Chopper Chicks in Zombietown
June 30, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Other than the fact that it’s one of Billy Bob Thornton’s earliest movies, I really didn’t know much about Chopper Chicks in Zombietown before I saw it. The awesome title promised both girls riding motorcycles and zombies, and it’s from Troma, so I figured it was worth adding to my Netflix queue.
The movie opens with a motorcycle gang (The Cycle Sluts) riding into a small town looking for a hot meal before hitting the road again. Turns out Dede (Rose) used to live in that small town, and her estranged husband Tommy (Thornton) wants her to stay. This upsets the leader of the gang, Rox (Carlen), and she causes a scene at a local bar. The townsfolk gather with guns and pitchforks and threaten to execute The Cycle Sluts.
Meanwhile, the local undertaker (Don Calfa), along with his trusty dwarf, has been reanimating the dead bodies that come through his funeral home and keeping them in an abandoned mine shaft outside of town. In a shocking turn of events, the zombies escape and shuffle into town. The zombies have their own theme song, which is very reminiscent of the fun Goblin soundtrack from the original Dawn of the Dead.
Well, the townsfolk don’t want to kill the zombies since they’re the reanimated corpses of their loved ones. So instead of executing The Cycle Sluts, they beg them to stay and take care of their flesh-eating relatives. Can Dede and Rox put their differences aside and lead The Cycle Sluts to victory over the walking dead?
This movie really should be much better than it is. The zombies are a little too comedic to be taken seriously, but not comedic enough to be funny. The gore is pretty tame for a zombie movie. As for the Chopper Chicks, they wear entirely too much clothing. A Troma movie without nudity is not a good thing.
On the plus side, you’ve got the hot girls riding motorcycles, guns, explosions, burning buildings and a dwarf getting tortured. Chopper Chicks in Zombietown is a fun way to spend 86 minutes, but it fails to live up to the potential its title promises.
Popularity: 18% [?]
At Dawn They Sleep
June 28, 2005 | Leave a Comment
At Dawn They Sleep takes a hard-hitting look at what happens to drug dealers who mess around with trashy women and wake up as vampires. I don’t think this is based on a true story, but it should be.
Stephen and Ian are a couple of drug pushers who have zero tolerance for incompetance. If a deal goes bad, they pull their guns out and start shooting. These guys hook up with a couple of babes, but the babes turn out to be Angels. (They have the wings to prove it.) After a wild night of passion, the Angels infect Stephen and Ian with a disease and they become vampires.
Stephen and Ian are charged with destroying the human race so the Angels can take over the world. After that there was a lot of talk about God and Demons and war, but I really didn’t pay attention. Why? Because these vampires were kicking everyone’s butts! They crashed cars into other cars, and threw televisions on the ground, and crashed into a house. But best of all, they carried guns and actually shot at non-vampires. How awesome is that? If they don’t kill you with bullets, they’ll kill you by sucking your blood out of your neck!
Anyway, it was a very fun but disposable movie, and I had a good time watching it. However, I’ve got to warn you: At Dawn They Sleep looks and sounds like it was shot on a camcorder. And it probably was. But I’m giving it four stars because not only is this an ambitious production on a low budget, it contains guns, blood & gore, car crashes, T&A and even a few laughs.
There’s something for every guy to like in this movie. Don’t miss it!
Popularity: 17% [?]
Demon Sex
June 28, 2005 | Leave a Comment
This is what happens when you try to make a Misty Mundae movie, but you don’t have Misty Mundae in your movie.
Demon Sex starts off with Brinke Stevens reading the history of an alien race that once populated the Earth. They created a new breed of alien, which was hunted down and destroyed. However, a secret cult of women had been protecting the secrets of the aliens, awaiting the right time to repopulate the Earth with the alien species. So far so good.
Then we see a really fat guy sitting at a desk with a computer, and he’s working on a DNA strand that was extracted from a pretty cool-looking alien skull. His work is almost complete. Despite the extremely low production values, I’m still interested at this point.
Then the really fat guy heads over to his buddy’s club, which happens to be a strip club. Sweet! This movie is going to rule. There’s a stripper dancing against a pole and she’s taking her…
GAH! What is that? Is that a man with fake boobs?!
