For his sophomore effort, director Scott W. McKinlay reassembles much of his cast and crew from his 2006 debut, Gag. That includes Brian Kolodziej, who takes the driver’s seat of Creep Van as Campbell, a young man forced to accept a lowly gig at a car wash after being fired from a grocery store for stealing porno magazines they don’t even stock.
Being without wheels, Campbell wants to buy a dirty and dirt-cheap van he finds for sale; says his co-worker/love interest (Amy Wehrell), “It looks like the poster child for rape prevention.” That’s really the least of the vehicle’s problems, because it’s driven by a guy who has booby-trapped it to do away with those who dare inquire about acquiring it. A busty blonde (super-sexy Lisa Waishes-Cornwell, Tomcats) finds its seat belt cutting into her shoulder, while a bikini babe (Angelina Armani, Fear Clinic) gets her head smashed in its spring-loaded side door.
To no one’s surprise, it’s in this realm of the sick that Creep Van finds its stride. While the film has a healthy sense of humor, one could argue successfully that it’s too jokey — verging on Troma, at that — than need be. (Speaking of, Troma head Lloyd Kaufman cameos, one assumes as nonfinancial payback for McKinlay serving as a producer for Kaufman’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.) When it most counts — Act 3, of course — McKinlay leaves the laughs in the dust, which I wish he had done much sooner, since the comedic tone doesn’t mesh as well with the convincingly grotesque effects as he might think.
That said, I can’t help but recommend that horror fans scream, “Shotgun!” and buckle in for a harmless 80-minute ride. As a throwback to old-school slashers, you could do a ton or two worse. I was never bored by what transpired — a target at which more microbudgeted projects should take care to aim. —Rod Lott
If there’s one thing I love about the grotty films of Lucio Fulci, it’s no matter how terrible a flick of his might be, there are always one or two vomit-worthy scenes that tend to hellishly elevate the thing above most other horror movies. In Aenigma, there’s plenty to choose from, but I’m going to go with a schoolgirl waking up covered in slimy snails.
I know here, in digital print, it doesn’t sound like much, but visually, it’s truly a waking nightmare of slithering special effects.
One of Fulci’s later films, he dutifully takes the worst elements of movies like Patrick, Carrie and Phenomena to make a film that, while not better, is definitely a lot more fun than any of those. Over the strains of a terrible attempt at a pop song, a young girl has a date with the hot gym teacher. Before anybody questions the morals, it turns out to be a bloody joke and she ends up in a coma.
Around that same time, horny new girl Eva (Lara Naszinski) show up at a Boston school for girls and she might be possessed by the bullied student who likes to manifest herself over a famed poster of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. From a head decapitated by a window to a Renaissance statue coming to life and choking a girl, the grotesque deaths keep piling up and how.
But, now that I think about it, even more disturbing than the traumatic snail death is the constant rotation of prepubescent strange the older men hanging around campus seem to be getting all up in — most notably, the gym teacher and the hospital doctor who, when at the school, wears a sweater that reads “University.”
The illicit intercourse, along with the splatter-filled set pieces Fulci (Demonia) was best known for, the only thing that truly remains an enigma to me is how to pronounce the fleetingly pretentious title. Eh-nigma? Augh-nigma? Augh-eh-nigma? —Louis Fowler
When I was around 12 years old, almost every weekend I’d walk the mile up the road to the closest Blockbuster and rent three or four movies, with its cult selection the best thing I had ever since Sound Warehouse shut its doors forever.
As basic as the small group of movies were, it did have the Shinya Tsukamoto film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, a cyberpunk masterpiece of gray-matter metal, complete with a massive drill as a penile substitute. Shocked and awed, I copied the film on my VHS setup and watched it repeatedly for the next year, becoming a big fan of Tsukamoto in the process.
