November: Nazi Zombies

Nazi movies and zombie movies: two good things that go better together! This genre (and I use the term loosely) seems to be making a resurgence with a couple of recent movies, Outpost and the eagerly awaited Dead Snow. In November, we’ll watch five Nazi zombie movies from the late 70s and early 80s. This month will be a real treat…

November 1: Night of the Zombies (1981). Not to be confused with the Italian zombie movie of the same name, this genre entry by Joel M. Reed (Bloodsucking Freaks) follows detective/spy/soldier/whatever Nick Monroe as he travels to Germany to investigate some mysterious canisters of toxic gas developed in WWII. Pretty soon some zombies show up. Could they possibly be connected to the mysterious canisters of toxic gas?

November 8: Zombie Lake (1980). During World War II, a group of villagers ambushed and defeated a band of German soldiers and threw their bodies in the nearby lake. Now, the Nazis have returned as angry zombies, preying on unsuspecting teenage female swimmers and skinny-dippers.

November 15: Oasis of the Zombies (1983): When his father suddenly dies, Robert discovers from his diaries that six million dollars in Nazi gold is buried at an oasis in the Saharan desert, protected by several zombies who want the gold to stay put.

November 22: Shock Waves (1977). In the dark days of World War II, the Nazi High Command ordered its scientists to create the Death Corps, a top secret race of indestructible zombie storm troopers — unliving, unfeeling, unstoppable monstrosities able to kill with their bare hands. No member of this horrific SS unit was ever captured by the Allied forces — and somewhere off the coast of Florida, it appears they have survived.

November 29: Hard Rock Zombies (1984). During a stop-over in a rural town full of unfriendly, hostile people, a quartet of big-haired, leather-clad heavy metal rockers are killed by a bizarre family who turn out to be Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun (who’s now a werewolf), and their freakish, inbred children and grandchildren. Determined to take part in the show they were supposed to perform before their untimely deaths, the band members rise from the dead to rock out one more time and defeat Hitler.

October: Days of Future Past

Hey, remember in 1999 when we were able to record our experiences and memories on MiniDiscs and high schools were taught by gun-wielding androids? Wasn’t that crazy when Hong Kong’s prisons were all privatized in 2001 and the riot police carried light sabers? How about the time Manhattan was turned into a maximum-security prison, back in 1997? This months, we’ll bask in the bright, golden future of eight to twelve years ago.

October 4: Class of 1999
October 11: Riki-Oh
October 18: Strange Days
October 25: Escape From New York

Favorite Horror Movie Weapons 1: The Chainsaw

One of my favorite zombie graphic novels, Living with Zombies, features two guys for whom the zompocalypse is nothing less than a fantasy come true. They immediately set about slaughtering as many zombies as possible, each one trying to out-do the other as if racking up points in Left 4 Dead. When they get separated, they keep in touch via cell phone:

Billman: [answering phone] Hello?
Chris: [fires gun repeatedly, right next to the phone]
Billman: God! What the piss was that?
Chris: [smirking] That was my new sweet ass gun.
Billman: Really!
Chris: Uh-huh.
Billman: See if you can place this sound. [revs chainsaw next to the phone] Could you hear that? Heh heh…
Chris: [dejected] Why is it that whatever I do…
Billman: I one-up you?
Chris: Yes!

In that spirit, I’d like to take a moment to honor one of my favorite horror movie weapons, the chainsaw.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, shot in 1974 by Tobe Hooper, has been both reviled for its gruesome displays of murder and hailed as a masterpiece of independent filmmaking. Hooper claims that he wanted to make a film about isolation and brutality, a response to the real-life massacres that at the time were being carried out by the United States on the other side of the world, in the Vietnam War. According to Hooper, the idea for the chainsaw as a murder weapon was inspired by being in a crowded hardware store and thinking of ways to quickly get out through the throngs of people.

Leatherface chasing after 'the one that got away.'

In the sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II, the symbolism of the chainsaw is a little more overt. The sexually immature (and possibly impotent) Leatherface now thrusts his hips suggestively while swinging his chainsaw, and final girl Stretch saves herself, in part, by reassuring Leatherface about how big and dangerous his chainsaw is. Dennis Hopper’s character, Lefty, demonstrates the fact that using a chainsaw as a weapon marks one as being a tad bit unpredictable and, well, crazy. It’s not a “sane” weapon — it’s a brutal weapon, a weapon one chooses not because it’s efficient but because it’s horrific. When Lefty decides to arm himself with three small chainsaws before going into battle with the Sawyer clan, it’s a demonstration of how his commitment to proper revenge has surpassed his sense of reason.