Yes, that was my exact reaction. During the next five minutes, I was able to determine that this stripper was actually a woman. She was all muscle and had almost no body fat. For a man, this is a good look. For a woman… not so much.
The movie just nosedives from there. We’re treated to another stripper, then two naked women in a pool, then a naked sex scene on a kitchen floor, then a naked shower scene, then another naked shower scene, several shots of a pregnant chick, another shower scene… you get the idea. And you’re probably thinking to yourself, “What’s his problem? That sounds like an awesome movie!”
The problem is that most of these women aren’t very attractive. I enjoy watching this type of formulaic erotic movie when it stars Misty Mundae or Julian Wells or Glori-Anne Gilbert or some other hottie because THEY ARE ATTRACTIVE WOMEN!
Why even review the movie? Well, there is plenty of blood, plenty of T&A, and plenty of bloody T&A. In fact, there’s so much that it’s impossible for me to give this movie less than two stars.
The long, expository history that the movie opens with turns out to be unnecessary fluff. This movie is a cookie cutter erotic horror movie, but I found very little that was erotic. This is worth a rental if you want to see Brinke Stevens naked and covered in blood in a bathtub.
Popularity: 39% [?]
Zombies vs. Satan
June 27, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Zombies vs. Satan is the first Double Digital Creature Feature from Troma Team Video. It includes two movies: Wiseguys vs. Zombies and Meat for Satan’s Icebox. Both movies are shot on Digital Video and are Dogpile95-certified. Oh, and both movies are really bad.
First up is Wiseguys vs. Zombies, written and directed by Adam Minarovich, who also stars as the lead gangster, Gus. In concept, this is a really good idea. Since gangsters specialize in killing people, watching the creative ways that a seasoned mafioso might kill a zombie sounds like a lot of fun.
But the movie is way too long, and by the time we get to the zombies killing people and gangsters killing zombies, I was already bored. If Minarovich had cut some of his tedious monologues in the first hour, the movie might have flowed better. Minarovich had good comic timing as a supporting character in Camp Utopia, but in this movie most of his “comic” lines fell flat. The only time I remember laughing was the Goat Man scene. There’s no real T&A to speak of, and the gore is adequate at best.
But Wiseguys vs. Zombies looks like Citizen Kane compared to Meat for Satan’s Icebox, directed by David Silvio. Icebox starts out looking like it might be promising, with a pregnant naked stripper getting devoured at a cannibalistic orgy. But it quickly goes downhill after that. Troma’s President, Lloyd Kaufman, has a brief cameo about halfway through that’s worth watching, but that’s about it. There’s plenty of blood and gore throughout this one, and there are some scantily clad women, but none of them get nekkid.
The sad thing about both of these movies is that the stories are pretty good. Wiseguys vs. Zombies features two mobsters driving to Miami with a couple of dead drug dealers in the trunk of their car. The twist is that, before getting whacked, the drug dealers had taken a drug (developed by the military) that turns its users into zombies. When the mobsters get their car impounded in a small Southern town, the zombies escape and the mayhem begins.
In Meat for Satan’s Icebox, a girl murders the headmistress of her Catholic School, but before she can get away she’s kidnapped by the owners of a local deli, Satan’s Icebox. She then learns that the meat being purchased by the local townspeople is actually the flesh of runaway girls.
I have the upmost respect for these filmmakers for seeing their vision through and making their movies, but the finished products are difficult to watch. I could write paragraphs about all of the negatives, but I won’t. Hopefully the filmmakers will learn from their mistakes and work harder on their next projects.
There was just enough blood and T&A to keep me from giving this DVD only one star. If you still want to watch it, add it to the bottom of your Netflix queue.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Dead Alive
June 27, 2005 | Leave a Comment
I’ve watched a bunch of zombie movies over the past month, and Dead Alive is easily the goriest of the bunch. It’s also the most hilarious.
