I should start things off with a confession. This is actually not the first time that I’ve shared Manos: The Hands of Fate here on the Shattered Lens. I previously shared it on October 8th of 2013 and I even used the exact same picture of Torgo.
However, Manos proved to be such a popular choice that I simply had to post it again. As I pointed out two years ago, Manos has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made. And, honestly, who am I to disagree? However, it’s also a film that is so bad that it simply has to be seen.
By the way, everyone who watches Manos ends up making fun of Torgo, who was played by John Reynolds. What they may not know is that Reynolds committed suicide shortly after filming on Manos wrapped. So, as tempting at it may be to ridicule poor Mr. Reynolds’s performance, save your barbs for Torgo and leave John Reynolds alone.
— Alex Travis (Emily Hughes) in The Dead Live (2006)
So, this is what it comes down to. There’s a lot of very critical things that you can say about the 2006 zombie film, The Dead Live. You can complain about the wooden acting. You can talk about the terrible special effects. You can talk about the numerous continuity errors and you can also point out that this film drags on for 120 minutes. Myself, I would complain about the repetitive heavy metal soundtrack. (What is the deal with amateur zombie filmmakers and heavy mental?) Judging from the comments over at the imdb, the number one complaint about this film is with the sound. To put it simply, it’s often time impossible to hear what anyone’s saying in The Dead Live.
But, with all that in mind, The Dead Live does feature brave journalist, Alex Travis (played by Emily Hughes), shouting, “It’s madness! Madness, I tell you!” And any movie that features “Madness, I tell you!” in the dialogue cannot be considered all bad.
Add to that, this film features a scene where an unfortunate guy gets shot in the head. However, before the trigger is pulled, the guy shouts, “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” and the action suddenly starts moving in slow motion. Even the “NOOOOOOOOOO!” is heard in slow motion. And, as I’ve said in the past, I love the slow mo of doom.
Oh! And I did I mention that, towards the end of the film, someone shouts, “STOP OR I’LL SHOOT! ARE YOU DEAD OR ALIVE!?”
And then there’s the visit to the Savini County Morgue in Romero, Ohio (that’s right — Savini County and Romero, Ohio), which turns out to be located in an office. The director plays the coroner. He also plays the sheriff, a member of a SWAT Team, and a zombie.
Before we get too snarky, I’ve read a FAQ at the imdb, one which I have a reason to suspect was written by the director himself. This was Darrin Patterson’s first movie and, assuming that he is the author of the surprisingly detailed FAQ, he admits that this film was largely a learning experience.
And, as easy as it is to criticize The Dead Live, there’s an odd sort of charm to just how thoroughly and totally inept this movie really is. I think it’s because we all secretly know that, if we ever got a chance to make a movie for only $10,000 and with no professional help whatsoever, we’d probably end up making something just as bad.
The phrase is overused but The Dead Live is literally “so bad that it’s good.” It’s a shame that the film doesn’t have a cult following. If you can appreciate Birdemic or April Rain, you can probably appreciate The Dead Live.
Jeez! That title card is even more generic looking than the one for Erotic Ink.
This movie picks up where The Confession left off. Katie is now rich, but remembers to remind us she’s Amish in case we’ve forgotten.
Is it in bad taste to use that particular screenshot after referencing the movie Erotic Ink? Nah, that movie was all one on one so it’s okay.
At least this time she doesn’t just flat out tell us she’s Amish. Actress Katie Leclerc can also do her fake Pennsylvania Dutch accent throughout the whole movie. Thank god! It doesn’t make it any less fake, but at least she doesn’t magically drop it like she did in The Confession. And neither is there a lady in the movie playing an actress playing an Amish girl doing a fake accent that we are supposed to recognize as fake. Since this movie is just a retread of a typical Hallmark romance with a bonnet thrown on it, here’s the wrong guy.