This theme comes up again in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness: when Ash loses an arm, and all appears to be lost — when he’s reached the point of no return — he comes up with a way to attach a chainsaw to his bloody stump, and subsequently uses it to wildly hack his way through the Deadites and other nasties.

Ash creates his chainsaw-arm.

…Ash’s chainsaw-arm is also cleverly referenced in the Japanese zombie movie Stacy, in a world in which defending yourself from zombie schoolgirls has become an everyday occurrence.

Bruce Campbell's Right Hand #2.

But then in the 1987 B-movie The Video Dead, the rules change — one of the zombies, after seeing several of her kin attacked by a teenager wielding a chainsaw, manages to get the chainsaw away and start attacking humans with it.

Zombie Bride turns the tables.

…anyone care to share their personal favorite chainsaw horror movie action?

September: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

1. It releases zombies into your home, killing off your entire neighborhood.
2. It sucks you and your family into a hell dimension of television satire.
3. It becomes a teleportation device, enabling hungry aliens to invade your planet.
4. It turns viewers into homicidal maniacs controlled by extraterrestrial beings.

September 6: The Video Dead
September 13: Stay Tuned
September 20: TerrorVision
September 27: Remote Control

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August: Sly as a Stallone

Rambo? Rocky who? Pssh. Forget about the “classics” — this month, we’re watching five reasons why Sylvester Stallone received the 2000 “Worst Actor of the Century” Razzie award for “95% of Everything He’s Ever Done.”

August 2: FIELD TRIP! Come out to The Dark Room, 2263 Mission, for a very special screening of Over the Top, Stallone’s epic arm-wrestling drama. Witty banter provided by Tristan Buckner and other hosts. $5. No potluck tonight, just come to the movie. Be there at 8pm sharp!

August 9: F.I.S.T. — “Jimmy Kovak (Sylvester Stallone) is a hardworking 1930s factory employee pursuing the American Dream. When factory conditions push him too far, he pushes back. As he unionizes his co-workers, he’s faced with a grueling uphill battle. But when he aligns himself with the mob, he realizes that he’s sacrificed far more than just his principles.”

August 16: Demolition Man — “In the violent 1990s, a cop (Sylvester Stallone) catches a relentless killer (Wesley Snipes), and both end up in a cryogenic deep freeze. In the peaceful year 2032, the criminal emerges from his long chill and attacks the now crimeless California. Unable to stop the bloodshed, a “Big Brother” boss (Nigel Hawthorne) defrosts the murderer’s past nemesis, who struggles to adapt to the ways of a new world and a restless new partner (Sandra Bullock).”

August 23: Judge Dredd — “Director Danny Cannon’s sci-fi thriller profiles Joseph Dredd (Sylvester Stallone), one of the heavily armed judges who act as jury and executioner when patrolling the streets of a futuristic megalopolis. After Dredd is framed for murder by a power-hungry judge (Jurgen Prochnow), he finds his own pitiless legal system turned against him. Sent to prison with a talkative criminal (Rob Schneider), Dredd quickly escapes to dispense true justice.”

August 30:Death Race 2000 — “In the racing world of the future, it’s no longer a crime to run down a pedestrian with your car. In fact, it’s all part of the game. Speeding across mixed terrain in a transcontinental contest, five daring competitors (including David Carradine and his character’s arch-rival, Sylvester Stallone) go up against a gang of rebels who’d like nothing better than to put a stop to them and their brutal sport. Mary Woronov co-stars.”

When Animals Attack…Again!

Our “When Animals Attack” theme was probably the most fun one we’ve had to date. So once again we’re gonna thrill you with animals hell-bent on revenge against humanity.

June 7th: Piranha (1978)
Joe Dante (director of Explorers, The Howling, Gremlins) sets loose killer fish on an unsuspecting river resort. Hilarity and a body count ensue.

June 14th: Grizzly (1976)
18 FEET OF TOWERING FURY!! A classic “animals attack” flick.

