It Came From Netflix Streaming: Ghoulies (1985)

It Came From Netflix Streaming
Ghoulies (1985)

By: Bill Brock

Occasionally, I like to imagine what 80s me would think of current technology.  I can see myself explaining to 80s me about streaming technology.  80s me, who has just recently become accustomed to this new VHS thing and may own a TRS-80, stares at current me in disbelief.  What the heck is this internet?  Does streaming involve knowledge of BASIC or COBOL?  Aren’t these suede Pumas awesome?  My jacket was $50 and is for members only, bitch!  80s me then asks current me to sit down in front of the console TV and watch Ghoulies.  Current me figures what the Hell I haven’t seen Ghoulies in 25 years and pulls up a bean bag.

Ghoulies is a bait and switch movie.  It positions itself as a bit of a Gremlins knockoff even though the titular Ghoulies have little to nothing to do with plot.  It’s like The Matrix calling itself Sentinels: The Movie.  A more honest title for Ghoulies would be The World’s Oldest College Dude Performs Magic.

The movie opens with a confused cult dressed in white robes going through the motions of a possible Satanic ritual.  There are pentagrams and something that looks like a DM’s map of that night’s  Dungeons and Dragons campaign so if Rona Jaffe is to be believed it’s satanic.  The cult leader is played by Michael De Barres, a guy who was Moriarty to MacGyver’s Holmes and was once married to “famous” book writing groupie Pamela Des Barres.   Evil leader guy pulls out a baby to sacrifice and the baby’s mama decides that maybe this is pushing the evil satanic cult thing too far.  She puts a necklace on the baby which prevents it from being sacrificed and apparently can’t be removed.  The baby is handed off to another cult member who takes it outside and does something with him.  The movie can’t be bothered to explain what exactly.  I’ll assume he was given to a nice family.

25 years later the all grown up baby inherits the house and arrives with his girlfriend.  He’s apparently a college student because he is wearing a letter sweater.  I say apparently because he looks to be in his 30s.  They meet the caretaker who doesn’t actually talk to them but looks vaguely familiar.  The caretaker gives a bit of voice over here and there throughout the movie.   I believe the first V.O. provided explains that evil cult leader is now dead and maybe the curse won’t affect the “kid”.  As it turns out the caretaker is the guy who carried the baby out at the beginning.  For a guy who doesn’t want the curse to get the kid he sure can’t be bothered to clean the house of all the cult books and paraphernalia.  They throw a party that night and we are introduced to other far too old to be college student college students.  

Well the world’s oldest college student/eventual magic user decides to drop out for a quarter and fix up the house.  I sat there waiting for the doing stuff 80s montage set to a song that would never get airplay and it never happened.  What the fuck, movie?  It’s the 80s dammit.  I expect a montage and you cheat me out of it.  Fine, I’m listening to “You’re the Best” from Karate Kid right now.  Screw you Ghoulies.

The guy gets deeper and deeper into the magic and summons the Ghoulies which are possibly the cheapest puppets imaginable and some midgets who do, well, not much of anything beyond being midgets.  Hmmm, unfunny and terrible puppets.  Ghoulies is also indirectly responsible for Jeff Dunham.  Fuck you again, movie.

Since it is the 80s, he throws a dinner party where everyone has to wear goofy sunglasses.  Somewhere along the way cult leader from the beginning is resurrected and wants to kill the former baby to steal his life force and, maybe, become young again.  The ghoulies fail to do much beyond kill a person or two.  The movie takes a few moments to knock off Poltergeist with this clown doll thing.  And the caretaker guy is inexplicably a bad ass mage because someone has to kill Des Barres again.  I would say the business with the dead friends knocks off April Fool’s Day but that didn’t come out until a year later.  We are finally treated to a bit of sequel-baiting.

I’ve never really been much for nostalgia.  It always bites you in the ass.  Not that I was ever all that nostalgic for Ghoulies or its many sequels.  But, what do we really have here?  Ghoulies ultimately is a movie about a guy who uses magic and shit happens.  There also happens to be some terrible puppets.  I’m guessing that Charles Band saw Gremlins and decided to pretend that the Ghoulies were more important to the plot than they really are and sold the movie based on them.  The later movies probably did feature them more.  To be honest I really don’t remember any of the other ones.  Perhaps I went back in time and told 80s me not to bother.