Oh, remember Daniel Fisher played by Cameron Deane Stewart in The Confession with wonder and a blind love for Katie? Yeah, he had to go because it’s imperative we replace him with the Jesus archetype family man guy played by Jacob Blair.
He even works as a carpenter in this movie. Speaking of characters who aren’t played by the same actor again.
Remember Katie’s biological mother played by Sherry Stringfield? Well, that picture is all you’ll see of her character in this movie. By that, I mean you won’t see her again, but you will hear a voiceover from her done by a different actress later in the movie.
So let’s lay out the plot. Katie decides to invest in a place Oak Vale: Home For Boys. A guy who worked as a janitor and grew up in homes like Oak Vale shows up and is hired as a counselor. Fisher shows up to tell Katie he’s not dead.
As you can see she takes it quite well. Of course Fisher starts working on the boys home. Gotta have someway for him to spend time around Katie!
Oh, there’s also a little subplot involving Katie’s adopted parents, but really it’s just there to tie up that loose end so that they can show up at the end of the movie.
The movie is about a girl moving forward with a marriage to the wrong guy while hanging around the right guy and helping this boys home out. Also, in reminding us she’s Amish.
I must say that as much as having the kids raise this barn to get them doing something positive together is a good idea, the size of it does make me chuckle.
Everything else is exactly what you expect from a Hallmark romance movie. If you think about it for a bit you can even figure out who the janitor turned counselor is. Some of the shots are quite nice. Oddly, once again, this Hallmark movie reminded me of another late night cable movie called Passionate Intentions which also had similarly nice cinematography.
All in all, it works well enough. Just know that the Amish bit really has nothing to do with anything and that this movie really exists just to give closure to this series of movies. Now I just need to watch The Shunning so that I will have reviewed all the movies in the series. Unfortunately, I can’t con my Dad into watching that one with me after watching this one. That means I’ll get to it eventually after the many more I have sitting on my DVR and the even more to be recorded in the coming months.
I finally saw The Lazarus Effect and … bleh, who cares? You may remember that the Lazarus Effect came out earlier this year and it got some attention because it was one of the first horror films to be theatrically released in 2015. But then the reviews came in and they were all awful. And then the movie opened in theaters and audiences saw it and soon, social media was full of tweets and updates about how disappointing the film was. I meant to see it but the movie just kind of came and went. Looking at my records, I can see that — when the Lazarus Effect was still in theaters — I instead chose to see Kingsman, Cinderella, and Maps to the Stars.
But, last night, I finally found the time to watch The Lazarus Effect and … well, I think I made the right decision skipping it. The Lazarus Effect is about a bunch of scientists who discover a serum that can be used to raise the dead. For instance, they use it to bring back to life a dog but guess what? The dog isn’t very happy to be back and he spends most of the movie glaring at every human that he sees. One of the scientists (played by Olivia Wilde) worries that the dog may have happily been in “doggie heaven” and now resents being brought back to life. Mark Duplass, playing her boyfriend and fellow scientists, laughs at her but it turns out that Wilde had a point.
The other scientists are played by Donald Glover and Evan Peters. There’s also a videographer, played by Sarah Bloger, who is there to record all of the experiments. You may notice that I’m not using any character names and that’s because the characters themselves are not that memorable. You remember them because of who played them and not because of anything that the character may have said or done. It’s true that The Lazarus Effect has a pretty good cast but it doesn’t matter because none of them are really given anything worthwhile to do. It’s not so much that anyone gives a bad performance — though the usually very effective Mark Duplass certainly does come close — as much as it’s just a case that the characters just aren’t that interesting. They’re all recognizable stereotypes and, if you can’t exactly predict the order in which they all die from the minute they show up on screen, you obviously haven’t seen enough horror movies.
Anyway, after they bring the dog back to life, Olivia Wilde ends up getting electrocuted so, of course, Mark Duplass decides to use the serum to bring her back to life. Needless, that was a big mistake. Not only does she return with a lot of super powers but it appears that Wilde left her soul in whatever afterlife she was inhabiting.
