Did you ever want to see the Suicide Girls take on a sea monster?
Well Australia has got you covered. Because in Stuart Simpson's El monstro del mar (translated to Monster of the Sea) you'll just see that. And that's pretty much it.
Monstro goes into the way back time machine to give us a throwback to B-movie monsterpalooza where a quiet seaside town goes under attack by 3 hot Aussie vixen pussycat kill kill killers as they battle a tentacle rape octupi.
The movie starts off as From Dusk til Dawn style as our 3 tatted up, goth femme fatales lay a Venus fly trap for some man fodder. They party hard, booze it up and sniff those lines. They meet a young girl (another Aussie hottie) and her grandfather but secrets lay deep in this beach town. Soon locals are slaughtered and much blood is lost.
The CGI monster is slightly above your SyFy original movie but the buckets of blood and gore is unrelenting. Kudos to Simpson and his team for going all out. But hell the tentacles are pure laughable as are the death scenes. It's definitely intentionally "bad", with ridiculous carnage of serpent arms vs man. But do I buy into the "it's so bad, it's good" formula? Well too a point I do. I'm all for seeing our 3 whores from hell Beretta, Blondie and the hottest of all Snowball go swimming and acting badass but without a real story or any interesting scenes of fun, it also becomes outright boring. It's fairly predictable and generic as they come.
If you want to see Aussie Suicide girls battle sea monsters, this will be your favorite movie. I liked the eye candy and the fairly cheesy monster mash gore. But clearly it's the same as watching a Skinemax action movie. Pick your poison.
Fresh from the jaded viewer indie mailbox, I was sent a very DIY film by Brandon and Leia Gadow of Scumbag Films. When I say DIY, I mean it. Scumbag Films based out of San Diego is run by this husband and wife team and they do it all. Act, produce, write and direct. They've produced a wide variety of music driven films and in Homemade Monster, which was made for around $400 they create a musical revolving around that old reliable Frankenstein cliche.
I gotta admit, I've seen some low budget indie films but I've never seen a low budget rockabilly horror musical. And if I, the jaded viewer have never seen it, you earn bonus points just on that.
Homemade Monster may have been made on a dollar cent budget but it's got a mixture of indie spirit and a killer soundtrack that make it a Misfits song come to life. It's clear Mr. and Mrs Scumbag are amateurs in the filmmaking world, but this musical has lots of ambition and they don't overdue it or try to hard.
What you get is a funny, jazzy DIY film that's like seeing a garage band music video.
Oh yeah it's got boobs and blood too.
Boring Plot-O-Matic
Faced with an unspeakable act at her own hands, she attempt to rectify the situation and since she is frustrated with men, our heroine decides to make her own. This story is about her struggle to gather the necessary parts, put together and animate the man of her dreams. Music by The Jim Rowdy Show, who’s psychobilly rock and roll parallels our character’s inner turmoil but hopefulness. Awesome Review-O-Matic
Leia wants a man with all the qualities that will make a lasting relationship. Somebody who cares, has brains and of course has a big dick. After a fight with her boyfriend she drugs and kills him and comes up with the bright idea to make her own new super boyfriend by assembling them out of the parts of various dudes.
Well that's the the gist of the story.
The film which runs about 45 or so minutes is littered with rockabilly tunes delivered by Leia as she sings her troubles, her plans and her ultimate goals. Some are catchy like the opening number and a song where she seduces a bar patron. They all have their country twang sound with a psychobilly beat and I'll admit, it's a bit catchy.
The big number comes after Leia assembles a brain from a yawny professor, a heart from a chubby bartender and Johnson from a big ole cowboy, she finally finishes assembling her masterpiece. Now all frisky she goes all stripteasy, gets topless and makes monster grunty with her dream man. We get lyrics like "cuz I am bringing you to life." as she tries different methods to zap him to life.
However it gets kinda repetitive at times and with all musical numbers you expect a elaborate dance routine to accompany the beat. We get sporadic moments of a choreographed number but mostly it's singing with monotonous acting.
The acting and singing are all pretty solid but the glaring oddness of it all is the lack of budget. I'm not going to criticize the film because of that but it's pretty funny to see SyFy-ish rain and lightning, a beer can labeled beer and some cardboardy acting by the other actors. Some scenes were way too dark but I wouldn't expect we'd get proper lighting on a $400 budget. During a penultimate scene where our Mrs. Frankenstein wishes her monster to "come alive!" we hear a dog barking in the background. It seems intentional but I got a chuckle out of the homemade-ness of it all.
The film is decently made for a husband and wife team with no film making experience. They do a good job of getting set ups to music numbers and there were different settings. But at the end of the day, it's all about the music and as a punk rocker in a former life, I dug the tunes. If you enjoy listening to the rockabilly you'll enjoy this rockabilly horror music video.