Should you watch this?  No.  It fails to engage even on a so bad it is good level.

It Came From Netflix Streaming: Troll Hunter

Review by Bill Brock

Norway is a fascinating country what with the fjords, the moose, and the blond ladies who don’t wear much clothing and have little to do beyond having frequent sex.  That last one may actually be Swedish.  But Norway is also the home of zombie Nazis and as it turns out, trolls.  Not the fun “don’t mess with the voodoo” kind but the living rock sort that hang out under bridges and have a taste for mutton.

Troll Hunter makes for the second found footage movie I’ve liked.  The first was Cloverfield.   But that was J. J. Abrams and the man can do no wrong (I’m conveniently forgetting he wrote a hunk of Armageddon and that I didn’t care for Mission Impossible 3).  Found footage movies come across as a thinly veiled excuse for sloppy filmmaking.  Did you see the film crew in the mirror?  The camera out of focus?  The lack of steadi-cam?  We meant for that shit to happen!  Fuck you for questioning it.  What?  You can’t handle real life?  

Troll Hunter has a bunch of college kids following an alleged poacher who turns out to be the guy with the awesomest job title of all time.  Evel Knievel and Chuck Norris are a distant 2nd and 3rd to this guy.  He’s a former Navy Ranger who was apparently so good at his job that the government approached him and asked him if he wanted to go fuck some trolls up and he said, “Sure.  Whatever.”

The college kids follow him into the woods and ignore a sign that says “No Tresspassing.  Blasting Area”.  I’m guessing their school is the equivalent of your state’s party school that has a 700 SAT and 2.5 GPA requirement.  They aren’t the brightest kids but they sure do work hard.  The kids see a light show and the troll hunter runs up and yells “Troll!” at them and they stand around discussing Julia Louis-Dreyfuss for a while.  Not really.  They run after him and keep asking about this troll thing.  One of the kids gets bitten and his car gets messed up by the troll.  The hunter decides to drag them along because he’s tired of the job which makes him even more bad ass.  

Throughout the movie we are given some background on the trolls.  Exposure to UV light either makes them blow up or turn to stone depending on age.  And here’s where I ran into my few complaints about the movie.  The first complaint is that we see the trolls a bit too much.  The effects aren’t bad but they begin to feel a little over-exposed after a while.  The other is that the trolls can smell the blood of Christians.  The hunter mentions in passing that trolls can reach ages of 1000-1200 years old.  I’d assume that trolls pre-date Christianity and I have no idea why trolls have such a grievance against them.  I’d think that belief in Norse gods might piss them off more.  If the movie explained it I must have missed it.  I guess we could conclude that Christian belief is based around midi-chlorians or something.

The movie hums along nicely while the hunter trys to solve the mystery of why the trolls are acting erratic.  The solution isn’t really anticlimactic and fits along fine with the rest of the movie.

Should you watch this?  Yes, yes you should.

It Came From Netflix Streaming: Savage County

Review by Bill Brock

If horror movies are to be believed, the South is just a large interconnected web of dirt roads with creepy run down old houses occupied by inbred redneck families keen to kill people because the cable companies are assholes and won’t run cable to their houses and they are just plumb bored.  Think of all the teens that could be saved if DirecTV went door to door offering services.  Rainstorms might still lead to a few deaths but otherwise backwoods folks could veg out to 250+ channels in crystal clear clarity.

Savage County was produced by MTV and directed by a guy who saw Natural Born Killers and apparently quite liked it.  It’s all shaky DV where the picture is either over-saturated or randomly colored or grainy.  I kept getting the feeling that the director edited in Movie Maker and kept saying, “Oh shit!  Look at all these effects!”

County has an unlikely collection of teens that seem less like friends and more like a cross section of MTV (one of the many fine channels offered on DirecTV) viewers heading out for swim and to drink a bit.  The “characters” are introduced via admission letters, juvie reports and the High School newscast.  It’s kinda like Feast but without the humor.  After a few moments you’ll do like I did and just call them “that girl with the hair”, “nerdy guy” and so on.  While hanging out at the pond one guy mentions to another guy that there is a creepy house with a reclusive family nearby who might be amused if they went and knocked on the door and ran away, because backwoods folk with guns are the perfect target for shenanigans and tomfoolery.