So, now, you’ve got an angry Olivia Wilde wandering around and killing people…
And it should be interesting but it’s not. The idea has promise but the movie does nothing new or unusual with it and the talented cast mostly just goes through the motions. The Lazarus Effect ends with the promise of a possible sequel. Let’s hope it’s a promise unfulfilled.
Well, it’s the 14th of October. Halloween is just two weeks away! Have you bought your costume yet? Have you tracked down a big bag of candy for all the trick or treaters? Do you have the Silver Shamrock jingle stuck in your head? Are you ready for Halloween?
If you’re not, why not watch today’s blast from the past because I guarantee that it will help to improve your Halloween spirit! First released in 1929, The Skeleton Dance was the first entry in Walt Disney’s iconic Silly Symphonies series. As you can guess from the title, it features dancing skeletons and it’s simply adorable. (It also features some black cats hissing at each other and you know I loved that!)
This was directed and produced by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks.
Remember Glenn Manning, the unfortunate “hero” of The Amazing Colossal Man?
The previous film may have ended with Glenn plunging to his apparent death from the Hoover Dam but, believe it or not, he survived! Unfortunately, he didn’t survive well. Now, he’s even bigger and he’s even angrier. Plus, he’s massively disfigured. The once articulate, if cranky, Amazing Colossal Man is gone. Now, he’s a Colossal Beast!
That’s the story behind the 1958 film, War of the Colossal Beast! In this sequel, Glenn is back and the army once again has to find a way to control him. Needless to say, it all leads to a final confrontation near Los Angeles’s Griffin Observatory, which means that War of the Colossal Beast is not only a sequel to Amazing Colossal Man but it’s also a bit of companion piece to Rebel Without A Cause!
(Speaking of companion pieces, am I the only one who associated the end of Colossal Man with those commercials that MSNBC used to show of Rachel Maddow going on and on about how only a nation could build the Hoover Dam? Never say “Lean forward” while you’re standing on top of a dam.)
Anyway, War of the Colossal Beast has a totally different cast from Colossal Man and a somewhat different feel. That said, the Colossal Beast makeup — that eye socket freaks me out! — is memorable and, like the previous film, it’s fun in a 1950s B-movie sort of way.
Seriously, I am surprised to see such a snarky plot description for Old Man. I’m assuming that it was written by someone who watched Old Man and didn’t care much for the film. Considering that Old Man currently has a 3.4 rating on the IMDb and has been voted on by 49 users … well, that’s 49 suspects for you.
But, honestly, that plot description isn’t even that accurate. For one thing, it’s not a house where “a murder supposedly took place.” Instead, it’s a house where at least 13 murders definitely took place. The murderer was named Walter Bowden and he was nicknamed the “Old Man,” presumably because he was 65 years old and old people are scary. Walter ended up murdering his wife and his son and then he hung himself. But is it possible that his ghost still haunts the house?
Of course, it ‘s possible! In fact, it’s not only possible but it’s what actually happens!
The other part of that plot description that I take issue with is the claim that “Nonsense ensues.” It’s not nonsense, it’s ghostly mayhem!
In defense of whoever wrote that plot description, they were correct when they stated that a married couple — Linda (Erika Stone) and Michael (Jason Kulas) — does move into the house. Michael knows why they got the house for cheap but he never bothered to tell Linda. And when Linda starts seeing and hearing odd things, Michael dismisses her concerns. Why do men always do that? Look, guys, if we say that there’s a big scary ghost in the closet, there’s a big scary ghost in the closet! We don’t need you to go check inside the closet, we need you to find a new house…
Anyway, Linda eventually meets a strange man (Kevin Cirone) who tells Linda about the house’s background. Linda, needless to say, is not happy. (As for Michael, he’s mostly jealous that his wife has made a new friend.)