June 21st: Alligator (1980)
“Beneath these manholes, a man-eater is waiting.” Alligators are living in the Chicago sewers.

June 28th: Deep Blue Sea
Pissed-off sharks and LL Cool Jay. What more do you need to know?

Happy Mothers Day

May is for Mothers, the kind that are sometimes aliens or werewolves or harboring dark secrets. Enjoy!

Serial Mom:
She’s a fabulous, loving, caring mother, who er… …happens to be a serial killer!

My Stepmother Is an Alien:
Starring Kim Basinger, Dan Ackroyd and also a young Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green
……

My Mom’s a Werewolf:
VHS-only 1980s flick. It has to be good, right?

Mommy Dearest:
Over-the-top portrayal of Joan Crawford…

May 3rd: Serial Mom
May 10th: My Mom’s a Werewolf
May 17th: My Stepmother Is an Alien
May 24th: Mommie Dearest

April: Carl Weathers Is My Wingman

Four movies featuring the best wingman a guy could ever hope for—Carl Weathers.

April 5: Happy Gilmore
April 12: Predator
April 19: Rocky III
April 26: Death Hunt

Carl & Adam

Carl & Arnie

Carl & Sly

No picture of Carl, WTF

Killer Cars — The Recapitulationing

I would feel remiss if I didn’t post a single word about “killer cars” month, so here’s a brief recap. (Also: note that there probably won’t be any reviews posted in the month of April, since I’ll be participating in Script Frenzy, a writing challenge in which I’ll be cranking out a hundred-page screenplay in a month. Naturally, it’s going to be a horror movie…

The Car — Marty actually wrote about this fine film last summer, when it was a Final Girl Film Club pick. Read the review he wrote then, here.

Maximum Overdrive and Killdozer — Why am I writing about both of these movies together? Because both of them feature the same hackneyed horror-movie plot device: unexplained outer space phenomena. In Maximum Overdrive, the earth is caught in the tail of a gigantic comet. This is all the explanation that’s needed to set the plot in motion, namely machines (most importantly for our characters, trucks) coming to life and killing humans. There doesn’t seem to be any real logic behind which things come to life and which do not, as machines running off of electricity, gas, and batteries all seem to have the same hell-bent murderous intent. Inexplicably, even a machine gun turns against our heroes. And as soon as the earth exits the comet, everything goes back to normal, of course. Killdozer is slightly different, featuring a bulldozer that strikes a meteor buried into a hillside. The meteor glows with a blue light, which we then see entering the bulldozer. That’s all we get — not even any speculation as to what the blue light really was, where the meteor came from, etc. No, all we know is that now the bulldozer is (slowly) chasing workers down and running them over. (I can’t even remember how this made-for-TV movie ends, since I think I left the room because it was so difficult to watch.)

Seriously: “there’s a comet” is not a sufficient backstory for your horror movie. Except for Night of the Comet, which is awesome. Oh, and I guess Night of the Living Dead featured a mysterious returned satellite…hmm.

Christine and Blood Car were both amazing. The main characters’ slow descent into madness in both of these movies is really well-done: in Christine, as the once-dorky nice guy becomes a slick jackass obsessed with his magical car-girlfriend, and in Blood Car, as the vegan kindergarten teacher becomes a rampaging murderer, slaughtering puppies and homeless people in order to fuel his “blood car” and get laid by the car-loving “bad girl” who sells meat. I guess both these movies sort of have an underlying message of “women make men do evil things,” which is a subtext that really makes them seem less amazing, in my eyes.

Anyway, all in all an excellent month. I’d give Maximum Overdrive and Killdozer a miss, but the other three are definitely worth checking out.

March: Killer Cars on the Loose

I’ve been excited about this theme for months. So here’s March:

March 1: Maximum Overdrive (1986) — Cars come alive and seek revenge. Based on a Steven King story.
March 8: The Car (1977) — A mysterious car terrorizes small town, and only James Brolin can fight back.
March 15: Killdozer! (1974) — Made for TV movie based on a Theodore Sturgeon short story. The one and only movie about a killer bulldozer.
March 22: Christine (1983) — Another Steven King-inspired masterpiece about a boy and his creepy relationship with his car.
March 29: Blood Car (2007) — Probably way too good for a potluck movie, but everyone should see it. Awesome satire-horror film about a vegan kindergarten teacher who invents a car that runs on human blood.