Well the hilarity is cut short when the guy in the house isn’t amused and pulls out a shotgun.  One of the kids whacks him on the head with a shovel and kills him and we stumble into the I Know What You Did movies for a bit.  The constant barrage of music videos and video games seem to have eroded the morals of these youths and they decide to not tell the police.  

After they leave the house the other backwoods raving maniacs show up and find their kinfolk dead and, unsurprisingly, decide that revenge may be the best option.  The crazy guys are “Otis as portrayed by Uncle Jessie”, “Fat Horny Retarded Guy” and “Fat Leatherface Guy Who Wears A Mask”.   “Leatherface Guy” appears to be resistant to bullets because two people shoot at him at point blank range and miss.

Earlier at the pond, “blond girl” pushed “emo girl with punk rock hair” into the pond ‘cause “emo” didn’t appear to be having any fun.  “Emo” went emo and wandered off into the woods alone.  She shows up at the crazy guys’ house and causes the plot to start creaking as we have to get everyone back to the house to be killed.  

Well, suffice it to say, various folks die and then other folks die.  There’s a not terribly twisty twist.  Revenge is had by both sides and the movie says, “Fuck it, I ain’t sequel baiting”.  

A wise man once wrote that “a good movie is never too long and a bad movie is never too short”.  County runs 78 minutes.  Ten of it is the character intros at the start and 3 are the end credits.  It still manages to feel 30 minutes too long.  I kept wiggling the Wii remote to see how much time was remaining.

Should you watch it?  No.  You’d be better off just heading down a long dirt road and knocking on doors.  

Vampires Suck (2010)

Review by Bill Brock

**Note: This was watched on Comcast streaming NOT Netflix Streaming**

I’m a masochist sometimes when it comes to entertainment.  There was a time when I watched the entire run of Unhappily Ever After promising myself that I’d stop watching when a joke on that show made me laugh.  I watched every goddamned episode.  I had to listen to Bobcat Goldtwait as the bunny.  Every “woooooo” when the not terribly attractive Nikki Cox walked into an episode.  The “yayyyy”s when Ms. Cox delivered on those terrible Al Bundy speeches from the later years of Married With Children.   Dear God, I suffered.

That same masochism has led me to watch every goddamned Friedberg/Seltzer “comedy”.

Vampires Suck is another in a long line of movie parodies that feature Seltzberg’s unique style of anti-comedy.  Not anti-comedy in the Neil Hamburger sense where the purposeful failure becomes funny after a while.  I’m talking anti-comedy that is the equivalent of Ron Silver touching his younger self and exploding.  

Seltzberg got their start on Scary Movie, a movie that concerned itself with ejaculate and parodying a movie that was already a bit of a parody of slasher movies to begin with.  Well, before that they wrote Spy Hard, one of those terrible later Leslie Nielson movies.

Vampires Suck is their take on the Twilight series, Stephanie Meyers 4 book “saga” about vampires, werewolves, and not fucking before marriage.  It’s become one of the most pointlessly beaten up things in history.   I’ve never read the books, so I really can’t comment on them one way or the other, even though roughly 50% of people on the internet feels the need to say they “suck” based on the roughly 50% who did read them and think they are “awesome”.  I have watched the first two movies and didn’t really think they were all that terrible (which is Bill-speak for, I actually liked them but don’t want to admit it).  They are no worse than the Underworld movies at any rate.  

Seltzberg’s typical parody consists of some movie that was popular with random pop culture references popping up here and there.  People get hit by things and there is usually a song and dance number set to a song that was popular around the time of filming.  V.S. doesn’t deviate from the formula that much although this may be the closest they have every come to staying on target for the entire run of the movie.

The major problem with every movie they’ve done is that they have no idea how to construct a joke.  V.S. takes scenes from the Twilight movies, films them more or less how they appear and then either add farting, something pop cultural or someone getting hit by something and seem to believe that these count as punch lines.  Case in point:  Edward “Sullen” (hahaha he’s emo so it’s funny) decides to expose the vampires at a prom.  He begins taking off his clothing (get it?  He’s exposing).  Since the vampire’s sparkle he has a disco ball over his penis (‘cause they sparkle and probably because disco is gay, just like him!!).  Ow, my sides.  Another scene has the werewolf kids running in to kill the black vampire.  They are shirtless and, wait for it, begin singing “It’s Raining Men” ‘cause they are gay!

