Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Brainscan (1994)

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While minding his own business, peeping on the mostly willing girl across the street, young Mike (Edward Furlong) gets a call from his generic horndog buddy — probably named Doozer or something equally dumb — telling him about this great new video game he’s reading about in the latest issue of Fangoria, because every little bit helps, right guys?

The video game is called Brainscan and it promises to be the most immersive experience in horror gaming on your 16 32 64-bit system and, at the very least, it’ll let Frank Langella enter your subconscious, as he is wont to do. Mike plays the game and finds himself in a first-person world of murder and madness as whomever he kills in the game, is found dead in real life. Bummer, dude.

Beyond the silliness of the game itself, the movie Brainscan goes one better by introducing the wholly grating boogeyman known as the Trickster, a horrific sprite from the video game world (?) here to convince Mike to kill himself while eating all of his well-stocked stash of junk food. With a stretched-out face and a shocking-red faux-hawk, it’s very easy to see why T. Ryder Smith isn’t at very many horror conventions signing copies of the movie poster handed to him by pudgy Trickster clones.

Although many of you younglings might not remember it, Brainscan comes from a time long ago and far away when Furlong was the affable-enough boy-king of the first-run genre picture, riding somewhat high after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But, sadly, too many silly scripts like Pet Sematary Two and this techno-trash caused his star to extinguish faster than a cigarette under Furlong’s well-worn Doc Martens boot heel.

Even worse, by the time this picture was out in theaters, the technology was already practically outdated, no matter how many cool-ish gadgets and Aerosmith posters director John Flynn (Rolling Thunder) threw on the screen. And even though the CGI was getting technically better, the actualized concept of virtual reality and cyberspace were still the thing of badly rendered William Gibson novels and horribly cartoonish Thomas Dolby screensavers.

Despite those winning attributes, realistically Brainscan isn’t even nostalgically good for the time, leading most viewers to check their futuristic Apple Watches and Fitbits to see how much time is left on the thing. To be fair, however, this flick does make a rather unwatchable double feature with Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War if you truly hate yourself.

Or you can just take a nap. Whatever.   —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Shark Kill (1976)

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Jaws wasn’t even a year old when NBC debuted Shark Kill on May 20, 1976, making the telefilm likely the first contestant in the still-ongoing sharksploitation sweepstakes. And that’s about all William A. Graham’s (Beyond the Bermuda Triangle) cash-in has going for it.

At an oil rig under repair in the Pacific Ocean, young marine biologist Rick Dayner (Phillip Clark, 1982’s Alone in the Dark) spots (stock footage of) a Great White shark, but blue-collar boss Banducci (Midnight Run’s Richard Foronjy, the Luis Guzmán of his day) won’t have any of it, claiming the kid just “sees sardines,” and orders his men to keep working. Dayner is adamant: “Mister, I know what I saw!”

Eventually, they listen to him … but only after the (stock footage of the) shark eats one worker and amputates the leg of another. The latter fellow’s brother, Cabo Mendoza (Richard Yniguez, The Deadly Tower), joins Dayner on a $20,000 bounty hunt for the shark. When Dayner answers Mendoza’s question about the size of their target (about 15 feet), we know this is a BFD because the music score wakes up just long enough to punctuate Mendoza’s face pause with a “dun-dun-dunnnnn!”

Scheider and Dreyfuss, they ain’t. Hell, Lorraine Gary and Mario Van Peebles, they ain’t. I’m sure I would have loved it at age 5. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

Lionheart (1990)

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Based on a story and screenplay by action star, martial artist and Tostitos spokesperson Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lionheart casts Bloodsport’s Belgian bruiser as Leo, a serviceman in the multinational Foreign Legion and stationed in the fun-to-say Djibouti; he’s one lone, stone-cold warrior surrounded by a bunch of comical Col. Klink-style Germans always riding his ass for something or another.

When his brother is gruesomely immolated by drug dealers, Leo uses his high-kickin’ feet to say goodbye to his superiors (and his superiors’ faces), hitchin’ a ride on a 1930s steamship to New York City where, as soon as he gets off the boat, in a moment of prescient critique, he harshly compares and contrasts the drug-abusing homeless dudes on the ground with the wholly porcine moneymen in their glass towers — to which he shakes his head and dismissively says, “America!”

Good burn, JCVD.

Leo soon hooks up with Joshua (Harrison Page, Carnosaur), a jive-talking fight manager whose profanity-rich dialogue would be moderately offensive if the guy wasn’t putting his heart and soul into this mildly racist character. Together, after beating up the cast of Beat Street, they make it to Los Angeles and, in between helping his sister-in-law and her adorable 5-year-old, he manages to get into one high-paying blood brawl after another, knocking out the best Frank Dux-choreographed stuntmen in parking lots, racquetball courts and the near-empty pools of the rich and famous.

Lionheart does a good job in casting Van Damme as the ultimate good guy: a nice, caring man doing everything through excessive violence to help his friends and family, all the while eschewing the continuous advances of a rich benefactor who is unsubtly letting him know she’s looking for a good-ish time, and I do mean sexually.

But he’s having none of it, instead choosing healthy alternatives such as constantly jogging around his neighborhood, eating bean burritos and outrunning the bulky Foreign Legion goons looking for him. (Although, to be fair, he does gratuitously preview his well-buffed buttocks for the ladies, although I’d really like to meet the woman who fell in love with this flick, Jean-Claude Van Damme and action films in general simply because of three seconds of tightly toned foreign ass.)