Dead Alive begins very much like an Indiana Jones movie, with two archaeologists capturing the Sumatran Rat-Monkey and attempting to transport it off the island. Despite warnings that the Rat-Monkey is cursed, the archaeologists manage to escape even when the natives try to attack them. It turns out that one bite from the Rat-Monkey turns its victim into a zombie. That doesn’t stop the archaeologists from selling the creature to the zoo on the mainland.
(NOTE: Despite Shaun of the Dead’s marketing claims, I believe Dead Alive is the first true attempt at the Zom-Rom-Com genre. To be fair, Shaun of the Dead is the definitive Zom-Rom-Com movie.)
After the Rat-Monkey intro, Dead Alive quickly shifts focus to a young man named Lionel (Balme) and his blossoming romance with a cute girl who works at the grocery store, Paquita (Pinalver). The problem with Lionel is that he still lives with his dominant Mum (Moody). Mum can’t stand the idea of her son falling in love and leaving her, so she spies on Lionel and Paquita when they go on a date to the zoo. But Mum gets a little too close to the Rat-Monkey cage….
Lionel abruptly ends the date and takes his injured Mum home. But she’s not quite the same. Her skin rips off easily; her arm squirts red goop from the bite wound; and, her ear falls off. And all of that happens in one scene!
Lionel tells Paquita he can no longer see her. He’s spending all of his time attempting to keep his zombie Mum hidden away. But then she bites the nurse, then the priest, and suddenly he’s babysitting several zombies, including a baby zombie! And if things weren’t bad enough, Lionel’s uncle (Watkin) invites a bunch of friends over to Lionel’s house for a big party.
The amazing thing about this movie is the way that director Peter Jackson (yes, that Peter Jackson) continually raises the level of gore. The scenes I’ve described above are only the icing on the blood-soaked red velvet cake. The movie steadily builds to a crescendo where Lionel becomes the zombie-slaying equivalent of Beatrix Kiddo. But instead of Hanzo steel, he’s armed with the rusty lawn mower from his front yard. And that’s not even the even the climax of the movie!
Dead Alive is mostly a visual treat, so describing it any further might spoil the surprises. I can assure you that this is more comedy than horror. If you’ve got a sick sense of humor, Dead Alive will be one of the funniest movies you’ll ever see.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Day of the Dead
June 20, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Day of the Dead is the third zombie movie from George A. Romero. While it is technically a sequel to Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, none of the same characters appear. That’s not a problem, however, since we do get appearances from three MFG favorites: Automatic Weaponry, Blood and Gore, and Reanimated Corpses.
After a beautiful opening sequence in a coastal town overrun with zombies (and a single alligator), the action moves to an underground military complex. And unfortunately, the rest of the movie takes place in the underground complex. Isn’t this one called DAY of the Dead? I really want to see Savini’s zombies in the daylight!!
In the wake of the zombie holocaust that’s wiped out most of the American population as we know it, the government has assigned a medical staff to study the zombies in a secret facility. Their mission is to discover a cure that will turn the zombies back into humans. A military unit has been tasked with assisting the medical staff when they capture zombies to be used as test subjects.
And where do they keep the test subjects, you ask? The best idea is probably to chain them up on the grounds above the complex, but that wouldn’t make for a very good horror movie. Instead, one of these United States Government employees made the decision to capture dozens of test subjects and to keep them unchained in a gigantic pen, which is located underground in the complex with the medical and military dudes. This turns out to be a very bad idea.
Tensions run high between the soldiers and the doctors. The soldiers are freaked out that they’re sharing living space with the undead. The doctors want to continue to test the zombies and try to develop a cure. Sadly, we get a lot of this in the first hour of the movie, and it becomes very tiresome.
Just when the movie is getting unbearably boring, Bub makes an appearance. Bub is a zombie test subject that Dr. Logan has been able to domesticate. Instead of finding a cure, Logan has found a way to train the zombies to NOT crave tasty human brains. Bub is his star student. He can salute, listen to music on headphones, answer a telephone, and point a gun. And lucky for us, right after the Bub scene, the tension from the first hour finally pays off. Predictably, all hell breaks loose.