Yeah… those are the jokes, folks.  They also mention Lady Gaga, iCarly, and a few other things that tweens might titter over because they recognize the names.  

Anyways, the movie is terrible and I recommend not watching it, unless you are either a masochist or have actually enjoyed their movies in the past.  God have mercy on your soul if you have.

Rated PG-13 because an R would prevent 99% of their target audience for seeing it in theaters.

It Came From Netflix Streaming: Dead Snow, The Horde, and Zombies: A Double Feature

What is a zombie and what is with the resurge of interest in them?  Well, a zombie is a reanimated corpse that inexplicably wants to eat people.  That’s was easy enough to answer.  I’m so proud of myself right now I’m going to go high-five somebody and have a celebratory cigarette.  
 
As for the other half of the question, well, that’s going to be a bit harder.
 
The earliest, chronologically, movie that I saw that touched on the modern idea of zombies was Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein, aliens decided to take over the world by reanimating a couple of dead people in a small town in the middle of nowhere.  Spoiler alert:  It doesn’t really work all that well.  While there wasn’t much by way of people eating and they were more the skulking and carrying off women that fainted from fright type of reanimated corpses still they were still reanimated corpses, nonetheless.
 
It wasn’t until Romero made a little movie called Night of the Living Dead that the modern zombie was given birth.  Night is kind of a Portrait of Dorian Gray type of movie were every year the picture ages a bit more horribly until, eventually, it becomes unwatchable.  On the off chance that Romero sees this, can you please go back and take that goddamned cricket out of the soundtrack?  Please?  A cricket really isn’t the ambient sound one needs in a movie where very little happens.  While Night was profitable, its influence led small studios to just make low budget horror movies.  There’s a pretty good chance we’d never have a Chain Saw Massacre or a Halloween without it.
 
In 1978 Romero made the greatest zombie movie that had the worst repercussions of all time.  Dawn of the Dead was epic.  While I could never work out who built the mall what with all the zombies that had been roaming about biting people since 1968, still it was epic.  The major problem with Dawn is that it showed every Italian with a camera, a few rolls of film, some fake blood, sausage links and those cheap Halloween kits that they could also make a zombie movie.  They were even cost effective, zombies don’t talk and extras who don’t talk make very little money.   It seemed at the time there was a cheap zombie movie released weekly each promising to show the audience some fucked up shit.  What audiences mostly got was bad dubbing and one or two zombies killing folks with terrible F/X.  This is considered the Golden Age of Zombies.  Golden Age of Mostly Shit, if you ask me.  Over the years there has been the occasional good zombie movie (Return of the Living Dead being about the best of the lot).  The best and worst things to happen to zombies were yet to come.
Back in the 60s while hippies were convincing themselves that drugs and fucking were changing the world for the better, some nerds created the Internet and actually managed to change the world on nothing but Mountain Dew and furious masturbation.  The commoditization of the internet and Hollywood’s increasing fears of losing money by actually making movies formed a perfect storm for the current zombie renaissance.  
 
Zombies, in modern culture, are an odd thing.  They seem to be liked or loved by all walks of life.  People who don’t even like horror, namely people who see the current crop of PG-13 J horror remakes and found footage nonsense, will squeal like little girls with a new unicorn pony at the very mention of them.  But why?  Zombies aren’t terribly interesting in and of themselves.  They are walking bodies that eat people.  They have no personality or discernable goals, regardless of how hard Romero has tried to shoehorn some in over the past few years.  
 
My pet theory is that zombies represent our fascination with viruses and how they spread.  In most movies that have bothered with an explanation of them zombies are caused by a virus.  Zombies present a macroscopic view of the microscopic process of viral spread and reproduction.  A person is infected and its only real desire is to bite others to spread it around.  I realize that most movies have them tear folks apart and eat them but to what purpose?  Their internal organs no longer work and they have no real need for sustenance.  Think of it as the virus controlling the person who is limited to basic brain functions and you probably come pretty close to the truth of it.
 
My 2 cents, anyways.  I hear that other like them because “they  r kool and shit lol”.
 