I can rest easy now that I've watched my first ever rockabilly horror musical. I can check that off my bucket list.
If you follow this online blogging publication, you know how much I praised Shawn Lewis Black Devil Doll so much, I might as well have been is internet slave. I even reviewed the book! So when I got the update of what Lowest Common Denominator's next flick was going to be, I got fuckin wet.
It's not Black Devil Doll 2. Oh man, its waaaay fuckin better.
Let me introduce you to the next big thing in rape monster horror.......
Lieutenant Joe Angell is a bad cop whose seen it all . . . but he's never seen anything like the hideous monstrosity that shambles out of a dark California river with a taste for blood, on the hunt for nubile female victims.
It's a monster spawned of toxic waste and depraved humanity, a mutation of man and fish that must rape and kill to state its distorted desires---and only Joe Angell knows where it will strike next! As the insane, deformed creature stalks it's prey, Angell is haunted by bizarre visions that lead him into a slimy web of evil . . . until the final, fiery confrontation explodes with a fury you will never forget. Prepare yourself.
Where HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP and BAD LIEUTENANT left off . . . the sick, twisted nightmare of BOTTOMFEEDER begins. And no one is safe.
This movie had me at "hunt" "nubile" "female" and "victims". Yay hip hip yay.
Shawn and Jonathan Lewis are the pioneers of the modern exploitation horror genre. If you still haven't seen Black Devil Doll, your missing out on the most fucked up LOL funny movie ever made in Oakland, California.
Bottomfeeder is going to put monster rape horror back on the fuckin map. Seriously, that's a good thing.
Didn't they have a Tremors sequel that took place in the old west? I swear they did. And it starred the dad from Family Ties. Right?
In any case, The Burrowers follows that same formula. It's a tried and true balance of underground animal monsters feasting on our ancestors. Well not my ancestors...but maybe yours.
Just a step above Sci-Fi quality, it's a mediocre film with very cool monster effects blending in CGI, animatronics and old classic prosthetics. The story is a bit recycled and has more political correctness than you'd think existed back in the 1800s.
All in all, it's a decent monster movie, westernized but makes 90 minutes feel like an eternity.
Boring Plot-O-Matic
A band of courageous men sets out to find and recover a family of settlers that has mysteriously vanished from their home. Expecting the offenders to be a band of fierce natives, the group prepares for a routine battle. But they soon discover that the real enemy stalks them from below.
Awesome Review-O-Matic
The similarities to Tremors and Feast is ever evident. Though both those films are horror comedies, The Burrowers is straight forward horror. What JT Petty gives us is a slow burn of suspense, some glimpses of monster attacks and a United Nations band of gun slinging slingers.
After a family is slaughtered, a John Wayne average joe, a transplanted Irish bloke, his compadre wrangler and his stepson join the calvary to find the Indians that may have slaughtered the family.
The cast is filled with "That Guys and Girls". Clancy Brown (It's that guy from Starship Troopers!), William Mapother (It's that guy Ethan from Lost!) Doug Hutchison, (It's that killer guy from the X-Files and that Dharma guy from Lost!) Sean Patrick Thomas (It's that guy from Barbershop!) and even Laura Leighton (It's that girl from Melrose Place!).
The filmed is filled with lots of the racist stereotypes of the Old West you'd expect. White man hates the Indians. Indians hate the white man. White man hates the blacks. Blacks hate the white man. Monsters hate and eat white man, red man and black man all equally. Thank the monsters for racial tolerance and not discriminating on eating anybody.
For the most part, the film is a mystery as the group head to an Indian reservation to find answers. They torture a poor Indian scout looking for answers. Soon a group of 5 venture out on their own.
Petty delves into the nature vs people aspect in the flick. The burrowers leave holes and in a Discovery channel docu-style he films ants within the holes. It's a theme ever evident in the film and the motivation of our hungry hungry hippoes.
They quickly disover a body, buried alive and motionless. The film hints at some jump scare moments but never delivers. There are so many set ups shots of these quick edit scare moments but nothing ever happens. Most of these in the dark, suspense buildup movies are very dependant on these jolts of BOO! But Jetty just teases and that's a drawback.
Soon after losing one of their own in a Sioux battle, they meet an Indian women whose family has been killed byu these burrowing monsters. She tells them the burrowers use to eat buffalo but once the white man killed all the bison, they searched for other food...and they got a liking to human flesh.
They use a poison to paralyze their victims then eat their organs when they've gotten mushy. I guess it's like ice cream. Thanks to the white men of old America, the monsters are looking to us as takeout.
The monsters themselves are very different from what we've seen. No slug like creatures in Tremors or big mouthy monsters like in Feast. These creatures look like that alien bug in starship troopers. They move on their inverted hind legs and have long nails to slash their victims. It's quite an odd looking monster, something new that makes them standout.