Even though it came out twenty years ago, the blood and gore are just as good (if not better) than any recent horror movie that I’ve seen. And while it’s not as great as its predecessor, Day of the Dead still manages to be a really great zombie movie. I highly recommend this Divimax special edition DVD, as the sound and picture are amazing, and there are more extra features than most current Hollywood releases.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Resident Evil
June 18, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Resident Evil is the latest movie to be released based on a popular video game. Let me state upfront that I have not played this particular game, but I do not think being a fan of the game could’ve possibly improved my enjoyment of this film. Suffice to say you’re not going to be hearing much about this one at the Oscars.
There isn’t much story here. Basically, there’s about as much storyline as one might expect in a video game. Imagine that! Unfortunately when moving a game to the big screen, one generally expects the story and characters to get fleshed out a bit. It just doesn’t happen here. The general idea is that this is set in the 21st Century where a big evil company is doing naughty things such as DNA manipulation and virus generation in the name of top secret military research. The virus gets loose, and a computer controlling the secret underground society goes haywire. And that’s just about enough setup to send in a special ops response team and give them some flesh eating zombies and other mutating creatures to shoot. The movie has a whole “Night of the Living Dead” thing going.
When I say there’s no character development, I’m not kidding. The movie stars Milla Jovovich, and we never even find out her name. I guess they assume we know it from the game. I must say she’s looking good here. She’s bulked up a bit since The Fifth Element and looks much much better. We do catch some of the other character’s names, but unfortunately the dialog is limited to exclamations, barking commands, etc. This movie really does just kinda start in the middle of the action like a video game and ends without closure. The prospect of a sequel is scary because I do not want to have to sit through it and review it!
Other than a bit of eye candy, there’s just not much to this movie. Resident Evil might be worth screening on DVD if you’re into horror and shoot-em-up type action. But there’s no reason to go out of your way to catch it on the big screen, and somehow I do not think it will be in theaters more than a couple of weeks anyway. We give it 2 stars, and we’re being generous.
Popularity: 16% [?]
28 Days Later
June 18, 2005 | Leave a Comment
28 Days. That’s an appropriate title because that’s exactly long this movie felt. This is likely to be one of those films where we’re on the opposite end of the spectrum from “critics”. The critics will love it, while we’re going to rate it low. Artistically, we can see a lot to like in this movie, but our ratings are based on how entertained we were. And we must’ve checked our watches and adjusted in our seats at least a dozen times.
The storyline was promising. A guy has been comatose in the hospital and wakes up to find that he’s apparently alone. There’s no one in the hospital, the street outside or apparently the entire city. A virus has taken almost everyone, turning them into zombie like creatures that only move in the dark.
Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting fame, is the director. The cast features a couple of people who look familiar, but no one you’re likely to actually know by name. The film has a documentary look that is intentional as this was shot on video. We speculate that the budget was about “three-fiddy”. He should’ve spent some of that on an editor because the film started to drag at about the halfway point and had really lost us by the end when things were really starting to go over the top. And the ending is a commercial cop out instead of the logical one, just to put the cherry on top.
The first half of the movie shows a lot of promise, we really liked the premise. But it built up the tension and then just kind of wandered into the weeds as the story started to drift onto tangents that were almost preaching to us. As a booger movie, the boogers should’ve played a much more prominent role. But we’re not going to overanalyze this movie, instead we’re going to just tell you that it lost us about halfway thru and left us a bit bored by the time it ended. We give it 2 stars, it’s artistic enough to be worth a DVD rental.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
June 17, 2005 | Leave a Comment
The original Dawn of the Dead is not only the greatest zombie of all time, it is arguably the greatest horror movie of all time. And it gets better every time I see it.
It’s a sequel of sorts to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but it involves different characters. In other words, you don’t need to see Night in order to fall in love with Dawn.
The movie starts with – surprise! – a major zombie infestation. Four characters escape the city by helicopter. They quickly realize that getting fuel for the helicopter is going to be a problem, so they search for a place where they can live safely until the world gets back to normal. They find the perfect place: a shopping mall.
This mall has everything (including plenty of zombies wandering around), but most importantly it has both a large department/grocery store and a gun store. That’s right, a gun store in a mall. How sweet is that?