Despite those 49 IMDb users, Old Man is not that bad. Erika Stone is a sympathetic heroine and the Old Man himself is properly intimidating. Old Man is better than your typical ultra low-budget, shot-on-video horror film. The only nonsense is to be found in that IMDb plot description! Snark is a powerful weapon. Don’t waste it on a perfectly inoffensive little film like Old Man.
How did I see Old Man? It was included as a part of the 6-movie, 2-disc Depraved Degenerates set from Pendulum Pictures. It’s probably the best movie included in the set.
The movie begins and we see a girl walking down the street on Halloween. She smashes a pumpkin and Billy Corgan takes revenge on her because her eyes turn creepy. She runs into the forest and becomes a monster. Then the movie reminds me that if I don’t like it, it’s not director Peter DeLuise’s fault cause it’s called R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: Cabinet Of Souls. The missing “the” had to be donated to the band The The who lost one of their the’s in a tragic accident.
Now it’s one year later and the kids are putting on a high school production of Something Wicked This Way Comes. We are introduced to two guys and two girls. Seeing as I got over my Disney Channel addiction a few years ago, I only recognize Dove Cameron seen here in Liv makeup…unfortunately.
This is a horror movie that wastes no time in killing off people.
He is never heard from again after being killed by that candy apple. Just kidding.
Anyways, we now cut to Nora’s Dance & Ballet Academy Halloween Spooky Dance Contest. Cue the Suspiria (1977) footage!
It’s bad enough the High School Musical movies made Disney think we want dancing and singing kids again, but then Nora says this.
No! Don’t do it kids! That’s how we ended up with the movie Nudist Colony Of The Dead (1991)!
Then these two show up. That’s Dr. Hysteria (Andrew Kavadas) and Lilith (Katherine McNamara). Dr. Hysteria then invites the children to visit his Hall of Horrors which is a journey “into the wretched black heart of pure evil itself.” He’s exaggerating though since it’s just a haunted house. He’s not holding screenings of God’s Not Dead (2014), Let’s Be Cops (2014), and Frenemies (2012).
All jokes aside, both of those actors do good jobs in this movie. They manage to actually be creepy and evil right up till the end. He even kills a kid. No joke.
Because the local news station actually had a story with enough information for the first time in days, they air that the girl from the beginning of the movie is still missing. Now we meet a guy who is probably interchangeable with an actor from Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (1990). I’ll find out when I get to it.
He goes on to brag that he once surfed in a monsoon and outran an avalanche with a broken snowboard so he doesn’t scare easily. I sat through the god awful Extreme Ops (2002) knowing that a guy actually died scouting locations for that studio cash-grab on the extreme sports craze, so this guy didn’t scare me.
Oh, and this movie has kids rapping, so if you are a child, you might not want to show this to your parents because they will probably want you dead. But let’s get to the haunted house.
And I put this screenshot here just so everyone knows that it’s okay to start submitting to IMDb that an alternate title of this movie is Troll 4.
There are scary things in this haunted house such as what Calculus II would have looked like in the sequel to Freshman Father called Sophomore Father: Revenge of the Derivative! There is also a guy making inappropriate references to penises by pretending to sell “brains on a stick”. But nothing is as scary as that ginormous pink scarf they have Cameron wear in these scenes. Seriously, why? She looks like someone is going to throw a saddle on her and start riding her. Also, I played The Walking Dead and know that you don’t want something a zombie can easily grab on to. Of course she stumbles into a backroom during this sequence to to find that maybe some of these monsters are real.
After Cameron figures out that the missing girl has something to do with the Hall of Horrors from a site with a malformed URL that it shows a close up of for no good reason. We see Lilith insist on having this guy wrap his arms around her as they ride her bike before she whispers in his ear that her favorite movie is Joe D’Amato’s Porno Holocaust (1981). The kid is naturally scared by this seeing as his favorite movie with Mark Shannon is Italian Batman (1982).