While I have seen many of his films since, the pseudo-period piece Gemini has always escaped my eyes until now, ultimately revealing his most challenging film yet. Based on the short story by Edogawa Rampo, it is set in the Japan of 1910 as former military doc Yukio (Masahiro Motoki) has settled down, now practicing private medicine and married to the charming amnesiac, Rin (Ryo).
With a plague destroying the surrounding slums, Yukio finds his upper-crust world crumbling when he saves a drunk politician instead of a poor mother and her baby. As a somersaulting man in dirty robes invades his house and kills his parents, Yukio soon finds himself stuck at the bottom of a well as the homeless villain — who looks exactly like him, by the way — takes over his life above.
While trapped, Yukio reverts to an animal-like state while the interloper, named Sutekichi (also Motoki), seduces said wife as we learn of the impoverished life and lusty connection they once had as well.
Utilizing a well-versed combination of classic filmmaking skills and industrial know-how, Gemini is an uncomfortable film, possibly more than any of Tsukamoto’s other kinetic flicks, if only for his ability to have his already-unlikable characters mechanically transform into even worse human-sized kaiju who can do more destruction than Godzilla and Gamera combined.
It’s something that, unexpectedly even for this type of film, is on full display here, both physically and emotionally. It’s pure grotesquerie that, if you’re able to connect with it, can leave anyone fully unsettled, just as much when I saw Tetsuo all those maggot-riddled years ago. —Louis Fowler
After Stephen Sommers’ adventure-stuffed remake of Universal’s The Mummy made a mint in the summer of 1999, a wave of low-budget mummy movies hit DVD, including Russell Mulcahy’s Tale of the Mummy, Bram Stoker’s The Mummy and, um, Tony Curtis in The Mummy Lives.
And then there’s The Mummy Theme Park. Containing all the enthusiasm its generic title can muster, it wasn’t so much released as it was dropped from director Alvaro Passeri’s rectum.
Are you ready for stunning ineptitude? (You’re not, no matter what you think. I’m just asking because I’m a polite host.)
So in Egypt, an earthquake reveals an ancient underground city filled with mummies. Naturally, a sheik (Cyrus Elias, Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound) does what anyone with do with such an archaeological find: Turn it into a theme park. And what will he name this vacation destination built to attract visitors from all reaches of the globe? The Mummy Theme Park. One assumes it wasn’t tested through focus groups.
Wanting to hire “the best” photographer ASAP to snap promo pics, the sheik — who looks like Nathan Lane dressed as Jafar on Halloween — flies Daniel Flynn (Adam O’Neil, in his only credit) and initially platonic assistant Julie (Holly Laningham, Fashionably L.A.) over from America. Daniel’s shutterbug experience seems limited to shooting topless women, but that fits right in with the sheik keeping a sizable harem, whose members sport inner-thigh “THE SHIEK” tattoos and say things like, “You think the sheik will like my boobs, hmm?”
Daniel and Julie get a thorough tour of the park by train, from the lab where corpses are “reanimated” via microchip (causing one skeleton to do a ha-cha-cha dance), to the concession area where the menu includes items like “Cream of Isis” and beer is dispensed tastefully through the beard of a pharaoh. Admittedly, the many, many POV shots moving along the tracks look cool, but that’s it; everything else looks false, because it is. Cars and trains are toys, and most of the movie utilizes either green-screen or rear-projection techniques for backgrounds. Fittingly, every line of dialogue is dubbed in post, yet using tones in which people don’t actually speak.
The supposed horror finally kicks in when a flash from Daniel’s camera triggers the microchip of a mummy, startling him to come alive and attack; the science totally checks out. This mummy can walk through walls. Being pursued by this Charmin-bound man, Daniel notices the mummy staring at Julie’s breasts, so he orders her to open her blouse to distract the mummy just long enough to be doused in a bucket of acid, conveniently nearby. By gum, it works!