Our heroes find an unused storage room that’s hidden from the zombies and set up house there. They eventually get the idea to block the entrances to the mall with large semi-trucks, and then go on a killing spree to remove the remaining zombies.
From there on out, it’s utopia for three of the four heroes. (One got a little careless around the zombies.) They’re living a zombie-free life; they have access to merchandise at all the stores; and, they’re basically living like royalty. But you know that’s not going to last, right?
Dawn of the Dead works on many different levels. The appeal to horror and action fans is obvious. And surprisingly, the drama works very well, even though we don’t know much about these characters. With the exception of two characters, none of them have meaningful relationships with one another before the zombie apocalypse happens. But while trying to survive, they forge a common bond and help one another out. There are times when I forgot I was watching a zombie movie because I was interested in what these characters were doing.
But more than anything, I love the movie’s wicked social satire on our consumerist culture, which is more relevant than ever in the 21st Century. When these characters first arrive at the mall, they go after the essentials: food, water, tools, ammo, some small electronics, and whiskey. These are all things they need to continue surviving.
Shortly after their arrival, one of the characters comments on the number of zombies congregated at the mall, saying that it’s “some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”
Can you imagine living a life so empty that when you return from the dead looking for brains to eat, you’re instinctually drawn to the local mall?
But as soon as our intrepid survivors get the doors sealed off and empty the mall of zombies, what do they do? They go on an immediate “shopping” spree, even though everything is technically free. New clothes, new furniture, new jewelry… even a visit to the bank to empty the cash drawers. They continue to live in their hidden storage room, which is starting to look like a nice condo.
Near the end of the movie, a roving motorcycle gang shows up to plunder the mall, and instead of escaping to survive, our heroes decide to defend “their stuff”. Of course, in the aftermath of a zombie holocaust, none of that stuff matters any more. The front doors are opened, and the zombies once again enter the mall to aimlessly wander.
Unlike most horror movies, Dawn of the Dead actually has something to say about our society. The shot during the closing credits speaks volumes.
One other comment: I absolutely love the Goblin soundtrack to this movie. Some say it’s cheesy, but I say it’s brilliant. It’s one of my favorite things to listen to when I’m working on my computer.
I enjoyed the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead on its own merits as a zombie movie, but I didn’t enjoy it as a remake. Besides the walking dead, the shopping mall, the fiesty blonde chick and the bad-ass black man, it really wasn’t much of a remake.
If you haven’t seen the 1978 original Dawn of the Dead, get your butt down to the store (or click on over to Amazon) and buy a copy. Don’t rent it, don’t borrow it, just buy it. You won’t be disappointed.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Boogeyman
June 16, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Boogeyman is Hollywood’s latest PG-13 horror movie. As fans of the buckets of blood and bouncing teen tah tahs from the 80’s, we really groan everytime we see another horror movie come out with only a PG-13 rating. A good horror flick should be campy, full of nudity and grotesque killings. Or it should really work you over psychologically. Most of today’s horror films do neither.
Unfortunately, Boogeyman is very typical of contemporary offerings and doesn’t bring anything special to the table. There’s no campy humor, no nudity and the action is almost completely bloodless. There’s no psychology, and the film relies on startle techniques to try to make the audience jump instead of actually scaring them. Everything about it is totally predictable and watered down to get that PG-13 rating and extract a few bucks from the teenagers.
The storyline is a bit of a cookie cutter mix that borrows heavily from Darkness Falls with just a dash of Poltergeist thrown in. The “Boogeyman” snatchs a kid’s father right in front of him when he’s 8 years old. We fastforward and pick up with the kid as a grown up. Psychologists have told him he just imagined it all as a child’s way of dealing with a parent who left. But he makes sure he lives in a loft with no closets and takes all of the doors off of all of the cabinets just in case.
We are giving this film 3 stars despite our rants. It would be unfair to hold contemporary movies up to the standards of a different era. As such, Boogeyman is what it is. And by today’s standards in horror movies, it’s about average. The gaggle of young girls sitting 3 rows behind us who came to a scary movie so they cold squeal seemed to really enjoy it. As guys, we think it’ll make a good DVD to watch in a dark room with a female who you want to cling to you all night.
Popularity: 15% [?]
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