Now the really creepy stuff starts happening. Dr. Hysteria takes kids in to the backroom and shows them their dreams through a portal he opens up in front of them. Their eyes flash and the kids are now his. We don’t know what that means exactly at this point, but we soon find out.
Inside The Cabinet Of Souls are kids standing around while a fog machine fills the room. It’s a little unclear, but I believe these are the kids souls while their bodies exist in the real world as monsters. It’s all a little unclear. We see some of the monsters walk into the kids bodies. And we see Dr. Hysteria feed off their souls. He does this to one kid who apparently only had one more shot to give cause she dies. I like children’s movies that don’t soft pedal the danger. Harry Potter may have been a bit much, but you get my point. Oh, and before I jump to the end. Just in case the kids aren’t already afraid of clowns.
I love the way this kid acts too. It’s like they gave him a copy of Beetlejuice, told him to watch it, and just do that. Oh, and here’s the kid dying.
He says she’s almost empty, then sucks that last bit of lifeforce from her body. She dissolves to the ground and he says “you were a good worker.” Again, kudos to the actors and the people involved with this production for making this movie genuinely creepy even while making it geared toward a younger audience.
The creepy stuff keeps getting more and more frequent until it finally comes down to whether Cameron is going to join the family or not. Notice two members of the family are rocking the Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, Part 2 look. Of course Cameron fights back and saves the kids, leaving Lilith, extreme sports guy, and Dr. Hysteria to go into a red oblivion.
I enjoyed this movie. Yeah, I’m sucker for kids movies cause I basically missed out on my childhood by being sick and at home through middle school and high school, but this was well made. I recommend it. Serious points to Andrew Kavadas for the character of Dr. Hysteria.
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
Last night, if you discovered that you couldn’t get any sleep around two in the morning, you could have turned to Showtime and watched the 1987 film, From The Hip.
In From the Hip, Judd Nelson plays a character named Robin Weathers. Of course, his nickname is Stormy. Robin has just graduated from law school and is working at a prestigious law firm. He’s ambitious, he’s outspoken, and he’s totally frustrated. As his co-workers (played, quite well, by David Alan Grier and Dan Monahan) continually remind him, nobody gets to try a case during their first year out of law school. They advise him to be patient and to wait his turn.
However, a man who is capable of being patient would not be nicknamed Stormy. It just wouldn’t make any sense. So, Stormy Weathers schemes his way into the courtroom. One morning, he intentionally withholds information from the senior partners, going out of his way to keep them from realizing that a trial is scheduled to begin that afternoon. When senior partner Craig Duncan (Darren McGavin) discovers what Stormy has done, he fires him and makes sure that he never get hired at another law firm … oh wait. No, he doesn’t because that would make too much sense. Instead, he allows Stormy to try the case because, at this point, Stormy is the only one who knows anything about it.
The case is a simple assault case that involves two bankers and should be resolved easily but Stormy manages to drag it out for several days and his flamboyant style catches the attention of the media. The other partners in the law firm — who are all old and boring — want to fire Stormy but Stormy’s client says that, if Stormy is fired, he’ll take his business and his money elsewhere. Stormy becomes a minor celebrity but — in a rather clever little twist — it turns out that he and the prosecuting attorney are old friends from law school and they conspired to make each other look good.
Anyway, Stormy is now so famous that he gets assigned to defend a college professor, named Benoit (John Hurt), who has been accused of murder. When it quickly becomes obvious that Benoit is not only guilty but will probably murder again, Stormy is forced to choose between ambition and morality…
When my friend Evelyn and I first started to watch From the Hip last night, I really thought I was going to hate it. The hot pink neon credits screamed, “Bad 80s movie!” and, because I happen to know quite a few lawyers, I tend to be a 100 times more critical of movies about lawyers than I am when it comes to movies about, say, homicidal fishermen.