The movies I watched this week just happen to have zombies and one of the two actually gave the zombies a bit of motivation.  I’m, of course, talking about Dead Snow and The Horde.
 
Dead Snow involves a bunch of Swedes—They’re Norwegian, MacReady—heading to a cabin in some out of the way place and having bad shit happen to them.  
 
The movie starts with a girl running from something as ironic classical music plays in the background.  Oh Edvard Grieg how far you’ve come.  She is promptly killed and we head into what looks suspiciously like the opening to The Shining.  We meet our soon to be dead folks as they talk about seemingly inconsequential things like avalanches and one of the guys being a med student who is disgusted by blood.  Both topics come into play later although the avalanche thing is used by a person in the other car.  Guess she has great hearing or something.
 
They arrive at the cabin and have some fun in the snow and play twister and listen to terrible Norwegian music.  Shortly after they are visited by Old Man Exposition who insults the coffee, steals a beer, lights up a smoke and provides pages of back story.  Some Nazis in the area generally acted like assholes and were chased off by the local villagers.  After he explains everything he buggers off back to his tent and gets killed.  
 
We continue with the slow build up which is code for shit fails to happen.  Two people fuck in an outhouse which is possibly the least sexy place one could possibly fuck.  If you’ve never been to a particularly rural place and have no idea what an outhouse is just replace it with a port-a-potty that’s been in use for a week and the honey wagon hasn’t been around to pump out the shit.  
 
While those guys are having at it, the folks inside find a small chest of gold and have fun with it.  The movie then becomes Leprechaun.  
 
The Nazi zombies in the movie aren’t traditional zombies.  I’ve seen slow and fast zombies, this is the first movie with supersonic zombies.  I thought for a while that it would paint itself in the same corner as Alien3 where any chase scene becomes pointless because no one can outrun them.  Thankfully, the Nazi zombies suffer from Phantom Menace disease and can only run fast when the plot demands it.  It’s never explained why they want the gold back.  I can’t imagine them moseying into town to buy anything.  
 
Well the zombies attack folks to regain their pot o’ gold.  There’s blood and gore and whatnot.  People die.  Nazi zombies re-die.  The last 20 minutes or so finally manage to entertain despite the relentless silliness of it all.
If you haven’t watched it I recommend it.  Just be ready to fast forward a bit.
 
The Horde is a French zombie movie where zombies happen to attack a tenement building while some cops try to kill some other people for some reason or the other.  It’s French so I’m guessing existentialism or a disregard for Jerry Lewis enters into it somewhere.
 
We open on a funeral for someone.  I’m guessing he was important ‘cause some friends of his decide to go kill the guy who killed him.  I guess you could say they form an Alliance and are in Thrall to one another.  A Stormwind seems to blow in the Forsaken zombies.  Yes, I played WoW.  Now shut the fuck up about it.
The four cops decide to storm the tenement building where the Nigerians who killed funeral guy live.  They do so in that really conspicuous way that little kids play spy.  While sneaking about the maintenance guy gets the drop on them.  So yeah they really really suck at being sneaky.  The Nigerians take a break from sending spam emails and shoot at the cops who get snuck up on a second time by maintenance guy.
 
So the Nigerians capture the cops and shoot some unrelated guy to prove that they are BAMFs.  Then kill one of the cops to reiterate their BAMFness.  Then Hell breaks loose.
 
Zombies converge on the building for no apparent reason and the first guy the Nigerians killed starts beating on the door.  They, of course, open the door and proceed to empty all their bullets into his chest.  This, unsurprisingly, proves ineffective so a couple of lackeys decide to go hand to hand, also ineffective.  The main Nigerian wanders over and shoots the guy in the head finally putting him down.  No one really learns from this though.  Throughout the movie approximately 4,000 shots are fired.  Maybe 2 are head shots.  Well there is the scene where one of the cops sacrifices himself and goes on a head shot rampage but by that point it really doesn’t matter.
 
The escape from the building is full of nonsense.  There’s more hand to hand fighting, an old crazy racist French guy, a few guys seriously considering fucking a zombie chick and the introduction of a concept wherein zombies store food for later.  It’s all patently ridiculous in its blatant attempts at “coolness”.
 
Should you watch this one?  No.  But you crazy kids love your zombies and probably will anyways.