The ending is climatic battle of the remaining survivors against the horde of burrowsers. As we are on top of the food chain, you can guess who comes out on top. Though, the movie trudges along for an extra 5-6 minutes to give us our obligatory unhappy ending (remember, the politics of the day can't possibly have any minority survive this film) and we see one last glimmer of our monster (probably Lions Gate is hoping to poop out a Burrowers sequel if this does straight to DVD well).
The Burrowers is not a perfect movie by any means. It's very slow at times and their is no character you start to care about. However, it's setting is different for a monster movie and the monsters make sure your alert the entire time.
There aren't many monster movies coming out so the Burrowers may be your only outlet if you need your Mimic/The Relic/Tremors/Feast beasties fix.
Not good, not bad...this is as mediocre as you can get. Gore-ipedia
After watching Splinter, you get the feeling that you've been thrown back into the wayback machine of creature feature horror.
Part The Thing, part Ruins, all fun ickiness. Director Toby Wilkins champions the simplicity of unknown actors, CGI and Savini effects, a wrong place wrong time set up and some parasitic "splinter" creepy crawlies to make the best "monster" movie of 2008.
The Ruins teetered on this premise but I mean how can we really get fuckin scared from plants. Even M Knight fucked that up with The Happening.
Nature can wreak havoc on those pesty biologicals. It reminded me of a friend who told me that his friend went into the wilderness or outback and returned with some sort of fucked up Ebola parasite shit that ate his brain and it took fuckin 3 years to recover.
Now that guy funny enough is a CEO of a dot com.
Splinter is the fear of the microscopic baddie that infects you from the inside out. Everybody can run from an unstoppable slasher or a skyscraper tall monster. But you can't run from monster that once it infects you with a killer disease, you die.
Boring Plot-O-Matic
A young couple has retreated to the wilderness for a romantic camping weekend-but the trip quickly spirals into a nightmare when they are car-jacked by an escaped convict and his girlfriend. Thrown together by chance, no one can imagine the terrifying horror that awaits the two couples at a remote and isolated gas station.
Awesome Review-O-Matic
Polly (Jill Wagner ) and Seth (Paulo Costanzo) play the city folk and are final guy and girl. One's a naturist the other a Dr. Biology. They get hijacked by Lacey (Rachel Kerbs) and Dennis (Shea Whigham) who are fugitiving to Mexico.
All play monster fodder well. Polly is our "firecracker" and Seth our dorky professor. Dennis the redneck is tough as nails but with some screws loose.
After changing a flat, they stop by a gas station where most of the action takes place. The infected humans are "driven" by our parasite and attack the survivors.
As Polly eloquently says: "It attacks you and you die".
We then see the end of an idiotic police lady by the splintered walking corpses and our rag tag team then start McGyvering ways to call for help by trying to pick up a police radio and then trying to find different ways out.
The most creepy moment is when a severed hand starts to attack, splintered spikes all over. You wouldn't think a walking hand would be fuckin scary, but it is.
Dennis goes all infecty and this requires some unscheduled surgery by Dr. Biology. HACK! CHOP! ARGHHHHHHH! later, Dennis is lacking an arm. Good times.
Soon the group plans their great escape and we have our final battle off ending 80 minutes of great fun.
Splinter is parasiticly controlled, retro virus gone awry, corpse walking hell of a ride. It does 300% more shit in its 1 hr and 20 min and limited budget. It's the mark of excellence on what a good story and solid acting and a few choice CGI effects can accomplish.
Splinter is definitely not a splinter in 2008. It's a big spike of horror movie. One of the 10 best easily.
Gore-ipedia (if you want to be shocked don't read)
Animal roadkill Splintered up gas attendant Splitted human and intestinal gutting Corpse bashing windows Severed arm surgery
Nude-ipedia (because you like boobies)
Nada
WTF moment Severed hand comes alive!
The Jaded Viewer's Final Prognosis
Splinter is a monumental achievement in indie horror done super duper right. Like Slither and all the other gooey, grossness creatures that wreak havoc in miniature form, it's all about the chills and goosebumps you get from knowing one little scratch and you're infected.
Because nobody wants to have to go out by having splinters grow out of em. Right?
Hollywood horror is lacking on the monster/beast horror movies of old. I mean I'm not asking for killer, mutant 50 foot tall radioactive ants, but give me a killer monster and I'm cool.
So after watching the trailer for Splinter, we could actually get something Feast-like with Mist-ish qualities and The Host like craziness.
Or it could be a turd in a toilet.
Plot is dumb-esque.
A young couple has retreated to the wilderness for a romantic camping weekend-but the trip quickly spirals into a nightmare when they are car-jacked by an escaped convict and his girlfriend. Thrown together by chance, no one can imagine the terrifying horror that awaits the two couples at a remote and isolated gas station.
El monstro del mar! 
1/2
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