Passeri’s 1994 debut, Creatures from the Abyss (or Plankton, if you prefer), enjoys a small, but solid reputation as a cheap chunk of cheese; The Mummy Theme Park goes one better in somehow being chintzier in every conceivable regard, most notably in the effects department. No greater representation of Passeri’s poor execution exists than when things gets goopy in the last 20 minutes. It’s one thing to see a guy get sword-sliced neatly down the middle like an MGM cartoon cat; it’s another to watch as a mummy grabs the testicles of a man whose face digitally twists in response, as if a Photoshop user navigated to “Filter > Distort > Twirl.”
Resist the urge to navigate your remote to “Eject” or “Power Off,” lest you miss the different kind of goop running through The Mummy Theme Park’s final frames: romance! After decrying the park for offending the memory of the pharaohs, the aptly named Queen of Eternity (Helen Preest) cuddles with a mummy in a train car headed to, one hopes, a love nest in which he can stare at her breasts without fear or risk of dissolution. We wish the same for your psyche. —Rod Lott
Rumored to participate in murderous orgies — and, thus, under suspicion of satanic possession — five nuns are literally crucified by God-fearing town residents in 15th-century Sicily. Meanwhile, in Toronto — oh, and 500 years later — archaeology student Liza (Meg Register, Boxing Helena) makes contact with their souls during a séance, conveniently before she’s about to travel to Sicily with her professor (Brett Halsey, Return of the Fly) to excavate some ruins.
Once there, Liza expresses her desire to check out what remains of the nunnery, to which the prof replies, “We’re archaeologists, not morticians!” (With Demonia being a Lucio Fulci film, however, characters might have to be both.) The locals are not of the Welcome Wagon variety. And neither are the nuns’ vengeful spirits, as one poor fellow (Fulci regular Al Cliver, The House of Clocks) finds out aboard a boat named the SS Perversion (seriously) when he’s harpooned by a headless, topless ghost.
Other unfortunate demises hot off the menu in Demonia include a woman killed by her own cats, who tug at her eyeballs like they were orbs of yarn; a man attacked by a slab of meat, which repeatedly slams him against a wall like a rolling pin to Play-Doh; another man tied to trees that rip him in half, from crotch to crown, as his son watches in terror; and one flame-broiled baby.
These are the wicked, wicked ways of the Italian gore godfather in his contribution to the world of nunsploitation; this being his lone work in that subgenre, he sure as hell leans in — sometimes even literally, pushing the camera forward with each swing of a sledgehammer or assault by beef. Part of the fun of watching a movie by Fulci is seeing how far he’ll go; only in the depiction of the infant’s death does Fulci show any restraint, focusing on the tot’s teeny-weeny hand as the casually discarded bundle of joy burns like trash on a farm. By contrast, the guy pulled apart like human Laffy Taffy is shown in daylight, out in the open, in a wide shot; at no point does it look real, but that’s hardly the point.
Demonia offers the Fulci faithful more than enough gore to have them foam at the mouths, preferably not as colorfully as the yellow bile oozing from the ghost nuns’ collective cakeholes in the abrupt final scene of utter WTF-ery. —Rod Lott
For his sophomore effort, director Scott W. McKinlay reassembles much of his cast and crew from his 2006 debut, Gag. That includes Brian Kolodziej, who takes the driver’s seat of Creep Van as Campbell, a young man forced to accept a lowly gig at a car wash after being fired from a grocery store for stealing porno magazines they don’t even stock.
To no one’s surprise, it’s in this realm of the sick that Creep Van finds its stride. While the film has a healthy sense of humor, one could argue successfully that it’s too jokey — verging on Troma, at that — than need be. (Speaking of, Troma head Lloyd Kaufman cameos, one assumes as nonfinancial payback for McKinlay serving as a producer for Kaufman’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.) When it most counts — Act 3, of course — McKinlay leaves the laughs in the dust, which I wish he had done much sooner, since the comedic tone doesn’t mesh as well with the convincingly grotesque effects as he might think.