And, honestly, From The Hip is a heavily flawed film. Judd Nelson is miscast and the scenes with his politically conscious girlfriend (Elizabeth Perkins) are painfully shallow and reek of limousine liberalism. But, if you can get through the weak opening, the film itself is watchable and enjoyable in a dumb sort of way. John Hurt does a great job as a sociopath and, miscast as he may be, it’s still fun to watch Nelson go insane in court.
From The Hip is not a great film but, in its way, it’s an enjoyable little time capsule. Believe it or not, there was a time when Judd Nelson starred in a movies that were actually released in theaters.
Last night, the Alamo Drafthouse hosted a special one-night showing of an infamous horror film. It was a film that was first released in 1985, the same year that I was born. It was a film that was obviously made for a very low-budget, featuring a cast of unknown actors, many of whom appear to have been amateurs. Much like Savage Weekend, it was a remarkably inept film that somehow managed to work almost despite itself. It was also a film that featured a scene with a giant fishing hook that made me and my BFFs Evelyn and Amy all go, “AGCK!” at the same time. The name of the film? The Mutilator.
That’s right, The Mutilator. Say what you will about this film, you can’t criticize that title. When you see a movie called The Mutilator, you know exactly what you’re getting into. And, though the film does get off to a bit of a slow start, it does ultimately live up to that incendiary title. There is a lot of mutilation to be found.
(And some it involves getting stabbed in the vagina with a giant fishing hook … AGCK!)
The film also features perhaps the most brilliantly generic theme song in the history of the movies. It’s called Fall Break and it’s all about teenagers having a good time. There’s no mention of fish hooks or anything else like that! Instead, it sounds exactly like something you’d expect to hear in a Crown International high school film, like The Pom Pom Girls or The Beach Girls. Just listen to the song below and tell me that it isn’t the most insidiously generic thing that you’ve ever heard.
Anyway, as for the film itself, it opens with a kid named Little Ed finding a shotgun and accidentally shooting his mother in the back. This leads to his father, Big Ed (Jack Chatham), becoming a drunk and declaring that his son will pay for what he has done.
Jump forward several years later and Ed Jr. (Matt Miller) is now in college. When Big Ed calls and demands that Ed Jr. spend his fall break taking care of their beach house, Ed Jr. is reluctant to take the job. But then his friends convince him that this would be a great chance for all of them to spend their fall break hanging out on the beach.
When they finally reach the beach house, Big Ed is nowhere to be found. Ed Jr. figures that Big Ed has already gone back home. After all, Big Ed’s battleaxe — which he usually leaves hanging on the condo wall — is gone. “Dad loves his battleaxe,” Ed Jr. explains.
Of course, what Ed Jr. and his amazingly stupid friends don’t realize is that Big Ed is still in the house. He’s in the basement, surrounded by empty bottles and sleeping with his battleaxe. When Big Ed wakes up and discovers that his son and his friends are in the condo, Big Ed decides to kill them all.
And that’s pretty much what he does.
The Mutilator was directed by Buddy Cooper and the end credits are full of other people named Cooper. This was Buddy’s only film and, for the most part, it’s definitely an amateur production. And yet, that amateurishness works to the film’s advantage. The start and the middle section of the film are so inept that when the murders start and when they turn out to be shockingly brutal and the gore effects turn out to be surprisingly effective, it’s a total shock.
Along with that fish hook (Agck!), we also get decapitations, drownings, strangulations, pitchforkings, and disembowlement by outboard motor. Making all of this all the more disturbing is that nobody really struggles or screams and tries to escape while being attacked. Instead, it’s almost as if they all realize that they’re in a slasher movie and the appearance of Big Ed and his latest weapon of choice almost puts them in a trance. It’s as if almost all of them have accepted their fate. And I realize that’s probably more due to inept directing and bad acting than anything else but still, it gives the film a disturbingly dream-like feel. In the end, The Mutilator becomes one of those films that should not work and yet somehow does.
The Mutilator will be released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video in September.
