character engage in infant discus, everything else is just gravy. It’s in Syd Field’s screenwriting book. Look it up. —Rod Lott

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Shot in Paterson, N.J., this regional horror indie is best known for being the film debut of Brooke Shields, age 11 at the time of its release. What it should be known for is being a solid fright flick, better than a majority of the studio-funded efforts of that time.

Shields (briefly) plays Karen, murdered during her first communion by someone in a yellow vinyl raincoat and a cheap mask from the five-and-dime. Suspicion falls like an anvil on her older, less-adored sister, Alice (Paula E. Sheppard, Liquid Sky), who “has a knack for making things look like accidents.”

Police detectives, one of whom has an office decorated with pages torn from nudie mags, investigate the crime — or crimes plural, as Karen is merely victim No. 1 in a string of attacks, the next of which takes place on a stairway. This sequence is well-executed (no pun intended) by director/co-writer Alfred Sole (Pandemonium), and perhaps the highlight. A close runner-up would be any featuring the family’s morbidly obese landlord (Alphonso DeNoble, Bloodsucking Freaks), a character so pathetic that he eats cat food from the tin and whose shorts bear permanent, prominent urine stains.

Alice Sweet Alice is as much a murder mystery as it is a slasher pic, but Sole errs by solving the whodunit portion far too early (and it was exactly who I thought it was). His manner of mixing the two genres yields an oddball soufflé — slightly flat in the middle, yet still tasty. —Rod Lott

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Famously, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Gruesome Twosome begins with a time-padding conversation between two Styrofoam wig heads, and yet, it’s not the weirdest thing among a compact 72 minutes.

Run by Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis, How to Make a Doll), The Little Wig Shop does brisk business for a Florida college town — not so much in selling them as acquiring new stock. That comes from the lovely college co-eds who inquire about renting a room from the matronly Mrs. Pringle, only to find their scalps evicted by the blade — later upgraded to electric — of her mentally challenged son, Rodney (Chris Martell, The Wild Rebels). Also part of the Pringle family: a stuffed bobcat named Napoleon.

When she’s not hanging with her sorority sisters by dancing on the bed and eating buckets of KFC while dressed in nighties, curious Kathy (Gretchen Wells) tries to figure out what happened to the missing girls. Says one of her sisters, “Honestly, Kathy, don’t you ever concentrate on anything but mysteries?” That’s a kinder way of putting it than the phrasing of her blue-balled boyfriend (Rodney Bedell, She-Devils on Wheels): “That’s all I need: Kathy Baker, girl detective. How’d I ever get mixed up with a female James Bond?”

Scenes of Kathy’s sleuthing play out in Lewis’ no-detail-spared style, so feel free to use the restroom or file your taxes while she observes an old man digging a hole in real time. If you choose to sit through it, however, you’ll be rewarded with Wells’ hilarious attempt at feigning a scream; no wonder Gruesome was her one and only screen credit. While the film is funnier than most of Lewis’ gore shows, it still is inferior to his Blood trilogy — inferior in a good way, mind you. —Rod Lott

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