I’m not giving away any well-guarded secret by saying there’s a final fight with a ’roided-out Paul Stanley look-alike, but make sure to stay for the final scene, as JCVD and his friends and family enthusiastically hug and laugh maniacally as the camera pulls back and the credits roll. You’ll instantly feel pretty bad about yourself and your life if you’ve never had one of those tender moments in your non-Lionhearted existence.  —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

God’s Bloody Acre (1975)

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Deep within the Grand National Forest live – well, for the time being – three redneck brothers: Larry, Darryl and Darryl Monroe, Ezra and Benny. They’re about to be displaced, thanks to a new campground opening in time for the July 4 holiday weekend. Monroe (William Kerwin, Blood Feast), the only sibling literate enough to read the sign that indirectly serves as their eviction notice, has other plans: “Ezra, we’re gonna run ’em off. This time, we ain’t leavin’.”

Efficiently, that’s the first scene of God’s Bloody Acre, and should be all the plot a hickspolitation flick needs: hillbillies vs. capitalists, as Monroe, the old one with suspenders; Ezra (Daniel Schweitzer, of the director’s 1977 follow-up, Tomcats, and nothing else), the one with facial hair and neck hankie; and Benny (Sam Moree, ditto), the Afro-sporting, simpleminded mute who sheds tears when tree limbs are felled, band together to take their revenge. Part of their plan involves chucking rocks at the guy operating the Caterpillar bulldozer. Part of that plan does not involve said operator getting bisected by the blade, but that’s what happens. Upon this grisly discovery, one of the dead guy’s hard-hatted colleagues asks if this means they “can knock off early.”

Curiously, director Harry E. Kerwin (Barracuda) and his co-writer/co-producer, actor Wayne Crawford (aka Jake Speed), dilute the film’s initial intent of pure, unfiltered revenge by adding buckets of subplots — one of which even overtakes that of the Monroe clan: the one featuring Crawford.

Under the nom de plume of Scott Lawrence, Crawford plays Scott, a proto-Jerry Maguire who impulsively quits the white-collar job he doesn’t believe in and hops on a motorcycle, searching for an America he doesn’t find anywhere. But, after his ride breaks down, he does find love — or at least lake sex — with Leslie (Jennifer Stock, Shriek of the Mutilated), a young woman in a VW Bus, fleeing an abusive relationship. Viewers see their individual backstories, as we do for the two occupants of an RV: a virulent racist (Robert Rosano in his lone credit) and his long-suffering wife (Suzanne Robinson of the director’s adults-only Sweet Bird of Aquarius).

We expect not all of these travelers will make it to the final reel; we do not expect to get to know them more than the siblings. As God’s Bloody Acre progresses — rape, murder, it’s just a shot away — Monroe and company becomes less like characters and more like faceless villains. File Harry E. Kerwin’s decision to do so not under “abject failure,” but “missed opportunity.” The finished film is unique enough in that its Greenpeace-friendly themes give us a glimpse into what might have happened if Rachel Carson had made The Hills Have Eyes instead of Wes Craven. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Mystery

Honeymoon of Horror (1964)

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After a whirlwind meeting-cum-courtship, blonde beaut Lilli (Abbey Heller) marries curiously mustachioed sculptor Emile Duvre (Robert Parsons), then goes straight from exchanging vows to embarking on a Honeymoon of Horror. Considering what follows, she should have had him sign a prenup, preferably one containing the phrase “promise not to kill you.”

After the couple lands in their love nest, those within their circle of friends begin to perish. The new Mrs. Duvre is not immune to murder attempts, either, most notably by gravity doing its thang on a giant metal globe objet d’art suspended above their swimming pool, because of course. And because all artists are weirdos with posses of weirdo pals, there is no shortage of suspects. Besides Emile himself (whose Euro accent signals viewers that he is not to be trusted), the culprit could be his mistress (Beverly Lane), his leering brother (Escape from Hell Island’s Alexander Panas, who also wrote the underwritten screenplay), a fellow sculptor who is blind, a spry dwarf and, last but not least, Hajmir (Vincent Petti), Emile’s turbaned live-in servant.

It is Hajmir who tells Lilli, “Madam is no doubt confused” — a statement applicable to anyone who dares watch. Befitting its later alternate title of Orgy of the Golden Nudes, the Florida-lensed indie is more interested in asses of lasses than knots of plot, despite the utilization of Monroe Myers (Adam Lost His Apple) as, more or less, Exposition Cop. Speaking of investigation, the movie is more mystery than horror, but because the ad man in me recognizes the power of alliteration in audience appeal, I’m letting that misnomer slide.

One could draw a direct line between this film and Blood Feast, and I don’t just mean on a map of the Sunshine State. The former traffics in the garish gore that Herschell Gordon Lewis pioneered one year prior, but with less panache (yes, panache) and considerably less in delivering what’s promised on its bill of goods. Honeymoon marks the lone shot at directing for Irwin Meyer, who plowed greener pastures as a producer of made-for-TV movies (e.g., 1998’s exclamation-theirs Legion of Fire: Killer Ants!), and one can see why.

Still, it’s not a vacuum of entertainment. Where else — in today’s society, especially — will one hear a woman speak the line “Yes, but he’s just a minor sex maniac” as a point of justification? —Rod Lott

Get it at Something Weird Video.

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